From various places, including samizdata (my emphasis):

I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both.

I think so too. As plain as it is that all government spending (including “green” subsidies) is not productive spending but consumption, that it diminishes economic growth  and cannot possibly stimulate production is clear, still a belief in the opposite pervades. This is no dry, academic debate. Economic voodoo has consequences which hit us all:

A study of renewable energy in Scotland shows that for every job created in the alternative energy sector, almost four jobs are lost in the rest of the economy.

That’s in addition to Spanish and German studies which show similar results. Each and every time someone calls for “green” subsidies into renewables they are calling for the government to destroy productive jobs by sucking wealth from the economy. It’s time to point and laugh at these idiots whenever they do so.

Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph is a strange one. He brings an Austrian-tinged eye in surveying the dismantling of our economies over the last few years before – invariably – always defending General Ben Westmoreland Bernanke’s total war against American wealth. Until now.

The gist of it:

Shut Down the Fed (Part II)

I apologise to readers around the world for having defended the emergency stimulus policies of the US Federal Reserve, and for arguing like an imbecile naif that the Fed would not succumb to drug addiction, political abuse, and mad intoxicated debauchery, once it began taking its first shots of quantitative easing […]

Ben Bernanke has not only refused to abandon his idee fixe of an “inflation target”,  a key cause of the global central banking catastrophe of the last twenty years (because it can and did allow asset booms to run amok, and let credit levels reach dangerous extremes) […]

So all those hillsmen in Idaho, with their Colt 45s and boxes of krugerrands, who sent furious emails to the Telegraph accusing me of defending a hyperinflating establishment cabal were right all along. The Fed is indeed out of control.

The sophisticates at banking conferences in London, Frankfurt, and New York who aplogized for this primitive monetary creationsim – as I did – are the ones who lost the plot.

My apologies. Mercy, for I have sinned against sound money, and therefore against sound politics.

I might not live in Idaho but I’ll take Seff Efrican gold over crumbling paper money any day. End the Fed indeed, as the only man inside the Beltway who understands money and economics has long advised.

These criminals monsters will not stop their catastrophic destruction of American wealth unless made to stop. A once extraordinarily robust economy is being piloted into the ground by people who genuinely have no idea what they are doing.

No wonder gold shot through $1300/oz today, yet another record price. It coincided with the New York Fed pumping $550million into tech stocks to bolster share prices. These people are mad and don’t anyone dare tell me that the free market has failed, for goodness sake.

Over there, as over here, we see central state command economies with genuinely mad people in charge. Sounds like time to build that log cabin in Idaho.

The idea that government “stimulus” programmes can create consumer demand and that that consumer demand in turn stimulates productive economic activity is one of the great – possibly the greatest – economic policy errors of our time. Just look around you for the evidence of that.

As someone has said in here before (modesty forbids), this precisely puts the cart before the horse; consumption (i.e. consumer spending) is a function of production, it cannot happen without production happening first and real economic production can only happen when we save money.

A couple of minutes of your time reading this will explain why this is so.

Via Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, I’d direct Americans to this Bloomberg piece by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University.

In short, you’re bust, as some people have been pointing out.

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt … And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.

Worse Than Greece

Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

“Worse than Greece” because the once most free and dynamic economy on the planet has been throttled, its life crushed by the fedsters with their welfarism, cost-increasing arbitrary rules, market-destroying corporatism and rampant pillaging on behalf of class and political interests.

Forget Obamacare, Medicaid, Madicare, Social Security and trips to the Moon and Mars, the economy can no longer support them. The great, stupid, Keynesian experiment is at an end, it’s time to get back to work and a more modest way of life. The future’s already been spent.

Economic central planner George Osborne is an idiot, of that I have no doubt, but really the Chancellor ought not be so keen on making it obvious.

George Osborne warns banks to lend to businesses ahead of £8.4bn profits announcement, reports the Telegraph.

So let me get this straight: a depression which was caused in the main by the state perverting normal market incentives by pressuring banks to lend as much as they could at perversely low interest rates … will be fought by pressuring banks to lend much more money at perversely low interest rates.

Truly, the Gods are laughing.

