Stan La-ffan

Virtue is to be feared more than vice as its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

[Roko 🐉 @RokoMijic]

When welfare exceeds 50% of the population in a democracy, you have a serious problem because now you can't vote your way out of the problem

[greg @gandalf_thegreg]

toddlers to people with deformities in the grocery store

[. @Ocar2z9g]

We need to stop electing middle aged student activists

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I think this hashtag needs to be trending tonight, don’t you?

#GeneralElectionNow

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

The UK used to be twice as rich as South Korea.

Now, South Korea is richer than the UK.

[Stan La-ffan @StanLaffan]

@ZachGarbarino 🤣

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

#GeneralElectionNow

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

It’s a very simple concept, really.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

I will repeat my prior post for @SenWarren claim about her tax plan:
This is post-hoc survivorship bias thinking. You are targeting the entrepreneurial winners & ignoring the vast majority (~90%) who go out of business or never have an IPO.

Do you think tax payers should cover the losses of all the would-be ultra-millionaires? You are targeting @elonmusk @JeffBezos et al. AFTER their success.

Where were you when Tesla & SpaceX were about to fold? Where were you all those years that Amazon ran at a deficit? We should reward the successful high risk takers because most fail. You want to punish people for success. That is not how you build a prosperous society.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

It is NOT ok to experiment on kids as young as 11 and make irreversible changes to their bodies.

We must protect children from dangerous ideology.

Conservatives will not just sit back and let this happen. I refuse to believe MPs, if given the chance, would let this continue. That is why we will force a vote, not just to pause this trial but to stop it completely.

[James Esses @JamesEsses]

If you want to summarise just how messed up the United Kingdom is in a single sentence:

The UK government believes that 11 year olds are too young to watch YouTube but old enough to block their puberty and render themselves infertile.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

They don’t want Elon Musk to give his trillion to the poor.

They want Elon Musk to give his trillion to them so they can take their cut, split it with their comrades and causes, then look virtuous by throwing to the poor whatever scraps remain.

[mert @mert]

"we couldn't do anything useful for citizens in my 14 years of office allocating 60 trillion USD. but if we can just steal from the rocket science electric car guy, then we can solve all your problems."

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Just to remind these same folk:
You’ve not lifted 1/2m kids out of poverty. You’ve just moved them over a bureaucratic line on a Whitehall spreadsheet.
Your ‘workers rights’ are destroying entry-level jobs, hitting young people disproportionately, where unemployment is now over 16%.
You have not transformed the NHS. It’s still the same old wheezing leviathan, just with a lot more dosh and still dismal productivity.
And you’ve nationalised steel and rail before. It was not the prelude to an economic or industrial miracle. Plus you will now have to include their demands for capital/subsidies among all the other priorities already crowding in on the public purse.
Other than that your reminder was useful. Thank you.

[mert @mert]

"ive been in office for 13 years and our yearly budget is 7 trillion but we can't help children unless we steal from the guy doing spaceflight"

[Handre @Handre]

Two small island economies blew up in 2008. Iceland and Ireland. Their names differ by one letter, and their handling of the crisis differed by everything that matters.

Iceland's three big banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir, had grown assets to roughly ten times the country's GDP by 2008. Pure credit-fueled madness. When the music stopped, the Icelandic government did the unthinkable: it let them fail. Bondholders ate the losses. The state refused to socialize private bank debt onto 320,000 citizens who never signed up for it. Capital controls went up, the króna collapsed, and the politicians actually prosecuted bankers. Twenty-six of them went to prison. Sigurður Einarsson and Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, the men who ran Kaupthing, served real sentences.

Ireland took the opposite road. In September 2008, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee covering the liabilities of its major banks, including Anglo Irish Bank, a property-lending casino that should have been allowed to die in peace. The taxpayer absorbed the bill. By the time the rescue ended, Ireland had poured around 64 billion euros into its banks, roughly 40 percent of GDP. The state took on private gambling debts, then went to the Troika in 2010 hat in hand for an 85 billion euro bailout, and accepted years of austerity to pay for losses it had no business owning.

Both economies recovered. Both eventually grew again. The difference is who paid and who learned. Iceland made creditors and reckless bankers bear the consequences of their own decisions, which is the entire point of capitalism: profit and loss, not profit and bailout. Ireland protected the people who made the bad bets and handed the invoice to schoolteachers and shopkeepers.

You will hear economists call Ireland's GDP rebound a triumph (much of that "growth" is multinational accounting fiction, Leprechaun economics, but that's another lesson). What they skip is the moral architecture. When you guarantee bank liabilities, you abolish the discipline that makes markets work. You tell every banker in the country that downside is optional.

Iceland jailed its bankers. Ireland reimbursed theirs.

[Stan La-ffan @StanLaffan]

@HLTCO Docked three points for not being a game at this World Cup. No issue with the content, just the timing. 7/10.

[Stan La-ffan @StanLaffan]

@Sam_Dumitriu @J_D_89 According to the Austrians, this won't end well...
https://t.co/etXuDqvS91

[Nozza_ @Nozza_]

Most I’ve laughed at a CourtNewsUK tweet in over a decade

[CourtNewsUK @CourtNewsUK]

Judge advises professional burglar Glen Banks to try a different career after he left a photograph of himself at the scene. 'You're no good at it,' the judge tells him. https://t.co/M9H0EPnP72