Timely

Via the Eye.

They just can't stop, can they?

Click images for links.

In his long-awaited Autumn Statement, the Chancellor will outline a £650 million scheme to provide free “early education” for about 40 per cent of two year-olds.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will today announce a £1 billion scheme to pay firms more than £2,000 for each young unemployed person they hire.

And all this at a time when some think the UK is already back in recession and may need a decade of austerity to really recover. So what's the Cobbleition's response? Copy the policies of the deranged madmen who fucked the country into this hole in the first place, that's what.

I can't carry on with this, I really can't. I've said umpteen times that they're as bad as the last lot and that there's no appreciable difference between the the main parties anymore with the possible exception of how quickly they're going to fuck the country into a hole. The issue of how deeply they're going to fuck it into a hole has long had cross party support. If I blog this again anytime soon something is going to get fucking broken. Instead I'll just point out that Douglas Carswell, the Tory party's favourite for MP Least Likely To Be Given A Front Bench Job, has been wondering what the government would be doing right now if it was still a Labour government with Gordon Brown leading it. His list looks depressingly like the actual policies of the Cobbleition.

Where's this money coming from?

Click for linky

Of course we know exactly where it's coming from. There are just shy of thirty million individual taxpayers in Britain, and of those about 6 million are public sector employees whose pre-tax salaries are paid out of other people's taxes anyway, leaving 24 million people. This governmental generosity is funded by them to the tune of £42 each - and think how you'd feel if someone just shoved you up against a wall and nicked your wallet with forty quid in - unless they go for the alternative of adding it to the nation's debt to be paid by future taxpayers. This latter choice is increasingly popular because it means the government does not have to shove you up against a wall and take your wallet, thus making you and everyone else much less likely to balk at what it's being spent on, but since the government has no money or income of its own it's a lot like going to an expensive restaurant where you can't possibly afford to eat and then running up a massive tab by shouting for all in the bar and ordering the best stuff on the menu while hoping like hell that you'll be joined by people with money before the coffee and liqueurs come.*

So what are you getting for your money? Well, not a damn thing, obviously, but what are the Africans getting for it?

Among the projects to be funded will be schemes to help African farmers insure their crops against flooding and drought while other projects include installing solar power in rural villages and building slurry pits that can produce gas to power generators.

In themselves these don't seem like terribly bad ideas, not least because they don't seem to be about appeasing the angry sky gods so much as acknowledging the fact that things don't always stay the same and adapting to it. Oh, and the very worthy goal of getting power to people who don't have it, or not much of it, at the moment. But...

The move, however, is expected to attract intense criticism at a time when the UK economy is struggling to recover from recession.

Indeed, and every other thing I blog at the moment seems to be about Britain's government spending money it hasn't got as fast as or faster than even its recklessly profligate predecessor. And I hadn't even got round to Cleggy's latest brain fart about jobs for da yoof paid for by, you guessed it, the taxpayer. Maybe later, or maybe I'll be too despondent to blog it at all, but for now it's enough to state that that's yet another billion pounds. Now back to Huhne-hoon and his bounteous munificence with your money.

One of the countries which will receive money is South Africa, the most economically advanced in the continent. Last year its economy grew by 2.8 per cent, while Britain's economy rose by 1.8%.

A little misrepresentative, this. By just about any metric, GDP nominal or PPP and absolute or per capita, the UK is much wealthier than the RSA. But then the UK has run up far greater debts than the South Africans have, again in both absolute and relative terms, and how much wealthier Britain really is after allowing for the phantom wealth that's come from living beyond its means for so long is tricky to say. On top of all that Britain's likely to go back into recession soon, which makes all these billion here and billion there stories more than a little worrying. So why... ?

The timing of the announcement, however, is being seen as a cynical attempt to "bribe" African nations into signing up to international deals being backed by the British Government at the climate change negotiations in Durban.

Ah, now it's becoming clear. The UK government, like that of many western nations, has caught the religious warble gloaming zeal and is determined to show its faith by righteously fucking its own economy hard in the arse until its well and truly buggered, but hasn't become quite so insane that it thinks its own citizens won't go nuts if they don't see developing nations - the ones that turn out to be causing more of the problem that we don't really know is a problem - making sacrifices too.

Oh well, I suppose the government bribing other people with your money is at least a change from bribing you with it.


* But no cigars of course. The restaurant's long since been forced to go all non-smoking.

A modern parable

Spotted by Fausty.

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of nowhere. Parliament said, "Someone may steal from it at night." So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Parliament said, "How does the night watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.

Then Parliament asked, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Parliament said, "How are these people going to get paid and administered?" So they created the following positions, two time keepers and three payroll officers, and then hired four human resources consultants and five health and safety executives.

Then Parliament said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created an administrative section and hired fifty people including administrative officers, assistant administrative officers, legal secretaries and a chief executive on £250,000 per annum.

Then Parliament said, "We have had this in operation for over one year and we are £25,000,000 over budget, we must cutback the overall cost."

So they laid off the night watchman.

True, that.

There are no winners, only victims of the security state

Via Longrider at his own place and at the Orphanage a couple of days ago, news that Muslims Against Something That Ended In The Thirteenth Century were leant on by Her Majesty's Home Secretary and Official Speech Permission Granter, Teresa Maybe, is being banned for being not nice enough. Longrider points out an obvious problem, though clearly not so obvious that Teresa Maybe was able to see it.

