Do note the little judo trick in there though. The scientific paper shows that racism and homophobia are associated with low intelligence. That these are conservative ideas is then sorta assumed (yes, there really is left wing racism, left wing homophobia). And then the leap…..thus all conservative ideas can be explained by low intelligence.

Quite fun really: the claim, an implicit one to be sure, that because racist boot boys are knuckleheads therefore the NHS must be State run, schools must be not for profit and the Laffer Curve is all poo poo.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.

Translating that into the English situation who does that remind you of? Inventing their own laws of economics?

And this is without considering the most important point in British politics today. Who actually are the conservatives at present? It’s not the Conservatives, is it?

Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasise the maintenance of the status quo”.

The Conservatives seem to want to shake up education, the health care system, the tax system, the way that councils are funded, the disability welfare system, in fact, the whole welfare state if IDS has his way.

It’s the left in Britain performing the conservative function at present, standing in the way of change, insisting upon the preservation of the status quo. We must not change the ancient (64 years old) NHS, we must not change the 1960s educational settlement etc.

If it really is true that dimbos attempt to preserve the status quo then it ain’t the current Conservatives who are doing that, is it?

On the other hand he might just be an arrogant jerk with an ego complex the size of Texas, who accused the BBC of Nazi tactics because he had lost the argument and was making a fool of himself.

Tricky one that.

Ed Miliband will make the case for keeping Scotland as part of the United Kingdom in a speech in Glasgow on Monday.

Miliband is expected to describe the “progressive” argument for rejecting independence in what the party billed as a major speech on the constitution.

He’s not listed there as telling them the truth. That there’s almost no chance of Labour gaining power at Westminster for a generation or two without the rotten boroughs of the central belt in Scotland.

Then again, the argument that you shouldn’t go so you can vote for me isn’t all that strong: not from a Miliband.

Sir Christopher said party donations should be capped at £10,000 and state funding increased to remove the taint of corruption.

This after wibble about how large donations are seen to be for preferential access.

Look, maybe donations do buy influence. Maybe the unions’ money gets them Labour MPs as lapdogs, just as hedge fund money gets the attention of Conservative MPs.

Heck, I’ve been at a dinner or two where a political party was trying to shake down a couple of rich men (erm, angling for a donation).

But all of that is far better than the idea that the taxpayer be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for politicians and their parties.

The Budapest protests must be heeded in a region walking a line between budding democracy and revisionist nationalism.

Could anyone parse that sentence for me?

I’m not in favour of what Fidesz is doing myself but what on earth does what they’ve said there mean?

For example, what is the conflict between democracy and revisionist? Even, between democracy, budding or otherwise, and nationalism?

I think we’d all agree that Scotland is becoming more nationalist as time passes and I’ve not seen anyone complain that that is either an affront to or incompatible with democracy.

Yet government is nothing if it is not asserting moral imperatives and if it is not trying to act in a moral way

Government is a method of working out who empties the rubbish bins not a form of moral imposition.

As long as it’s consenting adults and they’re not frightening the horses the morals of the populace, the actions of the citizenry, are not the concern of government in the slightest.

It’s one of the reasons I despise conservatives: they’re just as eager to impose their strictures on us all as the socialists, the puritans and the various flavours of moral idiots are. It’s just that they are different strictures.

Fuck off will you, we’re free people in a free land.

Politicians are complete fuckwits, incapable of ordering paper clips.

Therefore we must have much more government.

It’s the “therefore” that grates so much.

Creasy said: “This isn’t broken Britain, but broke Britain – and it is being bled dry by the legal loan shark industry and their interest rates of 1,700% or more. R3 highlight how in the next six months alone, a whopping 3.5 million Britons expect to take out a payday loan. Sixty-seven per cent say they are unable to get credit anywhere else.”

The research showed that 32% of those who took out a payday loan had to get another one to pay it off.

Creasy said the government should legislate before Christmas. “We know that capping would make a massive difference to those people. I don’t see why the government doesn’t get on and do it now.”

Yes, how wonderful, let’s abolish the only form of credit that, by your own numbers, 2.3 million people can get.

The whole thing is really terribly simple. Lending small amounts of money for short periods of time is expensive. Therefore borrowing small amounts of money for short periods of time is expensive.

And that’s pretty much it.

I do wonder whether Stella Creasy is actually capable of farting and chewing gum at the same time.

This is fun as well:

The true cost of lending to short-term borrowers is less than 2% of the amount charged by Wonga, the most expensive and highest profile payday lender.

