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Nigel Tatum
@NigelTatum55
Freemarketeer. Libertarian.
Joined November 2022
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889 Posts
Mayor Mamdani wants New York City to run five grocery stores selling food at 30% below market price, and you already know how this ends because Ludwig von Mises told you in 1944.
Consider the man who runs a private grocery. He watches his shelves. When cabbage rots and steak sells out, he learns something: prices, profits, and losses feed him a constant stream of information about what New Yorkers actually want. He adjusts. He hates waste because waste comes out of his own pocket. That discipline keeps millions of stores and supermarkets across the globe stocked with everything from plantains to kosher salt.
Now hand the store to a municipal manager. What guides him?
Nothing does. Mises identified the core problem precisely: "The paradox of 'planning' is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation." "What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark." A city clerk selling milk below cost has no profit signal telling him whether he stocked too much or too little. He has a budget and a rulebook.
The 30% discount is the tell. Wholesalers charge the city the same as they charge Gristedes. Rent in Brooklyn does not fall because the landlord is renting to a bureaucrat. Refrigeration, labor, spoilage, theft: all real, all paid. So the missing 30% comes from your taxes. You subsidize your own groceries and pay a middleman salaried by the Department of Whatever to hand them back to you at a loss. Efficient?
Mises again: "The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations." Watch what happens when tomatoes run short. The private grocer raises the price a nickel and orders more. The city store keeps the mandated price, sells out by noon, and posts a handwritten sign: OUT OF STOCK. Shortages stem directly from price controls.
Venezuela tried this with Mercal. Cuba runs it now with ration books and empty shelves. The USSR perfected the queue.
New York will get the queue too. I will be getting out the popcorn to watch this monumental disaster unfold in real time.
Burnham’s latest brainwave is to introduce a death tax. I mean why not go a step further? Why not turn up at funerals and rifle through coffins looking for valuables. Jewellery, watches, a gold tooth here and there. This is your socialist government, stealing from dead people who’ve worked hard all their lives, and tossing their money mindlessly at benefit scammers.
No money for the telescope.
Meanwhile, taxpayers have been charged for these projects under the UKRI:
The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000 — £841,830
Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives — £136,909
Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection — £805,769
Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism — £185,627
Trans Archiving Network (TAN) — £23,556
Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in early modern plays — £805,745
(De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film — £205,543
Transnational Anti-Gender Movements and Resistance — £35,285
Comics and Race in Latin America — £759,293
Listening to the 85%: underwater sounds and environmental awareness on the Isle of Man — £81,635
Sports media and identity: a theory-practice network — £24,292
Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archives — £123,470
Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet — £786,083
MAUSI Net: Menopause Activism in the UK, Sweden and India — £29,956
Decolonising the Page: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Arabic Publications — £200,462
The Tipuna Project: Intergenerational Healing, Settler Accountability and Decolonising Participatory Action Research — £310,724
Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present — £802,442
The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music’s Colonial History (1750–1900) — £1,183,769
South African Modernism (Follow-on Funding): Decolonising English Literary Studies — £80,192
The Future of Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities — £307,021
Milton Friedman educates young idealist advocating 100% inheritance tax:
“What is the effect of a 100% inheritance tax? To encourage people to dissipate their wealth in high living.”
“Where do you get the factories, the machines, the capital investment, the incentive to improve technology, if what you’re doing is to establish a society in which the incentive is for people who, if they by accident accumulate some wealth, to waste it in frivolous entertainment?”
Just brilliant from Andrew Doyle about the Identarians!
Dr Art Laffer explains the Laffer Curve
We can’t say we’re shocked that Andy Burnham has sacked Bridget Phillipson as Education Secretary.
One of her first acts as Secretary of State was to torpedo the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA) — arguably the most consequential piece of free speech legislation in the past 15 years.
She reversed the commencement orders that would have brought the Act’s most important provisions into force, including the vital complaints scheme.
Rather than asking Parliament to do so, she bypassed it through ministerial fiat. The Free Speech Union challenged this in the High Court on two grounds: first, that it breached the sacrosanct constitutional principle that a minister cannot defy the will of Parliament; and second, that she had failed to carry out an adequate impact assessment.
Days before the case was due to be heard, Bridget Phillipson partially U-turned, announcing that she would commence most of the key provisions — and she duly did.
We then became embroiled in a long-standing dispute over who had won the case. That mattered because it determined who would pay the legal costs.
The High Court decided that the Free Speech Union had won and ordered the Government to pay our costs.
