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Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked.
This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio -
"You don't speak for me."
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Brilliant.
Look at the body language of those poor EU fanatics listening!
What Europe needs is to become wider and thinner, i.e. embrace more countries, but limit the cooperation to the “four freedoms” (freedom of movement for goods, services, labor, and capital). And then let the individual countries compete, cooperate, and grow, as they see fit.
Winston Churchill would have been proud of Farage. He sees what the educated idiot elite does not. The EU is circling the drain, the Titanic is sinking and the steerage class is locked up while the band plays on. Pandamonium will ensue when they break out and reality sets in but all the lifeboats are gone. Almost reminds me of a movie I saw.
I don’t know why Nigel is so worried about the rise of fascism in Greece when he has been sitting among fascists for the last 4 years.
A voice of sanity among zombies.
Nigel is a lone voice in a sea of moonbats. They will not attack the problem but will attack the messenger.
And they all embraced the SCAM global warming, sinking trillions into “saving the planet”, there in Europe. If all the problems of Europe are not being noticed by our Canadian politicians by now, they are deaf and blind. Meanwhile I am manufacturing and selling “STP capes”, for a mere 199.95 I will send anyone truly interested in “saving the planet” a cape, because any self respecting superhero trying to save this planet damn sure needs a cape, right Al and David.
The trouble is, as the markets worldwide proved today, this bs has the power to take down global financial markets and us with them.
Time to suffer fools no more.
As the gasoline is running through their feet, they are trying to strike a match in hopes of seeing better.
mike
OMG, look at the zombies listening to Farage’s impassioned speech. They’re the EU reps from other countries? No wonder it’s in the toilet.
Nigel Farage is a treasure, a diamond in a sewer.
Ukip’s Nigel Farage pulled unconscious from plane crash
“Nigel Farage, the Ukip candidate, has had an extraordinary escape after his plane towing an election banner crashed into a field.”
“Mr Farage, was pulled semi-conscious from the wreckage with blood running down his swollen face after the light aircraft crashed upside down at…”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/7685237/Ukips-Nigel-Farage-pulled-unconscious-from-plane-crash.html
He seems well enough, considering.
Nigel Farage reminds me of a European Breitbart. Thank God, his injuries are minor.
Lots of empty seats there. Looks like they’ve given up.
Blunt and to the point. There have been a number of Brit commentators who seem to have seen through the EU for what it really is but unfortunately they appear to be blind to the fact that their own country is sliding down another drain, that of multiculturalism.
I love the way that man jumps around when he speaks.
That,
and the idiots not listening to him,
will make it easier for the USA and Europe to hold hands and jump off into the financial abyss together..
The MEPs look less like zombies as like sulky children who’ve sat through their well-meaning father’s lectures too many times. Giving them a good spanking would be kinder in the long run. They’ll go on ignoring his lectures about annoying the neighbour’s dog until it rips out their throats.
If I didn’t know your words were really intended for the plain people of the civilized world, Mr. Farage, I’d say save your breath. The plain people of every quarter of Europe will come calling to repay the MEPs for their treachery soon enough. Let them listen to them.
“A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool’s back.”
Next Christmas in Bucharest!
Mr. Farage has the air of a man who is tired. Tired of trying to explain to a pack of willful fools that you can’t escape arithmetic or gravity. That all their claimed good intentions plus five Euros will get them a cappuccino down the street at the cafe.
Because yeah, a coffee can run you five Euros in Brussels. $6.50 Canadian. That being the problem in a nutshell.
It appeared to me that 3/4 of the seats were empty? Like any parliament in my opinion if you don’t show you don’t get paid!
When the sh*t hits the fan this time North America will/should not bail them out with our young men!
Nigel Farage has that great quality of never being at a loss for words while at the same time
carefully calculating the needed boot toe angle to reach his detractor’s virtual scrotum.
.
Here’s a succinct outline of How An Economy Functions. Saw it on Publius by nomdeblog. It’s exactly right.
