1. The tax system in this country is so complicated nobody can be certain they are paying the correct tax, it's a cheat's paradise and an army of expensive accountants is needed to keep it operating to the extent that it does. These accountants are an overhead on the productive work force that we can't really afford. Together with the other forms of parasite they have made British industry so uncompetitive that it is rapidly disappearing.
2. Dyson jobs to Malaysia, Prudential jobs to India? now Dr. Martens jobs to China. The Far East will suck up all our livelihoods the way things are going. The writing is on the wall. It is doubtful that our standard of living can be maintained, we are living beyond our means and what is sustainable, in a fool's paradise. The souffle of our prosperity is in danger of collapse.
3. How can we be a trading nation when we have nothing to trade? Perhaps we should be aiming for self-sufficiency rather than Free Trade.
4. Our leaders aren't qualified to handle the situation, most of them are amateurs and lobby fodder.
5. China claims to be the oldest civilisation in the world, it should be able to look after itself without foreign investment.
6. The people of other countries, including China, are as clever as we are, as the Japanese, South Koreans etc. have demonstrated. It is ridiculous to think that we can always keep ahead of them technologically. Apart from anything else, most of our own population aren't very bright as is proved by the cretin's comics they read and the trash they watch on TV.
7. We may be able to buy things made abroad more cheaply than the same things made here but we are now reaching the state where this applies to everything. We can't buy things from abroad however cheap they are if we have nothing to sell or barter in return. Since the Second World War our balance of payments position has become serious several times and has led to devaluation of the pound on two occasions. Many of the things we import are expensive, luxury items like fancy cars, luxury yachts etc., most of the people who buy them are over-paid parasites who do nothing to earn foreign currency.
8. According to an article in Newsweek (w/e 3/11/02), the Chinese are luring away many of the companies that have shifted their production from the USA to Mexico close to their common border. They offer these companies even lower wage rates and a wider range of support businesses and skills. If Mexico can't compete in the manufacturing sector how on earth can we? The Prudential announced recently that it is moving a call centre to India which is also taking a lot of accountancy and software work, the Dr Martens footwear company that it is moving manufacturing to China, the Dyson vacuum cleaner company that it is moving most of it's manufacturing to Malaysia etc.,etc. The Japanese economic miracle did immense damage to our industry, what is the Chinese one going to do, destroy it completely? It's bad enough for most people to have only the choice of warehouse, retail or call centre work to choose from, soon there could be nothing at all if our leaders don't get their heads out of the sand and start to stop the rot.
9. We keep on being told that we are living in the world's fourth largest economy. If there is any truth in this at all, I expect it is only a fortuitous result of the otherwise undesirable house price inflation on our Gross National Product. In any case we are, at best, only just ahead of the bunch of medium sized economies and way behind the big three, the USA, Japan and Germany. 
10. Nearly everything one buys seems to be imported now, including about 50% of our food. How do we pay for all these imports, we don't seem to export very much? Most of our manufacturing industry has gone bottoms up, agriculture has been knocked out. Are we living off North Sea oil or investment in foreign slave labour sweat shops. Mostly the latter I expect.
