A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was "getting better", for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to "stimulate the economy"), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.

So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article ("editorial") on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:

It starts with a lie - Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to "fix American health care".

In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts...), but stressing some specific plan to "fix American health care" was not one of them.

Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.

"Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system" even for a magazine "as economically liberal as this one".

This is a standard Economist trick - propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of "economically liberal"), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market - but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.

However, we are not "starting from scratch" so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations - facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile - it suggests five years.

The first step, according to the Economist, must be to make everyone buy health cover by statute with the poor being subsidized by the government "as is done already in Massachusetts". That the Massachusetts "reform", introduced by Governor Romney, has turned out rather badly is a fact that the Economist article neglects to mention - even though the percentage of "uncovered" in Massachusetts was very low compared to other States so if this "reform" was going to work anywhere it would have worked in Massachusetts.

Of course, says the Economist, insurance companies must not be allowed to exploit government subsides for the poor. They must provide "affordable" plans (no prices are suggested - it is all left vague), and must not be allowed to exclude the old or the already sick from their plans.

In short - lower prices and covering high cost groups. As (contrary to the propaganda) American health insurance is already not a high profit margin industry, these "reforms" should be enough to bankrupt the insurance companies - even before the five year period comes to an end and the government plan the Economist suggests takes over.

However, just in case the private health companies are not bankrupted, the Economist also suggests that "anti trust" be introduced into the area. As the late Ayn Rand (and so many others) have pointed out, there are no clear principles (things that can be clearly defined in advance) in "anti trust" or "competition policy" in fact the whole thing is an excuse for arbitrary power for the government working with the politically connected. But the Economist either does not know, or does not care, about this point - and loves "anti trust".

Almost needless to say the Economist does not mean getting rid of regulation (such as the licensing regulations for doctors - exposed as a racket by Milton Friedman 60 years ago,. or the F.D.A. and its price inflating and new medical adavance preventing "health and safety" regulations). On the contrary the Economist means yet more regulations on top of all the ones that exist already.

Of course the Economist does not mention the real problems of American health care. Neither the ones I have mentioned already or the others. It does not mention how Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP have vastly inflated prices (just as the subsidies for higher education have had the effect of inflating tuition fees over the decades) or how the vast web of Federal and State regulations prevent much of a real "market" in health care at all, or how American hospitals are forced to provide free ER cover in spite of the fact that an expensive (although terrible - rather like some British NHS hospitals in fact)) network of government "county hospitals" already exists, or... But of course it does not - because it wishes to add subsidy schemes and regulations, not get rid of them.

Lastly I must mention one other policy suggestion of the Economist.

It suggests abolishing the tax deductibility of employer health care provision - not to switch the tax deductibility to individuals to buy health cover themselves, but because the lower taxes "cost the government" lots of money (all money belongs to the government it seems - although it should kindly allow people to buy toys, not important things like health care).

This massive tax increase is something that even Barack Obama is wary about talking about (although it would only pay for a fraction of the costs of his plans), but have no fear the Economist will hold his hand - it is all about "The Renewal of America" to quote one of the most vile magazine front covers I have ever seen.

As for the Obama plan of one and half TRILLION Dollars (according the Congressional budget office in reality it will grow to far more than that, entitlement programs always do) that will only cover a fraction of the people he says it will. Well if the Economist is truly "economically liberal" it will help lead the fight against this evil - but judging by this article...

Of course it could be claimed that I am being unfair - that the American coverage of the Economist is the worst element in the magazine. Although I have not noticed the Economist denouncing the move to income support schemes and government health cover in India (in spite of the ever growing fiscal deficit) in India - or indeed in any country.

Be that as it may, it is the United States where the alternative of a free market current affairs magazine is most needed - an alternative to the statism of Time and Newsweek and the rest of the mainstream media. And the Economist utterly fails to provide this alternative.

So, friend (again you know who you are), do not ask me to give the Economist a chance again - to do so is not good for my liver.

Here is a revealing article in the Washington Post - hardly a newspaper of the conservative or libertarian side - that mocks the fawning treatment of Mr Obama by much of the press. Things change but there are continuities: I can remember how Tony Blair, or, for a while, Bill Clinton got such an easy ride in the press. The media was studiously easy on JFK in the early 1960s and covered up Kennedy's numerous extra-marital affairs. Sure, Bush jnr got an easy ride from some of the Right - remember when Andrew Sullivan practically wrote love letters to Dubya before the gay marriage thing sent Sully off the edge? - but there was not the kind of broad-based cult of worship that there now is around the community organiser from Chicago.

Apart from Fox, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, a few niche publications like the American Spectator and the blogs, Mr Obama has had a remarkably easy ride and it does not seem to be ending soon. In part this is because much of the liberal media, even if some of its more intelligent denizens know that this is a bit silly, are playing as a "team" for Their Man, and don't want to be seeing doing anything that might help the other side.

There has always been, and always will be, slanted coverage of public affairs, and it will continue. Even if the BBC in the UK were scrapped tomorrow and its reporters sent off to planet Titan, the fact is that there will be a substantial block of leftish/liberal media types and pundits. But the sheer, jaw-dropping bias of the White House press corps is something to behold. But maybe, just maybe, there are signs of cracks in the facade. I cannot help but think that Obama has, by trying to be all cool and sophisticated over the Iranian turmoil, started to piss off even parts of his side. He does not walk on water, and it is about time that this fact was noted. The stance now adopted by the media is not one suitable for self-respecting adults.

Millions and millions of Americans support Obama's desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama's moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain's ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years.

I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.

Well yes, it will be different... in that the control obsessed Obama's of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.

This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry... plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.

Talking of issues to do with property ownership, this Daily Telegraph article about how some of the old industrial cities in the US are shrinking caught my eye. The US authorities are encouraging, with the use of a bit of public funds, the idea of knocking down whole swathes of supposedly defunct towns and cities and returning them to their "pristine" natural state. It is, in one way, a part of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter once called the "creative destruction" that is vital to capitalism.

Except that I don't see a lot of capitalism going on here, more a sort of hybrid of private enterprise and state involvement. If, as the article claims, hundreds of square miles of urban area in the US/wherever are no longer economically viable, and could be used for something more economically valuable, whether it be farmland, recreational parks, golf courses, boating lakes, race tracks, or so on, then why not leave it to property and land developers? I find it worrying that the US government, either in its federal or local forms, can decree that an area of land is no longer "economically viable," and decide to send the bulldozers in. And I also cannot help smelling a strong whiff of anti-suburbanism in this article, at least according to some of the folk quoted in it.

I tend to find that it is a revealing about a person's overall viewpoint as to whether they slag off suburbs or not. If you despise them, chances are that you are a member of the Enemy Class, even though such people hypocritically live in such places.

Maybe it is the garden gnomes, or something.

Unlike the dismal Economist, Newsweek magazine does not claim to be a free market supporting publication.

Henry Hazlitt stopped writing for Newsweek back in 1966 and his replacement, as a free market voice, Milton Friedman was fired (asked to stop writing for the magazine - which is being 'fired' as far as I am concerned) many years ago - which is the reason I stopped subscribing to Newsweek, which I had done as a youngster.

In recent years Newsweek magazine has been fairly openly socialist (although it does not formally admit this). So why am I bothering to write a post about the publication? I am doing so because I have just seen perhaps the most insane edition of Newsweek that I have seen - not just 'leftwing', or whatever, but an edition that just makes no sense, whether from a socialist or any other point of view. Makes no sense as in 'senseless' - insane.

The front cover of the edition has the headline 'Capitalist Manifesto' and this article is odd enough - page after page of standard statist stuff (supporting the bank bailouts and so on) written by one Newsweek's high ups. Why the high up is being given about half the magazine for his statist musings (rather than doing his job of editing the articles of real writers) is not explained - and the title of 'Capitalist Manifesto', for standard statism that one could hear and see on the BBC or American 'mainstream' broadcasters any day of the week, is also not explained.

However, this is by no means the most odd article.

There is also an article about a group of 'rebels' who are out to "save capitalism" from President Barack Obama. I was astonished to see such an article in the 'mainstream media' (especially in Newsweek) and read it. That is when the utter insanity of this edition of Newsweek hit me.

The 'rebels' are actually Democrats (and one is Bernard Sanders, the openly Socialist Senator from Vermont) who are "saving capitalism" by "opposing" Barack Obama (in reality they are all strong supporters of Barack Obama) who they fear is "too soft on Wall Street".

So capitalism is to be "saved" by even more statism than there is already. People like Senator Sanders of Vermont are interested in "saving" capitalism (which it has been their life long dream to destroy) and they are "rebels" against the (life long far leftist with Marxist background, whom they all really support) Barack Obama, who is too free market - in much the way Lenin or Mussolini were too free market I guess.

After I put my head back together (it had exploded), I tried to make some sense of this article. The only thing I can come up with is it is some sort of cover for the new regulations announced by President Barack Obama. By saying they are not enough (selling out to Wall Street and so on) and pointing at 'rebels' (i.e. pro Obama fanatics) who are out to "save capitalism" (i.e. are determined to utterly destroy what is left of the free market), life long far leftist Barack Obama can be presented as a 'moderate'.

Also the real causes of the present crises (the endless increases in the credit money supply by the Federal Reserve system and the wildly harmful "affordable housing policy" pushed by Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama and the rest via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and so on) can be hidden by lies about the "deregulated" (!) financial system.

However, this explanation is rather complex and does not really convince me. A more simple explanation is that the people over at Newsweek have just finally gone totally insane.

Here is a highly thought-provoking article in Forbes magazine about the phenomenon it refers to as "gentry liberalism" - a term designed to capture the mindset of the sort of person who has voted for New Labour in the UK and Mr Obama's Democrats in the US. It is, of course, such a shame that the word liberalism has been bent out of shape to mean something rather different, but the underlying logic of the article is hard to contest.

Of course, Mr Obama has a while yet in power, but if I were one of his campaign managers, I'd look at the massacre of left-of-centre parties in Europe with a certain amount of forboding. He's not invincible, not at all.

Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA, has some well expressed views on the wrong turn the USA has taken

At 47, I lament how today's America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the 'soft tyranny' of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century 'nanny state'. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans' surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain's Huck Finn are verboten - required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.

Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make "adequate yearly progress". Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.

Similarly, so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide open. 'Zero tolerance' for drugs and violence policies punish students carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent do-gooders want to ban school coke machines as well. And to think at my high school we could even smoke!

Today political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we would have laughed that you had smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian dystopia.

Young folks' freedom has been lost off campus as well. The drinking age has of course been raised, and now there is a host of teen driving restrictions I never had to obey. But we have all lost so much liberty. Look how government's neurotic nannies have restricted us with a host of seatbelt, child seat, and helmet laws. Likewise, so many cities and states ban smoking even in private restaurants and bars. A WWII vet can not even light up in his own bar.

So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O'Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we would all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we have lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we are set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea. Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.

In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an 'endangered' bird's nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4 we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington, D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory".

Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down - and shut up". No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.

Why has our liberty eroded so badly? Statist public schools have long taught that equality (of results) and 'social justice' trump freedom since liberty is the handmaiden of 'selfish' individualists harming 'the community'. As we have grown affluent, there is more desire to protect everyone from risk, and our burgeoning welfare state demands ever more of our economic liberty. Plus, as societies get more secular, they become more socialist (see Western Europe).

We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned:

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Meanwhile too many liberty-loving Americans are so ensconced in busy private lives that they neglect their public duties. But Jefferson warned that "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". Never forget that we are the heirs of the most libertarian, God-fearing revolutionaries in history. So let us pay attention, think critically, speak up, and vote in every election.

Timothy Sandefur writes about the very different treatment in the media, as he sees it, of the case of the guy who shot an abortion clinic doctor and an Islamist who killed an armed forces recruiter in the US. I must admit that until I read Mr Sandefur's piece, I had not even come across the story of the army recruiter. I am amazed not more of a fuss is being made about this.

A distant relative of mine used to be a US Air Force recruiter up in the Buffalo area. Recruiters are, and have been, targeted for attacks before. I hope this is an issue that is getting plenty of attention.

Whatever else he can be called, I do not think that Mr Obama can be called a liberal. I was having a good chat with fellow blogger Paul Marks last night and he made this point. And as if by coincidence, via Instapundit, comes this story:

"The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."

Brilliant idea (sarcasm alert). How will fingerprinting people make illegal immigration more difficult? Surely, if supposedly unwanted folk are leaving a country, they are doing that country a favour, so why make it more irksome for them to move away by fingerprinting them or by insisting on other evidence, details or whatnot? I guess greater minds than mine have an answer.

As Thaddus Tremayne noted on this blog not so long ago, our own marvellously-run administration is pondering the idea of getting all travellers from the UK to divulge their travel and accomodation plans, reasons for trips, etc. (So I guess eloping couples will have a lot of explaining to do). As he also noted, the day may not be far off when exit visas, of the sort that used to be applied in the Communist East, make a comeback. So if you want to get the hell out of the UK before it crashes into bankruptcy, rising inflation and tax, then it is probably smart to do so in the next few years, regardless of the outcome of the next General Election. Paranoid? Well, who would have thought that the very notion of detailed information requests from travellers would have been mooted a few years ago. The ratchet effect keeps going.

And by the way, for those who sneered at Dale Amon's enthusiasm for spacefaring the other day, it is stories like this that explain why "exit" strategies such as spacefaring and sea-steading are gaining some interest from libertarians. It may sound utopian, but the general idea of "getting out" has never been more popular. And that is why I keep banging on about the attempted assaults on so-called tax havens. They are an attack on the very notion that places of refuge from governments should exist, for rich or poor alike.

I have not written about the subject of the Chrysler bailout so far since, not being close to the action in the US, I did not feel I had much to say that was not already voiced by the US blogs. But it does occur to me that there is a general problem right now in the way that the US administration - and arguably the UK one as well - has been acting in respect of bailouts of certain industries, such as carmakers as well as banks. What do I mean? Well, this report (H/T: Instapundit) suggests there is real fear about the "Nixonian" tactics employed by Mr Obama's administration against bond-holders who have been angered by the expropriation of their capital via the Chrysler bailout.

For those who have not been following this story, bond-holders have been pushed to the back of the queue, as far as potential recovery of capital is concerned, with the auto union membership getting preferential treatment. Maybe Mr Obama figures that investors can be rained on right now because it is more important to get the votes and support of traditionally Democrat-leaning car workers. With mid-term Congressional elections a couple of years away, he will have his sly, Chicago machine-politics mind working out how to garner important support in the event that the US economy is still sluggish by that time. But pissing off investors - such as, let it be noted, pension funds - is not smart. The US requires large amounts of capital for any economic recovery that may take place. Ask yourself one of the most basic questions any investor should ask: can I get my money back if I need to? If the answer is no or only maybe, and if there is the threat of governments robbing investors, then less investment occurs. The problems of such behaviour explain why, for example, Africa has been such a bad investment bet for so many years.

It is an ugly business. Part of the trouble with the automakers is that even if they had been put into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, with the banks and bondholders put on a more even footing for any recovery of assets, there is still the issue of what to do about the enormous unfunded pension obligations that these heavy industrial companies have. It is the same with airlines and steel. I have heard it said of British Airways - to take a UK example - that is is a pension scheme that happens to have a lot of aircraft. The pension tail can wag the corporate dog. And that is a hideous issue to deal with against the background of an ageing population. So in fairness to US policymakers, running down Chrysler involves dealing with a lot of tricky contractual issues.

Even so, it strikes me that the Obama administration is showing a level of political ruthlessness and "bugger-the-investor" attitude that is hardly going to endear people towards investing in that economy. My fear is that Mr Obama is making the cynical calculation that memories will fade; after all, how many investors in the UK remember how the Blair government, in the form of the charmless Stephen Byers, the-then industry minister, shafted investors in Railtrack?

Like I said, an ugly business.

As here, for instance. Via Liberty Alone, I learn of a remarkable new recruit to the ranks of those who are panicking about the pandemic. Yes, it is none other than the US Libertarian Party. They have just issued a press release reprimanding the US state for not being statist enough about this medically trivial event, which is in any case only being plugged up in order to divert attention away from other governmental blunders and to excuse further governmental usurpations, despite all the blunders. Why can't they see that? Or don't they care about such things any more? One can imagine a true "pandemic" that really did need measures like draconian border controls to defend against it (sickness is the health of the state), but if this trivial flu variant is it, then, to put it mildly, an explanation to that effect should have been added.

The UK Libertarian Party should treat this pandemic pandering as an awful warning of what happens to small parties - parties "of principle" - who become gripped by the desire to pile up lots of mere votes, and who forget what they were started to accomplish. First they pick a regular politician to lead them, and he then picks more regular politicians to help him, and before you know it, they are behaving like regular politicians.

But it is more fundamental than that, I fear. Start a political party, and before you know it, it is behaving like a political party. LPUK beware.

Obama’s speciality is shaping up to be particularly dangerous because it’s hard to dispute given the average American’s sensibilities. No call for liberty and constitutional principle seems convincing when Obama is arguing that those relying on government giveaways should have to follow government-set rules. That is, once you’ve allowed them to go ahead with the handouts, the political game is almost over. Under the guise of “managing the taxpayers’ money", Obama and his crew are rewriting mortgages, deciding executive compensation, tossing out CEO’s. And note carefully that his plans for where taxpayers’ money should go continue to swell, from healthcare to the environment to energy policy to expanded “national service” programs. When taxpayers’ money is everywhere - and Obama is doing his best to make sure it is - then Obama’s control is everywhere. The Octo-potus is claiming his space and flexing his grip. As far as he’s concerned, it’s Barack Obama’s country. We’re just living in it.

- Brian Doherty

If all those 'libertarians' who dallied with The Community Organiser had been reading our own Paul Marks, who was onto Mr Obama's agenda months ago, they would have saved themselves a lot of buyer's remorse.

Welcome, Instapundit readers. Some rather grumpy folk out there wondered where there was a link to one of Paul Marks' comments (the archives on the side of this blog, so please use them!). Anyway, here is one reference.

Mr Obama's administration has released documents about details of "harsh interrogation techniques" that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences - assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked - then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what "hope and change" meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)

Torture, and its use, is one of those "canary in the mineshaft" issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.

As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.

Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.

The American Tea Parties were a huge success. Just go visit Glenn Reynolds for a great roundup with links, stills and videos.

Onwards to July 4th!

Diana Hsieh, amongst others, is justifiably outraged at the move in the US Congress to move towards an expansion of the Americorps programme, making it compulsory for all young people in the US to participate in it. It is a form of conscription, which while it may not involve an explicit military role, is nevertheless a form of draft.

Ideas, either good or very bad, have a habit of travelling across the Atlantic to the UK. I'd be willing to bet that if, say, David Cameron is the next prime minister, he will look favourably upon such ideas. It fits in well with his dreary, authortarian/paternalist version of conservatism. In fact, the worse the economic situation gets, the more likely that states will try such ideas out. And no doubt the social alarmists will latch on to such ideas as a way to address problems of violent youths and so forth.

Timothy Sandefur says the US legislation is clearly unconstitutional.

That Daniel Hannan video has been making all the news in my part of the blogosphere during the last day or two (and I wrote that before I had seen the previous posting right here), but here is some more video worth paying attention to. Yes, it's our old friend Ezra Levant. Many of us have already, thanks to an earlier posting here by Perry de Havilland directing us toweards the relevant YouTubery, had the extreme pleasure of seeing Levant sticking it to someone he doesn't like. In this latest performance, we see and hear him talking with a guy who is very clearly on his side, and who makes numerous admiring mentions of Levant's new book.

The performance is divided into five bits, and I started up bit one to just hear a short sample, to just generally get a clearer idea of what kind of a guy Levant is. But so engaging and entertaining was Levant's performance that I ended up watching all five bits, right through. Maybe you won't find yourself wanting to do what I did, but maybe you will.

What I liked was that I was able to learn more not just about Levant's character and presence, but also about the various cases he talks about, and has been blogging about, month after month. But the problem with reading these stories on Levant's blog is that once you lose the thread of some particular yarn, you are liable never to pick it up again. In this latest video performance, Levant is telling his various stories about some of the cases he has investigated, or some of the nonsense that he has himself had to battle against, to an audience which, he has to assume, has not heard anything about them before. For me, that was a whole lot easier to follow.

This letter from a highly pissed-off AIG senior staffer is worth reading. My own take is that if an employee, under an agreed contract, gets paid a sum of money that later attracts the evil eye of the political class and that money is retrospectively seized, then the rule of law is crumbling. Admittedly, it has been crumbling for some time. I note that those who berated the former Bush administration for its high-handed treatment of legal principles are less noisy about Mr Obama's own behaviour or that of his colleagues in Congress.

I have been reading Amity Shlaes' interesting book about the Great Depression, and among the many themes of the book is how FDR, in order to whip up support for his measures, sent his legal attack dogs after various people associated, in his eyes, with the excesses of the preceding boom years. In particular, his victims included the likes of Andrew Mellon. History repeats itself: when politicians run out of money, the easiest option is to bash the rich, bleat about "tax havens", and the like. We are seeing that now. And of course the politicians are getting away with it so far because they calculate, probably rightly, that the broad public cannot be interested or is not sympathetic.

To get the public interested, we have to figure out how this sort of looter behaviour by those in public office can be shown to be dangerous to the average Joe. That is not straightforward, but a bit of thinking is needed. Today, talking to a friend of mine who works in the City, he pointed out that as a result of the mass bailouts and the central bank's printing of money, a spendthrift who had a 100 per cent mortgage is being subsidised by a careful, elderly saver who is now struggling, say, to pay for a nursing home. By drawing attention to these sort of regressive transfers from the careful to the spendthrift, and from the productive to the unproductive, we can get the message across. And yes, Mr Cameron, that means support for cutting spending and taxes.

Update: Alex Singleton, who also blogs here, points out that the vandalism to the house of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, can be indirectly blamed on the government for encouraging hatred of bankers. I am not sure that Gordon Brown can be directly blamed but in his usual, cowardly fashion, he has found it convenient to pin the blame for the crisis on private banks rather than accept that the crisis was in large part driven by recklessly cheap credit as set, ultimately, by central -state - banks.

This is becoming increasingly ugly. Demonstrations are planned in the City to coincide with the totally pointless G20 gabfest in early April. Someone might actually get killed or seriously hurt.

Update: Mark Steyn's Orange County Register article about the AIG issue confirms what I now fear, that Mr Obama is, even at the most basic level, unfit to hold executive office. And Joe Biden is just down the corridor.....

This sounds horribly familiar:

Obama has never run anything other than his presidential campaign. He doesn't know the difference between governing and campaigning and he's sticking with what he knows.

Which sounds exactly like Britain's Labour government from 1997 until now. The difference being that in 1997 the British economy was in fairly good shape, which meant that the then British government had a decade during which to learn how to govern. It never did, but it might have. Now the world economy is in a terrible state, and Obama has no time at all.

Does the USA as a whole already have a bad feeling about Obama? Or is it just the people in the USA who detest him already, telling each other that they have a bad feeling about him? From over here, it's a bit hard to tell.

Bloomberg carries this article today about the willingness of China to go on holding Western debt that might deteriorate in value:

China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is “worried” about its holdings of Treasuries and wants assurances that the investment is safe, Premier Wen Jiabao said.

“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Wen said at a press briefing in Beijing today after the annual meeting of the legislature. “I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”

Good luck with that. As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the fact that the US, or indeed the UK, might be downgraded in credit terms as nations or even default on certain debts, is no longer unthinkable. Defaults are not just things that happen in Ecuador, Russia, or competelyfuckedupistan. They can happen in the supposedly rock-solid financial centres of the world.

As Glenn Reynolds says sarcastically of the new US government of Mr Obama, the country is in the best possible hands.

Unless American politicians and bureaucrats wise up, there will be a second war with Mexico within a generation.

This is not hyperbole. Drug lords are taking over the border areas between the two countries. Killings are spreading into American cities in the southwest. Firefights near the border are becoming common. There have been kidnappings within the United States in which some of the perpetrators are thought to have not only been using military equipment, but may have been moonlighting Mexican police or military men.

Before you begin to vent your rage on Mexico, I would like you to ponder the source of the problem. This is not an ideological battle where the world vision of the enemy is independent of what we think or do. That is what we face in the Middle East. Our actions there may affect Islamist strategy and tactics, but not their dream. We are not the creators of that problem.

