I don’t know
...continue Economists behaving oddly]]> Well, it seems to have been a slow day here on Samizdata. Me, I’ve been putting up CD shelves and then preparing for one of my Friday evenings, so I’ve not had much time to samizdatise. But I now have time to get a link to this up before midnight, this being a strange sort of variable diagram where a bunch of cartoon economists watch what happens. That’s a bad explanation I realise. When this diagram gets taken down and historians of this blog wonder what I was talking about, they’ll just have to carry on wondering.

I don’t know what it signifies, but I find it oddly entertaining. Perhaps it refers to the tendency of economists to be rather too attentive towards merely numerical data, and to neglect more important but less measurable phenomena. So, not Austrian economists then.

My thanks to the deeply strange people at B3TA for the link to this.

Who said the Germans don’t have a sense of humour?

There is a particularly good, but rude quote from his first Die Hard movie that springs to mind when I imagine what the white-vested Willis would say if he ever met the moustached villain
...continue Bruce Willis wants Saddam’s ass]]> Samizdata has in the past said some uncomplimentary things here and here about Hollywood actor and Republican Party supporter Bruce Willis, so maybe he is trying to redeem himself by laying into the various celebrities who have been opposing the case for war these last few weeks. It turns out that Willis volunteered to serve in the military, but was turned down due to his age.

There is a particularly good, but rude quote from his first Die Hard movie that springs to mind when I imagine what the white-vested Willis would say if he ever met the moustached villain of Iraq. Movie-goers will know the expression I mean. (Heh-heh).

On a totally different note about movies, I wonder how many readers have seen the Roman Polanski film, The Pianist? I saw it the other evening and although a harrowing film, contained some beautifully poignant moments as well. The terrible plight of Poland’s Jews is all too stark a reminder of the cost of appeasing evil. And the lessons of that time for our own are equally only too apparent. I urge those who haven’t to see this film.

“An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.” – Konrad Adenauer

During the course of this past month the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 has come into force. This is the legislative instrument which has introduced US-style asset forfeiture into UK law. But the Act goes much further than that. It also consolidates and widens the existing anti-money laundering laws and places a quite terrifying onus on those who are charged with enforcing them.

Prior to this Act the UK already had an anti-money laundering regime in place. It was
...continue The British government declares war on Britain]]>

Martin Taylor works within the British legal system. He is deeply troubled by the latest round of anti-money laundering laws.

During the course of this past month the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 has come into force. This is the legislative instrument which has introduced US-style asset forfeiture into UK law. But the Act goes much further than that. It also consolidates and widens the existing anti-money laundering laws and places a quite terrifying onus on those who are charged with enforcing them.

Prior to this Act the UK already had an anti-money laundering regime in place. It was aimed at the proceeds of drug trafficking and potential terrorist funding. The regime established a ‘regulated sector’ which consists of people such as bankers, accountants, lawyers, financial advisers, stockbrokers and anybody else who is broadly engaged in the business of money management.

The laws imposed an obligation on professionals working in that sector to establish and maintain procedures for obtaining and then keeping personal and business information about their own clients so that this could be used to assess whether or not, at any later time, there are unusual or unexpected patterns of spending or behaviour which may indicate money-laundering activity.

But that is not all, for it is professional advisers who are required to police their own clients. If the professional adviser suspects, for any reason, that his or client may be engaging in money-laundering then he or she is required their client and the circumstances of the transaction in question to a special police agency. Once a report has been made the professional adviser can take no further action on behalf of the client until they have been given express permission to do so by the police.

Penalties for non-compliance can be severe. In the case of non-disclosure of a suspicion of money-laundering, the maximum penalty is 14 years in prison. That was the situation up until this month, but the Proceeds of Crime Act has taken things much further.

As far as the anti-money laundering regime is concerned the relevent clauses are Sections 327 to 330. Sections 327 to 329 extend the definition of ‘money-laundering’ from handling the proceeds of drugs or terrorism to the proceeds of any criminal activity regardless of how petty.

However is Section 330 of the new Act which introduces the most worrying element:

“It is extremely important for all lawyers to note that s330(2)(b) introduces a negligence or ‘objective’ test which will mean that failure to disclose information about money laundering will amount to the commission of an offence where a person has ‘reasonable grounds’ for knowing or suspecting that another person is engaged in money laundering, even if they did not actually know or suspect that money laundering was taking place. A solicitor working in the ‘regulated sector’ will therefore commit an offence if they fail to report money laundering and a reasonable professional should have known or suspected that it was going on. In effect, incompetence or oversight will result in the commission of a criminal offence and probably imprisonment.