“Governments consume wealth, only the private sector creates wealth. The government has to be carried on the backs of the private sector. We have somehow gotten the idea that we are a consumer driven society. We aren’t, what got us out of the Middle Ages is that we are an investor (surplus) driven society. Without a surplus to invest we’d still be living day to day like a hunter gather society…i.e. like the Middle East wants to return to…utopian nomads of the past.
How the economy in fact works is that because of the magnificent strides in productivity in the West since the industrial age we have created fantastic surpluses which are available to invest and that offered risk/reward choices. When invested in production of something, that in turn creates jobs to make a product. The people in those jobs are then able to take their wages and go out and consume stuff. Consumption is at the end, investment is at the beginning. Getting this backwards is why the West is stalled in growth and the new King of France wants to tax the wealth creators at 75%. Class warfare, tax the millions and billionaires rhetoric will send us back to the middle ages.”
Note: governments don’t produce wealth; they consume it. What produces wealth? Investment and Production by the private sector. If the govt takes all this wealth for its consumption redistribution, then…there won’t be any left to put into the two economic phases that make wealth: Investment and Production.
This is such a basic, simple, elementary outline, and yet, our socialist ‘friends’ focus only on Consumption and consider that wealth comes from ‘The Rich’, who boil it up in their Magic Cauldrons. Incredible.
” Without a surplus to invest we’d still be living day to day like a hunter gather society …”
If I could add, ET – Societies were able to advance beyond ‘hunter gathers’ when Farmers were able to produce a surplus of food beyond their families’ needs. Others, when not being burdened with procuring their own food needs, then had the time to work to create an advanced society. Carpenters(housing), Doctors(health), Investors(any&all businesses), Woodloter (heat), Teamsters(transportation), ect.
What drives food production? CO2 and a warm climate.
WARM IS BETTER.
Honest the God the absolute best part of Farage’s speeches is seeing the sulking faces on all the EU one-world socialists in the audience!!
All I know is, I have never been hired by a poor man.
,
@jt,
I remember my boys studying photosynthesis when they were in grade 2 for science. I remember learning about it around the same age. That’s why I can’t understand why all the supposed learned people are crying about an increase in CO2 and warmth (makes it better for all plants including crops–and the other half of the equation is that more 02(oxygen) is produced). When people say the icebergs are melting and oceans will rise…I say if the US was able to dig a ditch from one end of Central America to the other almost 100yrs ago, who says we can’t build a ditch from the ocean, put the water through a desalinization plant and irrigate the friggin’ Sahara Desert? Maybe if we give those Arabs and Bedouins the means to grow their own food, they’ll start advancing their civilization past the tribalism they’ve been stuck at for the past 1400yrs.
ron in kelowna – exactly right.
The hunters and gatherers were a consumption-only economy. They invested nothing to make food or shelter; they therefore produced nothing. They relied, totally, on the Investment Wealth of nature. But, such an economy could only support about 30 people in a location. And, you’d have to keep migrating, keep moving, to fresh lands.
The agriculturalists Invested in making wealth, ie, they nurtured the land and animals to produce more grains, vegetables, milk, meat than was ‘natural’ in the area. This took work; a lot of work. They thus produced a surplus of food and this, as you point out, enabled non-food producers to emerge: housebuilders, carriage builders, etc. And, this economy could be stable, settled – and support larger and larger populations.
BUT – the thing to note, is that the tasks of Investment and Production emerged, people worked at these two tasks. They didn’t simply ‘consume’ the ‘riches-of-Nature’.
Our current alienated society ignores these two basic components of an economy: Investment and Production. The current metaphor of Bountiful Nature is ‘The Rich’. We have regressed to passive hunters and gatherers, relying on Bountiful Nature (The Rich) to support our Consumption needs. We don’t engage in Investment and Production.
