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Is it “Give us jobs!” Or “Laborare est orare”?

I noticed today an article under the headline”…British youth protest needs the spirit of los indignados…We’re marching from town to town to build a mass movement against the cuts, demanding job creation, not destruction.” The author of the article, Paul Callanan, writing in today’s Guardian, is the national organiser for the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. He continues “if...

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The pain on the high street

An editorial in the Guardian today refers to the failure of major retail chains and the increasing number of empty shops on Britain’s high streets. The retailers referred to were all part of the froth economy and it was inevitable that they would fail when the going got hard. Some, perhaps most, had failed to keep up with changing tastes. However, the fiscal incentive is to keep vacant premises...

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Damning European Court of Auditors Report

Andy Wightman has picked up this and reports it on his blog. The European Court of Auditors has just published a damning report on the Single Payment Scheme which was introduced as part of the 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (ECA Press Release here & BBC report here.). It is my view that this kind of thing comes about as much through ignorance of the laws of economics as from corruption....

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The only solution to the Greek financial crisis

Perhaps the most constructive comment on the solution to the Greek debt crisis has come from Andrus Ansip, prime minister of Estonia. He is reported to have said, “If I may give my advice to Greece, it is that you have to cut public expenditure. You have to make structural reforms. And you have to create a really efficient taxation system.” Whatever can he mean by a really efficient...

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Government by tabloid

Commenting on the U-turn over the proposals for prison reform by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, veteran journalist Simon Jenkins said this ‘As long as politicians pander to media-fed paranoia rather than calmly publicise facts, and as long as they delegate policy to the worst recesses of the press, money will be wasted. Families will be destroyed, drugs will proliferate and penal policy...

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A cursory rhyme

There was an old womanWho banked with the Euro.She had so little moneyShe didn’t know how toPay her billsAnd feed her children. She was up to her neckIn millions of debt.She was strapped for cash andHer economy?Trash!

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Putting a price on the environment

A row has erupted over a report that attempted to put a value on the natural environment. The counter-argument is that the natural environment is priceless and that it is somehow sacrilegious to put a price on it. There is an important sense in which this is true, but in our present state of society, surely it is better to put a value on nature than to assume, as at present, that it is worthless?

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Eurozone has failed

Intolerable choices for the Eurozone, an article in the FT by Martin Wolfe, who concludes that the Eurozone has failed and that no-one knows where to go from here. The surprise is that anyone in a position of authority ever thought that the project was viable in the long term. Surely this alone must now cast doubt on the entire body of economic theory that governments and those who advise them are...

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Wealthy sending their wealth offshore

This is an oft-heard complaint at the moment but what does it mean? What exactly has moved offshore? Truckloads of their money, in bundles of £50 notes? Containers filled with furniture? Houses, dismantled and put onto low-loaders? None of the above of course. And that is the trouble with economics as presently discussed and commented on. It does not look at actual physical objects and the real...

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