Here’s a tip to anyone thinking of borrowing: whatever rate you borrow at, add five, six or seven per cent on top, calculate repayments at that rate and then decide if you can afford it, because the real cost of money is much higher than the price set by the state.

So British Petroleum seems to have plugged the leak and the Gulf Of Mexico is shaking off a little organic Earth juice.

Soon the federal government will prove its wisdom by telling the oilmen how to do their job with new laws and regulations. But should there be new laws, regulations and oversight and of what severity?

After the worst environmental disaster ever, a catastrophe to rank with 9/11, it’s inevitable that changes are afoot. Besides, Obamses said so.

Let’s just hope that someone, somewhere, understands economics (and, therefore, that you must look past the obvious to what is unseen also) and realises that maybe, just maybe, new laws and regulations might not be necessary afterall.

For about the zillionth time, crackpot Keynesianism turns out to be a disaster, again.

Home buyers are being warned that it will become more difficult to get a mortgage in the coming months as experts warned of a second wave of the credit crisis.

A “second wave”? It’s the same wave, chaps, of one great depression.

Melanie Bien, director at mortgage broker Private Finance, said: “Just when it looked as though lending conditions were starting to ease, the Bank is warning that we could face a second credit crunch.

But … but … the banks had to be bailed out, to save the economy. They told us so. Could they have been wrong?!

Bank of England interest-rate setter Adam Posen said that the economy could be at a tipping point.

Mr Posen commented in a speech that he had “laid awake for a number of nights” worrying about the state of the economy.

He said: “The UK economy is potentially switching between two states – a recovery, which we are now in, albeit perhaps an initially weak one … and the renewal of a severe recession if not outright deflation.”

So, the economy is in recovery but on the verge of recession. Here’s a closer estimate: the economy is deflating no matter what you do. No matter how low you set interest rates, no matter how much funny money you print up, a burst economy is deflating, righting the imbalances of an economy catastrophically inflated by governments and central banks.

According to Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph, Ben Bernanke has snookered himself and, faced with a collapsing, deflating economy, is contemplating another $multi-trillion counterfeiting operation. That’ll do the trick after his previous, failed (say, did anyone predict that?) attempts at re-inflating a burst balloon: more, more and yet more money!

Key members of the five-man Board are quietly mulling a fresh burst of asset purchases, if necessary by pushing the Fed’s balance sheet from $2.4 trillion (£1.6 trillion) to unchared levels of $5 trillion.

Why not? It’s only fiat paper, not real money anyway.

I’d be interested to know just when Zimbabwe Ben Bernanke plans on sinking the American economy in a climactic last stand of the Keynesian lunatics. You’d think Obamses will want as smooth a path as possible between now and the mid-terms, no new crises please chaps, so that means early-2011 at the earliest. You have been warned.

If this is true, and the federal government is considering price controls on health insurance –

In a shot across the bow to the insurance industry Tuesday, President Obama warned companies facing higher costs in part because of his health care law not to hike their prices, saying “we’ll be watching closely.”

Backing up his rhetoric behind the scenes, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is quietly working on a new regulation to determine when insurance price increases are “unreasonable” and potentially prohibited by law.

 – these people are even more thick than I imagined. Price controls always and everywhere lead to one outcome for the product in question – shortages and rationing.

As with so much else, Henry Hazlitt explained how it works.

It seems the Chancellor promised details, in his budget speech, of a proposed “green investment bank”.

“The government is considering a wide range of options for the scope and structure of the green investment bank,” the report added. “The options will be evaluated for effectiveness, fiscal affordability and transparency.”

Given the truly disastrous record of Government when it comes to picking winners, we don’t want this bunch pouring our money into a bank because they think it’s a good idea, do we?

So here’s a model, one that will test the market for a “green investment bank”. The government could create the shell bank and not put a penny into it. Instead, it can publish details of an account into which we can pay what will be the bank’s investment capital – if we choose to do so.

Those who think “green” investments are sustainable, endurable, will meet a demand and be a winner can back their judgement with their money. Those of us who prefer not to be robbed can sit it out. If hardly any investment capital is raised, well that would prove no market demand exists and that such a venture would be unsustainable, wouldn’t it?