Home Secretary Theresa May is banning Muslims Against Crusades, a group planning an anti-Armistice Day protest.

Despicable though this group is, abhorrent as its message may be, their liberties are our liberties and holding a protest no matter how distasteful, is a basic civil liberty. In banning them, May hands them a victory without them lifting a finger, she does their work for them far better than they ever could.

Agreed, and via Trooper Thompson I see that this has been followed by a mass arrest of English Defence League members, for... well, since the now banned Muslims Against Historical Catholicism weren't there as planned absolutely nothing at all as far as I can see.

Scotland Yard said the group were detained "to prevent a breach of the peace" at a pub near the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Doesn't this seem a bit like crushing your car to prevent speeding? Technically they can probably do this if this is anything to go by.

A breach of the peace is not in itself a criminal offence, but the police and any other person have a power of arrest where there are reasonable grounds for believing a breach of the peace is taking place or is imminent. The Court of Appeal defined a breach of the peace as being ‘an act done or threatened to be done which either actually harms a person, or in his presence, his property, or is likely to cause such harm being done’ – see R v Howell. This power of arrest will, of course, be closely scrutinised in connection with [The European Convention on Human Rights] Article 5 (the right to liberty and security), Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) and Article 11 (the right to freedom of assembly and association).

And of course the ECHR being the pale imitation of a Bill of Rights that it is, doesn't really seem to prevent this either. Article 5 guarantees no deprivation of liberty except for various reasons including (my bold)...

"c. the lawful arrest or detention of a person effected for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority on reasonable suspicion of having committed an offence or when it is reasonably considered necessary to prevent his committing an offence or fleeing after having done so;"

... while Articles 10 and 11 both say freedom of speech and association respectively is guaranteed unless it's felt necessary to restrict it. These are the worst kind of rights: positive rights, permissions to do things as long as someone says you're allowed. They aren't liberties, they're just lip service to the idea of liberty. So with the ECHR being as much against you as for you, all the police need in order to arrest people who've done nothing for nothing is a semi-plausible story that it was "reasonably considered necessary" to prevent something they might have been going to do.

So this is liberty in modern Britain. Where NuLab started the Cobbleition has carried on, and in order to prevent you from damaging it your freedom is taken and locked in a cage. But at least they're doing to everybody, so that's alright, isn't it?

In short: fuck, no!

Tip of the Akubra also to Quiet_Man in the comments at Trooper Thompson's for the Telegraph link.

Pre Crime: it sucks

Straight from the Department of Making Everyone Feel Like Labour Won The Last Election comes Home Secretary, Teresa Maybe, and this:

Children as young as three can be identified as violent gang members of the future, according to a new Government report.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, unveiled plans to cut off gang violence at the root by intervening in “problem families” from the moment children are born.
A new Home Office report said the beginnings of teenage violence lie in the “very earliest childhood experience”.
It found warning signs are “already clear” by the time a child enters primary school, including neglect, aggression, absence from class and slow development.
Children identified as "at risk" by the age of three are more than twice as likely to have criminal convictions by the age of 21, the report said.
“Early intervention is absolutely key,” Mrs May said. “That may need to come at a very early age indeed, with toddlers, ensuring they just don’t go down that road.”

So let's see... belief that one's life is mapped out almost from birth, check; unshakeable confidence in the ability of the state to predict that accurately, check; implied confidence, equally unshakeable, in ability to correctly identify 'problem families', check; repeated statement of a need for the state to 'intervene', check. Frankly all that's missing from the story to give it those last hallmarks of a NuLab policy is the mention of a new database, but since the bastards spent all the money and wrecked the economy the Cobbleition probably can't afford a new one and probably have to make to with one of the existing ones.

Still, apart from that it sounds awfully like the kind of thing Labour used to love saying, which leads me to wonder... Did anyone check behind Teresa Maybe to see if Jacqui Smith's hand was up her arse making her mouth work?

Fantasy drugs policy

On this blog I've occasionally quoted from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books since it's always been less a fantasy series and more a series of parodies, often of parts of the world we actually live in, and there are often bits here and there which align pretty neatly with libertarian positions. I've no idea if Terry Pratchett would describe himself as a libertarian but some of his characters certainly are, at least on some issues, and they tend to be the protagonists or people on the same side as the protagonists. So when Mrs Exile bought me the latest one I wasn't surprised to find in the first few pages almost exactly the kind of drugs policy I'd support for real, implemented by Lord Vetinari, probably the most libertarian tyrant ever, real or imagined.

... Incidentally, sir, we have received a missive from Diamond King of Trolls, thanking us for our firm stance on the drugs issue. Well done, sir.’
‘Hardly a concession,’ Vetinari observed, waving it away. ‘You know my position, Drumknott. I have no particular objection to people taking substances that make them feel better or more contented, or, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies – or even their god if it comes to that. It’s their brain, after all, and society can have no claim on it, providing they’re not operating heavy machinery at the time. However, to sell drugs to trolls that actually make their heads explode is simply murder, the capital crime.'

