@afneil Yet another chart "randomly" choosing the mini ice age as a start point.
'Climate breakdown' catastrophism and Net Zero madness has two purposes - Taxation & control.
A gigantic scam.
Why do people born on 1st January seem to commit so much more crime?
They are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence.
My new piece looks at what's going on. Link below 👇
@beverleyturner 1. Strong men create good times.
2. Good times create weak men.
3. Weak men create bad times.
4. Bad times create strong men.
We are deep into number 3 right now.
The answer to “why is my £775k new build flat so small and crappy?” Is simple: the money left to actually build it after the government has took their £442k share is only £178k - less than some spend on their kitchen extension
The cope is dead.
“We contribute.”
The chart is right there.
White households are the only ones in surplus.
Everyone else is a net fiscal drain.
That’s not a debate.
That’s the ONS.
You take more than you put in.
The numbers shut the claim down.
“We built Britain.”
No.
The English did.
Centuries of continuous settlement, law, industry and institutions on these islands before you arrived.
A passport or a birth certificate doesn’t rewrite that.
You didn’t build it.
You turned up later and started consuming it.
“If all the immigrants left the economy would collapse.”
The opposite.
Remove the net recipients and the people who still fund the system are better off.
The infrastructure, the NHS, the welfare, paid for by the historic population that remains the only group in credit.
You are not the engine.
You are the cost.
You’re staring at the government’s own data and still running the same script.
Name one? How about a few?
Rockefeller lowered the cost of kerosene through efficient refining and distribution.
Ford made automobiles affordable through mass production.
Carnegie reduced steel production costs through industrial innovation.
Walton lowered retail prices through bulk purchasing and efficient logistics.
Dell made computers cheaper by eliminating retail intermediaries.
Kamprad made furniture affordable through flat-pack manufacturing and distribution.
Bezos intensified retail competition through Amazon.
Koum made international messaging practically free through WhatsApp.
Page and Brin made search, navigation, email, and translation available without direct charges.
And that's barely scratching the surface.
In fact, it would be considerably more challenging to find a billionaire who earned their fortune through voluntary trade without lowering costs, improving quality, increasing productivity, or making something more accessible.
That's how fortunes are generally made in competitive markets. You create value for others, and the more people you serve, the greater your potential reward.
You don't even have to buy from these businesses to benefit. Their competitors must improve their offerings or risk losing customers.
These clout chasers destroy their credibility daily without so much as flinching.
They enjoy the accumulated benefits of capitalist innovation while confidently demanding evidence that any of it ever happened.
The economic illiteracy would be impressive if it weren't so commonplace.
Rock has this right, and the numbers make it even better.
Vanderbilt broke the steamboat monopolies by cutting the New York to Albany fare from $3 to 10 cents, then to free, and still profited on food sales. His Nicaragua route drove the New York to California fare from $600 to as low as $150.
Rockefeller: kerosene cost 26 cents a gallon in 1870. By 1885 it was 8 cents. Light after dark stopped being a luxury for working families.
Carnegie: steel rails ran about $160 a ton in the mid 1870s. By the late 1890s they were $17.
Ford: a Model T cost $825 in 1908. By 1925 it was $260, and he doubled his workers' wages along the way.
The pattern continues today. Jobs put computing power that once cost millions and filled a room into your pocket for a few hundred dollars. Gates put a computer on every desk and drove the price of software toward zero, and he did it decades before he took up preaching the morality of giving wealth away instead of the morality of creating it. Bezos cut the price of nearly everything you buy and delivers it to your door in a day. Musk cut the cost of reaching orbit by roughly 90 percent and forced the entire auto industry to build electric cars people want.
Every man on this list got rich by making life cheaper for millions of people he never met. These fortunes were earned by lowering bills on a scale no government program would even claim to be able to match. And the fact is that such government programs ultimately have the complete opposite effect.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
@beverleyturner This is Corporate Socialism in a nutshell.
The little man is squashed. Big business gets a monopoly because they're the only ones able to absorb the costs and regulations.
The Big State wins. Globalism wins. Britain loses.