Man in a Shed: maintenance

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Maintenance ...

Going to be playing with the blog set up over the next few days....

Also going to update the blog roll a little. I've taken the view of using it as my own set of bookmarks, but few have gone out of date.

The fallen are going to include:

ContraTory : who has gone inactive .. but promises to be back.
Drinking from Home : who has just stopped - no one seems to know why. ( If you do please post a comment below).
Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs : The Daily Telegraph link has gone dead. I enjoyed Christina Lamb's reporting and thought she did a good job of drawing peoples attention to the reality on the ground in Afghanistan - but she's gone now. She has a web site here.
Woking Political Discussion Group : This carries on - but no-one updates the blog ( as the founder is on some sort of round the world trip - lucky for her !).

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