Snuff, Terry Pratchett

Seems fair enough to me. What you choose to put into your body should be entirely up to you, though of course you would still responsible for your actions when you're under the influence of whatever it is you've taken, but selling you something that's certain to kill you on the spot is not on. In reality nobody making a quid either illegally or legally from recreational drugs - and as usual I include alcohol and tobacco, and I suppose possibly caffeine as well - has any interest in killing customers since dead people have a tendency to stop buying the produce. Some of these things are dangerous and may kill some users eventually, though often that's as much a result of the adulteration that's commonplace with illegal drugs as a result of the drug itself, but if any drug was both rapidly and universally lethal it would have no market. People want to get high, but very few want to get high so badly they'll take something from which they will definitely never come down. In fact the only time I've heard of a drug being deliberately made toxic it was on the orders of a government who did have a particular objection to people taking a substance that made them feel better and more contented, and, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies fall over more often.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
[...]
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

Even now one foreseeable side effect of so many recreational drugs being illegal that they will end up being both more expensive and less safe through being adulterated with Christ knows what, and another is that people will turn to alternative drugs when their preferred choice is either too expensive or too hard to find. Because of this desire of certain people to make everyone else live to their standards rather than live as each chooses* we have almost the polar opposite of Vetinari's stance on the drug's issue - the belief is that user's brains are not their own and society does have a claim on them, and official policy has had the inevitable effect of making drugs more dangerous, sometimes deliberately.

Why does sanity have to come from the pen of a man who writes about trolls and dwarves and magic, and, sadly, who is also suffering from early onset Alzheimer's? And what does that say about the people who really are responsible for drugs policy?


* As a libertarian I have no desire to force other people to be libertarians as well. I'll try to persuade them it's a good idea but if they want to be neo-puritans Tories or socialists dumbly obedient to the state or whatever then that's up to them. That's their drug of choice and if they can do it without harming me I have no objection, just as I have no objection to people smoking, drinking or getting stoned around me if I'm not affected by it. The annoying reality is that neo-puritans and statists of all stripes have done me far more harm than drug users have, and much of the little harm I've suffered that was probably drug related (losses from a car break in and higher insurance, if you must know) may not have happened if drugs policies hadn't made the damn things cost more than they need to.

The worst of all drugs

Blogging has again been patchy the last week or so, time being so short for various reasons that I'm very behind on reading my favourite blogs. Honestly, my RSS has bookmark has what could easily be a serial number behind it and if I don't get either caught up or ruthless about skipping the older stuff I'm worried it might resort to exponentiation. So while I'm getting through some of it, and assuming I don't get all busy again right away, I'll resort to a bit of metablogging and bring up a post some will already have found via the Von Mises Institute blog: a moving story of a American who became a user of the most addictive and destructive drug in modern society, and how he's managed to get clean:

... My addiction to the state started in high school. I saw that all the coolest people — Naomi Klein, Tom Morello — wanted me to drop out of free society and free exchange. They always seemed to know what was best for everybody else, and I wanted to be smart like them. So I started experimenting with statism.

In university, I got into the hard-core stuff: socialism and communism. All my friends were doing it. I thought we were so revolutionary with our union buttons and our “Free Tuition Now” banners. Calling for state intervention to solve every social problem let me avoid thinking about my own problems.

In 2007 and 2008, I got hooked on the hypnotism of state theater. I gobbled up every YouTube clip of the US Democratic nomination fight I could get my eyeballs on. Everyone I knew thought Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would save the world. And when that nomination bottle was empty of all surprise, I couldn’t stop; I just starting using the Republican nomination to get high.

But somebody had mixed some crazy stuff into that contest, as I bet you know. The clean stuff hit me hard, and I hit rock bottom.

I woke up under my state-funded grad-student desk, heaped high with the papers for my state-policy-recommendation thesis, knowing that my black hole of student debt was papered over only by state scholarships, and I saw what I had become.

All my friends were still users. So it was hard, but on the Internet I found other people who were clean. I started volunteering, getting involved.

[...]

My life has started to come back together. I can spend time with my family now without even getting that itch to regulate something. I feel free again...

I am not an anarchist, anarcho-capitalist or otherwise. For reasons I will one day blog at length I'm a minarchist libertarian, all the same I'd recommend popping over to The Daily Anarchist and reading the whole thing. There's a particularly good version of the 12 step program among the first few comments.

I'd call that an out

Click for linky

Mr Cameron supports steps that the eurozone is taking to boost its banks and bailouts funds as part of wider moves towards closer fiscal union in order to avert a European debt crisis that has threatened to plunge the global economy into a slump.
But he fears that regular meetings of the euro’s 17 governments will lead to the creation of a Franco-Greman dominated “caucus” or a bloc that could hijack the EU’s single market for its own ends, damaging the British economy by imposing regulations that benefit Paris or Frankfurt over the City of London.
”There is danger that as the eurozone comes together that those countries outside might see the eurozone start to take decisions on some of the things that are vital to them in the single market, for instance financial services,” he said.

Well, no shit, Dave. So it'd be a really good idea to get the fuck out of there, right? Rather than have your supposedly Eurosceptic Foreign Secretary, Willy the Vague, attacking the idea of consulting the millions of British people who've never had a say on Europe along with the smaller number who were consulted and now feel they were misled? So if the Euro block is going to impose damaging regulation then the answer surely is to remove its power over the UK and cancel the standing order that pours vast sums of UK money into the EU black hole. You just need a good excuse, and happily the neighbours have provided one.

