Man in a Shed: Discipline

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

If you have time watch this

In the strange world that is BBC3 there a program called 'The world's strictest parents'.

My normal attitude to BBC3 is how to I put a block on the channel to stop my kids watching it after CBBC goes off air at 7pm, but I watched an episode on line yesterday which the most excellent To Miss with Love blog cited - go to the post for the link.

I have to say it almost moved me to tears at the end.

In some ways its saying the same thing Rio Ferdinand is saying in the press today.

Its a subject I'll return to at a later date ...

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