I can't embed a YouTube Clip to this, because there isn't one, but those of you who own Bob Dylan's absolutely dire/most excellent Xmas album* of last year can listen out for the semi-tone upwards truck driver's gear change at 2 mins 9 seconds into his hatchet job/idiosyncratic tribute to "Do you hear what I hear?".
See also O' Little Town Of Bethehem
* Is it dead serious? Is it a piss take? Or both or neither? Probably not even he knows.
Rumours, Half Truths and Myths
2 hours ago
7 comments:
Great to see you getting into it early, Mark.
Mark
O/T but a friend of mine is talking about how a book called 'Bad Samaritans' destroys the myth that free trade is good for the developing world. I've seen reviews and summaries and I won't bore you with my thoughts but: does it have anything interesting to say/is it worth reading/will I learn anything from it/should I burn it?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Mark
I've bee digging into the skill shortage/immigration data - and needless to say, the Left's arguments are complete bollocks.
I'd appreciate whatever oxygen you can give to this piece
Best
John Ward
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/our-most-pressing-skills-shortage-is-at-conservative-hq/
JH, I started listening to the Xmas playlist yesterday.
CI, hmm. Do you think they've magically disproved Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, which stacks up in logic and in fact. It strikes me that the poor countries which trade least with the West (Cuba, North Korea, Burma etc) are those whose economies are most likely to be going backwards rather than to be developing.
JW, feel free to leave a link to it.
Christmas songs depress me with their message of enforced jollity and compulsory fun. Every year I see how close I can get to December 25th before I hear "So here it is merry Christmas...." being played somewhere public.
Bah Humbug.
Mark
Indeed, apart from the obvious fact that the closed economies of the world are not doing terribly well, Japan and Korea got wealthy by producing a lot of things that people in other countries wanted to buy, that is by trading freely, not by closing their borders.
If they practised a form of protectionism against foreign imports it worked because at that time we wanted their goods but we didn't need their markets. I don't see this helping Africa, and of course it says nothing about the merits of free trade.
Ci, trade barriers works both ways.
I think Cuba doesn't trade much with the USA because the US government won't allow its businesses to trade with Cuba - conversely, North Korean or Burmese people can't trade with Western businesses because the NR or B governments respectively won't let them.
At one extreme is 'embargo' or 'boycott' and at the other extreme is 'protectionism' but it's all the same politically motivated shite.
Africa is a bit of both, and is a basket case anyway. The West subsidises its non-industries and has trade barriers against its actual productive industries, and the continent is largely run by kleptocrats etc.
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