”We’re sick of you criticising us and telling us what to do. You say you hate the euro, you didn’t want to join and now you want to interfere in our meetings,” the French leader told Mr Cameron, according to diplomats.

He didn't even want you in the room, Dave. Not even in the room. Can it be made any clearer for you? But don't treat it as an insult when Nicky is really doing you and Britain a tremendous favour. The response should be a dignified exit while tossing the phrase "Well, if our money isn't good enough for you..." over your shoulder on the way out.* Come home, announce a change of mind and policy in the light of the new attitude of the Eurozone to the UK's participation in helping to rescue it, and say that referendum is very much on the table.

Yes, I realise that there's a good chance you'll lose the vote in parliament because your LibDem partners are opposed, and right now Labour would vote against you if you copied every single policy from their own last manifesto. But that could work for you too, do you see? Having been defeated on the issue you could say that the only way Britons could have their say is with a Conservative majority government and call a snap election. Hell, you probably wouldn't need to actually call an election but just tell the LibDems you'll go see Mrs W if the vote is lost. They're unpopular with everyone at the moment and know it, and the last thing they want is an election any time soon where they'd probably lose seats to both the other two main parties. You'd probably also pick up UKIP votes by the bucketload as well. So man up and go for it, Dave. Sarkozy has opened a door a crack for you here, and all you have to do is be willing to kick it hard enough to open it all the way.

But of course this is Call-Me-Dave we're talking about, a man who has, like the other party leaders, already reneged on a similar promise and so someone I would trust slightly less far on this issue than I could throw a tree.


* Only, point of order: it's not your fucking money, and don't you even forget it in your sleep.

Another Gordon Brown chicken comes home to roost

And to no great surprise rather than being the kind that maybe provides a few eggs it's a chicken of the shitting everywhere and possibly giving everyone bird 'flu variety. Well, what else could we expect when it's enjoyed Brown's faecal Midas touch.

[Health Secretary] Andrew Lansley says he has been contacted by 22 health service trusts which claim their "clinical and financial stability" is being undermined by the costs of the contracts, which the Labour government used extensively to fund public sector projects.
[...]
Under the PFI deals, a private contractor builds a hospital or school. It owns the building for up to 35 years, and during this period the public sector must pay interest and repay the cost of construction, as well as paying the contractor to maintain the building.
However, the total cost of the deals is often far more than the value of the assets. As a result, Mr Lansley says, the 22 trusts "cannot afford" to pay for their schemes, which in total are worth more than £5.4billion, because the required payments have risen sharply in the wake of the recession.

Well done, Labour, and well done, Gordon, you shower of epically incompetent cunts. It worked well as an idea to help you spunk money into things so you got nice headlines along the lines of 'Government announces new £X million hospital for Anytown' while also being a way for you to be less than open about the full scale of the debts you were running up in the country's name. But it was a bad deal and I struggle to believe you didn't know it, because if the papers can work it out surely someone in the Treasury spotted it as well.

Earlier in the year, The Daily Telegraph disclosed the extremely poor value offered by many PFI schemes. Taxpayers are having to pay more than £200billion for schools, hospitals and other projects whose capital value is little more than £50 billion.

And this leaves the Cobbleition with having to find ways to make payments. They don't want to make cuts, which is just as well since contrary to popular belief among the hard of thinking they haven't made any, and I get the feeling they don't have a clue how to. My bet is they'll borrow because the mandarins who run things don't know any other way and today's politicians don't have the balls to stop it or the vision to privatise or charity-ise (if there's such a word) almost everything the British state does and let the whole fucking lot stand or fall on its individual merits. Christ, they're barely getting to grips with trimming some of Labour's fat.

It also emerged last night that the Coalition was expected to announce it is abandoning Labour's calamitous £12billion NHS computer scheme. Ministers will dismantle the National Programme for IT, a "one size fits all" project started in 2002 which has never worked, and relace it with regional schemes.

You've been in office for 16 fucking months, you feckless cunts. Is this all you've got to show for almost a fucking year and a half's work? You've worked out that scrapping one of Labour's hare-brained, over priced vanity projects - one that should have been killed before that fucking Labour drone and, judging by the fresh-from-a-come look he sometimes wore, possible rohypnol victim Andy Burnham had even left the fucking building - will save you a few quid.

Well, that's a relief. I thought for a moment Britain might have been in trouble.

'Kinell!

QOTD

Via Dick Puddlecote's link tank, wise words by magician, libertarian and Bullshit! co-host Penn Jillette.

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

People try to argue that government isn't really force. You believe that? Try not paying your taxes. (This is only a thought experiment -- suggesting on CNN.com that someone not pay his or her taxes is probably a federal offense, and I'm a nut, but I'm not crazy.). When they come to get you for not paying your taxes, try not going to court. Guns will be drawn. Government is force -- literally, not figuratively.

I've said similar things myself, but I don't think I've ever put it so concisely. I think that's going on the sidebar with the other good stuff. Do go read the rest, and have a trawl through the dismembered jewel thief's link tank too. There's often a few gems in there.

QOTD

From the ASI blog:

A police state that spread itself so thinly in order to control every one of us has failed in its core duty of protecting the peaceful majority's lives and property from the shocking rapacity of a violent minority.

