Ban the $1.8 trillion banners

It's bad enough having MPs wanting to ban, regulate and tax everything except themselves. Now the nurses are getting in on the act. They want to ban people enjoying life, they want us live long and miserably. The longer people live, the more health care they need, so the more employment will exist for nurses. So the nurses are wrapping themselves in a cloud of righteous morality and telling us that there must be a total ban on smoking. They conjour up images of genocide being caused by second hand smoking and society drowning under a sea of smoking diseases.

Hobbes declared that life was nasty, short and brutish. Give the nurses a chance and they will make it even worse: nasty long and brutish.

The favourite study quoted comes, inevitably, from California: land of the intolerant liberal. Professor Leonard Millar of the University of California at Berkely claims that the cost of dealing with smoking will be $1.8 trillion over the next 25 years.

Count Kostov's refined nose starts twitching at the mention of any "cost of..." calculation.

The bullshit calculation is totally one sided: it ignores any of the benefits. This is how companies in the dot.bomb era conned the public: they would declare profits based on revenues before costs. Anyone can succeed with a one sided equation. England can even beat Australia at cricket if we only count England's score.

The calculation stinks so bad the Count is having to hold his nose while writing this.

Let's look at the benefits of smoking for a bit:
a) smokers pay lots of tax to us non-smokers, thank you very much
b) smokers have the grace to die early: so they will not leech the pensions systems. Their clogged up arteries mean a few months clogging up the health care system before they shuffle off their clogs: that's much cheaper than clogging up the health system for decades as the non-smokers are likely to do.
c) some people actually enjoy smoking

And this ignores the $400 billion deal that US states did with tobacco companies to deal with their cost of smoking. It also ignores the billions that various get-lucky litigants hope to con off the tobacco companies by complaining that they were victims of smoking, not just victims of their own folly.

Both Duke University and France's Institue of Political Science reckon that smokers reduce the tax burden for the rest of us.

So the $1.8 trillion cost to society might as well be a $1.8 trillion benefit to society. Perhaps the states should be thinking of paying the tobacco companies for saving them money.

There is good news in all of this. The cost of calculations by all these professors are even worse than the baboon's bollocks. And if producing so much meadow mayonnaise makes you into a professor, then all of us can call ourselves professors. At least, we are unlikely to produce more rubbish than the so-called university professors produce.

So do not call me Count. Call me Professor Count. Or is it Count Professor?

The cost of vermin

The cost of vermin is far too high.

The slimey creepy crawlies who represent the lowest form of life on the planet, apart from Oasis, are of course our pompous, preening, overpaid MPs. Not that anything has changed in the last few thousand years ago. These low life have always been among us, easily identified by their brown noses and tongues.

Here is one version: "they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain….and while you work for their good they are completely yours….but when danger comes nearer, they turn away". That was Machiavelli, about five hundred years ago, who was generally a pretty sound fellow when it came to helping the aristocracy work out how to run things.

John Stuart Mill, about 200 years ago saw all the problems which would occur if you allowed the lowlife to get paid for their efforts. It would "allow adventurers of low class into parliament for whom there would be prizes for the most successful flatterer". And then, in Adam Smith's words, they would indulge in the sort of profligacy which comes from the noble mission of spending other people's money. It is very easy to take the moral high ground when you are spending the Count's hard won inheritance.

So I asked my butler, Digdog, to find out how much these vermin were costing the Count. The dog dug but without much success. The vermin are not too keen on advertising how much they spend on themselves. Freedom of Information, public accounting, and audited accounts are something for humans, not for the vermin in the commons. Eventually Digdog found that the Commons admitted to blowing away £133 million on themselves.

£133 million smelt of meadow mayonnaise to the Count's well tuned nose. Sure enough, the vermin do not include the cost of security, upkeep of Westminster or any of the ministerial perks and privileges. Their costs are the baboon's bollocks.

I told Digdog to go and sweep out the lake while I turned to a more reliable source of information: the Lords. Sadly the Lords is now full of the very worst sort of flatterer since all the true bloods have been dismissed in favour of Tony's cronies. But some of the Noblesss Oblige has rubbed off on the staff who are still producing honest information. Honesty and information are absolutley forbidden in the lower chamber of commons vermin.

The Lords produced a handy report showing that the Commons cost us £269 million: that's more than twice what the Commons themselves admitted to. That is nearly £400,000 for each nonentity that is trying to flatter his or her way into a ministerial limo and a knighthood. To put it into Commons-speak, we could hire another 10,000 nurses for the cost of the commons.

The Lords, by contrast, cost a measly £61 million a year. Run the Commons at the same cost as the Lords, and we would save £200 million and have another 8,000 nurses from Lithuania, Poland, South Africa and Malawi looking after deserving cases like the Count.

This, of course, is yet more evidence we should be bringing back a proper form of government: let the hereditary lords run things and you will not get Iraq, B. Liar and sleaze and spin. You will get the Count.

The alternative is to let the Brussels parliament take over. They cost a very modest £712 million or more than £1.1 million per euro-MP. Their noses and tongues are brown for two reasons: they either have their snout where the sun don't shine, or they have it firmly planted in the euro-gravy train. This is simple bribery: pay an unemployable vermin from Sunderland or Slovenia £1 million a year and even if they can not spell Europe, they will become fanatically pro-european. And most of us do not even know who our euro-MP is, let alone what they do for their £1 million a year.

So if we can not put in place a decent aristocratic government led by the Count, then the least we can hope for is that the European slime balls will bribe the Count with £1 million a year. For that, I might be able to find some aristocratic goodwill to the vermin before setting my dogs on them.