I'm sorry, what??

Sometimes, it's the little things in big stories that make you stop:

Bimlenbra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK, told the Business select committee that the UK had "structural weaknesses" that made the UK steel industry uncompetitive.

Business rates and high energy costs were top of the list.

On energy, he said that if Tata was operating in Germany, its energy bill would be £40m a year lower. The Tata chief defended the company's decision to put the business up for sale saying that the company and its shareholders could not continue to bleed. The business is estimated to be losing £1m a day.

OK, let's break this down. The civil service think man-made climate change is a big thing, therefore the government has instituted massive energy taxes to discourage people from making stuff that needs a lot of energy. Making steel takes a fucktonne of energy. Closing down Port Talbot will be a non-trivial step towards meeting our civil service approved emission reduction targets.

In other words, whether or not you agree with climate change being a thing, and our fault, and something that we can fix, and are fixing in the right way, the fact of the matter is that saying "tata to Tata" is exactly the the kind of outcome you would expect and want from our climate change policies.

However, despite the fact that it's only Morlocks losing their jobs, of course, there are votes to be had here, so now everyone has to panic and pretend to care. It's the usual fiasco of a planned economy.

Hidden away further down, though, was this little nugget:

Mr Javid said steps had already been taken to help on energy costs with £130m paid out since 2013 to compensate high energy users who incur environmental surcharges.

Just think about that: the glorious state has decided that we need saving from ourselves, so let's make energy more expensive. We start to get saved from ourselves, but suddenly we need to compensate businesses who have to pay the environmental surcharge.

What the actual fucking fuck is that all about? Make someone pay a tax and then give them a fucking handout to say sorry? I'm really dying to know which fucking retarded spastic cunt thought this was a remotely sensible fucking idea.

Actually, let's NOT "privatise" the NHS, shall we?

I realise this is probably going to come as a bit of a shock to everyone, given that I hate socialised anything, and my experience of the NHS has been universally depressing and distressing and frustrating.

But I've just realised the outcome of "privatising" the NHS is not going to be loads of independent surgeries and hospitals all competing openly and honestly, driving down costs and improving the experience of healthcare for everyone; it's much more likely to be like public transport, with large, bureaucratic corporate companies gobbling up regions of healthcare and providing de facto (or even worse, de jure) monopolies in each area.

It's a measure of just how useless government is and how reluctant it is to relinquish control of anything that the only model they have for privatisation is to farm the services out to a couple of their mates so that it's easy to "nudge" them in the "right" direction, rather than opening things up to the market and leaving them to sort themselves out. This despite the repeated and rather obvious failure of the model to provide any cost savings or a genuine improvement in service.

We might as well save ourselves the inevitable arse raping (without lube) that is going to happen, since government won't actually privatise the service, but rather just outsource it.

I can't really tell the difference between fascism and modern corporatism.

Can you?

Well, I'm fucking stunned

According to this piece of genius journalism, Europe's carmakers are yearning for the Obama touch.

As bailed-out US manufacturers recover their poise and markets at the Detroit motor show, jobs and plants across the EU are vanishing due to falling demand

O RLY?

Just guess* which of the lines above represents the company that got the biggest bailout?

All the bailout has done is postponed the inevitable. In much the same way as Gordon Brown's desperate reinflation of our bubble led to a massive economic collapse, in much the same way as QE has failed completely to fix anything, Obama's "touch" is just another politician's "Reverse Midas".

Government wealth transfer from bottom-of-the-pile taxpayers to failing multi-billion dollar corporations: how does this make sense? What can possibly go wrong? Why do lefties shout for more tax on companies while simultaneously demanding that the same useless fuckers who can't actually make stuff that people want to buy MUST be propped up by people who can't afford to feed their kids?

Is there some kind of special medication that these people take or what?

Cunts.

Why does big business oppose leaving the EU?

Pro-EU interests always trot out the large corporates who do not, under any circumstances, want to leave the EU.

Why is it that large corporates don't want to leave the EU? Surely they'd be better off without the burdensome yoke of EU regulations, free to trade in a simpler, less complex manner?

It's the same reason that these all-powerful corporations, with their massive clout from employing former ministers and civil servants seem to have incredible influence in shaping regulation, but somehow never manage to get rid of it.

It's the same reason that the mounds of regulation they face are massive, pointless box-ticking wastes of time.

All this regulation is a massive barrier to entry to new competition. Large corporates have already got the infrastructure to comply with all this, they are already able to cope with it all and they've adjusted their business processes to comply. If we left the EU tomorrow, there would be a massive reduction in the regulatory mountain any new competitor would have to climb and the incumbents would be left facing a much tougher competitive landscape.

And large corporates fear competition, they don't fear regulation, especially not when they can shape it to make it relatively easy for themselves to comply with.

Regulation may always start out as being for the protection of the little man, but it always ends up being for the protection of the regulated company.

It takes two to tango

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but I have to wonder why it's always business that gets the stick.

Whenever we get a blatant case of corporatism, where government is peddling its influence or using its monopoly on violence on behalf of a specific business, it's always "Oh, what a nasty, corrupt company" and never "what a nasty, corrupt state".

At the moment, we're similarly faced with McDonalds, who have paid a metric fucktonne of money to sponsor the Olympics, insisting on something that was in their contract being honoured. No-one is as outraged at the naked profiteering that the Olympics has become as they are at someone who paid a lot of money trying to recoup it legally.

I don't agree with the laws, I don't agree with all the crap that's come with the Olympics, but it's funny how the rule of law and morality have become divorced.

No-one really objects to the rule of law being applied to murder, theft, assault, etc. But it's almost as though the law has taken on a life of its own and has become divorced from being a clear codification of reasonable morals and ethics and turned into a Hydra of arcane, hair-splitting nonsense that drains us of our reason and stamps all over our will.

What moral purpose is there to a law which defines "ZIL lanes" for Olympic plutocrats? What moral purpose is there to a law which defines what you may eat in specific parts of London? What moral purpose is there to a law which disallows you from using the current year in your own marketing efforts if it is not approved by LOCOG?

There are really too many laws, regulations, statutory instruments and rules in our lives. You can't reasonably be expected to comply with things if you're not even aware they exist. "Ignorance is no excuse for the law" was a reasonable thing when there weren't hundreds of thousands of laws, rules and regulations micro-managing the minutiae of our lives. I think, perhaps, it is time to rethink that maxim.

But in the meantime, remember that it's business taking advantage of things that are offered to them by corrupt authorities. In the American parlance: don't hate the player, hate the game.

The Dangers of Centralised Power - Part 2

Earlier, I wrote:

I was reminded of the great Swine Flu non-pandemic of 2009 and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that didn't ensue, despite the World Health Organisation's prognostications.

And an observation in the comments stirred something in my brain:

Well, at least someone did well out of it – the company who got the multi-million pound contract from the Government to produce the vaccine.

Ironically, this comment was made by Letters From A Tory, who no doubt will be doing his very best to make sure that the Tories get to decide which contracts get signed with the government for the next five years and is doubtlessly confident that his tribe is populated by noble, faultless people who will make the right decision every time.

This also leads on to the other great danger of centralised power: there are fewer people that you need to convince for things to happen. If I manage to convince Ed Miliband that by building a wind farm, I'll save the planet, then I'll get my wind farm and all my lovely subsidies. I may only be getting a tenner from each taxpayer, but I get £300 million, thank you very much. And I get to charge for the dribble of 'leccy I provide as well. It's taken a couple of agreeable lunches and some schmoozing with a complete dickbrain, but I'm now seriously quids-in. And as I said before, I have a major, clear interest in this scam continuing, you have a much smaller, more vague interest in stopping me. So you probably won't.

Now imagine, for a moment, that you're in an anarcho-capitalist society. There are still 30 million people engaged in economic activity, but there's no government. I come up with this wizard wheeze to make some money, but instead of convincing Ed Miliband, I now have to convince 30 million people. Individually.

Now I have a much bigger problem. Assuming I can convince a large enough number of people to invest, I actually have to show them that I'm saving the planet, or when next year comes around, people are going to tell me to fuck off.

Fuck it, I'll try banking, instead.

Having a government at all also makes it easier to co-opt. Who is going to invade a country where every single house is its own government? if you want to defeat the EU, you just have to take over the European Council. If you want to defeat the UK, all you have to do is take over the government. If you want to defeat Afghanistan, you have to take over the government and defeat hundreds or thousands of small warlords all snapping at your ankles. Nobody's managed it in centuries of trying.

Now, imagine trying to defeat 30 million little rag-bag armies.

"Fuck it, let's go after France, instead."

The Dangers of Centralised Power - Part 1

I was reminded of the great Swine Flu non-pandemic of 2009 and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that didn't ensue, despite the World Health Organisation's prognostications.

And an observation in the comments stirred something in my brain:

Well, at least someone did well out of it – the company who got the multi-million pound contract from the Government to produce the vaccine.

Ironically, this comment was made by Letters From A Tory, who no doubt will be doing his very best to make sure that the Tories get to decide which contracts get signed with the government for the next five years and is doubtlessly confident that his tribe is populated by noble, faultless people who will make the right decision every time.