The problem in Mexico is an entirely capitalist one. There are goods which are in great demand. Those goods are profitable and over nearly four decades we have caused a vast global giga-billion dollar industry to come into existence where once there were college students smuggling trunks of grass over the border at Spring Break. That is also not hyperbole. One of the floors of a dorm next to mine did exactly that and supplied the entire CMU campus back in the 1969-71 era. Then came Nixon and 'Operation Intercept'. And what was the great accomplishment of this at the time great expenditure of taxpayer money? Why, by the time I left grad school prices had doubled, tripled or more and nearly all the smuggling was in the hands of organized crime instead of paying the tuition, room and board of a few engineering students. Even so, enforcement at the time was a still a joke, and much laughed at even as it transitioned from "Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues" to Cheech and Chong's "Up In Smoke".

So what did the moralizing Statists do? Admit their failure? Apply tax payer money to something useful? Of course not... they did what governments always do with failures. They increased the budget. When that failed utterly they increased it again. And again. And again. Meanwhile, Libertarians correctly predicted disaster after disaster, decade after decade. Drugs are money and all that it buys. We put drug entrepreneurs outside of our then liberal legal framework... so they adapted and operated by the old fashioned rules of Feudalism.

Feudalism is the name we gave to violent gangs far enough in the past that we can romanticize them as Princes, Princesses, Knights and the like. The rules of the Feudal game are simple. You murder your way to the top then you pillage your competitors and steal their land and resources. If you are a mean enough SOB you get to live a life of sybaritic luxury... until someone nastier and smarter and more underhanded comes along and cuts your throat.

Fifteen hundred years ago it came about due to the post-Roman power vacuum. In our era the power vacuum is in a parallel world and economy. It is outside of our laws and nation states, by our own hands, and it exists side by side with us at every point.

Every time we drive up the cost of doing business, the feudal lords of this parallel universe counter predictably. The government of the United States succeeds only in adding to their cost of doing business. You might imagine that would be a big thing... but Statists have probably increased the cost of doing legal business even more over those decades. The more regulation, the more laws, the more taxes, the more individuals will find the 'other side' preferable.

Twenty-five years ago US military men stated they wanted nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Getting involved in it would put their institution at risk of bribary and corruption. The moralistic morons in government would have none of it. The military was called upon to run interdictions at sea and in the air to find potential smugglers. They have been countered by minisubs, UAV's, counter-radar and a whole range of technological counter-measures. Every escalation provides the income necessary for the counter-escalation.

We have arrived at a predictable state of affairs. Feudal lords are now taking over portions of 'our' universe in which they hold the balance of power. Border provinces in Mexico are under their control. Military resources are appearing in their hands. Soon their private gangs will morph into real armies. They will bribe American military men and politicians. Where bribery does not work, they will kidnap and kill children and rape wives as object lessons in what happens when you dare to disobey the new royalty.

A time will come when the Mexican National government is absorbed. What do you think is going to happen then? When Mexican Special Forces are carrying out hits against any American who gets in the way of business, things are going to get very, very ugly. There will be calls to invade our southern neighbor and reasonable people will then have to agree there is no other choice. If and when it comes to that, we will have absolutely no one but our leaders to blame. It will be 100% their fault for getting us there.

You can not stop contraband. You can only make smugglers rich and powerful enough to buy you out or kill you.

It will of course not be the end of the Catholic Church, but the pattern of state regulatory encroachment here in what should simply be a criminal matter is unmistakable.

After a priest stole $1.4 million from a church in Darien, state legislators have proposed a law that would regulate how parishes are controlled and operated.

The state's Catholic bishops rallied opposition from the pulpits at weekend Masses.

The law essentially would strip the dioceses of all financial control of parishes and leave bishops and priests to oversee "matters pertaining exclusively to religious tenets and practices." A board of elected laypersons would handle parish finances.

Even if "lay control" (and what started with an "elected body of lay persons" would not end there - it is the principle that Church matters are governed by the government that they are after) was established the Roman Catholic Church would continue to operate in peaceful defiance of the government - as it did in France after the government take over (the "separation of Church and State" in the inverted language that is used by these evil people) of 1905.

This is the real reason that Obama and the other liberals are not popular with either conservative Protestants or Jews or with Roman Catholics - whereas FDR was. FDR, however far his economic radicalism went, was a social conservative - government control of churches would not have even occurred to him. The left think they can use scandals, both financial and sexual, to aid their objective of taking over (i.e. destroying) all institutions outside government.

They are mistaken. Even if there is no God - it is the independence of these institutions from government that gives them value in the minds of those who are involved in them. They will be deeply offended in ways the left do not understand.

(via Red State)

Remember that email I got from Tim Evans flagging up this? Well someone called James Tyler responded to it, also sending his reply to all of us on Tim's list, with a link to this, which I likewise recommend. It's a piece in Portfolio.com called "The End of Wall Street", by the guy who wrote Liar's Poker. I'm still reading the piece, but this is my favourite bit so far, about the observations of a man called Eisner:

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. "The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM," says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. "She was this lovely woman from Jamaica," he says. "One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, 'How did that happen?'" It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. "By the time they were done," Eisman says, "they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments."

Paragraphs like that make me optimistic that statists just will not be able to pass the catastrophe off as a mere failure of unregulated capitalism. Yes the whole Sub-Prime thing was aided and abetted by Wall Street, big time. But it was set in motion by Washington politicians, and in particular politicians of the Democrat persuasion. This was, as we cannot repeat too often, a failure of the mixed economy, not of the extreme free market of the sort we here favour.

The folly of the Republicans, which has already been electorally punished, deservedly, was that most of them didn't see it all coming and panicked when it did, and those that did smell the coffee were unable to do anything to soften the blows when the coffee exploded, or whatever. My guess is that there will soon be a cull of Washington Democrats as soon as the voters next get a culling opportunity - two years from now, right? And the big question is, what will the new intake's take be on it all? But, as I often say on my personal blog when discussing gadgetry of various kinds beyond my understanding, what do I know?

UPDATE: Although, I've now finished reading the piece, and it is clear that its author derives no such anti-statist moral from his wretched story. Wall Street is the villain, and Wall Street is being justly, although very insufficiently, punished. Not a word about Democrats, or for that matter Republicans.

The email I got today about it from Tim Evans of the Libertarian Alliance started "Dear All", so I don't know how many other bloggers have already noticed and linked to this. But like Tim, I strongly recommend it, having watched it earlier today. It's an American banker (who is also a follower of Ayn Rand) talking about the financial crisis, why it happened and what to do about it. The circumstances he describes so confidently, convincingly and knowledgeably are American, but the message of the talk is universal. He uses the word "interesting" a lot, by which he mostly means "disastrous".

Apologies for not having any time left over from watching it to add any thoughts of my own. But the thing itself is so good that I am sure I will be forgiven for simply recommending this remarkable talk. I daresay some may even prefer this.

Life for me is hectic right now - for all the right reasons - but I wanted to quickly put up this link to an excellent commentary by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute, concerning the current US government's drive against offshore tax havens, especially Switzerland. Governments such as that of the spendthrift US, UK and France are getting desperate for cash, and low-tax regimes which respect client confidentiality make for an easy target.

I can also recommend Dan's recent book, co-authored with Chris Edwards, as a fine study of the whole case for tax havens and why they are a thoroughly good thing. Whenever you read someone arguing for ending "unfair tax competition", what they really in fact want is to create a cartel. Most cartels, if not backed by states, tend to disintegrate in time, but are generally thought of as bad. Tax cartels are a prime example of cartels of the worst kind.

"What did you do during the recession, Daddy? I installed solar panels and wind turbines. If only Franklin Roosevelt had thought to put millions of Americans to work during the Depression doing make-work jobs that were gee-whiz futuristic.... Oh, that's right. He did. And it didn't work then, either. But this time is different, you know."

- Nick Gillespie, at Reason's Hit & Run blog.

Fraser Nelson at the Spectator has an interesting column at the moment about how Britain's Tories have been influenced by the culture of California, specifically, the northern part of that great state. I think his analysis is fine but I would add some caution, given that the state is, or is about to go, bankrupt. Here is what I wrote in a comment over at the Coffee House blog:

For a while, the political culture of California, both the northern, Silicon Valley/Napa/San Francisco and the southern, Hollywood bit, had been libertarian: or to put it in US politicsspeak: conservative on economics, liberal on social issues.

More recently, as the near-bankruptcy of the state shows, the culture of the state has become socialist. Spending is out of control; the Green movement has stymied developments such as new electrric power plants. Many of its best entrepreneurs are fleeing to nearby Nevada, or further afield. California has an economy the size of France and is exhibiting France-like dirigisme.

I would urge the Tories to draw the right conclusions from this state, not to get too dazzled by the admittedly superb economic success of Google and the tecchies.

One of the things that I liked about northern California when I used to visit a good friend of mine in Steve Jobs' back yard of Cupertino was that you might be sitting in a bar, drinking a coffee next to some pony-tailed dude in a Grateful Dead T-Shirt, and that the latter would be tapping away on his laptop about his latest round of venture capital funding before heading off down the gun range to fire in his new Glock.

A good historian of California is Kevin Starr. Check this out.

Here is a website that is obviously produced by people very, very angry about what they see as the one-sided coverage of Mr Obama in his recent victorious campaign. You do not have to buy into conspiracy theories to be alarmed at the fawning press coverage that Mr Obama received during the campaign. As for the treatment of the McCain/Palin ticket, while I am certainly no great fan of either, the hysteria over Mrs Palin's personal life or supposed wing-nuttery over religion seemed totally out of proportion.

In the end, we get the media we do because the underlying philosophical assumptions of the public at large are reflected by it and at the same time, those assumptions are held by the media outlets themselves. It pains me to say it but in many respects, the US is now closer to the social-democratic, corporatist model of Europe than many in the US will want to admit. There will, I hope, be a backlash, but whether that backlash is a particularly libertarian one is not something I am very confident about at this point.

Thanks to fellow contributor Paul Marks to alerting me to this website.

Ever since Ezra Levant came to the attention of Samizdata readers, thanks to a posting by Perry just over a year ago, I have had his blog on my personal blogroll and have occasionally visited there. But I do not read all of it. Sometimes the sheer detail of Canadian politics becomes too much to endure. But this recent posting I did read, right through, with great pleasure. Some political hack called Warren Kinsella, who sounds like a cross between Alastair Campbell and Derek Draper, has sued Levant for defamation, demanding five million dollars. The idea was presumably to make people scared of Kinsella, and maybe it has. But not Levant.

Filing a $5-million lawsuit to try to silence questions about his Adscam involvement probably isn’t Kinsella’s smartest move. I’m not sure why someone who wants to stop people talking about Adscam would create a conversation-starter like a massive lawsuit. And then there’s the prickly matter of Kinsella subjecting himself (and his private documents) to unlimited cross-examination by me - I mean days or weeks, not the brief appearance he made before Justice John Gomery’s Inquiry.

What is Adscam, I wonder? Something that makes Kinsella look bad, presumably. I ask this to show how right Levant is about how this bizarre and way-over-the-top lawsuit causes faraway people like me with no direct interest in any of this to get drawn into the story. Levant is asking for donations. Defending against lawsuits like this, thanks to the internet, can now be paid for by sympathisers.

The bigger picture here, or part of it, is that the political left is losing its grip on the means of political communication, and it does not like it. Time was when people like Kinsella could get up to all kinds of mischief and nobody would say a word. If anyone did complain, the story would be told from Kinsella's point of view and then forgotten. Thanks to people like Ezra Levant, those days are passing. But Kinsella seems to be having a problem adjusting to this new media reality. It looks to me like Kinsella is really suing Levant for the more elemental crime, if that's the right phrase, of not grovelling. Levant doesn't know his place. But Levant does know his place. It is Kinsella who no longer seems to understand his.

The bigger party political picture is that Kinsella risks damaging his political master. This is a certain Michael Ignatieff, known to Brits only as a talking head on late night culture shows on the telly, but now a Big Cheese politician in Canada.

It is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I came across this powerfully argued article stating what a great man he was. I strongly recommend it, particularly as it wrestles directly with the accusation, made by some writers in the libertarian camp, that Lincoln was some sort of demon. The author, David Mayer, argues that with some exceptions, the accusations made against Lincoln were and are unjustified.

Update: Well that was a bracing set of mostly hostile responses about Lincoln! A question that I would put to those who claim that the secessionists were justified and Lincoln was a monster is why are some libertarians so willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a group of men who kept slaves and defended the practice? Several commenters argue that slavery was never what the civil war was about, but that is a bit like saying that the English Civil War was never about religion. Plainly it was a factor. Not necessarily as big as the Unionist defenders always claimed, but a factor nonetheless.

The buyers will take possession of this seat April 7, 2009 at 8:00pm and retain custody for 10 years.

Rent seekers and power crazed collectivists from the ruling class, your bids are recorded here.

Small government conservatives and people who believe in personal rights and responsibilities, your bids are recorded here.

Aaaannnnd, (suspenseful pause) as of February 2nd, 2009 the totals are:

Rent seeking collectivists and associated members of the ruling class - $1,068,551
Small government conservatives and supporters of individuals rights and responsibilities - $53,674

I often hear people on this blog and elsewhere say "the voters are idiots, we get what we deserve." Leaving aside the grating sound of "we", when the small government conservative is outbid by a 20 to 1 margin, there is no way the message of small government and liberty can be heard. Incidentally, over $20,000 of his $54,000 came from his own pocket. And while your at it, compare Abrahamson's and Koschnick's statements of financial interest. I thought the small government conservatives were supposed to be the rich ones.

MSNBC reports that:

The Capitol Hill publication Congressional Quarterly yesterday reported that the White House, responding to minority groups' concerns about Gregg's commitment to funding the census, has decided to have the director of the Census Bureau report directly to the White House.

Why am I expecting ACORN to get the census contract?

In Article I, Section 2 the US Constitution orders that "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."

The Congress, by law directed that:

"The Secretary [of Commerce] shall perform the functions and duties imposed upon him by this title, may issue such rules and regulations as he deems necessary to carry out such functions and duties, and may delegate the performance of such functions and duties and the authority to issue such rules and regulations to such officers and employees of the Department of Commerce as he may designate."

As I read it, the Director of the Census must, by law, be within the Department of Commerce and under the direction of the (Senate approved) Secretary of Commerce who then reports to the president. Am I missing something?

Correction: From reading through Title 13, Chapter 1 it appears obvious to me that the POTUS has no role in the census whatsoever beyond, with Senate approval, selecting the Secretary of Commerce and, also with Senate approval, selecting the Director of the Census who " shall perform such duties as may be imposed upon him by law, regulations, or orders of the Secretary." Hhmmm... No president mentioned.

The Secretary of Commerce is the only authority the law recognizes. Since as commenter Laird points out, the Constitution did not place the census function in Article II - the Executive branch but in Article I - the Legislative branch, it is not at all within the President's reach unless the legislature places it there.

I think that interpretation is supported by phrasing such as this taken from Subchapter 1 section 9 "No department, bureau, agency, officer, or employee of the Government, except the Secretary in carrying out the purposes of this title, shall ..."

The Secretary of Commerce does not even report his findings to the President, but rather is instructed to 'publish' them. It looks quite clear to me that any incursion by the White House after those two Senate approved appointments is clearly against the law.

Here is a collection of good articles attacking the massive US stimulus plan. Fair play to Andrew Sullivan for linking to them. There's hope for him yet.

Nicolas Chatfort calls foul on the absurd sense of moral superiority trumpeted by Paul Krugman when the man's own pronouncements are riddled with falsehoods

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote about what he called the bad faith of the opponents of President Obama's economic stimulus plan. Krugman is apparently labouring under the view that his side has a monopoly of virtue in the current debate and that the Obama plan can not possibly be attacked on the merits. It must be comforting to be allied with people of such beneficence and infallibility.

Perhaps Krugman, however, should examine the good faith of his own claims before casting aspersions against his opponents. At first glance his counter arguments appear cogent, but a closer look reveals that Krugman is a master of illusion, employing many tricks that would do any sideshow magician proud.

First, Krugman assails the criticism that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created as being a bogus talking point. His reasoning is that this figure involves taking the multi-year cost of the program and divides it by the number of jobs created in just one year. Krugman claims that the true cost per job is closer to $100,000 - or even a net cost of only $60,000 if you take into account the higher taxes that would be generated from a stronger economy.

Let us examine this counter argument carefully as Krugman is employing some slight of hand here. He is pulling a switch by re-framing the costs from a total program basis to an annual basis. The critics of the plan never claimed that the $275,000 per job was an annual cost. By the way, the $275,000 per job estimate is generous as it cedes the point that the plan will create the 3 million new jobs claimed for it by President Obama. Not all economists believe that anywhere near this number of new jobs will be created under this plan.

What about Krugman's own estimate of $100,000 per job if you look at the program in a multi-year basis? He claims this cost from the extra millions of new jobs that would be created after the first year. As the cost of the program is $820 billion, this implies that he believes that the Obama plan will actually create over 8 million new jobs. If this is true, why is the White House claiming only 3 million new jobs from the plan? Making arguments based on the official claims of its government proponents, as the critics have done, are not deceitful as implied by Krugman. Well, not quite as deceitful as calculating costs based on an extra 5 million jobs that do not appear in the program.

As for Krugman's claim that the net cost will be only $60,000 per job due to higher tax revenues, it is nice to see that he has suddenly become a convert to dynamic scoring. I am sure we will see him be generous enough to allow tax cut advocates use dynamic scoring in their arguments.

The next card trick the Krugman dazzles us with is his counter argument about the relative benefits of tax cuts versus government spending. He stacks the deck by presenting a horrifying vision of airlines falling out of the sky if the government does not provide the air traffic control system. An honest contrast would have been between a government system versus a privatized one, not versus no system at all, but then again it does not appear the Krugman is really interested in having an honest debate.

Krugman claims that no one really believes that lower taxes are a better stimulus than government spending. He somehow must have missed the statement that the Cato Institute placed in major US newspapers, including the one for which he writes, that was signed by hundreds of economists, including Nobel laureates, taking just such a position.

His own argument in favour of government spending delivering "more bang for the buck" because a large share of any tax cut would be saved is also suspect. If the current economic problem was caused by a shift in preferences away from consumption and toward savings, then would not a large share of any income increase that is derived from new government spending also likely be diverted to savings?

One of the errors of the advocates of a Keynesian solution that increases demand is that they fail to recognize that it was an unsustainable level of demand the helped to get us into the current mess. We were consuming more than we were producing, relying on foreign lenders to make up the difference. A shift from consumption to savings is necessary for the long-term health of the US economy. Increased growth can be encouraged by taking permanent measures to increase the returns on production, but fiscal measures that try to artificially boost demand will only delay, and likely worsen, the correction in the structure of the economy that needs to take place.

Finally, Krugman ignores one of the most obvious criticisms of the Obama plan because he apparently does not have a convenient hat trick with which to dismiss it, that is the question of timing. According to the CBO's cost estimate, only 20 percent of the program will be spent this year and somewhat more than half in the first two years. If this massive stimulus program does not generate self-sustaining economic growth within two years, the clearly it will have to have been judged as a failure. Can spending that will not even take place until three or more years from now, when they may not be needed, really be considered as a stimulus to our current problems? A more likely explanation is that the Democrats in Congress had their own bad faith justifications for this spending. Krugman's warning against fraudulent arguments is perhaps the only point in his column with which I am in accord.

There is a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times written by Mickey Edwards, a Republican Party apparatchik of many years standing, called Reagan wouldn't recognize this GOP. This was the 'money quote' for me:

Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

So George W. Bush and John "I support the Bailout" McCain represented the worship of... small government??? So presumably this 'small' government must have consumed a smaller portion of the national wealth when it left office compared to when it took office, right? I mean is that not surely the most direct and uncontroversial measure of the size of a government? Ok, 9/11 happened... so if we were to factor out all military spending, would that give us a smaller state at the end of the Bush presidency than at the start? I will leave you to guess the answer to that very simple question. And are there more regulations governing, well, almost everything, now compared when Bush took power? If there are more, then how is that either small or limited?

In America, government is ... us. What is "exceptional" about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.

Of course this 'us' of whom he speaks are in reality the political activists who gain the support of a plurality to sanctify the latest looting schedules. His contempt for ' Joe the Plumber' says it all. Joe was indeed one of 'us', one of the great unwashed who dared to fart loudly during the chorus of media hosannas surrounding Obama's stately progress across The Blessed Land. Mickey Edwards on the other hand was a career politician who now lectures on Legislative Politics and International Affairs... in other words, he is about as much one of 'them' as you can get.

And there is nothing particularly 'exceptional' about his description of American government unless Mickey Edwards thinks most of the rest of the 'first world' are organised as feudal states. The 'limits' to government expressed in the sainted US Constitution may be still be a viable tool for securing thing like freedom of expression and the right to defend yourself, well at least somewhat, but they do less than nothing to make anyone secure in their property or in any way less vulnerable to the political looter class (whom Mickey Edward could identify by simply looking in a mirror) from using the political system to help themselves to other people's money.

And that, my chums across the ocean, is exactly why you are just as totally fucked as the rest of us.

Here is something very topical for today, Inaugaration Speech Generator:

A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he's calling for the internet's assistance one more time – to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever...

This is the result of my humble efforts to help out:

My fellow Americans, today is a psychadelic day. You have shown the world that "hope" is not just another word for "moon", and that "change" is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually fly.

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces confusing and rigorous challenges like never before. Our economy is embarassing. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for spaghetti. Our healthcare system is lethal. If your nostril is sick and you don't have insurance, you might as well call a dustman. And America's image overseas is tarnished like a aubergine bullet. But cookin' together we can right this ship, and set a course for Hebrides.

Finally, I must thank my excruciating family, my beautiful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank bankers for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of shootin' the American people. Without your rotting efforts, none of this would have been possible.

God Bless... the Internet!

Obama's supporters should savour today, they really should. Even Obama's detractors have at least something to be happy about. A black man has become President of the United States, The Leader of the Free-ish World, the Commander-in-Thief. And that at least is a fine thing.

But the mere fact it has happened shows it is much less important than it seems. A huge percentage of America's blacks voted along racial lines, and thus presumably can have had no complaint if non-black people had likewise voted their race en-mass. Fortunately by and large even in race obsessed America most white people did not see it that way. Things have moved on, something obvious to anyone who has visited or worked in the US over the last few decades. Perhaps, just perhaps, the sheer folly of identity politics, the poison wellspring of all ethnic sectarianism, can be discarded once and for all. Yeah, as if. Well one can hope.

But today Obama does indeed become the very embodiment of a victory over an irrelevant thing which should never have divided people in the first place. And against that noble tableau, the calls for a New Hope and Bipartisan Unity will ring out strong and loud against a backdrop of Old Glory fluttering in the wind as Obama looks out at the horizon in all his Apollonian glory. Powerful stuff given how much Americans respond to appeals to the sentimental.

And the correct response to this is not to put your hand on your heart and get all misty eyed, it is to nod sagely at the agreeable symbolism of a clear triumph over America's grotesquely racist past... and then, in answer to the calls for unity, raise your middle finger and make a loud raspberry sound. You will be drowned out by the cheering crowds but trust me when I say there will be millions of other people off-camera doing precisely that.

President Obama will only ever have one meaningful victory, and that is being a black man who was elected President. Cool. Seriously, very cool indeed. Celebrate that much in good faith. As for the rest, the things he actually wants to do, well that is the stuff that always should divide us and always will. Republicans and for that matter libertarians who cannot see that are, quite simply, political enemies who are part of the problem, not the solution.

So cheer the glorious apogee of the civil rights movement today because its significance ends the instant he takes the oath. Everything else that follows will be the start of a progressive and cumulative defeat for Obama. The One will get the laws he wants and his supporters will conclude that means he is winning, as if saying something is so makes it so. Let them do their worst because there is nothing anyone can do to stop them at this juncture in any case.

But Obama's actual enemy is not the Republicans, who are prostrate at the moment and worthless as currently constituted. No, it is reality itself that is Obama's utterly implacable opponent: that vast Ponzi scheme called 'regulatory statism' has reached the end of the cycle, as Ponzi schemes always do in the end. In previous times, economic growth has masked the pyramidal nature of what both parties did as they pushed the hard choices off into the future with the knowing connivance of millions of voters... but not this time. The future has arrived and the sainted American middle class, who acquiesced to it all and yet about whom no ill may be spoken, will find that future quite unsympathetic.