On the face of it, this might seem a trivial change, but in fact it is a dramatic and potentially very dangerous extension of the advisers liability. Up until now, advisers were only obliged to report their suspicions. Now, they will be liable to prosecution if it turns out that they should have had suspicions. In effect, they are second-guessed. It is no longer of question of what he or she knew, but of what he or she should have known.

The result of this is that where the police do uncover a case of money-laundering in a transaction touched upon at some stage by a professional adviser, then it will be near-as-dammit impossible for that professional adviser to defend themselves against criminal charges.

One should also bear in mind that a sentence of imprisonment for a professional person means not just loss of liberty but also the termination of his or her career and the loss of everything they have worked for. The destruction of somebody’s entire life for simply making a mistake strikes me not as justice but vendetta. How can this possibly be fair?

In the short term, at least, the understandable paranoia among those regulated professionals will cause them to file reports on just about every matter that crosses their desk. Now it is true to say that one cannot be too careful. Thus no significant financial transaction will take place in the UK without police knowledge and approval. This resembles more the febrile imaginings of Franz Kafka than the country I grew up in.

It would not surprise me in the least if ample numbers of professional advisers find the damoclean strain of coping with this from day-to-day to be intolerable and make the perfectly rational decision to earn their living by other means. Such an exodus would not be without national consequences for the financial sector in this country has earned a global reputation for efficiency, honesty and innovation. As a result, it is a sector which provides a generous proportion of Britain’s GDP. A ‘brain-drain’ (or maybe a ‘strain-drain’) would be an economic catastrophe.

I do not suppose that even the most vigilant public servant honestly believes that we are a nation of clandestine drug smugglers, wannabe-bank robbers or aspiring terrorists. I can only conclude, then, that the demand to monitor every material financial transaction is motivated by a concern over tax ‘leakage’. If that is the case, then I submit that the cure will prove far worse than the disease.

Was this not contemplated when our lawmakers drafted these proposals? Or was it contemplated but they simply didn’t care? I am not sure which is more disturbing.

Regardless of what behaviour it is that our government is trying to squeeze into extinction it is, nonetheless, encumbant on any civilised administration to enact provision that are both reasonable and measured. To my mind, the provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Act are greedy, vindictive and criminally short-sighted.

America’s oldest institution of higher learning has hopped on the Internet’s hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.

Harvard University has given the former software executive a fellowship at its Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School, in order to head up the new Blogs at Harvard Initiative. Winer, who studied math at Tulane University before collecting his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, will instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to
...continue “Anyone can do it!”]]> I followed Instapundit to this:

America’s oldest institution of higher learning has hopped on the Internet’s hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.

Harvard University has given the former software executive a fellowship at its Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School, in order to head up the new Blogs at Harvard Initiative. Winer, who studied math at Tulane University before collecting his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, will instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to the Web.

That took me to this, and I went from there I came across this:

SEOUL, South Korea – The earnest young man in tortoise-shell glasses spends up to 18 hours a day peering at a computer screen. Despite his unassuming appearance, Hwang Myong Pil’s online moniker is ”Nuclear Bomb,” and he is one of the secret weapons of South Korea’s president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun.

Hwang, 29, is a volunteer for an online fan club that is an increasingly important player in South Korean politics. The fan club, popularly known by a Korean acronym for ”People who Love Roh,” boasts 80,000 members — most of them in their 20s or early 30s with little previous taste for electoral politics. They are widely credited with playing a major part in Roh’s upset victory Dec. 19, and they are taking an unusual role in the transition to his inauguration today.

Meanwhile Freedom and Whisky links to a grumpy journalist complaining about blogging.

I WORRY about the internet. Useful it might be in many ways – make that some ways, rather like the occasional usefulness of a mobile phone – but the prat, nerd, geek, wonk, crank and fanatic count continues to rise inexorably.

People who surf the net for hours tell me that it is fascinating. Wrong. Unless you are looking for a specific piece of information that can be located within seconds by Google, the search engine which is a remarkable and useful invention, surfing simply wastes time.

Millions of people are apparently happy with that. They spend time on sites for sad people such as the “re-live your schooldays fantasy” of Friends Re-united, or track down weird theories about what’s wrong with the world, from global warming to athlete’s foot or how aliens are responsible for power cuts.

And they blog. Blogging, I’m told, is producing an online diary. Anyone can do it, inflicting the result on the world’s overloaded net rather like over-filling a slurry tank, to coin a farming metaphor.

Well, the man has a point. Not all blogs are as good as some blogs. But there are giveaway phrases: “I’m told” (he doesn’t really know about this stuff), “I worry” (yes, it’s not just harmless chit chat, his job could eventually go), and above all: “Anyone can do it” (!!!).