Such an economy cannot sustain itself; it can’t sustain our large populations. We are slithering along only because other nations such as China and India, are working in Investment and Production. We just consume; we just say: ‘I’m entitled to my entitlements’…a disastrous concept.
Nigel Farage is a treasure, a diamond in a sewer.
– batb
TRUE, but I have to ask: shouldn’t Nigel Farage do something productive!?
Europe, a continent of welfare state juveniles staring at the headlights coming towards them with no idea of how to avoid disaster because only through the state are solutions to everything found. Nigel wasn’t speaking to them, he was speaking to us.
ET: Thanks for nomdeblog’s post.
BTW, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) posits that booms and busts are caused by the artificial expansion of bank credit; that this causes a DISTORTION in the natural market-driven allocation between consumption and investment; that capitalists/entrepreneurs, normally highly skilled at forecasting business conditions, fall into a massive cluster of errors due to the false signals generated by this credit expansion, viz., a false impression of the available pool of savings.
In contrast, Keynesianism’s fatal flaw is that it has no such capital theory.
As you are most likely aware Keynesians believe that savings (hoarding) endanger the economy. See: Krugman and his favourite lecture at university: The Paradox of Thrift.
Well put ET, as usual.
Socialism means believing that, all evidence to the contrary, the law of diminishing returns does not apply to government.
mnd – yes, the function of Investment and Production is totally ignored by socialists, progressives, Democrats, NDP, Liberals. They focus only on Consumption.
Their agenda is to enable everyone to Consume equally. This is called Social Justice. In a very real sense, they reject evaluation. To evaluate is to discriminate, and discrimination is a ‘bad action’. Everyone must have a college degree and all such degrees are equal. Everyone must have a house, a car, a similar lifestyle. They totally ignore HOW one achieves these results, for the Consumed Results are considered collective human rights for all to Consume rather than the results of individual Investment and Production (working, studying).
Production is not in their world. Industries exist to simply transfer ‘wealth’ from the Magic Cauldron to the Workers. Unions are necessary to extract this wealth. The product produced by the industry is irrelevant; the focus is not on producing goods but on transfering wealth to the Workers.
Investment is not in their world. They ignore that factories have to be built, trains and planes have to be built – and these take tremendous amounts of wealth – wealth that isn’t available for rapid consumption but is stored in those factories, in those machines, in the technological development.
They have a nursery tale notion of Wealth. It comes, not as a surplus that is left over after goods are Produced and sold – and must then be Invested to make more goods. It comes from some Magical Cauldron owned by The Rich. The Rich, like Scrooge, won’t give it up, so Unions and The Government must force it from them. This wealth of course isn’t put into Investment but is distributed by the govt for Consumption activities: food stamps, medicare, more public service employees, higher wages and benefits, etc.
So, this socialist economy runs out of Wealth! The private sector is so heavily taxed that it cannot produce any surplus! But gosh, those ‘entitlements’ must continue. So, what happens?
We are like Hunters and Gatherers, who live off the surface of the land and must move elsewhere once they’ve depleted the land. Our tactic of ‘moving elsewhere’ is massive debt from China.
Ron in Kalona: If I could add, ET – Societies were able to advance beyond ‘hunter gathers’ when Farmers were able to produce a surplus of food beyond their families’ needs. Others, when not being burdened with procuring their own food needs, then had the time to work to create an advanced society. Carpenters(housing), Doctors(health), Investors(any&all businesses), Woodloter (heat), Teamsters(transportation), ect.
Good point! Maybe Ron or ET can explain why it is we seem to understand a surplus is needed in an Agricultural Age but can’t seem to grasp that the same concept is required in an Industrial Age and in our current Age …whatever that is …Digital Age?
For example, government or Obama’s Keynesian demand driven concept with the stimulus didn’t cause Apple sales to go through the roof. That happened because Steve Jobs invested and took risks to develop products that once launched into the market caused people to camp out in front of Apple stores to get the product.
