Man in a Shed: Glories past and inevitable financial decline

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Glories past and inevitable financial decline

I'm sitting in the science museum right now. Normally I would be feeling pangs of nostalgia for past British glories, especially in the space section with its model of Black Arrow.

But today its time to feel sorry for the Americans as they start down the same road with Obama cancelling their plans to return to the moon.

Not that he's made the wrong decision. The future does lie with better innovation. But I fear this is the first step in the US having to face up to the financial reality that they are broke. There will be far more pain to come, and our share of it is over due also.

But we can both over come our disastrous financial states. ( The US is at least staging a recovery, the UK is still cursed by Brown's canutist govt. ) We have little to fear and much to gain if we face up to the world as it is, and stop living in Labour's fantasy narrative.

This was the lesson of the eighties, taught to us by Mrs Thatcher. It's a great shame it has to be re-learnt.

Sent from my HTC

1 comment:

Bill (Transcriber) said...: Thats Black Arrow R4. The real thing. The project was cancelled in 1971. R3 successfully launched satellite Prospero from Woomera Dec 1971. The last one (R4) was donated to the science museum after the cancellation. Black Arrow is an icon for brilliant design and incompetent short sighted government. Another retreat along the long road from technical leadership to where we are now. I hope the yanks do not take the same path.; 7:50 pm

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman