Bonus #TopTen: Gareth Morgan goes full retard

 

One of these men is correct …

I CONFESS THAT THE ABOVE HEADLINE IS not totally accurate. Sam Morgan’s dad actually went full retard a long time ago. The latest manifestation of his retardness (and mind you it’s not even lunchtime yet, so there may be further incidents) is his response to Paul Henry’s confrontational interview with him and Jamie Whyte’s on-the-button critique of Morgan’s hoped-for tax grab from home-owners.

(Good advice may be not to feed the troll, since he’s only enjoying the attention. But since his sins are so egregious, and so fundamental, I can’t not.)

"No wonder Jamie Whyte and Paul Henry are whingeing" says Captain Morgan, "they and their rich mates love tax loopholes." So no trace there at all of the pandering to envy that both accused him of, is there. Nor of accuracy, since it is hardly a “loophole” that successive governments have elected not to take income tax from home-owners who may not even have one. It’s a policy. A fairly sensible one.

What’s not sensible is Morgen-pere’s response to his critics. A better word would be “unhinged.” What gets him most unhinged is them attacking him on what he thinks is his ground: on economics. He reserves special scorn for Whyte’s attack as coming from someone with only a qualification in philosophy (“he is a philosopher” he sniffs parenthetically, whose “lack of economics background leads him to a fundamental error”).

And yet a qualification in philosophy would be ideal to critique both Morgan’s claim and his whinging – since his whole argument is based on a fundamental philosophical error to which contemporary economists so frequently fall into, and his whole policy is aiming at what he claims is an ethical outcome – surely a province in which a philosopher should dare to tread, but must. (A fundamental economists’ error being to forget that their science, like every science, does have a philosophical base.)

SO TO CRITIQUE WHAT Morgenthau says is the philosopher’s “fundamental error”:

I am not proposing to tax the opportunity cost of assets as Whyte claims, I am proposing to tax imputed rental… Imputed rental is the benefit you actually (not potentially) get from owning an asset because you don’t have to rent it. Because no cash changes hands, it is far more tax efficient to own assets rather than put the money in the bank and use the interest to rent the asset (like a house). Hence the rich store their wealth in lots of assets that they can use, and legally avoid paying tax. Why join an expensive tennis club when you can put a tennis court in the back yard?

But as one wag says, “If you pay to build a tennis court in your backyard, you get the benefit of not having to pay membership fees to the tennis club. If you join a tennis club, you get the benefit of not having to pay to build a tennis court in your backyard.
Why does Morgan want to tax one of these benefits but not the other?” And as Whyte responds,

How can you have a "deemed rate" if you are taxing actual benefits received and not the some assumed opportunity cost?

This is the incoherence of Morgan’s incoherence. This is the crux. Morgan claims to be taxing actual benefits, yet he needs someone to deem what these benefits actual are because, well, they don’t actually exist. This indeed is the very problem at the very heart of the whole concept of imputing incomes: that these incomes don’t actually exist, and in glossing over this point – or trying to – Morgan wants people to pay his tax who have no actual income with which to do so.

Which means they will need to take out either a reverse mortgage on their house in favour of the IRD, or to ship out.

ECONOMIST GEORGE REISMAN EXPLAINS the mote in Gareth’s eye, which (being about the crucial difference between existence and non-existence) as much philosophical as economic:

The doctrine of imputed income openly and systematically avows that the absence of a cost constitutes income… Contemporary economics thus deals in non-existent incomes … which it treats as though they existed.  It’s formula is that money not spent is money earned… [this position] turn[s] out to be riddled with contradictions and absurdities. [Capitalism

Being riddled with contradictions and absurdities is a fair description of Morgan’s policy proposal, in large part for the reason that Reisman lasers in on. It amounts to:

It seems to be 'you own a house, so we'll tax you on the money you're not paying in rent'. I can't see how that's any different from 'you have a vegetable garden so we'll tax you on the money you're not spending at the supermarket' or 'you walk everywhere so we'll tax you on the money you didn't use to buy a car or catch the bus'.*

It’s true, as Morgan says, that contemporary economics measures these fantasy incomes as part of its national accounting.

Many countries in Europe [says Morgan] tax imputed rental already alongside other imperfect wealth and housing taxes. Imputed rental is even in our national accounts – so that we can compare our national income with that of Germany or Switzerland which have much lower rates of home ownership.
    Imputed rental is income like any other, but we don’t tax it... If Henry or Whyte could demonstrate they have even a basic grasp of national accounts … I’d consider them worthy commentators. They can’t.

Well, speaking for the philosopher, they can. Economist George Reisman’s knowledge of national accounts on this score is both impeccable, and highly critical. The fact that contemporary economics measures them as part of its national accounting does not make the fantasy incomes any more real. It just makes the error more egregious. I won’t labour the point here (but I will direct you if interested to pages 456-459, 461-462, and 476 of Reisman’s free online book for the wider and most fascinating econo-philosophical discussion). Instead, I will simply point out that once the conceptual error is imbibed, the economic and moral error committed by Morgan made by follows as a matter of course:

At the base all these absurdities is the failure to realise the importance of earning money as the means of living in a division-of labour society. As a result of this failure, contemporary economics [and contemporary economists like Morgan and those on his payroll] does not consider the earning or non-earning of money to be a significant matter.

But it is. It is of crucial importance. Says Whyte:

[Morgan] says he is offended by the fact that some incomes are taxed and others (such as living in your own home) are not. So he claims he is doing the opposite of what you say. He is taxing assets so as to tax [fantasy] incomes.

Whyte offers an example to make the absurdity plainer:

As the basis of tax policy … the idea leads to absurdity or even atrocity. A woman might benefit from having voluntary sex with her husband. She could have bought that sex from a prostitute. If she had, the government would have received tax from the prostitute’s income. So a woman who has sex with her husband is a “tax loophole cowboy”, as Morgan puts it. I am keen to meet someone who will say that people who have untaxed sex with their wives are enemies of the people and that the government should tax sex between husbands and wives.
    Dr Morgan has no plan to tax sex with non-prostitutes, of course. But it is an arbitrary violation of the principle that allegedly motivates his policy. The principle that all “income” should be taxed, whether it comes in cash or kind, will still be violated all over the place if Dr Morgan wins the next election. The only difference is that these violations will more closely match Dr Morgan’s views about what people should do for themselves and what they should buy.

Do we really want to be violated by Dr Morgan’s views about what we should and shouldn’t do, based on a fantasy of his profession’s making?