Importantly, when Phillipson announced her partial U-turn, the Free Speech Union offered to settle if the Government paid £80,000 — around a quarter of our total legal costs.
Pretty fair, no?
Well, the Government refused. The Free Speech Union believes this was because Phillipson did not want to admit she had reversed course.
The High Court has now ordered the Government to pay all of our costs. Bridget Phillipson’s hubris has cost taxpayers around £200,000. Combined with the Government’s own legal costs, the total bill exceeds £500,000.
That also means we now have the resources to challenge Phillipson’s successor, Lucy Powell, should she attempt to reverse any of the commencement orders that bring HEFSA into force — including the much-needed complaints scheme for academics, university staff and visiting speakers, which is due to come into force on 1 September.
Hear from @SpeechUnion General Secretary Lord Young of Acton 👇
“The government doesn’t have any money. Only people have money. The government only gets money by putting its hand in your pocket and taking it out.”
— Milton Friedman
Apart from omitting reference to Louise Haigh's stint in the Private Sector (with a job related fraud conviction), Daniel is bang on the money. This is akin to allowing someone to become an airline pilot without suitable qualifications.
Before Windows95, before Oasis released Wonder Wall and before OJ Simpson faced trial, our new PM Andy Burnham had a job. He had a job as a journalist working for a little publishing company for 3 years.
This is the only job any of the new UK Government Cabinet has had.
Other than those three years, more than 30 years ago the entire cabinet has only ever worked in tax payer funded roles.
None of them have ever had to make a sale. None of them have been paid to pour a pint. None have felt a sick feeling about making payroll. None have been answerable to investors.
In the UK 50% of the jobs are small businesses and almost ALL of the jobs growth is small businesses. None of them has ever started, owned or run one. Wouldn’t it be nice if just one of them had some experience in making a small business profitably grow before having a crack at the 7th largest economy.
Imagine what it must feel like to KNOW that your wage is paid for by the tax-payer. Imagine the certainty and security working for a government that never fires anyone for anything. Imagine how it would feel knowing you could blow out a budget with no real consequences or you could completely screw up a project and nothing bad would happen. Imagine that level of insulation and comfort for decades.
I can’t. I’ve been in business for the last 25 years. If I don’t sell I don’t eat. If I screw up I face very real consequences very fast. Millions of small businesses are being asked to get out there and hire people and grow the economy by a team of people who’ve never had a proper job. Surely something isn’t right with that?
Everything You Wanted to Know About Hope Not Hate* (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
Hope Not Hate is an organisation which continuously flirts with criminality and appears to enjoy CPS immunity. Its exploitation of English law seeks to further the ambitions of the Labour Party by whatever means, and now, it is embedded explicitly in Burnham's government.
Read it here in @ReinersProject: https://t.co/Qo5vtjqhJb
Since you mentioned Lady Thatcher, @andyburnham, here's a reminder of what she achieved 👇🏼
• Top rate of income tax: 83% → 40%
• Basic rate: 33% → 25%
• Inflation: 21.9% peak (1980) → 2.4% (1986)
• Days lost to strikes: 29.5 million (1979) → 1.9 million (1990)
• Real take-home pay for the average earner: up by a third
• Right to Buy: over a million council tenants became homeowners
• Home ownership: 55% → 67%
• Individual shareholders: 3 million → 11 million — one in four adults
• Foreign holidays: roughly doubled
• Homes with a telephone: two-thirds → nearly nine in ten
• Pensioners' average incomes: up around 30% in real terms
• Infant mortality: down almost 40%
• Real GDP: up by almost a third
• GDP per head outgrew France, Germany and Italy in the 1980s
• Manufacturing productivity: slowest growth in the G7 in the 1970s → fastest in the 1980s
• Self-employed: 1.9 million → 3.5 million
• Nissan to Sunderland, Toyota to Derby, Honda to Swindon
• Britain became a net oil exporter
• London restored as the world's financial capital in 1986
• Budget surpluses three years running — Britain repaid debt, 1987–90
• National debt: 47% of GDP → 28%
• State spending: ~45% of GDP → ~39%
• The civil service: 732,000 → 565,000
• Corporation tax: 52% → 35%; the small firms' rate: 42% → 25%
• Personal tax allowances: up more than 25% in real terms
• Higher rates of income tax: nine → one
• Death duties: fourteen rates → one
• Exchange controls scrapped after 40 years
• 40+ nationalised businesses privatised — 600,000 employees moved to the private sector
• The 33 big state industries: took ~£500m from taxpayers in 1980 → paid £8.4bn to the Exchequer by 1987
• British Steel: world-record loss-maker (1980/81) → £733m profit (1989/90)
• BT, 1984: the largest share offer the world had ever seen
• "Tell Sid" broke the record again in 1986
• British Airways: nationalised loss-maker → profitable, private, "the world's favourite airline"
• The Channel Tunnel: launched — entirely privately financed
• The Falklands liberated in 74 days
• Backed Gorbachev early, stood with Reagan, and won the Cold War
• Three consecutive election victories and the longest-serving PM of the twentieth century ✌🏼🇬🇧
“Wherever government bureaucracy takes over, costs go up and quality goes down.”
