A Place to Stand

  A couple of examples of  overgovernment.

  Tim Worstall writes an essay around this example of government engaging in preventing the market work and then being astoished to find it not working.

London's Metropolitan Police said they had arrested 16 people since Friday for illegal reselling of Olympics tickets, as Games organisers said they were investigating why scores of seats were empty at some events yesterday.

 Meanwhile the Scottish government are taking money from ordinary taxpayers to fund a campaign to put up prices for ordinary taxpayers, while claiming to be doing their best to get us out of recession.

Dairy farmers' campaign for fair pricing gets £100,000 of Government cash

Tim again on a point I have long been making - that much of the cost of housing is government parasitism & ending it would get us out of recession.

Britain Unleashed: Just relax the planning system

Douglas Carswell on how government printing more money isn't the solution to the printing more money financial bubble they caused.

Tim's 3rd outing saying government, using the excuse that Keynes had given them permission to print money during a recession to balance with a surplus during booms, hadn't actually followed their rules. Thus they caused the recession. .

So, let us look around the world and see whether, in the tail end years of the longest boom of modern times (roughly, 2000 to 2007) governments were running budget surpluses. Spain was, yes, and Ireland too. The UK certainly wasn't, as Brown decided to borrow more to "invest" and the idea that the younger Bush ran a surplus will be greeted with hollow laughter. But even Spain wasn't running a large enough surplus. The deficit/surplus should be symmetrical to some extent. If the slump is going to bring forth 5pc or 10pc of GDP deficits then at the peak of the boom we should be having 5pc or 10pc surpluses.

SNP explain their promotion of the most expensive form of power (windmills) and opposition to the cheapest, nuclear, is helping keep bills down

“Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and impossible to deliver without massive public subsidy...

“The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets to generate the equivalent of 100% of our electricity needs from renewables by 2020. That is already delivering jobs and investment to communities across Scotland demonstrating the kind of leadership that the UK Government would do well to follow

  And an example of the complete opposite in another field.
  Withoput any "help" from mankind nature is absorbing twice as much carbon as it used to.

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years'

  From the estimable Register, but unaccountably, this proof that the CAGW scare is nonsense and there is strong negative natural feedback is missing from the state controlled media.