But it does take risk capital to be invested and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Facebook is a hit, a phenomena. But MySpace wasn’t…these digital ventures are very risky and those investors who take the risk should be championed not vilified as the 1%.
Why can’t people understand the key to our progress and growth is to encourage investment? Because if we don’t get it soon, Nigel’s prognostications are a waste of time. “Nigel wasn’t speaking to them, he was speaking to us.”
Great comments by Ron, ET and nomdeblog.
ET asks, “So, what happens?” As my extended family experienced, everyone lives at different levels of squalor and bare existence except for those who are more equal.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which destroyed private enterprise and investment over a period of a couple of years (notwithstanding NEP), the US, and the EU, are largely taxing and regulating private enterprise and investment to death.
“We are like Hunters and Gatherers, who live off the surface of the land and must move elsewhere once they’ve depleted the land. Our tactic of ‘moving elsewhere’ is massive debt from China.”
But, but back in the day when I took Anthropology 101 Margaret Mead said we should all return to a commune. That psychedelic moonbat probably launched more communes than we realize.
Anyway, thanks ET, I get it why “they” don’t understand the need for investment, these utopians out of 60’s think wealth is created in a “Magic Cauldron …..and Industries exist to simply transfer ‘wealth’ from the Magic Cauldron to the Workers”
Your insight is very interesting about “once they’ve depleted the land. Our tactic of ‘moving elsewhere’ is massive debt from China.” It makes sense, that’s the new equivalent to emigration. Now you don’t need to emigrate, you just borrow from the Chinese.
You probably loath the popcorn anthropologist Jared Diamond, a big hit in airport book stores; anyway he wrote “Collapse” and in it he points out how ancient societies depleted the land and disappeared. In a Digital Age, we’ll collapse by letting Obama deplete the millionaires and billionaires and eventually he’ll get so downgraded that the Chinese won’t lend anymore money to water the White House lawn where Michelle will soon have to grow tofu and greens.
Then Margaret Mead will finally have driven her 1960’s Chicago Hippies to the bottom.
Meanwhile, thank God Canada is relatively sane, despite the MSM and over-tenured Professors warping our kids.
MND: “TRUE, but I have to ask: shouldn’t Nigel Farage do something productive!?”
I guess you’re right, MND. What’s a diamond doing in a sewer, anyway?
nomdeblog, please don’t mention that disgusting liar Diamond. Entirely aside from the thesis he’s trying to advance, his outright lies about past events put him completely beyond the pale. His discussion of Easter Island alone is an utter travesty.
For the moment, you are right; Canada is relatively sane. What does it say about the world today when Canada of all places has the most conservative government in the OECD? What does it say for Canada that there is a prospect, however small, of having an NDP administration here?
What we are watching in Europe is the unravelling of a common economic bloc now 50 years old. And it would seem that Nigel is right. Europeans are starting to turn to the same political nostrums that they did in the 1920s and ’30s. And they always end badly.
cgh – and others. My concern is that, as far as I can see, people don’t understand that a robust economy must itself engage in all three economic phases: Investment, Production and Consumption.
The hunting and gathering economies left Investment and Production to Nature. The result was they were able to support only a very small population and a necessity for constant migration.
Agricultural economies engaged in all three phases and this led to the explosion, in Europe, of wealth and thus, investment in technological innovation and development. And a subsequent rise in population.
Same with industrialism. The problem now is that the three phases have become unbalanced.
Unionization was a first step in driving Investment and Production out of the USA. It moved to the so-called ‘developing countries’.The next steps of ‘equilization of outcome’ (the New Deal, and the 60s, multiculturalism, political correctness)moved the focus of an economy solely and only to: Consumption. This is the ideology of the NDP. It’s very appealing; the imaginary utopian world is always appealing.
All we focus on is: Consumption. We utterly ignore Investment and Production. Europe has moved into this phase faster than the US because, after WWII, Investment and Production (I andP) moved heavily to the USA. Europe regrew its I and P but didn’t match that of the USA. And, it moved into ‘equalization of outcome’ and unionization earlier than did the USA. After all, the US fought communism; Europe embraced it.
