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Let’s date David Copperfield’s early childhood at circa 1824. Meaning that around 200 years have passed. Mr Micawber in the novel used the example of annual income of twenty pounds to illustrate that expenditure of sixpence less brought happiness and sixpence more misery. I want to focus on the twenty pounds. The full-time median income in the UK is now about £35,000. My question: what annual rate of inflation would take £20 to £35,000 in 200 years? A hard sum to do in your head. My Hewlett Packard calculator, itself some 40 years old, tells me it is about 3.8 per cent. I maybe expected a higher figure. The power of compounding is indeed awesome.
I have no doubt, if we were able dig out the numbers, that the money supply powered by government deficit spending would have increased by something in the order of 3000-fold in the past 200 years. Governments of all stripes, and certainly of red stripes, have so much more to do than their income allows. And they are unwilling to put immediate upward pressure on interest rates by correspondingly increasing their borrowing via bond sales. Hence to the “printing press” they go. Inflation follows as night does day. Some gain, many more suffer. More suffer than gain because government expenditure is wasteful. The value of resources swallowed up at the behest of government is with few exceptions more than the value of what is produced. The result is a net loss of value; borne by most of the population.
If all government expenditure were productive. That is, if it provided more value than it used up, there would be no inflation. And we would all be a lot richer. But of course that is against nature. Governments wasting money is part of their DNA. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. The “climate change” hoax or scam, whichever germane descriptor you prefer, has let loose the dogs of waste as they have never been loosed before; certainly outside of war.
Reserve Bank, Treasury, and private sector economists all pour over the latest CPI outcome. Is inflation coming down or going up, they query? Is the outcome higher or lower than expected? That’s fine so far as it goes, but it steers our focus away from the elephant in the room. And that is the inevitability of the currency’s value falling, year after year, decade after decade, in the face of wasteful deficit spending.
Now, in the first century of the third millennium, something particularly menacing is afoot. Namely, the sheer unadulterated waste of tearing down reliable power supplies and replacing them with expensive inferior alternatives. Year after year, decade after decade. Not to mention the taxpayer subsidisation of unviable industries and businesses built on the mirage of Australia becoming a renewable-energy superpower. This will not go unpunished. Unless reversed, this madness, for that is what it is, will eventually produce economic regression and debilitating inflation.
They used to say that Australia lived off the sheep’s back. Today we live off the back of industries generating copious quantities of so-called greenhouse gas emissions. As I noted in a recent Pipeline piece, we are rich only because of the exploitation of mineral and agricultural resources – the biggest exporter of iron ore, the second biggest producer of gold, vying with Indonesia as the being biggest exporter of coal, and with Qatar and the United States in exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG); the third in exporting meat and first in wool and wheat, etc. The rest of nation lives directly and indirectly off this bounty of commodity exports. This includes armies of public servants at state, federal and local levels and the vast array of ever-rising social welfare and health benefits. And yet, they are in the climate cultists firing line.
“Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men, when for so slight and frivolous a cause such factious emulations shall arise!” (Henry VI)
When the Prime Minister talks about a “future made in Australia,” he is talking about a future moulded by government not by market forces. It will end in tears, as such socialist follies always do. It is akin to a national suicide note.
Here is Chris Bowen on March 23 announcing $1 billion of government expenditure to help business build solar panels in Australia.
“The $1 billion federal investment in the Solar Sunshot program builds on over $40 billion of investment committed by the Australian Government to make Australia a renewable energy superpower.”
This is risible on its face to anyone with an ounce of business acumen. Memo to slow-learner Bowen: China does it much cheaper as, most probably, would any country unburdened by crippling industrial relations laws and soaring energy prices. QED.
Over $40 billion spent, says Mr Bowen, and it will end up much, much more. And how much value will that $40 billion-plus produce? For sure, less than what is outlaid. A lot less. In other words, it will be value dilutive not accretive. The very key to communist Eastern Europe’s decline and misery, as it will be to ours. Efficient power out, inefficient power in. Taxpayer money in, business bankruptcies out. Competitive industries penalised and hamstrung. What part of that seems beneficial to national wellbeing?