AND WHAT OF SO-CALLED FAIRNESS? – that illusive claim for which Morgan says makes his proposed tax grab so all-fired necessary (it apparently being “fair” to steal from folk on the basis of an income that doesn’t exist).

Reisman nails that himself in pointing out that what creates the inequality through capital gain that Morgan decries is the rampant monetary inflation that Morgan, in other writing, so strongly supports. [READ: ‘How Inflation Creates Inequality Through Capital Gains’]

And Whyte nails it too in his response, which addresses the “distortion” that Morgan confuses for a loophole:

There is an element of truth in the Morgan … position. Our current tax system is “distortionary”, most notably, by favouring consumption over saving and DIY over paying for labour. The culprit in the case of the pro-consumption distortion is the double taxation of capital income (you earn it from savings made from your already-taxed income). The pro-DIY tax incentive is created by the fact that income tax and GST apply only to observable monetary transactions. (Minimum wages also encourage DIY). The answer is to eliminate capital income taxes (a standard view in the economics of public finance, btw) and to reduce income taxes/GST (which are almost the same thing over the long-run, since all income is eventually spent).
This would also help the poor, who Dr Morgan seeks to benefit. These reductions in taxation would encourage productive investment, employment and, thereby, economic growth. Which is the only thing that has ever seriously improved the lot of the poor.
Dr Morgan often says that economic prosperity is impossible without “fairness”, by which he means equality of income and wealth. Ask someone from China if she agrees. 50 years ago, all Chinese were equally poor (except Communist Party big-wigs). Today, inequality is far greater. Yet even the relatively poor in China are far better off.

Game, set and match to Whyte and Reisman?

---

* So as Reisman argues, this false concept of imputed incomes “constitutes a kind of conceptual bridge” that helps support the whole Marxian exploitation theory on which Morgan relies for his very concept of fairness. Not an accident then.

Making a late run that top-ten most-popular posts at the country’s fourth-most read political blog was this end-of-year offering on the retarded father of Sam Morgan … which you have reposted today as a special start-of year bonus. (Don’t thank me, just throw money.)

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Gareth Morgan goes full retard

 

One of these men is correct …

 

I CONFESS THAT THE ABOVE HEADLINE IS not totally accurate. Sam Morgan’s dad actually went full retard a long time ago. The latest manifestation of his retardness (and mind you it’s not even lunchtime yet, so there may be further incidents) is his response to Paul Henry’s confrontational interview with him and Jamie Whyte’s on-the-button critique of Morgan’s hoped-for tax grab from home-owners.

(Good advice may be not to feed the troll, since he’s only enjoying the attention. But since his sins are so egregious, and so fundamental, I can’t not.)

"No wonder Jamie Whyte and Paul Henry are whingeing" says Captain Morgan, "they and their rich mates love tax loopholes." So no trace there at all of the pandering to envy that both accused him of, is there. Nor of accuracy, since it is hardly a “loophole” that successive governments have elected not to take income tax from home-owners who may not even have one. It’s a policy. A fairly sensible one.

What’s not sensible is Morgen-pere’s response to his critics. A better word would be “unhinged.” What gets him most unhinged is them attacking him on what he thinks is his ground: on economics. He reserves special scorn for Whyte’s attack as coming from someone with only a qualification in philosophy (“he is a philosopher” he sniffs parenthetically, whose “lack of economics background leads him to a fundamental error”).

And yet a qualification in philosophy would be ideal to critique both Morgan’s claim and his whinging – since his whole argument is based on a fundamental philosophical error to which contemporary economists so frequently fall into, and his whole policy is aiming at what he claims is an ethical outcome – surely a province in which a philosopher should dare to tread, but must. (A fundamental economists’ error being to forget that their science, like every science, does have a philosophical base.)

SO TO CRITIQUE WHAT Morgenthau says is the philosopher’s “fundamental error”:

I am not proposing to tax the opportunity cost of assets as Whyte claims, I am proposing to tax imputed rental… Imputed rental is the benefit you actually (not potentially) get from owning an asset because you don’t have to rent it. Because no cash changes hands, it is far more tax efficient to own assets rather than put the money in the bank and use the interest to rent the asset (like a house). Hence the rich store their wealth in lots of assets that they can use, and legally avoid paying tax. Why join an expensive tennis club when you can put a tennis court in the back yard?

But as one wag says, “If you pay to build a tennis court in your backyard, you get the benefit of not having to pay membership fees to the tennis club. If you join a tennis club, you get the benefit of not having to pay to build a tennis court in your backyard.
Why does Morgan want to tax one of these benefits but not the other?” And as Whyte responds,

How can you have a "deemed rate" if you are taxing actual benefits received and not the some assumed opportunity cost?

This is the incoherence of Morgan’s incoherence. This is the crux. Morgan claims to be taxing actual benefits, yet he needs someone to deem what these benefits actual are because, well, they don’t actually exist. This indeed is the very problem at the very heart of the whole concept of imputing incomes: that these incomes don’t actually exist, and in glossing over this point – or trying to – Morgan wants people to pay his tax who have no actual income with which to do so.

Which means they will need to take out either a reverse mortgage on their house in favour of the IRD, or to ship out.

ECONOMIST GEORGE REISMAN EXPLAINS the mote in Gareth’s eye, which (being about the crucial difference between existence and non-existence) as much philosophical as economic:

The doctrine of imputed income openly and systematically avows that the absence of a cost constitutes income… Contemporary economics thus deals in non-existent incomes … which it treats as though they existed.  It’s formula is that money not spent is money earned… [this position] turn[s] out to be riddled with contradictions and absurdities. [Capitalism

Being riddled with contradictions and absurdities is a fair description of Morgan’s policy proposal, in large part for the reason that Reisman lasers in on. It amounts to:

It seems to be 'you own a house, so we'll tax you on the money you're not paying in rent'. I can't see how that's any different from 'you have a vegetable garden so we'll tax you on the money you're not spending at the supermarket' or 'you walk everywhere so we'll tax you on the money you didn't use to buy a car or catch the bus'.*

It’s true, as Morgan says, that contemporary economics measures these fantasy incomes as part of its national accounting.

Many countries in Europe [says Morgan] tax imputed rental already alongside other imperfect wealth and housing taxes. Imputed rental is even in our national accounts – so that we can compare our national income with that of Germany or Switzerland which have much lower rates of home ownership.
    Imputed rental is income like any other, but we don’t tax it... If Henry or Whyte could demonstrate they have even a basic grasp of national accounts … I’d consider them worthy commentators. They can’t.