This bloke senses that the culture is shifting underneath him, and he doesn’t like it. The internet was fine when it was just a machine to help him write his columns. But what if millions of people out there would rather spend their time writing for a blog and reading other blogs, than reading his newspaper columns, or gawping uncritically at the television where his mates do their thing? What if people start having their own weird theories about everything, instead of getting them from him? Scary thoughts indeed.

His answer is: “Just say no.” Which never works.

Although I can see the argument, I don’t entirely agree. However, the very fact that this kind of argument can be plausibly advanced at all is because we are all aware of the decline of the ‘old’ priests; a phenomenon which gets little attention but is highlighted by leaders like this in the
...continue The Last Trumpet]]> I recall a conversation I had a couple of years ago with another British libertarian who argued that ‘pundits are the new priests’; they deliver ‘sermons’ from their TV or radio pulpits and minister to a befuddled public about the mysterious ways of our secular lords.

Although I can see the argument, I don’t entirely agree. However, the very fact that this kind of argument can be plausibly advanced at all is because we are all aware of the decline of the ‘old’ priests; a phenomenon which gets little attention but is highlighted by leaders like this in the Telegraph:

“But the Church has many good things to offer and it needs to start marketing them more successfully. Church buildings are testament to the triumph of Christianity. Soaring roofs, intricate stonework and stained glass windows echo a pride in Christianity that the 21st-century Church seems embarrassed to admit to. There’s a feeling that to modernise means stripping out pews, replacing organs with electric pianos, divesting priests of their robes and ignoring altars for Communion. But young people need someone to respect and admire. Today’s celebrity culture demonstrates that. If the Church, in its physical, as well as spiritual nature, is not the demonstration of the ultimate aspiration, what is?”

The leader quoted above is, in fact, an open letter from a twenty-something British Christian woman to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It is a plea to the Church to arrest its slide into irrelevence and provide some meaningful spiritual guidance to Britain’s Christians.

Despite not being a member of the Church, I can wholly understand her desperation because I can also see that it has gone quite disastrously off of the rails. The absurd and frantic mission to ‘modernise’ has resulted in just about every senior member of the clergy tripping over each other in the headlong rush to embrace every manifestation of fashionable claptrap from global warming to grievance politics. This is not to say that the Church should not address itself to current issues. In fact, quite the opposite. All institutions must evolve and adapt if they are to survive and the Church of England cannot and should not except itself from this process. But this does not mean eschewing moral certainty without which all that remains is vacillation and pointlessness.

I suspect these are the fruits of a failure to appreciate the difference between common decency and that dreadful word ‘inclusiveness’; the former requiring, nay demanding, judgement tempered with mercy, the latter demanding the indulgence of fecklessness and wanton barbarity for its own sake.

In those circumstances it is easy to see how certitude itself has become besmirched as ‘bigotry’ and that is something which we are required to purge from our social landscape. The act of judging other people and finding them wanting is a bit too much like ‘hate’ in this age of eggshell personalities and political correctness.

By my reckoning, Christians who go to Church do so for the comforts of faith and tradition but those ‘reactionary’ articles have been ditched in favour of a steady diet of political agit-prop and infuriating relativism. People who look to their spiritual leaders to provide them with values by which they can live their lives are instead enjoined into exultations of cant and stupidity. Going on protest marches is the new version of pilgrimage.

But, as evidenced by the correspondent above, ‘Our Lady of Trendy-Leftiness’ has probably run her course. The Church has attempted to please everyone but has wound up pleasing no-one. Even homosexuals, who have been quite fanatically courted by the Church for years, are starting to tire of this superficiality. I note the number of gay men who far prefer the solemn dignity of Anglo-Catholic ritual to the humiliating childishness of clappy-happy ‘outreach’. Adopting nauseating ‘niceness’ and recycled marxism as articles of faith may well have been rewarded with lashings of gratifying column inches in the Guardian but, simultaneously, the pews are emptying. Christians have not abandoned the Church of England, it is the Church of England that has deserted Christians.

As a libertarian, I regard religion as a matter of individual conscience and, as a secular Jew, I have no business telling the Church of England how to organise its affairs. That should be that. But it isn’t that. As I contemplate the possible demise of this institution I cannot dismiss the faint but persistant bat-squeak of concern about its possible replacement. Most people in this country have long forgotten that the Church of England was established as a vehicle for humane and moderate religious practice and to protect the nation against the savage winds of religious fanaticism that blew across this country in the 17th Century, leaving a charnel house in their wake. Such was the ferocity and instensity of this ideological war that it resonates to this very day in Northern Ireland.

The letter linked to above constitutes a call for ‘new blood’ to revitalise the Church of England and rescue it from it from its own folly. If the new blood proves to be insufficient then I only hope that it is not bad blood that is left behind.