Not a lot I can add to that.

Another lesson on government from Non Sequitur

From a few days ago.

Enjoy your weekends.

Hanging together

Despite the last post saying there'd be no blogging 'til after the weekend I'm going to make the time for a very brief blog on the topic of capital punishment, currently the subject of a reinstatement campaign by The Sun and Guido Fawkes. As usual it's a splitter, and in the blogosphere as well as day to day life. Some bloggers for whom I have a lot of respect - the Ambush Predator, Sue and Anna Raccoon, to name just three - are in favour of capital punishment while others who are equally estimable - such as Captain Ranty, Sadbutmadlad c/o The Raccoon's Arms virtual pub and ironically The Grim Reaper - are opposed to it. As I've written before (here and here, for instance) I'm very much in the opposed camp, and trying to put it beyond reach is one of the very few things that I think politicians have somehow managed to get right. Quite possibly by accident or for other motives but whether it's design or serendipity I'm not the slightest bit sorry about it.

Since this is supposed to be brief, at least by my normal prolix standard, I'm not going to go deeply into the reason for my opposition, which can be found on those links anyway, but I'll summarise it with a copy of a comment I left at Captain Ranty's an hour or so ago.

I say this time and time and time again: it simply astounds me that so many people who are so critical of the state - an entity that so many of us agree is corrupt, incapable of finding its arse with both hands and prone to abusing its authority if not acting ultra vires - are willing to give it back the power to kill its citizens. Fuck the criminal scum, a noose around the neck of the most evil man in the land is a potential noose around the neck of all.

Oh, you might be safe with a Cameramong or Millivanilli government but which of you death penalty supporters knows what kind of toad-licking swivel-eyed fucknuts you'll have for PM in 10, 15, 20+ years? For all we know right now the future could hold a Chancellor Sutcliffe or a British Mugabe, and why the hell would we want to make the bastard's job any easier? And I can't think of any democracy that hasn't elected a bastard at some stage and we all know that some have elected utter batsards, so there's really no reason to think it can't happen. In fact I'd bet that if you wait long enough it's almost inevitable.

If you love liberty the answer is straightforward: you must never, ever entrust the state with any power that you would not also be happy giving to a homicidal dictator.

It can be put even more succinctly than that (though clearly not by me). Old Slaughter, who doesn't even describe him as a libertarian but a "small government conservative", comments at Anna Racoon's blog:

... the death penalty is the ultimate symbol of the state's presumption of authority over our lives. I would find it incongruent with libertarianism to advocate such a policy.

Indeed, and I did leave a comment telling Old Slaughter him that I was going to nick that. Please don't hang me for it.

Lessons for a successful government #1

When the leader of the government is struggling to persuade sceptical taxpayers of the need for a policy, especially if they themselves had previously said they weren't going to do it, the best thing to do is spend those taxpayers' money on telling them again why you're going to do it anyway and denying that you ever said you weren't. You may repeat as necessary. In the event that the opposition suggests that this should be paid for from party funds the correct answer is 'Shuttup shuttup shuttup go way'.

Us too! Us too!!

In one of the more bizarre forms of international keeping-up-with-the-G7s it seems like it might become the in thing to have a pressing need to investigate and possibly re-regulate your media. So in America, despite there having been no suggestion that the NotW or anyone else not-hacked the phones of the victims in the ten years since the World Trade Centre attacks, the FBI is investigating to see if anyone from Murdoch's News Corp attempted to not-hack the phones of the victims of the World Trade Centre attacks.

Now, in the immediate aftermath there was a lot of confusion and some estimates of the number of dead were as high as ten thousand, more than five times what it turned out to be. Nobody knew who was missing, who was dead and who was lucky enough not to have been anywhere near the place after all, and in all that confusion and not really knowing it seems like use of the NotW style not-hacking voicemails would have been much trickier than the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. I might be wrong but I can't help thinking that the identities of the dead in an incident that killed so many more people... well, where would you even start? Supposedly someone from the NotW tried to bribe a cop or an ex-cop for phone records, but that seems a little odd. If it happened in 2001 or maybe 02, which is when it would have been newsworthy, then how come it's only now that we're hearing about it? Time heals and despite this being a huge injury you have to think that had phone-not-hacking etc of the dead been going on, ignoring for the moment the practical difficulties of not knowing who's dead (and therefore not knowing the phone numbers either), the level of outrage would have been far greater then than it is now. So why make the allegation nearly ten years later and only after it turns out that it was done after a later terrorist incident, one with far fewer dead whose identities emerged much more quickly and, being in the city where the NotW is based, seems likely to have been a much easier proposition as far as getting those phone numbers goes.

On the other hand if this is supposed to have taken place more recently then you have to wonder about the sanity of the NotW still playing the same games when they'd already been caught once and were under the spotlight. You'd also have to wonder at how slow a news day it must have been to go on that kind of fishing expedition perhaps five or six years on and, if they were going to do the not-hack of voicemails again, whether there'd even be anything there after all that time. Obviously the idea is out there now and of course it needs to be looked into but if I was a betting man I'd put a few dollars on it being all smoke and no substance. Still, if a government with a constitutional obligation not to interfere with press freedom wanted to be able to move in that direction, even if only temporarily, then a nice bit of public outrage against the media generated by the judicious poking of a still unhealed wound could be just the ticket. Not saying that the US government is behind the claims or even that they have such an agenda, but the US government is a huge entity with many people working in it and many things it doesn't want to discuss - anyone believe that not one single person has thought 'Just a minute, this could work in our favour'? Anyone? Anyone at all? No... ? Yeah, me neither.

