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In France a group of MPs has said that France ought to investigate the possibility of banning the burqa.

In Britain, 'More than 700 "controlled drinking zones" have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.'

If you want to keep your freedom to drink what you please on the public street then fight for the freedom to wear what you please on the public street.

But what about public drunkeness, then, and the fear and misery of those whose nights are blighted by drunks fighting at their windows and pissing in their gardens? And what about the cloth-entombed women, projecting an image of both slavery and Islamic aggression, who may or may not have chosen to wear the black bag?

My answer is substantially the same to both social problems: as a society we have chosen to deny ourselves the very tools of private social action (no, that is not a contradiction in terms) that could make things better.

For decades we have denied ourselves disapproval. For decades we have denied ourselves property rights. For decades we have denied ourselves the right to free association, which necessarily includes the right not to associate.

These tools are the ones we have the right to use. They are also the right tools for the job. They, unlike the tools of coercion, will not turn in our hands and cut us.

Bad form to quote oneself, I know. However it saves writing time, so tough. Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I said:

In general, I would say that strong private institutions are a bulwark against the type of creeping Islamification - or capture by other minority groups - that concern many of the commenters to this thread ... Contrast that with the position of state institutions, which includes state laws. These are a much more realistic target for capture by determined minorities. If, say 3% of the population feel really strongly about some issue and 97% are apathetic it is actually quite a realistic proposition for the 3% to get laws passed to steer things their way. Much easier than out-purchasing the other 97%, certainly.

However that brings me back to the main point of the article: the best (perhaps only?) long term defence against unfair treatment by "the authorities" is to keep the authorities out of our daily lives.

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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.

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The left should be sensitive to inequality, the left should never accept liberty on a playing field that is unequal.

- Conor Gearty. Quoted in this account of a debate on liberty at the Hay Festival by Afua Hirsch (do I detect an elegant lefty lawyer's eyebrow raised in, "There was no competition for this position..."?).

Every time I hear Prof Gearty or another human rightist of his water argue for a policy with which I agree (banning torture, say, or permitting freedom of expression), I have to remind myself that they are proceeding from an entirely different foundation. The position is coherent, but coherently alien.

----
* Well, last week, actually.

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How has the current Western political class come into being?

What economic, social, historical, cultural, technological or other factors have contributed to its growth and ascendancy?

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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.

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Guido's commenters are becoming like a collective character in their own right - scurrilous, sweary, obscene, libelous, sexist, gay-innuendonic, very eighteenth century. I particularly like comment 14 on this, a classic in the modified cliché genre:

Something in the air?…yes, and it stinks: there was shit hitting the fan last week but we could soon see a pile of shit with a fan beneath struggling to cope.

I have been making a bit of a prat of myself here lately, predicting that Brown will go any day now, any week now, within a month, etc. The trouble with predicting a Tipping Point is that you never know exactly when it will happen. You only know that it will. It's like knowing that there will be a stock market crash, but not knowing exactly when to switch all your bets. Yes, indeed, there will be a crash, but when? Only if you know that do you make your killing.

I think this story, about an old-school Labour ex-MP from T'North saying I quit is rather significant. There is no talk from this woman of the scurrilous Tory media or of what a tragedy Brown is enduring – this is as close to F*** Off You Mad Bastard as it gets. This is important because it goes to the matter of Labour's core vote. Things for Labour could just go on getting worse and worse. There is no price, to put it in stock market terms, beneath which Labour now cannot fall.

I am now waiting for the next clutch of opinion polls. They could be the Tipping Point, because these may include evidence that even hitherto incorrigibly Labour voters, utterly devoted to the nincompoop idea of the government controlling everything and subsidising everything and hence ruining everything, are now going to sit on their hands for as long as Brown continues. There is a feedback loop at work here. Some core Labour voters are already disgusted about the smearing, and more will be as they learn more. But others will be (are?) disgusted that the smearing may be causing the core Labour vote to collapse, and will decide that they also need to join the chorus to get rid of Brown, even though they personally do not dislike him that much and quite like it now that it is Tories who are being smeared. This is the essence of these landslide things. At a certain point they feed on themselves. But ... when???

I quite take the point made by Thaddeus yesterday, that a government falling for merely being horrid to other politicians is not nearly as good as a government falling for being an insanely bad government, of us. I would not be making half so much fuss about this Smeargate thing here if the charge against the Brown regime was not being lead by a hardcore libertarian. I'm now digging out my small collection of Guido photos, to exhibit here.

Guido even linked today to that wonderful Libertarian Alliance piece he did in 1991 about acid house parties. (See also this piece about The Benefits of Speculation, which now makes very interesting reading.) The LA is getting richer now, what with all us Gold Subscribers stumping up a hundred quid a year, year after year, but it will be many decades before it will be able to buy publicity like that.

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Matt Welch of Reason debates Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell over issues including the recent bouts of piracy in the Indian Ocean. One issue that comes up is whether the Somalia is a "libertarian nirvana". Duh. Lefties love to sneer that such lawless parts of the world are some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise. Have they not figured out that free societies are saturated with notions of law and property boundaries, which need to be upheld and defended? Laws and liberty are intertwined - the problem is when laws violate the right of humans to live their lives unmolesed, rather than protect such rights. Since when did robbing merchant ships have anything to do with freedom, exactly?

Anyway, Mr Welch more than holds his own in this encounter. Worth a view.

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In my posting here yesterday about what is being inelegantly called "Smeargate" (aren't you sick of this "gate" stuff?) I tried my best to keep up with events as they were already happening. I have a lunch date today, but just about have time to fling down some rather link-lacking thoughts (and done in ignorance of Philip Chaston's previous posting) about what might happen next. (Later on today, I might just get to go through this and pepper it with links, but: I promise nothing. Meanwhile, sorry for all the typos and grammar screw-ups.)

I have long regarded Guido Fawkes as a genius, ever since he wrote this gorgeous pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance. The thing about Guido is that he doesn't just believe in liberty in an abstract this-is-the-best-system sort of way, although he certainly does believe that as well; he really loves liberty, his own liberty. His throwaway remark yesterday to the effect that he started his blog "on a whim" captures this quality very well. Tactically, this makes Guido worth about ten ordinary Guidos, because of the ten things he just might do tomorrow morning to make you wish you'd never been born, you just don't know which one he'll pick, if any of them. (He might just stay in bed.) Why don't you know? Because he doesn't know himself. Oh, he has schemes afoot. "Plots have I laid", as Richard says at the beginning of Richard III before he acquired his numeral. But just when the knife will go in, just which applecart will be upset, which bandwaggon will have its wheels ripped off, which establishment forehead will disintegrate in the face of an oncoming sniper bullet, you never really know. I would hate to have him as an enemy.

Lots of people still woefully underestimate Guido. Perhaps they do this because he is not a "team player", as indeed he is not. About every two or three weeks, I get an angry phone call from my friend Tim Evans, the joint head honcho of the Libertarian Alliance, and general think-tanker on the up-and-up, about the latest Guido betrayal. (More to the point, Tim Evans is an expert think tank fund-raiser. Not many think-tankers are even adequate fund-raisers.) The latest phone call was a classic of the genre. Guido, said Evans, is "impossible to work with", a complaint that assumes that Guido is part of a team which includes Tim Evans, which he is, in an ideological sense, but is actually, in the meantime, not, as Tim Evans well knows in his less distracted moments.

The particular problem Tim Evans has with Guido is that Guido is very suspicious of free market think tanks and their relationship with big business. As far as Guido's concerned, that is just another applecart that needs to have its wheels bashed off. So now, the Institute of Economic Affairs is - get this - is in favour of "monetary easing". Why? Who knows? Don't they bloody read their own output? If the IEA doesn't stick up for Austrian Economics, who the hell will? So, about every three weeks, Guido shoves a well-deserved cricket bat into the spokes of the IEA's wheels. This enrages the likes of Tim Evans. This is not "helpful". This is not "useful". (Yeah, Tim, but it is, as you angrily say yourself in some of your private moments, true, isn't it?) The long game that the Tim Evanses of this world are playing is to build and build things like the IEA until they rule the entire known universe, and in the meantime try to stop them being trashed in gossip blogs when they talk trash. Guido "doesn't see the big picture". Guido is "biting the hand that feeds him" (???), blah blah. But I think that telling the IEA to damn well talk sense about economics, whenever it doesn't, is doing it a huge favour in the long run. That, in my book, is feeding the hand that feeds you, and absolutely understanding the biggest of big pictures, which is that "monetary easing" is a catastrophe, and having been for it could, in not many years at all, be the end of an otherwise highly effective think tank.

Closely related to Guido's non-team-playerness is his suicide bomb (wrong - see comments 1 and 2 - make that Errol Flynn) nature, which Tim Evans understands extremely well, because Tim Evans is the one who, more than anybody else, has explained this to me. How can I put this? Well, I once was acquainted with another Errol Flynn type, who used to say it this way. I want, he used to say, to die with blood in my mouth. Guido loves the taste of his own blood, maybe not in a literal way but in the sense that he wants to live, and in due course die, in a blaze of glory, not quietly plodding away in some damned team. He doesn't want to die. He loves his life, and his wife, and his baby. But, the fact that, right now, he just might get stabbed with an umbrella on a bridge - his commenters are now queueing up to tell him to "be careful" and "watch your back" - is, for him, all part of the joy of being Guido. You never live more completely than when death might be just seconds away.

This also makes him mega-formidable, because Guido doesn't react to threats in the normal way. Most of us, when threatened by people who, according to the official rules of who is powerful and who is not (job titles and salaries and who they know and what they know basically), back off in fear. Not Guido. He greets threats with genuine pleasure. What did you just say, mate? Yeah that's what I thought you said. I love it! And the creature who did the threatening has accomplished a minus quantity because now Guido is seriously interested, and the creature has just told Guido to his face exactly what kind of a creature he really is and what he really does for a living. Factor in that with who the creature works for and reports to, and the creature has just told Guido that his boss is a similar creature also, and probably his boss is as well. Interesting. Very interesting. Threaten Guido, and you are liable not to win small, but to lose big.

Guido's adopted persona as an anti-establishment desperado who ended up (a) trying to blow up Parliament and (b) as a result getting executed, but as a consequence then (c) never being forgotten is no mere random pose. It goes to the heart of Guido's view of himself and of the world, and of his place and purpose in the world.

There are about three dozen things that I might now put as following from the above cogitations, but here are two. First, this McBride resignation could be but the first of a row of dominoes waiting to fall. Does anyone now doubt that, in a deniable I-knew-nothing-of-these-emails way this particular story goes right up to Gordon Brown himself, and beyond him to the entire Labour Party who let him take over in Number Ten, unopposed? He is the engine at the heart of all this smear-mongering nastiness, and the Labour Party stands condemned of having known all about this for a decade, but of having let him get a top job, and keep it, and keep it, and then get the top job, and keep it, and keep it ...

Yesterday I passed on the widespread gossip to the effect that a government minister by the name of Tom Watson could be the next domino. Another name to look out for is Charlie Whelan (I know, links, links – try googling the news), who has been Brown's rumour-monger and muckspreader-in-chief for over a decade. He is in the loop with these emails, and no less a personage than Alastair Campbell has just fingered him as culpable. Campbell and Whelan are old enemies in the same kind of dysfunctional way that their bosses, Blair and Brown are enemies. I know, ferrets in the sack. And my point is: why should this stop until Brown himself, and the very Labour Party itself, is thoroughly trashed? The smart thing for Labour would be to do now what they should have done to Gordon Brown in about 1972, namely take him out into the yard and drown him like a superfluous kitten. That way, Labour at least minimises the damage that Brown is doing to them, as much as it now can. But they probably aren't enough of a team to do that. The nightmare scenario for Labour is far worse than that, far worse. Brown fights the next election campaign with "Smeargate" having worked itself methodically up his chain of command, and with the same exact sense of timing that caused Guido to break these emails during the Easter break, the denials being far more damaging (as they always are in these things) than the original trivialities that started it all, and with the journos asking Brown when he first knew whatever piece of shit they know he knows but which he still says he doesn't know, while his party stares electoral doom in the face like an enormous gang of rabbits trapped in a huge World War 2 searchlight.

But then, as I said in my similarly hasty ramble yesterday, it gets truly interesting. Because then, Guido settles down to rescue the forthcoming Conservative government from its own likely folly, the folly of just steadying Britain as she goes down the plug-hole of history, into a life of perpetual debt for us all. Then, Guido sets to work on them, and on who is paying them to go on doing such things. Just which bankers prefer ruining Britain for ever to ruining themselves? Which supposedly free market think tanks are keeping the faith, and which are merely putting their faith up for sale?

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because Guido doesn't believe in the same things you believe in, to do with being a normal person, that he believes in nothing except being abnormal. He is a libertarian, but not just for Guido. He believes in a world as little deranged by scumbag politicians as he or anyone else can possibly contrive. He does his "they're all at it" stuff for a reason beyond the reason of it being fun to wipe the smirk off these people's faces. He does it because the meta-message, the meta-context, as our own Dear Leader would put it, is that these people should not be running our lives. Look at them. Is this the world you want, the world you get when these people, all of these people, whatever label they stick on themselves, are deciding everything. You want the government to regulate everything? So, you want Derek bloody Draper telling you how to run your life, do you? Do you? Because that is what you are saying. Some lady cabinet minister recently said (again sorry about the missing link) that Guido is a "nihilist". Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all part of how these people, in his words, "don't get it". Just because Guido doesn't believe in what they believe in, which is them being in charge of everything, that doesn't mean he believes in nothing else beyond stopping them being in charge of everything. Guido is not just hacking away at the world as it is. He wants a massively better one in place of the world we have now. As I say, the important stuff starts after the next election.

Or, if they're stupid enough and angry enough and sufficiently agreed about it (as well they might become) they might kill him, or try to. They might make, or try to make, a martyr out of him. Which, for Guido, sort of, would be the ultimate Mission Accomplished, the ultimate tribute paid by the scumbags to him. In which case it will be up to us normals never to forget Guido, and to use the myth of Guido to help us accomplish approximately what the fact of Guido might have done. Not least because the threat to do all this, and in the meantime talking like this about him, might just help to keep him alive. I know, I know. Crazy talk. There's "no question" of any such thing happening. Too fevered. Tinfoil hat, conspiracy lunacy.

But sort of fun, don't you think? Or, to put it another way: let's all hope not. I'm late for lunch.

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Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.

The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.

In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.

Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.

Personally, I don't see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.

Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.

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This coming Friday, April 10th, I will be giving a talk at the home of the parents of Tim Evans, about the late Chris R. Tame. I was his junior libertarian partner, so to speak, during the 1980s into the mid-1990s, when I helped him to run the Alternative Bookshop, and did pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, so he obviously had a profound effect on my life. If you knew him, or if you have read any of the writings at the other end of the above link to the Libertarian Alliance website, you will know that I was only one among a great many.

The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, I want to remind people about my talk. Emails have already gone out to most of those likely to be interested, and fliers were distributed at that very well attended Kevin Dowd lecture. But, what with this coming Friday being Good Friday, I have no idea who will show up or in what numbers. If you want to attend and have not yet emailed Tim Evans (tim at libertarian dot co dot uk) to that effect, then do so and he'll send you attendance details. There has been talk of the event being video-ed. If that doesn't happen, I will at least sound-record it myself. So, no need to bust a gut to be there in person if you want to at least hear my performance (always assuming that it is not so terrible that I decide to delete the only record of it).

My other purpose with this posting is to solicit help. Chris Tame had a lot of his considerable impact on the world in the form of meetings and relationships, personal and intellectual. He did do quite a bit of published writing and performing, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. When he died just over three years ago, prematurely, he did so while feeling, as did many others, that he would have had lots more to give had he only been allowed the time.

But Chris Tame nevertheless did have a huge influence, as you can tell by reading the comments on this Samizdata posting that marked his death in 2006. It is the nature of this influence that I will be attempting to shed as much further light on as I can in my talk this Friday. The gist of what I'll be saying can be summed up in this comment by Dale Amon on that earlier posting:

I do not think the libertarian scene in the UK and Ireland would be anything like the same if he had not been there.

In addition to building the foundations and structure of the Libertarian Alliance and libertarian movement in the UK, Chris passed on masses of information, especially about the broad and ever growing range of libertarian books and articles out there, to a huge number of friends and acquaintances, to fellow libertarians of course, but also to many others from different parts of the political spectrum, and just to people he happened to come into contact with. The full range of such influences will never be fully known, but if you have recollections of Chris and of how he influenced or informed you, I would love to read a comment from you, or if you would prefer it, by you sending me an email (brian at brianmicklethwait dot com).

A good example of the kind of thing I mean is to be found in the opening paragaphs of Kevin Dowd's recent lecture, in which Dowd mentioned just how much of an impact Chris had upon him. I know these sentiments to have been very heartfelt, because when I met Dowd just before he gave that lecture, told me all of that and more about how Chris Tame had helped and influenced him.

Without the indirect influence of Chris Tame, the Samizdata story would probably have been a very different one. I am by no means the only Samizdatista to have made a start as a self-conscious libertarian because of him.

My thanks in advance to anyone who can comment in the way I have suggested. If you are reading this for the first time after I have done my talk but still have something pertinent to add, please do not feel on my account that you are too late. I'd still love to read such recollections, and many others surely would too.

A final thought occurs to me. If anyone thinks that Chris Tame's influence was bad, and did harm, I'd be interested to hear about that too. I will almost certainly not agree, but I will be interested. He has now been dead long enough for anyone who wants to to speak ill of the man without being pelted with the comment equivalent of vegetables. I do not want to encourage this, you understand, just to say that as far as I am concerned, that would be okay.

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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.

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There are so many things to do these days, especially in a place like London, that often you make up your mind about what to do of an evening at the very last moment. So, maybe you have the coming Tuesday evening, tomorrow, March 17th, still free. If you do, I strongly recommend the Libertarian Alliance's 2nd Annual Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, which this year will be given by Professor Kevin Dowd.

Getting on for a hundred people have already signed up to attend this event, in other words quite a few more than showed up for last year's inaugural Chris Tame lecture given by David Myddleton. But there is room for more still. Attendance is free of charge. All the organisers ask is, if you want to be there, email them beforehand. Follow the link at the top of this for all the details of the event, and for the email to confirm attendance.

What excites me about this lecture is that Dowd is both an unswerving libertarian, and an expert on banking, on the history of banking and on the baleful effects over the decades of state monopoly fiat money and of banking regulation. This is a man who not only believes in the idea of a free market in currencies and in banking, but someone who can actually explain in detail why that would be a better arrangement than anything else now being proposed. He also has firm and positive views about what should immediately be done, right now, to alleviate the crisis. And because he is a Professor, he has some leverage for getting his ideas reported in the mainstream media.

Having been looking forward to this event for several months, I now realise that I have, infuriatingly, a teaching commitment set in concrete for that very same evening. But the good news for me, and for anyone else who won't be able to attend the lecture in person, is that it will be videoed, and video internetted just as soon as that can be contrived. You may depend upon me to have further things to say about this potentially very important lecture just as soon as that video is available and linkable to.

Can we win the ideological war that now swirls about the current financial catastrophes? Personally I remain optimistic about this possibility, but whether we can actually win or not, we should surely try to win. And those of us who conveniently can should surely support those people, like Kevin Dowd, who are making the biggest efforts to this end. Most of Samizdata's readers do not live in London and can't be at this lecture in person, although lots are Londoners and could. But, Londoners or not, I very much hope that a healthy proportion of us will at least give the video our closest attention. Meanwhile, I am sure that almost all of you will join with me in wishing Professor Dowd all the best for tomorrow evening.

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It's like a parallel universe out there. Politicians, newspaper journalists and television presenters are running around like headless chickens with no clue as to how to deal with the economic crisis. But the truth is out there.

Things are quite different from the recession of the 1970's, which coincided with my discovery of libertarianism and Austrian School economics. Back then one had to be extraordinarily lucky to come across the likes of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard. Now correct explanations of why the crisis arose are just a few clicks away.

- David Farrer

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But the internet is a city and, like any great city, it has monumental libraries and theatres and museums and places in which you can learn and pick up information and there are facilities for you that are astounding - specialised museums, not just general ones.