The voters in Britain infuriate me. I like the people, by and large. Salt of the earth, most of them. But when they get around to voting, they have profoundly different priorities to me, or to
...continue The War Against Terror – how Conservative fortunes could finally be changing]]> On the face of it the Conservative Party just now is having a terrible time, with the very telegenic Michael Portillo making life an utter misery for the deeply untelegenic Iain Duncan Smith. But something big is happening in the world which could see off the Labour Party for the next little slice of British history, and bring the Conservatives right back into contention.

The voters in Britain infuriate me. I like the people, by and large. Salt of the earth, most of them. But when they get around to voting, they have profoundly different priorities to me, or to anyone with a serious interest in politics.

Basically Britain’s voters would sooner vote for a party which is united in agreeing to do the wrong thing, than a party which is divided about just how enthusiastically it should resist that (or some other) wrong thing, or do any right thing. Division is all. Unity is all. They vote against the former and for the latter, regardless of what is being agreed or disagreed about. I loath and despise this, as I say, but that is how it is.

Well, for the last fifteen years, ever since the Cold War fizzled out, the Big Thing in British politics has been Europe.

Labour is a tiny bit disunited about it. Most Labourites love it that Europe gives them as much socialism as the real world is ever going to give them, in the form of a ocean of capitalism-hobbling regulations and interferences. A few Labourites aren’t satisfied only with that much socialism and would prefer more and on that basis they complain about Europe.

But such bickerings are nothing compared to the giant axe that Europe slammed into the very torso of the Conservative Party. Conservatives have been at each others’ throats about Europe for, as I say, the last decade and a half. It did for Thatcher. It did for Major. It did for the lot of them.

But now, post 9/11, the issue is no longer Europe. The issue is, to put it bluntly: the USA. Well, not the USA as such, merely its policy of choosing actively to prosecute the War Against Terror (i.e. against terrorists) rather than just hoping that terrorism and terrorists will go away. President Bush has decided to hunt them varmints until there ain’t none left, and what’s more to hunt down the no-good preachers who are stirring them all up, and if Europe don’t like it, too bad for Europe. As Bush said – in one of those scary speeches he made soon after 9/11, which sophisticated Europeans ignored as the gaseous emissions of a politician seeking mere poll numbers and re-election, but which Bush himself actually, it is now turning out, meant – either you’re with us or you’re agin’ us. That is now the Big Question.

And it so happens that the Conservatives are united in being with George Bush, less a few freakish europhiliac grumblers, while Labour is catastrophically divided about the War Against Terror (in the form that the Americans are now choosing to fight it), as today’s dramas in the House of Commons have now made very clear.

If it is true, as I found myself saying last week, that this War Against Terror thing is not just going to be an episode, but maybe something more like an era, then to that exact degree the news is now a lot better for the Conservatives.

It aims to promote: “Friendship and confidence between the French and American peoples” and “Friendship and solidarity between France and the United States of America”. The slogans are French. More details can be found here.

Among French libertarians there is the same division as in the US, with minarchists tending to support a war of liberation and both the anarcho-capitalists and
...continue My Kind of March]]> On Sunday (2nd March) a demonstration will be held in Paris outside the U.S. embassy. The assembly point will be the place de la Concorde. The rally has an English name: “Friends and Freedom”, which in itself is unique.

It aims to promote: “Friendship and confidence between the French and American peoples” and “Friendship and solidarity between France and the United States of America”. The slogans are French. More details can be found here.

Among French libertarians there is the same division as in the US, with minarchists tending to support a war of liberation and both the anarcho-capitalists and the conservatives against. The Catholic liberals (almost the exact opposite of the socialist ‘liberal Catholics’) are opposed to war both for the damage it could cause (some French people remember the ‘collateral damage’ of Caen in 1944), and the fear that a successor government might be less religiously tolerant than Saddam. An example of this view can be found here.

I regard the different cases being forward (in public by Messrs Bush and Blair) for war with Iraq as poor because they are either wrong (the Iraqi dictator probably has fewer ‘weapons of mass destruction’ than either Kim Jong Il or General Musharraf) or contradictory (is Saddam an ally of Bin Laden Yes or No?). Tyranncide is good enough and UNESCO can go and get stuffed.

I also consider the British forces almost entirely incapable of offering any worthwhile help to the Americans for reasons I’ve mentioned here before. Lend-Lease the air tankers and the SAS to the US and that’s all. ‘The Borrowers’ are probably going to get in the way of a US air strike or hold up the advance when the British made tanks break down in “the wrong kind of sand”.

Despite these misgivings, I would certainly go to the place de la Concorde this Sunday if I could afford the fare. The nasty game being played by French and German political leaders is as much a threat to world peace and the prosperity of this corner of the planet as any gang of terrorists.