Well, speaking for the philosopher, they can. Economist George Reisman’s knowledge of national accounts on this score is both impeccable, and highly critical. The fact that contemporary economics measures them as part of its national accounting does not make the fantasy incomes any more real. It just makes the error more egregious. I won’t labour the point here (but I will direct you if interested to pages 456-459, 461-462, and 476 of Reisman’s free online book for the wider and most fascinating econo-philosophical discussion). Instead, I will simply point out that once the conceptual error is imbibed, the economic and moral error committed by Morgan made by follows as a matter of course:

At the base all these absurdities is the failure to realise the importance of earning money as the means of living in a division-of labour society. As a result of this failure, contemporary economics [and contemporary economists like Morgan and those on his payroll] does not consider the earning or non-earning of money to be a significant matter.

But it is. It is of crucial importance. Says Whyte:

[Morgan] says he is offended by the fact that some incomes are taxed and others (such as living in your own home) are not. So he claims he is doing the opposite of what you say. He is taxing assets so as to tax [fantasy] incomes.

 Whyte offers an example to make the absurdity plainer:

As the basis of tax policy … the idea leads to absurdity or even atrocity. A woman might benefit from having voluntary sex with her husband. She could have bought that sex from a prostitute. If she had, the government would have received tax from the prostitute’s income. So a woman who has sex with her husband is a “tax loophole cowboy”, as Morgan puts it. I am keen to meet someone who will say that people who have untaxed sex with their wives are enemies of the people and that the government should tax sex between husbands and wives.
    Dr Morgan has no plan to tax sex with non-prostitutes, of course. But it is an arbitrary violation of the principle that allegedly motivates his policy. The principle that all “income” should be taxed, whether it comes in cash or kind, will still be violated all over the place if Dr Morgan wins the next election. The only difference is that these violations will more closely match Dr Morgan’s views about what people should do for themselves and what they should buy.

Do we really want to be violated by Dr Morgan’s views about what we should and shouldn’t do, based on a fantasy of his profession’s making?

AND WHAT OF SO-CALLED FAIRNESS? – that illusive claim for which Morgan says makes his proposed tax grab so all-fired necessary (it apparently being “fair” to steal from folk on the basis of an income that doesn’t exist).

Reisman nails that himself in pointing out that what creates the inequality through capital gain that Morgan decries is the rampant monetary inflation that Morgan, in other writing, so strongly supports. [READ: ‘How Inflation Creates Inequality Through Capital Gains’]

And Whyte nails it too in his response, which addresses the “distortion” that Morgan confuses for a loophole:

There is an element of truth in the Morgan … position. Our current tax system is “distortionary”, most notably, by favouring consumption over saving and DIY over paying for labour. The culprit in the case of the pro-consumption distortion is the double taxation of capital income (you earn it from savings made from your already-taxed income). The pro-DIY tax incentive is created by the fact that income tax and GST apply only to observable monetary transactions. (Minimum wages also encourage DIY). The answer is to eliminate capital income taxes (a standard view in the economics of public finance, btw) and to reduce income taxes/GST (which are almost the same thing over the long-run, since all income is eventually spent).
This would also help the poor, who Dr Morgan seeks to benefit. These reductions in taxation would encourage productive investment, employment and, thereby, economic growth. Which is the only thing that has ever seriously improved the lot of the poor.
Dr Morgan often says that economic prosperity is impossible without “fairness”, by which he means equality of income and wealth. Ask someone from China if she agrees. 50 years ago, all Chinese were equally poor (except Communist Party big-wigs). Today, inequality is far greater. Yet even the relatively poor in China are far better off.

Game, set and match to Whyte and Reisman?

---

* So as Reisman argues, this false concept of imputed incomes “constitutes a kind of conceptual bridge” that helps support the whole Marxian exploitation theory on which Morgan relies for his very concept of fairness. Not an accident then.

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Gareth Morgan wants to tax your home

 

So let’s talk about Sam Morgan’s dad, Gareth. Because for an apparently smart man, he can be awfully fricking dumb.

There he was yesterday announcing the very first policy of his spanking new party, the Opportunists’ Party, capitalising on the opportunity of the Prime Minister’s resignation by flying up from Wellington to be photographed outside the Prime Minister’s Parnell home so he can announce a new tax. In a country that values home ownership, he announced he wants to tax your home.

Nice policy announcement by which to launch a new party.

What’s the connection with Parnell, you wonder? Why outside the Prime Minister’s home? Because Sam Morgan’s dad is very much an opportunist, and there were already reporters stationed there. And because his very first policy being so gleefully unwrapped is a new tax that will make those Parnell home-owners’ eyes water. A new tax that reveals Morgan senior to be something of an old-fashioned redistributionist – the sort that should have long ago been put out to pasture.

Morgan Sr says in essence that NZer’s houses, boats and cars are unproductive assets, so therefore (the “therefore” is his) his party would tax them all as if they were. He will simply “deem” your asset (his word again) to be a productive asset, and then tax you as if it has generated an income stream. Even if it hasn’t.

So not a direct property confiscation then, just confiscation by a thousand cuts.

Morgan Sr says not to worry about that however. It will only hurt some people (many of them in that leafy suburb he and his charts took over yesterday).

And, Morgan Sr says, don’t complain that this is just a tax grab, because we have it balanced out with income tax cuts for those other people who it won’t hurt. That will however hardly comfort those for whom it will.

This, he has said before, is a “fresh idea” that all makes sense. In point of fact, it is as stale as redistributionist dogma and makes no economic or moral sense at all.

• It may or may not be “balanced” overall by income tax cuts, but even if true that would be cold comfort to those on low or little incomes. If you have a large house but little income, you’re going to have to find Morgan’s nut every year or sell out. If you have a small house but no income (perhaps because you’re retired and on a pension) then Morgan’s tax lords will simply “deem” you to have one and confiscate their tax anyway. And if you have any kind of house on leasehold land that doesn’t turn an income, then if Gareth’s policy were implemented you may as well just hand him over your wallet and all your credit and debit cards to with as he pleases.
      In any case, if you’re income poor and asset rich, this would come at you like Len Brown’s rate rises, only at a rate many times higher. (Expect rental margins to be squeezed, and slum landlording to be encouraged.)
• And why on earth would we expect it to be balanced by a promise of commensurate tax cuts? Has any politician since Pericles ever kept a promise not to raise taxes? And Gareth himself seems fairly new to the idea since, when he first floated this new tax way back when he was talking about “Big Kahunas,” he talked about using have the new tax to pay for his Universal Basic Income – i.e., a godawful and expensive scheme making everyone in the country a beneficiary. So he’s not even wedded to that tax-cut linkage himself.
  And in an MMP environment, neither would any major party either who was likely to adopt the policy, if any. When you consider that a politician is someone who has never seen a new tax they wouldn’t like, nor an income tax cut they would offer (except in election year), the chances of it being tax-neutral are essentially nil.
  Yet even if not nil, it would still not be tax neutral for those he intends to harm. Who would be many

Morgan says that this new tax is necessary to hold down house prices and direct capital to more productive uses. But the fact remains that no tax on houses anywhere in the world has held down house prices when, in our hampered markets, the things hampering the markets are holding those prices up. And as economist Jim Rose pointed out to Gareth back in April when he was floating this particular trial balloon, “optimal tax theory, including that pioneered by Stiglitz and Merrlees, economists of impeccable left-wing credentials, show that taxes on the income from capital should be low because the deadweight social costs of taxes on capital are very high.” For that, Rose was threatened with banishment as a troll.