But the US are not alone in wanting to give their media a bit of a shoeing, and so inevitably there's to be an investigation down here in Australia as well.

THE Australian media faces a sweeping parliamentary investigation into its ownership, regulation and ethics after Julia Gillard yesterday left the door open to an inquiry into print and broadcast companies.

The Prime Minister indicated she would consider Greens leader Bob Brown's call for a wide-ranging Senate investigation into media practices in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

Translation: the bloody media have embarrassed us parliamentarians often enough and if we can't use this to bring the bastards to heel then I reckon we can at least get our pound of flesh, what do you say?

The thing is that Gingery Dullard, unlike the Yanks, may have rather more cause to investigate the Aussie media. And interestingly it's not the Murdoch owned mob but their competitors, the Graun friendly, lefty-loving, phone-hack hating Fairfax group, who have been accused of being up to no good.

THE editor-in-chief of The Age, Paul Ramadge, has refused to detail his personal involvement in the newspaper's unauthorised access of an ALP database now being examined by the Australian Federal Police.

And how did this happen?

The Age accessed the database from its own computer terminals using an unauthorised password provided by an undisclosed source.
"This story came through entirely appropriate journalistic methods," Ramadge said. "Entry to the ALP database came via a whistleblower who raised concerns about private information held on it.
"This whistleblower had authorised access to this material and we reported in the public interest."
[...]
The Age used material obtained from the database to inform a story run in the final week of the Victorian election campaign about Labor keeping a "secret" file on citizens. Several people whose details were accessed were contacted by the newspaper before publication. Others, such as Mr Faris, were contacted after publication and assured their information would not be stored or misused.

Okay, so they may have had good reason but it sounds like it's fair to ask the question. And even if they have good reason if they commit a crime in the process does it somehow un-crime it? I'm not sure a good reason would let me off something as trivial as a speeding offence - actually I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - so I can't help thinking that if a crime has been committed with good intentions it's probably still a crime and that there'd be a case to answer. If there is, and I stress 'if', then it's for the judge and jury to take any claims of good intentions into account. In the meantime they seem to be in a glass house and might be advised to drop the stones.

Barrister Peter Faris QC, one of a group of high-profile Victorians whose personal details were accessed through the database by The Age, described the newspaper's actions as "very close to corruption and criminal conduct."
"The Age has covered up this incident and it is a bit rich that they now lead the charge to criticise the Murdoch press in Australia," he writes in The Australian today.
The Age has denounced the phone hacking by News of the World reporters, which prompted News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch's global media interests, to close the paper. It has given front-page prominence to the story every day this week.

Quite. Motes and beams, fellas, motes and beams. This has been the Angry Exile bringing this information to both his readers (hi Mum).

Because it'll be little short of a fucking miracle if you see it in The Guardian.

Never was so much owed by so many for so little

Click for linky

The Treasury will publish full accounts for all Whitehall departments to give taxpayers an idea of what the public finances would look like if it was a company.
The move will for the first time bring into one place the future liabilities of accrued pension liabilities for public sector workers and the future costs of schools and hospitals built using the private finance initiative.

Not before time. All this off book stuff has been hiding the true cost of the profligacy of recent British governments (including the current one) for way too long.

Experts suggest that this will add an estimated £1,200billion from debt in the accounts of 1,500 public bodies to the Government’s books.
Adding in the official national debt figure of £909billion, it takes the overall total debt bill to more than £2,000 billion, as at the end of 2009/10.

And that's not the highest estimate I've ever heard. I'm sure the old Burning Our Money blog gave higher estimates of the real debt now and then, but let's assume that £2,000 billion, or two trillion if you prefer, covers it all. How much is that in meaningful terms?

Well, this sort of thing has been done before of course, but since that picture has a bit of cash in it I thought it'd be interesting in a random kind of way to start from there. In it I can see a couple of tenners, a couple of twenties and 22 £1 coins. If you were to throw away that £82 and follow it up by throwing away another £82 a minute later and so on and so on then in 24 hours you'd have thrown away just over a hundred grand - £118,080 to be precise - and if you kept it up for a year you'd have chucked just over £43 million. But if you started a little while ago, actually just over two thousand years ago at midnight on New Year's Day, year Zero AD, then by now you'd have thrown away only - hah, only - £86 billion and some change. Change in this case meaning £730,232,238. Clearly a long way to go to equal the UK's debt by chucking away money at that same rate of £82 per minute - and let's be honest if we saw someone chucking away eighty quid every sixty seconds we'd think he was an idiot. Starting from 0AD again, from today you'd have to keep going for another 44,373 years. Worse still, you wouldn't finish until halfway through October.

Now that's a very simple calculation and doesn't allow for such things as meal breaks, sleep, days off, sick leave, holiday time and dropping dead with well over 460 centuries to go, so you might be thinking of sharing the workload a bit. If you enlisted the help of ninety nine other people and covered for each other to allow for breaks and a bit of sex - probably quite good sex if you've ever fancied doing it on a huge pile of money - to breed replacement money wasters you could get it done in just a few generations. But of course there's an even faster way to do it which involves almost no effort at all.