The result of an economy rejecting I and P is that these activities move to the ‘developing countries’ (Asia, India, C.America). But this means that the wealth, the surplus, produced by I and P – remains in those developing countries! So Europe and the USA have disabled their capacities to produce wealth!
But their Consumption needs remain and indeed increase. So, they borrow and borrow and get into massive debts.
Can you imagine how dumb this is? An economy moves itself into a situation where it primarily focuses on Consumption. This means high wages, benefits, pensions, lots of entitlements. Sounds great.
But industries can’t afford these wages and benefits. They move Investment and Production out of the country. The wealth produced in these two activities is also moved out of the country!
So, the hapless nation has to borrow from those ‘developing nations’ to fund its own people to engage in Consumption!
It’s insane. Yet, people don’t seem to be aware of it. They focus only on Consumption and the Magic Cauldron. I don’t get it.
I dunno, keep hearing about the EU crash and nothing but talk.
So when will it really happen?
ET, the trend was inevitable. Investment capital seeks growth. It moves to those locations which offer the highest return on investment. North American economic growth now averages less than 4% through a complete business cycle. Europe now averages less than 2% through a complete business cycle. Compare that with China and India which have had double digit growth through the past 10 years.
Of course there’s a capital flight. There’s no stopping it. Unionization is only one small part of the composite picture. There are many other components, but probably the single largest is regulation. There are regulations for environmental protection, regulations for financial stability, and many others. All of these serve to restrain growth. For example, if you restrain banks by regulation so that they can never undertake financial activity that they can go bankrupt, then you diminish their prospects for profitable returns. So capital goes elsewhere to financial investments offering greater returns.
The reason for all of this regulation is that we wish to live in a risk-free society. We want banks that can never fail, and we want the life of every newt in every streambed preserved for all time. The fact that much of this regulation is for perceived risk rather than relative risk simply makes the problem that much worse. By larding up our system with all of these regulatory costs, we diminish the incentive for investment and production that much more.
The problem with regulation is that it never figures adequately into economic models. But at some point it will be recognized that the dead hand of regulation is a bigger killer of economic growth than corporate tax rates. Corporate tax rates can and have been reduced, but the dense thicket of regulation has never been significantly trimmed back any time in history to my knowledge except by the violent overthrow and destruction of the state.
johnbrooks, the party will start coming to an end with the next rollover of European sovereign debt. The next sales will unquestionably come from a sharp rise in interest rates. In the case of Greece, after the recent elections, its debt probably cannot be rolled over at any price. Bondholders were willing to buy Euro debt as long as the Euro government agreement held on the various austerity commitments. We’ve now had two elections that rejected that. So, interest rates will go up heavily, governments will be unable to service them at the interest rates demanded, and thus run out of money.
At that point they have only two choices. Raise taxes, which won’t work because tax rates are already so high that the actual government revenues raised will be less than at current tax rates. Or they can leave the Euro and go back to their own previous national currencies. That means that all of them will depreciate enormously, making everything they import prohibitively expensive. Like oil, which is priced in US dollars. In the case of Greece, it may have to go back to horse-drawn transport, as it doesn’t have a real economy of any kind.
It’s the bondholders which will bring the whole house of cards down.
cgh- excellent comments on regulation and the notion of a risk-free life.
So, we sue, if we incur a problem. Recall the woman who sued McDonalds for the hot coffee, which she herself spilled on herself by stupidly placing it on her lap as she drove.
But this notion of life without risks suggests a deeper societal problem than the one I am outlining. I am focusing only on our neglect of the first two parts of the economic triad: Investment and Production in favour of Consumption alone.
You are adding a cultural attribute to this scene, the notion of perfectibility, the notion of a life that, like a mechanical system, can be designed, managed, controlled, to be without problems. Perfection is an aspect, I think, of the Consumption phase. If we consume such and such, whatever the latest fad, we will achieve perfection.
