The purpose of morality is to teach you,
not to suffer and die, but
to enjoy yourself and live.

The high profile effort to agree legislation to lend $14bn to the US auto industry collapsed on Thursday night, leading the Bush administration to hold open the possibility that it would seek funds from its financial rescue plan instead.

Efforts to agree a deal in the US Senate ended in failure when Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority, said negotiations with Senate Republicans were at an end and warned that millions of jobs were at stake as a result.

…

Both Democrats and Republicans said the sticking point was a demand to push Detroit to bring down labour costs to a par with foreign manufacturers in the US. Democrats said the move made unrealistic demands on the United Auto Workers union, while Republicans argued that no effort to restructure the industry would work without such a step.

Perhaps a loan conditional on appropriate commercial restructuring was an appropriate way to help families through this catastrophe, but it appears the coercive powers of state and union have created a destructive intransigence.

Presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul spoke powerfully in the debate:

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The new Council of Food Policy Advisors, chaired by Dame Suzi Leather, Chair of the Charity Commission, will advise on food distribution and consumption as well as pricing.

Food shopping bills rose at their fastest rate since records began last year, with bread, rice, pasta and meat all going up by well over the rate of inflation.

And this is before the impact of the falling pound on food imports. This looks awfully like the road to price controls: price controls do not work [1, 2] and they never have:

In 284 A.D. the Roman emperor Diocletian created inflation by placing too much money in circulation, and then “fixed the maximum prices at which beef, grain, eggs, clothing and other articles could be sold, and prescribed the penalty of death for anyone who disposed of his wares at a higher figure.” The results, as Schuettinger and Butler explain, quoting an ancient historian, were that “the people brought provisions no more to markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them and this increased the dearth so much, that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was set aside.”

Much better to let farmers get on with it.

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Joseph Stalin in 1934, quoted here:

Bureaucracy and red tape in the administrative apparatus; idle chatter about “leadership in general” instead of real and concrete leadership; the functional structure of our organizations and lack of individual responsibility; lack of personal responsibility in work, and wage equalization; the absence of a systematic check upon the fulfillment of decisions; fear of self-criticism — these are the sources of our difficulties; this is where our difficulties are now lodged.

Miserably familiar stuff, but from the introduction on trotsky.net:

Stalin and his regime represented the interests of this bureaucracy. But in order to consolidate their control over society this bureaucracy had to eliminate the genuine traditions of Bolshevism. Thus the struggle between Stalin’s faction and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, was a struggle between the genuine representatives of the working class and the up-and-coming bureaucratic elite.

So here is a preposterous conflict between two enemies of bureaucracy, one a monster and the other a bungling thinker. Yet Trotsky influenced Tony Blair and Alistair Darling:

So far as [former Scottish Labour Party boss Bob Thompson] was concerned, Alistair Darling had gone from Trotskyist to New Labour overnight.

Perhaps we see where Blair’s disastrous “sofa government” originated: in the ideas of Trotsky, a passionate but feeble communist intellectual.
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The Times has learnt that the vehicle manufacturer, which employs around 5,000 workers at plants in Merseyside and Luton, approached Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, last week along with other carmakers, to urge the Government to give guarantees offering financial comfort to its car-part suppliers and dealerships.

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The EU will be limiting the number of pesticides available to farmers. Lower yields and higher prices are expected. No impact assessment was carried out for the proposals.

It’s as if the bureaucrats think regulation is free!

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