And when irksome reality stubbornly refuses to follow Hollywood's script and accept the Triumph of the Will, more laws will follow. And then more. And more. The cannibalisation of the shrinking productive economy to 'bail out' the failing bits will become ever more intense. Much as John "I support the Bail Out" McCain would have done in fact. Pervasive political regulations trying to manipulate things back into health will become ever more pervasive, all to rapturous applause at first... and all to no avail. Obama's progressive and spectacularly expensive defeat will be a defeat for the entire nation with implications that will be felt around the world. It will be a defeat that consumes much that is still gleaming and golden in the Republic and turns it into toxic waste.

So now is not the time for 'unity' and 'bipartisanship', which is just a genteel way of demanding surrender, it is the time for resistance and the renewal of purpose by those who see the liberty and prosperity that comes from constitutionally limited government as a prize worth any price to defend. This was never really about race other than as the final flourish of a very worthy battle that had already been won.

Andrew Roberts, the UK historian, pens what can only be described as a robust defence of soon-to-be-ex-US President, George W. Bush. It has stirred up a hornet's nest of comments, some of which include open support for OBL's cause, which makes me wonder about who edits the Telegraph blogs these days, if at all.

Unfortunately, this piece suffers from a number of basic factual errors that make one wonder about the quality of the editing of the Daily Telegraph's print edition, never mind the electronic version. He says, for example, that Oliver North directed a movie about Bush, when in fact he meant Oliver Stone. These Olivers are a bit of a pest: I mean, there's Oliver Reed, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Twist, and loads of others. It might rather tickle both Messrs North and Stone - one a rather controversial soldier, the other a former-soldier-turned leftwing filmaker, to be so conflated.

On a more serious note, though, Mr Roberts suffers from over-reach in his understandable desire to set the record a bit straighter. For a start, any believer in the small government brand of conservatism, even a hawk who supported the overthrow of Saddam and the fight against the Taliban, has to confront the continuing expansion of government and debt under the Bush administration. Bush went over the heads of Congress to support the bailout of the US auto industry. Then there is the whole nonsense of No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, Patriot Act, and the rest.

As for protecting America from attack, it is true, that he deserves - as I said some time ago - some, if not a lot, of credit for the fact that there has been no major repeat of a 9-11 sort of attack on US soil since that terrible September morning; and yes, I happen to agree with Mr Roberts that paying a pure "wait-and-see", defensive posture after that day was not really plausible.

Libertarians continue to argue among themselves, never mind with others and often vehemently, about the proper scope of foreign policy, or whether a libertarian foreign policy is an oxymoron. For me, the principle of self-defence cannot rule out the need, in certain circumstances, to go after declared enemies with a track record of violence and mayhem. Bush went after some of those enemies and made mistakes along the way. But I think, that on foreign policy at least, the judgement of history on this man will be rather kinder than at the present time.

There is an outpouring of 'good will' towards Obama coming from the statist establishment on the so called 'right', whatever that means, in the USA, such as this fellow. These are exactly the sort of apparatchiks I have talking about before who are at the very heart of the Republican party's problems. They may well be personable but now is the time for radicalisation and resistance, not conciliation and surrender.

Noting how specific Republicans react to the beatification, sorry I mean inauguration of Obama will be a useful guide to who 'gets it' and who does not... who is part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course the easy entries on the 'kick the fools out' list needs to start with the party worthies who actually thought it was even good politics, let alone good for the country, to run such a profoundly statist candidate like McCain against the most left wing Democrat since FDR. Even the most clueless of marketing men (and that is an industry more awash with cluelessness than most) understand the importance of product differentiation.

Feel free to use the comment section to stay who on the Big Government wing of the Republican Party most urgently needs to be given the boot so that the Republicans have any value at all as a worthwhile alternative. Of course I am well aware that the answer may be 'kick out all of them' but that is not a very useful observation. The current crisis is a golden opportunity to actually do some creative destruction that could yield interesting results in the years to come. If that possibility is not of interest to you, then you have nothing to add to this particular discussion.

Take a look at this, and scroll down for some of the comments. I still occasionally come across the sort of comments in the vein of "would it not be a good idea to stick all those yobs in the Army/whatever or make them do unpaid work?" etc, etc. These comments come up when there is a discussion about problems of our terrible young people. And this seems to be a viewpoint that transcends the usual left/right political divide: conservatives like the "get em sorted out" mindset while the left goes more for the "building a sense of community" approach. As usual, the notion that individuals are entitled to live their lives for their own sakes gets lost. I mean, that is just so damned selfish.

The issue is quite simple: if the problem is youngsters getting bored and into trouble, then the obvious solution is paid work, hence removing all the legal and tax barriers to said, such as minimum wage laws, restrictions on hiring teenagers, and so on. Acquiring the pride of getting a paycheque strikes me as far more useful in encouraging positive behaviours than some sort of conscription plan for young adults, as seems to be on the cards in the US.

And I'll repeat my point that it is not enough just to speak out against plans to conscript 18 to 25-year-olds, for example. Proposals to make people attend schools (or whatever euphemistic words for such places exist) until they are 18, for example, is also wrong, and in many cases, counterproductive, particularly where non-academic youngsters disrupt the teaching of their fellows because they are bored senseless. Far better to encourage apprenticeships, with things like tax breaks, than keeping them in one damned education project after another.

If this idea of a young civilian corps in the US becomes fact, I wonder how many of all those young Obama fans will became disenchanted with him? But then I recall that Mr McCain, his vanquished opponent, was pretty keen on all this service stuff as well.

2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack "The One" Obama crushed Big State Republican John "I Support the Bail Outs" McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for... statism.

Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.

Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic 'broad church' politics no longer apply on the so-called 'right'... no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.

In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.

I am not calling for the 'libertarianisation' of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party's rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become... conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question "do you want the state to have less control over people's lives or more control?" If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller.

This is the time to apply that test to Republican politicians, every last one of them... and drive any who fail that simple test out of the party by whatever means necessary. Now is the time for a figurative internal 'Night of the Long Knives'. This is the opportunity to destroy a great many political careers and remake the Republican Party into the party of constitutionally limited government and to start fighting the culture war that the party should have been fighting since the day Ronald Reagan left office with his job only half done.

Lest people think I abominate Reagan, I do not and he must be judged within the context of the Cold War (and winning thereof), and so the inconvenient fact the military build up actually increased state spending need not be glossed over. What Reagan did do, and what gives him lasting appeal to those of us who value liberty, was that he actually did fight the culture war with a veritable litany of quotable remarks in praise of smaller government. It is hard to overstate the importance of that as part of the long process.

But the biggest failure of Reagan, and indeed Thatcher, was that they did not establish ideologically motivated party cores to build on their successes. They acted as if their successes were so self evident they did not need to be defended, let alone built upon in the future. That Margaret Thatcher let Norman Tebbit destroy the Young Conservatives was perhaps her biggest of several mistakes as it more or less guaranteed the party would vanish into a pointless intellectual void resembling one of David Cameron's apertures.

Reagan's big mistake was made at a much higher level, namely his choice of vice president. People voted for George "Read my lips" Bush because they thought he was a continuation of the Reagan 'Revolution' (hyperbole I know)... and they voted his patrician butt out of office when he turned out to be nothing of the sort. That a significant number of Republicans never got their head around that key dynamic is the root cause of many of the party's problems today. Instead a great many accepted their enemy's analysis that Bush Sr.'s defeat was a rejection of Reagan's legacy and ultimately why a ghastly candidate like John McCain could ever have got the nomination.

What is needed is a return to the ideologically driven and highly successful Reagan days, but happily without the distorting bipolar reality of nuclear superpower rivalries to worry about. Compared to the Soviet Union, the threat posed by Islamic terrorism is nothing more than the yapping of an annoying poodle, albeit one with rabies. Face it, it was the Cold War and fears over his hawkish foreign policy leading to nuclear Armageddon that did in Barry Goldwater, the best president the USA never had.

So now is not the time for Republicans to spend most of their efforts pulling together against The One in the White House... no, it is the time to rip the Party apart, ruthlessly and quickly, so that it can eventually become something worth uniting around. Oh sure, put the boot into Obama at every opportunity as this is also the time to fight the culture war without cease or apology, but the most important thing now is for Republicans to get their own party in order and that will require some extremes of disunity to achieve.

But this all needs to be done sooner rather than later, at the juncture where the Democrats are unassailable and party unity is frankly pointless. Pull out the political knives on Inauguration Day as a way to take you mind off the nauseating waves of sanctimonious kack radiating across the media caused by Barack Obama's living beatification. Concentrate instead on the much needed massive internal political bloodletting and leave Obama and his Congress to do their worst as in truth there is nothing the Republicans can do to stop them anyway.

The economic crisis needs to be re-branded for a start: this is not, and never was, a 'crisis of capitalism', it is in fact the 'crisis of regulatory statism'. John Maynard Keynes said "in the long run we are all dead"... well sadly for the Keynesians of all parties, the long run has finally arrived as it always does with Ponzi schemes. The lesser evil, the easy option, is no longer a viable option at all and the sooner the failures of the past are not dealt with by more of the same, the better.

It does require a measure of courage however and the first act of courage needed is to cut the Republican Party to pieces and rebuild it without the cancers that grew during the Bush dynasty.

Although I will wish you one, do not expect a Happy New Year.

The One is not yet in the White House, but already, one of his most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the blogsphere, Andrew "Excitable Andy" Sullivan, has discovered that Mr Obama might not be totally signed up to the notion that consenting adults should be left alone to make arrangements to their liking, such as gay marriage.

Well done, Andrew. It took Mr Sullivan just two years to swing from rather gushing praise for George W. Bush to treating him as as worse than Attila the Hun. Will Obama's fall from Sullivan's pantheon of political heroes be even quicker?

Just to be serious - and lest folk think I am just engaging in a spot of mud-throwing at Sullivan - it is truly sad to see how this influential commentator has made a prize ass of himself over his assumption that voting for Obama was something that anyone who favoured small, limited government could be comfortable with. Oh for sure, Mr Obama may remove some of the bad things that the Bush White House encouraged, but I would not bet on it. Come to that, I am not at all sure that civil libertarians, be they concerned about issues like gay marriage, drugs, free speech, abuse of police powers, etc, can be at all confident that Mr Obama, a scion of the Chicago political machine, is good news. That's not to say that the GOP will be any better, of course.

What Sullivan, and indeed all of us, need to remember is that Bush, Obama, or for that matter Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel, are politicians.

Here is an interesting article about how Wal-Mart, the bete noire of the anti-globalistas, acted much more effectively and efficiently in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago than was the case with Federal or other state agencies.

What the article does not really discuss, however, is whether companies ought to be doing things like this at all. There is the old Milton Friedman line that a company has one duty only: to benefit its shareholders by making a profit. But of course if shareholders vote in company meetings in favour of allowing their company to spend some money in certain civic endeavours, then as a supporter of private property rights - of shareholders - then I have no problem with that at all. If a company whose shares I own starts to engage in all manner of "social" projects that I think show the firm is increasingly being run by twerps, I can always dump the stock or even, assuming it is not banned, short-sell the shares to punish the firm for not being professionally run.

That approach is, of course, very different from those advocates of what is called "corporate social responsibility" who might want to legislate to force firms into such activities, which blurs the political and business spheres. It enables politicians, for example, to bring about changes without having to explicitly say how these are going to be paid for. Such public-private partnerships are all too often about concealment of cost.

Richard North on UK writer, actor and travel writer, Stephen Fry:

As he takes us on his taxi-ride around the US, he is not ostensibly defending the place, though in his accompanying notes (in interviews and on his website) that seems to be his mission. It is easier to warm to Mr Fry's account. He seems a nice old thing. But he has a striking narrowness of mind, best exemplified by the disdain with which he passed by Miami as too horrid to detain him. He sneers too easily. I doubt that he is quite as clever as he thinks, though he clearly has a good memory and has an intense middlebrow love of science.

Brrr, that was venomous! Considering that Mr North dislikes Fry's sneering, that is quite a snide comment itself. Ouch, as they say. Even so, Mr North has a good review of a number of books written by folk about the US recently. He does not seem very impressed by them.

I still think the greatest book written about the US from an outsider is Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Andrew Sullivan, commenting on a remark about the enormous bailouts being put into place by Western governments, has this to say:

"The debt was so reckless and so immense that it now threatens to destroy the entire financial system. That's what electing George W Bush twice has done for us. But then we are told that this threat requires us to do even more of the borrowing and spending before we can begin to get ourselves back in balance again. The unchallenged doctrine of the day is that: doing nothing would provoke a worse collapse than necessary and so we have to make our fiscal situation much worse now in order to make it much better later. Why am I not convinced?"

Well, Sullivan is obviously right that the way to solve our debt addiction is not to go on the equivalent of yet another binge in the hope of relieving the hangover. Although his glib remark that re-electing Bush twice has added to the debt addiction does rather ignore, for example, the role of the Democrats, for example, in opposing Bush's attempts to constrain the US federal home mortgage agencies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. He is right though to chide the Republicans for letting spendng soar, but then I fear that Sullivan has become such a victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome that even a good point now becomes distorted through his worship of Mr Obama. And if it is debt addiction Sullivan is worried about, I somehow do not expect the Community Organiser to be the one to decisively take us back to the days of small government.

A conservative friend of mine in the USA sent me a link to an article in Weekly Standard called The Sector Formerly Known as Private: how Obama intends to use corporations to effect social change... and I must say that it somewhat surprised me. The following is largely based on the letter I sent him in return.

We're beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like. It won't be a conservative era, that's for sure. Nor will it, despite appearances to the contrary, be a reprise of the Clinton era. Bill Clinton's version of economic liberalism meant slightly higher tax rates on income and capital, a slightly more burdensome regulatory apparatus, lower deficits, and a commitment to free trade. The public sector didn't meddle too much in the private sector. It was content, for the most part, to sit back and enjoy the tax revenue that the tech boom poured in. Obama's liberalism will be different.

Let us gloss over the absurd American use of the word 'liberal' when they actually mean 'illiberal', but my response to "We're beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like" was... we? Was article author Matthew Continetti not listening to Obama during the campaign? Has he not examined the copious record of the vile man's public statements ever since he entered politics? Nothing Obama is going to do should be unexpected. For Obama to do anything unexpected he would have to slash public spending and roll back regulation.

Is it really only now dawning on some people that Obama ain't Bill Clinton? But guess what, do you actually think McCain would have shrunk the state and lowered the regulatory interference that not so much led to but actually mandated the sub-prime melt down? McCain is the one who is Bill Clinton, just with zipped flies and less charisma.

Let the whole stinking system of patronage politics burn I say because nothing is going to change for the better until the piles of garbage and rats in the streets reality rubs people's faces in the true cost of voting in a political class who thinks wealth is something that is created by political actions rather than markets. Hell, it does not matter what I think, just look at the numbers as the economy slows, then contracts, and at the same time state expenditure actually increases. Do you really have to be an Austrian School economist to see the implications of that?

Never was there a better time for openly authoritarian regulatory statists to be in power, right when the global economy is on the edge of an abyss. There will be no economic growth to mask the expansion of the state this time. Personally I am looking up at them standing on the edge and chanting "Jump! Jump! Jump!"

Just at the point where the state's tax take will nose dive because of the economic slow-down, the USA has elected someone who is going to massively increase 'public' expenditure. The money will come from where exactly? Tax the middle class? That kills consumption and the economy tanks even more. Print more money? That fuels inflation and the economy tanks even more. Screw it out of productive sectors of the economy? That makes marginally productive businesses go bust and makes them all cut their labour forces and increases unemployment... and the economy tanks even more. My guess is that by the time he is done Obama will do all of the above. It does not matter that the media will love The One all the way down to the crater, the pain will be spread around so widely no amount of propaganda will be able to shift the blame. If the so called 'right' cannot turn that into political success a few years from now then they are worthless fools.

A lot of people are going to get hurt and that is just too damn bad. Has the GOP actually run a free-market candidate for president since Barry Goldwater? Well Reagan was at least half way there, but only half way, but I give him a free pass because busting the Soviets actually was worth the money he spent. The GOP is as much to blame as the Democrats for where the USA is now, so a plague on both their houses. The situation now is exactly where 'pragmatic' and 'realistic' voting gets you. Why anyone who wanted a smaller state would have turned out and voted for McCain was beyond me... and of course many did not, they stayed home in droves and quite right too.

Guys, you have been voting for the lesser evil for so long you may have lost sight of the fact that you have been voting for evil, just a tiny bit less than the other guy. Well no more easy options, no more putting the day of reckoning off for some point in the future... the day of reckoning has arrived and I for one am delighted. Do your worst Obama... to quote Lenin's inspiration Nikolai Chernyshevsky, "the worse, the better". Do not think of it as a disaster but rather an opportunity to actually create an opposition worth voting for. Never has there been a better time to destroy the political careers of really large numbers of Big State Republicans.

That is what I think. Have a nice day.

There is a good article by Bloomberg columnist Mark Gilbert on why just transferring billions of taxpayers' money to America's embattled automakers is a bad idea, and he has thoughts who might be better equipped to run these firms.

As he says, long before the credit crisis hit, some, if not all of the carmakers were suffering from problems. There is a glut of cars on the world market and the spike in oil prices - admittedly now in reverse - has made a number of such vehicles uneconomic.

Talking of oil, the black stuff is now below $50 a barrel, down by about $100 from its peak. Wow.

The US motor industry seems about to fail. Credit insurers are now withdrawing their support as the firms burn through cash, with faltering sales and outstretched hand for charity. But, with their size, their number of jobs and their Main Street history, these car firms have been deemed too important to fail.

If the Democrats do decide to rescue the US car industry via a bail-out, they will rationalise and reorder. Perhaps they will even wish to intervene as to which models and which research should be undertaken. Think of the opportunity for renewables...renewing jobs, renewing pork, renewing votes. By the end of this process, it is doubtful if there will be any US car industry at all. Congress will have undertaken a wonderful role in clearing out the undergrowth for more efficient rivals and Detroit will go the way of Morris, Austin and the Triumph marques.

Simon Heffer concludes this Telegraph piece about why there must be public spending cuts, despite the public statements of all the political parties which by omission suggest the contrary, with this:

Having just witnessed the American election, I am aware of one other point. In the run-up to elections, people say absurd things about the economy to garner votes. Barack Obama has made $1.3 trillion of spending promises. He will shortly have a rendezvous with reality. He will not deliver on those promises. He will instead have to preside over a financial situation whose full horror we have yet to see here. Wiser and older heads in his administration will need a plan to deal with reality, even though one was not promised during his campaign.

This is what we need here. An early election - which Mr Brown might as well call, since the Tories have been found out and are slipping back in the polls - would at least get all the lies and idiocies out of the way. One party would then have to confront reality, just as Mr Obama is about to have to do. Then we could end the pretence of a pain-free recession, and get on and take it. So long as our politicians feel they must butter us up and make out that what is to come won't hurt a bit, the only way is down.

All the lies and idiocies? That would be asking too much. But you can see what he means. My first reaction was: what a frightful commentary on the state of public opinion just now, if no politician dares tell it like it is. But then again, it is the very fact that Cameron is not telling it like it is, but instead just following idiotically behind Mr Brown, that is causing his current decline in the polls, which I confess I did not see coming.

I can't recall who said it - I think one of the Coffee Housers - but the best recent comment on the Conservatives I heard said something like: Cameron was picked to deal with good times, in a way that Blair was doing, and Brown subsequently couldn't. But face Cameron with a catastrophe, in which the option of pretending to be nice to everyone no longer exists, and he is a rabbit caught in the headlights. Mr Brown loves a good catastrophe and is benefitting from this one now, even though it is to an appalling extent a catastrophe of his own making. Like I say, I did not see that coming. The voters now face a choice between clever and determined but deluded, and nice - well, polite, in a smarmy old Etonian manner - but bewildered.

One thing I do seem to recall saying a few months ago, although I can't recall when, was that Cameron believed he merely had to say and then do nothing in order to sail into power and stay there for a decade. Only "events" would upset such a calculation. Now, those events have arrived. Optimistic Conservatives presumably now hope that Cameron is "keeping his powder dry", and will stir up a rhetorical storm come the actual election campaign, whenever it materialises and when it will be too late for Brown to steal all Cameron's brilliant policies. But I am starting to think that Perry de Havilland has had Cameron's number all along. There are no brilliant Cameron policies. There is no Cameron powder, or not the sort that accomplishes anything. Which means that a general election now would simply prolong the reign of idiocy, no matter who wins.

Before the end of this century, there will be another American Civil War.

Crap.

We have sometimes been pretty harsh on John McCain at this blog. It is only right, though, to remember the very fine qualities of this man. Coffee House does so. Well said.

Some of the comments that we got yesterday after the Community Organiser from Chicago was elected were wonderful. Here is my personal favourite:

First, demonize him and ascribe his motives to evil and malfeasance, not just policy differences. We should proclaim often and loudly that he is not our president, that he stole the election and he has no mandate. We should repeat false stories about him, no matter how crazy or wrong, until they are accepted as common wisdom. We should create lies and urban legends to smear him and demean him. We should ridicule any verbal slips or gaffes, and ascribe them to his native stupidity and intellectual vapidity. We should accuse him of every sin and crime under the sun and attempt to have him impeached for policy differences, which we should call crimes. We should undermine any programs he wants to pass by misstating their goals and content. We should take quotes out of context to make him seem ridiculous and to make him seem mean-spirited. We should repeat often that he doesn't care about people who aren't the same race as he is, and that he is only out for his own kind. We should claim that he is going to try to force a coup and take over the country by force. We should claim he's going to lock up any dissenters. We should loudly scream about losing our rights and interfere with his speechs and disrupt any gatherings of his party. Our politicians should cynically misstate his policies to make him look bad.

Update: one or two commenters are outraged by this and the words "native stupidity" have prompted at least one commenter to accuse me of being a racist in putting this paragraph on the blog. For goodness sake: the whole point of the comment was that it was written by a very bitter man who understandably feels that it is time that Obama should be attacked in exactly the same way as was Bush, who after all has been constantly attacked for being stupid, for his Texan drawl, whatever. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I don't normally respond to comments by adding to my original posts, but in this case I think it is necessary to lay down a marker to all those Obama supporters out there who might get twitchy when their hero gets any flak: criticism of Mr Obama is not some form of disguised racism. If the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the MSM spend the next four years trying to ward off all criticism of their man as racist, they will demean the genuine examples of racism that still exist. Further, they will, either unwittingly or not, harm racial harmony in the US and elsewhere. They will also deserve our contempt.

Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online's The Corner blog makes the point that the election of Mr Obama, by a landslide, does rather crush the idea that colour is any longer a serious bar to achievement in the US. Well he has a point, although I am sure there are still plenty of racists around who might try to hinder the efforts of others on grounds of race. But as we free marketeers like to point out, outside the world intermediated via political coercion, being a bigot imposes a serious cost on the bigot, since being prejudiced against a smart, hardworking person on the grounds of their skin colour is stupid. A rational employer, for example, even if he is a bigot, will employ people if he or she can get a competitive edge thereby. That is why markets can have a general tendency, if they are allowed to work vigorously, against bigots, even if racial prejudices persist.

With the institutions run by the state, meanwhile, Mr Goldberg argues that with the election of Mr Obama, it is going to be much, much harder for defenders of racial quotas in things like university admissions to continue with the idea that reverse discrimination is required any longer. Hmmm. I personally am a bit skeptical: there is such a large vested interest in maintaining the politics of grievance that getting rid of reverse discrimination will not be easy. But I think one welcome aspect of Mr Obama's election is that he will emphatically knock down the image of America as closed to non-whites. It has been nonsense for years of course, as a prominent, black economist like Thomas Sowell has been pointing out. Condi Rice and Colin Powell's advancement to the summit of government hardly squares with the idea of a bigoted Republic, although having served under Republican administrations, they do not get much of a pass from the MSM. But the grievance industry, as an unintended consequence, just took a big hit with the election of the Community Organiser from Chicago. That is surely a good thing.

I attended a US Election Night Party in central London last night. It was wall-to-wall Obamamaniacs. They had badges (or 'buttons' as you Americans call them) on sale and while my first choice would have been Bob Barr, I chose a McCain/Palin one just to piss everybody off. Significantly, the Obama/Biden badges were on sale at £5 each while the McCain/Palin ones were going for a knock-down £3. A portent of things to come, I thought.

Anyway, since Perry has manfully tried to steer us all towards optimism this morning, I felt compelled to sink my hand into the mud, dredge up a big, smelly, greasy, filthy dollop of pessimism and smear it all over you. Oh come on, you know you love it really.