And I think people must understand that about the internet - it is a new city, it's a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don't pull down London because it's got a red light district.

That's Stephen Fry talking, which I spotted here. This got posted at almost exactly the same time as the one below. Never mind. Both are worth having. And I am sure that Jon Coupal would agree that those wanting to castrate the internet make copious use of children to do it, just as others use children to boost their budgets.

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"The trouble is that because schools fail to teach history, especially legal and constitutional history, the vast majority of today's citizens have no inkling to what they owe their liberty and prosperity, namely a long and successful struggle for the rights of which the right to property is the most fundamental. They are therefore unaware what debilitating effect the restrictions on property rights wil, over the long run, have on their lives."

- Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, page 291.

Of course, by property, one does not just mean physical property, but also to the whole idea that individuals, not the state, own their lives.

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Are you optimistic about the future? Several months ago I was not, but I am now. From what I can see, governments are walking down the path of their complete moral and financial bankruptcy far more quickly than I ever imagined they would. I thought that it would take our overmighty governments several slow, demoralising decades of decline and eventual collapse to completely discredit their authority and control in the eyes of the people. However, our governments appear to be going supernova right now and I suspect they will burn themselves out over a few painful and tumultuous years - destroying a great deal of wealth in the process, no doubt. However, as worrying as that prospect is, it was always going to be that way. And in spite of that, I feel particularly upbeat about the longer term future. Those who know nothing more (and expect nothing less) than widespread government authority and control over all aspects of our lives will have their imbecile - sorry, umbilical - cords to the State cut sooner than expected, thanks to the overwhelmingly reckless (but entirely predictable) government response to the current financial crisis. I really do believe that future historians will pinpoint this crisis as marking the beginning of the end of the big-government era.

Do you agree?

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One of the best journalists out there, Claudia Rosett, responds to the dimwit assertion in parts of the MSM that "We are all socialists now". Quite. I would also be happy to see someone write denying that "we" are all Keynesians now, by the way. Who is supposed to be the "we" is never quite explained. It is just assumed by the issuers of such pronouncements that all those in positions of power and influence have signed on to a particular world view.

Rosett, as I remember, did great work in helping to expose that sink of corruption and double-dealing that was the Oil For Food Program of the United Nations, yet another reason for shutting down that organisation.

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I just watched this BBC Horizon programme, about cannabis.

Many who favour the legalisation of cannabis base their case on the claim that cannabis is less harmful than is widely assumed. It is less bad than you think, they say, in fact very good. For me, the case for legalisation does not depend on any claim about riskiness or lack of it, but rather on the idea that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves about the risks they take, and about how pleasurable the pleasures are that they take these risks to enjoy. Not myself having any plans to take cannabis, I have tended to remain rather ignorant of the details of the riskiness argument, because I just do not think that this is what matters, any more than I favour denationalised washing machine businesses (which I do), because of and following long years spent studying the internal workings of washing machines.

But being a libertarian, I inevitably come across screeds about cannabis, of which this splendid rant (linked to from here yesterday by Johnathan Pearce) is a fine example. Spurred on by this rant, I watch the BBC show. I dozzed off during some of it, but still learned quite a lot.

For me, the most interesting bit was about how cannabis contains several different ingredients, rather than just one key ingredient that makes cannabis cannabis, so to speak. There is THC, which stands for ... whatever THC stands for. But, there is also CBD, and according to this, lots of others besides, all of which seem to sound like television news organisations. And CBD, unlike THC, is anti-psychotic, according to this bloke that they ended up talking to on the telly, growing masses of cannabis courtesy the government, at an undisclosed location. The harm done by modern drug-dealer type cannabis is that it contains lots of THC, and very little CBD, if any. Interesting. (I seem to recall Dan Ayckroyd getting a stern lecture from a policeman about the evils of THC in Changing Places.)

I do have one prejudice about cannabis, which applies also to alcohol, and also to baked beans and to computer games, and in fact to just about anything, which is that different people react to the same things in often very different ways. This commonplace notion, strongly confirmed by this programme, often seems to be lost on the medical profession, and in particular on the more strident sort of medical amateur. Some people are clearly helped by cannabis, getting, for instance, otherwise unobtainable pain relief from it. (They did some filming in California.) Others get hours of innocent pleasure from it. Others go mad and hear voices, voices that they might in due course have found themselves hearing anyway, but perhaps not.

Judging by the size and splendour and apparent respectability of that huge but secret cannabis farm, it looks like cannabis may soon be legalised, but simultaneously nationalised. A bit like the Church of England with religion. This is the other way to discourage things, when outright banning has failed. As an agnostic about cannabis, I favour outright legalisation on libertarian grounds. As an atheist about religion, I have rather a soft spot for the Church of England.

The bloke doing the programme ended by saying that in his opinion the harm done by cannabis was not its dramatically bad stuff, like turning a few people into psychos, but in the form of all the lethargy it spreads. Because of cannabis, lots of people just loaf about doing very little, giggling inanely, he said. I do not really need the BBC to tell me that.

Besides which, I think the real encouragers of loafing are the Department of Social Security, or whatever they call that this year, and the Inland Revenue (ditto). They pay people to loaf about and do nothing, and fine them for working. If people suffered much more economically for doing nothing than they do now, and made much more dramatic gains from working by keeping almost all (all is my preferred arrangement) that they made, cannabis would not be nearly so popular as an encourager of negativity. It would still be used to achieve other benefits, such as pain relief, and for calming down after a hard day at the office. Just not for making a life spent doing nothing somewhat more pleasurable.

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This topic will be familiar to a few readers, as will one of its main protagonists, Patri Friedman. But via the excellent Alex Massie blog at the Spectator, is this interesting fresh take on the issue, in a Wired article about the topic of seasteading and politics.

It is easy to scoff at such things - as scoffers no doubt laugh at other attempts by people to get away from governments they dislike. But it always struck me as valuable to get the meme out there that existing national borders are not sacrosanct, and that they can and should be challenged. The earth is a big place. Why should its current divisions be regarded as sacrosanct? The way things are going, it pays to think of options, such as these guys.

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I have felt for some time now that for all its many faults - and there were many - the UK's traditional Labour movement, with its desire to see prosperity for all, was likely to be deeply at odds with the Greens. Yes, the former, with its foolish confidence in central planning, redistributive taxes and the rest, had some shockingly silly ideas, but at least it wanted people to be better off, to be materially richer, for there to be more stuff about to enjoy. Indeed, having a good time was part of the idea.

As for the Greens, or at least those taking a more 'Deep Green' approach in ideological terms, their agenda was and is very different. It cannot be stressed too often that parts of the Green movement are profoundly reactionary. Well, it seems that some leftist commentators have joined in the voices of environmental skepticism about things such as man-made climate change. In this case, the commentator is justifiably irritated that Greens such as George "Moonbat" Monbiot have welcomed the onset of a recession, a fact that is hardly likely to go down well with traditional Labour voters scrabbling to pay a mortgage.

I think that libertarian free marketeers such as ourselves should see this as an opportunity for a spot of intellectual, friendly outreach to the more moderate, still-post Enlightenment bits of the left. There are surely fissures to be exploited. For as Paul Marks has noted below, part of the far-left has hooked up with radical Islam much in the same way as it has hooked up with the radical Greens, and for a similar purpose: a hatred of science, rationality, individualism, progress, enjoyment of this life and Man's ability to reshape it. Islam means submission; the Greens want Man to submit to their static view of the Earth.

So, is it really very surprising that those parts of the Left that still cling to a tradition that goes back to the Enlightenment are getting irritated by all this? Or, to pick up on a theme occasionally mentioned by Samizdata commenter Ian B, this can be framed as a class issue: the deep Greens and their far-left/far-right friends are part of the 'posh establishment' that want to keep the nice views to themselves and bugger the unwashed.

In fact, if there is an upside to this period of economic turmoil, is that it might, just might do serious damage to part of the Green cause. Well, it's Monday and one might as well kick off the week on an optimistic note.

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Life is always better when I have a book on the go which I can hardly wait to get back to. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is not quite going to be that for me. Too complicated. Not central enough to the things I happen now to be interested in, probably because I already agree with it far too completely for it to grab me by the throat. But, I have recently been dipping into this book, having finally got hold of a cheap second-hand copy of it, and yesterday I came across an argument in it which I found familiar, but in another context.

Dawkins criticises Bishop Hugh Montefiore (on page 38 of my 1991 Penguin paperback edition) for again and again resorting to the argument that he just cannot believe that this or that complex organ or organism could possibly have evolved.

For instance, Dawkins quotes Montefiore saying this:

As for camouflage, this is not always easily explicable on neo-Darwinian premises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-coloured form of camouflage.

This, says Dawkins, should be translated thus:

I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study, never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear in the wild, and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white.

Dawkins then adds a further objection, which is that even labouring under all these handicaps, Montefiore ought to have been able to work out that predators benefit from camouflage – from being invisible to their prey – just as a creature benefits from being camouflaged if it is, potentially, someone else's prey. The polar bear is not dominant anyway, whatever colour it is. It is dominant because it is white, and can thus sneak up on its targets unobserved.

But what interested me was the similarity between Dawkins' first objection to arguments from incredulity, that the incredulous one has simply not given it enough thought, and confused his own casual inability to come up with an evolutionary explanation for this or that puzzling or complicated biological phenomenon with the absolute inability of anyone to provide such an explanation, and above all of the inability of evolution itself to work the trick.

This reminds me a lot of how many opponents of a free market economy have argued with me in the past, and my repost was a lot like the Dawkins repost to Montefiore. My anti-free-marketeer would posit some problem which he alleged would crop up in a free market, such as: – I don't know – only rich people being able to get the kind of food they like, or: the chaos caused by a mass of conflicting standards for personal computers (I am old enough to remember that one), or (now): the problem of failing banks, or: whatever. And he gives his chosen problem about the same amount of thought, and with about the same lack of preparatory qualifications or relevant experiences, as Bishop Montefiore brought to bear (sorry) on the matter of the whiteness of polar bears. He fails to think of a free market, entrepreneurial, voluntarily funded, customer financed answer to his problem. And he immediately concludes from his own failure instantaneously to provide a market solution to his problem that nobody, however well (i.e. massively better) acquainted with the business in question, and however much longer and harder they try to devise an answer, will be able to crack it. Ergo, the government must immediately step in and sort it out. In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.

I am making a very modest point here, perhaps too modest given the length of this posting. I am just saying that these two arguments remind me of each other. I'm not saying that because Darwinism is true (as I think it is) it therefore follows that the free market is right (although I think that too). Nor am I arguing that if you agree with me about markets, then you should agree with me and Dawkins and the rest of the Darwinian tribe, about evolution, if you happen now not to. I am just, as many Americans are fond of saying, saying.

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When I saw this:

California may accept military identification as proof of legal drinking age under legislation proposed after a group of Marines were denied service because they weren't carrying other documents showing they were at least 21. [...]

The legislation comes after a group of Camp Pendleton Marines attending a banquet in Temecula were refused service when none was able to produce any identification other than their military card.

The cards include the holder's picture and date of birth. What the cards don't have printed are height, weight and other physical characteristics, which are encoded in a magnetic strip for security purposes. Because that information isn't visible, the cards are not officially recognized by the state as proof the person is old enough to purchase alcohol.

I thought

— Wow! an extension of personal liberty; pity it is only for state employees.

Then I thought

— 'Wow'? Is that really the reaction to such a feeble easing of regulation? Surely there are plenty of better things happening all the time?

And I thought. And I thought. And I discovered I could not think of any significant withdrawals of the (western 'liberal' democratic) state from the personal lives of its citizens this side of the millennium. It is too depressing (and would involve half an hour of futile typing) to list the obvious encroachments — in 2009 so far.

Please prove me wrong by providing copious examples of liberty expanded.

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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.

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Following on from my post earlier about what sort of things might be regarded as wrong or intolerable by future generations that are widely done now, this book by David Friedman (son of Milton F), which looks at potential future legal, scientific and ethical controversies, looks interesting. For instance, Friedman asks what might happen to inheritance wrangles where the "deceased" is in fact held in cryonic suspension and hence not technically dead, as might be defined in a specific legal code. Some of this stuff might appear pure science fiction, but SF has a way of sometimes becoming reality. After all, the very fact that many people can afford to not use animal products such as leather has been made possible by synthetic fibres and materials such as plastic, something that did not exist about 100 years ago. Other developments could also make certain moral controversies either irrelevant or shift the boundaries markedly, or raise controversies that no-one has to contend with now.

On the dystopian side, the developments going on in IT might raise such worries about how the state might try to do things like implant computer chips into people's bodies as a sort of ID system. Only the innocent have anything to fear...

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Via Timothy Sandefur's blog, I came across this interesting question: what practices will be regarded as disgusting and barbaric in a 100 years' time that are widely accepted and tolerated now? Tim reckons meat-eating is a possibility, and I sympathise with that. I would like to think that the practice of forcing people to attend places called schools between the ages of say, 4 and 18 and then taxing nearly half of their wealth at source and regulating the ways they spend the rest of it might one day be regarded as barbaric as slavery. We can always hope.

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Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at Forbes about the connection between wars and the expansion in state power. He argues - quite convincingly I think - that while war may once have been one of the primary causes of increases in state power, that increasingly, it is demand for other public goods and initiatives that drives state power. For example, I reckon that the environmentalist argument is likely to prove a significant justification for such increases in spending, tax and regulation, as will, alas, the current financial crisis.

The "war is the health of the state" argument is often one that some libertarians use to oppose any wars, even if such wars might have some legal/moral justification, on the grounds that wars inevitably create costs that outweigh the supposed benefits of toppling some nasty regime, etc. An example of this view comes from Robert Higgs, whom I recommend. But the WIHOS argument is not a fixed law, rather a general tendency with some clear exceptions. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, for example, the UK public sector, such as it was, was retrenched and the income tax was abolished for more than two decades. The end of the Cold War saw significant cuts in military spending. Perhaps what is not so easily retrenched, however, are state controls and regulations over behaviour. Consider World War One. Before 1914, UK subjects did not need a passport; there was no Official Secrets Act and the role of the state, relative to that of our own time, was small. Now it is much larger.

WIHOS is not an iron law, but rather a sensible rule of thumb. Alas, there are plenty of other factors besides war that drive expansion of public spending and controls.

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Government has never been more popular or more trusted.

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To the authoritarian mind, freedom and chaos are synonymous.

- Commentator Ian B, er, yesterday. My guess is that 'Ian B' does not stand for Ian Blair, nor is it a pseudonym of Liam Byrne MP.

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I too was at the LA/LI Conference held at the National Liberal Club over this weekend, which was excellent, as Johnathan has just said. The organisation of this now solidly annual event was indeed the best yet.

Not everybody likes the star system, but reality does not care what you think of it. The dumb fact is that certain people, in the libertarian world as in all other human milieus, put bums on seats. Other performers, however excellent, can contribute mightily to the success of an event like this - our own Guy Herbert, who spoke most eloquently on the Sunday afternoon about the Database State, springs to mind – but such lesser luminaries do not each cause another three dozen people to show up in the first place, having booked encouragingly early.

The arrival in our midst of David Friedman (talking about this) was nevertheless a stroke of luck, conferred by Friedman himself, next to whom I sat at the Saturday dinner. I'm afraid he was too tired from travelling and speaking at other events, and I too star-struck, for our conversation to amount to much, but he did tell me that he was at the conference because he had already semi-booked to do another talk nearby, in Germany or some such place, and he would only agree to do that if he could achieve economies of scale by giving a handful of other talks on the same trip. So, he contacted the Libertarian Alliance and asked if they'd like him to speak at this conference. Oh, I imagine we could just about squeeze you in, they replied. All of which reminds me of that remark by the golfer Gary Player, to the effect that the more work he did, the more luck he had.

I hope I will have more to say here about what was actually said at this gathering, but in the meantime, first impressions first: like JP said, it was a good show.

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Jesse Walker at Reason magazine points out something very inconvenient for Naomi Klein, whom I discussed recently at this blog:

Let's just zero in on the contrast Klein draws between utopian theories and real-world practice. It's a fair argument if you apply it properly: that is, if you look at the consequences of Friedman's policy prescriptions where they are put in place. It makes sense, for example, to look at how Friedman's ideas about denationalization and free trade fared in Chile after they were put into effect. It doesn't make much sense to look at Blackwater's contracts in occupied Iraq, because -- try as Klein might to pretend otherwise -- they don't have anything to do with Friedman. (And of course, it's important to examine the ways Pinochet's Chile deviated from Friedman's economic ideas as well as the ways it embraced them.)

Exactly.

At the same time, you have to consider how Friedmanism fared everywhere some portion of it was applied, not just cherry-pick the most unappealing regimes that experimented with it. If the only place that adopted any of Friedman's economic ideas was Chile, then Klein might be onto something when she suggests there's a connection between libertarian economic policies and deeply un-libertarian ideas about torture, censorship, surveillance, and state-sanctioned murder. But the most sweeping free-market reforms of the last 40 years were not adopted in Pinochet's Chile, Thatcher's UK, or anyplace else addressed in Klein's book. They were enacted by the New Zealand Labour Party in the 1980s. Far from fusing economic liberalization with political repression, the Labour government expanded civil liberties: It adopted a bill of rights, decriminalized homosexuality, improved the treatment of the native Maori. And while Pinochet signed on to the CIA's war against the Latin American left, New Zealand strained its relations with Washington by making itself a nuclear-free zone, a policy that effectively barred the U.S. Navy from New Zealand ports. By Klein's logic, these are all effects of Friedmanomics.

One would not expect Ms Klein to respond to this other than with smears. It turns out that she more or less ignored the devastating review of her book by Johan Norberg at CATO recently, did not address his very serious accusations of widespread inaccuracy or misrepesentation. To repeat: it is not just her views that are a problem - I am sure some leftists argue in good faith - but her actual, repeated lying, fabrications and errors that are so easily corrected and yet she cannot be bothered to do so. That is one reason why I loathe so much of this sort of writer. It is a sort of contemptuous attitude towards simple fact-checking that I cannot abide. So Friedman did not support the Iraq war after all? Well, whatever, he might as well have done, seems to be her attitude.

The point that Jesse Walker makes about the varied effects of free market ideas is important. Yes, some repressive regimes around the world may have found it convenient, for whatever reason, to claim they had signed on to the package, as Chile did. But then remember that even former London mayor Ken "friend of Hugo Chavez" Livingstone once argued that he had borrowed the idea of road-charging from the great Chicago professor. In different times, very different types of political leader, such as Richard Nixon, claimed to be Keynesians, just as, right now, a lot of people are scurrying to claim to be in favour of tougher regulations (see Guy Herbert's comment immediately below this one).

Klein tries to draw an equivalence, in a muddied way, between those leftists who deny that Marx can be blamed for the horrors done in his name and those of us who point out it is absurd to try to blame free market thinkers from what is happening now. Well the reason, Ms Klein, why Friedman et al cannot be so blamed is that what is happening now is not an example of laissez faire capitalism. Re-read that slowly, Ms Klein: what is happening now is not a case of laissez faire. Just to spell it out for those who have not been following this debate: the central banks responsible for setting interest rates are state bodies; the US home loan agencies such as Freddie Mac that underwrote risky mortages are ultimately state bodies; the legislation forcing banks to lend to risky groups is state activity; the Basel and other bank capital rules that have arguably encouraged the irresponsible use of credit derivatives are state rules, and so on. With the exception of Lehman Brothers and some of the Icelandic banks, not a single large financial institution has been allowed to go bust, as a private company would in a free market. Not one.

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Sometimes the odd phrase can tell you everything you need to know about the kind of philosophical assumptions, held either wittingly or not, that people carry around in their heads. In a rather fluffy BBC TV news item this morning about how elderly gardeners are helping young schoolkids to learn about the great outdoors, a character involved said that this showed the "valuable contribution that senior citizens make to society". For some reason that really bugged the hell out of me.