Because basically, Morgan thinks he knows best how to run things, and in the end doesn’t care that he’s wrong or who he may hurt in the process.

So if you’re a cat-loving retiree who owns a leasehold home, you may want to start a club. It could have as its first aim doing to Morgan pere what he’d like to do to your family pet.

[Hat tips Jason Krupp, Stephen Berry, Jim Rose]

PS: A reader sent me this link to Captain Morgan being interviewed this morning by Paul Henry, for whom I generally have little time – but when he begins by telling the Captain (accurately) that what he proposes is an Envy Tax, he immediately has my attention.

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Gareth Morgan gets German housing wrong

 

After Gareth Morgan managed to sell his failing Kiwisaver to scheme to a government department, he graduated to generally telling lies for a living – and employing others to tell them on his behalf.

One such entity burst into print yesterday, telling the country on his employer’s behalf that

German house prices have been flat (in real terms) for the past 30 years, while over the same time ours have increased by 150%. This despite the fact that Germany is the one of the most successful economies in the world and their per capita incomes have risen faster than those of New Zealanders.

He has a graph:

Unfortunately, the graph is a lie. Certainly, it shows the New Zealand housing bubble fairly faithfully. But consulting this German house-price index, instead of Gareth’s lapdog’s, shows that real house prices in German cities have not been flat at all in recent years – rather, they have increased by 46% since 2007, rising faster than rents and incomes. [“The quantitative easing programme by the European Central Bank, worth about US$65 billion per month, is fuelling fears of housing price bubbles in several European countries – with Germany, Norway and the U.K. most at risk….”]

Does that look flat to you?

Sure, it’s not as precipitate as our own local bubble (just check that scale), but it does not tell the story Gaweth’s minion would like it to (which is essentially that government should meddle more in the market, rather than less—which is to  say, Gaweth’s own preferred policy settings.) And rather than the flat line showed by the minion, if we extend the story out a few more years, back to German reunification in 1990 (which the minion doesn’t mention) we see both decline and increase.

So the story is nothing like the one the minion makes known. (Just file that knowledge away next time you hear Captain Morgan bellowing his strandard bullshit around the usual channels.)

This is not to say that house prices should not be either flat or gently declining over time (they should), nor that there is nothing to learn from German housing. There is: They are still generally cheaper to buy than many other places in the west (“on figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as US$55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just US$80,000. Broadly equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times higher.”)

One of the reasons for the decline certainly is political: It followed the reunification in 1990 of the socialist East- with the semi-capitalist west Germany.

During the time of the socialist GDR housing was part of dictatorship government. They built the so called "Plattenbauten", large flat houses with hundreds of small flats, while the old housing inside the cities couldn't be renovated because of governmental price control on the rents. The rent income couldn't cover the costs for repairs nor paint. After the fall of the wall, there was a time when they adapted the governmental controlled rents to reasonable rents. A lot of people of the western part of Germany bought properties in the eastern part and got subsidies for renovating all the degenerated extremely cheap houses. But because of the people's migration to the west, a lot of houses couldn't be rented out, prices decreased and a lot of property owner got broke. But this applies only for the eastern part of Germany.
During the last years the property prices increased by 46%, esp. in cities like Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart...
Left-state governments try to keep the rents low by governmental price control. But it is easy to see to where it will lead.

And “a prominent critic of America’s latter-day enthusiasm for doctrinaire free-market solutions” is still forced to conclude that

a key to the story [of generally cheaper housing] is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis… housebuilders [as a result] rarely accumulate the huge large land banks that are such a dangerous distraction for U.S. house­builders like Pulte Homes, D. R. Horton, Lennar, and Toll Brothers. German house­builders just focus on building good-quality homes cheaply, secure in the knowledge that additional land will become available at reasonable cost when needed.

Mind you, that critic actually bothered to research his story properly.

Because if you do, you do find in the critic’s account at least two real lessons for reducing rocketing New Zealand house prices: the first (as mentioned above) is to to allow land onto the market rather than restrict it; the other has been promoted here by the NZ Initiative, that local councils (as long as they hold the whip hand) need to share in the economic benefits of new housing. Both encourage supply, rather than restrict it.

That, really, is the “ultimate driver.”

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Jones pays homage to Gareth Morgan’s greatness

 

The various books of Bob Jones’s Letters are hilarious.

Bob Jones just wrote a letter to Wellington mayour Celia Wade-Brown suggesting that the great Gareth Morgan be recognised inteh appropriate way, for which Bob is prepared in regonition of Morgan’s magnificence to replace his 15-storey tower on The Terrace with a 5000m high statue of the great man standing atop a temple “accommodating up to 8,000 Morganist pilgrims at a time.” Barely enough, I would have thought, for all those wishing to worship at the world-leader’s feet.

Surprisingly, Captain Morgan was less than effusive in response to the magnanimous offer.

[Hat tip Megan Denize and the ‎Sir Robert (Bob) Jones Appreciation Society]

The continuing delusions of Gareth Morgan: Part XVIII, The RMA edition

Readers, I ask you: Can Gareth Morgan still be taken at all seriously?

Since the day he sat in a spa pool sipping a well-earned champagne after his son’s sizeable sale to Fairfax, Captain Morgan has spiralled swiftly downhill. He’s now such a rum old bloke you’d think he was swallowing the giggle juice by the gallon.

There is no topic on which he hasn’t voiced an opinion, without seeming to ever trouble himself with either facts or fruitful thinking first.

Today, his chosen topic is the RMA and the housing crisis. The latter, declaims the Captain from the pulpit of the NBR, has nothing to do with the former. Just as my nickname for this gobshite has nothing to do with my total disrespect for his acumen.