— Milton Friedman
“The word ‘liberal’ has come to mean almost the opposite of what it used to mean... If you look at behavior today, ‘liberal’ means freedom with other people’s money.”
— Milton Friedman
Well said Madam.
Ann Widdecombe schools a roomful of woke students on the importance of free speech.
"Only two sorts of people oppose free speech... snowflakes and totalitarians."
"Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offence, or from insult, or from hurt feelings."
"It is an occupational hazard of living in society. And if you really can't take it, become a hermit."
"No matter how much we may disagree with somebody, we should defend to the hilt their right to say it."
"You succeed by defeating your opponent, not by wishing him away. You get nowhere by trying not to hear what is being said."
"You may feel virtuous today in what you will not hear, but tomorrow somebody may feel virtuous in not hearing what you have to say."
"Free speech is for all, not for the privileged few."
If you don't want us to "speculate" about criminal cases then don't try to convince us that Axel Rudakubana was a nice choir boy from Cardiff.
Don't wait to communicate the details of major atrocities and criminals when they happen to involve minorities and illegal migrants.
Don't allow distorted clips of airport brawls to go viral without showing us the full story.
Don't draw our attention to the families of victims that make pro-diversity messages while ignoring other families -- such as the Whyte family -- who called to fix our broken borders and end illegal migration.
Don't keep subjecting us to endless psy-ops after major tragedies, Islamist attacks, and assassinations, socially engineering newspapers and media to tell us that we should sing songs, praise 'diversity', and do anything except ask questions about the actual cause.
Don't endlessly tolerate hate marches through our country's streets while putting London in total lockdown when a few patriots decide to hold a peaceful protest.
Don't keep allowing dangerous people --Rudakubana, Calocane, Abedi, Butt, Zaghba, Khan, Ali, Adebolajo, among many, many more --to murder our own people despite being KNOWN to police authorities.
Don't tell us it's fine for Labour politicians to constantly attack "the right-wing" after the murder of Jo Cox but if Nigel Farage demands justice for his friend and colleague then he's "politicising" a tragedy.
Don't tell us the death of a career criminal like George Floyd can be used to justify a full-sale cultural revolution against the West but if Nigel Farage dares to ask questions about the murder of his friend then he is "exploiting" the crime.
And don't corrupt our police organisations with extreme Critical Race Theory and then try to claim there is "no such thing" as politically biased two-tier policing.
If you don't want people to "speculate" and ask questions about what is REALLY happening in this country and within our taxpayer-funded police organisations then I would suggest you start restoring public confidence in police & the justice system.
That starts with rooting out two-tier policing. Rooting out diversity, equity & inclusion policies. Rooting out psy-ops and social engineering. Actually telling people the truth about what is happening in our own country. And getting back to what Britain used to be about: equality before the law.
Drip, drip, drip ..... the overweening Leftist State continues its incremental march through the liberties of its citizens.
How did we get to the point where “state approved investments” are even a thing?
Your pension is your money. It should be managed to secure the best possible return for your retirement, not directed by politicians pursuing their own priorities.
The government is slowly expanding its reach into every area of our lives.
Day by day, more decisions that once belonged to individuals are being pulled into the hands of the state.
That should concern everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
"When is our political and media class going to wake up to the fact that we can't keep spending at the rate we are spending?"
@LiamHalligan says we need a change after the OBR warned Burnham needs to introduce £120B in tax rises
@iancollinsuk
Two countries split from the same colonial body in 1965. One picked economic freedom. The other picked handouts and racial spoils. You already know how this ended.
Singapore had no oil, no farmland, no hinterland. Just a swamp and a port. Lee Kuan Yew looked at that and trusted trade, low taxes, and hard money. Central planners hate what he did.