There is this continued use of the word "society" as if this were a sort of person. I have contributions that I make to my married life such as paying certain bills and taking care of my wife if she gets ill or needs help, for instance, and I am very delighted to do so. I contribute to paying my mortgage by going out to work. I make contributions to certain services by paying for them, willingly or not, via private payments or through the violence-backed channel of tax (although "contribution" is not the right word in the latter case). But the idea that Johnathan Pearce's activities somehow "contribute to society" is so much collectivist nonsense.

The turn of phrase shows that how people choose to live their lives is not viewed through an individualistic perspective - the idea that people are entitled to pursue their lives for their own sake and happiness - but according to some sort of utilitarian or altruistic calculus, as Ayn Rand might have put it. There is actually something rather chilling about this, in fact. What if some person decides that the oldies are not making a "contribution to society"? Should they be put down, like a crippled dog?

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I am troubled at the spread of a certain meme. It is hostile to liberty, yet seems to be fairly popular with those who in other respects defend freedom of speech and abhor State interference in personal relations. In the comments to this Samizdata post, a regular commenter here, 'Mandrill', expressed this particular meme unambiguously:

It should be illegal for any adult, parent or not, to indoctrinate any child in any religion, period. If they choose to follow one of the multitudinous superstitions which we've infected our intellects with once they're an adult that's their business, but to poison a child's mind against reason from a very young age is, in my view, abuse and is something that stunts not only the intellectual growth of the child but that of the rest of humanity also. Just as much as genital mutilation (male or female) is.

That is all.

I have a few more examples that I have collected at the end of the post. Those quoted are not necessarily famous or influential, only those that I bestirred myself to note down or to find by casual googling. Trust me, there are plenty more out there. Feel free to add your own examples in comments. I would also welcome comments from anyone – such as Mandrill - who thinks this is a good meme.

Meanwhile let me speculate on how what I hold to be an insidious and bad meme is propagating itself with some success among them as should know better. Such qualities as 'truth' and 'goodness' and 'internal consistency' are often useful characteristics for a meme to have but are by no means essential to its success as a replicator.

1) Firstly, the 'ban religion for children' meme appeals by a having a spurious similarity to generally accepted ideas about when and whether sex should be prohibited. Most of us accept that consenting adults can do what they like, but children and mentally deficient people cannot give meaningful consent. My answer to that is sex is sex and talk is talk.

Campaign groups often try to 'borrow' some of the public willingness to abhor and forbid certain sexual acts and use it to get the public to abhor and forbid non-sexual acts of which the pusher disapproves. For instance, campaigners against smacking children often blur the boundaries between sexual and physical child abuse. In a loosely related way campaigners against rape sometimes blur the boundaries between forced sexual intercourse i.e. rape and the sort of 'force' involved in the use of emotional blackmail to get sex.

I am sure that many of those who support banning parents from passing on their religion to their children are motivated by honest horror at real cruelties and crimes. Prominent among these must be the numerous incidences of child sexual abuse by clergy, Roman Catholic and others. Unfortunately fear of paedophilia has given rise to a tendency to view all interactions between adults and children as suspicious unless monitored by authority. I would argue that the record of 'the authorities' in such matters is yet worse. There have been several long running paedophile rings at children’s homes, for instance.

Ach, I have got distracted. I wanted to stick to saying why it is wrong to treat passing on one’s values as being, like sex, a matter that has an age of consent. At root, human affection is inseparable from living one's values, religious or not. "I could not love you half so much loved I not honour more". And since affection must be conveyed, the values must be conveyed. To do this all the time explicitly would make you a bore, if not a nutter, but in a sense all parenting is one life-long song of your values. You sing in the hope of an answering voice, not an echo. State interference in parenting is a smoke alarm set off by music.

2) A second reason for the appeal of the idea that religion should be banned for children is our old enemy, the argument that freedom is trumped or 'balanced' by some type of repression that can, with some twisting, also be portrayed as a freedom. Or even 'true freedom'. Here is a perfect example from a comment by 'Jason' at the blog “Dispatches from the Culture Wars”:

We obviously already limit what parents may teach their children regarding religion, most obviously by exposing children to other teachings in schools, many of which may directly contradict what the parents teach while others undermine the parents' teachings in more subtle ways. You don't seem to be able to let go of this silly notion that any further intervention by the state in the education and raising of children, including their exposure to religious teachings, constitutes some kind of nightmarish Orwellian totalitarianism.

I am indeed unable to let go of this notion.

Furthermore, any serious 'concept of freedom' must consider the freedom of the child as well as the parent. And as I suggested in my last post, religious indoctrination may constitute a serious violation of the child's freedom of thought as a form of brain-washing. If people are to be truly free to make religious choices, they cannot do so if they have been massively conditioned from birth to favor one religion over another, or to favor religion over alternative philosophies and belief systems.

The post to which this was a comment concerned an occasion when Richard Dawkins (who, by a coincidence less interesting than it seemed at first sight, was the man who originally coined the word meme and made the meme meme popular) first signed, then retracted his signature from, a petition to the government to "make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16".

In the kerfuffle that followed he made it clear that he rejected compulsion and admitted that he had dropped a clanger in ever signing this petition. However 2,242 other signatories did not. As I said, quite a popular meme. See the comments at 'Dispatches' and 'The Panda’s Thumb' for more supporters.

3) Possibly the 'ban religion for children' idea has a sort of attractively ironic similarity to the debates among various denominations of Christianity about whether infant baptism is valid. Many people who have rejected Christianity nonetheless retain a vague memory of such arguments.

4) Alas, the meme is no doubt also propagated by getting religious people like me riled to the extent that we write blog posts denouncing it. I just hope that I am doing it more harm than good.

5) This meme can also be assisted by protective coloration - or perhaps it could be called a form of neoteny - in the form of an assurance, which I do not say is insincere, that it is only a joke, a discussion-starter, or a playful hypothesis. Our meme seemed to be the cuckoo in the otherwise pro-freedom nest provided by this article by AC Grayling:

But that raises the second question. We do not like children being involved in either Mosley-like or religious activities of elective suffering, one reason being that we do not think they are in a position to give properly free and informed consent. This, in turn, raises the question of what else children should be protected from in the way of religious practice, or even doctrine: for psychological effects are every bit as real as physical ones.

One might think that teaching six-year-olds the Calvinistic dread of eternal torment in hellfire is as harmful as flagellation - the youths in the Manchester case began their self-flagellation in Pakistan at that age. But what about teaching children false or weird beliefs as fact?

Once one begins to ponder where these lines should be drawn, one has begun to ponder again that border between modern secular society and religion. In my view, leaving adults to do what they like in private - providing it does not harm the unconsenting - is the right course, but that includes acquiring religion too. Leave the children out of it, both the believing and flagellating, until they can make a free and informed decision for themselves.

It is not clear to me whether "leave the children out of it" is meant to be a recommendation to individual parents to change their behaviour or to lawmakers to change the laws. Ambiguity can be a successful 'entryist' strategy for a meme. It can help an otherwise unattractive meme to spread if it is camouflaged by the sub-meme - or "is associated with the fellow-meme" if you prefer; asking where one meme stops and another starts is like asking the length of a piece of string – that the unattractive meme is only a joke or a thought-experiment. The meme can thus be spread by those who would recoil from seriously advocating it.

In this Normblog post Norman Geras complained of lack of clarity in Professor Grayling’s article, as did I. By means of rhetorical questions concerning how such a ban would be implemented, Geras also explained why the idea is invasive of private space and incompatible with secular liberalism.

Here is another example of this meme spreading under the camouflage of being a joke. In a comment to a Guardian article by Madeleine Bunting (of whom I am not a fan) 'Icerat' commented: "Religion in any form whatsoever should be kept out of education. By force, if necessary". Later he or she said it was a joke. Yet his or her comment got plenty of recommendations.

A few more entries from my meme-watcher’s notebook:

Example A: Comment by 'CritKing' to a Guardian article on faith schools by Polly Toynbee:

The only solution is to make it a cultural, and legal crime to inflict the disease of religion on a young mind.

By all means let people have their mental crutches, their bigotry, their superstitions... but brainwashing children, whether your own or those of others needs to be seen as the hideous crime that it is.

All religions know they are doomed unless they can mould the minds of those who do not have the developed intellect and experience to see through the lies. Inflicting religious doctrine and misery on a child should be filed in the same category as physical abuse.

Example B: Comment by 'Morgoth' to this Harry’s Place post about Michael Reiss being forced out of his job at the Royal Society

There is no place in education for superstition or fairy tales. If a child comes into school mouthing off fairy stories then the parents should be arrested for child abuse.

Example C: Comment by 'PidlenBach' to a Guardian article by Theo Hobson (another of my un-fave Comment is Free writers):

“No-one, however, has the right to tell their kids fundamentally untrue stories and pretend that they are the truth. Kids have rights, and one of them is the right to be told the truth by people that they trust."

Several strands of anti-liberty arguments come together in this comment: the assumption that the speaker can determine truth and untruth for all, and the mangling of the term 'right' to include a right that could only be enforced by serious curtailment of the rights to privacy and free speech of both children and parents. Furthermore a key part of trusting someone is trusting them to tell you the truth as they perceive it: PidlenBach wishes to have children trust people who are in fact lying to them under threat of punishment.

Example D: The originator of the petition to make it "illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16" (link above) added the following explanatory text to those contemplating signing:

In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with other laws, they would then be considered old enough and educated enough to form their own opinion and follow any particular religion (or none at all) through free thought.

Example E: Exposing Children To All Religion Is Abuse And Should Be Illegal. A discussion on the City Data forum.

Example F: Found somewhat late, this 1997 lecture by Nicholas Humphrey is probably the source of the meme, although its present run of success dates only from 2001. Mr Humphrey said:

Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas - no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon

It is about as well argued as this case can be. This lecture is approvingly cited by many of those who say they fear a 'Christianist' or 'Dominionist' regime in America. Odd, therefore, that they do not foresee what will really happen. When I snatch the crown from the Archbishop’s hands and crown myself Most Christian Empress of the World, no liberty they prize will survive the hour. I will take the laws Humphrey once advocated, strike out the words "literal truth of the Bible" and replace them with "atheism" in my own Imperial hand. What, let the little ones be brought up to believe that life is meaningless and death the end merely because their wretched godless parents honestly believe it?

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There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians. I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity. Let's get money out of politics by making politicians less powerful.

- Russell Roberts (over a week ago now but surely worth being made to linger a little)

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An agreeably splenetic Pat Condell video to get you in the right mood for the weekend...

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I'm sure that Hugo Chavez has done some good. Much more bad than good probably, but some good. And Ken Livingstone is certainly not totally evil. But when the two of them get together it is very implausible that it is good news for the world on average.

Though if Mr Livingstone spends a lot of time in Venezuela, that will be pleasant both for him and for Londoners, I am really quite puzzled what Latin America, or even Mr Chavez, gets from this deal:

Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital's policing, transport and other municipal issues.

"I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years. I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this," he told reporters at the presidential palace after meeting Chávez.

But the most puzling thing of all is that use of the phrase "first-world city". I was under the impression that the 'first world' was the capitalist western countries, the 'second world' the realm of state-socialism, and the 'third world' the unindustrialised rest, not clearly part of either. Continuing the metaphor of separate worlds - and wishing away trade and travel and telegraph - the Rev John Papworth has even coined "Fourth World" for the poorest of the poor and those rejecting economic development altogether.

I cannot believe Red Ken was trying to suggest that the Bolivarian Revolution will fail, and that in 20 years Venezuela will be fully part of the capitalist first world again. Surely Mr Livingstone means he wants Caracas to be a second-world city?

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[M]aterial prosperity enables people to develop morally as well as intellectually. It provides the very basis through which individuals can begin to live like humans and not act like animals.

- Neil Davenport, in the course of a sp!ked piece that neatly demolishes David Lammy's barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich. Lammy's article is more wide-ranging in its insanity than Davenport allows. He ends up advocating compulsory social service and apprenticeships for all as a cure for gangs.

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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.

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I am more than usually depressed by the report of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that is published today. A Bill of Rights for the UK? is a reaction to the present administration's kite flying for a "British Bill of Rights and Duties", and goes to confirm my suspicion that human-rights lawyers are equipped with a tin ear for political discourse as part of their education.

They do not see the fierce conditionality of Rights-and-Duties. They are in their eunoetic little universe of the kindly legislator not the populist fury. Rather than a reaction of horror at the transparent desire to entrench ergate slavery to a corporatist 'civic republican' state as a citizen's lot, there's a mild whinge that the Government isn't speaking clearly enough - no grasp that there is a different language in use:

33. We regret that there is not greater clarity in the Government's reasons for embarking on this potentially ambitious course of drawing up a Bill of Rights. A number of the Government's reasons appear to be concerned with correcting public misperceptions about the current regime of human rights protection, under the HRA. We do not think that this is in itself a good reason for adopting a Bill of Rights. As we have consistently said in previous Reports, the Government should seek proactively to counter public misperceptions about human rights rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true.

That I could support. And the discussion in the same section makes some sense of reframing the ECHR and the Human Rights Act to give better protection to individual liberty against the state. However, it doesn't face up to the Government's agenda, which is entirely opposite. It doesn't, as any Bill of Rights worth the name would do, presuppose the implacable hostility of authority to the exercise of freedom.

The rest is horror. Chandler called the game of chess "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency". You would need to harness a gigantic advertising group - WPP, say - for a full year, to piss away as much brain and education as has been wasted in the construction of the Outline of a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms. Given the task of criticism and reflection, they have been reflexively orthodox. Not just the committee, but most of their witnesses, have demonstrated that, if it contingently makes the owner deaf to political meanings, the purpose of the tin ear in human-rights legal education is to pour jurisprudential treacle directly into the brain.

The increasingly strained relationship of yoked citizen and official driver is ignored. The basic principle of the Human Rights Act is deemed good enough, despite the hopeless vagueness and pliable nature of most of its provisions. What they want to add are procedural and interpretative twiddles (which it is arguable is all the HRA did anyway) to how state power is exercised. One of those would (inadvertently?) give strong constitutional foundations to administrative rule as separate empire from the rule of law - as if unspinning the fusion of law and equity. Adopted wholesale is the superstructure of "second generation" human rights, social and economic rights. This doesn't just instantiate the presuppositions of the modern European welfare state as if fundamental to human society, it does the same with the mythic functions of the late 20th century British welfare state:

• Health care
  • Everyone has the right to have access to appropriate health care services, free at the point of use and within a reasonable time

  • No one may be refused appropriate emergency medical treatment

• Education
  • Everyone of compulsory school age has the right to receive free, full-time education suitable to their needs.

  • Everyone has the right to have access to further education and to vocational and continuing training.

• Housing
  
  
  
  • Everyone has the right to adequate accommodation appropriate to their needs.

  • Everyone is entitled to be secure in the occupancy of their home.

  • No one may be evicted from their home without an order of a court.
    
  
  
• An adequate standard of living
  • Everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living sufficient for that person and their dependents, including adequate food, water and clothing

  • Everyone has the right to social assistance, including care and support, in accordance with their needs.

  • No one shall be allowed to fall into destitution.

The clue, I suppose is in the name: a Joint Committee on Human Rights cannot be expected to step outside the nostrums and quasi-religious formulae of the legal-academic establishment that calls itself the human rights movement, and sees the role of the state as promotion of that cause. The greatest horror in the report springs from there: a "duty" for the state of "Progressive Realisation" of social and economic rights:

The Government must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of the rights in this schedule.

The one addition to 'second generation' rights is also from received wisdom of the age, one that though weaned in the 70s became a commonplace of thought among the common complacent only in the 90s: an 'environmental right' to be progressively more governed:

Everyone has the right to a high level of environmental protection, for the benefit of present and future generations, through reasonable legislative and other measures that - (i) prevent pollution and ecological degradation; (ii) promote conservation and (iii) ensure that economic development and use of natural resources are sustainable.

These, in grey general and in Green particular, show forth is a new constitutional principle. Here, explicitly for the first time I am aware of in a (notionally) common law jurisdiction, is permanent revolution: not just a protective welfare state designed to succour the weak (with all the nasty side effects on human freedom that we are used to), but a teleological state with the hard-wired object of transforming society in which the whole body of the nation is laid open for cosmetic surgery.

The Committee is really building on the same New Left foundations that the Government is. The consequence is that, though it thinks that it is repudiating populism: ("... rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true"), it is providing an apparatus perfectly suited to soft fascism.

With complete lack of self-consciousness, the chairman, Andrew Dinsmore MP has been appearing on the news this morning to say that when people appear at MPs surgeries to demand their 'human rights' they mean social and economic rights and do not understand that this is not what the current Human Rights Act covers - ergo perhaps it should. Flattering the casual demands of a clientele with the dignity of 'fundamental rights' strikes me as about as populist as one can get. The mysticism of the manor-court. As above, so below.

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My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I'm Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?

- Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker's book entitled Unjust Rewards

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Maybe I'm the last one around these parts to have clocked Pat Condell. If so, apologies. But just in case I'm not and you still haven't heard of this man, well, clock him for yourself, now. He has a YouTube homepage, and I particularly recommend the performance featured here, at the Ezra Levant blog (remember him?), which is how I found out about Condell.

The thing that strikes me about Condell is that if you were to read a transcript of the talk that I've just heard, you might dismiss him as, well, some kind of obsessive, in a word, as a crank. Certainly anyone wanting to dismiss him thus would find it fairly easy. But his manner of talking makes him seem a lot more sane than that, and that makes him a potentially huge threat to the forces of darkness. If I were them I'd be quite bothered, and anxiously trying to think of a way of shutting him up which doesn't risk him becoming a hundred times more famous. Killing him springs to mind, obviously. But what if they fail? And what if they succeed, but turn him into a very, very eloquent cadaver?

Here is an interview he did with The Freethinker which they called Laughing religion off the planet, which I am right now about to read.

UPDATE: On the other hand ...

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There's no doubt that one of life's pleasure's is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of "science fiction" that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.

Jeff Read defends Disch thus:

Most literature is about people. That's a topic that the Asperger's-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don't think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.

And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond ("esr") responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:

This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The "especially modern people" is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about "the terror of the situation".

The subject of "peak oil" then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, "right on schedule". Replies Raymond:

Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later "Peak Oil" models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.

In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I'm not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.

As for copper and platinum - they're not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that's better quality "ore" than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.

Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:

The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don't need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.

Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.

Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?

I did. They're staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they're describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.

In among that there's another potential SQOTD, I think.

There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, ...

And so it goes on. I've lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond's Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.

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There is sometimes quite a lot in common between the world of professional sports and the investment and wealth management industries. When a talented individual leaves a bank or a football team, it can cause a lot of news and chatter in the industry, prompting fans or clients to change their bank or fret over whether their club has a shot at winning games. I have worked in the financial sector long enough to know that there is also a similar sort of pecking order with banking and sports: there are "league tables" of fund managers, for example. Getting a top ranking as a fund manager with an investment record for beating the S&P 500 can be like the equivalent of winning the Player of the Year award, scoring the most goals in a season, etc.

Which nicely brings me to the subject of a certain Mr Cristiano Ronaldo, the Manchester United forward who has made a very public, and much criticised, effort to leave for the warmer climes of Real Madrid, the famous Spanish team that has won the European Cup (now the European Champions League trophy), more times than any other club: 9 times. He is blessed with wondrous dribbling skills, is brave, fast, good with both feet, can head the ball, can float around the front of the pitch and has the ability to turn a game in a flash. He scored a hatfull of goals last season, and is undoubtedly one of the best players in the world.

He is also very well paid for his efforts. No argument from me on that: he is in a free market for talent and I do not begrude him a penny of his wages. But - and this is a rather big but - he has four years left to run on his contract at Old Trafford. Naturally, his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is very unhappy at the prospect of losing him, although a monstrous transfer fee would ease the pain and enable the club to buy in some new players. United has not been exactly a saint either in nabbing players from rivals before their contracts fall due.