Give the job to a government.

Want a new drill?

I don't but if I did I'd certainly order it from TradeTools.com, the people behind this advert (PDF). Click to seriously embiggerise or read a couple of the highlights below - there are points on offer for every reference to one of Julia Gillard's policies and there may be prize for the one who spots the most.

COMRADE JULIA Has Take Over TradeTools???

Thank goodness NO! But if she did, the following scary changes would quickly happen:

1. We'd have a doubling of our backroom office staff with rostered days off, possible 9 day fortnights & committee meetings to decide on which fair trade coffee we should all begin drinking! Every store would have a children's crèche of course. Selling tools would immediately become a strangely secondary issue for Julia.

2. With all those extra staff to pay, that amazingly none of us here ever realised we needed before, Julia would think it quite okay to begin raising all selling prices at TradeTools. She would absolutely believe that all customers would fully understand that our cost base had markedly increased, but be amazed when many started taking 24 years of hard won business elsewhere in confusion & frustration!

No, I didn't say that. I said... er... I said, there'd be no carpet tacks. Yes
that's what I said. Yes, ban carpet tacks, just gripper rods from now on. 

[...]

4. ... she would quickly notice that our mining company customers seemed to be doing quite well, particularly as they were buying so much equipment. Due to this brilliant observation, she would think it totally acceptable to single out all these successful mining companies then charge them a lot more for our huge range of products over what we charge all other customers. She would then wonder why on earth all the miners thought she’d gone bonkers? These intrepid miners would immediately begin looking for alternative suppliers of course, a real mystery to Comrade Julia...

5. Julia must secretly despise power tools as they use electricity from power companies that she loves to disparagingly call “big polluters”. This is even though she is a large power user herself but seems to hypocritically believe that electricity is in some strange way evil... She would then make an alliance with some flaky inventor in order to source wind or solar powered drills & saws. This dynamic duo of rocket scientists would then wonder why nobody wanted to buy their new enviro powered drills & saws, even though they only cost twice as much, were twice as big & had half the power...

6. Julia would promise not to introduce price increases just prior to being elected as boss of TradeTools, shortly after knifing the previous head honcho in the back that is. Immediately after becoming boss though, she would completely renege on this price promise, bleating about having never really meant it anyway, or some other such nonsensical drivel involving cars & roads. She would then mysteriously ask for mass consultation, even though her mind was already & obviously made up for us years ago...

[...]

9. We’d spend much of the week attending occupational workplace health & safety courses as Julia, in her wisdom as our Nanna, would never believe that any of us are truly capable of using our own common sense & survival instincts. It’s amazing that she knows all this even though she wouldn’t know what 75% of what TradeTools sells actually does. This training would give the new mix of TradeTools guys & girls something to do as there would be far fewer customers left to serve by now anyway. This is a good old left wing strategy that always works, until the real world hard earned money runs out, as it always mysteriously seems to...

10. Julia would have the most expensive builders she could find build temporary looking workplace safety training rooms in every TradeTools car park. This would involve squandering previously accumulated profits to overpay her builders who would then supposedly spend their windfalls in the adjoining TradeTools store on tools. Trouble is, they thought she was actually raving mad & instead bought all their workers overseas holidays or new plasma TV’s. There was plenty of space in the car parks after all, space that throngs of once happy TradeTools customers previously parked their utes all over.

The ending is sensational.

Let’s be brutally honest & admit that ‘Comrade Julia’ could never run a medium sized private company like TradeTools; think about it, it would be absolute madness to even let someone like her try. Neither has Julia ever understood the now well proven rule that socialism is wonderful, until you run out of somebody else’s money! So, most of us at TradeTools really do now wonder why on earth we have someone broadly like her waddling around trying to run Australia? And we all hope something’s done before it’s all too late!
From Most Of The Hard Working & Heavily Taxed Staff At TradeTools.

Did you spot them all? Well done, but I'm terribly sorry about the prize. It was going to be a packet of the last carpet tacks made in Australia, which I felt was suitable for their rarity value. However, carpet tacks haven't been banned after all. Funny that, eh?

Still, on the upside it's nice to see that there's a fightback going on. It'd be nice to think that those being screwed by the carbon tax will all bump into those being screwed because they smoke, and there'll be a big mutual 'What, you as well?' moment. The biggest pity for me is that the opposition leader Tony Abbott's only real advantage over Julia Gillard is that he's not Julia Gillard. Since that was also Cameramong's main advantage over Gordon Brown, though with Cameramong it seemed to go as far as being an actual policy, this whole business of someone promising something and reneging on it while I have little faith that the alternative would actually reverse it has more than a touch of déjà vu.

Big H/T to the Real World Libertarian for the TradeTools advert.

A penny saved is a penny earned

You could be forgiven for thinking that the federal government here in Australia have taken that old maxim to heart for our latest budget. Purse strings are to be tightened, cuts are to be made, benefits frozen all in order to get back into surplus in FY 2012-13 to the tune of $3.5 billion dollars.

Just as an aside at this point, I'd like to ask if anyone in the Cobbleition has any idea to get Britain back into surplus? Dave? Nick? No? Er... Ed and Ed? No, you've already tried spending even more, remember?

