AK Haart has posted his favourite, so here's mine.
From the BBC:
Mr Carswell said UKIP "needs to change gear and to change its management if it's to go the next level"…
In a reference to Mr Farage's claim that the Oldham by-election postal vote was rigged, he added: "I don't want to wake up the morning after the European referendum and hear it was the postal votes."
From City AM:
“They’re on the back foot, momentum is with us, and I think we’re going to win,” Carswell says.
“[The CBI] are not neutral players in this. They tend to favour big corporate lobbying because they are a big corporate lobbying organisation. They produced a poll that even the British Polling Council admitted was questionable,” he adds, using a recent corporate scandal to land another punch on the business group.
“The CBI is to measuring what British business thinks about EU membership what Volkswagen is to carbon emissions tests. They’re methodologically rather suspect.”
Some businesses want to stay in the European Union, Carswell concedes. But that’s because “those businesses – big corporations and banks in particular, but also lobby groups – that have a clear vested interest in a commercial system based on lobbying and the granting of permission, who are going to love the EU.”
“But they are not representative of the broad bulk of business in this country, who can’t afford to rig the rules. I also happen to think there is something unethical about gaining market share by fixing the rules by hiring lobbyists.”
“I believe in the free market, and the corporatist vested interest in Brussels who are rigging the system to their advantage are not helping us be competitive. Competitiveness, like red tape and all problems in the EU, has been a problem all Prime Ministers have said they’ll address, but nothing ever changes.”
Which is what I have been saying for years. The Outers should not be just attacking the EU from 'the right' by focusing on immigration (even though in the light of recent events, that's becoming ever easier), they should be attacking the EU from 'the left' as well.
I was at a UKIP event in London a few years ago, and when it was finished, I told the others that I was off to the Occupy London thing at St Paul's. That took some of them by surprise, but I explained that as far as I was concerned, in some ways, UKIP and the Occupy people are fighting for the same thing, they just don't realise it.
Well done, Douglas Carswell in yesterday's by-election, but now comes the interesting bit and the reason why UKIP - with it's easily understandable manifesto* - isn't bigger than it is.
Exodus 20:3: "You shall have no other gods before Me"
Farage was always perfectly nice to me, but I was just a humble bean counter and form filler. It's people who show a bit of free spirit and possible rivals to share what little limelight is shone on UKIP who he can't stand (let alone people who seriously stand against him in leadership elections). I suspect that Carswell falls into one or more of those categories, so my money's on him standing as an independent in May 2015.
* "If you don't want all your taxes to be spent on concreting over the green belt with social housing for Romanian and Bulgarian welfare claimants, vote UKIP!"
UPDATE: The Stigler adds...
That's UKIP manifesto (South). UKIP Manifesto (North) is:-
"Note UKIP and we'll keep making sure you get lots of lovely benefits by keeping the Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants from getting their hands on them."
Douglas Carswell in The Spectator states the bleeding' obvious:
Here is a graph that shows the four economic downturns Britain has been through (red lines) over the past forty years.
What I find strking is that each downturn was preceded by the same thing: a surge in the growth of money (blue line). In other words, the bust followed an unsustainable credit-induced boom…
The man in the street can't see the increase in credit or the credit bubble, as it is a bit abstract, but what we can easily see is land price/house price bubbles, which are always debt fuelled.
That's where nearly all the extra credit goes - into buying and selling the same old land and buildings which have always been there, they are already built on/built and so little need for further investment above and beyond annual maintenance etc.
You can't have a credit bubble without a land price bubble and vice versa, they are the same thing, two sides of the same coin.
And we know how to dampen land price speculation (and reduce taxes on real economic activity and investment), don't we?
1. Basic accounting
The FT peddles the same old myth, that somebody can make a profit by trading with himself:
Changes to the state pension announced at the weekend will bring the exchequer a stealth windfall of almost £6bn a year from 2016-17, mostly paid by public sector employers and employees in the form of increased national insurance contributions.
The extra NIC deducted from public sector employees' pay packets (if they end "contracting out") is indeed a reduction in government spending, and HMRC can book an increase in receipts from public sector employees as extra income if they so wish but the extra receipts from public sector employers is matched by an equal increase in government spending to pay the extra employerer'sNICs in the first place.
It's an uphill struggle all this. A working assumption must be that most people really are as thick as pig shit (is pig shit actually "thick" or is it more runny? No idea.).
Pointing out that this is a self-cancelling transaction is about as futile as trying to explain that interest paid to HM Treasury on its holding of UK gilts is HM Treasury's income but it's also HM Treasury's expense because they are paying the interest in the first place. Or the fact that Housing Benefit claimed by social tenants is not government spending because the money is being paid by one branch of the government (DWP) to another branch (local councils) who then pass it back to HM Treasury anyway, who in turn fund the DWP and so on ad infinitum.
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2. Basic accounts
Lola alerted me to Douglas Carswell's bright idea on banking reform, which is pretty much the same as Positive Money's bright idea, and they say so themselves:
My Bill would give account holders legal ownership of their deposits, unless they indicated otherwise when opening the account. In other words, there would henceforth be two categories of bank account: deposit-taking accounts for investment purposes, and deposit-taking accounts for storage purposes.