But the recent comments that Ronaldo's contract amounts to a form of slavery is stretching the use of language to breaking point, contrary to what Mick Hume, a self-described "red" both in political and sporting terms, says. If a person signs a contract to work for a bank or football team for a minimum of say, four years, he must serve that contract out, unless there was any clear proof that he signed under conditions of duress. A footballer who signs terms with a club binding him into a four-year contract is not selling himself into slavery. It is not as if Mr Ronaldo was kidnapped, frogmarched into the club and forced to play. It is not even as though he was starving, and so desperate for a job that he was prepared to do anything to get a job. Marxists of old like Mr Hume used to argue that workers, who had no reserves of cash to live off, were "coerced" into signing work contracts and hence exploited, an argument that might have just about held water in the early 19th century when thousands of people were living on the edge of starvation, but hardly applies now.

With bankers, it is quite common for executives to sign contracts stipulating that if they give notice to leave, they have to serve out at least six months "gardening leave" and a further period of not soliciting new clients before they can start at a new job. This sounds harsh, but banks have to protect their interests, since if there is an exodus of talent from Bank A to Bank B, the latter bank can grab some of the clients of the former bank who wish to stick with their old managers. For all I know, the same sort of things can apply in other industries.

It seems to me that the only way such terms can be likened to slavery is if there is some clear form of coercion involved in signing the contract, and some clear sign of violence or threats being employed to sustain such contracts. I see not examples in the case of the Portugese footballer.

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I notice that the this week's Economist is taking the same basic line as its sister publication the Financial Times did the Saturday after the Irish 'no' vote, that the EU can carry on without the text that was voted down. And, from their own stand point, both publications may well be correct.

It would be nice for them if the European Union had total power (which the 'Treaty of Lisbon' would have given it - especially with its amending clause), but the E.U. already has vast power (about 80% of new regulations are a response to its orders) so there is great scope for more collectivism of the involuntary, statist, sort.

And as the European Union contains almost all the major nations of Europe (with the exception of Russia) it can bully the remaining nations - at least with these nations being dominated by a political class who go along with basic philosophy of the EU anyway, due to their education and to the influence of the mainstream media, and so are looking for excuses to give in.

Meanwhile, in the United States the totalitarians look set to take over soon. I have presented evidence that they (both key members of Congress and others) are totalitarians in a previous posting and I will not type it all out again - so I will content myself with wondering whether, when the spiritual son of Saul Alinsky becomes President of the United States, he will invite Bill Ayers (and the other comrades he left Harvard to join in Chicago) to his inauguration.

So the United States and the European Union will sit grinning at each other as vital parts of the "world community".

It will be rather like Tolkien's Orthanc and Barad Dur. Or a fallen Minas Tirith grinning at Minas Morgul - over a land "filled with rotteness".

Try to prevent this, or do not, as you choose. But do not lie and say you did not know what was coming.

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Liberty is everywhere evident in licence and injured by licensing.

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Blimey! This is what the deputy leader of the BNP said about the Davis by-election:

We would argue that these people [jihadist extremists] should not be in the country in the first place, but if the price we have to pay for the accommodation of millions of immigrants is the scrapping of our ancient rights, then it is not a price worth paying.

It seems they have principles deeper than the anti-immigrant feeling that people like me assume is their prime appeal. That's a very pleasant surprise, though for this open-border freemarketeer rationalist and sexual anarchist they have a little way to go to catch my vote. HMG on the other hand makes a big fuss about its 'anti-racist' credentials, but is happy to appeal to xenophobia at every conceivable opportunity in order to promote the destruction of liberty for its own sake.

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... we have given people new rights to protest outside Parliament ...

- Gordon Brown on "Liberty and Security"

... omitting to mention that until 2005 there was a general liberty to protest outside Parliament, and giving just a little bit of it back, having fortified the area in the meantime, is not all that impressive. Read the whole thing, if you haven't been paying attention while a free country changed into something else.

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The Guardian newspaper, which regards David Davis' resignation as an MP to hold a by-election over detention without trial as a "stunt", carries this rather sniffy editorial that tells you a great deal about the mindset of those in power and their media lackeys. Excerpt:

He is right on ID cards, but only on the basis of an excessively sweeping mistrust of the state. The liberty he is concerned with is, almost exclusively, liberty from official interference. There is little place in this conception for freedom from destitution, for example, which only the state can provide. There is also a strongly patriotic dimension, baffling to those who see rights as universal. Mr Davis's defence of the age-old liberties of English common law, such as habeas corpus, is impressive, but his past disdain for the Human Rights Act sits strangely with that. The European convention which that act codifies may not be exclusively English, but it will provide the only legal basis for a challenge if 42 days becomes law. Another convention right is that to life. Liberals who see that as the most basic freedom will be uncomfortable with Mr Davis's personal support for the death penalty.

As Perry de Havilland of this parish would put it, that is wrong on so many levels. At the most basic level, the Guardian has conflated the idea of liberty and the idea of power. There is "negative liberty", which says that liberty is the absence of coercion, and "positive liberty", which blurs the idea of freedom with the ability, or power, to do things, or have things one wants, such as food, shelter, good health, nice weather, and so on. The late, great Isaiah Berlin skewered this reasoning years ago. The problem in claiming, as the Guardian does, that being "destitute" is the same as lacking liberty is that it ignores what has caused such destitution. A destitute person, living in a free country, will not be molested by the agents of a state in the way that anyone, rich, middling or flat broke, can and will be in a society that has the sorts of restrictions that Mr Davis is opposing. Of course, in some extreme cases, a very poor, or handicapped person is vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others, which is why prosperous societies full of people willing to help the weak and vulnerable are far better places to be. But socialism makes the fatal error in conflating liberty with power. In fact that error leads to the idea that somehow, all manner of regulations are okay so long as we have a full belly and somewhere to lay our heads at night. David Kelley, the philosopher, also confronts the nonsensical idea that poverty and coercion are the same thing in his book about welfare. Here is a review of that book that is worth reading.

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Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

- David Davis MP

Quite unprecedented. An MP - and a privy counsellor - quitting in order to draw attention to loss of liberty (and he used my phrase, "the database state". A meme whose time has come, I hope).

Update: now the official text rather than Sky's slightly mangled transcript.

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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.

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What it [the UK Libertarian Party] will do, like the Libertarian Party has done in the United States, is to tarnish the libertarian brand, allowing the crazier aspects of libertarian thinking to come to the fore, and achieving nothing of any merit.

- Alex Singleton, 'How Libertarians undermine liberty'

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Wired reports on a scheme to make new nations:

Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?

If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."

Excellent. Most of the bad ideas about how to govern nations have been tried out for centuries. They work moderately well for luckier ones amongst the plunderers, more or less appallingly for the plunderees. The good ideas, like very low taxes, very light regulation – in short: liberty – have been attempted only very occasionally. Anything which tilts that balance in the good direction is to be welcomed. I strongly believe that all social, political, and legal ideas should indeed be allowed on these jumped-up oil rigs (rather than merely my own social, political, and legal ideas), as the Seasteading Institute clearly envisages, but only if all those involved in each attempt consent to being part of it.

That should shoot most of the collectivists at the starting line. Most collectivist political ideas are about what should be done by them, the evil collectivists and their evil friends, to others who can't defend themselves against their ghastly ideas even by running away, let alone resisting plunder. If only for that reason, the evil collectivists are all going to hate this stuff. And if only for that reason, I already like it, even if it never gets much beyond internet speculation.

The more honestly deluded among the collectivists, who really think that people will consent and go on consenting to their rancid notions, like those 1620-vintage (have I got that date right?) settlers on the east coast of what is now the USA, will, if they are ever silly enough to try one of these schemes, get a crash course in what they really should be doing and how the world really works.

I found out about this plan via one of my internet favourites just now, BLDG BLOG. The BLDG BLOG man is torn between architectural excitement and political unease:

It's not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it's a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.

Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn't just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.

He's not advocating it, you understand. Perish the thought. Who knows what frightful political genies may be let out of the bottle of the twentieth century collectivism to which most architects are still wedded? But, he can't stop himself thinking: cool. I hope he's right. About the coolness, I mean.

I've been doing some more reading of the Wired piece. One of the moving spirits behind the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, who is David Friedman's son. If David Friedman is anything to go by, Patri (whom I have not met but whose blog I dip into from time to time) is surely a great guy. However, this makes me fear that the people doing this particular scheme are experts not on money, power, etc., but on libertarianism. This is not a good sign. Schemes like this cannot merely be virtuous. They have to work, and I fear that this one won't. I mean, if it only starts to look like working, think of the number and nature of the people who will want it squashed. I really do hope that I'm wrong about this particular scheme. If I'm only wrong once about schemes like this, it will be a different world and a massively better one.

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It is hard not to be struck by how often the British state threatens its subjects. You can hardly turn on the television without being confronted by direct unambiguous threats that say 'obey-or-else', as mention here on Samizdata before recently. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute wrote about this in an article titled Watch out, the Gestapo are about.

The latest one I have noticed is a threat to car owners. If they do not pay their car tax, they will have their cars seized and crushed (cheers to Andy H for the link to the advert).

Imagine hearing this on your television, set to ominous music:

We are the MasterCard Credit card Company and we have lent you money...

If you don't pay it back, we will send the bailiffs around and seize your property!

Of course MasterCard only lend money to people who are willing to take that money in the first place, yet can you imagine the howls of outrage if a company publicly threatened people if they do not comply with the terms and conditions of a loan? Of course no company in their right mind would actually do that.

Yet do you hear any outrage from the Conservative Party or the LibDems when the state uses tax money to run advertisements threatening to use the Boys in Blue against people who do not cough up the money the state wants? Not that I have heard.

Well I am not outraged either, in fact I am delighted. Every time I see the TV Licensing adverts or the Car Tax adverts, I am struck by their educational value. States are self-perpetuating institutions through which the means of collective coercion are applied, nothing more or less, and having the state be completely upfront about its true nature is very useful indeed. One of Samizdata's tag lines is 'The State is not your friend', so I can hardly complain when the state starts running advertisements saying much the same thing.

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My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:

The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.

I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.

More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.

The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.

So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:

However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist ...

Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.

... and said they could face legal action from parents.

Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.

Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:

"They have a choice, people always have a choice," the minister said.

"What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court."

This is the language of the Mafia.

What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose "progressive" and "radical" change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.

Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the "private" sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.

Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There's a lot of it about.

The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.

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Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.

... Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”

There's a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for "not doing enough" on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain - and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address - liberty is no longer intelligible.

Does the word "liberty" appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? ...

Not here. But ... a Google site: search at www.curriculumonline.gov.uk brings up just two items.

The first is, a rather icky, PC, citizenship teacher's guide to the internet:

This unique and invaluable resource is a guide to the best of a huge collection of Citizenship resources available on the Internet. Fifty nine sites are included and each site is evaluated in terms of its content, usefulness, links and suitability. Sites included: ActionAid Schools and youth groups anti-slavery Central Bureau for International Education and Training Council for Education in World Citizenship Global Citizenship Global Dimension The Institute for Citizenship Montage Plus QCA Subjects Citizenship Hampshire Citizenship Project United Nations Home Page Knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens Campaign for Freedom of Information European Citizens' Rights The Citizenship Foundation Commonwealth Secretariat Council of Europe Education in Human Rights Network Europarl Explore Parliament The Hansard Society ippr Local Government Information Unit Local Government Association WEB SITE: Oxfam's Cool Planet Save the Children's Fund Scottish Human Rights Trust Department for International Development Understanding Global Issues Developing Skills of Enquire and Communication The Bar Human Rights Committee The Commission for Racial Equality : The Council of Europe Portal The British Institute of Human Rights The Runnymede Trust PICT Developing Skills of Participation and Responsible Action Amnesty International UK The Anne Frank Educational Trust UK The British Youth Council The Centre for Alleviating Social Problems Trough Values Education CEDC Community Education and Development Centre Community Learning Scotland Development Education Association Democracy 88 The Global Caf?? Age Concern Centre for Citizenship Studies in Education Human Rights Unit The Institute for Global Ethics NSPCC Kid's Zone : Liberty Peace Child Schools Council The Howard League The Human Rights Centre of The University of Essex Changemakers Windows on the World Worldaware This book comes with a disk that you can run through you web browser so that you just have to point and click to be connected to sites without having to type the address (you will need Internet access on your computer)

Not a huge variety of viewpoint there, though at least the "Liberty" referred to is the organisation of that name, which (in its soft-left way) definitely understands the meaning of the term.

The second is rather more sinister - a published standard lesson product, entitled "Why Obey the State":

Product Details
Description: Information about obedience to the state, with activities, for KS3 and KS4.
Publisher: Pearson Publishing (Publication date-15th Nov 2002)
Covers: Lesson
Teaching subject: Citizenship
Key Stage: Key stage 3 [11-14], Key stage 4 [14-16]
[...] Resource Information
Product type: Drill and practice
[...] Education Information
Covers: Lesson
Who is the resource for? Learner
General keywords: state, obey, democracy, intervention, liberty
National curriculum keywords: Citizenship and PSHE (Responsibilities - general information)

I wish I were making this up.

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Fabian Tassano, who has recently written a rather fine book, links to this rather darkly amusing outline of how a country goes down the U-bend.

The interesting question is whether there is an equivalent series of steps showing how things get better. An issue that occasionally comes up in the comment threads is how do we get from the current god-awful statist mess A to sunlit uplands of liberal society B? What should happen first, second, third, fourth, etc? For instance, what would be the sequence of changes? Should we start with the little stuff (abolish the Arts Council, confine Polly Toynbee) or the Big Stuff (slash the Welfare State, abolish state education departments, repeal most taxes)?

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Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune...

Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:

Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it's inconsiderate.

Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.

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As suggested by a Samizdata reader called Hugo, I am going to kick off a Friday discussion which takes the following line: "A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we'd let people starve in the streets."

I think the contention would be grossly unfair, to put it mildly. Libertarians oppose the welfare state, we do not oppose welfare. That logically means that we support charity, although not necessarily existing charities, many of which have been subsumed by the state. As history has shown, mutual aid and philanthropic societies typically thrive because of, not in spite of, a powerful pro-freedom, pro-free enterprise culture. The belief that we are entitled to pursue our self-interest (so long as it does not involve aggression, theft or fraud) does not clash with the idea that it is good to be generous and helpful to those who have been dealt a crap hand in the cardgame of life.

In fact, the philosopher David Kelley recently wrote a book, which I heartily recommend, saying that feelings of generosity and benevolence towards one's fellow Man are an actual consequence of a society where people feel no shame or guilt about the pursuit of happiness in this life. In many cultures, including the Judeo-Christian one, generosity is a duty that is owed at the command of God. However, in the sense that Kelley and I use it, a generous, friendly approach to our fellows does not have to be commanded because such a trait generates long-term benefits to the giver as well as the recipient. This guy makes a good set of points in a review of Kelley's book. Okay, vicious, grasping people may be happy in the very short run after they have achieved their goals, but they usually have very few friends and often end up getting shunned. And being shunned is not very nice.

Given all this, a society in which every able-bodied person had to work if they had no private income, and where the rise in wealth would be great because of a free market system, is likely to be one in which there would be plenty of people willing to give to charity to help out the infirm, the handicapped, and so on. It also goes without saying that the idea of poor people starving in the streets would be a near-impossibility in a dynamic economy oozing with wealth and ideas.

The one place where starvation of the poor is a likely occurrence, of course, is under collectivism. Just look at the great socialist disasters of the 20th Century.

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David Selbourne is one of those intellectual figures who swims in similar currents to that of John Gray: mixing a sort of gloomy, conservative (small c) dislike of much modern culture and public life; a sort of grumpy dislike of the inevitably messy impact of individual liberty combined with a sort of authortarian desire for those in power to somehow rein in all this terrible individualist excess and take us back to say, 1950. Tim Worstall, well known around here, subjects his latest article to a fairly gentle fisking.

Here is the original piece by Selbourne. It follows a similar, arguably even more incoherent rant in the Spectator last week (sorry, I could not get the link to work, so you will have to trust me). Here he goes:

To expect the fulfilment by the citizen of his or her duties is no impertinence. It is essential to liberal democracy. Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for "constitutional renewal" or for a more "contractual" relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.

As Tim puts it:

To return to a feudal system in which I owe duties to My Noble Lords in return for whatever rights they might see fit to grant me? Fuck that quite frankly.

Quite. Feudalism is actually a polite word for what this character wants to impose. A society in which freedoms are handed over like sweets in return for the prior performance of duties might be known as something rather ruder, like fascism.

Or maybe the problem could be more easily solved if Selbourne was honest about what he understands the definition of "rights" to be. In the classical liberal sense, a right is nothing more than a prohibition on the initiation of force against a person and his or her property; under socialism, the term "right" has been debauched into a claim on things such as the "right" to "free" schooling, which means that someone else be coerced into paying for the latter. The former negative definition of a right implies no such zero-sum game.

Selbourne must surely have heard of Isiah Berlin's famous attempt to unscramble this confusion.

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This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn't put it up a week ago, when I should have.

So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we'd talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And "Devil's Kitchen", one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:

We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen's Tavern, Westminster.

Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …

So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen's Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil's Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. "They all are", he said.

I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.

Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.

But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.

I also learned something else. Mr Devil's Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That's another thing that maybe should not count, but does.

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Over on The Line is Here, they are hosting the Carnival of the Libertarians, where various folks sound off about, surprise surprise, issues to do with liberty.

Check it out.

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The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.

This quote is great:

“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”

Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.

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I like this:

For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.

"Us" being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.

To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people's religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.

Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!

Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you're there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.

I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao's argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).

That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.

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On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: "How to Cure Government Obesity," which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.

Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA's president, by email: tim [at] libertarian [dot] co [dot] uk. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.

I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It's the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves - even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed "the rape of the libraries" and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.

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David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense - ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government - has had a sort of epiphany:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

He finishes thus:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist - and a great one - rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.

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A friend of mine ("Don't give any names!") has just told me some very good news. The friend of mine's landlady has a way of dealing with nasty lodgers, who don't pay (despite being warned), or who make too much noise at night (despite being warned), or who do anything else evil (despite being warned). She expels them! That's right, she chucks them out. This is illegal, and they (the scum being chucked out) often point this out. But it works. She has her own locks to the doors, which she duly locks. And just puts all their crap out onto the street and refuses to let them in ever again. They have the law on their side, but what bloody use is that if you need somewhere to live tonight and all your crap is out on the street? The law takes months!

The landlady has now done this thirty six times, including last Sunday, just after Church (the landlady is a born again Christian). They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom. They were warned, but paid no attention.

Good to know. Civil society is being re-established. See this, linked to, again, by Patrick Crozier today, for details. Be civil. Or suffer the consequences.

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Rob Johnston has produced a very interesting essay on the true soulmates of Green Politics in Britain

• Forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants
• Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles
• Grant British citizenship only to children born here
• Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites
• Restrict tourism and immigration from outside Europe
• Prohibit embryo research
• Stop lorry movements on the Lord’s Day
• Require State approval for national sports teams to compete overseas
• Disconnect Britain from the European electricity grid
• Establish a "new order" between nations to resolve the world economic crisis

These are the policies of one of Britain’s most influential political parties: a party that has steadily increased its vote over the last decade; a party that appeals overwhelmingly to whites; and a party that shares significant objectives with neo-fascists and religious fundamentalists.

Perhaps - the BNP? Despite its attempts to appear modern and inclusive and the soothing talk in its 2005 General Election Manifesto, of "genuine ethnic and cultural diversity" [1].

Or UKIP? It harbours some pretty backward-looking individuals - but would they stop Britain buying electricity from France if necessary?

Or, maybe, the Conservatives? Could that be a list of recommendations from one of Dave’s lesser-known policy groups - chaired by the ghost of Enoch Powell - quietly shredded to avoid "re-contaminating the Brand"?

Actually, affiliates of the progressive consensus may be surprised to learn that all the reactionary policies in the first paragraph are from the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (MfSS) or were adopted at the party’s Autumn Conference in Liverpool over the weekend of September 13-16, 2007 [2].

Of course, the Green Party will protest against the accusation of reactionary politics. However, in an article critical of the G8 leaders in June, George Monbiot, (capo di tutti capi of the green movement) advised readers to judge politicians for "what they do, not what they say".

