The Tax Justice Network is a lot of busy people keen on extracting more taxes from all round the planet: … our approach does not fit easily into either of the old political categories of left and right. We do not argue generally for high or low taxes (that is for […]
Chavez seizes rice processing factories. Mugabe seizes more farms. In the UK we have the Rule of Law, so we are safe from this sort of thing. Wrong! Behold, the Chavez/Mugabe/Brown doctrine: What is unacceptable to me won’t be accepted: "The prime minister has said that it is not acceptable and […]
We had the privilege last week of joining a small private dinner in London in honour of Baroness Thatcher. I took the opportunity to congratulate her on her unswerving insistence on Honest Money. See eg this speech in 1984: Today we have the lowest rate of inflation since the 1960s. […]
Do you remember Grantrepreneurs and GONGOs? Organisations which profess to be independent but in fact are getting large amounts of taxpayers money, with little if any real accountability? Thus: My idea. Any so-called non-governmental organisation which receives either (a) more than 10% of its total income from government or other […]
As we all know, across its vast territory Russia has all sorts of energy resources. And, as energy gets scarcer, Russia therefore gets richer and can throw its weight around again, right? Not so fast. The problem with vast energy reserves is that it costs a vast amount to develop them. […]
Simon Heffer takes a polemical pot-shot at David Cameron, accusing him of succumbing to socialism in his recent Davos speech: … one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read. It should also terrify anyone who might feel he or she should vote […]
Back to earth with a bump. Here is a startling puff-piece for radical communism in the Independent. It is all about a neo-Trotskyist postman, one Olivier Besancenot, who it is claimed ‘defies the Trotskyist stereotype’ by having short hair and wearing well-fitting jeans and a black or white T-shirt. His […]
At last. Someone intelligent looking at first principles: The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation… Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of […]
I have not added anything on this important subject, as my earlier posting in December said more or less all I have to say on it. This time the Russians have played hardball, actually letting people all over the place get very cold by turning off gas supplies. The accounting […]
The BBC notes that the legacy of the Cuban socialist miracle is ‘complex’. This is just what Serbian Communist leader Draza Markovic used to say about the problems in Kosovo in the early 1980s: "the situation is still complicated, even complex!" The BBC on Cuba: Fifty years on, the legacy […]
