The Irish "Celtic Tiger" economy of 1995 to 2008
was one of the great capitalism success stories
in the world.
Average wealth doubled from 1994 to 2006.
Average wealth tripled from 1986 to 2006.
This drove the Irish left completely mad.
They hated the Celtic Tiger from the start.
Year after year, from 1995 to 2008, the left endlessly sneered at the Celtic Tiger,
pointed out its flaws,
and seemed to long for it to end.
Ireland remains a low-tax, high-tech, English-speaking, globalised economy.
Irish prosperity is not over.
But we need a government that puts Ireland first,
refuses to pay off debts that are not ours,
and dumps the euro, and even the EU, if necessary.
The Irish left and the Dublin 4 media
love intellectuals whose policies have never helped the poor,
but they
hate
anyone who actually did anything for the poorer people of Ireland,
such as Ryanair,
which allowed the poorer people of Ireland to travel.
Image from here.
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The Republic of Ireland is ranked by
the Heritage Foundation
as the 4th most economically free country
in the world.
It is freer than the US, the UK,
and all of Europe.
Why Ireland Boomed,
James B. Burnham,
The Independent Review, Spring 2003.
He argues that EU money was a minor factor in Ireland's boom,
and that it was caused by an embrace of the market
- almost by chance rather than by ideology
- plus a number of lucky external factors.
He discusses in particular
the state monopolies in
telecoms
and
air flight
and how they crippled the Irish economy
until they were (thankfully) broken.
"For a generation after achieving independence from the United Kingdom in 1922,
Ireland sought to be economically self-sufficient. It relied on small-scale agriculture,
exporting primary produce to the U.K. market and manufacturing mainly for the home market
of less than 3 million people. Trade barriers such as high tariffs
and a policy of import substitution sought to make this reliance on economic nationalism successful.
Inevitably, it failed."
He considers the origin of Irish prosperity to be
T.K. Whitaker
and his landmark paper, Economic Development,
in 1958.
GDP per capita of Ireland
since 1922.
GDP per capita was
(1990 $) 2,736 in 1913,
and
(1990 $) 3,092 in 1947.
That is,
Ireland was hardly any richer in 1947 than it was in 1913.
But things got a lot better after that.
Stats from Angus Maddison.
Close-up of recent years.
Average wealth doubled from 1994 to 2006.
Average wealth tripled from 1986 to 2006.
World GDP per capita actually grew
quite well during this period,
as you can see if you
change the scale.
It's just that Irish growth was so amazing it makes world growth look almost flat.
GDP - per capita (PPP).
Update showing after the 2008 crash.
GDP per capita in 2010 had fallen back to 2005 levels.
After the Ball,
by Fintan O'Toole, 2003,
exemplifies the yearning desire of the Irish left
to see the boom come to an end.
Here is a man - like many others - who did nothing but complain
as Ireland transformed from a land of emigration and unemployment in the 1980s
to one of the richest countries on earth.
By his ideas, he did everything he could to stop this happening.
He has been heaping abuse on the "Celtic Tiger"
for years.
And now, one brief economic slowdown
and he produces this book
with its sneering title,
delighted that the "Ball" is over,
gloating that at last, he may be proved right.
But of course, the good times aren't over.
The Celtic Tiger isn't ending.
Prosperity isn't ending.
And it's Fintan O'Toole who will look bitter and foolish.
Thank heavens Ireland isn't run by narrow men like him.
It used to be, in the days of de Valera.
But not any more.
Just some of hundreds of articles I could have chosen to illustrate that
you should not rely on people like Fintan O'Toole for your prediction
of what will happen next.
He once angrily replied to criticism that
his ludicrous anti-capitalist economic policies
would lead to a lower standard of living.
Like Arafat,
or Castro, or any other economy-wrecker,
De Valera blithely said:
"You say "lower" when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think
it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable and that
it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied
that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right
or proper one."
And de Valera delivered the poverty that he praised.
Irish GDP stagnated under de Valera,
who was head of government from 1932 to 1948,
then 1951 to 1954,
then 1957 to 1959.
It only started to really grow after he left office in 1959.
His long period in office in particular was a disaster.
GDP per capita (in 1990 dollars) was $2,972 in 1931.
It was $3,092 in 1947.
While praising the poverty the Irish lived in,
De Valera himself of course lived in a succession of two beautiful
houses (Bellevue and Herberton)
on Cross Avenue
in Blackrock.
I would love to be able to live on Cross Avenue!
"Please God let it be true", you can hear the left praying,
that the Celtic Tiger ends.
"Please let this appalling, distasteful wealth end!"
The Irish left, which always hated Irish prosperity,
has been hopefully
predicting the end of the Celtic Tiger since the very start in the 1990s.