Malaysia went the other way. In 1971 Kuala Lumpur launched the New Economic Policy, a state program handing quotas, contracts, and university seats to ethnic Malays. Politicians decided who got what. A commissar fantasy dressed in liberal language.
Now let's look at the numbers. In 1965 both places sat around $500 per capita. Today Singapore clears $84,000. Malaysia sits near $13,000. Same climate, same starting line, one sixth the result.
The Singapore dollar holds its value because the Monetary Authority of Singapore manages it against a currency basket and refuses to print its way out of trouble. The ringgit has lost roughly two thirds of its value against the Singapore dollar since 1981.
You cannot subsidize your way to wealth. You cannot redistribute what you never let people produce. Every ringgit funneled through a quota is a ringgit some bureaucrat spent on his own vision instead of a customer's.
Malaysia bet on planners deciding outcomes. Singapore bet on people deciding for themselves. The gap between $84,000 and $13,000 is your answer.
🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧
Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.
Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧
So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖
Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.
They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.
Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.
In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.
In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.
In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.
In 1807, Britain banned the trade.
Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.
The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.
From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓
In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.
In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿
Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.
That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧
So why haven't you heard any of this?
Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.
The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.
We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.
This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.
We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.
If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
The Chagos deal was stitched together by 3 long-time good friends, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and his Attorney General Lord Richard Hermer, acting for the UK, and Philippe Sands acting for Mauritius.
Starmer controversially made the unelected Hermer part of his government by giving him a peerage so he could be Attorney General.
It's not been revealed if Hermer was vetted before, or after, being appointed AG, and he's still not explained why he recused himself when it came to sign off on the Chagos deal.
Coincidently, Sands, who had been Mauritius counsel for Chagos since 2010, gave up the role shortly before the deal was signed too.
However, what extraordinary good fortune it was for the Labour-supporting old legal-buddies, Starmer, Hermer, and Sands, to be in a position to transfer to Mauritius the sovereignty of the 250,000 square-mile Chagos Archipelago, all its mineral wealth, which could be HUGE, and control of the France-size airspace above the EEZ, and to arrange for the UK taxpayer to pay £billions to Mauritius for the privilege of leasing Diego Garcia for 99 years.
Starmer deceived the country about his intentions to give Sovereign territory away.
Starmer never mentioned Chagos during the 2024 General Election, and it wasn't in the Labour manifesto, which promised to protect Britain's overseas territories.
In 2013 before he even became an MP, Starmer visited Mauritius and discussed the future of Chagos with then prime minister Navin Ramgoolam, the same man he sat down with in London in 2025 to sign the treaty that gives Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, and control of all the airspace above it's territorial waters which, at 250,000 square miles, is the size of France.
Proof that Starmer did not want the country to know his intentions is the fact he hired Tony Blair's former highly controversial chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, without informing parliament, or the public, to be his special envoy for Chagos to negotiate the details of a deal to transfer the British territory to Mauritius.
It's not known when Starmer hired Powell as he refuses to reveal the date, or to say if Powell had been vetted for the role; even when asked directly at PMQs.
Powell had been working, and using his private company email, on Chagos for at least 5 weeks before his appointment as Special Envoy was officially announced in September 2024.
Chagos is not just some tiny islands nobody visits, or cares about, as Powell told Times Radio during an interview in October 2024.
Apart from everything else, it's home to the strategically vital joint UK/US military base for front-line combat aircraft, and nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines, on Diego Garcia.
Starmer's deal gives Mauritius, which is far smaller than Luxembourg, sovereignty over everything, including the fishing rights, all minerals and hydrocarbons in the seabed, which could be worth trillions, and it also gives Mauritius control of the 🛫airspace above an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which is the size of France in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
In April this year, at China's behest, Mauritius revoked permission for the Taiwan President’s aircraft to fly through its airspace on a planned trip to Africa.
If Starmer's Chagos deal is ratified, in future, China will be able to dictate who flies over an area the size of France in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Starmer's, deal means Mauritius will have knowledge of, and vetoes over, all military operations at Diego Garcia.
As only Diego Garcia is being leased, the UK and US will be unable to station early warning and air-defense assets on the outer islands to protect against the rapidly increasing threat of missile and drone attacks.
Nuclear weapons will be banned from Degio Garcia under Starmer's deal as Mauritius is a signatory of the African nuclear-weapon free zone treaty.
And don't forget, Starmer's deals denies the Chagossian people resettlement and self-determination.
Starmer tried to rush his deal past the Americans, and through parliament, as he knew it would be exposed as anti-western pro-China treachery.
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