My Home Finance, a not-for-profit organisation set up by the government and the National Housing Federation in 2010, charges a representative APR of 69.9%, just 1.66% of the 4,214% APR charged by online lender Wonga.

Rilly?

My Home Finance loans are not subsidised, and a borrower would pay £7.09 a week for 52 weeks to repay £300, producing a total repayment of £383.68 over the year including interest of £68.68 and an administration charge of £15. The same borrower taking out £300 from Wonga for just 31 days would repay a total of £398.91.

See what they’ve done there?

That £15 arrangement fee? It’s charged just once per annum. But they’ve compared it with the same arrangement fee (which might well be a different amount I agree) which is charged for a month’s loan from Wonga and then annualised that month’s fee.

This is known, to be delicate about it, as lying like fuck with numbers.

Place your choice for the Dogbert characvter in real life……

The latest playground insult for adults? You’re so ‘leftwing’

David Cameron seems to be hoping ‘leftwing’ will stick as an insult – much like the way ‘liberal’ is thrown about in the US

Ignorant, counter-productive, these aren’t insults either but they are usefully descriptive of much of the British left wing.

Yes, I know, I’m going off on Worstall Rant #162 and will soon start foaming at the mouth and screaming.

There’s nothing at all wrong with desiring a richer, greener, more equal perhaps world. Similarly praising the dignity of manual labour, thinking that we’d all be better off with a bit more community and a little less individualism.

Even the elimination of rent seeking, the removal of the power of one over another.

You can agree or not agree with any of these goals as you wish: they’re goals, largely determined by your priors, your morals and prejudices. I might disagree with some, you might. Might prioritise individual liberty a little more than that communal outcome, whatever.

But what drives me into that screaming froth mouthed rage is that so much of what is proposed by the so called “left” in Britain is actually counter-productive given their expressed goals. And I can only think that this is because they are ignorant of the consequences of the actions they propose to supposedly reach their goals (I doubt very much that any of them are bright enough to be evil about these things. I’ve worked, as you know, in politics and none of them strike me as that clever).

Yes, the dreary litany: they argue for higher corporation taxes when such taxes are, in large part, actually paid by the workers in lower wages. They argue for high tax regimes, highly progressive tax regimes, to fund a large state, without realising that you can only fund a large state with regressive taxation. They argue for national pay deals refusing to see that these kill people. We must keep the NHS as the last Stalinist bureaucracy in Europe despite the obvious failures of such Stalinist bureaucracies.

Polly’s “we must be more like Sweden” without anyone going and doing the work to understand why Sweden fucking works.

And this is where the froth mouthed screaming rises to hysteria: I could design them a system which achieves their goals better than the idiocies that they themselves put forward. We know how to lower the gini, we know how to provide more affordable housing, we know how to provide better equality of opportunity and even greater equality of outcome.

But the fuckers just won’t listen, will they?

REMOVED: Ron Paul labels Newt and Mitt muppets

The Lib Dems….more short term political expediency?

Sirsly?

There are many things I can do in life, but making Polly happy is not one of them, I’m afraid.”

So it was with a feeling of groundhog day like despair that I read this morning that the government has decided to ACT on the housing crisis in the UK. Of course there is not a housing crisis in the UK yet, but on current trends there will be a problem soon, unless there is more construction of new housing permitted across the country. In the past the state has managed the process directly, by building social housing- council housing, we used to call it- but now the proposal is to provide government guarantees to banks to support mortgages to first time buyers.

Doubtless the ministers and the Prime Minister who is making the announcement this morning will congratulate themselves on an exciting and original idea to stimulate the housing market into growth once more.

Except it is not an original idea- FDR thought of it in 1930s America and created the federal mortgage protection agency that became known under the friendly acronym Fannie Mae. Yes, you have heard of it, because it is the essential bankruptcy of Fannie Mae that has been one of the major problems that the US government has had to deal with.

Not all that surprising as we’re both liberals of course, even if I might be slightly more red in tooth and claw.

Now, to a slightly different question. Anyone know how I can get in touch with the bloke who is Cicero? I’ve tried a tweet and that didn’t work, can’t see an email addy around and for some reason I can’t leave a comment there.

The reason I want it is that he knows a lot about Estonia and I want to find out if he knows the company that I’m interested in talking to…..

The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages.

This has been done before. In the US.

The people who did it, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, went gloriously bust in doing it too. And the FHA, which is still doing it, is going to go gloriously bust at some point in the future.