Search for the phrase
"end of the celtic tiger"
in the news.
After hopefully predicting its demise for years,
the left finally got their apparent victory in 2008.
Damien Dempsey
produced a hilarious song called
"Celtic Tiger"
in 2003,
with Sinead O'Connor.
I can sum it up as follows:
Free-market capitalism ends
unemployment and emigration.
Artist is not happy but rather whines about it.
Sinead O'Connor is of course very wealthy:
In 2007,
Sinead O'Connor paid
almost €2m
for a 6-bedroom, 3,200 square foot
Victorian house
overlooking the sea at Bray.
I love her music:
but I am afraid
she is part of an age-old tradition of rich people telling the rest of us
not to be rich.
Similar examples:
Millionaire actress
Natalie Portman, Aug 2009, says the recession, and people losing their jobs, is
"kind of an exciting time.
I mean, everyone is cutting back. It's happening in every industry - including our own. All of a sudden, people are doing jobs that they hate and they're not making as much money as they thought they would or they've lost their jobs entirely. I've started to see people looking more toward their own passions and what really excites them."
One day later,
she buys a $3 m mansion
in a gated community in LA.
(She just sold her Manhattan home for nearly $7 m.)
Millionaire actor Ben Affleck, Dec 2010, says salaries in banking and business are disgraceful:
"The banks shouldn't - people shouldn't make such a giant profit off just moving money back and forth.
And CEOs' pay shouldn't be 200 times the average worker. It used to be nine times."
He, of course,
gets paid millions of dollars
for acting,
while the lighting and camera people earn nothing.
He was paid $10 million for acting in the useless
The Sum Of All Fears.
He was paid $12.5 million for acting in the flop
Gigli.
He was paid $1.5 million for doing commercials for L'Oreal Shampoo.
His song
"Colony" (2000)
treats Ireland as if it is some oppressed third-world nation!
"We had a civilisation;
When they were still neanderthal nations;
We suffer with the Native American, the Indian in Asia;
Aboriginal Australia;
The African people with their history so deep;
And our children still weep and our lives are still cheap".
What planet is he on?
Ireland is one of the richest countries in the world.
Browne admits that Ireland implemented free-market economic policies during the boom:
"We also got a country that seemed willing to be governed by the ideology of the Progressive Democrats, albeit without ever voting for that party in large numbers."
He admits that Ireland got much richer. He's not crazy enough to deny that!
He claims this was a coincidence.
"As the proud boasts from media and business leaders about how neoliberal policies created the boom fade away, we are forced to admit that "success" was probably due to highly contingent circumstances, none of which were within our control, making them unlikely to be repeated. So there's literally no way back to prosperity, or not any way that we can map."
Some coincidence!
Harry Browne sums up the Irish left's approach to empirical questions.
He sneers at 20 years of the greatest prosperity in Irish history:
"But instead of a radical upheaval, we got Fianna Fail kicking off more than two decades of semi-permanent government with savage cuts in healthcare."
And despite the empirical track record of free-market economics in generating wealth
- which extends far beyond just Ireland
- he calls for a - yes - socialist revolution.
Yes, that will make us all richer.
Let's look again at GDP per capita of Ireland
since 1922.
In 2003, Fintan O'Toole
sneered that the "ball" was over for Ireland.
In 2009, Eddie Holt
sneered that capitalism was finished:
"consumerism has consumed itself. For about 20 years - since the collapse of socialism - it was inevitable anyway. It was just a matter of time."
Yeah, right.
What a dream world these left-wing intellectuals live in.
What lack of gratitude
for the incredible prosperity that Fianna Fail and the PDs have delivered.
If they just openly said:
"I hate Ireland being rich and I want it to be poor",
then at least I could respect them for being honest.
But they never say anything so direct.
They just sneer at the people who made Ireland rich.
I am no economist, and it is hard for me to judge among the competing explanations for the Irish crisis.
I do not find these convincing as causes:
Greed.
The free market.
Low tax rates.
I find these explanations more convincing:
Lack of Irish government control over our currency exchange rates.
We gave up control of our own currency when we joined the Euro.
Lack of Irish government control over our interest rates.
We gave up control of these to Europe too.
In summary, Ireland giving up control of its
monetary policy
to the EU, which was not concerned with Ireland's interests.
The government decision to bail out the banks.
In particular the decision to bail out the useless Anglo Irish Bank.
While letting a bank fail might have costs,
it seems that bailing out this bank was far worse, not better,
for the Irish economy
than letting it fail.
The government decision to protect not just Irish citizens
but also foreign investors and speculators.
Brian Cowen (who was unelected
too, as Taoiseach).