Anyway, among other things Treasurer Wayne Swan has said he's done is to achieve a budget which is free of rorts - 'rort' being Australian for spunking taxpayers' money up the wall unnecessarily, generally in such a way as to let a bunch of chancers cash in and run off with most of it. The word may not be familiar to readers in Britain or other parts of the English speaking world but I'm pretty sure the concept will be. The fact that Australians have a special word for it is probably a testament either to their inventiveness when it comes to language or the incompetence of the country's politicians, perhaps both. The last really big rort was one I blogged on just over a year ago - the home insulation program in which home owners were offered government grants to have roof insulation batts, typically pink for some reason, installed in their lofts. This was such a good example example of government intervention going catastrophically wrong on many levels that you can practically make a politician flinch simply by saying the words "pink batts".

The government men indeed came to help with 'handouts', and when they were finished 'helping' cowboy fitters had pockets full of taxpayer's cash, hundreds of thousands of Australian homes ended up with substandard, badly fitted or simply unneeded loft insulation, more than a hundred houses were damaged by fire, thousands of jobs were put at risk and four deaths had been linked to the programme.
[...]

Under the Home Insulation Program the assistance is paid directly to the insulation installer, on behalf of the Householder, and $1,600 is expected to cover the cost of insulating an average home, so for most people there should be no more to pay.

The first thing that should have been expected from this is that many smaller jobs would now come in at around $1,600 regardless of size. The second is that having created an artificial boom in the supply and fitting of insulation it's natural that new companies would jump in to try and grab a share of all the taxpayer's money being hosed around. This is fine if the demand created by a subsidy becomes self sustaining, and I'm sure the wonks in Canberra hoped that this would happen, but if that doesn't occur by the time a subsidy scheme ends then suddenly, almost overnight really, the market is oversupplied.
[...]
[The third and most serious problem is] that whenever the government gets out its chequebook almost inevitably cowboys and fraudsters are attracted in the hope that the government is too busy giving away taxpayers' money to look too carefully at the work it was supposed to pay for. Sure enough the Home Insulation Programme, despite supposed safeguards such as a government approved list of companies, saw everything. There was the merely deceitful, such as falsely telling people that insulation batts need to be replaced periodically. There was the fraudulent, such as submitting claims to the government for non-existent work. And there was the downright dangerous: fires blamed on ceiling downlights igniting the insulation and even whole roofs becoming electrified because of badly installed foil insulation.

This was all horrifyingly embarrassing for the government at the time, which despite an election and a change of faces at the top is still more or less the same government we have now, and which is therefore promising that there won't be anything like that happening with this budget. Oh, no, nothing like that at all. Well... apart from this:

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Stephen Conroy has defended the massive cost of installing television set top boxes in the homes of pensioners.

He admitted it would cost taxpayers $350 per installation and that each box would cost just $50-$60, double the cheapest available in electronics stores.

"We make no apologies for helping pensioners through this difficult transition," he told Sydney radio 2GB this morning.

Mr Conroy said the whole country would benefit when the analog television spectrum was switched off and sold off.

No, Stephen, the country will be down the $308 million you and Wayne Swan have budgeted, because you can be damned sure that there are people out there planning to grab every last cent. Just think: one in the morning, one in the afternoon, $700 for a day's work installing - and having been the proud owner of a couple of set top boxes I'd say the word 'installing' for sorting out up to six but possibly as few as just one cable and plugging the bloody thing into the main is seriously gilding the lily [corrected thanks to commenter Dave pointing out that lilies do not in fact glide - AE] - two set tops boxes bought by the federal government for twice the going rate. If you can keep that up for 8 months you're looking at the thick end of a hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers' hard earned filling up your pockets. It'd be nice for someone to tell me this scenario is way off base but unfortunately we really don't know because the politicians refuse to tell us the specifics.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's office said yesterday the package cost about $350 per person, but his spokesman declined to provide a breakdown of labour, equipment and administrative costs, saying it was "commercial in confidence".

However, they are promising that it won't be pink batts all over again, mainly because the Opposition are saying it will be just like pink batts all over again.

"I will never apologise, never apologise for supporting our pensioners," he said of the program, to install $30 set top boxes at a cost of $400 each.
[...]
Mr Swan said the scheme had already been rolled out to 38,000 pensioners and was running well.
"There's a tender process that is gone through. There are accredited people who not only provide the box, but set it up and work with the household to make sure it works," he said.

Oh, accredited people, the answer to everything. Except of course it's no answer at all to the question of why it's necessary for the government to do it at all, let alone spend as much as $400 per person on what would probably come in for well under half that even if people paid someone to install the box and far less if they simply read the instruction book that comes with the box. The way I see it is that it's not a government function to go buy our electronic goods for us, and if it thinks it can afford to do so then it's clearly taken more than it needed in taxes and should simply give the money back for people to do with as they will.

However, in fairness to the Labor government I feel I should defend them against the Opposition's charge that this is just like the pink batts rort because there's an important difference. It's not likely that any deaths will end up being blamed on this, not even if the specially accredited installers leave a box turned on to a special 2 hour long edition of Million Dollar Drop.

Social security ≠ Ponzi scheme... according to a certain way of thinking

And in a way it really isn't but you'll have to watch to the end to find out why.