So, the USA has finally got its version of the Tony Blair/New Labour revolution and, if our experience is anything to go by, then 'get ready for da pain'. I wish someone had had the foresight to slap an export restriction on it. It means (as if you have not already guessed) a whole heaping helping of new taxes and regulations but, most tellingly, a huge expansion in the public sector payroll. What better way to ensure future election success than with an army of loyal, grateful and dependent voters? That's how they did it here. Welcome to the client-state. Can they do it? Yes they can. And they will.

The Republican Party (which I care little for) is probably buggered. Not only is it going to take them a long time to get over the now-universal loathing of 'Bush and the neocons' but they are also likely to paralyse themselves with an extended period of intra-party squabbling about which directon to take. Furthermore, it is very unsafe to assume that they will move in the right direction. We made that mistake here after the Conservatives got their clocks cleaned in three consecutive elections. "They have no choice", we said "but to take the party in a more free market, libertarian direction". Boy, were we wrong about that. Instead, they decided that what they needed was a big dose of what the other guy was having. Don't be surprised if you find that the whole centre of American political gravity has shifted semi-permanently to the statist/left.

However, libertarian ideas (which I care a lot for) are also probably buggered. The Keynsians are busy priming their pumps which means that not only are things going to get worse, they are going to made worse. But do you think that Mr. Audacity and his chums are going to get the blame for that? Think again. "Unregulated, free market capitalism" (as if we have ever been within a cruise missiles range of any such thing) has already been fingered as the culprit for this crisis of regulatory statism and that gigantic lie has now become the accepted narrative. As I always say, its perceptions that matter. For crying out loud, the epidemic of violent youth crime in this country is still being laid at the door of Margaret Thatcher ("She created a greedy, me-first society where nobody cares about other people").

Furthermore, we can expect to have to deal with an emboldened IslamoLeft. Regardless of whether or not there is any objective justification, they will see this as a vindication of their efforts meriting a redoubling of their political 'jihad'. I'm not necessarily referring to bombs on buses here but, if I was them, I would be drooling at the sight of all those 20-something "Yes we can" chanters and gearing up to harvest a fresh crop of Useful Idiots (a Western commodity so reliable that it really ought to be the subject of a futures contract, like pork bellies or cocoa).

So, there we have it. Several reasons to be uncheerful. What do we do? I have no idea. Probably carry on doing this. What else can we do?

Have a nice day.

And come back soon.

Missing you already.

Unlike many, well, most of my compatriots, I am not filled with a deep sense of gloom and foreboding at the prospect of the most left wing president since FDR gaining the Whitehouse. In truth, I can see many reasons to think it may well be a far better outcome than if a Big State Republican like McCain won.

Of course Obama will bring an avalanche of policies that will be truly appalling and quite wicked, of that I have no doubt, much like his predecessors in office in that respect. As the global economy continues to come unglued, everything Obama does to deal with the mounting crises will in fact make things worse. Civil liberties will be hammered, all in the name of 'fairness', and the flood of regulations pertaining to every aspect of economic life will grow into a drowning ocean.

And that is actually the good news.

Why? Because in truth the Republicans under John "I support the bailout" McCain would scarcely have done much better. The economic global meltdown is only just starting to roll: if you think the sub-prime mortgage crisis was the biggie, just wait until you see the fallout from the fun and frolics of the impending mess in other areas, such as debt swaps. This is all going to get worse, a lot worse, and Obama is going to do absolutely everything to dig the holes deeper. Looking back on this period ten to twenty years from now, the Republicans crying into their beer tonight will be saying "thank Christ it was not us in office then".

The lesser evil is not going to win this time and much as it may not seem that way now... or any time soon I suspect... in the long run this has a far far better chance of leading to the rebirth of a genuine pro-liberty, pro-market political culture, something which the gradual incremental surrender of recent times made impossible (such as the 'pragmatic voting' of people who want a smaller state for Republican candidates who ended up growing the regulatory state).

Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.

Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.

Blimey, those Atlas Shrugged themes keep on coming. Glenn Reynolds has a collection of reader thoughts about how, assuming Obama or for that matter, McCain wins, entrepreneurial vigour will be hit by any rise in taxes, particularly things like capital gains tax. Obama wants to raise CGT, which would be damaging to the US equity market, hence pension savings, not to mention curb new business formation. Way to go, Barack! Even so, the idea of entrepreneurs consciously choosing to cut back on any business plans while they sit out the first year or two of a leftist presidency is striking. Small businessmen and women are not getting much attention from politcians right now. No surprise: small businesses are disruptive; they tend not to be much interested in screwing subsidies or other benefits out of the state and are consequently not widely chased for campaign contributions. For sure, now and again a politician might talk about "helping small businesses" but there is a sort of going-through-the-motions aspect to it which means the pols do not really care that much. Just ask Joe The Plumber.

It is easy, in the current fears about the state of the world economy and what might be in store, to lose sight of what has actually been achieved in recent years. Fuelled by a mixture of education, supply-side tax cuts, a benign regulatory climate and the emergence of computers, small businesses in California's Silicon Valley and other parts of the world have driven much of the growth seen in the past 20-plus years. Sure, big businesses get on the front page of Time or The Economist, but the small, or not-even-yet-started firms are the ones that matter. If the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurs are held back, we are all in a lot of trouble.

Anway, unlike some people who seem to want to torture themselves by sitting up all night to watch the elections, I shall be heading off to watch the latest James Bond film. Friends tell me it is not as good as the last one, with too much head-spinning action and not enough characterisation or jokes. But watching Daniel Craig blasting along in his Aston surely has to be better than watching Mr Magoo or The Community Organiser from Chicago. It is a shame Mr Fleming could not have written a novel where a bunch of crooked politicians wind up in a pool of sharks. Maybe that should be the next plot. Perhaps I'll go ahead and write it.

Many of you will remember that back before the Democratic primary I was one of those who argued for a term of Hillary to help the Republicans understand that small government, liberty minded people won't vote for the lesser of two evils indefinitely. My goal was and is always long term and I think four years of Hillary would have been a Carteresque setup for a popular swing in the direction of personal liberty and small government.

Three factors I didn't anticipate have changed the dynamic since then. Any one of them would be an argument against that plan but, taken together, they add up to a veto.

First: Obama is not Hillary. Not by a long shot. Hillary is a fairly typical opportunist politician who thinks socialist programs have a place in a free society. She is badly mistaken but not a serious threat to America itself. I think she is at the core an American citizen before she is a 'Citizen of the World'. She tests the winds of American public opinion and that public could survive and learn from a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Obama is a cipher. He is like a Russian matryoshka doll. Nobody except perhaps his closest associates know what is at the core. The best estimate is to look at his friends and mentors and what their values are. That topic has been thoroughly discussed and some reasonable people place him solidly in a group of hard core totalitarians. If we ignore his promises shifting like smoke on the wind, his closest core group seems to be fired by hatred and revenge against America in general and the US Constitution in particular. Certainly that is what his confidants and advisers (and wife) say in public.

Second: Palin is not Romney or Giuliani or any of the other candidates that looked likely to be on the ticket with McCain. She is the most recognizably small-government, libertarian leaning candidate on a major party ticket certainly since Reagan, I think since Goldwater. She has proven her credibility with the trail of bodies in her wake. I have no doubt that she was offered any amount of inducements to turn a blind eye toward corrupt associates. She is an articulate defender of federalism and seems to be the only person outside of a few legal scholars that understands the nature and history of the role the Vice President of the United States has as the President of the Senate. I suspect that, as corrupt as this Senate unquestionably is, she may go into history as the one who took that role back to its constitutional purpose. Would that she leaves a similar trail of bodies in the Senate; it is certainly a target rich environment. Just for the record, the last President pro tempore was Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the current President pro tempore is Senator Robert 'King of Pork' Byrd. If elected V.P. she will have the Constitutional authority to take over that role. If she does and leaves as big of an imprint on the Senate as they have, we're in for a good time; buy popcorn. Don't for a minute underestimate her potential to seriously upset the apple cart pork barrel.

Regarding the emotionally charged 'libertarians' attacking Palin, anybody who is holding out for a vehement hard core atheist, isolationist, big "L" Libertarian to be in the top spot is detached from reality in other ways too. I am amazed by all of these alleged libertarians attacking Palin for her personal beliefs while ignoring her political principles. They quite obviously don't hold to even the basic first principle of individual liberty. Even the advocates for small government and personal liberty who are more tolerant of alternative lifestyle choices (like religion) must realize that a candidate for Vice President who is a moderate, small "L" libertarian is absolutely the best we can do as a first step.

Third: The clincher. The economic turmoil boiling right now is not unprecedented. The last time it happened on this scale, the crash started on a Republican president's watch and resulted in the New Deal, schemes for packing the Supreme Court to better destroy Constitutional restraints and, ultimately, in an invitation to fascist and communist governments to have a go at world dominance. Roosevelt needed an amendment to change the court system. Obama doesn't. Also remember, after four years of the worst of the depression's misery, FDR was reelected by a landslide. Why should it be any different with Obama? This crash, which is an inevitable and substantial correction of regulatory market tampering, is coming right at the most critical phase of an election cycle. It could have come earlier or later, but with the Schumeresque assistance of the MSM it is timed perfectly to trigger an anti free market landslide. It places (Republican) President Bush in the role of (Republican) President Hoover. Under an Obama presidency, it is certain not only that the crash will be far worse than it has to be, but that it will be blamed entirely on 'the free market policies of President Bush'. This is absurd in so many ways, but do any of you doubt it? Electing Obama will be taken as a clear message that Hoover/Bush Republican 'free market' policies are at fault and forever discredited. Electing FDR/Obama (with potentially a super majority in congress) could do for free markets what the Hindenburg did for airships. How apropos that the Hindenburg was destroyed by the incendiary paint job but for decades the blame was wrongly placed on the technology that did the actual lifting. Obama, the Democrats in Congress and the MSM arm of the Democratic party would lock in the perception that free markets caused all of this. At least McCain won't deliberately try to make things worse so that he can blame Bush, the Republicans and free trade.

Another reason that didn't make my top three is that already 43% of American 'tax payers' pay no taxes. We are getting dangerously close to the point where the people who net more off of government outnumber the people who pay more into it. If we cross that threshold of voters taking versus voters paying, it is a point of no return. It appears certain that we will pass that point early in an Obama administration. Probably before mid-terms. Two years could be too long. It may not matter if the RNC learns its lesson.

Dizzy, of Dizzy Thinks fame, recently made an interesting prediction, concerning the attitude of Brits towards the USA:

If Barack Obama becomes President-Elect next week, don't expect any of the snide anti-american Brits, Aussie and others to change their tune. They've had a hate figure in Bush for the past eight years, and I don't doubt that Barack Obama will become an equal hate figure within a short amount time.

I do doubt this. I think that much anti-Americanism is really anti- a particular part of America, and this hatred is felt with equal strength by other parts of America. President Bush, after all, is not only hated in Britain. Many Americans hate him too. And Obama is from a very different part of America to the part that gave us President Bush. Obama is from one of the parts that hates President Bush.

I recall the Clinton years. Had the (very large) part of Britain that now hates Bush wanted to hate Clinton, it would have had at least as much to work with as it has had with Bush. But it didn't want to hate Clinton, and it didn't. Likewise, it won't want to hate Obama, and it won't.

Well, we shall probably soon see.

It is becoming increasing difficult for me not to concur with Paul Marks's ahead-of-the-curve branding of MARXIST upon the much kissed behind of Barack Obama. At the very least, his political compass swings disturbingly left on economic issues - to a degree I was not aware of. Previously, I could dismiss his "spread the wealth around" comment that arose from the infamous encounter with "Joe the Plumber" as a spot of ill-chosen populist rhetoric in a campaign unusually heavy on populist rhetoric - which, by the standards of US Presidential elections, is saying something. However, the rediscovered 2001 radio interview in which Obama explicitly advocated redistribution of wealth suggests to me that Americans ought to take him at his word when he talked of spreading the wealth around in that Ohio driveway.

Of course, this is electoral kryptonite in the USA, and the Obama campaign's denials came hard and fast. Quoting from a CBS News article:

“This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

“In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.”

That is technically correct, but Burton is lying by omission. It is indeed true that Obama did not say in the interview that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth. However, what Burton neglects to mention is that he said they should not because they wouldn't be any good at it and that going through the legislature would be much more effective. He also went on to say that the civil rights movement's greatest tragedy was that it failed to massively redistribute wealth to the victims of racial discrimination in the USA. This 2001 recording of Obama advocating a redistributionist policy has convinced me that Obama's "spread the wealth around" remark to Joe the Plumber was a genuine insight into his inner beliefs - beliefs that he would not dare expose to the American public who, by and large, fundamentally oppose them. In 2001, Obama stated that the legislature would be a better tool for redistributing the wealth of others to black people. Then, he was in his mid to late 30s, an age when most people's political views have solidified. In 2008, one wonders if he now believes the executive would be even more efficacious? It is not such a stretch.

As for the Obama camp's deeply duplicitous claim that the 2001 interview was deliberately misinterpreted by the Right, well, why break the habit of a campaign and start being honest? I am not denying that the McCain campaign has, on several occasions, twisted the truth out of all recognition over a number of issues. But at least they don't cloak themselves in self-righteous, holier-than-thou fervour while doing so. If I had a vote in this election, the constant and largely unchallenged spectacle of Obama and his camp trumpeting their integrity - whilst they dissemble and weasel their way to November 4th - would be as good as any motivation for me to pull the lever for McCain.

(2001 Obama interview and CBS article both sourced from Drudge)

Occasionally, whenever one of us Samizdata scribes writes about events in the UK, such as loss of civil liberties, or the latest financial disasters perpetrated by the government, or crime, or whatnot, there is sometimes a comment from an expatriate writer, or US citizen in particular, suggesting that we moaners should pack our bags, cancel the mail and come on over to America. Like Brian Micklethwait of this parish, I occasionally find such comments a bit annoying; it is not as if the situation in Jefferson's Republic is particularly great just now, although a lot depends on where you live (Texas is very different from say, Vermont or for that matter, Colorado).

But considering what might happen if Obama wins the White House and the Dems increase or retain their hold on Congress, I also wonder whether we might encounter the example of enterprising Americans coming to Britain, not the other way round. The dollar is rising against the pound, so any assets that are transferred from the US to Britain go further. Taxes are likely to rise quite a bit if The One gets in, although they are likely to rise in the UK too to pay for the enormous increase in public debt, even if the Tories win the next election in 2010.

Of course, this is an issue at the margins. If I were an American looking to get out of a left-tilting America, there are many other countries apart from Britain I would want to live in, not least because the weather here is generally lousy, you cannot defend yourself with deadly force, and the place is so crowded. Switzerland is likely to be popular for those who want to go to Europe; some East European states will be attractive. And there is the whole of Asia to consider, possibly even the better bits of Latin America. But do not be surprised to read of a steady exodus of Americans in the next few years, assuming Obama proves to be as bad as some reckon he is. We might hear the accents of the West Coast or New York on the London Underground and in the bars of the West End a bit more.

Update: Here's more on the collapse of the pound. At this rate, New Yorkers will be heading to London to do their Christmas shopping. Seriously, this shows that markets believe Brown has so badly mortgaged the UK economy on debt that Labour will try to turn on the money printing presses. And we know where that leads.

When reading on the internet about Islamic terrorism, commenters often mention that there is also terrorism by Christian fundamentalists in America, where there have been bombings of abortion clinics and shootings of abortion providers.

How prevalent is this form of American domestic terrorism? In recent years there have been round about 15,000 - 20,000 murders in total per year in the US. How many of these were of abortion providers?

Guess now. Scribble your answer down.

If you had asked me a few months ago I would have said three or four murders per year.

Considered over the last fifteen years I was overestimating somewhat. According to the best-known pro-abortion organisation in the US, NARAL Pro-Choice America,

Since 1993, seven clinic workers – including three doctors, two clinic employees, a clinic escort, and a security guard – have been murdered in the United States. Seventeen attempted murders have also occurred since 1991.

That figure comes from a document published in December 2007. So far as I know the figures have not changed since then.

However the phrasing "Since 1993 seven abortion clinic workers have been murdered in the United States" could be re-arranged, with equal truth, to say that "since 1998 no abortion clinic workers have been murdered in the United States."

The last such murder was ten years ago today.

When I first found out this fact I was surprised. Again and again I have read comments that assumed that this type of terrorism was less deadly than Islamic terrorism but was nonetheless a steadily lethal undercurrent of American life - a death here, a death there.

In the fight against any type of crime, no victory can ever be anything but temporary. The most you can ever say is that the trend is down. There have been several attempted murders of abortion providers during the last ten years and the fact that none of them have succeeded must owe something to mere chance. As has often been observed, the terrorist only has to get lucky once. However it does now seem probable there will be zero murders of abortion providers during the presidency of George W Bush. I doubt that he will be given much credit for this, though if the trend had been otherwise he would certainly have been given the discredit.

Greg Nemitz is running a write-in campaign for the Idaho 2nd Congressional District:

I'm Gregory Nemitz. I'm a conservative Republican running for Congress as an official Write-In candidate for Idaho's 2nd Congressional District.

Your Congressman, Mike Simpson, recently voted twice for the $810 billion bailout bill. You also need to know that the liberal Democrat candidate said she would have voted FOR the bailout.

I have absolutely no idea if we have any readers in that district, but if you are one, check out his campaign video.

Greg is an acquaintance of mine through aerospace circles. We first crossed paths on the internet a couple decades ago and I have even met him in person a few times.

Fox News asks the question: "Will Obama's $604M Haul Kill Off Public Financing?" Ask any Libertarian and I am sure the answer you will hear is: "I certainly hope so!".

No Libertarian presidential candidate has ever accepted stolen funds for their campaign. Perhaps the attempts to regulate political speech have simply reached the point at which even a Socialist Democrat recognizes they are better off not accepting State controlled financing.

If the Republicans stay out of the trough as well four years now, perhaps we will at least get the State out of campaign financing.

Poor naive George W. Bush! For all his shambolic presidency, his dreadful mistakes, and the horrors of aggressive imperialism, his last couple of months in office could end up being the most disastrous for the world.

Bloomberg reports:

The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election.

President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement after meeting yesterday that they will continue pressing for coordination to address "the challenges facing the global economy.''

The initial summit will seek "agreement on principles of reform needed to avoid a repetition and assure global prosperity in the future,'' and later meetings "would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles,'' the statement said.

Just how bad this could be is already showing. The report continues:

Sarkozy and Barraso are pressing Bush for a G8 agenda that includes stiffer regulation and supervision for cross-border banks, a global "early warning'' system and an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund. Talks may also encompass tougher regulations on hedge funds, new rules for credit-rating companies, limits on executive pay and changing the treatment of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Monaco.

Just what has the continuation of the OECD nations' campaign to plunder smaller states and institute globally uniform (high) taxation got to do with the market crash? Nothing. Executive pay? Irrelevant, too, save in the politics of envy. Mainstream banks, not hedgies, were the ones that crashed after playing iffy games with CDOs, and governments helped pump-up house prices - with enthusiasm. Where this agenda comes in is as an opportunity to kick the resented "Anglo-Saxon" model of capitalism while it is down - even, and especially, in those places where it is not down yet. (Are we missing Commissioner Mandelson yet?)

Mr Bush has lost the thread entirely if he really thinks a transnational "reform" of the financial system can do other than damage "free markets, free enterprise and free trade". He may have a patchy record on liberty, and a bad record on limited government. His guests in November will have no interest in either. They will tempt him (have tempted him) with the mantle of world saviour, and will try to get him to bind his successors. We shall have to hope that his successor, either one of whom would be well to the economic right of the self-selected 'international community', depressingly enough, is more wily and far-sighted.

Meanwhile, where is there left to run?

I like Fridays these days, because on Friday, David Thompsom does another clutch of Friday ephemera, and this Friday's ephemera included three links to a black guy named Zo, explaining why he will be voting McCain/Palin. When I started listening, I kept thinking, there's a snag. When is the ambush coming? I don't know quite why I thought this, but I did. Cognitive dissonance, I imagine. Guys who talk like that just do not think like that. Many of them hardly think at all, except about show business concerning which they are highly knowledgeable.

Another favourite blog-ephemerist is Lynn Sislo (sp?), who will not be voting McCain/Palin, in fact in this posting, she includes a link to a report about the equal and opposite phenomenon to Zo. But best of all, in a more recent Lynn S posting, there is a link to an amazing time-map showing the growth of Walmart. Capitalism at its formidable best (talking of which, have you heard that Buffet is now buying shares?). It is an object lesson in starting slow, getting it right and then – and only then - conquering the universe. Well, not the universe, yet, just America. But give it time. Highly recommended.

Through the miracles of modern technology, Bob Barr will be delivering live replies to the questions put to those 'other parties' candidates tonight. You can read more here and get the link for the live broadcast. As it will be at 9pm US eastern time, I will probably not be watching it from here!

Last night I attended a Libertarian Alliance talk/discussion evening at the Evans household, the talk being given by Antoine Clarke. Here is what Antoine said in an email about his talk beforehand. I learned several interesting things which smarter people than me doubtless already realised but which were new to me. The most interesting thing I learned, assuming Antoine was right about it, was that after the first mega-billion dollar bale-out package failed to be agreed by the politicians of the USA, the market immediately went up. But then, as soon as a revised bale-out package, containing more bribes, was agreed, the market went down. "We should do nothing" is a tough political sell, but the smart move, said Antoine. And McCain should have gone with what, according to Antoine, were apparently his instincts and torpedoed the whole damn bale-out operation, and thereby clung onto a chance of being the next President of the USA.

My take on this is that there is a crowding out effect going on here, big time. I trust we are all familiar with this idea. It says that big government plans of any kind not only do harm because the government plans fail and all the wealth it wastes on them is wasted, but, and arguably even worse, because people with better plans in the same line of business are frightened into inactivity. In this spirit, I recall the disgraced former Tory MP Neil Hamilton once saying at a meeting I attended long ago that the money that an earlier Labour government had spent on buying up and ruining the British motor industry would have done a great deal less harm if it had just been put into several thousand suitcases and chucked into the sea (I daresay this would have been good for inflation also). That way, saner motor car entrepreneurs could have gone to work making cars and car stuff in better ways than then prevailed, unimpeded by the fear of great walls of government "investment" screwing up their plans, bidding up the prices of all the people and all the things they wanted to hire and buy and put to good use.

Well, now, exactly the same thing seems to be happening in the banking industry. Were I one of the immensely rich and immensely sensible banking people who had (a) seen this crash coming and cashed out at roughly the right time, and who now (b) has plans to gobble up failed banks and reorganise them along more sensible lines, I would now, despite all my hopes of profitable new business, be sitting on my hands, waiting for all the government plans to do their immense damage before I went wading in and god chewed up too. Only when these government plans had become an obvious failure, and the politicians had just totally given up, would I be ready to move in and sort things out. Only when the politicians lapse into inactivity, which for a brief shining moment looked as if it might happen straight away, does economic optimism, among the people willing to back their optimism with money, reassert itself.

But, as I like to say from time to time when blogging, what do I know? I am no expert on the banking business, and as I say, I only realised this thing about the ups and downs of the world's stock exchanges when Antoine Clarke pointed it out to me last night. So, did Antoine get this story right? And have I explained this phenomenon, even part of it, even approximately right? Tomorrow afternoon, Antoine, I, and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings will be getting together to record a conversation about all this, so comments now would be especially welcome.

I just want to remind any of our readers in Massachusetts to help keep up the pressure for the initiative to end the income tax. The time until eleection day is running out. Money and publicity are the things our folk need so get out there and do your damndest to assist them. The opposition are raising large amounts of money from the people with their snouts deepest into the swill and are doing their best to convince Massachusetts voters to keep feeding them money.

If you are unfamiliar with this ballot initiaitive, or even if you know all about it, you should find this episode of the Glenn and Helen Show is of interest.

Instapundit has been doing yeoman service in covering it and I hope the bar conversations I had with Glenn on this subject back in May had a little bit to do with it!

What does Bob Barr have to say about the latest debate? "Booorrrrrinngggg!" But then, I knew that ahead of time and did not even bother to follow either it or any of the predictable coverage and pontification about nothing.

If you are interested in Bob's take on the DC feeding frenzy, you can go here to listen.

I'm at the point I was at a month ago: the two tickets consist one one old guy who frankly should have been put to pasture, two leftist asshats who belong in prison, and a lady who's the only one of the four who's worth a damn

- Commenter Sunfish.

