Monday, August 15, 2011
Some Recent Comments
I'd go for having 2 Ministries of Defence. One for everything we do now except the SAS & submarines, inc Trident and 1 for those and for new things - space satellites, computer-war, orbital impact weapons, lasers that can shoot down planes and missiles, UAVs. With a civil service staff of no more than 1,000. Then fund both according to how useful they turn out to be. I think the traditional Ministry would wither very quickly.
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It means cutting back the size of government to useful functions. Useful functions have the bonus that the people doing them don't have the time to conspire, brief and lobby for more money.
So long as government is half the economy anybody ambitious is going to want to be a bit of it.I would also suggest hypothecating most welfare and NHS away from direct government control and giving it a set proportion of income tax and all NI. That alone would take about 20% of the economy out of Whitehall's hands & prevent them hiding behind the frail and sick when cuts are needed.
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I believe that if NASA's budget had been put into space development technology prizes (X-Prizes) we would probably now be building the first starship.
If I am correct then we have seen money that the electorate were willing to be spent on space were instead, at lleast 95% stolen by government to pay for government bureaucracy.
1 reply - If the public was able to keep the trillions of dollars that NASA burned through AND it was not illegal for anybody except NASA to go into space in the USA then we would almost certainly be much farther along then we are now.
Such prizes do allow market mechanisms to function because profits still exist if it comes in under budget.
They do not fit the "official libertarian" line because they are still money raised by forced taxes, (albeit as i said relatively popular ones). However I believe that technological breakthroughs do not and probably cannot receive the same returns compared to value added that normal inputs of land labour and capital do* and that it is thus both moral and practical for society to provide an incentive to cover the difference.
* an example being Tesla's development of alternating current for which the patent could not, in practice, be enforced. The short term cause of this is that patent law is written for and by patent lawyers but the underlying and insoluble problem is that an invention is only valuable once it has been made and is known about, at which point keeping control of it is like shoveling sand with a fork. ....
Compared to all government spending NASA's $20 billion is no more than a drop in the ocean.I consider it not the waste of money but the failure to use the money effectively to promote more efficient private development of space that is the tragedy.
That there is public support for space development, when there is less for other parts of government is a form of market pressure, which Congresscritters notice, for such spending.
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Danial Hannan on Chris Huhne being an ecofascist parasite yet calling others Nazis [3 weeks ago]
Huhne is a member of the party most enthusiastic about illegal wars fought, against Yugoslavia, for the specific and deliberate purpose of promoting mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the sexual enslavement of children and the dissection of living human beings & sale, to western hospitals, of their body parts.
All of this was done to promote the Balkan policy of the late Adolf Hitler. All of it was enthusiastically done with the full knowledge and support of the Liberal Democrats.This cannot be credibly denied.
Huhne owes everybody who he has compared to Nazis a public apology. None of them are 100th as supportive of Nazism as he himself is.
Reply I had the misfortune to watch a video (in full glorious colour) of the Handzars executing a group of Serbian Civilians by mass hanging and firing squad. Even though the events happened 70 years ago, the video left me traumatised. Until that point I just believed the political rhetoric of "the Serbs are the baddies" and Alijah Izetbegovic is a nice man. I'll bet 99% of the population of Europe have never even heard of 13th SS Handzar Division, let alone have any understanding of what they did.
Had our schools over the last 60 years included the holocausts of Serbs, Gypsies, Poles & Soviets as well as Jews in their teaching of "History of the Holocaust" I do not think we would have ever allowed our government to support Germany in its determination to "recognise" the Croatian and B & H Moslem regimes, both led by former Nazis.
Without that either Yugoslavia would have survived or would have been peacefully divided on clear ethnic lines, rather than giving the Nazi statelets territory with clear Serb majorities.
Unfortunately during the cold war it was impolitic to mention that most of Hitler's genocide was aimed against Slavic peoples. It still is.
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I believe that a deeper reason is that the political class, though enforcing an enormous amount of Luddism. From preventing us having inexpensive nuclear power, which could reduce electricity costs 93%; through 75% of the cost of housing being government regulation; to a H&S Executive that destroys the work of 4 million workers.
