Man in a Shed: Nassim Taleb

Showing posts with label Nassim Taleb. Show all posts

Friday, January 02, 2009

For 2009

I'm just about half way through reading Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan" at to show I have been paying some sort of attention I'm not going to make vast predictions for 2009.

However here's my resolution:

I intend to pay far more attention the the Ratchet effect in our society where by society is changed small step by small step, without its consent, towards the artificial construct of the so called progressives and the socialists.

I'll be labelling such posts with the label The Ratchet.

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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