Journos: UK officials don’t want to “ban encryption” — they want to ban encryption that *works*.
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It takes a particularly obsessive mindset to politicise everything in life, but the UK media seem happy to report without scorn or derision that latest wails from totalitarian obsessives about the UK’s new passport design, which features humans (the previous one features various feathered friends). Let us see some of the complaints reported:
It was Stalin who was the past-master of airbrushing. Why? To influence what people think, and what they remember. And those who regard a passport design as an opportunity to make a political statement are a lot closer to Stalin than they would probably care to admit. This is a passport, and it is there to get you through passport control and that is that. And it is not as if all the men chosen are particularly outstanding, Constable and Harrison I would put forward, but that is what you might expect in these days:
Is no one going to call out these objecting people as (i) boring (ii) obsessive (iii) totalitarian* in their quest to ensure that a political agenda is rammed into every aspect of life? If you seek to control what I see, you want to control what I, and others, think? By what right? Why on Earth should what I see be determined by someone else’s political obsessions? Will no one rid us of these turbulent beasts, by laughing them into the dustbin of history? * In the full sense, regarding everything, like Mussolini dentro dello Stato, and a matter for politics. November 3rd, 2015 | 33 comments
 And also as ever, if you want to reduce inequality and also, not quite the same thing but close to it, raise the incomes of the working poor then what you should be agitating for is not more price fixing, but a return to full employment. Which, in this particular place and time, means arguing for less regulation of who may employ whom to do what and also arguing that the Federal Reserve should delay raising interest rates. For there are indeed things we can do to make the economy better but we do also have to make sure that they’re the right things. – Tim Worstall, who is picking apart the thinking of the chief operating officer of Blackstone, the world’s largest listed asset management house. I have been to briefings where I have heard investment managers say that minimum wage laws are a good thing and have dismissed worries about unemployment, especially among minorities and the young, as unwarranted. What I fear is that there are now quite a lot of people working in the investment sector who have imbibed some “making water flow uphill” socialistic nonsense, and these folk now oversee our investment portfolios. It is definitely worthwhile spending time working out if the investment professionals in charge of your money subscribe to these ideas or not. For a brilliant take-down of minimum wage laws, rent controls and other attempts to push up/reduce prices from where they might otherwise be, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, over half a century old, is still a classic of devastating argumentation. (Author’s note: corrected from the original where I wrote BlackRock rather than Blackstone. Mea culpa.) November 2nd, 2015 | 35 comments
I and my libertarian friends all love Uber. By that I don’t just mean that we love using Uber, the service, although I am sure that just like many others, we do. I mean that we love talking about Uber, as a libertarian issue, as an issue that nicely illustrates what libertarianism is all about and the sorts of things that libertarians believe in. In particular, we believe in: technological innovation and the freedom to do it, for the benefit of all, except those in the immediate vicinity of it and overtaken by it, because they make a living from the technology that is being overtaken. Example. A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk about Art, which suggested that Art is not abundant enough and not benefiting enough people. A big part of the response from the floor during the Q&A afterwards was: It depends what you mean by Art. By most reasonable definitions, there has never been more Art. Prominent London libertarian Professor Tim Evans compared the attitude of the speaker to that of a London Black Cab driver fretting about how to keep London Black Cabs going, what with so many Londoners now preferring Uber Cabs. My point is not that this was a fair comparison, although I thought it was. My point is that we libertarians love Uber so much that we insert Uber into conversations about quite other things. Uber is something that we just love to talk about. And it’s not just Tim Evans, and me, and Johnathan Pearce, and Rob Fisher and Perry de Havilland who love to write and talk about Uber. Based on the conversations I’ve been having with fellow libertarians, it’s pretty much all of us. This is an issue which unites all of us, and which divides our opponents. After all, even anti-libertarians need a taxi ride from time to time, and they prefer it to be cheap and obtainable rather than expensive and unpurchasable. At the very moment I first typed in the above paragraph, an email arrived from the IEA, telling me about how the IEA’s boss, Mark Littlewood, has been mixing it with Black Cabbies on the radio. As for me, I found my interest renewed in the Uber battle when I encountered this Black Cab, last August, in Victoria Street, just up the road from the Houses of Parliament:
Why was this cab of interest to me? Well, let’s take a close look at the rather intriguing politics lesson on the side of this Black Cab:
As you can see from this posting at my personal blog, way back in August when I took those photos, I had in mind to put something here way back, provoked by them. But the delay didn’t matter. This issue is not going away any time soon. The taxi driver whose taxi sported this advert clearly thought that this was an advert about how wicked Uber is. Uber lobbies. Uber puts Prime Ministerial friends on its payroll. Bad Uber. But to me, this read more like an advert in favour of David Cameron. Cameron wants Uber to flourish in London. Does he now? I did not know this. Good for Cameron. And bad for Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, who does not. This also an advert for Uber itself. Uber is cheaper … because it pays no tax! Come again … Uber is cheaper, you say? Hm, interesting. I must give it a go. The LTDA, who, as you can see from the top picture, is responsible for the above advert, thinks that Uber is systematically breaking the law. What that tells me is not that Uber is bad, but that the law, insofar as it now impinges upon Uber, is an ass. → Continue reading: Why we libertarians love Uber not just as a service but as an issue November 1st, 2015 | 20 comments
Call me a traditionalist if you wish, but I can muster very little enthusiasm for Halloween, particularly the current neutered Americanised version of it. For me, it does not hold a candle to Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th of November or Krampusnacht on the 5th of December. 