Both candidates supported the contemptible bailout. Indeed Senator McCain made a special point of supporting a Federal buy up of mortgages so that "people could pay at the new values and stay in their homes". As the securities which the United States government is buying up are based on mortgages this is at least "logical" I suppose.

However, there were economic policy differences:

Senator Obama told some truly absurd lies, for example he claimed he would cut more spending than he would increase (in reality he would increase Federal government spending by close to a trillion Dollars on top of the various bailouts), and Senator Obama also repeated his lie about cutting taxes for 95% of the population - a lie because he treats welfare payments as 'tax cuts'.

But I found the differences on health care policy most interesting.

Senator Obama denounced the very idea of buying health cover over State lines - competition is evil and would allow wicked places to attract business by having less regulation "as Delaware does with insurance and credit cards" perhaps Senator Obama should tell Senator Biden how evil the State of Delaware is.

Clearly the chance of competition being allowed to reduced health costs under a President Obama is zero.

Instead there are to be mandates and regulations. given the absurd notion that lack of regulation, rather than credit bubble finance and the government backing of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and ACORN, is the source of all of America's problems... with fines to make small business enterprises give health cover to their employees. Senator Obama refused to say what size these fines on individuals and business enterprises would be.

William Rees-Mogg wonders, in his Times (of London) column today, whether Barack Obama has it in him to be the next FDR. I sincerely hope not. Let us consider the following data on unemployment rates during the 1930s:

1930: 8.7%
1931: 15.9%
1932: 23.6%
1933: 24.9%
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.1.%
1936:16.9%
1937:14.3%
1938:19%
1939:17.2%
1940:14.6%

(Source: US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, as quoted by Thomas J. Lorenzo, in "How Capitalism Saved America, page 180-181),

With a set of figures like that, perhaps it is no wonder that hagiographers of FDR prefer to focus more on his record as a war leader these days. If Obama does share any of FDR's traits for sheer deviousness on the economic front, we have trouble on our hands.

It is amazing how certain myths persist. Back in the early 1980s, when I was doing my history A-levels, one of my teachers gave me the whole 'heroic' portrait of FDR. I suspect this is still the default position of most history textbooks today.

Here is a press release on the event scheduled for tomorrow:

Date: Saturday, October 4th
Time: 12:00 Noon - Doors open. Speeches begin at 1 p.m. sharp.
Location: Faneuil Hall in Boston
How to get there: PDF
More on Faneuil Hall: here

You're going to kick yourself if you miss this Rally to END the income tax.

Maybe you heard the announcements and chatter about this YES on 1, END the state income tax rally on WTKK radio. Or heard Howie Carr asking you to come. Or read about it in the Globe or the Herald or one of the dozens of other newspapers spreading the word.

Sam Adams helped launch the American Revolution from the stage of Faneuil Hall. James Otis won hundreds to the cause of Independence and Liberty at Faneuil Hall.

Come to this rally. Join these champions of liberty. Help rally support for ENDing the income tax this Election Day.

We need you to come. We need you to bring a friend or neighbor. It'll be exciting - and fun!

Get a look at our speakers:

* Michael Graham, Talk Show Host on WTKK, author, and stand-up comedian.

* Me. Carla Howell. Co-founder and chair of the Committee For Small Government.

* Kamal Jain, government budget analyst, will show you the tax money

* Matt Kinnaman, columnist, former candidate and Republican Party Committee Member

* Keith McCormic, Republican candidate for State Senate in the Hampshire & Franklin District

* Ted Tripp, for Citizens for Limited Taxation

* Cynthia Stead, a small business owner and weekly columnist for the Cape Cod Times and former Massachusetts Legislative and Administrative Aid

* Dr. Chuck Ormsby is a mathematics professor, a columnist, and a two-term member of the North Andover School Committee.

* John Cunningham, small businessman and tax-cutting candidate for U.S. Congress against Democrat Ed Markey

These speakers support you. They are campaigning for you. To END the income tax this November 4th.

Celebrate and Rally with these terrific champions of ENDing the income tax.

Share their laughter.

Savor their passion for lightening the tax burden of 3,400,000 Massachusetts workers and taxpayers.

Delight in their quips and insights into the huge, immediate, direct benefits to taxpayers of ENDing the income tax.

Let them share in your values. Let them meet you.

Please plan to come tomorrow. Put this in your calendar. Or your Blackberry. Or on a prominently placed Post-It Note to remind you.

Date: Saturday, October 4th
Doors Open: Noon to 1 p.m. Come early to get your seat.
Speeches begin: 1 p.m. sharp and run until approximately 2:40
Location: Faneuil Hall in Boston

Please join us. Please come.

Small government is possible,

Carla Howell

It sounds like fun, and if by chance you get thirsty during the speeches, there is a great old pub called the Green Dragon not far away where the Boston Tea Party was purportedly planned...

I have always considered the US Drug Enforcement Agency a bunch of anti-liberty and dangerously out of control houligans (out done only by members of BATF), but this ICE activity just leaves me slack jawed.

I think some ICE and perhaps DEA officers are due for prosecution as accessories to murders. Twelve of them, in fact.

PS: While you are over at Reason.... the second half of the Counter Debate video is now available.

The Cato Institute blog makes this observation:

Some commentators are suggesting that the McCain campaign has panicked about Sarah Palin’s appeal, trying to cram her head with policy-wonkery and then hiding her in a closet when that didn’t work. Let Palin be Palin, they say — let her show her authentic self, the gun-totin’, family-raisin’, reformist governor that Alaskans love. Good idea. Let’s start with the bailout. Surely a rugged individualist reformer from way outside the Beltway is champing at the bit to denounce this $700 billion bailout for Wall Street insiders cooked up by Washington insiders behind closed doors, without public hearings, with the unanimous support of the mainstream media. Let ‘er rip, Governor Palin. Tell the Wall Street bankers that when a small business makes bad decisions in Wasilla, it goes out of business, and the same rules should apply to large businesses in Manhattan. That’s the Sarah Palin conservatives say America would love.

I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to see the reaction if she did give the bailout the finger, though. Judging by some of the media coverage of her and the credit crunch, large parts of the MSM press would lose their minds completely.

The first portion of Reason's Counter Debate is now available. I quite enjoyed listening to Bob Barr pointing out the economic nonsense of the two 'major' party candidates.

My impression from the debate is I agree with Bob Barr on his economics and McCain on the war that is coming to an end. It is, however, economics which look to be the big worry right now. It is a shame Bob Barr was not invited. He would have injected a little bit of capitalist free-market sense into the event.

I have heard a bit of backchannel news from the network infrastructure guys in North America. It appears that the text of the Bailout giveaway went up and the government server got hit by the Slashdot effect. It became unreachable due to the huge volume of traffic caused by people attempting to get their hands on the Reid-Pelosi financial free for all bill. From what I have heard, this is not just pork... it is the whole damn pig sty.

Bob Barr will be at Reason's office in DC tonight at 20:00 Eastern Time. You can watch here for a link that will allow you to join the event. If you are in DC, you might want to plan on dropping in for the live event.

The time at the Barr website says 9pm EST for the Counter-Debate now, which is 2100.

I went in search of funny quotes, like the one at the start of this posting, but instead found mostly sensible ones, like this (via here):

The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That's clearly not what happened here. The market is practically shouting at people, "Don't build something you can't afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore."

Instead the state "insurance" scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it's the government that's telling people that it's OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the "insurance."

And this (via here):

The CRA ...

That's Community Reinvestment Act.

... forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound. Under the CRA, banks must convince a set of bureaucracies that they are not engaging in discrimination, a charge that the act encourages any CRA-recognized community group to bring forward. Otherwise, any merger or expansion the banks attempt will likely be denied. But what counts as discrimination?

According to one enforcement agency, "discrimination exists when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants." Note that these "arbitrary or outdated criteria" include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history - the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.

And this (via here):

If we really wanted advance warning (and a chance to mitigate) the next financial crisis, we wouldn't be banning short-selling; we'd be legalizing insider trading.

Now there's a thought. All those quotes are from Americans, about America. But it is at least as bad here. Today, on my wanderings in London, I came across a headline in a free newspaper that went Darling declares war on City's risk culture.

What new horrors of intervention will be inflicted upon the British economy by this dying government of ours, in its dying months, as they forget about the country as a whole and concentrate on trying to keep the loyalty of their core vote?

I have been hearing that Sarah Palin was hacked and her private email put up on wikileaks. In addition some folk say they can not reach wikileaks and the FBI had shut it down as part of an investigation. Others say it is temporarily unreachable simply because so many people are trying to download. This has apparently been under discussion on SlashDot.

I am just in the door from lunch and that is the entirety of what I know that is not from the tinhat brigade. I have checked none of it and am unlikely to do so as I am expecting a call from New York any minute about some engineering work.

If the FBI is in the picture, I hope the crackers behind it get sent up river for a long time... and that they enjoy man-love from Islamic extremist prisoners.

I would say the same if they hacked Joe Biden's mail box: "T'ain't no diff'r'nce to me." A crime is still a crime.

Our suit has been filed in Texas.

You may remember my earlier article about this: both the Republicans and the Democrats missed the legal filing deadline in Texas. Unlike their suit against us in Pennsylvania, this is not a simple nuisance suit. There appears to be a clear legal issue.

The ruling parties have long gotten away with a one-sided set of ballot access laws. Laws are enforced against us but under the same circumstances they get a wink and a nudge and a pass.

Times change.

I had long intended to write a post on the issues thrown up by the Max Mosley case. Basically I was going to ask the readers of the post to help me come up with a principled justification for thinking what I do think, namely that the News of the World did not have the right to sneak a camera into Mosley's commercial sex session and yet the New York Times did have the right to expose Elliot Spitzer's commercial sex session. "Private citizen versus politician" looked like it was giving me the answer I wanted, but the post kept off veering into the issue of the implied contract of confidentiality between prostitute and client. As it happens, Spitzer was not betrayed by his prostitute but what if he had been?

I strongly disapprove of adultery. I disapprove, though much less strongly, of fornication. (I confess that I take a certain transgressive pleasure in writing that last sentence on Samizdata.) I strongly approve of people having the political right to commit adultery and fornicate, including the right to employ prostitutes or be a prostitute. Did I really want an outcome whereby a person became fair game for being spied upon and betrayed simply because he was a politician?

Then along came this Jill Greenberg thing and made me want, no burn, to write an almost completely different post. Shame to waste a good title, though.

Some readers may be angered by my comparison of Senator McCain trusting a photographer to deal with him honestly with Mr Mosley trusting the prostitutes to deal with him honestly. There is no need to be offended. If the thought of the shabby treatment that Mosley suffered made me uneasy, the thought of the treatment that McCain suffered made me... let me find words... made me finally start to want him to win.

I had long thought I ought to want him to win. After all, the policies pursued by the President of the United States have an effect beyond that country, and if Senator Obama becomes President he will pursue policies of socialism and appeasement. Yet I had never warmed to McCain. Yes, I respected his courage. Yes, I appreciated his wisdom in choosing a reasonable person with some knowledge of the world to be his running mate rather than a man who thought it might be a good response to the attacks of September 11 2001 to send a no-strings-attached cheque for two hundred million dollars to Iran because he thought the Iranians were Arabs and the Arabs needed to feel reassured. But no, all these sensible arguments were not enough to get me over the barrier of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech, and other discontents.

It may not be sensible, it may wear off, but today this was enough:

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The thought of the sophisticated little simper with which she must have said those words reached clear across the Atlantic Ocean and put me in a rage. I do hope it has the same effect, only more so, on many Americans, and particularly on American swing voters. Part of the reason I hope this is that the affair is unlikely to do Ms Greenberg any net harm with the other sophisticates she hangs out with: any loss of custom from her respectable clients (such as the unfortunate Atlantic magazine) is likely to be more than compensated by the prospect of, as the late Bernard Levin once said of the British counterparts of Greenberg and her circle, "every poodlefaker in the business swooning, cheering and commissioning." So the only way I can envisage her paying a price is to hope that she will at least experience chagrin at the thought of her role in the election of President McCain.

I may not get my way. The odds, they say, are even. Yet what a fool Greenberg is to tempt fate when the contest is indeed so close, and what fools are the substantial numbers of commenters to early reports of the story who supported her action. Do they really not see that when they mock McCain for trusting Greenberg they suggest that people like them are not to be trusted? That when they boast of having manipulated the media they confirm that they do manipulate the media? Do they not see that when they fault McCain or the Atlantic for being so naive as to employ a Democrat as photographer, they give the voters reason to believe that they might be naive to employ a Democrat as President?

In this post I have twice admitted to non-respectable habits of thought. In the case of Mosley and Spitzer I had decided upon my opinion first and only then looked for reasons to justify it. In the case of McCain and Greenberg I wished for the most powerful office in the world to be filled by one man rather than another merely to make a spiteful woman sorry. Stuff it, I bet most people think like that most of the time, and sometimes I think that these instinctive decisions have the silent sum of many unconscious observations behind them.

Here is a small conjecture concerning the claim that secret racism may be causing US pollsters to overestimate Barack Obama's true support, which I have most recently been reading about in this article.

Party elders also believe the Obama camp is in denial about warnings from Democratic pollsters that his true standing is four to six points lower than that in published polls because of hidden racism from voters - something that would put him a long way behind Mr McCain.

Maybe the concealment is real, and maybe some of what is being concealed is indeed racism, but maybe some of it is something else. What if a lot of people secretly oppose Obama being the President for good non-racist reasons, but fear of getting involved in arguments which will involve them being accused of racism, even just thought to be racists, by annoying pollsters? Although not Obama supporters, such people just say "I will vote Obama" to avoid even the hint of such unpleasantness. They will not be voting Obama, because they think he is a vacuous windbag, from Chicago, too thin, dodgy on Iraq, or because they don't care for Biden, whatever. They will be voting for McCain for similarly varied reasons, other than McCain's mere whiteness. But they fear that the pollsters they are talking to might suspect otherwise, and who needs that grief?

For that to make sense, it is necessary to believe that people care what stupid strangers think of them. But surely, at least some do. I certainly care, a bit, what people whom I hardly rate at all think of me. I don't like being cursed for my lack of generosity by drunkards in the street, or shouted at by people who are clearly rather unstable, or denounced for bumping into someone by someone who actually bumped into me. I don't like it when a mere fleeting expression on the face of such a person even suggests such critical thoughts on their part.

None of this matters to me very much. Such slights are very quickly forgotten But then again, nor would lying about my true voting intentions to some annoying pollster in what is, after all, supposed to be a secret ballot.

Remember that merely replying that "most people" would never think like this is no answer, although a sadly frequent error when all that is being surmised is that a few people might be persuaded to act differently by an oddity in their environment, although not a majority, and certainly not everybody. This is a surmised marginal effect, influencing a few but ignored by most, like a small change in the price of a chocolate bar. To dismiss what I am suggesting, you would have to believe either that nobody thinks thus, or that there are other concerns – what concerns? - that might cancel out such tendencies.

Just a thought. No link, because I have not seen anyone else say such a thing, although I'm sure plenty have. If not, I am sure that some have thought this.

More US election speculations from me here, which has links to more. I am flattered that the mighty Guido Fawkes thought this piece worth linking to in his Seen Elsewhere section, although blink and you would miss that, because Guido sees a lot.

UDATED UPDATE Sunday evening. The link chaos of the final paragraph is now all corrected. Posting errors by me have been cleaned up and my own blog is now back in business. Apologies for all the confusion, and apologies also for spelling apologies wrongly in the previous version of this update.

What women, if any, have been part of a US Presidential team garnering a least one vote in the Electoral College?

Tony Suruda got it: It was the LP ticket of John Hospers and Toni Nathan in 1972. She took one electoral vote, making her (as far as we know) the first woman to ever do so.

Ed King has added the second: The Democrat's ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 with 13 electoral votes. They came from Minnesota and DC.

Now some more LP triivia: What state was the vote from?

Sam Duncan got it. It was indeed Virginia.

Now, What was the back story behind the vote? (I will admit that even my memory is a bit hazy on the details).

For extra credit, since I do not know the answer: Are we correct that she was the first? This is perhaps more a James Taranto type question since he is an expert on US Presidential elections.

Bob Barr and Wayne Allen Root have offered the LP Vice-Presidential slot to Ron Paul.

The question is: "Will he take it?"

If I were a betting man, I'd give it 1 in 4, but the very thought of bringing all those Paul supporters over to our side is enough to set a Libertarian's heart a flutter!

Last night I was on my weekly international phone call to my 'boss' to discuss progress on various agreements, proposals and such of our small Wyoming aerospace company. Before signing off we got into a discussion on Sarah Palin's background and future prospects. Jim suggested I read his article in the Telegraph. I might add we both agree that 'win.lose or draw', she is now a force to be reckoned with in the GOP and will probably make her own Presidential run in the next decade.

I expect many of you will find it of interest also.

I see that Gordon Brown has come out in favour of Mr Obama winning the White House.

For Mr McCain, this must be a hopeful sign. As Guido Fawkes likes to point out, Gordon "Profiles in Courage" Brown has a track record of cursing any cause he attaches himself to.

Of course, I can see why Brown might relate to The One. Both of them have never done a stroke of work outside of politics in their lives.

I am sure there are some strong Republican supporters who read us who do not understand how we could even compare the two candidates and say they are not all that different. Over the last few days I have been tossing around in my mind what exactly I want out of a President. This is not meant to be entirely a Libertarian view although it obviously is mostly that.

Issue	John McCain	Barack Obama
Repeal parts of Patriot Act	No	No
Repeal RealId	No	No
Repeal McCain-Feingold	No	No
Repeal part or all of Sarbanes Oxley	No	No
End Domestic spying	No	No
Respect States Rights On Medical Marijuana	No	Maybe?
Respect States Rights in general	No	No
1st Amendment record	Loathsome	Unknown
2nd Amendmen record	Bad	Worse
Understands Capitalism	No	No
Understands Constitution	No	No
Strong defense	Yes	Maybe
Decrease Spending	No	No
Decrease Size of Government	No	No
Space Policy	Okay	Excellent

As you can see, both candidates come out dismally on pretty much everything I am interested in. About the only exception to the overall grimness is that I know personally one of the key space policy folk on the Obama team so I know that area at least would be dealt with competently.

More important, would a U.S. government default indeed be "the end of the world"? .....One could plausibly argue just the opposite. In fact, a firm refusal to bail out the mortgage agencies would establish a strong barrier between U.S. Treasuries and the fortunes of not only the mortgage agencies themselves but also the myriad other institutions that we can imagine receiving similar treatment. Wouldn't that in fact help maintain confidence in U.S. government securities?

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

Similar arguments, of course, apply to state bailouts of other institutions, such as UK mortgage lender Northern Rock, for instance.

Thanks to Reason's Hit & Run blog for the pointer.

"Vetted for fifteen minutes"

So runs the subheading in the "Lexington" article about Sarah Palin in this week's Economist magazine. A choice, the Economist says, which raises serious questions about John McCain's judgement... and the rest of the normal left media establishment spin.

The line is a lie, as Governor Palin was closely vetted by the McCain campaign over an extended period of time.

No doubt some clever-clever person will come up with the excuse that if I read the small print of the article (or read it up side down and in a mirror) then... However, I am not interested in excuses, the intention of the article is plain. The intention is to use lies and distortions to undermine any challenge to the "liberal" left power elite.

As for the source of the "Vetted for fifteen minutes" lie. The New York Times of course (Joe Stalin's best friend in the Western World). A cynic might question how close the New York Times is to the McCain campaign, but the Economist would denounce such evil right wing cynics.

Bob Bidinotto has an excellent appraisal of John McCain. It should serve as a corrective to some of the hopes that people may have about him after his - in my view - wise choice of Sarah Palin as his VP choice.

John McCain is a decent man of great character, with a wonderful sense of life and a courageous spirit. But he is no intellectual and certainly no philosopher; ideologically, he is very much a mixed bag. He is governed by his feelings, which are shaped in turn by his personal code -- the code of national service, of "Country First." Just as his notion of "selfishness" falsely packages legitimate self-interest with narcissistic self-indulgence, so too does his notion of "Country First" falsely package legitimate patriotism and "free enterprise" with the idea of individual sacrifice to the state.

In this incoherence, John McCain perfectly embodies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American society: the clash between its conventional morality of self-sacrifice, and its political-economic system of individualism and profit-oriented capitalism. The fact that so many conservatives also try to square the circle of these logically incompatible premises means that McCain's candidacy is dragging the Republican Party significantly to the left in its basic philosophy.

I can also recommend Matt Welch's recent book about McCain. For all that the senator from Arizona might like to claim the mantle of a maverick, he is not quite that, and Welch points out that McCain is a different animal in certain respects from his Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater.

That is not to say that there is a not much to admire about McCain, especially his obvious courage under captivity. But like Bob I really worry about McCain's version of "national greatness conservatism". Any politician that takes Teddy Roosevelt as a political idol should be treated warily. Roosevelt inflicted the monstrosity of anti-trust on the US, for example.

Bob comes to this conclusion:

On individualist philosophical grounds, then, we are left with the choice of supporting either a profoundly flawed representative of America's founding premises, or of supporting a candidate whose philosophy and every policy proposal are profoundly at odds with those premises. For me, that is no choice at all. (I leave aside the Libertarian candidacy of Bob Barr, who has zero chance of being elected; the only meaningful choice is between McCain and Obama.)

Something for the weekend:

The Republicans and their alter-ego Democrats have for decades used their control over the system to give Libertarians no end of grief on our ballot access campaigns. I remember one Libertarian pundit in the eighties commenting 'it is easier to get on the ballot in Nicaragua than it is in the United States'.

Their mis-use of power has become more and more egregious these last few years. I still keep tabs on Pennsylvania because that is where my absentee ballot goes. The last time I voted I had to return large parts of it blank because the LP was not on it. On top of that, Democrat Murta's people pulled some real low-life shenanigans to prevent our candidate in his district from running against him. I got the that story via private communications with the Pittsburgh LP of which I was a long ago member.

This year it is the Republicans taking the low road in Pennsylvania. I suspect we will defeat them in court there, but I and most LP supporters are not of the victim mentality. Simply responding to their efforts is just not satisfying enough.

Fortunately we have an opportunity to turn the tables on them in Texas. It seems both parties failed to deliver their papers to the appropriate authorities in Texas by the time of the legal deadline. This is Texas law. Had it been our party, we would have been shut out, no questions asked. move along now boy. We would have had no hope of getting on the ballot.

The Republicans and Democrats are different. They are the ruling class. Laws are made for us, not for them. So the Texas authorities have attempted to waffle around the problem. I am sure the Texas legislature will do whatever needs to be done to assure the McBama twins are on the ballot if they can get away with it.

Normally this would just be done behind the scenes in a 'gentlemanly arrangement'. But not this time. We are going to rock their boat and with some luck teach them the bitter taste of their own anti-democracy medicine.

I remember several years ago when I commented on 'having my right to vote stolen' in Pennsylvania, some one commented my vote was not stolen because I could always do a write in. So if by chance we block Obama and McCain from the ballot in Texas this year all you Republicans and Democrats should not be at all fussed about it.

After all... you can just write in your candidate.

The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a "libertarian". To which I would respond: "If only".

US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:

Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: "What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush's or Mr. McCain's philosophy."

After eight years of "no child left behind," Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON'T think government should solve?

I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.

Well quite.

So there are many women voters who do indeed want to vote for a women. Just as there are many black voters who want to vote for a black person. After all Senator Obama does not get 90%+ of the black vote because most of these people say to themselves "I really like Barack's interpretation of Karl Marx via Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, it is much better than the interpretation of ..."

I doubt that one voter in a hundred even knows that Senator Obama is a Marxist - certainly the mainstream media have not informed of this.

- Paul Marks

I do not bother to write articles attacking leftist stuff from openly leftist publications or broadcasters.

For example, it may irritate me that the BBC sneer at Sarah Palin as "close to the oil industry" when, in fact, the lady exposed corrupt links between oil and Alaska politics. And it may be annoying that the BBC sneers that Governor Palin made her speech with "her husband and children in tow", when it did not say that Senator Obama had "his wife and children in tow" when he made his speech. But the BBC is the BBC... it is a leftist broadcaster and its job is to present a leftist view of the world - although it is irritating that people are forced to pay for the BBC.

However, the Economist is different, it claims to be a free market magazine (sorry "newspaper") dedicated to rolling back the state - and it simply is not.

The latest example is the front cover story "Bring back the real McCain". When one turns to the article it turns out to be yet another Economist attack on the "irresponsible" policy of John McCain - the policy of trying to keep tax rates from being increased, and even reducing some of the absurdly high tax rates presently in place. The general tone of the article was both that tax cuts for "the rich" are immoral and that, on top of this, they must be "paid for".