Take away that parasitism and our economy would easily grow t least the world average of 5% and probably above the Chines level of 10.8%. In the 13 years of Labour the economy would thus have grown between 2 and 4 times making Brown's doubling possible, though still not desirable. It would now make ending the deficit possible in just over 2 years and even paying off the entire National Debt in 5.
However the purpose of government is to pay government employees and their friends and the nominal purpose of improving the country is at the very end of the list. Booker has proven this many times over the child "welfare" "services" but it holds true generally.
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Tim Worstall, who doesn't know climate physics but does know economics looked at the economic part IPPC's report and found that a high growth high technology strategy would produce less CO2 than what the Luddism the "environmentalists" demand. This is because high tech is, by definition more efficient and uses less resources per unit output. This was picked up by Bishop Hill where Tim put in comments:
"My arguments about climate change always start with: the IPCC is correct. OK, now, knowing what we do know about economics, what should we be doing?
Emissions are an externality with a cost, we know how to deal with those. Pigou Taxes. So, we'll have a carbon tax please, reduce other taxes so its revenue neutral. We also desire a globalised economy and a market based one (these two can also be derived from the IPCC reports).That is, even if the IPCC is right, Jonny Porrit, G. Monbiot, nef, Greenpeace, Foe , Chris Huhne and them all: they're wrong."
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As a Scot I find this disquieting. It suggests that what we need is independence followed by a devaluation of our pound. I do not like either option but the universe does not always do as I wish.
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For the leaders of "Green" organisations I agree with you.
However what brought ecofascism from a tiny bunch of loons to a major political influence and indeed an existential threat to western civilisation is government adoption of it. If the BBC were not giving 40 times more coverage, per voter, to the "Greens" than UKIP and government not pouring over a billion annually into ecofascist propaganda they would be very far short of getting half as many votes as the BNP do.So why is government pushing what they know to be a complete fraud. - HL Mencken said it nearly a century ago.
""The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Almost all of government is parasitism but they need such fraudulent scare stories to get away with it.
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This is for anybody who cares about the way the American "scienceblogs" "created by Seed media Group2006 to enhance the public understanding of science...Authors include active scientists working in industry, universities and medical schools as well as college professors, physicians, professional writers, graduate students, and post-docs ... ScienceBlogs had an "authority" of 9,581 and its number of inbound links ranks it 37th among blogs worldwide" according to wikipedia
My experience is different. Even on those sites that don't censor, they seem almost entirely incapable of even attempting. honest or intelligent debate. I do accept that there are many American active scientists (disproportionally in "climate change" studies and college professors which, in my opinion makes the incapacity of honest reasoning and its replacement by not merely obvious lies but obscenity even more shocking. I know that there are American scientists who are world leaders; who engage in political dialogue and yet who are can do so with old fashioned courtesy (Freeman Dyson and John McCarthy being 2) but that such a large section of American science, almost all of it Democrat by inclination and economics, think obscenity trumps intellect and censorship trumps both, should be very worrying.
This thread started as the author ridiculing Republicans for having the "thin skin" to object to Joe Biden calling them terrorists. Since Biden is the one who said he wanted to put 10 million Serbs in "Nazi style concentration camps" that seemed a little rich and I waded in. The thread has since gone into detail over the atrocities in the Kosovo war (well OK I have, everybody else says NayaNayaNaya.
Regulars here will believe I have had no trouble matching insults but without obscenity and sticking to facts supported by evidence and logic.
However when, not only does one of these eminent American "scientists and college professors" resort to
"I'm a firm believer in a good ol' swift kick in the nuts to reichtard douchemorans of your stripe. ...Let me know if you need a translation of this; STFU, you fucking fucker" as his only response to facts and worse, not a single reader, including the site's author suggested that such language was inappropriate, it is clear that the barbarians and Brownshirts are not only within the gates in America they are occupying the Ivory Towers. These people should be the best America has.
This is the thread. I don't advise anybody to waste time reading it all but a little sampling shows what I mean.
Labels: Government parasitism, letters, Yugoslavia