October 31st, 2015 | 55 comments
Police have arrested a UK teen following the leak of ISP-U-Like’s browsing history database. The news follows revelations of a hack of the internal systems of the nation’s most popular ISP that left 60% of the country’s browsing history accessible from a public web site based in Sweden. British ISPs are required to retain records of the last 12 months of users’ browsing history under the so-called “snooper’s charter” introduced in 2016. Previously only police could access the information. Now visitors to ismyneighbourapervert.com can simply type in an email address and view anyone’s browsing history. Since then, there have been calls for a senior officer at Gloucestershire Police to resign after it emerged that he once visited a pro-GamerGate website. And the Daily Mail has defended criticisms of its “20 Celebrity Health Searches That Will Shock You” article, stating that the boil on the home secretary’s groin is “in the public interest”. Meanwhile, the CEO of ISP-U-Like issued the following statement: “In the unlikely event that your mother-in-law finds out about your membership of gaymidgetsgonewild.com, then as a gesture of goodwill, on a case by case basis, we will waive termination fees.” The investigation is ongoing. October 30th, 2015 | 16 comments
October 29th, 2015 | 41 comments
The whole system is clearly a tax-collection scheme masked as justice. In the end, what this court wanted was money, and the people it squeezed were the least able to pay. What I saw rivaled the worst forms of petty tyrannies I’ve read about in history books: how tyrannical kings would use every trick to pillage the population of their meager resources. I very much doubt that there is anything unusual about what I saw. It probably goes on every day in your town, too. October 28th, 2015 | 20 comments
Liberal economics, wanton consumerism, or an overregulated and brain-dead citizenry — zombies can epitomize whatever alleged mindlessness the critic most strongly objects to October 27th, 2015 | 16 comments
For just over a year now, the younger of my two Goddaughters has been a student at the Royal College of Music, learning to be a mezzo-soprano. The two of us just shared supper in Chelsea, and while we consumed it she told me something very bizarre and rather sinister, about the chaos that was apparently inflicted, earlier this evening, upon her and her colleagues at the RCM by the latest James Bond film London premiere. This jamboree took place just across the road from the RCM, at the Royal Albert Hall, and it seems that the RCM was commanded to evacuate all its practice rooms that overlooked this premiere activity (quite a lot of which was outside the Royal Albert Hall on those big steps at the back), to stop anyone seeing it, and in particular, presumably, to stop them filming it or photographing it. These RCM practice rooms are in constant use, and alternatives are very hard to come by. Neither the students nor the teachers of the RCM were at all amused by this intrusion into their already stressful and hardworking lives. How the hell can a mere bunch of movie people insist on barging into other people’s buildings and ordering them around like this? I thought James Bond was all about defending the liberties of British citizens, not violating them. According to GD2, the Royal College of Music did not agree to this arrangement. It was merely informed of it, by Westminster City Council. If the College did consent voluntarily to this arrangement, in exchange for a cash payment, for instance, rather than simply being forced to submit to it, they didn’t tell any of their inmates about that fact. You can see what the people who inflicted all this upon the RCM were thinking. It was their event. They owned it. Nobody whom they did not invite or control should be allowed to film it. But, I say that if you want total control of the filming or photographing of an event, don’t hold your event in a public place, out in the open air, and then impose your control on places that merely overlook this public place. If you do bizarre things in public, you are fair photographic game, to anyone in the vicinity who chooses to snap you or video you. GD2 is my only source for this story, and maybe she, or I in reporting what she said to me, have it wrong. I’d welcome comments about this or similar events, corrective if necessary. (I could find nothing about this event, other than about it simply happening, on the www.) But if what GD2 told me is right, and if my recollection of what she told me about it is also right, well, I am not impressed. This circumstance reminded me of the crap inflicted on London when the Olympic Games came to town. October 26th, 2015 | 23 comments
The United Nations is truly an amazing organization. Dictators and authoritarians from around the world can work together to solve their common problems, like how to keep their own citizens under control. A solution to this serious problem has been found, Cyberviolence against women is the new justification for the police state. Terrorism just isn’t cutting it anymore. October 26th, 2015 | 14 comments
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