Man in a Shed: India

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Why are we sending money to India ?

First congratulations to India on the Launch of their Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon which lasted off this week.

But this begs the question why is the UK funding development projects in a country that chooses to put the development of Nuclear Weapons and a Space programme above other needs that we are funding ?

The UK doesn't have a space launch capability, having been the only country in the world to abandon that capability. Its not unreasonable - we have other spending priorities.

So why are we sending a further £825 million to India between now and 2011 ?

Personally I suspect this money is funding the egos of the politicians in the DFID.

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