Man in a Shed: Fence sitting

Monday, May 10, 2010

Double dealing with the Lib Dems

Looks like the Lib Dems have been playing both sides, and that Lib Dem activists and Executive would rather the economy crashed and burned with all the misery it will cause then they're chances of getting on the public pay roll should suffer.

Maybe Nick Clegg can still pull it off - but I'm starting to think a cynical rainbow coalition of denial based on self interested may be more likely than a stable LibCon coalition.

There will be very real trouble if it does and the voters are denied the change they voted for....

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