Agreed, the two sets of schemes were slightly different. The FMs really insured interest rate risk thus allowing the 30 fixed rate mortgage. The FHS guarantees a mortgage when there’s only a 3.5% deposit….and there are other schemes which mean you can get that as a grant in certain parts of the country too.

But this sort of intervention into the market is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Even if it works it won’t really work. For if you subsidise one generation of first time buyers then they’ll stick there in the market like constipation in the gut. Who will move to get off the subsidy? You’ll just end up with entry level housing being occupied by those who will not give up said subsidy, dried turds blocking the free flowing of the market.

The answer to the British housing market is to make housing cheaper through reducing the cost of the most expensive part of it, the scarcity value of planning permission. Which is already being addressed by the changes to said planning system.

But then this is the problem with politics isn’t it? Sorting out the system properly is going to take a few years: which doesn’t give the politicians the ability to grandstand and wave our money about as the solution.

It does have to be said that Murphy is right on one point: we do need courageous politicians. However, ones courageous enough to say that this problem isn’t best solved more more rule, more subsidy, more of your money being spent on other people. Rather, those courageous enough to say that actually, this problem has been caused by the current rules therefore we’re relaxing the current rules to solve the problem.

Lord Bell, who as Tim Bell was a key PR adviser to the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s, said: “I can’t be bothered to sensationalise this rubbish.

“I can’t see the point of this film. Its only value is to make some money for Meryl Streep and whoever wrote it. “

That is the point of this capitalism thing after all.

The big mistake made by libertarians is to assume that economic and social liberalism go together. Liberal capitalism requires social conservatism.

Apparently the buying and selling of apples and pears in a market requires that adult men must not stick their cocks up each others’ bums.

I have to say that I really can’t see it, don’t get the relevance of one to the other.

I can see conservatism in both being logically sound: you adults can only do what we say you can. I can see liberalism, libertarianism, being logically sound: consenting adults get to do what consenting adults wish to do as long as it’s not frightening the horses.

But I really cannot see that in this corner of life consenting adults are just fine and over in this corner of it they may only do what Tim Mongomerie thinks should be allowable. That’s as nutty as the social liberals and economic conservatives over on the left who insist that the bumchummery is so admirable it should be promoted while the selling of apples is so dangerously close to that trade that no respectable person would do and therefore must be banned.

You’re either a liberal and consider your fellow adults to be adults capable of acting like adults or you don’t.

Best my memory can do on the quote.

But how should we reformulate that for politics?

“We made a great mistake in not joining the euro,” the former defence secretary told a gathering of the Conservative China Group at the Palace of Westminster. “It would have been good for Britain.”

To gasps of incredulity, he went on: “All my political life, we have suffered in this country from a vile disease called inflation.

The fundamentalism of the policies being pushed by the Tories, and echoed in police tactics, is rooted in desperation of the material collapse of global capitalism – and the scope of reform runs much further than the darkest years of Thatcherism. The coalition’s marketisation of education and health; its criminalisation of squatting; its dismantling of youth work – all can be viewed as a completion of the Thatcher-Blair years

It has become clear to ordinary people that the political elite has run out of ideas and its agenda is born of desperation. It is in this context that movements of resistance, including the students’, are appearing so dramatically and with such public support.

The challenge that faces students is not only the achievement of direct political goals, but internal re-invigoration. There are still those who view national mobilisation and local direct action as ineffective or taboo, rejecting it in favour of operational collaboration with institutions and their internal structural reviews. This model of activism looks more and more out of step with the realities of the situation that we face.

Change one or two of the time specific references and you could run this piece in just about any left wing paper of the last 150 years.

Yet another teenager has read a bit of Marx, ties together class, capitalism, struggle, youth as the vanguard and print.

Put it in Spanish or Catalan and it’s 1930′s Spanish Republic. In Russian it’s St Petersburg in 1917. In English any copy of the Socialist Worker ever published.

Is there a little factory somewhere that churns these people out?

A huge increase in state funding of political parties, worth up to £100m over a five-year parliament, is being proposed by a government-commissioned inquiry.

No, no more of our money for you lot. Bugger off.

One little wrinkle:

The draft report is proposing that parties receive funding worth £3 per vote they receive.

That makes it profitable to run as a candidate if you get 166 votes after putting up your £500 deposit.

If you’ve a bit of a name in a constituency you could actually make quite a tidy little profit in running to lose.