Making solar panels competitively and profitably, becoming a green-hydrogen superpower; and how about transporting green electricity to Singapore? All pipedreams. The market quickly demolishes pipedreams. Only governments are thick headed enough to fund and pursue them into penury.
That dollar in your wallet or purse will be worth a lot less in the years and decades to come. It’s inevitable if the mad climate cultists in charge persist. Australia will slip down and down the league ladder of prosperity, as did Argentina. Make them stop. Please.
‘Green hydrogen’ is just an updated version of the ‘run your car on water’ scam.
Spot on Peter.
I think we can all add Brazil to the list of countries going down the drain, now that the even further extreme left Lula da Silva has stolen his way to another stint as President, and along with his henchman Superior Electoral Court President and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, both seemingly untouchable, are running the country like their own private fiefdom.
Perhaps the most risible defence I have heard of the Solar Sunshot boondoggle is that national security demands we become self sufficient in solar panels.
As poor as that argument may be it is the only one with any remote justification, that and particulates.
My labor voting child (M22) was instructing me on the joys of net zero looking forward to a firm discussion on the matter with me over dinner as is our want.
He was taken aback when I advised that it is no longer my problem, that he and his collective of voters had set the stage for what would be a financial and social disaster.
That the experiment is being run, and no amount of oxygen expended arguing for sanity will prevail or change direction.
And so it is he who will bear the costs of those decisions as by the time they are in full swing I will be on the other side of a pine lid.
He will remember that conversation when he sees the bread lines that result from the frivolous waste and ideological capture evidenced on both sides of the house.
I remember when I was 22, sagely advising my parents of the utter nonsense peddled to me at university. My son (M20…you have to add the M these days) is a smart cookie, and vehemently more conservative, and free market than I. Perhaps a bellwether of hope.
An interesting article here from Peter Smith, including the following statement: “Governments wasting money is part of their DNA. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. The ‘climate change’ hoax or scam, whichever germane descriptor you prefer, has let loose the dogs of waste as they have never been loosed before; certainly outside of war.”
A Google search reveals tonight that the world “… has proven [coal] reserves equivalent to 133.1 times its annual consumption. This means it has about 133 years of coal left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves.”
This is fossil carbon laid down across about 100 million years of Carboniferous-Permian geological time.
We have, in addition, in the way of oil reserves, “… proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times … annual consumption levels. This means … about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves.” That is a helpful explanation as to why bowser prices move only in one direction: up.
This also makes it necessary for your common-or-garden carbon shill to deny the scientific mainstream
on the way CO2 from the industrial-scale burning of coal and oil is likely to affect the Earth’s climate. (NB: That happens to be in much the same way as the frequency-band of electromagnetic radiation inside a microwave oven raises the kinetic energy of absorber molecules for those frequencies, principally those of water vapour and other molecules they pass that energy on to.) And thus, the ‘conservative’ mindset leads directly to its complete opposite, which is global-scale environmental vandalism. Where mainstream science starts with the facts of Nature as discovered by experiment and observation, ‘conservative’ science starts with the needs of vested interests, and works backwards from them and from there. With eyes wide shut.
Moreover, those who disagree with this ‘conservative’ approach such as Yours Truly, get sin-binned by the editor of the run-of-the-mill ‘conservative’ journal, such as this one; operating in the manner of a senior associate of the Ostrich School of Climatology.
The last thing we should be doing with our fossil-carbon reserves is burning them up for the production of electric power, particularly when there are renewable investment-options available (eg, solar, hydro, pumped hydro, and geothermal.) Once burnt, those fossil-carbon molecules are no longer available for the production of road tar or of the plastics so ubiquitous in modern life.
Check out the interior of any modern home or automobile, including in particular the largely invisible plastics needed for electrical insulation. As a result, our descendants will face a sparky and all-too-often electrocutional future, as well as one featuring glacial melt, sea-level rise (of 3.5 +/- 0.4 mm/year) as well as increasingly stormy weather, flood, fire and likely famine.
But, like a tantrum-throwing child, your ‘conservative’ will not be told. ‘Conservatives’ want things to remain as they are, even if that reality is as packed inside a bus speeding with no brakes down a mountain road that leads straight over a cliff.