While Cowen's FF was rightly blamed,
the Irish people seem to have a mental block about blaming the EU and the Euro.
Richard Waghorne, 28 Feb 2011, is depressed about the 2011 election:
"there has been no mainstream acknowledgement that rampant Europhilia and the catastrophic Irish decision to join the Euro are root causes of Ireland's supplicant helplessness today. Despite the centrality of the EU membership and the euro to any analysis of the causes of the Irish crisis, neither properly became an election issue in their own right."
Vincent Browne takes on Klaus Masuch of the ECB, Jan 2012.
He may be a
socialist nutcase
on other issues,
but I agree with
Vincent Browne on this.
Why are Irish people being forced to pay billions to save European bondholders?
Whatever saving the banks is,
it is not capitalism.
Capitalism means letting failed businesses fail.
The taxpayer should not be paying for the mistakes of private business.
If you lend billions to absurd schemes that will never pay you back, tough luck.
You should lose the money.
The taxpayer should not help you.
The FF-Green government
spent tens of billions saving
Anglo Irish Bank.
David McWilliams articles
on the incredible sums spent by the FF-Green government on saving toxic banks.
There is a case to protect regular banks like AIB and Bank of Ireland.
You cannot let 3 million Irish citizens lose their life savings
because of reckless speculation by bankers.
But the people who should take the hit are the banks' creditors,
not the taxpayer.
And when it comes to Anglo, why should it be saved at all?
I do not understand why the government wanted to save Anglo.
I find the idea of the state bailing out bankers
just as disgusting as any communist does.
"My heart sank when I heard .. that the state was going to waste yet more of our money on Anglo. No one needs Anglo and, if we closed it down tomorrow, we'd miss it less than Hector Grey's. More to the point, the financial markets would reward, not punish, us.
Our government has indicated that it will have to put up to €20 billion into Anglo so that it can give this money to institutions that lent to Anglo.
...
But it's not my problem and it's not your problem: it is the Anglo investors' problem and, because they took a punt on Anglo, they should have to sort it out themselves.
...
the ''insiders'' who financed Anglo and were great capitalists four years ago, today don't trust the normal rules of capitalism to solve their problem. They have miraculously turned into Marxists."
"So, close it down. The financial markets will reward us, because that is one less debt that the Irish taxpayer will have to pay in the future.
The reason the markets will support closing down Anglo is that markets have no interest in an Ireland that turns itself into a debt-servicing machine to pay for the mistakes of yesterday.
There is always new money and, if someone has to lose on Anglo, well, so be it - that's the game. Move on.
...
In the past 12 months, 141 banks were closed down in America and no one noticed.
Close it and move on."
Anglo armageddon is a myth, David McWilliams, April 5, 2010:
"The financial markets want to see that Ireland is going to grow again. They want to invest in us, in our real abilities, the abilities of the people. Therefore, they want to see a strategy for growth. What they are seeing now is an illegitimate strategy, with no public support, which will turn Ireland into a large debt-servicing agency."
If we can survive this banking crisis,
Irish prosperity is not over.
The Celtic Tiger was not all about property.
It was also based on a low tax, high tech, smart economy.
Right now, even after the crash,
there are thousands of job vacancies in my sector
- computing in Ireland.
"Let's start with the seemingly incredulous fact that Ireland's GDP per capita last year was, despite an 8 per cent plunge that year, still the 2nd highest in the EU. It was also a staggering 31 per cent higher than the EU average.
...
on this, albeit imperfect, measure, Ireland's well-being is broadly back where it was in 2004."
"Employment in the economy is, at 1,859,000, ... settling at the levels prevailing in 2005, levels that are over a quarter of a million higher than in the year 2000 and 700,000 higher than in 1993."
"GDP and employment are now settling back at 2005 levels."
"Employment is at around 1.9 million, meaning we have one worker for every 2.5 persons. That compares to the one-to-3.3 ratio in the Eighties."
"GDP per capita was 40 per cent below the EU average in the Eighties. It is now 30 per cent above it."
Ireland also remains - unlike Greece
- a very attractive location for any American or international company's
European Headquarters.
David McWilliams
has an interesting idea for Ireland's future
- open up the right to live and work here to the world-wide Irish diaspora.
Indeed, why not open up Ireland to all
of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
and maybe also places like Hong Kong, South Korea and Israel.
Let the best, brightest, most energetic and best-integrating
immigrants of the world come here.
RTE report on job vacancies in computing in Ireland, Apr 2009.
Contrary to all the leftie sneering that the boom is over,
there is (and has been for years)
a huge shortage of people for the thousands of open jobs in computing in Ireland.
Since 1995.
