Man in a Shed: Plotting

Monday, January 14, 2008

Lib Dem civil war warning

I can't see how any honest Lib Dem can really put up with their policies be changed over night in an Orange coup d'etat by Nick Clegg.

Listen carefully and you should be able to hear the knives sharpening ... of course its always hard to stab a Lib Dem in the back as they are usually facing both ways. But its not impossible just ask Charlie Kennedy and Ming. ( And of course Blair managed to knife the naive Ashdown about a decade ago ).

If I was Nick Clegg I'd be trying to figure out how to cancel the party conference in the Summer...

Having said all that I approve of Nick Clegg's attempts at giving a coherent policy lead - especially as its to the right - I just don't think he's chosen a party that wants to be lead.

PS You can tell the BBC disapproves by the photo they chosen of him for his economic liberalism speech !

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