For example, as well as supporting ethnic and cultural diversity, the BNP says it accepts:

"... the right of law-abiding minorities, in our country because they or their ancestors came here legally, to remain here and to enjoy the full protection of the law against any form of harassment or hostility..." [3]

But, use Monbiot's argument, disregard the rhetoric and look at what the rest of the BNP manifesto promises would actually do and it remains a party of racist and neo-fascist ideology - internationally isolationist and domestically reactionary.

The trouble for Greens is that their manifesto pledges would result in many of the same outcomes as the BNP programme.

You will not find the words "Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites", in the Green Party’s manifesto, but consider Monbiot’s advice about the effects of these policies:

"The Green Party recognises that subsidies are sometimes necessary to protect local, regional and national economies and the environment, and we will support them in these instances" [4].

"Controls such as tariff barriers and quotas should be gradually introduced on a national and/or regional bloc level, with the aim of allowing localities and countries to produce as much of their food, goods and services as they can themselves. Anything that cannot be provided nationally should be obtained from neighbouring countries, with long distance trade the very last resort" [5].

The paradox of arguing for Fair Trade while refusing to buy African vegetables because of "food miles" has been noted many times, but it is a paradox the Green Party simply ignores. According to the Guardian, Britain has two black farmers [6], so any policy to subsidise domestic produce and erect barriers to outsiders will, ipso facto, support white farmers and disadvantage black farmers. Even if supplies are "obtained from neighbouring countries", white European farmers benefit at the expense of poor farmers in Africa and the developing world.

On agricultural policy in general, Greens will agree with the following sentiments:

"Britain's farming industry will be encouraged to produce a much greater part of the nation's need in food products. Priority will be switched from quantity to quality, as we move from competing in a global economy to maximum self-sufficiency for Britain, sustainable agriculture, decreased reliance on petro-chemical products and more organic production" [7].

However, those promises come from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto - in a section indistinguishable from the Green Party manifesto:

"To be able to fulfil all our basic food needs locally. To grow as many other products as we can to meet our basic needs (e.g. for textiles, fuel, paper) on a local or regional basis. To enable all communities to have access to land which can be used for growing for basic needs. To ensure that all growing systems use only natural, renewable inputs and that all organic waste outputs are able to be recycled back into the soil or water system" [8].

Perhaps this is why, according to the BNP:

"We are the only true 'Green Party' in Britain as only the BNP intends to end mass immigration into Britain and thereby remove at a stroke the need for an extra 4 million homes in the green belts of the South East and elsewhere, which are required to house the influx of 5 million immigrants expected to enter the country under present trends over the next twenty years" [9].

Greens agree with the BNP about migration and the green belt. They promise to: minimise the environmental degradation caused by migration; not allow increased net migration; and end the pressure on the Green Belt by reducing population and stopping growth-oriented development [10]. Reduction in non-white tourism and immigration would be an inevitable consequence of government restrictions on air travel. Few refugees from Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe manage to get all the way to Britain without a large carbon footprint, neither can tourists from beyond Europe.

How about the accusation that the Green Party would:

"Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles and prevent crime; forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants."

Here, are the relevant resolutions from the MfSS:

"Communities and regions should have the right to restrict inward migration when one or more of the following conditions are satisfied: [11]
a) The ecology of the recipient area would be significantly adversely affected by in-comers to the detriment of the wider community (eg. National Parks, Antarctica).
b) The recipient area is owned or controlled by indigenous peoples (eg Australian aboriginal people) whose traditional lifestyle would be adversely affected by in-comers.
c) The prospective migrants have, on average, equal or greater economic power than the residents of the recipient area and they or their families were not forced to leave the area in the recent past."

"Regions or communities must have the right to reject specific individuals on grounds of public safety" [12].

The examples (breathtakingly disingenuous) assert that they intend simply to stop Richard Branson driving a new main line through Stonehenge, Rupert Murdoch building a printing press on top of Uluru or Caesar’s Palace opening a casino at the South Pole.

Surely the Greens, of all people, know that Britain has hardly any desolate tundra and few Australian aboriginal communities. In practice, these policies would give the "indigenous" white folk of a quaint rural hamlet the right to rebuff a Leicester Bangladeshi purchaser for its corner shop because she has "greater economic power" than the villagers – whose "traditional lifestyle" would be "adversely affected" by her ethnicity and religion. They could also keep her out "on ground of public safety" because her inner city Muslim children are more likely to be criminals than their own offspring.

Not surprisingly, the BNP agrees with the Greens about the "right of all peoples to self-determination and that must include the indigenous peoples of these islands" [13]... Alas, not every small community is Ambridgely-correct – thrilled to embrace a half-Irish gay couple, a Vicar with a Hindu girlfriend and a mixed-race child, and an African husband for the daughter of the Lord of the Manor with the same enthusiasm it has for organic ciabatta and carbon trading.

In the 1980s, when the Thatcher government restricted immigration to Britain to those with at least one grandparent born here, it was accused of constructive racism. Thatcher claimed her measures were not racist – any discrimination against nonwhites was just an incidental consequence of the need to maintain what is now called "community cohesion". Green Party policy would go even further down the road of constructive racism than Mrs Thatcher, refusing citizenship to children born overseas even if their parents hold British passports [14].

The Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence identified "unwitting racism" in the police that can arise from well intentioned words or actions that arise out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible ethos of the "traditional" way of doing things:

"It persists because of the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership. Without recognition and action to eliminate such racism it can prevail as part of the ethos or culture of the organisation" [15].

By its uncritical acceptance of "traditional" ways of doing things - from the "spiritual link between ourselves and nature" [16] in agriculture, to anti-globalisation, to making the home "an important centre of economic activity" [17] - the Green Party allies itself with some of the most reactionary contemporary political forces in the land. And the "traditional" way of doing things is usually a reactionary approach to modern social issues.

Green Party agreement with Christian fundamentalists on at least two issues requires no textual analysis: MfSS policy number EU523 would ban lorry movements on Sunday throughout Europe and H329 calls for an immediate ban on embryo manipulation and cloning for any research, therapeutic or reproductive purposes [18].

Policies EU532 and 533 would scrap all connection of electricity grids throughout Europe - partly because interconnectivity allows nuclear generated power to creep along the wires [19].

For national sports teams, CMS871 would require politicians to determine "whether it is appropriate for the team to take part in competition against a country with whom normal friendly, respectful, or diplomatic relations are not possible” [20].

It is frequent for parties on the extreme fringes to share an analysis of contemporary politics - and Greens and BNP certainly share a lot of analysis. From the BNP 2005 Manifesto [21]:

"For most of human history, the existence of such ethnic and cultural diversity among humanity was so obvious and apparently unchallengeably natural that the political theorists and philosophers of past generations simply took it for granted. Only in the last few decades has this been changed forever by the advent of mass passenger travel, the insatiable desire of the globalised capitalist economy for cheap labour, and the worldwide reach of US consumerist culture through film and television."

"That poison is in large measure the blind economic force of global capitalism, with its insistence on the unrestricted flow of goods, capital and labour to wherever in the world they will make the maximum short-term profit ... It is not about 'love' and 'tolerance', it is about profit."

"Formidably powerful and publicly unaccountable transnational companies are becoming ever more footloose, their strength and mobility facilitated both by technological advances, and by the progressive withdrawal of investment controls by governments and by multilateral institutions such as WTO. TNCs are now increasingly able to exploit differences in social and environmental standards between countries in order to maximise profits" [22]. "The rush towards globalisation is neither inevitable nor desirable. It is leading to the sharp reduction in powers of local and indigenous communities, states, and even nations, to control their futures, as economic power is transferred to global institutions. A worldwide homogenization of diverse, local, and indigenous cultures, social and economic forms, as well as values and living patterns increasingly reflect the new global monoculture" [23].

To solve these "problems" the Green Party calls for an international "new order" to address a "global economic … cris[i]s" [24]. That language requires a very special kind of historical ignorance. Can no one in the Green Party have noticed that the last ideology to emphasise the spiritual oneness of man and nature ("blood and soil") and used the phrase "new order" was the fascism of the mid-20th century? A fascism represented in contemporary politics by the BNP. Similar analyses may be common for parties on opposite wings of politics, but it is not so common to posit the same solutions.

No doubt, when the Green Party adopted its manifesto there was no deliberate intention to implement a reactionary and racist strategy. But the Green Party is overwhelmingly white: of more than three dozen individuals listed as speakers and discussion leaders at its Autumn Conference only one was obviously a member of a visible ethnic minority (VEMs to those in the know) [25]. Even the discussion on issues affecting women from ethnic minority communities was led by a white woman and just 2% of Green Party candidates in the 2006 local elections were VEMs [26]. Perhaps the absence of minority members in Green Party counsels results in the same sort of "canteen culture" that affects the police, making it oblivious to the right-wing, pseudo racist nature of its plans for Britain.

The lessons of the Macpherson Report’s "institutional racism" could be expanded to include "institutional reactionaryism" and should be learnt not only by the state apparatus and large companies, but also by the Green Party - which declares its desire for a fair and just society.

References:
1.BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto: Rebuilding British Democracy (BNP 2005) pg 3 http://www.bnp.org.uk/candidates2005/manifesto/manifesto2005.pdf
2.Green Party Autumn Conference 2007: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2007/Final_Agenda_Autumn07.pdf
3.BNP 2005: pg 21
4.Green Party Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (GP MfSS): EU413 http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/
5.Ibid: EU443
6.The Guardian Monday June 26, 2006 “Meet Britain's other black farmer” http://www.guardian.co.uk/country/article/0,,1805973,00.html
7.BNP 2005: pg47
8.GP MfSS: AG500, AG501, AG502, AG503
9.BNP 2005: pg 48
10.GP MfSS: MG200, MG400, CY561
11.Ibid: MG204
12.Ibid: MG207
13.BNP 2005: pg 3
14.GP MfSS: NY515
15.Rachel Morris, Cardiff Law School: Summary of Macpherson Report: http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/tlru/Lawrence.pdf
16.GP MfSS: AG100
17.Ibid: EC403
18.Ibid: EU523, H329
19.Ibid: EU532, EU533
20.Ibid: CMS871
21.BNP 2005: pg 18-19
22.GP MfSS: EC902
23.Ibid: EC903
24.Ibid: EC900
25.Green Party Autumn Conference 2007 Timetable. http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2007/Liverpool_timetable_full.pdf
26.Green Party Candidates for May 4th 2006 http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/election/2WebverLE06cand.htm

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Would laws to protect animals from cruelty and/or neglect be legitimate in a free society?

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...Good.

It is also insensitive to Catholic feelings, Nazi feelings, Buddhist feelings, Communist feelings, Capitalist feelings, Manchester United Supporter feelings, Surrealist baboon trousers, Scientologist feelings, Creationist feelings, Darwinist feelings...

"Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group."

The whole point of a reference book or reference wiki, is to present information regardless of anyone's 'feelings'. And if some Muslims do not like that... tough shit, here is a link to the 'Mohammed Cartoons' for you because to my mind it is not enough to just ignore them, intolerant Islam must be confronted and loudly defied. I could not care less whose 'feelings' get hurt by publishing something and thankfully to their credit neither could Wikipedia.

Samizdata is also fairly insensitive to Muslim feelings

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In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer gets stuck right into police forces, and especially the constabulary of Kent, for various offences against liberty and common sense. It is a rather populist article, designed to stir the pot, but I think it is a pot worth stirring. I myself on the other end of the world share his disdain for my local police force, which I regard as nothing more or less then the armed enforcers of the Treasury Department.

I certainly have reservations about their ethics, methods, and purpose, and I suspect much worse of them. Given that the head of Australian Federal Police is trying to push for a media blackout of its anti-terrorist activities, a power that could easily be abused, I think I have good reasons to fear the worst from the boys in blue.

How did it come to this? My own guess is that police forces are just reflecting the nature of the governments that supposedly control them. Monkey see, monkey do.

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I am fond of telling people who are asking or reading about my views on the rights of employers, employees, etc., that I think that an employer should be allowed to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes. But I think that, courtesy of the ever alert Dave Barry, I may now have found a more vivid way of making the same point:

In her civil case, which is slated to begin in Los Angeles tomorrow, former employee Mary Nelson charges the eccentric Charney, 39, once had a meeting with her wearing only a fragment of clothing called a "c- - k sock," invited her to masturbate with him, and then fired her when he learned she planned to meet with a lawyer.

Nelson's lawyer, Keith Fink, said his first witness would be Charney, who's turned his company into a multimillion-dollar retail giant with 7,000 employees.

Asked in a deposition whether he'd ever referred to women as "sluts" at work, he said, "In private conversations, where such language was generally welcome."

Asked whether he considered the word "derogatory," he said, "There are some of us that love sluts ... It could be also be an endearing term."

Asked whether he'd ever used the c-word for female genitalia at work, he said, "Absolutely."

He also acknowledged traipsing around his company wearing only his American Apparel-made underwear.

"There is no evidence to say that you can't walk around in your underwear all day anywhere in the United States of America," he testified.

"Not only does he admit to virtually all of the outlandish allegations in this case, [but] he's somewhat proud of how he comports himself in the workplace," Fink said. "That's what I find so shocking."

Yes, how appalling. A man, who clearly likes very much being a man, struts about in his own property, behaving like some ancient God of Fertility. Worse, what with his enterprise being a "multi-million dollar retail giant", I'm guessing that a great many of his employees actually enjoy all this horsing about, and work harder and more alertly than they would if employed by somebody like lawyer Fink. Working for Charney probably wouldn't suit me, although you never know, maybe I would enjoy it too.

Mr Charney overstates his case when he says he can wear only his cock sock "anywhere in the United States". The essence of his defence should be his right to wear what he likes in his property, not any right to upset other property owners with their different and duller ideas about what constitutes suitable apparel. But as for everything else, my verdict would be that Mary Nelson and her lawyer, Fink, should leave Mr Charney alone. If Ms. Nelson has discovered that she does not like working for Mr Charney and his multi-million dollar retail giant, she has a simple alternative. Find somewhere else to work and someone else to work for. Clearly this was the arrangement Mr Charney preferred, once he discovered Ms Nelson's perverted taste for litigation. Ms Nelson should simply acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Charney's decision, and look elsewhere for employment.

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Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).

It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine's writers. This has to hurt:

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I'll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn't do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul's newsletters back in the early '90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul's populist appeals. (Note that by "cosmopolitan" I do not mean "Jewish." I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul's record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.

The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.

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There is an outstanding article on the interesting new blog The Line is Here called I am no longer a child and I strongly commend it to everyone. It captures the essence of the New Totalitarianism in a very different way to my polemical approach to the subject and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.

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I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.

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Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon.

- Samizdata commenter Ian B. We do not have to imagine these things any more, alas. The only problem with his quote is that he omitted to mention assault on jury trials, Habeas Corpus, double-jeopardy...

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Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect - although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion - that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:

I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, ...

At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase "This charge if found guilty" It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar.

I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more.

Lionheart's central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not "Islamic extremism". The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart's ideas about that.

But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit's attitude:

I don't know much about the blogger, but I don't need to - people shouldn't be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don't like.

If Lionheart's claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.

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Even more predictable than the post-Thanksgiving appearance of shopping-mall Santas is the inability of pundits at this time of year to say or to write "commercialism" without prefixing to it the word "crass" - as we encounter in your pages today in Tom Krattenmaker's "The real meaning of Christmas."

What truly is crass is politics - that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue.

- A letter from Donald J. Boudreaux to USA Today. Amit Varma liked it too.

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Is it possible to be both a nationalist and a libertarian?

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Amazon has just been ordered by the French state to stop delivering books for free, and in general to refrain from charging too little for books. This is just wrong, says Instapundit.

With questions like this, I come over all Paul Coulam. I start not with what might or might not seem nice, but with libertarian dogma.

Amazon owns some books. They should be allowed sell them to you for any price they like, and subject to any conditions they like. They should be allowed to offer to deliver them any way they like, for any price they like. And if you are interested, you should be allowed to say ... yes! Or: no. It really should be that simple. If you have to die your hair blue before they will sell books to you, well that would be a strange business model to follow, but: the books belong to them and they should be allowed to part with them, or not, on any basis they like.

However, the principle that if you own something you should be allowed to sell it on any basis you like would also allow certain other arrangements to pertain.

Suppose publishers want to sell their books (books that are their property) any way they like. Suppose, for instance, that they decide that retailers can only buy their books if retailers agree beforehand to sell those books to other people at a price which they, the publishers, not the retailers, determine. And suppose, if a retailer makes a deal like that, but subsequently break it, and the publisher then says: sorry, we don't trust you any more, we won't sell you any more books. Fine. It may be a bizarre way to do business, but if that's how publishers want to do business, let them try to do it that way, and see if they can make it stick. So long as they don't expect you and me to pay for a huge police force to punish deal-breakers, but merely punish deal-breakers by not doing any more deals with them, then, from where I sit: no problem.

If supermarkets want to be able to sell books cheaper then bookshops, well, then I guess they'd have either to find publishers who don't price their books this way, or else go into the publishing business themselves. Again, fine.

The bizarre arrangement I just described in the previous two paragraphs actually did pertain, until in Britain (definitely) and in other EU states (guess) such arrangements were made illegal, for books, and for everything else. This change was called "the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance" and was hailed (definitely in Britain) by many deluded Free Marketeers as a Good Thing. One of the earliest IEA publications was about, and in favour of, this very change, before it actually happened. Says IEA Director John Blundell:

An early study, by Basil Yamey, urged the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance. The texture of everyone's life has been transformed by the result. We forget that supermarkets were effectively illegal under the old price-rigging but there is no thanks in politics. Who now recalls the 1979 election scrapping of exchange controls? We had to get authorisation to take even small sums abroad.

Note the blurring together there of (a) the imposition of a government control (making a particular sort of contract illegal) and (b) the relaxing of a government control (exchange control). I think I shall write about this for my next piece for CNE Competition, where I have until now always defended supermarkets against politicised gangs of small shop-keepers. This puts the whole existence of supermarkets into a quite new light, I think you will agree. John Blundell was not trying to convince me that supermarkets are wicked, but I think he might just have done so.

More recently, I recall a case where somebody making bicycles wanted to sell these bicycles only to shops which didn't then ever sell them for knock-down (as they saw it) prices. The retailer Halfords did want to sell them for knock-down prices. The manufacturers accordingly didn't want to sell their bicycles - their bicycles – to Halfords. But, the British state (which is now for this and for many other purposes a mere branch office of the EUrostate) compelled these bike-makers to "sell" their bikes to Halfords even though they didn't want to. As Instapundit might have said, but I am pretty sure never did say: this is just wrong.

The point is, there was a free market, property rights respecting way of solving the problem that the French bookselling rivals of Amazon now have, which was for those booksellers to sell only those books which publishers forbade to be discounted. That solution was made illegal. And I'm guessing that French supermarkets have a far tougher legal time of it than supermarkets do in Britain. Now the shopkeepers want the resulting arrangement, which was bound to hit them eventually, once global businesses beyond the reach of French law got involved in the French book-selling market, also to be made illegal. Foolishness.

Mind you, if the market had been allowed to decide, Amazon, like Britain's book-discounting supermarkets, might by now also have become a publisher. It might even, by now, be publishing books in French.

Freedom, in this case and in many others, should not mean the state imposing its own idea of freedom by in fact restricting freedom (in the form of some rather odd contracts that various people want freely to make). It should mean different groups of people with different ideas about how to do things confronting each other in the market place, and the state recognising all their legitimate rights as legitimate. And the rest of us should then be allowed to choose which arrangements we prefer, with equally little state interference. If those rules had been followed in this case, of Amazon's discounted books, my guess is that Amazon would still be discounting books, but to be sure would involve being sure about an alternative reality scenario, and you never really can be, because what free people will choose is inherently hard to predict.

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John Louis Swaine wrote in with an interesting piece about his own 'road to Damascus'. "It took approximately 8 years to move from being a Labourite teenager to a Libertarian at the age of 23. I used to blog quite a lot so I felt the urge to write something about it. Since the Samizdata weblog has been one of the most important contributing factors for this change, I thought I would submit it to you."

Most people have a "Summer of '69" they can relate to; a magic period of youthful exuberance, tempered by important life experiences and left to bake softly in the warmth of the July sun. Mine was in 2001, I was 16 and beginning to ask the bigger questions about society and life.

