A Place to Stand

This is lead letter in the Scotsman today. I did not expect it to be used since it was really quite vituperative about the interfering nature of our political masters & of activists generally & also implicitly, of the refusal of the media to report the real economics. By removing the last paragraph (here in italics) they both prove my point about the difficulty of having a literate discussion of economic & prevented me properly making it!

David Fiddimore blaming capitalism for the cost of getting across Europe without aircraft shows all the mindless implacable hatred of self styled socialists for free enterprise.

Firstly he is simply wrong to say that costs have been widely pushed up by scarcity - booking ferry places at the last moment has always cost more. Indeed it can be argued that for political reasons there has been to little rationing by price.

There have been news reports of people buying bicycles to become priority "vehicle passengers" - who benefits from that?

Anything that is scarce will be rationed & if it is not done by cost it will be done by some more oppressive method - usually the sort of government control & allocation by political connection that so appeals to the politically connected parasites that the "socialist" movement has descended into. It requires no fundamental understanding of economics to know this, though clearly far more than the assembled "left" has.

Of course in his letter there was, naturally, no mention of the French railway workers going on strike & making things worse. "Greed" by those charging money to provide services may be denounced but not by strikers.

But the worst part of this attack is that he says the crisis is the fault of the airlines & that their wish to be allowed to fly merely demonstrates this. The real fault is that an overbearing governmental EU bureaucracy whose default position is that anything should be banned.

It is becoming clear that this ban was put in place in circumstances much less bad than the Mount St Helen's eruption which so noticeably did not ground all American aircraft or indeed many other instances.

This obfuscation tactic is used constantly. Just as the recession was not caused by the bankers but by the politicians printing money & regulating in the wrong direction so this is caused not by airlines but by government over regulating. Of course it is necessary to maintain these claims if the answer to every question is more state regulation. But that has been & still is an enormously destructive answer, much though it appeals to those who create no wealth & wish to take it from those who do.

OK so they took out a sentence about leftists economic ignorance as well but that makes no new factual point. I regret the omission of the end because the important point about this being a regular tactic is lost.

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When I make a mistake I think it important I acknowledge it. A few days ago I said that "Europe is going to have to get used to being partially cut off from the world for many months". That was because, despite what some may think is my cynicism about what government tells us, I had assumed that when they said this ash cloud made it impossible to fly they were telling the truth. That as Frank Furedi & the excellent EU Referendum had been saying, was not the case.

Alongside transport minister Lord Adonis, they stood in front of the TV cameras, admitting that the rule book had been rewritten and that, despite the lingering presence of the ash cloud, unrestricted operations were to recommence at ten that evening.

For the first time with any clarity, we then heard from the mouths of the officials the words "risk assessment" and "dust concentrations", plus news that the engine manufacturers had backed off from their stance of "zero tolerance" for ash ingestion and redefined acceptable limits.

Yet it was on Sunday last, the words written on the Saturday, that I was pointing out that the then current safety guidelines for dealing with volcano eruptions made no distinction at all between major or relatively modest eruptions.

Nor, I wrote, did they take into account the dilution effect as the cloud spreads from the original point. The only reference was to generic dust clouds, without any attempt to carry out a risk assessment. Furthermore, it was evident from those very guidelines that the model used was the largest and most dangerous of Icelandic volcanoes, the Katla volcano – way more serious than the relatively modest eruption we are currently experiencing.

Now, with hundreds more millions spent, much heartache and disruption and increasing chaos, ministers and officials have finally come to the conclusion that was evident almost from the start, that the total shutdown of UK aviation was a gross over-reaction, and entirely unwarranted.

Predictably, the about-face has been shrouded by lies and prevarication, the impressions being given that there has been constant dialogue with airframe and engine manufacturers. Yet, we know from talking to them on the Saturday that the flying ban had been imposed without such consultation, or even with the airlines who were so immediately and badly affected.

I really must stop being so trusting of these innumerate, lying, thieving, murdering parasites.

Labels: Government parasitism, letters, Science/technology