Man in a Shed: Welsh executive

Friday, October 05, 2007

The madness of little Wales

The Welsh assembly executive needs to grow up. If you can't afford two brain surgery centres and one is in Cardiff and the other Swansea ( virtually next door to each other ) the solution is - how can I put this - a no brainer.

But instead they plan to make the people of North Wales travel 5 hrs ( each way) to Cardiff or Swansea to get enough patients to keep the unit open.

That is just plain nationalistic, short sighted nonsense.

Its 90 mins to Liverpool where the good people of North Wales get referred right now, which till a few decades ago still had Welsh speaking churches - not that it should matter at all.

Why not offer services to the English NHS in Bristol - if you can get the price right ?

This just shows that the Welsh executive couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Perhaps devolution should be revoked. It would certainly save a lot of English money wasted on Celtic fooling about.

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