The words “nothing to do with” are Captain Morgan’s. As in “The housing crisis has nothing to do with the RMA.” Or as in ‘housing prices have nothing to do with restrictions in housing supply,’ which is what his argument amounts to. Or as in, ‘prices have nothing to with supply,’ which is the economic argument this alleged economist is actually making.

Because he is not saying the price of X has very little to do with the supply of X. He is saying it has nothing to do with its supply, or any restrictions thereof.

Gareth Morgan was once thought to be an economist.

Compare and contrast.

North Korea a “prison camp”? “Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Gareth Morgan back in September.

Now, it’s reported that North Korea has publicly executed 80 people for watching banned television programmes, including

in the eastern port of Wonsan, [where] the authorities gathered 10,000 people in a sports stadium to watch the execution of eight people by firing squad…

 Public executions on trumped-up charges are so common in the slave state, it’s clear North Korea has little interest in concealing what it is.

Unlike Gareth.

UN Commission of Inquiry has more news for Gareth Morgan

The head of a UN Commission of Inquiry into the place Gareth Morgan recently described as “just fantastic”—a place whose economic achievements have been “magnificent”—calls North Korea a place harbouring “unspeakable atrocities.” Retired Australian judge Michael Kirby, who has spent recent months gathering evidence in South Korea and Japan from North Korean defectors and other victims,  says "testimony heard thus far points to widespread and serious violations in all areas."

He said the evidence, both sobering and heart-rending, had "given a face and voice to great human suffering."

Gareth Morgan v Liberty Scott: update

I reported on last Friday’s ramble the online stoush ‘tween Captain Morgan and Liberty Scott that began when Gareth left North Korea decrying how badly the prison state has been misunderstood by everyone but him and Kim Jong Il.

Turns out Gareth has backed down—in exactly the same way that Soviet historians used to back down, i.e., by rewriting the past.

Scott reports that Gareth

has removed his libel threat and his lengthy ad-hominem attack on me which started with a diatribe against ad-hominem attacks.  He has edited many of my comments extensively, and has done the same to his own, adding in one:
    "I am in no way sympathetic to the form of governance in North Korea."
    Sure had a lot of us fooled.  
    There is much more in the language now used in the edited comments to suggest a more reasonable interpretation for what he saw.  Had he said all that in the first place, there would be far far less to criticise him about.   
    He has still helped to feed the DPRK's propaganda machine of course - that horse has bolted.
However, so have his original comments.

So too has his credibility. What remained of it.

Scott concludes:

I look forward to seeing whether the MSM takes him on when he finally returns to NZ, for his original comments and behaviour in being confronted with the absurdity of them…

Any journalists out there up for  it?

More from Gareth’s spiritual home

Still talking about his spiritual home, Gareth Morgan and his entourage continue to swallow North Korean history lies whole while delivering propaganda gold to the Peoples' Captors of North Korea.

Via Kiwiblog, NK News reports more from Gareth on how wonderful North Korea is:

From there, the Morgans got the chance to appreciate the scenic and personal beauty of the international pariah at harvest season.
    “There could be problems in the country where we didn’t see,” Joanne said. “So we can’t comment on anything we didn’t see. But what we saw, it was fantastic.“
    “The country is beautiful,” Gareth said. “The country is just fantastic, the farms are perfect. They have no pollution.”

It’s a paradise! Perfect farms. No pollution!

“You look at their personal gardens, and they have got sunflowers, pumpkin growing over their roof, they (have) tobacco, huge pride in their personal space as well as their communal farms,” Joanne said. While the standard of living is clearly lower than in the South, they said it probably is not much different from South Korea a couple of decades ago, and that those they witnessed were not malnourished or lacking in necessities in clothing or shelter.

Never occurred to them, that of course they don’t get to see the areas where three million people starved to death.

“Frankly I don’t see the DPRK regime through any different lens than I see China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia – even Singapore at times – authoritarian regimes all of them,” he added.

 

Yes, North Korea is just like Singapore. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, “at times.”

Add this twat and his fantasist wife Mrs Gareth to the list of other fantasists like Walter Duranty and George Bernard Shaw who visited the Slave State of Soviet Russia and returned to write eulogies about what they saw through their red eye-patches.

WRITING IN 1933 AFTER returning from a tour of Russia’s Potemkin villages, Shaw called what had become a continent-wide red prison a wholly

civilised territory [in which] we saw [a] hopeful and enthusiastic working-class…developing public works, increasing health services, extending education, achieving the economics of independence of woman and the security of the child…..setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us.

For those not having “earned the privilege of living in a civilized community” by not “pulling their weight in the social boat,”

That [said Shaw] is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.

Fantastic!  Oh, and he dismissed reports of the famine of 1933 in which it was later discovered about 10 million died, saying,

I saw no underfed people there; and the children were remarkably plump.

JOURNALIST WALTER DURANTY WAS as bad, living in “paradise” in the Soviet hell-hole of the 1920s, while writing glowing accounts for the New York Times of mass-murderer Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plan, shrugging off stories of famine and bloodletting “by telling those who dared to inquire that eggs have to be broken in order for an omelette to be made.”  "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” was the tenor of his regular despatches. Anyone who dared to air stories of the famine in which Stalin wiped out the Ukranian kulaks Duranty dismissed as “exaggerated or malignant propaganda.”  In any case, he said, this "almost privileged class" needed to be "liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labour into the proletarian mass" since they stood in the way of Soviet progress. And “the final fate of such enemies,” he said, “is death.”

A very useful idiot indeed, of whom Stalin found much propaganda value.

As have the Peoples' Captors of North Korea are with Gareth and Mrs Gareth.

NB: By the way, it’s appropriate that the literal meaning of the word used by Mrs Gareth is closer to the truth than her glaring misuse of it. The literal meaning of “fantastic” (from Greek phantastikos, able to create mental images, from phantazesthai, to appear) is “Unrestrainedly fanciful; extravagant; based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal.”

Gareth Morgan has found his spiritual home

It’s clear from his recent comments that Gareth Morgan has now discovered his spiritual home: the slave state of North Korea.  Which fits with his growing enthusiasm for meddling in everything.

The news he was there came first from the slave state government’s own propaganda service, which knows how to make the most of a propaganda opportunity. (Just ask Dennis Rodman.) But the mushy thinking is all Gaweth’s. The West needs to "rethink" North Korea now, gushes Gareth. The people are poor, he understates, “but wonderfully engaged.” “That North Korea has achieved economically despite its lack of access to international money has been magnificent,” says this simpleton.  “Hopefully, with enormous interest from the world media, this trip will be the catalyst for … change,” says New Zealand’s most ego-driven communist sympathiser.

