It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. (Aldous Huxley)
Stewart Morris in his essay Did Thatcher Governments Change Britain? and abridged greatly here, states that the changes of the Thatcher years were in political style; the attempt to present an image of ‘strong government’ to the electorate. Read more of this post
Finn had spent may years collecting the signatures from some of the most famous – and infamous – people in the world. Finn would collect mint ten shilling (10/-) banknotes and mail them to the person whose autograph he wished to collect , requesting them to sign and return the banknote. While such people received many requests from autograph collectors, Finn’s method of using a banknote was fairly unique at the time. He would often posses more than one autograph and provenance as to their origin.
A recent article; 138 Years of Economic History Show that It’s Excessive PRIVATE Debt Causes Depression, states that government debt – over a certain level – does matter as it forms a drag on the economy, but private debt kills it.
Focusing on private sector debt (credit), the article referenced a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, The Great Leveraging, which analysed 138 years of economic history in 14 advanced economies. Read more of this post
My seeming obsession with money relates essentially to those who, like me, are living on a fixed income with limited disposable income or residual income and wealth, knowing that my cash (money) is not ‘secure and sound’ – securely maintained in a bank and soundly maintained by the government. However; in an effort to ‘lighten up my posts’, I set out to write an amusing piece on the subject of money. Instead, the following lead from Adrian Ash – The Daily Reckoning – Australia provided the scenario for a black comedy. Read more of this post
A previous post Seeking Keynes – the cake introduced John Maynard Keynes and his book THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE. Keynes wrote the book in 1919 following his resignation from the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, when it became evident that there was no hope of substantial modification in the draft Terms of Peace. The following is a condensed version of selected parts in which Keynes considered the nature of Europe and the Treaty of Versailles.
The Cobden Centre aims to promote social progress through honest money, free trade and peace. Something very commendable, but obviously doesn’t preclude disingenuous commentary now that advocates of hard money would seem to be in the ascendancy over the advocates of soft money. At least that’s the view I took on reading the ‘Top ten reasons why fiat currency is superior to gold (pdf – full transcript)’. Read more of this post
The cornerstone of Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics textbook,Principles of Economics, is a synthesis of economic thought into Ten Principles of Economics (listed in the first table below). A quick perusal of these will likely affirm the reader’s suspicions that synthesizing economic thought into Ten Principles is no easy task, and may even lead the reader to suspect that the subtlety and concision required are not to be found in the pen of N. Gregory Mankiw. Read more of this post
We’re all Socialists now! records Peter Hitchens saying of Margaret Thatcher:
‘I shall never cease to admire her courage and determination. – But at the end of it, she was a great and noble failure, who forgot or ignored half of what she really needed to do, and so lived to see almost all her successes negated. And until conservatives in Britain and America are ready to recognize that, they too will fail, over and over again’.
Abridged here from a commentary with the title Anatomy of Thatcherism that first appeared in 2009 at the Project Syndicate and written by Robert Skidelsky, he would seem to support Hitchens’ view of Margaret Thatcher. Clearly a Keynesian, Skidelsky sees Thatcherism as the outcome of Thatcher/Reagan economics.
‘The Thatcher revolution inspired policies to free markets from government interference. Many people attribute the global crisis to these very ideas, the Anglo-American model of capitalism is deemed to have failed. The following hindsights are judgement on which elements of the Thatcher revolution should be preserved, and which should be amended as a result of global economic downturn’. Read more of this post
Debt is the prolific mother of folly and of crime – Benjamin Disraeli
The Market Oracle has published an article focussing on Britain’s debt dynamics. With the title Bank of England Cancels Britain’s Debt, Budget Deficit Crisis is Pure Propaganda it deals with the political propaganda declarations for economic austerity by the Coalition government. Whilst the Labour party takes the opposite line, the reality is that there has been no real net economic austerity in Britain, as there has been no cut in government spending and hence the deficit continues to expand by about £120 billion per year. The reality is that the UK is immersed in an exponential inflation trend that results in the stealth theft of wealth to finance government spending for the purpose of buying votes. Read more of this post
It’s quite difficult to give an equivalent figure for the 2012 worth of four shillings from 1545. Here, the 1545 four shillings becomes an approximate present day (2012) income of £1000. This makes the sum seem large, but if it had to be divided equally between say twelve people, they would each receive four silver pennies, which in 1545 was the equivalent of one day’s wages for a labourer. This is based on the equivalent ‘income value’, which measures a specific wage or more-general income and is thought to be the most reasonable method for what follows.
WordPress.com Support
The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change