But back in the real world, the reality of it is this: people make bad decisions all the time. I've been divorced twice. I've made loads of terrible decisions and in almost all the cases, I can hand on heart say that my motivation was good. In some cases, even noble.

The good thing about my bad decisions is that they may have affected people, but at the very worst (and it was probably my very worst decision ever) it affected a few dozen people.

Nobody died, or was even hurt. At worst, they were angry, inconvenienced and discomforted. So with the "power" that I had, the worst decision that I took affected less than 40 people and did them no material harm.

Let's look at what happens when you centralise power, though. A while ago, a number of councils decided to invest our money in Icelandic saving schemes. In doing what seemed like a very good idea at the time, they fucked up royally and threw away billions of our money. Services had to be cut, taxpayers had to be squeezed even harder, thousands of old, poor and disabled people who depend on council largesse certainly suffered as a consequence.

The faceless bureaucrats who made the decision are still there, still making more nobly-motivated bad decisions.

Now look further up the scale. The British government signed a contract with no "get-out" clause to buy tons of vaccine off the back of this scare. I heard something like a billion Pound Sterling was involved. I've also read scare stories about the side effects of the vaccine. It may not be statistically significant, but if just one person died because of that bad decision, that's a terrible cost. And if that was a billion Pounds of our money that was cynically thrown away, think about how many Inclusive Diversity Outreach Co-ordinators schoolz-'n'-hospitalz it could have funded. And of course, the person making that decision is still doing that job, making more bad decisions for the greater good.

So, a decision which directly cost you a night's beers or a tank of fuel could also have killed someone. Which seems like a better deal, a night out or a corpse? It's not a difficult choice is it?

The faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat who made that bad decision was probably bounced into it by the panic created by another unaccountable quango and the no "get-out" clause was probably in exchange for a better price. So, the decision was made for perfectly valid, noble reasons, but it was an incredibly bad decision.

Now look further up the scale: we have the United Nations and the European Union, both of which are accruing decision-making power to themselves. Now imagine the potential impact of and EU-wide or UN-wide bad decision. Look at the EU and their shit "low-carbon" lights, packed with poisonous mercury, inconveniencing half-a-billion people. Look at the swine flu thing (WHO is part of the UN), where millions of people around the world got ripped off via their governments and probably dozens or hundreds of people died taking the vaccines.

The greater the centralisation of power, the more people suffer from each bad decision.

One fewer Tory Twat

A lone voice of reason in the Tory party is John Redwood, who for his consistent sensible position on financial matters makes me feel that he too, should be spared the piano wire and lamp-post solution:

You may need bank bridging finance if you were slow to make the adjustments, but that can be no substitute for controlling the losses. You cannot ask future customers to pay more for the product to pay for the subsidy you gave to current customers. They will not be prepared to do that. State loans can be an excuse to put off the necessary adjustment. They are also a massive diversion of top management time from tackling the reality that costs have to be slashed to survive in dreadful conditions like the present.

Hurrah!

A group of freakishly deluded, tinfoil-hatted lunatics have chosen to try to stop the government's ludicrous bank merger bollocks.

Good luck with that, but it's nice to see someone try to do something, rather than just moan about it! [Ipse dixit.]

Chirp, Chirp, Chirp

The Austrian Economist points out the crickets:

Those are the sound of the crickets coming from the world of Naomi Klein (link to the worst book of the decade not provided) and friends as the real truth about the relationship between crises and political economy is now right in their faces, providing exactly the evidence against the "shock doctrine" that some of us pointed out right away: crises cause the state to grow and the free market to shrivel. Disaster Socialism is back in business.

On a related note, will folks on the Left attack the Paulson bailout plan for the naked violation of the rule of law that it is?

Chirp, chirp, chirp.

Ugh!

Now I have a nasty internal conflict: IBM is the vendor of Informix, which I love, but it's now also clearly aiming its sights at the deeply unpleasant world-wide corporatist state agenda that I see coming over the next decade:

There are two things recent events have shown us these past weeks: how small and interconnected our world is. And that change is unavoidable.

Once our economies have stabilized, we will need to heed the call for change and address the systemic inefficiencies in our world's infrastructures—the processes that underpin the way billions of people work and live—and make our planet smarter.

Tell me that these words don't make your blood chill. Especially when you look at one of the successes they laud and where they are going:

We have just scratched the surface. Right now, IBM is working with thousands of forward-thinking companies, governments, universities and institutions to make our smarter world a better place to live where...

* Smarter roadways reduce traffic

We helped Stockholm implement a road charging system that reduced traffic by 20% and emissions by 12%.

Ugh. I can't believe my beloved Informix is part of this disgusting quasi-fascist bullshit.