Gareth Morgan is a tool. A useful, easily-led tool.

Liberty Scott points out that all the very nice folk Gaweth meets in the slave state really are nice. They’re paid to be nice. Their good graces with the regime depend on them remaining nice. “They are privileged members of the elite painstakingly trying to make sure their country is seen in a good light.”  They’ll tell any lie necessary to fool the easily deluded. (Even about their great leader’s birthplace, allegedly pictured above, but in reality in Khabarovsk, Russia.)If Gareth believes anything he’s heard, says Scott--and he seems to--he has simply  become a propaganda tool for the child torturing fiefdom of the Kim family.

Oh, and the freedom of all those nice people? Unlike Gaweth, they’re not even free to leave. Because the place he is praising is a prison state from which even his hosts who treated him so well can’t leave.

Matt Nolan has questioned his wisdom here.
    I question his sanity.  
    Imagine if he had travelled through Pol Pot's Cambodia and did this, or Nazi Germany in 1938 talking about how misunderstood the proud German people were and they only want more living space and to be reunified with Germans in Czechoslovakia, and it isn't a prison camp, the stories about the Jews are lies, demonising them.
    Well Gareth - you kind of did that.
    Go get your head examined.

Eric Crampton wonders for a moment whether he’s “maybe playing the regime-supporting shill while there … so that he could have some chance at seeing what was going on.” But only for a moment. Because his post praising his former hosts and the country’s captors was posted after he’d left the regime.

I'd thought that he was going to come out claiming that starvation works wonders on reducing feral cat numbers; this is worse.
Maybe there was some case for the tour somehow facilitating better North-South talks. Unlikely, but not impossible. But that the West has a "beat-up" view of North Korea? They have freaking concentration camps! Morgan's next tour could perhaps hit a few of those off-piste highlights. Morgan found the North Koreans with whom he spoke wonderfully well-informed; it's problematic even asking what that means in a place where preference-falsification is a necessary survival characteristic…
    Even if Morgan was away from his handlers, everyone is a handler. That's the point of a totalitarian regime. Any disclosure can get you and your family sent to a concentration camp because somebody else will have purchased an indulgence by dobbing you in. And the safest course is making yourself believe the things you have to say.

Morgan is an easy dupe for the propaganda of a slave state led by a secular Messiah. Perhaps because he has a Messiah complex himself.

WARNING: Contains busybodies

You don’t like swearing?

Well, do you like it less than New Zealand’s richest communist taking time out from a busy day telling the country what to put on their dinner plate to tell us we should all effectively have the state as our landlord.

Gareth Morgan: fuck you, and the dipshit ideas you rode in on.

You might have fooled the country’s worst performing bank  into taking your badly-performing donkey off your hands, but home-owners will be less forgiving.

Home-owners, be wary of a Gareth bearing recipes for new taxes on your house; you have nothing to lose but your freehold.

Cat killer killed by cat

Yes folks, the cats are striking back against Gareth Bloody Morgan—the alleged economist who reckons your favourite family pet should be killed off to satisfy his fondness for fauna.

The man who took a soccer team and killed it off to satisfy his fondness for megalomaniacal meddling.

The monetary moron who takes on farmers by calling them “retards,” and fans of his losing team “pathetic.”

The investment non-adviser who took your KiwiSaver dollars, and turned them rapidly into cents.

Yes folks, it’s clear that Captain Morgan not only lacks any basic human quality other than self-regard, any ability in the field of football or farming—or even in the field of penguins—he lacks even the ability (in what is supposed to be his specialist subject) to beat or better the market, belief in which ability would presumably have been the reason so many of you gave so much to his failing fund. 

Yet while it’s clear that while Gareth has no ability whatsoever to beat the market—as his five years of piss-poor returns amply demonstrates—we read in the Guardian today that a pussy cat called Orlando does have exactly this ability. Meaning, given Gareth’s returns, that the cat is far more likely make you money than he is.

Or to put it another way, Gareth has just been whipped by a pussy.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Kill them all, let Gareth sort them out

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath hosts another weekly clinic on idiots and others in the news.

In typical heavy-handed fashion, and in a stunning display of sheer ignorance of property rights—and of human enjoyment of our feline friends—economic dunderhead and Kiwisaver failure Gareth Bloody Morgan has suggested what I can only call a "final solution" to the feline problem.

Because, he reckons, cats are "natural born killers" causing problems for native birds, there should, he says, be a “national cull” of domestic cats. All of them. 

Cats are “serial killers” says the busybody. And that fluffy member of your family from which you derive so much pleasure? According to Morgan, “It has to go.” This, he says, would be “a step in the right direction.”

This piece of human excrement—this excuse for a human being—this over-educated oaf with too much time on his hands (bloody-minded earnestness like his just being stupidity sent to college)—has not only forgotten that a man's home is his castle (if indeed he ever learned that principle), but his solution necessitates invading your castle by main force, dragging out your cat and exterminating it. [Try that in my house, and the first thing I’ll be doing is enacting a national cull of busybody economic dunderheads. That would be a hell of “a step in the right direction,” I can tell you.– Ed.]

Furthermore, this fellow with no interest in your own values, and none at all for your love for your family cat, has failed to even consider that property rights and the common law offer solutions to his perceived "problem"?

Those like Captain Morgan who want to preserve our native fauna—and good on them for caring—should be free to breed New Zealand birds to ensure continuation of the various species that are unique to our country. But they’re not—instead, they’re frequently prohibited from doing so. They would then be free to shoot any marauding cats that threaten the existence of their birds. They should be free to take simple common law action against owners of a particular cat who attacked a particular bird—common law offering restitution where damage was caused to the property of one person by pets belonging to a second person—or against those who dump cats in the wild with no thought to the fauna in the area.  But they’re not.

Instead, he and his ilk simply wish to kill stone dead all cats—innocent or guilty—to boldly interfere with the property of other people simply because he favours bird over cats—regardless of evidence (or not) that a particular cat attacked a particular bird. A policy of “Kill them all, let Gareth sort them out.”

How about we reverse that policy. How about we start with Gareth.

Captain Bloody Morgan and his fellow feline haters would do well to read the blog of James Delingpole, who for years has been highlighting the avian mass murder by what he calls "bird-slicing, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes"—wind powered turbines, the Green dream which violently and indiscriminately kills all sorts of flying animals.

Why isn't the captain taking time out from killing football to demand, as well, that that all uneconomic taxpayer subsidised bird-killing wind turbines be dismantled forthwith?

