Category Archives: Britain

UPDATED: Bravo Britain (Neocons For Total War)

Barack Obama, Britain, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

BBC News fails to lead its Internet page with the magnificent news that Parliament, for once, has executed the will of the people, and that the UK will be staying out of Syria.

Instead, the left-liberal interventionist at BBC News (people of Samantha Power’s ilk) have buried the item in an article about “I, Obama” (America’s imperial president), and his administration’s various ahistoric, idiotic pronouncements.

The lead in question reads: “US led by ‘best interests’ on Syria.”

BBC News makes only veiled allusions to the “unexpected outcome in the parliament,” to “British MPs [ruling] out London’s involvement in any US-led strikes against Syria,” and to “British members of [parliament’s rejection] of the principle of military action against Damascus in a 285-272 vote.”

UPDATE (8/30): TOTAL WAR.

“The BBC footage is grisly; the British media have been far more invested in the Syrian civil war than their U.S. colleagues,” confirms Mark Steyn.

This week, David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer recess to permit the people’s representatives to express their support for the impending attack. Instead, for the first time since the British defeat at Yorktown in 1782, the House of Commons voted to deny Her Majesty’s Government the use of force. Under the Obama “reset,” even the Coalition of the Willing is unwilling. “It’s clear to me that the British Parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action,” said the prime minister. So the Brits are out, and, if he goes at all, Obama will be waging war without even Austin Powers’s Union Jack fig leaf.

Steyn here advances the staid neoconservative tack (in dazzling style, as always). When neocons lose an argument for war, they just regroup and renew their efforts.

“What the British people are sick of, quite reasonably enough,” claims Steyn, “is ineffectual warmongering.”

Yeah, give us total, all-out war and we’ll march in goose step with Chuck Krauthammer.

Actually, re-reading “An Accidental War,” I can’t quite tell what Steyn advocates (all in dazzling style, of course).

John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2)

Britain, Capitalism, Celebrity, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, History, Inflation

The following is an excerpt from “John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2),” the conclusion of my conversation with Benn Steil. (Read part 1. ) Dr. Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is “The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.”

ILANA MERCER: After reading a negative review of your book in The Times Literary Supplement, I decided to go cold turkey on what had been a guilty pleasure for over a decade. I did not renew my TLS subscription. The TLS had stupidly assigned the review to one Eric Rauchway, a left-coast history teacher. Rauchway would not let an argument favorable to the gold standard—yours—stand. Your case against the Bretton Woods system of “managed currencies” he turned on its head. Rauchway credited Harry Dexter White, one of Bretton Woods’ architects, with helping to lift the “cross of gold” from the shoulders of the world’s working classes. Since White was also a Soviet spy, Rauchway quickly concluded that the Soviets saved capitalism (an “unknown ideal” for a very long time). Sound money is suspect, but a Soviet spy is capitalism’s savior. How do you unpack that!?

BENN STEIL: You can’t get blood from a stone, and you can’t get logic from Rauchway’s review, just gobs of nonsense and libel (as I documented on on my blog ). The review’s title, “How the Soviets saved capitalism,” is so inane that the only explanation for it is that Rauchway, or his TLS editors, fell in love with the sheer childish cheekiness of it. It certainly bears no relation to Rauchway’s account of Bretton Woods, nor that of anyone who can actually claim to know anything about it.
Rauchway would no doubt mock the economist who wrote the following of the 19th century classical gold standard: “[t]he various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages.”

Unless, that is, Rauchway knew who it was – none other than J. M. Keynes.

MERCER: We can both agree that John Maynard Keynes’ opposition to WWI and his “bitterness over the terms of the peace” were admirable. Priceless too was John Maynard Keynes description of President Woodrow Wilson as “slowminded and bewildered”; a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” (pages 70-71) On the other hand, also quite admirable was the following unflattering description of Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” It comes courtesy not of Keynes, but of our author: “It is only slightly outlandish to liken the book to the Bible: powerful in its message, full of memorable, mellifluous passages; at times obscure, tedious, tendentious, and contradictory; a work of passion driven by intuition, with tenuous logic and observation offered as placeholders until disciples could be summoned to supply the proofs.” (page 88) Have Keynes’ disciples really delivered? It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory.

STEIL: Yes, if the economy sinks, then Paul Krugman was right about the need for massive stimulus; if it recovers in the face of plunging deficits, from spending cuts and tax increases, then Krugman was right that deficits were not a problem. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

MERCER: Keynes assessed Karl Marx’s “economic value” as “nil… apart from occasional flashes of insight.” (page 87) I would venture that in the United States, Marxism has been far less destructive to free-market capitalism than Keynesianism. Marxists honestly wish for capitalism’s demise and say as much. We can fight such an enemy. Conversely, Keynesians have redefined capitalism and banished our definition therefrom. The Keynesians then proceeded to cripple capitalism so as to ostensibly save it. Positively Orwellian.

STEIL:

The conclusion of the Steil-Mercer conversation about Keynes is now on WND. Read “John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2).”

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Change Your Constitution, Says Another British Redcoat

Britain, English, Founding Fathers, GUNS, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Terrorism

He looks about 12-years old and is already retired. Where could he possible have worked? In the military, of course, where you are put out to pasture decades before individuals in the private sector (read the real economy) can retire. His name is Lt. Col. Michael Kay, formerly an adviser to the British Ministry of Defense. Lt. Col. Kay is here to tell Americans that, because the amorphous terrorist threat against us is “unconventional”—the National Security Agency has to take unconventional means to counter this undefined, unconventional threat.

Magnanimously, Kay concedes his host’s point about the NSA’s trampling of the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular. But hey, what do the Brits know about a constitution—they’ve already trashed their ancient, unwritten, venerated freedoms which inspired the fathers of this nation. Kay, of course, makes his living stoking fear.

Piers Morgan is another Briton who, from his perch at CNN, suborns treason against Americans by preaching against their natural right to defend life and property.

The backdrop: The Washington Post’s revelation—a mere formality really—that the president’s protestations to the contrary, “The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.”

MORE.

What Ever Happened To Debtor’s Jail?

Affirmative Action, Britain, Debt, Government, Justice, Law

Judge Rosemary Aquilina is hoping to suspend reality in Detroit with her gavel.

Aquilina is “an Ingham County Circuit judge,” who “ordered Friday that Detroit’s federal bankruptcy filing be withdrawn,” reports the Detroit News. “Aquilina said the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees, including those in the City of Detroit.” (Imagine: The state’s constitution works against Michigan taxpayers.)

The Library of Economics and Liberty remarks that “Early English bankruptcy laws were designed to assist creditors in collecting the debtor’s assets, not to protect the debtor or discharge (forgive) his debts.”

This was the wise, ancient common law. The latter is not the concern of Wikipedia, when it talks about the “debtor declaring bankruptcy to obtain relief from debt,” which “is accomplished either through a discharge of the debt or through a restructuring of the debt.”

That the US even allows Chapter 9—“municipal bankruptcy; a federal mechanism for the resolution of municipal debts”—says a lot.

Governments should not be availed of the legal instruments meant to protect private-property owners. How about debtor’s jail for politicians who defraud taxpayers?

Perhaps Aquilina worries that the fat cats (Detroit’s political class) will obtain relief at the expense of the little guy (public-sector workers) to whom the politicians and the unions promised the world?

The sooner the oink sector is disabused of its delusions, the better.

Last week’s column introduced readers to the Colosseum of courtroom cretins. In a word, a dumbed down courtroom commentariat that is incapable of separating politicized constructs (racism) from facts admissible in a court of law.

Judge Rosemary Aquilina is another of this idiocracy’s many exhibits.