Contrary to what the Economist seems to believe, it was not the reduction of top rates of tax that was the problem under President Bush - on the contrary the revenue from the top rates of tax increased. It was the wild increase in government spending that has been the problem under President Bush.

Not just the mis-management of the Iraq war, although whatever one thinks of the judgement to go into Iraq in the first place the lack of planning for an insurgency meant a lot more blood and treasure being spent in the long run than would have been spent if more troops had been sent in the first place. There has also been all the subsidies, new entitlement programs and other wild spending and, again contrary to what the Economist thinks, the "earmarks" have been very important - for often Congressmen and Senators only vote for a spending bill because of the little earmark for some special interest buried on page...

And who in the Senate has been the most important voice of opposition to all this wild spending over the last few years - for all his faults, it has been John McCain. So for the Economist to claim he is not tough enough on spending to "pay for" his desire to make taxation less heavy is absurd, anti-earmark McCain is but it does not stop there - and, as stated above, the earmarks grease the wheels for the rest of the spending.

As for the idea that higher rates of tax at the top end will mean more revenue, the basis of the Economist claim that not ending the Bush tax rate reductions will cost X vast amount of revenue, this claim does not just ignore the reality of higher revenue from the reductions in the top rates of certain taxes under Bush, it ignores what happened under both Reagan and Thatcher, and under President Kennedy, and under every government that has reduced high top rates of tax since at least the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany in the 18th century. Perhaps Grand Duke Leopold is too recent for the Economist writers, but to the horror of collectivists, "tax cuts for the rich" really do "pay for themselves".

However, there is also another factor. On the very day the Economist hit the shelves, its sister publication the Financial Times reported that yet more companies were leaving the United Kingdom because of our very high rate of Corporation Tax.

Yes, you guessed it, the American combined State and Federal Corporation Tax burden is actually worse than that of the United Kingdom. "But lots of American corporations do not pay Corporation Tax" - the ones that make losses do not pay for they have no profits to pay tax out of (hint - this is not a good thing for the corporations concerned), other companies do not pay because they are not "corporations" at all - they are privately owned companies whose owners pay income tax on their profits.

Sadly ignorant of all of the above, the Economist specifically targeted John McCain's proposal to reduced the rate of Corporation Tax as one of his "irresponsible" policies.

John McCain is no economic genius, but has shown the ability to learn. The Economist writers show no such ability, all they can do is to trot out the moronic collectivism they were taught at school and university. I know I have said this before, but it needs saying whilst the Economist still pretends to be a "free market" publication.

Probably it is the whole world I do not understand, but I am going to stick to not grasping it a bit at a time. It seems less daunting.

How does this work? Some commentators are saying that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin as his running-mate in order to attract supporters of Senator Clinton who are cross with Senator Obama for not giving up when he was winning the Democratic nomination.

Just who is crazy here? The Clintonites who think Obama is such a middle-of-the-road disaster for failing to appeal to the activist base that they might consider voting for a party that is over the other side of the road? And having done so, I look forward to their saying is the racism of the American public not Democratic-party petulance that has kept him out of the Whitehouse. Or the super-Clintonites who say they are mad at Obama for not being a woman? Republican strategists (if they exist) who care about what the tiny number of leftist Democratic activists think, but nevertheless think Palin will attract them, despite her being of the religious right persuasion and ideologically about as far from a leftist Democratic activist as possible? Or the commentators who assert such a strategy would make sense?

Or are there really large numbers of Americans who will vote for McCain solely because Palin is female and for no other reason of policy, personality or competence dividing the candidates and their platforms? That would be crazy. Wouldn't it?

Comrades! - and revisionist Hillary supporting scum. Only a little joke, Hillary comrades - your support is really most welcome.

I stand before you today to tell you that Now is Our Time. The pathetic remnants of Western Civilization are ripe for destruction, and we will be the generation of revolutionaries that will finally achieve the goal of creating the new society. Outmoded institutions like private property will be swept away, and a new progressive order created.

And this will be achieved without once mentioning such words as "socialism" or "Marxism" in public. Indeed it is our very care to avoid scaring those mislead by capitalism, the ignorant who still cling to their guns and religion, that will help us achieve total victory. Ultimate power is within our grasp.

No longer we will have to pretend to be "proud of our country", for as the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution our country is the whole planet.

We have the children and young people already. It is true that most children are still given such outmoded and old fashioned things as birthday and even "Christmas" presents. Few children are given the intense political education that these two children receive [at this point Comrade Speaker is to wave the two girl props], or that the Great One himself received - the three hours of political education per day that our Beloved Leader was given by his mother, the untypical white person, from his most early years.

However, such intense political education is only needed for the leaders, for the Community Organisers - for the Intellectual Vanguard of the Revolution. For the masses the level of conditioning provided by the progressive media and by the public collective schools and even some of the "private" schools, is enough. With minds clear of experience or information, the young can be taught that all problems are due to the greed of big businessmen (we need not even use word "capitalists" ) and can be solved by enlightened collective power.

It is true that we have made compromises and sacrifices, but look at things have turned out:

For example, only forty years ago our Comrade Revolutionaries were fighting on the streets with the corrupt Chicago Machine. We decided not to fight that Machine - but to cooperate with it, using our family ties to the Machine when we had them. And look at the results.

Now the machine is ours. It is our instrument - the instrument of the Revolution!

Today many of the largest corporations fund our organizations - just as Saul Alinksy predicted they one day would. But it is more than fear - the infiltration and, more importantly, the permeation of ideas (as Gramsci taught) means that many of the largest corporations are managed by people who are in whole or part in sympathy with us. The transition will be easy -for the managers of such corporations as General Electric hate the whole concept of share OWNERS already.

This is what pragmatism has given us - power, ultimate power. And soon this whole stinking Imperialist country will fall to us. And when this place falls, so will the whole world!

This is the secret of our success - our flexibility. If the "liberals" with their bourgeois humanitarianism are against the death penalty then we are against the death penalty - whilst they are useful to us.

But as soon as it is more useful to be in favour of the death penalty then we are in favour of it - indeed more in favour of it than anyone else. Indeed we truly are in favour of the death penalty, although not for the offenses the deluded reactionaries are - pause for laughter and shouts of "kill them all".

Comrades, Comrades - we must remember Comrade Lenin's teachings.

If it is for the good of the Revolution we should kill off nine tenths of the population of the whole Earth, but if it is for the good of the Revolution to resist our urges and kill no one at all - then that is the policy we should follow.

The only morality is the Revolution - the new society. There must be no more self indulgence in killing than in anything else.

Just as living children may be used as props to attract the votes of sentimental idiots - the kind of people who give "Christmas" presents [pause for more laughter], so they may be killed out of hand after they are born, or used for experiments [pause for laughter]- experiments the capitalists and their dupes are so weak as to be forced to fund with their taxes - pause for wild laughter.

There is no contradiction - for the only truth is the Revolution and its needs. For this end we may even set up Churches to take over the "God" nonsense.

Of course this is more than "we may" - for we already have, this is what Liberation Theology is about.

For whilst religion is the opium of capitalism - it can also be the energy of the Revolution!

When the new society is achieved, and it will be soon comrades, we will get rid of this "God" concept for the only true God is the Collective - not some mythical individual. Just as we will get rid of other things we pretend to hold in high regard, such as the "family" [wave prop children again - to wild laughter] - but till then these absurdities are of use. We will even use the idea of the pathetic Bush of capitalist taxes to subsidize religous groups - our religious groups. Indeed we have so ordered things that we get most of this money already!

Wild laughter - and shouts of "the capitalists fund the rope with which we will hang them", other shouts of such things as "Warren Buffet and ...... do this without being forced to" more laughter.

Comrades, Comrades we must not indulge ourselves even by too much talk - there is still much to do in the campaign.

So I will conclude by telling you that I think that our traditional private chant of "Death-to-America" is too narrow - too much in the spirit of narrow bourgeois nationalism and counter nationalism. Indeed it is has even been taken up by Islamic radicals, although of the more anti imperialist and useful kind, and they are even stupid enough to chant it in public.

So I propose a new chant. I was inspired by some of our more weak minded, but useful, comrades at Stamford University - with their "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho - Western Civilization has got to go". But I propose something that is shorter and less flippant.

[At this point the speaker leads the crowd in the new private chant].

Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West! Death-to-the-West!..........

A few days ago, the venerable Glenn Reynolds linked to an article published in the Asia Times titled Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess. The article, written by pseudonymous columnist Spengler, is something of an interesting read, as it offers up a comprehensively explained and intriguing motive for the former superpower's recent machinations in Georgia.

Many Western commentators ascribe the recent Russian belligerence to a newly acquired military ability able to act upon the yearning of its current leadership which is trying to recapture the glory days of Soviet power. A good dollop of credible force applied carefully should make Russia's tiny neighbours wake up to the fact that they are kissing the wrong butt. Spengler contends that the truth is rather less vainglorious; Russia's recent adventures represent moves in a long-term game in which the country's very survival is at stake.

After all, it is - as any moderately informed individual knows - facing what present-day figures predict to be a near total demographic collapse in the coming years. Russia is, says Spengler, exercising a grand strategy to eventually absorb the Russians and other ethnic populations living in the nations in its so-called "near abroad", declaring them all Russian and thus halting the country's disastrous population decline. This will also ensure the minority status of the Muslim population in Russia (the only ones who are breeding) and, lo and behold, win the survival of the nation in the eyes of those pulling the levers in the Kremlin. It is an insightful alternative analysis of what is driving the crisis in Georgia - not groundbreakingly so, as I am certain a number of Samizdata contributors and commenters could have provided us with much the same explanation - but nevertheless well worth consideration.

Beyond this, however, the article is boneheaded. Of course, the reader immediately perceives the author's withering contempt of American foreign policy - and the refined superiority of that of the Russians - just by reading the title of the article: (simple) Americans play (the simple game of) Monopoly, while (cerebral) Russians (that most cerebral of games) chess. This metaphor is rather silly and falls apart quite easily after examining the facts, however one must delve into the article to fully comprehend just how ridiculous Mr Spengler's representation of the tensions in Russia's "near abroad" is. One also has the added bonus of marvelling at the astonishingly amoral and historically myopic remedy Spengler proposes to pacify the unfolding crisis. All in good time. Firstly, let us have a poke and a prod at the myth of the Russian leader as über genius that Spengler somewhat artlessly constructs:

The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards

This is rank hyperbole, especially the bit about all the stupid Russian politicians being dead. Certainly, there were periods of significant attrition in post-Soviet society, when the present crimina - sorry, commercial - elite was establishing itself by expropriating the wealth of the fallen Soviet Union. And no one is denying that the undoubtedly highly intelligent Putin has sidelined those politicians (perhaps even some smart ones, as well as the dumb) who sought to stymie his consolidation of autocratic power. But Mr Spengler suggests that Putin, his former masters and his subordinates had all their vanquished, lesser rivals put to the sword! Of course, there are most probably politicians who met with a sticky end and just happened to oppose Putin and his new political order. It would also not surprise me that, even after the reign of the country's most notorious butcher ended, the odd political obstacle in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia suffered an untimely demise at the hands of an unidentifiable but highly lethal aggressor. However, Spengel makes it sound as though Stalin has taken leave from the absolute depths of hell, where he is undoubtedly residing, to again sweep through Russia's political class, this time weeding out the dim-witted as opposed to the Trotskyites. This is a misleading assertion deployed to convince the reader that the sinister, Darwinian ruthlessness of the current Russian leadership will undoubtedly overcome its clueless and ham-fisted American opponent.

No doubt that plays well in certain circles, where a good spot of America-bashing never goes unappreciated. Et tu, Mr Spengler? I mean, we have seen some folk question the intelligence of American foreign policy, only to rather spectacularly eat their words when events did not turn out as predicted. Consider when Ronald Reagan - widely derided as stupid, even in the present - saw through the accepted wisdom of the day and outmanoeuvred the Soviet Union, supposedly primed and optimised by socialism's best technocrats, but all in vain. The anticlimax of its demise was thunderously louder than its feeble implosion. Bringing the rotting hulk of the Soviet state down also rather impudently snuffed out the inspiration of countless highly intelligent folk who no doubt considered (and consider) themselves to be easily the intellectual superior of that improbable President; a man who was fit for little more than making Bedtime for Bonzo sequels, a man who would have been better advised to leave the business of statecraft to a more suitable candidate, such as his predecessor. One would think that when the US won the Cold War so decisively, the Spenglers of this world might have started to realise that just because they cannot perceive a coherent strategy behind American action, the Pavlovian assumption that one does not exist may be inaccurate. But no, our fearless columnist insists on toeing the ever-popular "doltish, clueless America blundering about on the world stage" line:

What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

And that is all there is to it, folks. American "hard power" foreign policy stripped naked; its writhing, muscular, unfocused imbecility revealed. All right, enough of the sarcasm. I concede that I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of declared US foreign policy imperatives, and I am the first to admit that my interpretations as to why a base is built here and not there should not be considered authoritative by any means. Still, I am fairly confident that there's rather more to it than the "hotels on squares" Monopoly metaphor offered above. Spengler interprets US base building in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, along with the encirclement of Russia by pro-Western neighbours as the US clumsily and unnecessarily creating a potentially dangerous strategic opponent. My interpretation is that the US considers that Russia could credibly develop into a strategic threat to the US in the long term, regardless of whether the US turns a blind eye to Russian aggression in its region, thus it builds bases and cultivates alliances along Russia's border.

No doubt, Spengler would consider the above a ridiculous notion. Russia and the US are so far away from each other. There is no reason for any strategic enmity if each country stays out of the other's way. I am not sure. Geopolitical realities have a habit of shifting over time. More importantly, it is not as though Russia doesn't have form when it comes to aggressing against others near to, and far from, its borders. What happened after the Americans, the British and the rest of the Allies helped the Soviet Union eliminate the hideous bedfellow that initially enabled the Soviets to devour Poland, before rather inconveniently metamorphosing into the motherland's most memorable Great Existential Threat? But that was then, and this is now. So let us examine the soothing balm Spengler prescribes to salve all that nasty chafing and inflammation between the US and Russia, so that the latter's present-day Great Existential Threat can be solved, to the overwhelming benefit of all. Oh, except for the Ukrainians, who will henceforth be known as Russians, if Mr Spengler has his way:

The West has two choices: draw a line in the sand around Ukraine, or trade it to the Russians for something more important.

My proposal is simple: Russia's help in containing nuclear proliferation and terrorism in the Middle East is of infinitely greater import to the West than the dubious self-determination of Ukraine. The West should do its best to pretend that the "Orange" revolution of 2004 and 2005 never happened, and secure Russia's assistance in the Iranian nuclear issue as well as energy security in return for an understanding of Russia's existential requirements in the near abroad. Anyone who thinks this sounds cynical should spend a week in Kiev.

Well, I am back from my week in Kiev and I did not manage to find your argument, which was sadly absent in your article, Mr Spengler. What is one supposed to discover in Kiev that would destroy that country's sovereign rights and make Russian conquest acceptable? Why is Ukraine's self-determination "dubious"? I agree that Russian cooperation over Iran and energy supplies would indeed be a valuable prize, but then again, so is the credibility of a US security guarantee. Hard to make alliances without it, and in this circumstance there can only be one choice.

Anyway, for the sake of argument, let us take Spengler's advice and give Russia a free hand in its "near abroad". The US sees the light and throws its allies in the region under a bus. Russia takes much of its former empire back, thus defusing - or more likely deferring - the population time bomb by the forcible "Russofication" of the people living in the former nations that made up the newly annexed "near abroad". Think of it as lebensraum, although the raum is not of such great importance this time around, more so the untermench living on it (well, they must be untermench in the eyes of the Russians if it's acceptable to steal their country). Of course, dear old Greater Mother Russia will still be a lousy place to live for most, yet its leaders will be too busy gobbling up other countries to do anything about that. Let us tease this out a little more. The factors that fuel the Russian population's dramatic David Copperfield impersonation will continue to make themselves felt, but with a vengeance - what with the huge influx of war-ravaged, miserable, press-ganged "Russians" and their no doubt limitless appreciation of their new nationality. I see no reason why the population will not go into freefall again. Never mind, Russia will have some fresh new neighbours to impose its "existential requirements" upon when these resurface.

Another troubling gap in Spengler's argument is that he does not attempt to explain his assumption that Russia has an absolute right to conquer its neighbours and assimilate the citizens of these countries to avert its impending population collapse, beyond sneering at their recent sovereignty and the quality of their democracies. These largely ad hominem remarks, which he does not bother to expand upon, have not convinced me as to why Russia should be allowed to destroy another nation to repair its own, especially considering that Russia is wholly responsible for its present misfortunes. The prevailing deep malaise that compels millions of Russian women to abort their unborn children rather than bring them into the world, men to drink themselves into the grave several decades too soon and refugees to get the hell out by any way they can is clearly - tch, what is that term so beloved of the American left? Ah, yes, blowback - from a seventy year long experiment with the most disastrous and destructive political system the world has seen thus far. Not only did the Russian leaders force their people to endure this nightmarish, mass-murdering tyranny; they also foisted it onto millions in many in other countries and tried to impose it upon all the world's people. Of course, the Russian communists eventually failed, thanks largely to the superior productive power of the vastly more moral alternative; a random network of free individuals making choices voluntarily in a market, but the toxic remnants evidently still remain in Russian society. This is unfortunate for the Russians. However, I am struggling to comprehend why on earth the US, the world capital of the enormously powerful system that slew the Soviet monster, should compromise its morals and throw its allies to the wolves to save Russia from demographic destruction that the nation brought upon itself.

Spengler makes some interesting points in his article, but ultimately his justification of Russia's designs upon its neighbours is morally bankrupt, and the solution he has devised for the West to undertake to reduce the tension between them and the Russians while Russia "solves" the problem it has brought upon itself is unconscionable, too. This is further emphasised by his inability to perceive the evil inherent in a government willing to invade its neighbours and forcibly assimilate the people living there, along with the enormous loss of innocent life that such action would invariably entail. He detects no threat from those willing to wield power in such a manner - they are so far away!

But hang on; after the dust has settled and all the involuntary new Russians have been minted, where do the country's conquering leaders look then? We have been down this road with the Russians before. Spengler may well have correctly identified the motive driving Vladimir Putin to want to force the now-sovereign countries that used to make up the Soviet Union into submission. However, he is dead wrong in suggesting that the US should simply turn a blind eye to such warlike behaviour, because it could never affect them. We can see the folly of this assumption from recent history. Moreover, instead of justifying Putin's naked aggression (and the subsequent reconquest of lost Soviet territory) as the only way for Russia to survive the life-or-death struggle Spengler describes, why not recommend that the Russian leader abandons his intention to devour his neighbours and starts to concentrate on making his country a better place to live? A place where women choose to give birth to their babies and raise them into adulthood, rather than terminating them at the first sign of pregnancy. A place where middle-aged men do not die in droves from alcohol poisoning because they don't need to drink bottles of vodka every day to escape from a poisonous reality and its unrelenting assault on them. A country that folks from abroad choose to migrate to, as opposed to the local inhabitants doing the reverse. It should be made explicitly clear to Vladimir Putin that this is the one and only way he can turn around his country's dire demographic predicament, and thus save it. He may not do so at the expense of another. If the US did elect to draw and maintain that line in the sand, then I assert that it is a moral and pragmatic decision to contain a demonstrably dangerous nation led by a warmonger that, if left unchecked and allowed to prosper, could certainly represent a threat to the US in the future.

And if that is Monopoly the US is playing, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Firstly the many people who signed up for the 'special' text message announcement of Senator Obama choice for "running mate" were treated with great disrespect. Democrats were out singing the praises of Senator Biden (for example on Fox News) on Friday morning. Then an aircraft was sent to pick up Senator Biden from Delaware and take him to Chicago (this was first spotted by a blogger I believe) - so that he could appear with Senator Obama in the Saturday event.

This was duly noted (by both American and international media) as confirmation that Senator Obama had picked Senator Biden.

Everyone paying even slight attention knew.

Everyone from evil 'rightwing' foes of all that is 'socially just' in Britain (people like me), to casual watchers of, for example, Indian English language television.

Everyone knew - accept those activists who had trusted the Obama campaign to send them a text message and were away from the broadcast media or the internet. The texts were not sent out till this morning.

As for Senator Biden himself: a totally pro-union (i.e. supportive of government special pro-union laws) politician. And someone who is ardently in favour of expanding the size and scope of American government health, education and welfare programs - a Welfare Statist.

Almost needless to say Senator Biden is also a 'gun control' man and so on.

However: Senator Biden's son will be off to serve in Iraq this October - which will show patriotism. And Senator Biden himself is strongly anti Castro - and is clearly from the non-communist left. Perhaps this is what Senator Obama meant when he promised (on CBS) that he would pick someone with very different opinions from his own, who would "challenge my thinking".

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.

This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.

At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.

On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as "Nannyfornia". In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, "Did you mean California?". That's gotta hurt.

If you live in the tri-state area, or anywhere actually if you are up for it, please contact the LP team in West Virginia. They are short on people for the final push to get on the ballot.

The LP needs YOU!

Speaking of Ron Paul... here is a press release I received last night:

If they expected us to retire quietly from the scene, the political elite are in for a surprise.

Today I am making some very big announcements.

First, from August 31 to September 2 in Minneapolis, we will host a handful of events that will shake the political establishment. Everything will culminate on Tuesday with the official launch of the Campaign for Liberty at the Rally for the Republic.

The Campaign for Liberty will be the largest organization for peace, freedom, the Constitution, and sound money in American history. It will launch in grand fashion with lots of special guests and - if the early television and print inquiries we've received are any indication - plenty of media attention.

I would like to personally invite you and your family to join me and thousands of others in Minneapolis for these events and send a message to the Republican Party.

Tickets will go on sale for the Rally for the Republic this Friday, July 25 @ 10AM CST. We want this to be an unforgettable day, so we are holding a ticket bomb all day Friday in the tradition of our famous money bombs. How many seats can we sell on the first day?

In patriotic fashion all tickets will cost $17.76, so you can afford to bring the whole family.

This leads me to the second big announcement. After measuring the excitement and enthusiasm, we decided that the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota was just too small to hold you. Therefore, we are making a significant upgrade. The Rally for the Republic will now take place at the Target Center, the largest arena in Minneapolis !

This promises to be the most spirited and provocative political event of the year! We held some very large rallies during the presidential campaign, but I have never attempted anything of this scale before. Its success rests entirely in your hands.

Later this week I will announce two internationally renowned musicians as headliners for the Rally for the Republic. We'll also be joined by rock star Aimee Allen, NBC's Tucker Carlson, Barry Goldwater Jr., Gov. Gary Johnson, conservative stalwart Grover Norquist former Reagan deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, presidential historian Doug Wead, MTV's Adam Curry, musician Mark Scibilia , and Frank Sinatra impersonator Rick Ellis . Other special guests will be announced soon.

My staff has been working overtime to provide you with three full days of entertainment. Please visit the schedule page of the website and read all about upcoming events. We also have a lodging page to help you find?accommodations in Minneapolis.

Together we are taking back our government and restoring the republic. Please join me in Minneapolis to kickoff the Campaign for Liberty and support our Revolution. Can I count on you to be there?

I hope our LP folk in Minnesota will be out there in force!

The Bob Barr for President efforts have been gearing up in Atlanta and if you want to see what you can do, you can find out about it here.

I would love to see that fund raiser counter spinning like the Ron Paul one did!

Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here's a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.

Good article about the nonsense being proposed in the US about civilian "volunteering" programmes which are not in fact, voluntary. It is worth keeping an eye on this issue because I recall that David Cameron, Tory leader, might be keen on a sort of non-military version of national service as a way to deal with problems of teen crime and lack of personal responsibility. Bad move. See my post below for how it is working in a free market that is what is required. Treat people as free adults: it works

A couple of months ago, I wrote a long piece here about how British voters, from having been two rather distinct groups of people, with different beliefs and habits and social characteristics and consumer tastes, were converging into a single much-harder-to-distinguish lump, which both major political parties will shun their traditional supporters (the two old separate lumps) to appeal to. Hence the new "political class", and hence the new electoral landslides won by Thatcher, Blair, and now soon (it looks more and more likely) Cameron.