Or would that tamper too much with another tent of his anti-human religion.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

“Greens Opt For Fewer Yellow Pages”
Green Party MP Gareth Hughes suggests that the Yellow Pages have had their day—in particular the backward Soviet-style diktat that demands (if Hughes is correct) that the Yellow Pages Group must, by law, publish 6.5 million copies of the White and Yellow Pages each year. Yet at the same time, to increasing numbers of recipients, these tomes are nothing more than heavy junk mail.

Well done Gareth, for suggesting that this law be repealed, and that users of telephones be given the option of either purchasing a printed copy of the 'phone books', using an online book which for most people would be a lot easier, or both. I certainly stand behind you in getting rid of this stupid piece of legislation.

“Nick Smith Returns To Cabinet”
Like a dead body in the last reel of a horror movie, the stinking cadaver of Nicholas Rex Smith is reanimated and the Green zealot finds himself reinstated to his place at the trough. John Key should have weighed his corpse down with an axle or two, but then John Boy never does think in abstract concepts, and nothing matters except re-election of the Blue Team in 2014.
Reinstatement of a disgraced MP, who deserved permanent exile to the back benches and de-selection in 2014, says it all really. 
And you have to wonder whether ‘twere better to have a housing minister who does nothing (the sacked Phil Heatley) than one, like Smith, who we know will only make the severely unaffordable housing situation worse!

See ya next week! 
Richard McGrath
Leader, Libertarianz Party

Gould, Morgan et al: Hopeless

If you’ve ever wonder why Gareth ‘Bloody’ Morgan’s alleged investment company is the worst performing of all the Kiwisaver providers, perhaps the answer is that their economic analysis is as risible as the analysis in the books churned out by their principal.

Consider for example the Pollyanna like pronouncements by their “senior economist” John Carran recently that everything is about to become all rosy in the garden again—that official Chinese GDP figures (measuring the construction of empty cities, empty shopping malls and the like) are to be believed; that European banks have been inoculated from Greece’s by oodles of printed paper; that all the printing by all the world’s central banks will (sometime soon) bring about a second Land of Cockaigne; and that the US is one of these place in which Milk and Honey will soon be flowing. 

Or the equally insipid “analysis” by their “senior equity analyst” Nathan Field, who also pins his hope on a fabled US recovery while appearing not to realise that the US stock market has been rising recently for no other reason than all the phony paper money pumped into markets by The Fed, and that there is and had been no credible signs of a US recovery (about which more below).

The level of reasoning on display is so dim it almost makes the analysis in the Herald this morning by failed British Labour Party MP Bryan Gould look good. Basing his “analysis” on facts both historical and from out of yesterday’s papers, Mr Gould reckons that  a recipe of spend, spend, spend is the answer to today’s economic woes. And he’s wrong on virtually everything he says, both factually and analytically.

In the 1930s [for example, says Gould], there were those, like Herbert Hoover, who insisted that austerity - cutting government spending - was the way to beat recession.

In fact Hoover did nothing of the sort, as he himself boasted in his 1932 presidential campaign.  Instead of doing nothing, he crowed, “we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.”  “Gigantic” then meant raising spending by nearly one half, and adding a deficit where before there was none:

Spot any fiscal or monetary austerity there? (Note: these are not “gee-whiz graphs.” There is a zero baseline.)

The result of this non-austerity was to make the situation worse, not better---with even worse to follow when his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, followed the same medicine.

The myth of Hoover’s do-nothingness is just one of many myths from the Great Depression [PDF[ that are still peddled by the know-nothings of today to justify their own nostrums. It should be known to Mr Gould (who has the same pretensions to historical acumen as Mr Morgan and his colleagues at his lacklustre firm have to economic acumen) since the spending, debt, and deficit numbers are all given in tables published every year with the president's proposed federal budget [PDF]. So he really has no excuse. Because as often as this myth is repeated, the truth is the reverse: that Herbert Hoover was a big-government man who did not trust the free market whose meddling turned an ordinary depression into a Great one.

Not that accuracy is any part of Mr Gould’s intentions (even as a failed politician, lying was one of his professional talents) since he then goes on to suggest, quite erroneously, that the reason for the failure of Portugal, Ireland, Spain and the UK to get off the floor is not the enormous debts with which they’ve saddled themselves, which all have increased in the last four years, but some alleged “austerity” which all have inflicted on themselves.

If only they had.

It is not an austerity programme when you debt keeps rising—as it has in all these jurisdictions. It is not an austerity programme when you raise taxes—as all have done. The UK for example

raised capital gains taxes from 18% to 28%, which is the taxes that hit business formation the most.  Raising capital gains decreases the return on investing in new economic activities and investors can easily decide not to invest their capital so this tax reduces economic activity more quickly than other taxes.  If the UK had not raised taxes, they would most likely now be experiencing an economic boom.

It is not an austerity programme when governments spend beyond their means, and it is not a real rescue when the the real causes of the financial crisis [PDF] not only have not gone away but have been given more legs.

So what’s the argument Mr Gould gives for the success of his plan to spend more money?  It’s the wonderful success story of the United States of America in the last four years, wherein “President Obama's stimulus programme - bitterly opposed and relatively timid as it was - is pulling the US economy around.”

Really?!

Mr Gould seems to be reading the same poorly performing tea leaves as Mr Morgan’s poorly performing staff. Because far from recovering, as they both suggest, the latest data doesn't indicate a recovering US economy at all but precisely the reverse: a place wherein all that the Fed's phony paper money is sloshing around the highly inflated stock markets while  every real measure of recovery is on the floor or falling.

The evidence of an improved labor market, higher corporate earnings and the return of the housing market are all based upon misleading data [observes Charles Biderman in Forbes magazine]…

• The only increase in cash since the March 2009 has been the Federal Reserve giving newly created money away as payment for government expenses… The combined $4 trillion deficit, when added to the $1.4 trillion given away to banks to buy their worthless mortgages equals the $5 trillion increase is US debt.
• Corporate after-tax income is growing at just under 3% year-over-year, not keeping up with inflation… The reality is that if income tax collections are not growing very fast than neither are the number of new jobs. That calls into question the recent BLS press release that said jobs are growing fast.
• Without seasonal adjustments unemployment claims are currently down the same 10% year-over-year as the past six months. In other words, by counting year-over-year numbers there is no improvement…
• Real-time data, ignoring seasonal adjustments and counting year-over-year numbers, indicate both prices and sales of new and existing home sales are pretty much unchanged from year end 2011…
• Yes the stock market has been going up, but that does not have to mean the U.S. economy is improving. While U.S. and European stocks have been going up, gold keeps rising faster. That means it is not gold that is a chimera, or a phantom, it is the U.S. currency that is a phantom.

