Assange update

http://www.executedtoday.com/2014/09/06/1771-matthias-klostermayr-the-bavarian-hiasl/

Following our London visit and walkpast of the Ecuadorian Embassy last month, where perhaps the most famous victim of the abuse-inviting European Arrest Warrant is besieged by the British Government, and where the (sole) Met police guard slipped furtively round the corner when we spotted him, it has been decided:

(a) to remove the guard, after spending 10+ millions of pounds allegedly securing this fugitive from dodgy justice - and I'd really like to see the accounts for that thoroughly audited;

(b) to deny Assange his right to medical assessment - with potentially lethal consequences.

How does this look to fair-minded people? Perhaps HMG is unselfconscious - or is it simply thundering arrogance?

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

 

- Robert Burns (1786)

 

"History has taught me, that RULERS are much the same in all ages & under all forms of government: they are as bad as they dare to be."

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to his brother George (c. 10 March 1798)

It's odd, but in various ways - e.g. reflections on national constitutions and the abuse of State power -both sides of the Atlantic seem to be revisiting the late eighteenth century.


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Rolling back the State

... won't happen. Only a major disaster is capable of breaking the hands that are strangling us. But maybe that is what is now on its way.

Mish reported yesterday how the banks are insolvent, and in his opinion monetary reflation can't work , for three reasons:

1. Putting more cash into the system to create inflation to reduce the real burden of debt, won't create jobs, raise wages, or stop outsourcing (China's nominal GDP per capita is $2,483, America's $45,725, according to IMF figures).
2. But "quantitative easing" - monetary inflation - will lead to a currency drop (if it succeeds) and the reaction will be a raising of interest rates as lenders try to protect the real value of their loans.
3. And if government creates jobs directly, it again skews the economy, giving higher importance to the objects it chooses than the market would, if left to itself; in short, what economists call "malinvestment".

A longish essay over on Mises looks at how the State has seized the wealth and assumed many of the functions of the private citizen, and how the First World War and subsequent events helped accelerate a process that had begun long before.

Back in the 70s, I came across the work of Ivan Illich. His general thesis was that the State takes over activities that previously we performed ourselves - teaching our children, tending to our sick and injured, etc. These functions are then made into organisations with big buildings, many workers and officials, and large budgets - all paid for by taxation. Sociologists call this "reification". It increases the size and power of the State - and here we are.

They don't even do the job well.

As someone in education (as well as finance), I don't subscribe to the airy assertion that "our youngsters leave school illiterate", but they don't read or write as much or as well as they did, and what the liberals have done to the curriculum in English (for example) is painful to see. Heads of English in secondary schools in the 70s literally burned or threw out their schools' textbooks and coursebooks (I remember hearing of three separate cases); but the temptation to micromanage returned. It's like the historical irony that saw the French kill their King and end up with an Emperor.

And having seen the medical service in action on my wife a few years back, I no longer have the blind faith in doctors that I used to have. Phil Hammond (the GP/journalist/entertainer) tells us that the NHS kills or maims about 10% of its hospital patients, and Illich was ahead of him again (Medical Nemesis, 1974).

That's not to say we don't need doctors or teachers, but once created, institutions develop a will to live and purposes of their own, and can drift perilously off-task. Individuals who join them can become sidetracked by career opportunities and political hobby-horses, and in any case have to accommodate themselves to working in a structure run by others who have already done so and altered the operational rules to fit their interests.

Looks like the banks have done the same.

We have to hope that, however painful, after the coming changes there may be some better balance between the citizens taking care of their families, and that black hole of wealth and power, the State.