I didn't mention the USA, but I have long had the sense that something opposite is happening over there, with a more homogeneous population being replaced by two much more distinct social groups. Well, what do I know? I've never even been there. But now Terry Teachout has recently done a piece for Commentary called America Sorts Itself, arguing pretty much exactly this, writing about books that paint the same picture.

But the change in the political landscape goes deeper than that. Today, a voter's decision to support one candidate over another may well have little to do with that candidate's positions on specific issues. It is, rather, an ideological fashion statement, a declaration that one is a certain kind of person, whose tastes on a wide variety of cultural matters can be reliably inferred from his political preferences - and vice-versa. "If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," said Ken Mehlman, who managed President Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for Bush."

The now-familiar phrases "latte liberal" and "NASCAR conservative" are expressions of this development. ...

Teachout quotes a University of Texas sociologist saying this:

the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us ... live in counties that are becoming less [politically] competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.

I certainly have the feeling that the "latte liberal" objection to the war in Iraq is not that it is a bad war, but that a hated gun-owning, evangelical Christian cowboy conservative is running it. Were President Obama to take charge of this war, and decide to press ahead with it pretty much indefinitely, the latte liberals would then be quite content, or such is my suspicion. The NASCAR conservatives, on the other hand ...

Two questions. First, obviously, is this notion of much more socially divided and regionally sorted USA true? And second, if it is more or less true, what impact with that have both on the USA's political system, and on the world?

One of Teachout's answers to the local USA part of the second of those questions is that US politics is becoming less gentlemanly, because voters and (perhaps even more importantly) politicians on different sides don't mix with and know each other as much and as well as they used to. They are thus quicker to attribute dishonourable motives and mentalities to one another, as, now, are younger presidential candidates like Obama and Huckabee. The USA, Teachout says, is becoming harder to govern as a single political entity. This may not be such a bad thing, but it will surely have consequences, and not just in the USA.

As a coda, it is perhaps relevant to add that whenever any of us Brit Samizdatistas writes anything bad about Britain or British political trends, as we do quite often of course, as likely as not some US commenter will say: Give up on Britain, mate. Move here. And by "here" he doesn't just mean the USA, he means one of the good bits of it. I have no inclination whatever thus to move, being very content in London thanks very much. I find these calls to give up on my own country insulting. But maybe such comments are part of the process described above, and maybe some people, especially within the USA, find such appeals persuasive. It would seem so. Such anecdotage certainly points up the way that improved communication reinforces such a process of sorting by political preference, simply by making choosing and moving easier to do and to organise. I am, of course, wholly in favour of people being allowed to do this kind of thing.

Such appeals also hint at a possible future for the entire world, of geographical sorting, along distinctly political and sociological lines, rather than just organised according to the mere accident of where you happened to be born.

The power of the American left (the "liberals" the "progressives" the "radicals" - call them what you will) is very great. About 9 out of 10 newspapers lean to the left in their editorials (and, to be blunt, in the rest of their content also - from news coverage to book and film reviews) and most television networks also lean to the left. Some more than others - but the general direction is plain.

This is perhaps the result of the "education system" - in which the "public" (i.e. government) schools are dominated by people with a leftist world view. They are saturated in this view of the world during their time at college and it is reflected in what they teach and how they teach it - and in the open political allegiances of their organizations. And would anyone like to deny that the vast majority of American universities are dominated by the left?

In Congress the Speaker of the House is someone, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, who would have been considered way to the left of the Democrat mainstream only a few years ago. And Speaker Pelosi has shown that the oft mentioned moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats are a busted flush - they are people who fall in line when the Speaker and her associates put the pressure on.

In the Senate, Harry Reid was once considered a moderate - but these days it is clear he is either on board with the left, or just a front man (a cardboard cutout) who does not prevent the control of the Senate by people like the senior Senator for Illinois.

But in spite of all of the above it is clear that the left is not satisfied - they demand total control of all aspects of life, totalitarianism.

This is made clear by such evidence as the effort by elements within the Californian courts to de facto ban home schooling (by demanding that parents have teaching training qualifications - indeed perhaps in every subject they teach) and that private schools only be allowed to hire people who have undergone a training process that the left control.

In other States (such as supposedly strongly conservative Tennessee) there are efforts to refuse to recognise the qualifications of children who did not go to approved schools - it seems that independent testing is not considered enough, indeed is the very thing that the left wish to avoid.

And at the Federal level there is a very strong movement to use all the agencies of the government (from the FCC to the IRS) to eliminate or castrate that minority of media outlets where the left do not already have the main influence.

All under nice sounding words of course - such as "the fairness doctrine", or "freedom" and diversity", but, under the Orwellian words, the intent is plain - no dissent will be tolerated. Either it will be declared "hate speech" or it will be declared "biased". With an "unbiased" presentation of news and current affairs (and everything else - from music to sports) being a leftist one of course.

And with judges that a President Woods Fund Obama would appoint and who would be confirmed by a Democrat Senate, with a Republican minority brow beaten by "main stream media" that the left already control (who will declare that any opposition is "racist"), there will be no First Amendment problems (or any other constitutional problems) for any of the above.

The Bar in almost every State in under the control of the left (and I am not just talking about the ambulance chasing Trial Lawyers Association). Which is why States in which the lawyers have great influence in deciding who become judge, the courts are on the left. For example, Alaska is a very conservative State, but the courts are very much on the other side.

There will be no real resistance from the legal establishment against a leftist takeover of the Federal courts (to make them all like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) - there is no great love for things like the Second Amendment in this establishment.

"The internet Paul, the internet".

The power of the left on the internet is actually very great - and not just in organizations like MoveOn (which claims three million activists), but in the internet companies themselves. Companies that most of us use (such as Google) have already shown which way they lean - whose world view they share.

And even if some (perhaps rather difficult to reach) conservative and libertarian websites remain - so what? Sorry, but a handful of websites with no broadcasters to work with are not going to defeat the left.

"But surely the rich in America will not allow the left to take over".

This view shows the influence of the false doctrines of Marxism. The billionaires are not going to prevent anything - indeed they are often supporters of the left.

Billionaires like Warren Buffet may be more moderate than such men as George Soros, Peter Lewis and Marc Cuban - but they are still no more likely to come to the defence of talk radio than they are to oppose higher taxes (in fact they are often the loudest voices demanding higher taxes).

Indeed many of the billionaires in the United States resemble the baddies in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories (super rich people in league with the Reds) more than they do the sustainers of the "intellectual superstructure of capitalism" of Marxist theory.

"But what about the big corporations".

Such as General Electric?

The controllers of MSNBC and NBC (The distinction between the two has been breaking down for some time) can hardly be called enemies of the left.

I suspect that even nationalization would not really bother the top management at General Electric - they would not have to explain why the share value has done so badly over the last five years. Life would be so much less irritating without any real shareholders.

After all such de facto government owned entities (for all the claims that they are private) as Fannie Mae do not prevent top managers earning many millions of Dollars - ask Senator Woods Fund Obama's friend Mr Johnson.

Of course ever more taxes, regulations and outright government control (from the oil refineries to insurance) makes no economic sense - but that has not stopped the left in the past and will not now.

"But why should non-Americans care what happens in the United States?"

Because the brutal truth is that neither Britain or any other part of the West can stand if America falls - there is not, and can not be, any Plan B.

Bob Barr is looking more and more to have been an excellent choice to carry our banner this year. He is getting the sort of serious media coverage we have only dreamed of despite us working towards it for decades. Ron Paul's run for the Republican ticket earlier this year has probably had a great deal to do with it.

On Sunday Bob appeared on CNN's Newsroom and ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos

That is a lot of media impressions so I really have to congratulate him on a sterling start to the Libertarian Presidential Campaign. His job is not to win. That is just not possible yet. He is an educator who is out there to introduce our ideas to a mass audience for which a message of individual liberty is a novel experience. Bob is delivering in spades.

It is a good thing too: this is a message the general public will certainly will never hear from 'the other guys'.

I thought our readers might wish to celebrate the end of a very long and arduous road that Carla Howell and her friends have trod. I have heard they have just passed the last hurdle and their initiative to end the income tax in Massachusetts will appear on the ballot this fall.

If you are in Massachusetts, help spread the news. This is your chance to roll back the State like it has never been rolled before.

Get out there and give the Massachusetts government a good extra hard kick in the goolies for us here at Samizdata!

In 2004 anti-leftists were determined to prevent the Democrats capturing the Presidency. "No Child Left Behind" and all the rest of the Bush's absurd wild spending (opposed by John McCain and a some other Republicans) were forgotten about. Even Saddam turning out not to have stockpiles of WMDs (although, yes, he had plans to get them) was downplayed by people trying to prevent a President Kerry, and lots of evidence of serious mismanagement of the war in Iraq was ignored (apart from by McCain and a few others). Total focus was on winning the election.

However, even if Senator Kerry had won - the Republicans would still have controlled Congress. Now in 2008 there is the most leftist leadership of House and Senate there has ever been. Speaker Pelosi (who has shown that the "Blue dog" moderate Democrats are either a myth or a joke) and her friends in the House (such as Barney Frank). And a Senate in the hands of people like Senator Durbin - with pathetic "coal makes you sick" Harry Reid acting as front man.

Yet no one cares that the Presidency may be about to fall to the Democrats - indeed a Democrat whose record and background is of the hard left.

Total power over every part of government (from the FCC to the IRS) via control over the Executive and the Legislature - and power over the appointment of judges. And there is no focus - no will to prevent it happening.

"But they are corrupt, Paul".

Someone can be corrupt and still work for a cause.

For example Senator Dodd is corrupt (and in the most old fashioned sweet heart loan from a corporation way), but this is not stopping him putting a housing bill into law that will send yet more millions upon millions of tax Dollars to leftist activist groups. Think how much more the left will be able to do when they have total power.

Or stay as you are and do not think - after all thinking about it might mean it would occur to you that you should do something.

I make a point of looking at the Economist each week, in order to see what this part of the establishment are thinking. I can not normally stand to read it for than a couple of minutes (as it makes me feel unclean), but that is enough time to find some utter absurdity with which amuse people.

However, this week I think I have come upon the worst Economist article of all time:

The title, featured on the front cover, is "McCain's lurch to the right"... For those who do not know British "political speak", "lurch to the right" is what the Labour party (and so on) have long said whenever a Conservative party politician gives any sign of not agreeing with everything the BBC and Guardian newspaper hold to be correct.

However, in the case of John McCain the Economist goes overboard.

First he is, as normal with the Economist, damned with faint praise - for example we are told that although it "may be wrong-headed" he does genuinely believe in the right of individuals to own firearms - so at least he is an honest lunatic. We are to forget the basis of freedom in the right of freeman to be armed, in both Classical Civilization and in English (and other Germanic) Common Law - only a few insane Americans believe in the right to keep and bear arms.

But McCain is worse than wrong-headed - he is also a liar.

For example, he has "recently" been saying that there should only be immigration reform after the borders of the United States are secured - which everyone knows is impossible.

Actually it is not a recent "lurch to the right" as McCain has been saying this (over and over again) for more than a year. And everyone clearly does not include the vast majority of Americans who support securing the borders.

On taxation the evil McCain now supports the Bush tax rate cuts - which he once wisely opposed (no mention of John McCain also opposing the Bush spending increases of course), and the crazy man even wants more tax cuts.

The Economist of course does not mention that the American tax code is absurdly complex and something like a voluntary flat tax would be sensible - but it is more than this.

According to what is implicit in the article this recent "lurch to the right" by McCain, actually - again something he has been saying for ages, is wrong (indeed obviously wrong) - McCain should come out and support higher taxes. Which is what "ending the Bush tax cuts" actually means.

So the Economist holds that taxes should be increased at a time of economic weakness - this is a position that even Lord Keynes would have had trouble with. Even a few months off the Federal fuel tax is an insane thing that the all-wise Senator Obama "cleverly opposed".

Finally we are told that McCain's support for off shore drilling, if the States agree, is the sort of thing that centrists and moderates would never go for.

This is odd on two grounds:

Firstly as John McCain's main task at this election is to bring out the conservative, or rather conservative and libertarian - i.e. the anti left, base (a lot bigger than the Republican base) which includes many people who really dislike him. The stay-at-home threat is a terrible one for McCain.

Secondly - the Economist folk simply do not know what they are talking about.

In reality, with the price of fuel being what it is - and set to get a lot higher over time, about 70% of American voters support an end to the Federal de facto ban on new off shore drilling. Nor does the Economist even mention alternatives like opening up the areas of the Western States for oil shale, and allowing new nuclear power stations (both of which McCain has supported and Obama has not).

So by "centrists and moderates" the Economist in fact means "committed hard core leftists who would never vote for McCain if their lives depended on it".

I do not expect to influence some people to vote for McCain with the above, John McCain has too much baggage (McCain-Feingold, the amnesty bill for illegals, and so on) for that.

However, I do hope to have finally have convinced the die hards that if the Economist is a "free market" publication then I am the Emperor Augustus.

The Economist is written by a group of people who were taught a lot of semi, and not so semi, collectivist doctrines at university - and simply trot them out each week in vague connection to the events of the time.

I have been perhaps less fascinated by the current political season than some, but despite my loathing for one media darling and disregard for the other, I have watched the rather normal campaign season unfold.

It is all so predictable. The Democrats are running a Chicago politician, and that means someone who knows 'machine' politics inside out. Whatever Obama does, Obama does for political reasons. "Change" is just a nice meaningless word with which to whip up the party workers. One can well imagine that each 'problem' has been orchestrated to make some faction of the Democratic base feel he is 'their' man and is being 'pushed' toward the middle. Instead of seeing campaign events through the lens you are accustomed to, start looking at it from the viewpoint of "which constituency does it play to?"

Take the Reverend Wright bruhaha. It simultaneously solidified support for him amongst the radical black constituency, made him appear to them as an oppressed victim, and allowed him to move toward the center. That is one brilliant bit of maneuvering, a double play that would do Karl Rove proud.

Democratic candidates have a certain problem to deal with. The activists who will get out and work and who will secure the nomination are significantly (consider that an understatement of British proportions) to the left of the general population. Without their support, a candidate will have a difficult time getting the money and workers required for a successful nomination. Then comes the problem: once nominated they must be positioned for electability. That requires a bit of legerdemain.

The best way to handle it is to appear 'forced' to the right. The base believes they 'know' what the candidate really believes and continues to support them. There is always enough new blood around that either did not learn through a previous election what happens next or else is gullible enough to believe it will somehow be different this time.

My prediction? By September Obama will be so centrist and mainstream you will be hard pressed to find light of day between him and the polled positions of the American public.

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

From the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

It is a melancholy thought that in much of the Anglosphere today, the concepts of classical liberalism: natural rights, limited government, private property, free trade, freedom of speech, rational enquiry, and the pursuit of a happy life, are under attack. The US has been and still is an imperfect exemplar of those values, but in my mind it still is the best of them, amd I wish my American Anglosphere cousins a very happy Fourth of July.

Fire up the barbecues!

I am watching a number of videos in which our candidate Bob Barr has been interviewed and he sounds pretty good. You may enjoy this one in which he talks extensively about Statist spying and the way in which the government is destroying the privacy of the individual.

So the Supreme Court's opinion in Heller really has me wondering. Will this have any effect on the practice of so many police departments, especially big city ones with bright shiny SWAT teams, to use middle of the night no-knock raids when a less dramatic approach might have been a better choice? Will it encourage better investigations of exactly who's home they are breaking into before they begin battering down doors?

I suspect but haven't checked that most of these raids occur in jurisdictions that do, quite likely to soon be 'did', not permit armed self defense in one's home. I further suspect the unspoken reasoning was too often, 'Don't worry about it. If they're not bad guys, they won't be armed'.

As the US television journalist John Stossel points out, when politicians start calling for "windfall" taxes on oil or other evil firms for making "obscene" profits (which begs a question of what the right level is), they ignore the fact that such taxes will reduce dividends and shareholder returns, including those of pension funds. And the pension fund members - us ordinary Joes - lose out when politicians decide to come a-lootin'.

Part of the trouble is the vocabulary. "Windfall", like "windfall apple", implies that a good - such as a juicy apple - has fallen to earth and the acquirer of said has done nothing to earn it. It is, so the argument goes, just dumb luck that the chap who found the apple did so. And so, to switch to those Big Oil firms, there is no merit in clocking up monster profits when the oil price spikes. But this ignores the fact that oil firms and their investors took a risk in seeking to find, process and sell oil products and those risks could easily have gone wrong. We tend to forget how risky, both physically and economically, investing in oil is. When Brent crude was trading below $10 a barrel in the mid-90s, did those politicians who want to chase a few votes by bashing Big Oil cry any tears for the oil firms that were taking big losses at the time? No, of course they did not. And frankly, given that petrol is so heavily taxed in many major nations today, it is, to put it politely, rank hypocrisy for any politician to strike attitudes on the supposed venality of oil firms at all.

By the way, John Stossel is a marvel. If only we could have a few of him in the British television media.

The efforts to slay the tax dragon in Massachusetts have advanced past the last of the expensive hurdles. According to Carla Howell and Michael Cloud:

We collected over 22,117 raw signatures from around the state, sufficiently distributed to meet the state's requirement that no more than 25% of them may come from any one county. We should end up with plenty to meet the 11,099 certified signature requirement - with a kevlar cushion to slow the challenges from the teachers' union.

We're jumping through the last legal hoops necessary to get on the ballot.

We already told you about the legal hoops we had to jump through last fall to get the first 76,000+ certified signatures.

We turned in these additional 22,117 signatures to 319 different town clerks June 18th.

Now we're waiting for the town clerks to certify those signatures so we can turn them into the Secretary of State by July 2nd. That wouldn't be very hard - except the town clerks don't have to give us back our petitions until just two days before July 2nd.

Massachusetts signature drives are hard as hell. Ask the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who just failed to make the 2008 ballot.

We're almost done. Finally.

it appears they have our enemies quaking in their boots this time around. According to
The North Attleboro Sun Chronicle:

In the meantime, legislators said the ballot initiative has an excellent chance of passing, considering a similar proposal got 45 percent of the vote in 2002.

Poirier said voters feel there is nothing they can do to lower gasoline or food costs and may see wiping out the income tax as the only step they can take to save themselves money.

This is the November contest I look forward to with glee. The passage is likely enough and the libertarian impact great enough that not even MSM will be able to ignore it. If we win this one, it will only be the first of a cascade with which we will sweep the nation.

So if you are in Massachusetts or nearby, get out there and help Carla and Michael fight the teachers union front organization and the AFL-CIO and other hard-line socialist organizations who will be out defending their God, the State.

Ron Paul and his campaign workers are still out there taking on the dirty job of rebuilding the Republican Party. If you are interested in what they are up to, you can watch this speech.

I might also add that I read "The Revolution: A Manifesto" while I was on the road for a month. It was pretty much as I expected: I disagreed with him on Iraq and vehemently agreed on almost everything else. It is a very readable tome and I will go so far as to say it will be seen as a classic. It should be on the shelf of every libertarian.

Blogger Timothy Sandefur has an interesting item questioning the argument that the inefficiency of using slaves rather than free labour would have gradually eroded the institution anyway, such as in the Old South of the US. He makes the point that as far as the owners of slaves are concerned, maximising wealth may not be the only reason why they keep slaves, so the inefficiency of this repulsive institution may not prove fatal to it. In other words, it would be naive for defenders of say, the Confederacy, to argue that a war was not necessary to get rid of this institution.

Sometimes, oppression does not just wither away. A loathesome institution or regime can endure for a long time. You need action, sometimes involving bullets, to remove these evils. For those of a pacific nature, this is not a comforting conclusion.

Here is an article I wrote some time back celebrating one of the great British campaigners against slavery, Thomas Clarkson, who is a lot less well known than William Wilberforce. Reading through the comment thread reminded me that a lot of people imagine that free marketeers like me claim that capitalism will inevitably weaken slavery. There is nothing inevitable about the demise of any human institution, certainly not one that satisifies the human lust for power over others.

The Libertarian Party convention has, as most of us expected, selected Bob Barr as our candidate. As I have been on the road the last month I have not had an opportunity to do much in the way of research on the man. I intend to correct that in the ensuing weeks.

The major party election landscape is about as dismal and disgusting as it has ever been. I would not support John McCain (author of the infamous anti-First Amendment limitation on political speech McCain-Feingold Act) if he were running against the Satan-Cthulu ticket. Had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic winner, I might have given her luke warm support simply because she is a rational political animal and thus predictable. She would be less likely to do something immature and stupid. True, she would have been as bad for our ideals as McCain, albeit in different areas, but at least she is not John McCain.

I might add that the bitter pill would have been considerably sweetened by the probable ascension of a very old and dear friend to top policy wonk in space affairs. There is barely day light between her ideas and mine on what has to happen to NASA over the next 20 years. It would have been a joy to have her in a high position, but that is not to be.

So... I am firmly back where I have been as a voter for the majority of my majority: it is the LP candidate or nothing. So who is Bob Barr? Is he a suitable carrier of our banner?

For those who know even less than I about the man, he is a former Republican Congressman from Georgia who became a card carrying Libertarian about a year and a half ago and seems to have accepted our ideas and platform in toto. His legislative history prior to that has some flaws from our perspective but he does not appear to have ever been a truly hard core statist. He does indeed appear to be someone who was philosophically close to us on many issues and finally crossed the line, decided some of his prior stands were in error and 'outed' himself as one of us.

We know we are not going to put our man in the Oval Office so our candidate requirements are different from those of the Republicans and Democrats. We need a communicator and a teacher. We need someone who will attract reasonable media attention. Our candidates job is to move another slice of the citizenry towards a belief in the importance of individual liberty. He must educate the electorate on the death of a thousand cuts the 'major' parties have been applying to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Purity is not as important as effectiveness.

I will naturally make up my own mind but at this point it is Barr or stay home. I am leaning towards supporting him and I am interested in the views, pro and con, of other libertarians. Can Bob Barr reap what Ron Paul has sown for us? Can he consolidate those gains and extend them over the next five months?

The ruling can be found here.

Via Ezra Levant. Mr Levant's name, his own persecution, and that of Mark Steyn are both almost certainly familiar to Samizdata readers and probably familiar to an increasing number in the English speaking world. For that reason they may fare better in their own struggles with the witchfinders than those less widely liked.

Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter's Big Government views and the former's alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama's recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:

The glee with which some have pounced on Obama's decision to quit TUCC strikes me as unbecoming to anyone who takes faith seriously.

Maybe the "glee" has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let's just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a "Christianist" (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer.

Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself.

In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period.

Even for critics of George Bush's Big Government brand of conservatism like yours truly, it is fair to accept that this Wall Street Journal author makes a good point:

"But when a professed enemy succeeds as wildly as al Qaeda did on 9/11, and seven years pass without an incident, there are two reasonable conclusions: Either, despite all the trash-talking videos, they have been taking a long, leisurely breather; or, something serious has been done to thwart and disable their operations. Whatever combination of psychology and insanity motivates a terrorist to blow himself up is not within my range of experience, but I'm betting the aggressive measures the president took, and the unequivocal message he sent, might have had something to do with it."

And:

"Terrorism is now largely off the table in the minds of most Americans. But in gearing up to elect a new president, we are left to wonder how, in spite of numerous failed policies and poor judgement, President Bush's greatest achievement was denied to him by people who ungratefully availed themselves of the protection that his administration provided."

Of course, it may be that America has avoided a major attack after 9/11 due to good fortune, or that Islamic terrorists hit their peak on that horrific day and have not been able to muster the co-ordination or resources to do anything so spectacular since. I hope that is right. I think some of the security measures, such as the Patriot Act, have added a further layer of red tape and intrusion without boosting security. But on the face of it, Bush has done something right in helping prevent a further attack on US soil. It is unlikely, however, to be a fact that gets much attention these days. It does not fit with the narrative of Dubya The Texan Idiot that so many supposedly intelligent people like to play at dinner parties.

Its always so gratifying when you can say "I told you so", especially when you have an appellate court backing you up.

As I noted a month ago, it seemed to me there were serious questions about the State of Texas taking custody of all 460-odd children living at the YFZ Ranch, a fundamentalist polygamy sect located in Eldorado, Texas, just south of my home in San Angelo.

Background (shamefully omitted from my first post): The YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch was founded by the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) a few years ago. The FLDS split off from mainstream Mormons back when the Mormons officially gave up polygamy. They have run into trouble with the law at some of their other locations, and their current "Prophet", one Warren Jeffs, is actually serving time as an accessory to (statutory) rape in connection with an underage marriage in his church. Their Eldorado ranch was raided after an anonymous call, since determined to have been a hoax, in which a "16 year old girl" (actually a woman in her thirties with no connection to the FLDS) claimed to have been beaten and raped there.

