Friday, August 30, 2013
Recent Comments
Roger Helmer did an article on his "I have a dream" of a technologically progressive country. I am proud if this because of his unstinting comment:
The way they select which "protests" to cover and the way they conceal and lie to promote government funded "astroturf" environmental organisations as real. Apart from greenpeace virtually every "environmental" body is as much as 90% funded by our government and the EU. Without that there would be no ecofascist movement.
Then they put a mass demonstration of 6 people across the airwaves. Yet when 500 people turned up at a recent party conference to protest against windmills it went almost unreported.
The same tactic is used on other cases. We have had considerable coverage of spontaneous demonstrations against Russia (many of the demonstrators being the same government paid greens) on the gay agenda. Watch foreign demos reported by the BBC and you will often see the filming is close up and low angle to conceal the fact that there are only a few people there (this ignores the case where the BBC took an Iranian pro-government demo and simply captioned it as anti-government).
-----------------------------------------------
John Redwood on housing:
What this phenomenon shows is confirmation of my claim that at least 3/4 of housing cost is government regulation.
It is far easier to get planning permission to rebuild your own house than to build a new one elsewhere. It is also inherently far more expensive in building terms to demolish your house, maintaining the façade and then rebuild a new one reattached to the façade. Also there are always economies of scale form mass production – if the government allows mass production.
Imagine that if you wanted a new car you had to handbuild the wheels, engine, interior and chassis and then weld on the body of your old Escort. This is the equivalent.
In fact that (knocking down your own house and rebuilding it) is sufficiently cheaper as to attract anybody into putting up with the inconvenience of doing it strongly suggests that my 3/4 parasitism estimate is understated. Even 90% might well be.
-------------------------------------------------
Herald - Since there was no ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo I must have some doubts about the accuracy of this account. There were a substantial number of both Albanians and Serbs who fled the bombing, though obviously the Serbs fled deeper into Serbia.
Since the bombing NATO police (as the KLA formally became) have been authorised to ethnically cleanse 350,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Christian Albanians and others. They also kidnapped 10s of thousands of teens to sell to western brothels and dissected 1,800 people while they were still alive to provide organs for western hospitals.
This is justified, on those rare occasions it is not censored, by our politicians, the BBC & newspapers as "revenge".
Perhaps if an ugly example of neo-nationalism is wanted that might suffice? http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/we-should-not-wallow-in-history.21940015
The degree of backwardness and waste in housing cannot be overstated. We have never seen a modern house.
Thanks Neil. You’re quite right — we can’t be sure yet that the future of shale in the UK is as rosy as I hope and expect. But it would be criminal not to find out
------------------------------------------------------
A long debate here with Autonomous Mind and Richard North (EU Referendum) engaged in a vitriolic attack on UKIP which I considered had echoes of the Judean people's Liberation Front. North has, on his own blog asserted that I had lost but that is not my reading.
Immediately afterwards AM declared he was giving up his blog but, I am glad to say, has now changed his mind.
----------------------------------------------------
Tim Worstall asks if governments everywhere should get paid for state funded inventions where else should that go.
---------------------------------------------------
Spiked - "That is one of the unmentioned instances of the state owned BBC/C4 proving themselves fascist propagandists rather than news reporters.A long debate here with Autonomous Mind and Richard North (EU Referendum) engaged in a vitriolic attack on UKIP which I considered had echoes of the Judean people's Liberation Front. North has, on his own blog asserted that I had lost but that is not my reading.
Immediately afterwards AM declared he was giving up his blog but, I am glad to say, has now changed his mind.
----------------------------------------------------
Tim Worstall asks if governments everywhere should get paid for state funded inventions where else should that go.
---------------------------------------------------
The way they select which "protests" to cover and the way they conceal and lie to promote government funded "astroturf" environmental organisations as real. Apart from greenpeace virtually every "environmental" body is as much as 90% funded by our government and the EU. Without that there would be no ecofascist movement.
Then they put a mass demonstration of 6 people across the airwaves. Yet when 500 people turned up at a recent party conference to protest against windmills it went almost unreported.
The same tactic is used on other cases. We have had considerable coverage of spontaneous demonstrations against Russia (many of the demonstrators being the same government paid greens) on the gay agenda. Watch foreign demos reported by the BBC and you will often see the filming is close up and low angle to conceal the fact that there are only a few people there (this ignores the case where the BBC took an Iranian pro-government demo and simply captioned it as anti-government).
-----------------------------------------------
John Redwood on housing:
What this phenomenon shows is confirmation of my claim that at least 3/4 of housing cost is government regulation.
It is far easier to get planning permission to rebuild your own house than to build a new one elsewhere. It is also inherently far more expensive in building terms to demolish your house, maintaining the façade and then rebuild a new one reattached to the façade. Also there are always economies of scale form mass production – if the government allows mass production.
Imagine that if you wanted a new car you had to handbuild the wheels, engine, interior and chassis and then weld on the body of your old Escort. This is the equivalent.
In fact that (knocking down your own house and rebuilding it) is sufficiently cheaper as to attract anybody into putting up with the inconvenience of doing it strongly suggests that my 3/4 parasitism estimate is understated. Even 90% might well be.
-------------------------------------------------
Herald - Since there was no ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo I must have some doubts about the accuracy of this account. There were a substantial number of both Albanians and Serbs who fled the bombing, though obviously the Serbs fled deeper into Serbia.
Since the bombing NATO police (as the KLA formally became) have been authorised to ethnically cleanse 350,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Christian Albanians and others. They also kidnapped 10s of thousands of teens to sell to western brothels and dissected 1,800 people while they were still alive to provide organs for western hospitals.
This is justified, on those rare occasions it is not censored, by our politicians, the BBC & newspapers as "revenge".
Perhaps if an ugly example of neo-nationalism is wanted that might suffice? http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/we-should-not-wallow-in-history.21940015
The degree of backwardness and waste in housing cannot be overstated. We have never seen a modern house.
- Reply The main reason for the price rise is the long term conduct of monetary policy, especially the artificial bubble pre 2008. There has also been a long term trend to better houses, with more equipment as part of the package – e.g. central heating, fitted kitchens etc which justifies some extra cost/price
-
-
Central heating is a reasonable point (though cars have far more add ons since the model T was it.
- However monetary policy would have had no excess influence if the government had not been unnaturally restricting housebuilding. Speculation only occurs in markets (like old masters) where the laws of supply and demand do not lead to increased supply.
-
----------------------------------------------------------------
Labels: Cheap Energy, International politics, Yugoslavia
Whether shale has the same potential as nuclear is open to question but at least 90% of the cost of nuclear is state regulatory parasitism.
Part of a general principle – that we can’t say how much government banning/regulating costs because we cannot know the maximum growth foregone but we can say that the minimum cost of regulation, which entirely destroys without benefit, is going to be at least twice the cost of taxation, which also has the advantage that much of the wealth taken in taxation continues to exist.