Man in a Shed: Better of out

Sunday, June 24, 2007

My position on the EU is changing

When I was young I was an enthusiast for the ECC. Free trade and a counter balance to the US all seemed like good ideas.

Whilst I might have wanted to slow down changes - I always saw the advantage to Britain of being a member.

The free and open market was the key prize - but the French have made clear its days are numbered. There is also the point of gaining influence and the old English foreign policy imperative that a power should never be allowed to emerge in Europe that could dominate the UK.

But now no more - it seems that we can't stop the march to ever closer union and we will not be asked. Politicians put their next 5 years in office ahead of over almost a thousand years of history. They can no longer be trusted - and I don't just include Labour in this.

Politics in the UK has no point - no point at all - if it is unable to achieve anything and we have ceded power over our country to a foreign power.

Better of out - now gets my vote ( but will anyone be willing to ask ? Or with electronic voting ~~fraud~~ will it be counted ? )

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