I think such an alienation from reality, such a lifestyle possible only in the imaginary realm (where the oceans will cease to rise and peace will exist on earth)…is operative within the utopian left.
cgh, “The reason for all of this regulation is that we wish to live in a risk-free society.”
ET, “So, we sue, if we incur a problem.”
“We live in a society of zero tolerance where the risk of everything must be measured and the safety of everything must be measured and the safety of everything guaranteed or else we sue”. Leslie Craig, Northern Ireland Agricultural Producers’ Association
ET, I would put it the other way round. Consumption is an aspect of perfectability or utopianism. Put it in very large terms. The universe is driven by entropy, the notion that everything breaks down over time. As humans we resist the idea that everything passes away completely, particularly including ourselves. We try to overcome it by placing meaning in things like family carrying on afterwards, personal legacies, and so forth. These sorts of things have always been present in human society. In a religious age, we resist having to accept mortality through belief in concepts like the immortal soul or karma or a host of other things. In short, if this world is not perfect, the next one is.
But with the great age of technology over the past century, it has become increasingly possible to think that all things can be cured, all ills remedied. This is the great delusion of perfectability. We can and indeed have improved human living conditions enormously, but because people do not understand science and technology, it becomes easy to believe that such improvement is unending or without costs of its own. If it’s new, it must be better. To use a silly example, just plain detergent won’t do; women have to have beer or enzymes or aloe or whatever the current fad of the day is in their shampoo.
And it’s destructive. Because we can cure anything, my child is a perfect child. So, if my child has something incurable like Downs, then there must be something to blame for it. If God isn’t an explanation, then it must be some malignant effect of technology. Which is a large part of why we’ve spent enormous resources fruitlessly looking for environmental causes for cancer.
The Greens have a worse notion of perfectability. Specifically that the truly perfect human condition is one that has no impact on the environment. The end result of such reductionism is no humans at all. And given their malthusianism, they’re quite open about it.
We have not yet had time to grow used to the powers and the limitations of technology. Because we can do so many things utterly unthinkable even two generations ago, we suffer from the illusion that literally anything is possible even though science itself has defined unmovable limits, Einstein and Planck are just two of them who have done so. The laws of thermodynamics are another.
I think it’s important to understand the role that technology plays today. People place the same kind of faith in it, as manifested by things like consumerism, as in previous centuries they placed in religion. The difference is that God, to the religious, has no limits, while science and technology have very clearly defined theirs. Limits which, because of the general ignorance of science, most people do not understand.
cgh, thanks, but wasn’t this said last time by ‘people in the know’ Greece, yadda yadda yadda, Spain, etc.
Not being snaky, but if everyone keeps crying wolf, when the real dog comes, we’ll all be asleep at the wheel. Is there a solid indicator that say June this year things will go south in a hurry? Not looking for tin foil hats, but I find financial folks on both end of the spectrum, some who go around yelling the sky is falling at the first rain drop, and others who won’t do anything till the rising waters hits their doorstep.
Didn’t they say this the first time Greece got bailed out?
“johnbrooks, the party will start coming to an end with the next rollover of European sovereign debt.”
johnbrooks: Greece was only getting money as long as it was committed to balancing its budget. Now that that commitment is gone, no one’s going to give them money under any circumstances. There is no bailout coming now. Default and all the horrors which come with it is now inevitable.
The actual time when it collapses will depend on the schedule by which Greek sovereign debt comes due. If it’s bad, 10 year bonds will go through the roof. If it’s catastrophic, no one will even touch their 90 day treasury bills.
Why will no one give them money? Because the previous bondholders have already had to take 80 per cent losses on the writedowns thus far. In short, the disaster has already happened. The moose has been shot, now it’s simply waiting for the time when it falls over.
Man, I just love it when somebody stands up like that and gives it to the slime…just like Hudak does.