Since 2000 the European Union has given the Assad Regime over £1 billion. The money, given to promote such things as "good governance," "social reform" and "economic reform" have obviously all failed - to the detriment of the people of Syria and the international community. However, this revelation was ever the more startling as the United Kingdom did not participate in some of these schemes. It raises further questions over the extent of UK influence within the EU, when programmes fund unsuitable regimes without explicit UK support.

I have been reading the Spectator this morning, and in their Portrait of the Week found this gem:

Despite a ban on ringing the speaking clock, Ministry of Defence staff spent £18,804 of its money last year dialling 123 to check the time.

I don't know where to begin. Out of respect to my host, I start with the idea of 'its' money. Where do they think this bloody money comes from? It isn't 'its'. I would suggest the correct word to use here would be 'our' money. 

Then why is it that our civil servants have a need to call a fee paying service to find out the time? Do the individuals who work there, on now very generous salaries matching their outrageously generous pensions, not have a watch? A phone? The cognisance to read the time in the corner of their computer screen? They are either profligate or stupid, or perhaps both. 

The article does not tell us what happened, but one suspects someone used the ultimate English retort of 'writing a letter'; or in other words a memo, which was probably circulated, which will be ignored, much as the orginal rule clearly was. How about we recover the money from these overpaid imbeciles? And give everyone a warning so that if they do so again they are suspended without pay, or better, sacked? I need hardly point out that spending our money in contravention of their rules of employment has a word in the real world, and a penalty. It is called theft, and it is a criminal offence. 

This may seem petty, but sloppy language, especially in media, betrays sound thinking. Is it any wonder we are in the state we are in? 

BBC News - David Cameron loses Commons vote on Syria action.

I am not a pacifist. There is such a thing as legitimate self-defence. However we are not currently threatened in any serious way by anyone in Syria. Quite the contrary, as Perry de Havilland explains over at Samizdata; 

Some people want to intervene in Syria to stop Al Qaeda backed people and Hezbollah backed people killing each other.

Really?

 I have a better idea… sell ammunition to both sides.

Country Joe and the Fish provide the best marching song for the upcoming Syrian War; the latest attempt by our effete rulers to prove their machismo. They will do it in their usual style by shedding the blood of far better men than themselves from a very safe distance.

h/t The View from Cullingworth

Since the 17th/18th century capitalist seizure of government power, and specifically following from the 1694 creation of the Bank of England, the government's debt has been the basis of our monetary system. This combination of government power and capitalist credit money made possible a broader based integration between government and the economy - contributing directly to the explosion of British economic, industrial and military power which later gave birth to the British Empire.

This system has obvious advantages with respect to the coordination of a mass economy but from the perspective of individual freedom it is deleterious.

Some argue that the private creation of government money is a separation of powers which itself limits government. In reality, the opposite is true. Finance is government and government is finance - and at the same time, if we wish to do business, we cannot help but be drawn into this government-private hybrid money nexus. The power of government is surreptitiously (or not so surreptitiously) extended to every aspect of economic life.

Not only is it nearly impossible to escape this system but also, if the government relies upon and controls the private money system, we face the twin dangers that (1) control of government/finance becomes the most profitable activity in society and (2) the temptation to raise revenue for government takes precedence over real economic considerations.

The Fred Goodwins of the world, or the trend for physicists to become bankers are a result of (1) while the austerity/ higher tax campaigns are a result of number (2).

Libertarians would generally seek to solve these problems by eliminating the government from money creation. There are a number of problems with this approach. Firstly, credit networks without government support tend to be either small and personal, or entirely unstable. Secondly, there is no evidence that pure "commodity money" has ever existed or that barter can be used to run a large scale economy. Thirdly, almost everyone agrees that there must be some role for government and if government must use private money we again run into problems (2) + (1) - because government relies upon private money it cannot be separated from private business.

Now, there may well be a trade off between the ability to run a mass economy and individual liberty, in order to be free we might have to accept fewer things. I'm relatively comfortable with that - from the perspective of libertarians the destruction of the mass economy may well be a feature rather than a bug. However, I do feel that, rather than eliminating government money creation, as libertarians suggest, (or eliminating private money creation as per the positive money proposal) - we should allow both systems to operate alongside each other, but to exist, entirely and conspicuously separately - in essence, make using government money and engaging in the mass economy a choice.

Government created money could be a form of virtual commodity, (with the function of gaining respite from the taxman - essentially a tax credit). If the government did not require private money, there would be no (revenue related) reasons for it to tax these transactions. Therefore, it would be relatively easy to eliminate VAT, income tax, capital gains tax and replace it with some form of flat tax on tax credits only. In this way, the ability to do business would be separated from the need to pay tax.

Personally, I would set up the system in such a way that it would be possible to choose through lifestyle to avoid tax entirely. (For example - we distribute 100 tax credits to each citizen every year and tax on the basis of natural resource consumption- 100 tax credits for every 10 squared meters of land - by making a lifestyle choice to consume fewer natural resources you could avoid taxation and then be free to engage in whatever other business you choose - obviously many people would insist that people did "work first" before they get credits.)

You could then choose to conduct business either using surplus tax credits (which would offer the mass stability of government money), private credit agreements or barter/commodity money. These entirely independent monetary systems would provide a *real* division of economic power and be based entirely upon voluntary exchange.

As I say, I don't know if this would be more efficient from the perspective of production or "raise GDP", but I do think it would be more conducive to personal liberty.

BBC News - Real IRA man's family to be compensated.

I do not agree with the basic idea behind the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. Compensation is a private, civil matter. The only crossover should be that the guilty verdict in the criminal court is accepted by the civil judge, so that he can move straight to deciding the amount of damages. There will also be cases where civil claimants can succeed despite the defendant's acquittal in a criminal court, because of the lower burden of proof.

I know that most of my readers are in Britain and am aware that your comments are fewer when I post about other places. Where, however, would I find a funded-by-extortion British professor uttering such words as:

No matter how robustly our tax revenues grow, government always finds a way to spend everything it collects - plus more.

I loved his comment that America would have been better off asking its physicians to reform government than its politicians to reform healthcare, since the per capita increase in healthcare costs since the 1950s is an outrageous 2,000% but the per person cost of government has risen 3,000%. To put that in context, other costs have risen by a mere 700%, which rather suggests to me that both healthcare and government should be privatised.

I would be fascinated (and probably horrified) to see a similar analysis of inflation- and population-adjusted increases in government spending since the 1950s in the UK.