.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/#:~:text=World%20Coal%20Reserves&text=The%20world%20has%20proven%20reserves,levels%20and%20excluding%20unproven%20reserves).
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/#:~:text=World%20Oil%20Reserves&text=The%20world%20has%20proven%20reserves,levels%20and%20excluding%20unproven%20reserves).
https://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Bowens ecstasy at the arrival of the new EV ute stunned me, still limited in range but costing $250,000.
>”… we are rich only because of the exploitation of mineral and agricultural resources”<
I can't speak for the agricultural segment, although having worked comprehensively with them on geological exploration I have respect, but with the mining industry I've worked as a geologist across the globe excepting Africa for almost 50 years. Australians are the equal to anywhere and superior to most – exploration, production, safety, environment, marketing. A retired bureaucratic heavyweight (Ken "King" Henry) is of the view that this is all "dumb luck" – yet when Treasury Head honcho he tried like all getout to grasp most of the money from mining without taking any risk with "his" capital.
Yet no MSM outlet (occasionally excepting NewsCorp), no bureaucracy (local, state, federal), almost no uni faculty and hugely increasingly no government (local, state, federal) will now acknowledge this – likely because the city voters have come to regard mining as a dirty near-Neanderthal activity, rather than the very high-tech industry it is. I mean, any fool with a shovel can dig a hole, everyone knows that. So the food supplies and money flows are constantly being hard squeezed, incrementally.
I agree with RB's viewpoint above in regard to his M22 son. I cannot bring myself to squash the inherent optimism of my own children (M42, F38) – just can't do it. The subject is simply avoided. Besides, that I will most likely not see the misery caused by this "let's control the weather by going without" superstition, classing dying as an avoidance technique will be quite disappointing, I suspect
Ianl hits the nail on the head. Australia, with notable exception of our farmers who are world class, is really only another Saudi Arabia, but of a whole range of minerals, not just one. We have been extracting minerals since the first gold rush, and almost all wealth in this country originates in the mines. The problem with it though is that because of the wealth it has generated, many other industries and services are substandard. This latest brain fart from Albanese and Labor is just another way of spending tax generated by miners on their own dreams. Labor are almost to a man and woman functionaries and bureacrats who were only ever going to put their ideas into practice by getting into politics and getting their hands on other peoples money.
I must ask Buckshot Bowen what is the tangible outcome of being a ‘green energy superpower’. I know it is just a BS rallying cry, but I will ask him for the forecast reduction curve for energy thus produced. This would be the only evidence of superpowerness I could think of.
Buckshot? No real target, just pellets scattered everywhere.
On the subject of mining.
A few years ago I asked a very smart greenish young lady to look at a car parked outside and answer a simple question.
Ignoring leather seats, name one thing in the car that does not come from mining?
After reflection the answer is the air in the tyres.
The corollary is that without mining the car would not exist.
At present we see the government milking the massacre stories for all they are worth to garner support for their censorship legislation. The obvious aim is to a achieve the ambition of bringing to an end, unwanted public comment of the type presented by “Quadrant”, Sky News, and any others who dare to question government spin, lies, and propaganda.
Naturally, after the new legislation arrives, the government will enjoy immunity from prosecution.
Chris Bowen, for example, will continue to maintain his story that electricity produced by nuclear power is the most expensive, that battery powered utilities are a logical choice for those known as “tradies,”
Should “Quadrant,” “Sky News” or anyone else dare to mention that these wonderful vehicles, compared with those at present in use, cost three times as much and are half as practical would definitely be misinformation. It would be found, at considerable cost, that ACMA had morphed from a tired old “toothless tiger” into a vicious, many fanged watchdog.
Life for all government ministers would be much easier. Bogus arguments such as nuclear energy being the most expensive could no longer be challenged with solid evidence, such as the experience of Finland. Who would dare to risk receiving a draconian penalty by mentioning that after a nuclear powered electricity plant came online, prices fell substantially and a reliable base load became available?
Of course, the slogan “Publish or perish” would need to be modified to become “Publish AND perish.”
Yes. Henry vi is appropriate. So is Richard 11.
“That England (or wherever the CAGWarm scam lives) that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah! would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”