Stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com Website Review

> Britains still absolutely fine, by the way, probably better off than > its ever been. Its just politics thats a mess. If you think this is > the Apocalypse, which some people apparently do, then you havent > lived long enough or travelled far enough. that “the difficulties we face now have the potential to be much worse” than the financial crisis of 2008. The government is obviously a sh*t-show. But the messy Brexit negotiations are – so far – having only a small impact on real of the original decision to leave. And they seem to be contributing to weakness in the housing prices slightly. But on the other hand, their impact upon the stock market has been small these are minor irritations – much less than the everyday has*les of traffic jams, stressful work and troubled relationships. For those of us outside of the Westminster bubble, life is going on as normal. Westminster politics is like my garden – an ugly mess but only if you look at it. In this sense, Tim is right. For someone wise enough to ignore day-to-day politics, life goes on as normal. But Tony might also be right. What matters here is the distinction between government and the state. The government is a mess. But the state, to some extent, is not: the NHS is carrying on as usual, taxes and benefits are being paid and so on. (An exception, here of course, Let’s put this another way. We can think of the state as a provider of intermediate goods – things that enter the production process: transport links, banking regulation, the rule of law and so on. And as Chad Jones has rightly stressed nation, which can limit its tax-raising powers, which can make it harder to finance good law enforcement thus keeping it trapped in One such intermediate good provided by the state, of course, are international trading arrangements. And these are in jeopardy: how much so is, I fear, indeterminable given the high noise-signal ratio.  It’s for this reason that Tony is right: less good trading arrangements have multiplier effects in the sense that less trade