This is not anything like the US of Mr Gould’s dreams then. This is the real US data from just yesterday--real data that doesn't corroborate an improving U.S. economy. 

Real data indicating Messrs Gould, Morgan, Carran, Field—and Pollyanna—have all been talking through their hats.

So perhaps instead of talking about some non-existent “austerity” of today, or talking up the failed super-Keynesian stimulus of the 1930s, they might instead look at the last time a serous economic depression was seriously allowed to play itself out by adopting the real hands-off approach Mr Gould erroneously attributes to Mr Hoover.

It was the Great Depression of 192o.  The Great Depression you’ve never heard of.

And the reason you’ve never heard of it before?  Because the hands-off real austerity turned around a bigger crash than 1929’s plunge in less than eight months.

And oddly enough, it was similar policies that eventually allowed most of the non-US western world to recover from the Great Depression , while Franklin Roosevelt (following Mr Gould’s recipe, which includes every ingredient necessary to stop a recovery in its tracks) was busy making it impossible for America to recover.

But don’t expect to hear that from a failed politician. Or Gareth Morgan’s “experts.”

It’s still all Greek to some people [update 3]

You’ll have heard it reported in recent days that Greece has been “saved.” That the Greek government has been bailed out by the European Central Bank and the EU Rescue Fund (EFSF), that things will be tough for a while, but the Greeks will now be able to dig themselves out of their hole.

Nothing could be further from the truth—and the fact Gareth Morgan subscribes to this fiction (among three other fictions) is almost certain proof the outcome won’t be all rosy.

What has just happened in this second Greek bailout (remember how the first bailout was going to save things?) is another enormous tranche of borrowing lent to the Greek government to save it from its previous enormous borrowing. And if that sounds stupid, it is—but only if you think this is a rescue of Greece.

It is not a rescue of Greece.

Because it is not so much a bailout of Greece by European central bankers, but a bailout of European bankers put together by European central bankers—with German taxpayers picking up the tab.  Greece is now officially a ward of the international community—and as a ward its only job now is to make its guardians rich, or at least to provide a conduit for whatever of its mis-loaned money its guardians can claw back through good old EuroPolitik.

Face it, there was no other way European bankers were going to get any of their money out of Greece—not with Greek 1-Year Bond Yield having just hit 682%.  So when you hear bankers whooping it up because the “rescue” plan has gone through just remember to whom the lifebelt has just been thrown. And it’s not the Greeks.

Frankly, the best thing the Greeks could do now is default, and then leave the Euro Currency Zone.  And the best thing German taxpayers could do is let them—and then leave the zone themselves.

NB: Liberty Scott has an excellent summary of how things came to this pass, and how a Greek default would help:

• “Greece for Dummies.” – L I B E R T Y   S C O T T

PS: Oh, and in case you were wondering … yes, Virginia, bailing out banks is inflationary.

UPDATE 1: Mish summarises the options:

The sooner Greece exits the euro, the more likely Greece will be able to prevent still more capital flight. The smart money has already left. (Please see Germany Draws Up Plans for Greece to Leave Euro; Athens Rehearses the Nightmare of Default; Merkel's Denial Rings Hollow.)…
    The best solution would be for Germany to exit the Eurozone first, but that is not going to happen.
The next best option would be for a simultaneous bank holiday involving all Greece, Portugal. Spain, and Ireland at the same time as noted in Why Greece Must Exit the Eurozone, How it Will Happen (and Why Portugal and Spain Will Follow); Does the Euro Act Like a Gold Standard?
That too is highly unlikely. Thus the odds of a protracted, one-by-one, and very costly breakup of the eurozone is the most likely outcome whether or not Greece survives the Ides of March.
For further discussion including an analysis of why it would be best for Germany to exit the Eurozone, please see Eurozone Breakup Logistics (Never Believe Anything Until It's Officially Denied).

Short of a real gold standard emerging, my own opinion is that best economic outcome would see the more solvent countries (solvent only in relative terms, you understand) such as Germany, Finland, Austria, The Netherlands etc. leaving the Eurozone to go back either to their original currencies or a common one, which would quickly find their/its own value; leaving the less solvent, the halt and the lame, to soldier on under the (relative) discipline of a bargain basement Euro.

It would certainly make a southern European holiday something of a bargain.

UPDATE 2: Philip Bagus on “The Future of the Euro”:

“The problems of the eurozone are ultimately malinvestments…    even before the crisis, governments had accumulated malinvestments due to their excessive welfare spending.
    Two causes had incentivized social spending in Europe’s periphery. The first cause is low interest rates… an expansionary monetary policy by the European Central Bank (ECB) and … an implicit bailout guarantee…
    The second cause is that the euro is a tragedy of the commons.”
 

UPDATE 3: An overview on what just happened in Greece from Krazy Economy, “A Note on Greek Banks Recapitalization”

As an overview, here is what we have:
The Greeks (actually you can insert any European Common Market country you want because the pattern is consistent throughout) borrowed from anywhere they could for a massive spending spree.
They required the banks to be a major lender.
They required the banks to have little or no reserves against the loans to the government.
The government can’t repay the loans.
The banks are failing.
The government, with money acquired from elsewhere because it has done stupid, insane things, is going to buy the failed [Greek] banks.
These banks are even more tied to government policies than before.
The government has ownership and control of the banks.
Does anyone think that the Greek banks will be better off?

Meanwhile, and this is perhaps the main point of the whole fiasco, the reality evasion in high places and low:

The failure of putting two and two together is a common theme in the entire European debt crisis. It is most blatant with the Greeks.
This week there have been more “strikes,” riots, and protests against the terms required by the agencies that would bail out the Greeks. Many of the chanted slogans and posters and banners declare that the foreigners are dictators and imperialists. The protestors want the politicians to “resist”!
    The Greeks appear like angry four year olds who have been told that they can’t have the toy on the shelf because mommy doesn’t have the money. How and what are the politicians suppose to resist? They are suppose to resist the requirement that they do not incur more debt. They are suppose to resist the requirement that they try to pay back their existing debt. They are suppose to resist the requirement that if they are given money they spend it wisely instead of like a drunken sailor (my apologies to sailors).
    The Greek protestors have no contact with reality. None. They have no idea that money has some connection to real things. That real things are made by someone who wants to be paid for their efforts. That borrowing actually means that the lender expects to be paid back.
    The Greek country is a testament to modern education and economic “thinking.”