In 1723, a rather bizarre book was published in London (and then reprinted in Boston a year later) called Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And All its Frightful Consequences, in both Sexes, Considered: With Spiritual and Physical Advice to those, who have already injured themselves by this abominable Practice.. The author was an anonymous Puritan minister who equated “masturbation, homosexuality and bestialy”. It was “addressed predominantly to adolescent males” but was applied to all ages. The book is full of metaphor – and exhorted a “hope in God” to “awaken … the Guilty” who are “Daily, and often-times Dangerously wounded by this foul Practice” and to stop the “Innocent and Unwary from falling into it”. It represented part of a conservative literature that was intent on pursuing its moral agenda by scaring people into believing that certain activities would be injurious to their health and life-threatening. The agenda exploited ignorance among the general population and traded on this ignorance to advance an agenda based on myth. With George Osborne’s Mansion House Speech last week, not a lot has changed. But I have a cure for him!

When I was studying in the UK during the dark Thatcher years there was a rat plague in Manchester. The reason was traced to the public spending cuts that had led to the reduction in rat catchers/baiters who had worked on the canals that go through Manchester. Later that year (December 1982), there were widespread collapses in the Manchester underground sewers which caused effluent in the streets, traffic chaos and long-term street closures. Major inner city roads were closed for a good 6 months while repairs were rendered. The reason – cut backs in maintenance budgets. The repairs ended up costing much more than the on-going maintenance bills. That experience brought hometo me the myopia of austerity. While the austerity causes massive short-term damage, it is clear that it also generates a need for higher public outlays in the future as a response to repairing or attending to the short-run costs. The latest focus in Britain is on rising waiting lists in hospitals and increasing violence in prisons. All these examples of austerity compound and reverberate throughout society in countless little ways that accumulate to one huge mess. The Thatcher years were highly destructive for the well being of the British people contrary to the myths that the conservatives pump out. The current period will be of a similar ilk. And spare a thought for the long-term damage in places like Greece! It is beyond belief.

The British Office of National Statistics released the data – Gross Domestic Product Preliminary Estimate, Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2015 – yesterday, which should tell the British voters that the Conservative government has failed. There is no political spin that is capable of changing that conclusion. With a general election next week in Britain, the real GDP figures (and related data – productivity, real wages, per capita income etc) should spell the end of the Conservatives. Especially, given their plans for the next few years. But then the British people have as an alternative the Labour Party which has proposed more or less the same thing except they will be “fairer”. Pigs might fly! Britain is continuing to demonstrate that fiscal austerity is bad for economic growth and that on-going deficits are good.

You may not remember the prediction by the American Arthur Laffer in his Wall Street Journal Op Ed (June 11, 2009) – Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates. As the US government deficit rose to meet the challenges of the spending collapse and the US Federal Reserve Bank’s balance sheet shot up as it built up bank reserves, he predicted “dire consequences … rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four years or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s”. You may have forgotten that prediction because it was in a sea of similar nonsensical claims by mainstream economists locked in a sort of mass hysteria and only their erroneous textbooks to give them guidance. It is 2015, nearly six years after Laffer humiliated himself in that Op Ed. Inflation is low and falling generally. Interest rates remain very, very low (note his use of “much, much” to give his prediction some gravity). Gravity forces things to crash! But the doomsayers have learned very little it seems.