I had opinions, I suddenly cared about issues. Like virtually every young person I came to the conclusion that equality was of paramount importance and that the only means by which to achieve it was through the prescription of schemes and initiatives by Government. After all, is that not what my generation had been taught? The importance of civil duty, of taking part in the organs of governance and through them making life better for your fellow man?

I dutifully signed up to the Observer brigade. Things could change, things could be fixed and crucially, the fix was always within the grasp of Government.

I did have the benefit of a decent grounding in knowledge of markets. I rather suspect you cannot have spent a significant amount of time growing up in Hong Kong without absorbing it - capitalism and free markets are in the air there, mixed in amongst the toxic levels of pollutants and exhaust fumes. Your chances of developing lung cancer or respiratory disorders may be high but you will also assimilate at least some understanding of how a financial system works.

Tony Blair's governing ideology therefore seemed intoxicating - using the state to care for one's fellow man whilst reforming the public sector and embracing free markets. Everything fitted nicely into place.

The first cracks in my political viewpoint began to appear on the 11th of September, 2001...

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and subsequent UNSC Resolutions authorizing the use of force to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan, I read daily in my newspapers of the horrors of warfare in Afghanistan. The US, it seems, were doomed. If the might of the Soviet Empire could not conquer the nation, then surely the US would be bogged down into a quagmire of small arms fire and disappearing assailants.

Within a month of beginning their assault the US had demolished the Taliban's standing army, on November 12th the Taliban fled Kabul and a military victory was imminent. The emperor had no clothes.

I read the Observer and the Guardian less and less and instead migrated to the Times. However I retained my same staunch belief in the struggle for an egalitarian society through Government. I wrote a political blog and had quite a bit of traffic. I moved to London to read Law and joined the Labour party. I was ultimately quite satisfied with the way in which the United Kingdom was being run and governed.

During my study for my degree I took a particular interest in Constitutional Law and received a 1st for the module, my lecturer asked me to perform some extra research for one of his upcoming books on Civil Liberties and I happily accepted. The history of the British 'constitution' was enthralling and I began to get a real sense for what it meant to be British.

We were a people who lived under the Magna Carta, whose parliament established the ground rules for modern day governance, and who time and time again, took up arms in defence of liberty. We had little time for despots, deposing one and then giving up on the other's ridiculous dictatorship the moment he passed on. Through all of this, a current of individual liberty ran strong. The Common Law is a marvellous thing and leafing through its enormity was like gazing up at the shadowed spires of a Cathedral from the inside.

I watched the Labour party's reforms shudder to a halt. Where there were steps taken towards decentralization in Foundation Hospitals, the Government took several back in other areas of public life. Government began to balloon. I grimaced as grown men and women on the Labour back benches complained that businessmen from the private healthcare sector had been given posts within the NHS - heavens forbid those who have proven themselves in competitive healthcare markets should be given the reigns of a Hospital.

I had the good fortune of attending a Grammar school for two years after passing the 11+. As a young adult, the 'debate' surrounding Grammars disgusted me. My school (Colchester Grammar) had certainly not been a haven for rich boys whose family could afford "tutors". Amongst all my classmates I was unquestionably the most affluent, being the son of a successful barrister. My friends were almost universally drawn from the working class, with one or two hailing from the lower middle classes. I do not think I knew of one boy at that school who was 'privileged'.

What people objected to, it seems, was not that this 'free' schooling system existed, but rather that it meant someone, somewhere out there was getting a better education than someone else. This was not a cry for equality of opportunity, this was a demand that no child aspire to or achieve better than anyone else his age. The gifted should remain amongst the rest, to be held back to ensure that they did not get too far ahead or somehow to drag their classmates towards better academic achievement. Anyone who has attended a school in which they have exceeded the academic capability of their classmates knows that this is a patent fallacy. Roald Dahl's "Matilda" has special significance for those of us who have, we know what it feels like to be kept in a system for arbitrary reasons, which limits your liberty and traps you within the confines of what is deemed to be 'average'.

I drifted towards the centre of the political spectrum and no longer called myself "centre-left" or "Blairite". However it was not until about 3 weeks ago that I came to my final realization. The writers with whom I agree most tacitly: Hemlock, Glenn Reynolds, the contributors to Samizdata are libertarian to a man.

They are not simulacra of Ebineezer Scrooge, they all believe that society should be fair, they just disagree vehemently with the notion that such a task should be left to the state, or indeed that the state is in any way capable of achieving this goal. Charities and NGOs perform consistently better than public initiatives designed to carry out analogous tasks.

It was this realization that was the final catalyst: caring about your fellow man and opposing the works of the state in achieving that goal are NOT mutually exclusive political creeds.

I've lived in a society in which there is no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends, an extremely low income rate (16%) and a streamlined civil service under the full protection of British Jurisprudence. Guess what? It was a great society! Crime was low, the streets were well kept and the tasks, which Government is necessary to perform were carried out perfectly adequately. The Government did not need to pick up Inland Revenue like a dust-buster and hoover up half my money each year to achieve it! It had followed a Laissez-Faire industrial policy for generations and had been a free-market economy since its creation.

I speak of Hong Kong pre-1997 and I can not believe it took so long for me to see how competent such a system was.

Sure it had an ID card system, but it was across the border from a billion people doing their damnedest to escape a barbaric communist dictatorship and had an immigration crisis on its hands. The card is now tied into the Drivers License so it's not an arbitrary extra bit of identification you need to carry around and works as a passport for HK immigration. Most importantly since the state is not hell-bent on interfering with every single facet of your life, it generally does not seem so odious.

One of the arguments made for ID cards in the United Kingdom is that the state is not some malign force as in other countries so it can be trusted with an extra means of keeping tabs on its populace but this is akin to saying that the pit bull about to ravage your arm is not in fact a carrier of rabies like the one across the street, so it's all right to put down your handgun. If the state wants an ID card from me, it can bloody well start behaving a lot more like its former colonial charge.

Why, when all the evidence available points to the same facts - Free Markets perform better than regulated ones, US States with more lax gun control laws have lower rates of violent crime that ones which do not, Charities and NGOs are more efficient than public sector bodies etc - do we insist on following the ideas which have proven, in the past 100 years, to be complete and utter hogwash?

Banal though it may be, I remember playing SimCity 2000 as a teenager on my computer. Every time I tried to set up a high-tax, high-service economy within my city, my economy, followed by the city itself, stagnated. The answers have been staring me in the face for years.

Yesterday I cut up my Labour party membership card and cancelled my standing order to the party. When asked about my political affiliation a few days ago, I answered "libertarian" and somehow the world made a great deal more sense.

As I pondered this matter and resolved to write this piece, I concluded that I had taken far too long to realize what was in front of my nose, yet the sobering reality is that this left-to-liberty transition is typically played out over the course of a lifetime. How many 40 year old Labourites are there still in this world? I believe I've been remarkably fortunate, I have the means to concentrate my personal wealth under a low tax regime and now have the intention of doing so. I can still make the world a better place like my 16 year old self wanted and more importantly I can do it without stuffing the paycheck of 40 inefficient public sector bureaucrats. All that at age 23? I have got a bright future to look forward to and perhaps with the growth of libertarianism, my children will too.

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Jack Straw, it is amazing to relate, has been touted as a potential Prime Minister. Who knows, if the implosion of the Brown government gets worse, he might still be in the running for the top job. So it might be useful to realise that among his gifts is one for sublime comedy:

The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor has commented that when the history of this era is written, the last 10 years will be seen as heralding a "quiet revolution" in the way in which the UK is governed. He is correct.

Quiet or not, there have been major changes. In case our Jack needs a bit of assistance, here are some of them:

• Emasculation of the House of Lords
• Erosion of the right to trial by jury
• Removal of the double-jeopardy protection in court trials
• Extension of blasphemy laws
• Law enabling the creation of a centralised state database and ID card system
• The passing of more than 3,000 criminal offences
• Anti-social behaviour orders - many of which can be imposed without full due process of law
• Civil Contingencies Act, giving sweeping powers in the case of "national emergencies"
• Erosion of right to hold public demonstrations
• Erosion of rights of private property owners to use their premises as they seek fit: bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, for example
• European Arrest Warrant

Okay, I think you get the general idea. And on the other side of the balance sheet, what can Straw suggest? He talks about the Freedom of Information Act and EU "human rights" legislation. The former is an improvement but hardly compensates for the list above; the latter is a mish-mash: some of the "rights", as my sneer-quotes imply, are not rights in the classical liberal sense as acting as brakes on coercion, but rather entitlements, or claims, and which interfere with things like freedom of contract, etc.

The general thrust of policy over the past few years has been towards more regulation of personal behaviour in the fields of health, the environment, family upbringing, smoking and diet. About the only emphatic move in a libertarian direction is on the area of booze: 24-hour drinking; yet the government cannot get itself in a consistent frame of mind when it comes to drugs - and alcohol is a serious health hazard when consumed to excess - so we continue with a largely unwinnable war on drugs, which by the way operates to the detriment of our campaign to undermine the likes of the Taliban, etc, and the poppygrowing druglords of Asia, etc. On sex, yes, the government has lowered the age of gay sexual consent to 16 and permitted gay civil partnerships, but a properly liberal approach would be to get the state out of the business or regulating marriage completely.

Generally, an appalling record. The challenge for the Tories, if they have any gumption, is to reverse it, lock stock and barrel (oh, did I mention that the right to self defence is pretty much dead as well?).

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The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, those somewhat indistinct eras between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Napoleonic Wars, were when the modern world was born. It was when rationalism emerged from the previous millennia where superstition and obscurantism were mankind's norm and goring a sacred cow could bring down the wrath of the powers-that-be.

Yet it seems that there are still those in the west who hanker after having their beliefs protected by the force of the state in ways that other sets of personal values are not. So rather than surrender to Christian authoritarians who wish their views to be protected by law, thereby quite reasonably handing even loonier Muslims a tool to protect their equally preposterous views, a little final clean up work, a final long overdue flourish of Enlightenment thought, is needed.

Abolish every last one of the ludicrous blasphemy laws. Right now.

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And anyway I wanted to see what it would feel like ordering a three hundred quid starter

- Giles Coren, reviewing the St James'-Ukrainian restaurant Divo for The Times.

The capacity at will to do something improbable (and quite possibly stupid) in order to find out what it feels like is to my mind the measure of a society worth living in. Mr Coren did not have to consult religious authorities about that starter, and no government inspector determined for him whether it was fair or appropriate fo him to do so, or insisted on him having counselling first, or afterwards. He is not confined in a fixed universe of approved experiences. For how long? The vigilantes are abroad, though they are coming for the poor first. And everyone ought to be free to be daft, not just oligarchs.

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Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul seems to have attracted a lot of attention with his big fund-raising day, although Mark Steyn says that although he now has money his poll rating is still very low. If you don't know what he looks and sounds like, watch him being interviewed by Jay Leno.

The most interesting thing I have encountered about Ron Paul is this, from Jonathan Wilde:

On the heels of the big fundraising day, I've noticed that a lot of people I know are declaring themselves Ron Paul supporters. Many of them are not just not libertarian. If anything, they're big government advocates. They justify their support with vague statements like, "He's shifting the landscape" or "The system needs to be shaken up". I don't think they have any idea what Paul actually stands for.

Maybe they will learn. I have long thought thought a way for libertarianism to spread will be when people get that it is a different sort of mischief they can make to the usual kind. This was surely the appeal of Marxism, while it had appeal. Now, the world is still full of Marxists but they keep quiet about it, and wrap it up as other things, like Greenery. Where's the mischief in that? That won't shake up the system. That is the system. But libertarianism is a kind of mischief making that dares to speak its name, and if done, would cause serious embarrassment to thousands of politicians and lobbyists and subsidy guzzlers.

Of course, much of Paul's appeal is that he is mounting a non-left attack on US military involvement abroad. But if many are backing him because of that, they may also become acquainted with the notion that maybe seriously cutting back big government is something that a decent man could genuinely want to do. Paul wants to cut government spending on foreign wars, and rather than blowing what is 'saved' on schools and hospitals and other foolishnesses, he says: let the citizens keep their money.

I presume that Ron Paul has lots of domestic personal policy positions concerning how to get there from here, so to speak, as any serious political candidate must. I do know, because he said this to Leno, that he wants to phase out welfare addiction very gradually, rather than just cold turkey it, for example. But that makes sense ('cold turkeying' it might also make sense, I think, but what do I know?)

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I've yet find an area that I've studied extensively where the arguments justifying the state stand up to historical evidence. I think the state's takeover of these aspects of human life occur for different reasons than the reasons currently given for the state in those areas, and that what we see is a lot of ex post rationalisation to justify the state. I haven't looked at every area, and certainly may find some where I wouldn't make that argument. But I have yet to find one.

- Bruce L. Benson (one of the speakers at the LA/LI Conference last weekend) talks about his work to Patrick Crozier - the whole thing lasts a little over 15 minutes

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I say "recorded conversations" because I never know quite what the definition of a 'podcast' truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.

First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.

Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, "Modern Movement" architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.

Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.

And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.

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I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be 'totalitarian'. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total... mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as 'tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).

As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls 'soft fascism') in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws "for your own good'' or "for the children" or "for the environment".

And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent's interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a 'licence to smoke'. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.

The person suggesting this latest delightfully totalitarian brick-in-the-wall, Professor Julian le Grand, says some very telling things:

"There is nothing evil about smoking as long as you are just hurting yourself. We have to try to help people stop smoking without encroaching on people's liberties." [...] But he said requiring them to fill in forms, have photographs taken in order to apply for a permit would prove a more effective deterrent.

No doubt Julian le Grand thinks that makes him seem reasonable and sensible, because he does not want people to have their civil liberties encroached upon... and he then proceeds to describe how he would like to do precisely that in order to 'deter' you from doing what you really wanted to do.

The reason for this seemingly strange approach is simple to understand because to the totalitarian, something does not have to be 'evil' to warrant the use of force to discourage it, you merely have to have (a) coercive power (b) disapprove of another person's choices regarding their own life. That is all the justification you need, simply the fact other people are not living the way you think they should, in your presumably infinite wisdom.

Notice how coercive actions imposed by state power are described as 'helping'. We will force you to pay more, force you to go to a doctor...but we will throw your arse in gaol if you dare try to circumvent our unasked for 'help'.

The 'paleo-totalitarian' simply uses force if you disobey, no messing about... however the post-modern totalitarian prefers to add a morally insulating intermediate step that allows his kind to talk about 'civil liberties': first he gives you a nice regulation to obey and only if you dare not comply with that do the Boys in Blue get sent to show you the error of your ways.

I can think of quite a few ways I would rather like to 'help' Julian le Grand and his ilk in order to mitigate their pathological need to interfere with other people's lives. All for the greater good of society, you understand.

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The other day I encountered this argument, which I failed properly to swat away and as a result, got rather rude to my interlocutor and he went off in a huff (sorry about that mate). What he said that made me go red was this:

"You libertarians keep banging on about the terrors of regulation. Yet you also slag off massive lawsuits and things like that. But if you want to get rid of huge payouts for things like people suing for damages, you need regulations. So why are you so hostile to them?"

As I pointed out, this is what is called a straw man argument.. Such "arguments" hold up a false, or in some cases deliberately false and weak, version of a point of view that a person wants to knock down easily (hence the "straw" bit). So let us fisk it.

First, I do not know any liberals or libertarians who argue that regulations are and always are a bad thing. Private sector bodies and voluntary associations of all kinds have them. A privately owned hospital, for instance, would regulate the behaviours of people who entered the premises. Why? Because that hospital would not want its reputation and bank account to be wrecked by outbreaks of disease, which lead to nasty insurance payouts. So it is in the self interest of said institutions to operate regulations, and more important perhaps, to be seen to do so. Another case is the London Stock Exchange. Long before modern financial regulators like the Financial Services Authority came along, the LSE was founded (back in the 18th Century, I think) and it had rules, albeit not always formal ones, but rules nonetheless ("my word is my bond", etc). Trust is the key. And if you do not have trust, and have ways of enforcing said, then networks of commercial or other transactions do not work so well. So let us dispose of the canard that classical liberals are agin regulations. They are not. What we are against is one-size-fits-all regulations imposed heedlessly by the state. This is the crucial thing. Regulations, to be useful, need to be tried and tested, and if need be, discarded. State regulations tend not to be like that, but rather resemble clumps of ivy climbing up the side of a tree. They are much harder to reverse.

Okay, so now we come to the idea that libertarians hate expensive lawsuits. I suppose it is true that we hate frivolous, massively costly lawsuits, by definition (and who does not, except lawyers?). But sometimes you need to have lawsuits because you will not always have perfect knowledge of the kind of problems that can arise. Take the example of the hospital again - its managers may not know about new diseases that can be transported into the building in unexpected ways. A lawsuit following a disaster may be the trigger for a new rule. In this sense, lawsuits, although unpleasant for those on the receiving end of them, act as a sort of discovery process about what sort of problems exist. Lawyers have their uses.

In other words, this is quite a complicated argument. I just will not make the same mistake of trying to explain it after two beers and a 13-hour day at the office.

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It is interesting that the French government is now apparently seriously trying to stop people eating Ortolan, a delicacy I once tried some years ago (that said I ripped it apart rather than the traditional method of eating it whole). A small matter to be sure but It really does seem to me that the control obsessives like to pick on the people who have tastes or habits some despise, as a way to gradually control more and more aspects of civil society.

Smoking is another interesting example: wait until social attitudes mean smokers are not in the majority and only then use the force of law to repress the hard core. This dynamic is why I have often thought that people who are statists and also homosexuals, i.e. who are members of a group that is always going to be disliked by a significant portion of the population, are really quite stupid. There will come a time when they reap what they sow.

I suspect all of us do something that a lot of other people will dislike and there is an entire class of people out there who use that fact to convince 'us' to support the use of the state to "do something about that".

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This essay, which I found while browsing the excellent website of Stephen Hicks, will resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.

As a farmer's son, I sympathise with its message, but more optimistically, I'd argue that in some ways, life in the countryside is still a lot less regulated than in the towns, perhaps rightly, since when people live in close proximity and have to get along, more rules are required, if only tacit, rather than written, rules. But the sort of restrictions this farmer writes about are not caused by that sort of issue, but by the ongoing move by the state to regulate agriculture.

Cynics may argue that farmers have signed a Faustian pact with the state; they have accepted massive subsidies and can hardly be surprised if the providers of said increasingly demand to control the actions of the recipients. I agree with this. The sooner that the Common Agricultural Policy and its equivalents are obliterated, the better.

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This is a public service announcement to save time for those who would rather get on with irrelevant vituperation and not bother digesting the point of my post: In a moment I'm going to say something positive about Gerry Adams.

First, consider this from The Washington Post:

The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness.

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific.

Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses "a much larger universe" of suspicious U.S. citizens.

"There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept," he said.

Gotta love those adjectives: "Potentially dangerous", not "dangerous". "Dangerous" would invite the question: How dangerous, exactly? And: What mayhem have these invisible pseudo-threats caused that the forces of security could not have created all by themselves? As for the visibly suspicious, the "sinister", just how threatening they are is shown up by the US Customs and FBI's own account - a "small" number of arrests, not necessarily related to terrorism, a number in the hundreds turned back at the airport. Which can happen even if you have been arrested without charge at some other time in your own country and didn't realise that in consequence you need a visa.

Which brings us to Mr Adams.

He has an amusing little piece in The Guardian, Panic at Passport Control about being selected for secondary security screening selection, or SSSS.

I hand the FBI young gun a copy of my travel schedule - a document that has been in the possession of the US state department for the past month or so.

"Huh," he says. "Why are you going to the White House, sir?"

"To see the president."

"Huh. Why?"

"He asked me," I say evenly.

My deadpan delivery is wasted on him. Maybe he is used to dealing with wise guys.

"Why, sir?"

Now we all know - maybe even the callow G-man knows - that Mr Adams is formerly a terrorist by most modern definitions. At the very least he was a leading member of a banned organisation, which is quite enough to get you locked up in many places - or extraordinarily rendered to unpleasant conditiond in secret parts of the world, if it is Banned Organisation of the Month. But Mr Adams is a former terrorist whose current business is known and accepted by the US government, so pulling him aside and interrogating him is not just a waste of his time. It is a monumentally stupid misapplication of the FBI's time.

