jonatanforsberg.net: The disposition of our situation

Monday, June 10, 2013

The disposition of our situation

If countries would become rich by their population and public sectors spending more money, there would be no poor countries as each and everyone can figure out how to spend money.

Expenditure of funds not based on a relative increase in value, means nothing but inflation of capital and actually destroys what savings we have, eventually rendering the money worthless. These savings are incidentally the very same savings that are needed for investing, which in turn is what is needed for possible future wealth.

The discussion should for this reason concern how the necessary revenue is created in order to pay for the states primary undertakings, here under in my opinion, a clearly delimited welfare state.

Understanding these facts does by no means imply that one does not care about all those in desperate situations just now, unable to find a job and living life on stand-by. But continued escapism will only hit those at the bottom even harder. It is only a realistic outlook than can achieve the sober politics which can bring the West out of this nasty predicament of ours.

We have been living on loaned funds for decades and have become accustomed to rising living standards paid for through the expansion of credit. Entire generations perceive life in abundance as sensible, meanwhile much of the industry has moved abroad. It is time we start living by what we earn.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"
(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."
(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"
(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."
(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."
(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."
(The aim of The Economist)

"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)