The Texas Court of Appeals heard an appeal relating to the seizure of children at the ranch, and threw the state out on its ear. Basically, the Court of Appeals found that the state had presented no evidence that met the statutory requirements for summarily seizing children from their parents, namely, that the children were in imminent physical danger and that there was no alternative to seizing them.

The appeal related only to 38 children, and so its not entirely clear yet exactly what its effect will be on the other 400-odd children (the number jumps around as some are found to be adults, and others are born). The language of the opinion is pretty sweeping, though. The state presented exactly the same case with respect to all of the children, and the Court of Appeals even indulged in a bit of obiter dicta, noting (even though none of the children in the appeal were pubescent girls) that the state had not even presented evidence that the pubescent girls at the ranch were in imminent physical danger.

The local court was in the process of grinding through the "60 day hearings" (so called because the state has to come back and make a full case 60 days after the emergency seizures). An attorney I know who is involved in the case told me the 60 day hearings had been cancelled. At this point, I see little alternative for the state other than returning the children to the ranch, but the state has obviously been planning to shut down the YFZ Ranch for some time, and I don't expect it to just give up and go home. Careers are on the line, after all.

Certainly the FLDS is a distasteful lot, but this seems a pretty clear case of state overreach. The core of the state's case can be fairly summarized as a claim that being raised in the FLDS is per se abuse. The Court of Appeals declined to start down that dangerous road, and should be applauded for it.

Or perhaps a 'stupidity' of congressmen? A 'fantasy' of lawmakers? An 'arrogance' of representatives? They all seem to fit.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.

Glenn Reynolds links to this article on not one, but two different pipe bombings in San Diego.

I suspect the answer to the question "Why Haven't We Heard About This" is to be found in the lack of blood and bodies.

No bleed, no lead.

From time to time I have covered the efforts of libertarian heroes Carla Howell and Michael Cloud to bring about an end to the Massachusetts income tax. They succeeded in the collection and complex certification of a huge number of signatures; they defeated an underhanded counter-attack by the teachers union; they even overcame a law-breaking legislature:

Fourth, although the Massachusetts Constitution requires the state legislature to take testimony on and vote on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative, the legislature refused to obey the Constitution. The legislature refused to invite us to give testimony. They refused to vote on our initiative.

Fortunately, the legislature cannot exercise a "pocket veto," cannot block a ballot initiative by refusing to comply with the state Constitution. A Massachusetts Supreme Court decision allows our Initiative to move forward - even when the legislature violates the state Constitution.

Now they have one more hurdle before they get on the ballot. Another twenty thousand signature collected, distributed to each town for certification and then delivered to the appropriate State official by June 9.

Should be a dawdle for those two, but if you want to help you can do so here.

By the way, I will be working the JPMorgan Tech08 show in Boston later this month.

Andrew Sullivan, who seems to have bought into the Obama campaign wholesale despite Obama's Big Government views - hardly what Sullivan claims to support - makes this pretty sweeping assertion against those who are unimpressed by Mr Obama and his interesting choice of friends and associates.

It's extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this.

Well, I guess in the case of Malkin or National Review's roster of writers at its Corner blog, they are, you know, Republican supporters. They are more interested in the views of the candidate across a whole range of issues - Iraq, spending, the size of the government, security policy, immigration, trade - than whether he or she is going to somehow change the "victimology" that Andrew Sullivan writes about. It is a bit like Sullivan moaning that Roman Catholics are only in favour of black priests who are Catholics rather than Protestants. Well, duh. As for Glenn Reynolds, he once supported the presidential run of Al Gore, if my memory serves, so he is hardly a blind follower of the GOP.

Sullivan's critique of other bloggers would carry more weight if he could accept that US voters face essentially three big government candidates, albeit with subtle differences. I am surprised that Sullivan has not made more of why this is, and what to do about it.

Swiss banks have not had a good time of it lately, which does rather dent their image of being sober-suited outfits able to protect your millions. UBS, the Zurich-based banking and wealth management group, has booked a total of $37 billion in losses connected to the credit crunch. Wow. Even other banking groups in the Alpine state, like Clariden Leu, Julius Baer and Credit Suisse, have suffered - though not remotely as badly as UBS, which possibly may break up or get taken over.

So I was a bit bemused to read that Credit Suisse has hired former US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta as an adviser. Has no-one told Credit Suisse that this fellow used to be known unflatteringly as "Underperformin' Norman" when he was in charge of sorting out airport security and other areas?

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests', I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

- Barry Goldwater, US politician. As cited by David Mayer, over at his excellent blog.

I live about twenty miles from the polygamist ranch near Eldorado, Texas, and my office is about three blocks from the courthouse where the child welfare case(s) are being handled. A few observations, from up close:

The Schleicher County sheriff seems to have been in firm control of the law enforcement activities at the ranch, and there really is no federal presence or role at all. This probably has a lot to do with the lack of any kind of violence or armed stand-off, in contrast to the Branch Davidian, um, incident, where the feds disregarded the local sheriff’s advice and went in heavy.

I am perfectly willing to believe that there were all sorts of sexual abuse of teenage girls – illegal marriages, statutory (and perhaps even forcible) rape, etc. If the current allegations pan out, I think that the men involved in what amounts to a sex slavery ring should be jailed, and I am even willing to grant that the state should have the authority to take custody of children who have been subjected to this kind of abuse. For the moment, let us leave avoid the well-ploughed ground about the appropriate age of consent for sex.

That said, this case increasingly looks to me a like a serious overreach by the state, and one that practically begs us to conclude that the state was motivated to take down this community, even when doing so required it to go beyond what was necessary to ensure the welfare of the children.

(Warning: Actual statutory language and legal analysis follows below the fold)

The state has taken custody of all the children at the ranch, alleging abuse. The applicable definition of abuse is found in the Texas Family Code Section 261.001. Relevant provisions include (emphasis added):

"Abuse" includes the following acts or omissions by a person:

(A) mental or emotional injury to a child that results in an observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning;

(B) causing or permitting the child to be in a situation in which the child sustains a mental or emotional injury that results in an observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning;

(C) physical injury that results in substantial harm to the child, or the genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child, including an injury that is at variance with the history or explanation given and excluding an accident or reasonable discipline by a parent, guardian, or managing or possessory conservator that does not expose the child to a substantial risk of harm;

(D) failure to make a reasonable effort to prevent an action by another person that results in physical injury that results in substantial harm to the child;

(E) sexual conduct harmful to a child's mental, emotional, or physical welfare, [citations omitted]

(F) failure to make a reasonable effort to prevent sexual conduct harmful to a child;

(G) compelling or encouraging the child to engage in sexual conduct [citation omitted];

Note that some of these definitions include allowing another to abuse a child.

The standard for the state to take custody of a child is found at Texas Family Code Section 262.101.

An original suit filed by a governmental entity that requests permission to take possession of a child without prior notice and a hearing must be supported by an affidavit sworn to by a person with personal knowledge and stating facts sufficient to satisfy a person of ordinary prudence and caution that:

(1) there is an immediate danger to the physical health or safety of the child or the child has been a victim of neglect or sexual abuse and that continuation in the home would be contrary to the child's welfare;

(2) there is no time, consistent with the physical health or safety of the child, for a full adversary hearing under Subchapter C; and

(3) reasonable efforts, consistent with the circumstances and providing for the safety of the child, were made to prevent or eliminate the need for the removal of the child.

(1) First question: Why the boys?

I have heard nothing that indicates that any of the boys at the ranch were physically, emotionally or sexually abused. The state seems to be arguing that, because they were being raised in a polygamist community, they were being raised to be abusers. I am very uncomfortable with the idea that this really meets the definitions of abuse set forth above. Are we really prepared to conclude that raising someone with a certain set of religious/social beliefs amounts to "an observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning" or is a "mental or emotional injury"? Are we really prepared to apply that standard across the board?

(2) Second question: Why the young girls?

Again, I have heard nothing that indicates that any of the young girls at the ranch were physically, emotionally or sexually abused, and have the same questions about whether being raised in a community such as this is per se abuse. Granted, leaving the young girls at the ranch sets up a difficult question about when you do remove them because they have grown into an "immediate danger" of being abused, but I am also less than comfortable with the idea that someone who is not now in immediate danger of abuse can be removed from their home because there is a mere foreseeable risk of abuse.

(3) Third question: Why separate the children from their mothers?

I suppose the easy answer to this is that the mothers were accessories, under the definitions stating that allowing another to abuse a child is also a form of abuse. If so, why were the mothers allowed to remain with their children for some time after the state removed them from the ranch? Further, once the mothers and children were separated from the men, I do not see how any kind of continued abuse would be possible, so what is the justification for the subsequent decision to separate the mothers from the children after they had been removed from the ranch?

(4) Fourth question: Why remove the children?

The standard for taking custody of a child refers to the "physical health or safety" of the child or "neglect or sexual abuse", none of which seems to apply to the boys or younger girls, even if you grant the argument that being raised in a polygamist community is a species of abuse due to some presumed mental or emotional injury.

The standard also includes a requirement that "reasonable efforts, consistent with the circumstances and providing for the safety of the child, were made to prevent or eliminate the need for the removal of the child". I can think of all kinds of steps that the state could have taken to protect the children without removing them from the ranch, including maintaining a law enforcement presence at the ranch to ensure protect the teenage girls. The state has maintained such a presence at the ranch since day one. Is the state saying that Texas Department of Public Safety, Rangers, and Sheriff’s Deputies on-site cannot protect the children?

(5) Fifth question: Why are the men still walking around free?

I do not think there is any question that the primary perpetrators were the men at the ranch, not a single one of whom has been arrested. Nonetheless, the children and their mothers have borne the brunt of state action here, while the wrongdoers are walking around free. Are we really saying that we had probable cause and sufficient evidence to take custody of every single one of these children, but not probable cause and sufficient evidence to arrest anyone? I suppose there is a gap between "We believe this child has been abused" and "We know believe this man (out of the dozens at the ranch) committed the abuse," but still...

(6) Sixth question: This is due process?

Leaving aside the question of whether a single mass hearing for hundreds of children could ever be due process for anyone involved, some of the attorneys reportedly could not hear or follow the hearing from their video feed at a remote location, and the court did not have copies of evidence for each attorney. The hearings pretty much ground to a halt over entirely predictable logistical problems, but the court went ahead and ordered the children placed into foster homes.

The case is, as they say, developing. I will keep you posted.

It is occasionally an accolade when a person's name becomes a figure of speech, such as 'Churchillian' for example. Far more commonly however it is a sign of cultural stigmatisation: a Hitler, a Napoleon, Fisking, Dowdification, Pilgerisation... these are not saying anything nice about the source of the respective terms.

And to which must be added, to be 'a Spitzer'.

There is a magnificent article on TCS Daily called The Universal Spitzer that I strongly commend to everyone:

It is a shame that we only laugh at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us. Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements. Whether it is "cleaning up Wall Street" or "giving everyone health care," the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.

Great stuff. Read the whole thing. The article also links to an excellent article by Virginia Postrel about the deeply unpleasant John McCain which I missed first time around.

Apparently they are exclusive alternatives. According to Wired:

Maine is now the lone state not to have been given an extension to long-delayed Real ID regulations, after three fellow protesting states - Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina - got their extensions in the last two weeks despite not pledging allegiance to Real ID.

What was it Maine in particular did to offend? There is no clue. One might suspect being the easiest to blockade has something to do with it. Bullies like to pick on the weakest victim when making an example.

Assuming no actual bombs get on the plane, then it scarcely matters who the passengers are - particularly since the rules did change in one important respect on September 11th 2001 and few are likely to sit quietly and do what a hijacker says, as they were advised to before that date. If someone could explain to me why any identification at all is needed to board a plane - other than that the government just wants to know where you are going - then I'd be most grateful for the explanation.

[* Yes I know that is New Hampshire, but presumably it is in the line for the DHS's third degree.]

Laird Minor, one of our commentariat who has spent a lifetime in this sector of the financial industry felt the first article on the subprime financial crisis gave an incomplete picture. He proceeded to fill in the rest of the story in such fine form that I am re-posting his comment here on the front page so that it will, in conjunction with the first article, give our readers a much better idea of what is going on and what to expect.

Having been a participant in one way or another in the subprime mortgage industry for over 20 years, this is a topic in which I possess a fairly substantial degree of expertise. The first article is reasonably accurate as far as it goes, but there is a lot more to the story. I could probably write a book on this, but I will try to keep this post as brief as I can.

The CRA only applies to banks, and while banks are the originators of a large number of mortgage loans, non-bank lenders have come to comprise a substantial portion of the mortgage industry. This is especially true in the subprime sector. Thus while the CRA was a typically bad Washington idea, propounded by "poverty lobby" zealots with no conception of how the market works, it isn't really the principal source of the problem. That honor goes to Wall Street.

Subprime loans are not "agency-eligible", which means that they can not be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the two huge quasi-governmental agencies that dominate the mortgage world. For this reason subprime lending remained a fairly small segment of the market, much like "payday lenders" are in a different market, until Wall Street figured out how to securitize the loans. Securitization is an extremely valuable financial tool, as it allows loans, which in essence are nothing more than streams of cash flows, to be combined into giant pools and carved up into separate "tranches" having different characteristics as to timing, default risk, etc. By separating these cash flow streams the tranches can be sold to different investors with different investment criteria (insurance companies, for example, have clear actuarially-determined timing needs for cash) which results in better pricing. Overall, securitization created a more efficient market for mortgages, which benefited everybody. Unfortunately, it got out of hand, primarily because of the rating agencies and, to a lesser extent, the monoline bond insurers.

Mortgage-backed securities are rated by Moody's, Standard & Poors, and Fitch, to determine their investment grade. This affects both price and the appropriate universe of investors. As more and more subprime mortgages and especially unusual ones like "pay-option ARM" loans began to be placed into securitization pools, the rating agencies failed miserably in analyzing them and forecasting their performance characteristics. Monoline insurers, who provide bond insurance for the highest-grade bonds, similarly failed to adequately model these loans' performance, and thus imposed inadequate credit enhancements (loss reserves, subordination levels, etc.) on the deals. Lenders found that they could sell all the loans they booked, with no meaningful penalty for weak credit quality, so of course they expanded their guidelines. They were merely reacting rationally to signals the market was sending, and do not deserve all the blame for the ultimate melt-down.

So the mortgage pools got riskier and riskier, but no one really appreciated that fact until delinquency levels began to surge last summer: there is a fairly long lag time between mortgage origination and delinquency. Once investors realized how bad the pools had gotten they stopped buying the bonds. The market for mortgage-backed securities ground to a halt almost overnight; pricing for existing securities went into free-fall, and new deals simply couldn't be completed. And since banks and other financial institutions which own most of those securities are required to write them down to current market values, their paper (unrealized) losses ballooned. This is the reason for such events as the Bear Stearns failure; it had pledged those securities for its borrowings, and when the bond values plummeted and the loans were called they could not come up with the cash.

It is a typical Wall Street "bi-polar" overreaction, but the pain is very real. Property values, which had been driven up by speculative excesses and cheap money (as noted in the first article), are falling rapidly, especially in the areas where they had risen the most (Florida, southern California, Arizona, etc.), and until they bottom out the liquidity crunch will continue. Eventually that will happen, though, and when it does things will return more or less to normal. Hopefully the participants in this market will have learned something from the experience, but I am not sanguine about long-term wisdom; Wall Street has a short memory, and the next generation of traders will probably repeat at least some of these mistakes.

So there is blame to go around: foolish laws and regulations; inadequate understanding of the effects of weakened credit standards; a few, but very few, truly predatory lenders taking advantage of unsophisticated borrowers; and greedy borrowers who were speculating in real estate values or who simply wanted to extract all of the equity in their homes for current consumption. In my opinion this last group is getting far too little of the blame. It was a market failure of monumental proportions, but as long as the politicians will stay out of the way the market will correct itself; it always does. Unfortunately, it now appears that politicians, who always want to be seen as "doing something", whether it makes sense or not, will muck around in matters which they don't understand and make things worse.

The Law of Unintended Consequences will come back to bite us. It always does.

From NRO 'The Campaign Spot':

The tour will begin at McCain field, named for the family in Mississippi. McCain will note in a speech there that a distant ancestor served on George Washington’s staff, and "it seems that my ancestors served in every conflict this country has fought". One of the themes in that speech will be how government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children.

Holy. Crap. And this is the Republican candidate. Read that again: "government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children". Just de-construct that for a moment. Is that not a phrase that should send cold shivers down the spines of anyone who thinks civil society has been fucked over by the state quite enough for the last fifty or so years, thank you very much?

Clearly the government does not want any old values passed on to the kiddies, so John McCain must see a role for state approved politically vetted family values. And what if someone want to pass on the values of respecting the property of others and so not tolerating proxy theft via third parties (like, say, the state), is Johnny going help out there somehow? How about atheism? Contrary to the popular perceptions, I know a great many God-Free Americans (almost all of whom are self-described hyphenated Republicans). Will the state give them a hand passing that one on to Junior too? How about utter contempt for the political elite and their army of functionaries? John McCain's kind offer to 'help' is another manifestation of the baseless arrogance of so many members of the political class who think that civil society revolves around the state and is something for them to tinker with.

So John, let me tell you how to "help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children"... mind your own goddamn business. There is nothing complicated about that.

I received and read a copy of this article from DC Downsizers early this month but have only today been given a go ahead for republication. I think you will find it an interesting and refreshing account of just who is responsible for the whole subprime mortgage problem.

You can watch hours and hours of news, or read columns of print in most newspapers, and come away no wiser about the causes and prospects for the current financial turmoil.

Most journalists and TV talking heads do not really understand the subject, and those that do speak and write using so much jargon that the average person must feel he or she is trying to follow a conversation in ancient Hebrew.

We are going to try to cut through the jargon, and explain the situation as best we can, in plain English. If you find our explanation of value, please forward it to others.

The current housing crisis, and all that flows from it, comes from two main sources, both deriving from Washington.

First, Congress passed something called the "Community Reinvestment Act" in 1977, resulting in the creation of bureaucratic regulations designed to encourage, or even compel, financial institutions to make loans to people with lower incomes. These regulations were then amended in 1995 and 2005 to create different rules for institutions of different sizes, so that various kinds of institutions would be better able to meet the government's goals for fostering home ownership in lower income communities.

Second, the Federal Reserve starting making loans available to the banking system at extremely low interest rates.

Third, steps one and two combined to make cheap housing loans available to people who could not have afforded or qualified for them before. This caused an increased demand for housing that sent home prices spiraling upward.

Fourth, mortgage lenders managed the risk involved in making these loans by selling their mortgages to other companies, which in turn thought that they were managing their own risk because they had a wide variety of mortgages, from many different types of borrowers, in their portfolio.

Fifth, these decisions about how to manage the increased risk created by the "Community Reinvestment Act" were all in error, because the Fed's policy of easy money had falsely inflated the value of ALL homes. This meant that good mortgages could not be used to manage the risk involved in questionable mortgages, because the value of ALL homes was falsely inflated.

Sixth, as with all inflationary booms, increases in home prices finally absorbed the increased purchasing power provided by the Fed, leading to a slow-down in home purchases. When this moment arrived everyone realized that the homes they had purchased weren't really worth what they had paid for them. The defaults and foreclosures then began, along with the collapse of the financial institutions that owned these unsound mortgages.

Now, the complicated, multi-part scenario described above has been simplified in popular reporting to just two words: sub-prime loans. These two words, combined with the idea that lenders took advantage of poor unsuspecting customers, are supposed to explain everything. But this explanation is both simple and simply insufficient.

A study by the Mortgage Bankers Association tells the true story. In the third quarter of last year fixed rate mortgages accounted for 45% of foreclosures, while sub-prime ARMs accounted for only 43%. (See Cato)

It's not hard to understand why. Who wants to be on the hook for a mortgage that is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than the property is really worth? Rather than bear this burden, many borrowers are choosing to default, and walk away from their properties. This is especially happening with speculators who bought houses in order to "flip" them. To cope with these foreclosures . . .

Banks have offered their bad mortgages as collateral to borrow money from the Federal Reserve. The money the Fed lends through this process is created out of thin air. This has two shocking consequences. First, the Fed is coming to effectively own an increasing portion of America's stock of housing, and two, these Federal Reserve loans are inflating the money supply, causing prices to rise all through the economy.

As the Fed creates more and more new dollars, the value of all the previously existing dollars declines. This forces people to seek ways to protect their accumulated wealth against the devaluing effects of monetary inflation. Thus . . .

People buy other currencies, causing the exchange value of the dollar to fall They buy gold, pushing the price up above $1,000 an ounce And they buy oil futures, driving up those prices too

But it gets worse . . .

Monetary inflation is making foreign investors reluctant to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. Who wants to hold bonds denominated in dollars when the Federal Reserve is reducing the value of the dollar?

The "London Telegraph" reports that foreign participation at a recent auction of U.S. Treasury bonds fell from 25% to less than 6%. (See Telegraph)

Sadly, there is every reason to expect this phenomenon to continue. This will leave the Federal government with only two options for funding its ever growing deficits. The government must either pay much more interest on its bonds, to compensate lenders for the monetary inflation, or it must sell its bonds to the Federal Reserve System, which will buy the bonds with yet more money created out of thin air, adding still more fuel to the inflationary fire.

The more the Federal government has to pay in interest, the larger the deficits will grow, or, the more it borrows from the Federal Reserve, the more it will have to pay in interest to private lenders. It's a vicious bind.

There is one thing the Federal government could do immediately to lessen this bind. It could cut spending to balance its budget, thereby reducing inflationary pressures. Please use our "Unfunded Liabilities" campaign to ask Congress to do exactly that.

Use your personal comments to tell Congress that you know foreign participation in U.S. bond auctions is declining. Tell them you do not want them to sell their bonds to the Federal Reserve, thereby driving up the money supply. CONGRESS MUST BALANCE THE BUDGET NOW. You can send your message here, at DownsizeDC.org.

Then, do one thing more. Send Congress a second message asking them to pass Ron Paul's "Honest Money" bills. Use your personal comments to tell Congress that you're aware that the current crisis was caused by a combination of the "Community Reinvestment Act" and the Federal Reserve's easy credit policy. Tell them you want Ron Paul's "Honest Money" bills to curb the ability of the Fed to inflate the money supply. You can send that message here, at DownsizeDC.org.

Tom Clougherty on the ASI Blog today points to a great article by the Cato Institute's David Boaz on the two groups that threaten liberty in the United States: "The Hillarys and the Huckabees". At Tom puts it:

The Huckabees, named after Republican primary also-ran Mike Huckabee, are the big government conservatives who want government to fill God's shoes, stamping out sin and telling everyone what to do and what not to do. They're the people who reject the social liberation of the 1960s.

Meanwhile:

the Hillarys (no prizes for guessing who they're named after) reject the economic liberation of the 1980s. They "want to raise taxes because they think they can spend your money more wisely than you can. They don't believe in school choice because you don't know how to choose a school for your children. They think they can handle your retirement savings and health care better than you can." In short, the Hillarys want government to treat citizens as parents treat children – the nanny-state writ large.

What a relief that neither camp's glorious leader is going to be US president.

Dallas City Hall has idled more than one-fourth of the 62 cameras that monitor busy intersections because many of them are failing to generate enough red-light-running fines to justify their operational costs, according to city documents.

- Dallas Morning News (with thanks to Engadget for picking up on the story)

The downfall of Eliot Spitzer has recently been celebrated on this blog, and rightly so. However, I believe the major casualty of the affair will prove to be Hillary Clinton, rather than Spitzer. This juicy scandal will deliver the Democratic nomination to Obama. You could almost - almost - feel sorry for Clinton; the press was only just starting to crack the shiny Obama veneer, when this had to go and happen. Who will pay any attention to Rezko and co. with this circus unfolding over the next few weeks? It will suck the oxygen right out of Hillary's campaign at the critical juncture - just when it was catching fire.

Not that Obama as the Democratic candidate will necessarily be a bad thing for the Republicans; the more I see and read of him, his views and his actions, the more I am convinced that Obama08 is John McCain's smoothest path to the White House.

If I was a believer, I would be pouring a thankful libation right about now. Eliot Spitzer, one of the most nasty power crazed politicos in US politics today, perhaps second only to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson in authoritarian thuggishness, has just shown that he who lives by the judicial sword, can oh so easily die by the judicial sword. To see a man