11. The main cause of 'boom and bust' cycles is the gambling nature of investment. When the stock prices are rising everybody wants to take advantage and buy, so stock prices rise faster, when it is falling everybody wants to do the opposite so stock prices fall faster, in both cases it is almost inevitable that there will be overshoot followed by a correction that starts the next half cycle, instability and oscillation therefore results. This suits gamblers with plenty of money very well, they can increase their wealth with almost no effort merely by buying and selling at the right times. Provided they don't try too hard to maximise their profits it is almost risk free. No wonder Capitalism is so popular with the wealthy establishment and any alternative so unpopular. These people also welcome the entry into the market of less affluent people with little financial knowledge and little time or inclination to gain such knowledge because, to a large extent, those are the people who destabilise the market by misjudging when to buy and sell. Either that or they are unable to buy and sell at the best times because their money is in pension funds, life insurance or some other form that they can't move around freely. The small investors are used as suckers by the financial institutions and the rich. Capitalism benefits rich parasites and harms people who do useful work. Investment shouldn't be left to gamblers (and many investment managers of insurance, investment and pension companies are little more than gamblers). Experts, or panels of experts, with in-depth inside knowledge of particular industries are probably the people best equipped to make sound investment decisions. Unqualified people should be prevented from choosing where their investments are invested (apart, perhaps, from a small proportion for what they consider to be deserving causes). Investments should go into a general pool, their destination should be decided by panels of experts (whose performance is monitored and, perhaps, whose tenure is time limited) and the profits from the investments should be averaged before being passed to the investors. The general public shouldn't have to study finance, the stock market, the performance and prospects of every company in the market, the prospects of currencies, futures, junk bonds, gilts, derivatives, commodities etc., etc. on top of forty hours of useful work in order to earn a decent living. People shouldn't have the freedom to interfere in important things they don't understand and foul up.
12. How can the value of stocks and shares be determined if there isn't a market? Experts within an industry are more likely to be able to assess the prospects of a particular business and hence the value of it's shares than outsiders are. Formulae and the monitoring of trends can give good indications for many types of business.
13. A sensible, efficient number of teams of experts could bid for shares and make a market. The teams could be rewarded with bonuses or forfeits according to the relative success or failure of their investment activities over each financial year. The investors' returns would be the average of the results of all the teams, ie an individual investor wouldn't lose out because his money was handled by a poorly performing team; each team would be given a proportion of the pool of investment funds, the size of which could depend on the team's success or failure the previous year and, perhaps, over a longer period also.
14. Should all investment be made in the form of loans rather than the buying of shares? Share prices sometimes fluctuate wildly, they can't be reflecting the true value of companies a lot of the time. It is in the interests of some large investors for the market to fluctuate a lot. These investors try to make the market go up and down in a reasonably predictable fashion so that they can buy when share prices are low, sell when they are high and make a lot of money for doing nothing productive. In the USA investors can make a lot of money even when prices are falling, they sell shares that they pretend to have but actually don't then, when the price has fallen, they buy the same number of shares at a lower price so that they can fulfil their selling commitment. Their selling price was higher than their buying price so they make a profit. This is possible because transactions don't have to be completed immediately, the seller has several days to produce the shares he is selling. In this country selling short is illegal but I doubt whether the electronic trading systems detect it.
15. Could restricting investment to loans, perhaps of a particular type ie fixed term, fixed interest rate, provide a more stable and just financial system?
16. Is it impossible for a society, all the members of which are equally prosperous or poor, to work? Is there some fundamental theoretical reason why this should be so? Some people seem to think there is.
17. If somebody provides a product or service for free, all the other providers are undermined, deprived of the means to earn a livelihood. Is it important for everybody to get the maximum amount they can for their products and services? No, if it were, cartels would be beneficial. It is important to get what a product or service is worth to the customers who buy it. When a product is new and exclusive, customers will pay a high price, this finances investment in greater production which enables the product to be sold at a lower price to a larger market.

THE ECONOMY

1. About the only sections of the economy that are prospering now are the drugs trade, porn, crime, vice, importers of foreign goods, smugglers and the black market.
2. I keep hearing that our economy is the world's fourth largest; I wonder how this is worked out; largely on the basis of house prices I should think.
3. Even if our economy is the fourth largest, ten to one it is minnow sized compared with the top three, the USA, Japan and Germany and only a gnat's whisker bigger than the next ten.
4. No other European country has allowed it's business to be taken over by foreign owned companies to the extent that we have. Most of the jewels that were in our crown are now foreign owned, in the car field alone think Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Lotus, Land Rover, Mini, pathetic and humiliating isn't it?
5. We now congratulate ourselves on not being able to do anything properly without foreigners being in control. The government boasts that we attract more inward investment than any other European country but this is a sign of weakness more than strength, the other large European countries can finance their growth themselves.