Apart from the fact that the government do not want to reform banking in the slightest, as the UK government (like so many other governments, including but not limited to the USA and the EU) is run by, for and on behalf of bankers, this will not achieve anything:
1. Let's gloss over Carswell's fundamental error that credit creation starts with somebody depositing money in the bank. No it does not. It starts with the bank making a loan.
2. And let's gloss over the fact that banks would manage to circumvent the rules on a practical level, for example by lending out money taken for "storage purposes", booking the corresponding receipt as being for "investment purposes" and then slipping the money back into "storage" again before anybody notices, i.e. by the end of the each day's trading.
3. The point is, we do not need to mull over what would happen if customers were offered two different types of accounts, because we already know.
Twenty years ago, we still had the Post Office Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank, which were government run/sponsored, implicitly 100% government guaranteed and safe. And we had commercial banks, which also had some sort of government guarantee for deposits, but it wasn't very high (it was up to 90% of the first £30,000-odd until a few years ago, I've no idea what it was twenty years ago).
And twenty years ago, we had a lot of building societies, which were inherently safer than banks (because of what they did, how they did it and all the restrictions imposed on them).
4. So instead of making commercial banks offer two different types of accounts (which can be easily circumvented, see 2.) we could simply set up a new government bank (similar to PO or TSB) and offer people "basic accounts" which pay little or no interest, offer no overdrafts, which do direct debits and offer a debit card and not much else, and which are 100% government protected.
In this case, there would be no need to make commercial banks offer "storage purpose" accounts or to give a government guarantee for deposits with commercial banks because if people want that, they can put their money with the new PO-TSB. And if they want something a bit racier without a guarantee, they are free to open an account with a bank on whatever terms and conditions they please.
5. Will commercial banks continue to merrily blow credit bubbles and land price bubbles, like they always have done, with or without government guarantees for deposits, with or without there being safer types of investment, with or without all but the fiercest bank regulations? Yes of course they will. They'll keep splitting the zero and creating new loans and new "investment purpose" accounts.
6. Will people be happy with this? No of course not. During the next boom, people's urge to make a quick buck and get something for nothing (or the politicians desire to be seen to be giving the voters something for nothing) will take over, the PO-TSB will be privatised, demutualised, become a quoted company, over-trade and then go bankrupt again, the government will bail them out etc, and then the cycle starts again.
7. And during the next bust, the government will simply extend the deposit guarantee to all accounts again, or increase the eligible amount, just like they did this time.
As ever, the real problem here is the bankers (and landowners) tapping into people's desire to make a quick buck and get something for nothing, and the politicians just going with the flow.
People have to remember that they are the ones who end up paying for the quick bucks - for sure, all Halifax members got £1,800's of "free shares" in the 1990s (I've still got my contract note selling them on the first day) but we've ended up paying a lot more than £1,800 each to bail out Lloyds-HBOS. Its the usual vested interests who are getting richer from all this, not the likes of us common or garden voters.
Douglas Carswell muses on how the internet and the concept of licensing "intangible assets" enable companies to avoid paying taxes designed for a system of physical production (mines, factories) in today's City AM Forum, and concludes thusly:
"But if the tax base turns out to be a river that can flow away," you ask, "how are governments going to manage to raise revenue to pay for all the things that governments do?"
How indeed. Perhaps they won’t. Without a dependable tax base, maybe the era of Big Government is over.
How about taxing land values instead of turnover, income and profits? Costa Coffee trades from 700 shops; Google has offices and data centres (and their employees all have to live somewhere); the businesses who sell goods or services via Amazon or eBay still need somewhere to store their goods; they need parcel companies to deliver them, who have their own offices, warehouses and car parks etc etc. And if those premises are currently abroad (for whatever nefarious reasons) then let's build more suitable premises in this country and invite them all over.
Just for a giggle, I've emailed this post to theforum@cityam.com, feel free to have a go yourself.
Courtesy of Douglas Carswells blog, I found this.
Here's what they say about...
"Laissez-faire
In economics laissez-faire is an environment in which private parties are free to trade and transact in the absence of state intervention. State intervention can take the form of capital controls (human and financial), regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies. Laissez-faire is a French phrase and literally translated means “let do”, but more broadly it means “let it be”, or “leave it alone”. Much of the debates within economic and political circles centre around to what extent economies should be left to operate on a laissez-faire basis.
A number of prominent gold investors are intellectually aligned with the Austrian school of economic thought and argue that it is in fact intervention in our money and markets that has caused the gross imbalances in our financial system that manifested themselves in 2008. Whilst the heart of these arguments centres around a flawed monetary system and the problematic effects of central banks (cited as an apparent cartel) gold investors such as Peter Schiff argue that intervention in various markets is responsible for many of our economic woes.
This political interference is said to have distorted market forces and pricing, with the manipulation of interest rates and provision of credit being most obviously visible. Such manipulation of interest rates and credit, for example, enables politicians to purse their goals of increased home-ownership above what would be possible under a normally functioning market.
Here endeth.
