For most of the last 30 years it looked like socialism had been soundly beaten by its old adversary, capitalism. From the mid 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s second government defeated Britain’s striking coal miners, until around 2009 when the extent of the banking crisis had sunk in, free-market capitalism was the only game in town.…
This article by Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp at Business For Scotland annoys me on so many levels. Firstly, he buries the only substantial fact in a short paragraph in the middle of the piece. According to GERS (Government Expenditure & Revenue in Scotland) in 2012 Scotland contributed 9.9% of UK tax revenue but received only 9.3% of…
Just finished reading Blossom by Lesley Riddoch. It’s an account of Lesley’s investigations into various aspects of Scottish life over the years and her analysis of what needs to happen to allow the people of Scotland to flourish. The topics that she covers could easily have dragged the book down into the “worthy but dull”…
Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population. Professor Hans Rosling telling us how it actually is. Entertaining and inspiring. Please share this far and wide.
With the referendum on Scottish independence a little more than a year away the debate remains depressingly shallow. The “Yes Scotland” campaign presents us with a wishlist of policies and outcomes that it would like to come to pass in an independent Scotland without acknowledging that the only certain outcomes from the referendum will be…
This article on the BBC News website tells us that the US Treasury expects to reach the “debt ceiling” sometime in October. The debt ceiling is an arbitrary amount of federal government borrowing that Congress has decided cannot be exceeded. It’s a bit like an overdraft limit for the nation. The limit has been imposed…
Rory Bremner’s One Question Quiz on Radio 4 this evening asked Where Did All The Money Go? Most of it was predictable comedy that skimmed the surface of our financial dysfunction, but they did tell us loud and clear that banks create most of our money when issuing loans, which was unexpectedly accurate. More disappointing…
I have been self-employed for the best part of 30 years. If I’m not doing something that a client has agreed to be invoiced for, then I don’t get paid. That’s a whole working life on zero hours contracts, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can pick and choose who I work…
This article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times tells us that the gap between rich and poor has grown significantly over the last few decades, and suggests that the trend is self-perpetuating: the bigger the gap the easier it is for the rich few to become richer and fewer. Tim reckons that the free…
Views From The Boatshed 