6. Yet another government is allowing our industrial base to be wrecked, by the strong pound this time. Soon, the only jobs left will be low skill, low wage, low interest, low satisfaction service sector jobs, the sort that is probably already driving large sections of the population to drugs. The government is fiddling while our livelihoods go down the drain.
7. Banking mustn't be in private hands, it is too prone to corruption. Competition has rarely, if ever, worked properly in the banking sector.
8. The planned economy in Russia (also Japan in the days of MITI) had more spectacularly successful results than the market economy in the West. Russia lifted itself from being virtually a peasant economy in 1917 to being strong enough (with some help from the other allies) to play the biggest role in the defeat of Hitler in the Second World War, to becoming the world's second super power by the 1950s (without the benefit of Marshall aid from the USA such as we received). This despite a large section of the middle class and intelligentsia being purged.
9. What are the effects of devaluation of the currency? The same as those of inflation? Cheaper exports, more expensive imports, outstanding debts are adjusted so that creditors are not affected? Pensioners worse off? Ditto anyone on a fixed income? Favours home production. Everybody worse off because of more expensive imports. Foreign holidays more expensive.
10. If investors had to give a period of notice that they were going to withdraw/transfer/buy funds they would think longer before making these trades, particularly if the price for the trade was that current at the end of the notice period. This might put an end to the computer controlled trades that occur automatically as prices reach preset levels and the sudden fluctuations they cause. Would it make matters worse? Would it make fraudulent price rigging easier? Would it be fair? Investors would be committing themselves to a trade at an unknown price if the end of notice price was the effective one. Some account holders have to give notice of withdrawals.
11. If we import a lot, we have to export a lot to pay for the imports. To export we have to compete with other countries that also want to export so our costs, particularly labour costs, have to be competitive. The salaries of those working in pure export industries (is there such a thing?) are therefore determined by international competition, assuming equal productivity etc. The salaries of those not working in export industries are not constrained in this way. What does constrain or determine them? The value their customers put on them, the need/necessity for their services, competition. Competition doesn't seem to be working in the legal and accountancy professions, the top firms seem to be rigging the market so that their partners can receive obscene rewards. The salaries of the lawyers, accountants etc. that commerce and industry (and their employees) employs add to their overheads and tend to make them uncompetitive. They also put upward pressure on the wages of productive people who don't want to be left too far behind in the rat race. Result: we are priced out of practically every market. Non-productive people are a burden on producers. Sales people reduce the profit of producers.
12. What is all this nonsense about Britain having the world's 4th largest economy? Not long ago, the Italian economy was reputed to have overtaken ours.
13. Britain has become a third world country, it relies on inward investment from technically advanced countries such as the USA, Japan, Germany and Korea. Most of the profits from most of the largest businesses operating in this country are going to US, Japanese and German shareholders. We are being exploited in the same way that we exploit miners in Africa etc. One government after another has allowed our assets to be sold off to foreign companies in order to buy low grade jobs to make the unemployment figures look better.
14. The majority of the working population seem to be involved in the selling operation, the minority in producing, this is inefficient. There need to be standard selling mechanisms, ie. advertising methods, so that fewer people need to be employed in selling.
15. Very few of the people who buy Mercedes, BMWs and other expensive foreign products have anything to do with producing the exports that are necessary to keep our trade balanced. The poor suckers who perform that role can't afford fancy foreign products, their wages have to be low otherwise their products wouldn't be able to compete against those of low wage economies in the Far East and elsewhere. The salaries/wages of parasitic, non-productive workers have to be kept at the same level as those of workers who have to compete in the world market, the parasites mustn't be allowed to take advantage of those who perform the vital role of earning foreign exchange.
16. Day traders and all the other market gamblers and manipulators are the worst form of parasite, they do nothing productive or useful at all (in fact they do the opposite, destabilise markets), their activities must be stopped.