I am inclined to believe it is also a stupid waste applied to everyone else as well. If the guy isn't carrying a bomb the first time you check his luggage, he won't be the second time, half an hour later. If he's been specially screened before, then doing it again has no benefit at all. Severe disbenefit in fact. All that is time and money that could be spent on real HUMINT, or at least recruiting officers and teaching them the languages and culture to do real intelligence work. However, once you are on a list of the sinister, you may never get off. Look at the trouble even Teddy Kennedy had. If you don't have influential friends, like the senator and the Sinn Féin leader do, fat chance. And the inconvenience involved is likely to be greater.

Lists feed other lists. And feed back again. Confirmation bias, the prosecutor's fallacy, and the spirit of ley-lines do their work. The shade of Profesor Parkinson hovers over all: "Look, this is important work. Because we are doing it, and because we are doing a lot of it." "We suspect 20,000 persoons now, and we are working on suspecting 60,000."

As Adams says: " This is usually a random selection, we are told. The legend SSSS is stamped on the tickets of those randomly selected, and the lucky ticket holder gets extra attention. Richard and I are randomly included for this treatment all the time." It is a common experience. A consitutional reformer of my acquaintance is also randomly selected more often than not. Unlike Mr Adams, she has never justified violence (I'm fairly sure she's against smacking children), but like him she has publicly criticised government. A sometime commentator on this blog and friend of the Samizdata family is formally on the US Homeland Security Register. The reason: he was born in Kabul and lived there till the age of one year, and has a sinister surname. This despite the triple absurdity that (1) lots of people have the same name who are entirely unrelated in any sense, (2) names even if they do indicate family connection don't signify character - imagine pulling in Peter Hitchens and questioning him based on Christopher Hitchens's writings - and (3) middle-eastern names don't follow the western European pattern, so suspecting people on that basis is to elevate ignorant misconception to an operating standard.

Now if you only want to fly to Croatia for a bit of skinnydipping in the Adriatic, you may not think this affects you. (Me, I've stopped flying. Not that I ever could bear airport bureaucracy much.) But where one idiot government programme goes, another government is likely to follow with its own idiot programme. Particularly if the idiot government programme is brought to you by the Pax Americana As Perry pointed out recently, Britain's shiny new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA), is also a borders and emmigration agency. It not only contributes to those "various sources, including airline passenger data," for the convenience of US securocrats, but is keen to start operating its own no-fly and supplementary screening programmes.

And the point is? Well it doesn't do, and cannot do, anything for its purported purpose of "protecting the travelling public". It is counterproductive as at the very least a waste of resources. And it pointlessly delays, inconveniences, iritates and humiliates, tens of thousands of people, from minor statesmen (whether or not they are retired... er... 'freedom fighters'), to government critics, to those more "randomly" selected on the basis of being a bit sinister. It is for the latter it will be most frightening, since they are unlikely to be fortunate enough to know specialist lawyers, politicans and media people who might be able to protect or rescue them if things turn nasty. There is another group we must not forget who will be frightened and overawed unnecessarily: all those other travellers who see one of the previous categories escorted away by officials, not to return to sight. They who will think, "Omigod that could be me - I musn't make any trouble."

That's the point, I suggest. The exercise is about exercise of power. Demonstration that the state is doing something, and you ought to be frightened - of the state or of the "threat". Either will do. Keep your head down "beneath the radar of enforceable actions".

It sends a message. Those people being marched away are a massively expensive exercise in dramatising insecurity in an objectively safe world. It is 'security theatre' in Bruce Schneier's enduring phrase. And it is the biggest, longest lasting production in the history of security theatre, being brought direct to you at any of 1,000+ airports throughout the world on an indefinite run. At massive taxpayer expense (remember, you bought your own ticket for this performance, and every other one, for the rest of you life, at a special block-rate) it helps keep you frightened about bad people, reassured that the government cares about your fear and is doing something, and discouraged from questioning authority.

It is a huge vanity project, in essence. Securocrats in praise of themselves and the power of the state for good as the state defines good. Not so different from this. Or this. At least the Bolshoi Ballet could really dance.

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I may not like utilitarianism, but I would suggest it is wrong rather than "outdated". Roy Hattersley wants to keep utilitarianism but scrap, as for some (unclear) reason no longer applying, the constraint Mill put on the doctrine of respect for individual freedom.

Here he is in The Guardian on Monday:

Mill's libertarian philosophy is based on two precepts that - despite having written an admirable essay on women's rights - he always expressed with the use of male pronouns. The first principle asserts that "all errors which (a man) is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good". Only cranks believe that now. If it were a generally held view, we would not prohibit the use of recreational drugs or require passengers in the back seats of motor cars to wear safety belts. [...]

Mill's second precept makes a distinction between "the part of a person's life which concerns only himself and that which concerns others". In short, we are free to damage ourselves but are not at liberty to behave in a way that harms other people. The distinction was easier to make in Victorian Britain than it is today - though even in 1859, when On Liberty was written, subscribers to the cult of the individual grossly underestimated how much one human is dependent on another.

Gawd! I never thought to find myself inwardly nodding at that trite radical saw about it taking cranks to start a revolution. 'Do what I say, because I say it is good for you.' This is the creed of slavery.

In fact, in 1859, the year of On Liberty, the following appeared in The Spectator:

The intelligent, christian slave-holder at the South is the best friend of the negro. He does not regard his bonds-men as mere chattel property, but as human beings to whom he owes duties. While the Northern Pharisee will not permit a negro to ride on the city railroads, Southern gentlemen and ladies are seen every day, side by side, in cars and coaches, with their faithful servants. Here the honest black man is not only protected by the laws and public sentiment, but he is respected by the community as truly as if his skin were white. Here there are ties of genuine friendship and affection between whites and blacks, leading to an interchange of all the comities of life. The slave nurses his master in sickness, and sheds tears of genuine sorrow at his grave. When sick himself, or overtaken by the infirmity of age, he is kindly cared for, and when he dies the whites grieve, not for the loss of so much property, but for the death of a member of the family.--This is the relation which slaves generally, and domestic servants universally, sustain to their white masters.

There is a vast deal of foolish talk about the delights of freedom and the hardships of slavery. In one sense no one, white or black, is free in this world. The master orders his slave to work in a certain field, when he perhaps would prefer to go elsewhere--this is slavery. But is the master free to do as he pleases! Not so.--He is driven by as stern a necessity to labor with his hands or confine himself to business, as the slave ever feels.

Protected by laws and public sentiment. Respected by the community. Why should self-deternination be relevant, when we have modernisation? And unlimited public sentiment.

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And not just for other people, which is the usual way of things:

I am responsible. I think. I care. I hold myself back from all sorts of desires and wishes which are impulsive, brought on by the clamour and disturbance of this corrupt over-materialistic world we live in, separated from nature and in intense competition with each other. We live in a sick society which is not going to cure itself. Like small children, we need forcibly calming down, we need to be held to account, we need to 'learn'.

You may find this deeply disturbing as a view. But then, I'm not romantic about our so-called 'liberties' as Henry Porter is. I'm not a sentimentalist about old-style 'freedoms'.

A commentator on Henry Porter's article Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state on the Observer website. Depressingly much more where that came from.

The neo-puritans hate their own desires and the possibility of choosing between them. They think surveillance is good because 'if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear', and they know you need watching in case you might do something wrong. They have bad impulses too, which by awful effort they control. The total control of the state - conceived as an undesiring arbiter of good - can relieve us of the burden of choice and keep us working for the good of society. It will free us from fear; because the freedom of bad people, who might be anyone, is what we have most to fear.

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For those here determined to hate the BBC and all its works, here is a reminder that it does do some useful things. That it isn't quite in the mould of the fawning state broadcaster found almost everywhere in the world. Along with a reminder that some would like it to be.

This week File on 4 did the first really serious, probing investigation into HM Government's National Identity Scheme that there has been in any media yet. You can listen to it here, and it is full of fascinating things for the attentive listener.

The most extraordinary is this testimony from IT consultant Peter Tomlinson:

The meetings were called by people in the Cabinet Office. There were topics on the agenda that were set by people in the Cabinet Office and we kept on thinking: why are we not seeing people from the Home Office.

Why are we not seeing technical people from the Home Office, or people involved in technical management? Eventually they began to come along but they never produced anyone who had any technical understanding of large-scale systems. We were just completely puzzled.

This is the first really solid public evidence I have seen that the scheme really is [or was?] intended by strategists at the highest level as a complete population management system and revolution in the nature of government, rather than being one by accident. That it is the emanation of a philosophy of government. It is it is not always good to have one's analysis confirmed. In this case I would prefer not to have been vindicated.

Remember Philip Gould? He's one of those high-level strategists.

This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

The philosophy is probably best summed up by a word from Foucault: governmentalism. Christopher Booker to the contrary, it is not a 'mental' creed of "The Mad Officals" but a pervasive pragmatism - using the natural history of humanity the better to shepherd it. The better shepherd is a member of the new innominate politico-bureaucratic class: maybe a civil 'servant', maybe a politician, maybe officially neither.

And just today a new example of the sage. A strategy memo has leaked to the Daily Mirror's sharp political editor Kevin Maguire. Lord Gould allegedly writes:

No-one in Britain should have any doubt about what you stand for, what you want to achieve. You should position yourself as a powerful, muscular modernisation politician with the power and the determination to change Britain. You should aim to be a great reforming PM.

You have to meet this mood for change. You have to exemplify renewal and a fresh start.

Your Premiership has to have a dynamism and an energy that pulls people along in its slipstream. You must become the change that Britain needs.

There is a name for this, too. It is one of the most widely used populist techniques in world politics: Strong Man government, tribal leadership, caudillismo. A national security state, presided over by a Big Man - has "a nation of freemen, a polite and commercial people" (Blackstone), really come to that? When exactly did liberty become such a minority taste in Britain that it were possible?

[Just a footnote on the BBC below the fold.]

And the BBC? Well. it remains independent, but since 1st January 2007, it too has fundamentally changed, though fundamental changes work slowly through large flabby organisations.

It is now defined by its duties (where have I heard that before? - oh yes...): They are headed by: "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and include, "representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities". Its previous objects were to provide broadcasting as a public service, as it saw fit, subject to certain restrictions, impartiality being the most prominent requirement. "Impartiality" is not to be found in the new charter. It is relegated to the supplementary "Agreement" between the BBC Trust and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport.

I have no doubt the BBC will retain its capacity to irritate me. (Some other recent Files on 4 have been predicated on some classic lefty axioms.) The question is, will "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and "representing the UK," allow it to continue to irritate the Government of the day?

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This thread features TimC comparing unenforced laws to fence posts without the panels.

Here is a clear example of an uninstalled panel.

A vicar who lit his pipe in a Kent police station as a protest against the smoking ban has failed in his attempt to get himself arrested.

The totalitarians typically begin each step by enforcing it against those who garner the least sympathy. Clearly a pipe smoking vicar is too sympathetic of a target this early on. Beginning with social outcasts, progressively less unpopular targets are chosen for enforcement until the 'Why should ___ be allowed a 'privilege' that I am not?' argument takes over.

And notice that in a five word headline about the vicar's smoking protest, BBC managed to use the words "unholy", "stunt" and "failed".

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On this day, 231 years ago, thirteen colonies declared themselves to be thirteen states.

Less known is that Thomas Jefferson wrote the "original Rough draught" of that declaration. Today is a good occasion to read in that rough draft what the full scope of grievances were before the representatives "in General Congress assembled" took the pen and scissors to it to assure unanimous support.

The last paragraph is the final treason of a treasonous document and had we lost the war that ensued, the greatest thinkers, doers and leaders of this continent would certainly have been executed for the crime of attempting the liberty of self determination.

We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name & by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve & break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us & the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independant states, and that as free & independant states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independant states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honour.

Like they say, read the whole thing. It wasn't just about tax. It wasn't even primarily about tax. Some of the grievances have returned to us in force today and are worse perpetrated today by the government in Washington than they were by the government in Britain when this document was written. But some of the grievances may come as a surprise, particularly to some of you feeling the colonization by the EU. That is EU 'colony' as in definition 2.

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This is a bit scary:

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

The study found 54% of Americans regard atheists as dangerous or threatening.

It is not just because I am an atheist that I find this disturbing. I would like to suggest that it is an example of a more general tendency among the populations of even advanced states to react more strongly to the imaginary dangers of things they don't understand than to real threats. It is an inexhaustible fuel for authoritarian populism.

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Democracy or small government. Choose one.

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I, {insert name here}, do solemnly swear, (or affirm), that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

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I like to feel that programs get on to my computer at my invitation, rather than barging past me into the living room and demanding to know where the drinks are.

- Charles Arthur on the Word 2007 converter. Which goes for all sorts of institutions and people. If someone is prepared to explain themselves, gives us an alternative, recognises our autonomy, then we incline to trust them simply because they have shown they understand that there is trust involved.

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The problem is, they will outlaw almost everything while enforcing very little. Imprisonment by stealth. People will not know they are encircled until it is too late - like putting in all these very deep, robust fence-posts with no fence panels. All seems open. One day you will wake up and the panels are in, you are trapped and they can decide what law they wish to impose to nail whomsoever they desire.

- Regular commenter TimC in this thread.

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Following the brilliant 'straw man' quote below, I thought I would list a few regular straw man arguments that I come across in the comment threads of this blog as well as in the wider media/public world where the ideas of liberty, defence policy or the free market are mentioned:

Free marketeers do not believe in law and rules of any kind

This is often posited as a fact, when in fact law and liberty are necessary for each other. Without laws defining property rights, for example, much peaceful intercourse is impossible.

If you are against the invasion of Iraq, you are a peacenik

This boils down to a form of argument by intimidation. Even though many opponents of the operation to overthrow Saddam are stupid, evil or possibly both, quite a lot were against it for prudential reasons.

If you are in favour of the invasion of Iraq, you must be a warmongering lunatic

Many people from all parts of the political spectrum thought overthrowing Saddam, who was a bloodthirsty tyrant, invader of neighbouring nations, sponsor of terror, user of WMDs, was a humanitarian and necessary act.

If you are a skeptic about global warming and other alleged environmental terrors, you care nothing for future generations and might also be in the pay of Big Oil

This is not a start of an argument, but an attempt to shout debate down. It betrays the fact that Greenery is becoming a religion with its own notions of heresy. If anyone plays this gambit, refuse to take it up.

Libertarians believe in the idea that humans are born with a mental "blank slate" and hence pay no heed to inherited characteristics of any kind

I often see this argument made by bigots as well as more benign folk. In fact it is possible to believe that many human characteristics are inherited but also changeable. And just because we are influenced by genes, it does not mean were are driven in a deterministic way. Free will still exists. The more knowledge we have about human nature etc, the more power it gives individuals, not less.

For capitalism to work successfully, everybody has to be obsessed with making money all the time

All that is necessary is that human economic interaction is based on voluntary exchange, not force. How much people want to get rich or not is irrelevant.

Libertarians are uninterested in preserving certain old traditions and cultures

In fact, a free society is often much more able to preserve certain traditions, not less so.

Libertarians tend to be loners and discount the importance of community life

This is rubbish: liberals value communities so long as membership is voluntary and further, co-operation is a consequence of liberty, not its opposite. An individualist can enjoy group activities as much as anyone, such as being part of an organisation, club, football team, whatever. The key is that such membership is freely chosen.

I am sure that other commenters can think of a few more...

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I was on BBC Radio Five Live this morning to voice some opposition to the IPPR, a populist authoritarian think-tank who are arguing companies selling flights, holidays and cars must be compelled by law to propagandise on behalf of the environmental movement.

Adverts for flights, holidays and cars should carry tobacco-style health warnings about climate change, a think tank has said [...] Simon Retallack, the IPPR's head of climate change, said the evidence of aviation's negative environmental impact was "just as clear as the evidence that smoking kills". [...] "We know that smokers notice health warnings on cigarettes, and we have to tackle our addiction to flying in the same way," he said

On air I challenged Mr. Retallack that by comparing smoking. something which results in a habit-forming chemical (nicotine) entering a person's body, to flying, a choice made by a person entirely devoid of habit forming chemicals, he was pathologising people who made decisions he disapproved of.

If you disagree with the orthodoxy of the political class and keep making 'wrong' decisions, then you are an 'addict'... and of course we all know addiction is something that must be 'treated'. What does that remind you of?

In a sense I have done the same thing myself in the past, suggesting a pathological need to control other people with the threat of violence (i.e. laws) is more or less the defining mental state of members of the political class everywhere in the western world today... which is why IPPR's constant output of new and innovative ways to control people is often well received by the radical centrist control freaks of both the Labour and 'Conservative' parties.

Update: you can hear the brief exchange on 'Breakfast' (08:38 am... time is 02:38 into programme)

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Sean Gabb has been a busy chap lately. As mentioned in an earlier post, the latest issue of Free Life Commentary exposes the fraudulent nature of the British Conservative Party's 'intellectual revival'.

Also Sean will be on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sunday 1st April at 11:30am UK time, to discuss whether 'junk food' advertisements should be banned (no prizes for guessing what his position is). This programme takes calls and so some of Samizdata.net's readers might like to ring the relevant number and air their views. All the BBC Radio 5 details, such as telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and on-line listening, can be found here.

Another thing of interest and relevance: the Libertarian Alliance has released its latest pamphlet called Habits Are Not Illnesses: A Response to Dr Robert Lefever, by Joe Peacott.

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Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore's vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier's, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.

I am talking here about the "we are not doing enough" way of winning - and of losing - arguments.

You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins.

Suppose that Mr X announces a tax cut. I applaud, but I also say that although this is a small step in the right direction Mr X could and should have gone far further.

Suppose that you, on the other hand, oppose tax cuts, and want taxes to be higher, and higher, and higher, until the state dominates absolutely everything. The right way for you to oppose Mr X's particular tax cut is ... to oppose it! You should say: "This is a step in the wrong direction." But, if it is actually a rather small tax cut, what extreme tax enthusiasts are often tempted to say is that although it may be a tax cut, it is not a very big tax cut. The implication, and sometimes even the explicit claim, is that Mr X could easily have done more, "more" in such a case being awfully liable to sound like "better". Which is exactly what I, an enthusiastic tax cutter, am also saying. So, if you oppose the general direction of the policy that Mr X is going through the motions of supporting, but yet you complain that "Mr X could have done more" or "Mr X didn't really do that much", you are actually endorsing the agenda of your opponents. You are helping me to win. You are scoring, to put it in football terms, an own goal.

I think that all this bitching about Gore's gas emissions is achieving a similar outcome. Personally I am not sure whether it is wise to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Is this necessary, or pointless and therefore economically harmful? Not sure. Still tracking the argument. I am inclined to think that the gases do a small amount of harm, but that the suppression of them does more harm, not least in weakening our technologically developing ability to respond to climate changes and climatic disasters,and that there may soon be far cheaper technology-based ways of getting rid of the gases. But, I am truly not sure.

But suppose that you are convinced, as many in my part of the political landscape are, that all this talk of greenhouse gases is a load of hooey. If this is your belief, then the last thing you should be doing is complaining that Gore is not doing enough to reduce his own emissions. On the contrary, you should be praising him for at least showing some commonsense in his personal economic and ecological conduct, and for having a lovely big house and generally living the kind of life that all of us should be happily aspiring to. Saying that he should cut his emissions, on the other hand, is to concede that the central argument of his movie is quite right, and his only mistake is in not doing even more of what you and he both agree should be done.

Those who oppose state education make the same mistake when someone who is pro-state education is observed sending their child to a non-state, fee-paying school. In this argument I am a convinced anti-statist, just as I am a total enthusiast for tax cuts being huge to the point of total state abolition. All state education should be ended, just as soon as that can possibly be contrived. But, when some Labour politician is revealed to be sending her kid to a half-decent fee-paying school rather than to a scumbag state school, I absolutely do not join the chorus of complaint about her "hypocrisy". On the contrary, I praise her for being the good and loving parent that she is. I do also say that I disagree with her about state schools in general, and say that her wise and correct decision for her child illustrates my belief that state education generally is bad, and that in this particular case, in choosing the non-state option she is not responding to some mere one-off aberration but to a general tendency for state schools generally to be rubbish compared to fee-paying schools. But the absolute last thing I do is try to bully the poor woman into sending her kid to some lousy state school when she can afford a better one.

