Author Archives: Giolla

What’s right with Libertarians

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Yoinked directly from The Devils Kitchen from a rather excellent article by Bella Gerens, I think this really sums up a huge amount of what I find appealing and a good thing about the Libertarians: Libertarians don’t fight with left-wingers, they fight with each other. It’s the only ‘mob’ you’ll ever see where the crowd hears a rousing speech and says to one another, ‘You know, I’m not sure I agree with him. He misses Friedman’s point about the fact that…’ and then argues all the way to the pub, where they’d all much rather be anyway. 0-1

A fiscal miscellany

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Back to talking about the economy again I’m afraid, and you know it’s got bad when even the BBC have noticed something’s wrong (H/T Penny Dreadful). Sadly it seems that the terribly dangerous deflation we should all worry about hasn’t happened, instead by printing a metric truck load of cash we’ve got inflation. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone, and at least we can inflate our debt (which ok screws over all of us that can’t just vote ourselves a pay rise) but at least the countries credit rate isn’t heading rapidly towards junk status like say … Continue reading →

Happy Birthday Magna Carta

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Today is the 796th anniversary of the first great charter – the magna carta of 1215. Now some people think that it’s pretty much a busted flush these days, having been all but entirely repealed. Others seem to think that it’s irrelevant because we’re now a parliamentary democracy though the evidence suggests that despite them changing our passports to say “citizen” rather than “subject”* we are still actually a constitutional monarchy. Just because parliament acts like it’s supreme (and sadly the monarchy lets it) doesn’t make it so, just as just because parliament would like us to think they can … Continue reading →