No, I save all my vitriol in this argument for those truly and totally disgusting politicians who impose bad state schools upon their defenceless children out of mere ideological adherence to the general idea of state schools being good, even though they can afford to do what they know would be far better in their own particular case. That really is horrible. Consistently horrible. Stupid and evil, as opposed merely to good but stupid.

Back to Gore. If you think Gore is right about his gases, then it makes perfect sense for you to object that he emits too much gas himself. But if you think he is wrong about the gases, then for heaven's sake concentrate your efforts on explaining why. Do not let yourself be diverted (that link being a fairly randomly chosen example of the kind of thing I mean) into spreading enemy propaganda by agreeing with something else that your enemies are also saying, which is that Gore should indeed cut his emissions, and that by implication so should all of us.

To use another sporting metaphor: keep your eye on the ball.

I think I just wrote a Libertarian Alliance Tactical Note.

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Who (approximately) said this?:

"Most people have no interest in liberty. The limit of their desires is a tolerable overseer."

I ask not because I know and wish to show off, but because I do not but am curious. I found it here, and he would like to know too, but has so far had no suggestions.

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The late FA Hayek once memorably denounced the way in which socialistically inclined writers used the word 'social' to shred any word with which it was conjoined of meaning. For instance, 'social justice' begs the question of what sort of 'justice' is involved: it is a term which implies that one accepts, for instance, the notion that wealth and property is held collectively and therefore must be 'distributed' in accordance with some sort of pattern deemed to be just. Social sucks the content out of the word it is put against, just as the weasel sucks the contents of an egg (hence 'weasel word').

So when I heard that the UK government had created a "social bank" to seize unclaimed money from "dormant" bank accounts, I knew what to expect:

AT LEAST £80m ($154m, €116m) of unclaimed monies left in high street bank accounts will be used to fund the establishment of a social investment bank.

The new institution, which will be unveiled at the end of this week, will help finance charities and community groups and lead to the emergence of a viable social investment market, its proponents claim.

What is so troubling about this creation is the assumption, baked into the very idea of this body, that wealth that has not been claimed for a set period is automatically the property of the State. In practical terms, it may be the case that very few people will be inconvenienced by this action, and for all I know, much good may be achieved by this bank. But the presumption on which it rests is a further step, a further sign, that property rights are under assault in this country.

For some enlightenment, meanwhile, I strongly recommend this collection of essays on property rights. I somehow doubt that Chancellor Gordon Brown has time to read it as he prepares his last budget next Wednesday, but it he could do a lot worse.

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Jesus did not say, "I was hungry and you lobbied the government to tax others to feed me." He said, "I was hungry and YOU fed me."

- W. E. Messamore. Read the whole thing.

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My inestimable thanks to the commenter who linked to this exquisitely germane wiki in the comments section of my post below:

Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and were usually used for social discrimination. This frequently meant preventing commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities.

I was wrong about Cameron. He is not trying to drag us back into the 19th Century, he is making a bid for the 14th Century!! I suppose it may be to some advantage that we know exactly what is driving him and his ilk. Of even more advantage is to accept that the struggle for freedom, prosperity and progress is necessarily going to encompass some degree of class war.

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Do libertarians have anything useful to learn from Karl Marx?

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It has often been pointed out that whilst government spending is seen as a proper way to express compassion we (meaning those of us who believe that government is too big) can not win.

The above was brought home to me, yet again, yesterday. I watched a person being interviewed by a television presenter, and the person was requesting yet more government spending.

A decade ago a new government scheme was set up to pay for medical cover for children from poor families not already covered by Medicaid (the 'working poor'). As welfare state schemes tend to do, the scheme has greatly grown in expense and yet 'essential needs' are not being met and so the person was on television (with the full support of the television interviewer) saying that the budget suggested by President Bush was not enough.

That is right, the wild spending George Bush (a man who gives the impression that he has never come upon a welfare state scheme that he did not like) is being attacked for not spending enough taxpayers money.

The man who was speaking was Republican Governor Perdue, from conservative Georgia, who was in Washington DC (with other State Governors) to ask for yet more taxpayers money. After all Georgia has implemented the scheme 'aggressively' (this was assumed to be a good thing to do) and, therefore, was facing a serious financial problem. As the people talked film was shown of a poor little child getting medical care (subtext - if you oppose the scheme you are a monster).

And the interviewer? A presenter for Fox News (the only non leftist television network). If the ever-more-government-spending-on-welfare-state-schemes position wins by default (for there were no arguments) when the people in the conversation are a Republican Governor from a conservative State and a presenter from Fox News then what hope is there of victory, what hope of rolling back government? At present not much.

One can trace the roots of the problem as far back as one likes. Some trace it to the error made by the German Samuel Pufendorf and other scholars, in confusing taxes and government spending with the virtue of charity (as if there could be such a thing as compulsory charity). FA Hayek even traced the problem right back to human nature evolving when humans lived in hunter-gatherer packs, so that there is always a danger of civil society (or the 'extended order') breaking down under the pressure of our near-brute instincts - the atavistic instinct for 'fair shares' dignified as the doctrine of 'social justice'.

However, be at that is it may, the belief that government spending = compassion is clearly deeply rooted. Is there anything that we can do?

Well we can argue against ever bigger government and we can try and get these arguments to the public. But many people before us have tried to do this, over the decades, and they have failed to roll back government or even prevent its growth (although we do not know how bad things would be if they had not tried). And we can do all we can to help people in need, but all the efforts of charity (or 'benevolence', or the 'independent sector' to those who have been taught to think of 'charity' as a dirty word), have not convinced most people that 'helping' is not a proper role for government.

Perhaps only the bankruptcy of the Welfare States of the modern world will make people think again. It is possible that even bankruptcy will not make people turn against statism, perhaps 'pack instincts' will take over totally with total collectivism and the break down of civil society. However, if we keep on arguing as well as can and trying to get our arguments before people as much as we can, then perhaps people will consider the path of freedom, the path of voluntary interaction that is civil society, when social and political bankruptcy finally occurs.

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To date, libertarian ideas have had no material impact upon the body politic.

True or false?

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It must be a good show when a sociologist (who does not seem to think his discipline is a by-word for socialism) says:

A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress... and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.

Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says

Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don't realise that by going there and telling them 'this is the way you must live your life', you're actually being fairly coercive; you're imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people's world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else's becomes quite secondary.

Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a 'right-wing' counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical - and enormously more believable - than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.

This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a 'road to Damascus' scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start - I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians - yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as "rugged individualism" by statists - until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics - the world's poorest - those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine - help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone - in fact, they can be positively deadly.

Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large 'catch-all' political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics - that is, the realm of human welfare - Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth's grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.

The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.

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I have just discovered that I am clearly a member of the scofflaw demographic, as I suspect are a great many of Samizdata's contributors and readers.

What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, by a credit card company, or when traffic at lighted intersections is tracked by remote cameras, or when our employers begin forcing us to piss in cups as a condition for keeping our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unrelenting psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers, our governments and everybody in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives.

Great article, read the whole thing.

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We know what she is smoking (see below), so the real question is: What is taking her so long to move there?

(21)

Last week I was interviewed by David Grossman of the BBC, on the subject of Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes. When I did the pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, we published three pieces by Paul (this, this, and this), hence the BBC's interest. The show I was contributing to, a Radio 4 programme called Profile, was first broadcast at 7pm on Saturday night, and you can listen to it by rootling around here.

The impressive thing about Paul Staines is that he has always understood the connection between political freedom - civil liberties etc. - economic freedom, and what for want of a better phrase is called lifestyle freedom, i.e. sex and drugs and rock and roll. All are but different faces of the same thing: freedom! Most self-styled enthusiasts for freedom tend to emphasise some freedoms but to downplay and even oppose others. Paul Staines always was (and now Guido is) in favour of freedom across the board. Those three LA publications - about human rights abuses around the world, about acid house parties and the efforts of bossy Conservative politicians and of newer varieties of lefty safety nazis to shut them down and to stop anyone having any fun, and about the benefits of unfettered financial markets - cover pretty much the whole spectrum of freedom. When it comes to freedom of any sort, Paul Staines is on the side of the angels.

He is particularly good at distinguishing between the idea of free market capitalism, which is about how we may all do what we want with and trade with what is rightly ours, and the mere interests of particular capitalists.

Not that the man himself is always an angel. He is very flawed, very human. As are all the politicians whom he now torments. Their problem being that they often try to present themselves to the world as something rather more elevated than that, and accordingly as people who know better than we do what is best for us.

(34)

This man writes very well and very entertainingly, but I wish he would stop using the word 'liberal' to describe people who want to restrict and often abolish liberty.

Liberal is a good word, and we who believe in liberty should keep hold of the word tight. Calling shameless collectivists, who believe neither in economic nor 'social' liberty nor any other kind of liberty, 'liberal' will destroy this good word.

When someone disagrees with you about how to protect and extend liberty, he is still entitled to be called a liberal. When he stops even bothering about liberty and starts saying that liberty is neither an important end, nor even an important means towards the achievement of other worthy ends, then what sense does it make to let him take the word liberal off with him into the tyrannical bog that he has blundered or marched into?

In the USA, it would appear that the battle for this word was won and lost long ago. But on this side of the Atlantic, the word 'liberal' still means something far more truly liberal. We must keep it that way.

This short posting is the sort of thing I am objecting to:

Further proof of the moral degeneracy of Liberals. Not only pushing even more legislation restricting free speech, but loading it down with caveats to protect people whitewashing their favourite murderers.

The point is a good one, as are so many points made by this writer. But... Liberals?

I also think that describing your very sharp views as coming from the 'House of Dumb' is, well, dumb. He is not a bit dumb, and I am sure he has his reasons for doing this, but whatever they may be, if I learn them I do not expect to be persuaded by them. Irony perhaps? Whatever. Argumentatively speaking, calling yourself dumb amounts to constructing a huge open goal for your opponents to tap in a succession of soft goals. One of the basic rules of propaganda is: do not put yourself down. Speak out with clarity, seriousness and sincerity. By all means make trivial jokes about yourself, but the seriously wounding jokes should always be on the other fellows. 'House of Dumb' ought to be a blog dedicated to the idiocies of the non-liberal, anti-liberal collectivist creeps, and it briefly crossed my mind while writing this sentence that maybe this is what the man had in mind, which would have made this sentence read very foolishly. But then I remembered that he calls himself 'DumbJon'. It is his own house that he is talking about, just as I had been assuming. And his very name, never mind his blog's name, is a pre-emptive cringe. Right wingers bloggers do this a lot, with their I-know-what-you-think-I-am-but-I-don't-care names. They think it is showing toughness and wit. It think it is admitting that you are wrong before you even open your mouth.

I repeat, I really like how 'DumbJon' writes, and I agree with point after point that he scores against his hated "liberal" anti-liberals. I particular, agree with him, as many ferocious opponents of Islamism or "Islamic extremism" often do not that Islam itself is a huge problem for the West, rather than the Islam problem merely being a few nutters who take it too far. What the nutters do is take Islam seriously, just as they claim to.

Anyway, having made my points about liberality and dumbness, I will leave it at that and continue to read House of Dumb with profit and pleasure. It is obviously far too late for 'DumbJon' himself to consider any name changes. But, to any other worthy people with ideas like his who are still wondering what to call their blogs, I say: do not be ironic about yourself if you want to be truly persuasive and truly wounding to those whom you seek to wound. Do not build the insults of your opponents into your descriptions of yourself and of your ideas.

And do not hand your opponents compliments that they do not deserve. Do not, for example, call people 'liberal' when they are nothing of the kind.

(27)

This morning, when I read Guy's post about his and the public's responses to the letter bombing, I felt a thrill of excitement. I have been expecting and looking for signs that this time is finally coming. I actually have found some comfort in the acceleration of the recent decline of liberty and privacy in the UK. It is slow declines that go undetected and unchallenged. Generations may forget, but individuals remember. When good intentions run amok, individuals remember what the original justification was. James Madison in Federalist 51, said "Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." Recognition of this danger seems to be unique to English cultures.

Being farther removed from the UK, I have a different and wider perspective. My expectations come from reading more Tolkien than Times. And from reading history, not histrionics. English literary and political history is one of awakenings. In the past millennium, freedom has been won in sweeping victories, and is only lost through neglect. For two of my favorite authors, Lewis and Tolkien, awakening was the sole plot line of virtually their entire life's work. Dickens's best known character is Ebenezer Scrooge, and his story is the essence of an awakening.

This struggle against obsessive domination by a big brother state will be difficult with many wobbles and diversions. There will be times when backward steps out number the forward ones. But my confident expectation is that the history of Britain and of English speaking cultures everywhere is on our side. Liberty "lost in the pursuit," will be reclaimed. It always has been.

This event inspires a feeling that confuses a lot of people. They cannot quite put their finger on it. Some have mentioned schadenfreude. No. That's not it. In fact, that particular viciousness is so alien to English speakers that we need to borrow a European word for it. I am confident that no person here takes any sick pleasure from that clerk's suffering. The trail of English history is a search for justice, not redistribution of suffering. The feeling this event inspires is deeper than that and it is a just and justified one. This feeling is coming from our recognition of possibility, of alliance, of purpose; the first perceptions of a change in the direction of history. Since this feeling is one we have felt seldom and mentioned even less, it does not surprise me that it should go unrecognized. But when I read Guy's post this morning, I felt it.

Joy.

(15)

I am fed up with Western companies collaborating with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, helping them restrict the internet and monitor communications by those who disagree and oppose them. Julien Pain of Reporters without Borders writes in Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0.

These days, "subversive" or "counter-revolutionary" material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become "cyberdissidents" and "online journalists." ... The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.

He expands:

The predators of free expression are not all the same. China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users, spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment, and hires armies of informants and cyberpolice. It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector--such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems--to do what it wants them to; all have agreed to censor their search engines to filter out Web sites overcritical of the authorities.

Long-time readers of Samizdata.net will know that one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in any way but especially when it comes to limiting the technology that could help dissidents to communicate among themselves and with the outside world - the first step to any meaningful resistance. Both Perry and I and others have blogged about it when Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft or Google put their foot among the oppressors' jackboots.

I have often said, although have not blogged it anywhere in detail yet, that had the internet existed in the days of the Cold War, its end would have come much sooner and possibly in a different manner. I say this on the basis of my own experience of the power of communication and information dissemination within an oppressed society. Not just the serious political information. I remember the first 15 minutes of any clandestine meeting was spent sharing new jokes. All of them political, of course. And then there were western adverts that caused considerable damage to the communist propaganda. Soft-focus commercials for washing powder, chocolates, electrical appliances that we did not know even existed. The images of a world beyond got through thanks to the clear reception of the few TV channels near the borders with the Western countries. Speed that up, add scale and the rips the internet could have made in the Iron Curtain are beyond measure... imagine all the YouTube videos testifying to the ubiquitous presence of technology (cameras, computers and connectivity, not to mention homes, past-times and the luxury of being able to post inane clips online) for the exploited workers in the corrupt and decaying capitalist countries. Hmmm.

Even without quaint anecdotes from dissident days, most people can appreciate the importance of free flow of information and see what the internet has done for freedom of speech. What I see is a shift in the balance of power between systems (political and corporate) and the individual (citizen or consumer). That is why I do what I do (crusade against advertising and for individual empowerment) and why I am a big fan of technology like blogs, wikis, tagging, VoIP etc, and especially of applications such as Skype that is P2P, encrypted and distributed by individuals. Since its beginnings a few years ago, it has spread like wildfire precisely because it is secure and decentralised and, most importantly, unmonitored.

The Web phone service Skype, for example, has made it much easier for journalists - and Reporters Without Borders - to communicate with their sources. It works especially well because it is encrypted, so conversations are hard to tap.

Apparently, not any longer, which is the source of my anger and disappointment:

But China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?

After Googling "Skype" and "Chinese government", I found more about the story which broke some time ago. Shame on me for missing it:

In September 2005 Skype and TOM formed a joint venture company to "develop, customize and distribute a simplified Chinese version of the Skype software and premium services to Internet users and service providers in China." The Chinese client distributed by TOM Online employs a filtering mechanism that prevents users from sending text messages with banned phrases such as "Falungong" and "Dalai Lama."

Human Rights Watch provides a comprehensive summary well worth reading in How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China. (Scroll down to point 4 for Skype.)

The real issue for me here is a moral one, not political or technological, although they define the context within which the moral choice should be exercised. I know and believe that technological innovation will prevail in the end. In fact, I am banking on it. For each repressive use of technology there will be new ways of bypassing it. My problem is that this merely treats the symptoms, not the disease. It leads to a kind of arms race, dictators and geeks locked in a battle to bypass each others' technological resources and cleverness. True, geeks may be winning on that front. But the dictators are still oppressing and the losers (apart from the victims), in more ways than one, are the companies that have made the pact with the devil.

To explain where I am coming from, let me quote the Black Book of Communism, the most erudite and articulate book about the horrors of communism to date (2000 edition p. 11):

In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Incredibly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks fo the Communist International and local sections of the "world party of the revolution", Communists and fellow-travellers around the world warmly approved Lenin's and subsequently Stalin's policies. continued...

Undoubtedly, of course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favourite technique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowledge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside their gods of yesterday, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men's souls and damn the consequences?

Today the likes of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Skype, Yahoo! cannot be excused even on the basis of ignorance...

Robert Conquest wrote: The fact that so many people "swallowed" [the Great Terror] hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror succeeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not received the blessing of some 'independent' foreign commentators. These pundits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the purges...

But what self-deception kept Western European Communists, who had not been directly arrested by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very start?

The complicity of those who rushed into voluntary servitude has not always been as abstract and theoretical as it may seem. Simple acceptance and/or dissemination of propaganda designed to conceal the truth is invariably a symptom of active complicity. Although it may not always succeed, as it was demonstrated by the tragedy in Rwanda, the glare of the spotlight is the only effective response to mass crimes that are committed in secret and kept hidden from prying eyes.

They say that history repeats itself... a truly depressing and frightening thought.

(24)

In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.

The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.

and...

Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.

and...

... and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?

(5)

This entire situation has come about because of State intrusion into matters that should be left to private conscience. It is a consequence of contradictory legislation that tries to protect rights to religious beliefs at the same time as preventing actions that stem from those beliefs. This Government is constructing a State morality backed by legislation. Not only is this wrong in principle – it is a practical impossibility as this situation demonstrates.

- UKIP Chairman John Whittaker commenting last week on the row about gay versus Roman Catholic adoption (with thanks to Peter Briffa for the link)

(12)

To ask everyone to embrace everyone else is clearly absurd. Toleration is the best we can do, and what's more, it works.

- Julian Baggini, encapsulating a much broader principle than that suggested by the context, an article in which he just stops short of telling Guardian readers that the categories 'racist' and 'anti-racist' are inadequate to cope with real, live human beings. Liberty requires only that we live and let live. It is made manageable by being civil. We do not need conformity. We do not need to love one another. We do not need to censor our opinions. Civility suffices.

(9)

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector

- Henry Hazlitt, author of books including the superb Economics in One Lesson.

(27)

Democratic Undergrounder 1: "Dude, Bush is a god-damn fascist. I asked everyone I know and like no one voted for him! Patriot Act, wiretaps made easier, locking up people in Guantanamo Bay without a trial... he's like some whacked out Christian dictator!"

Democratic Undergrounder 2: "Yeah man! It's so good to see Chavez in Venezuela sticking it to Bush's buddies in the oil business! He's gonna make Venezuela totally free now!

Democratic Undergrounder 1: "That's right! Did you hear? He's been given powers to rule by decree and now he can close down opposition newspapers, silence non-socialist radio stations and throw his political enemy's asses in jail if they don't do whatever his decree says."

Democratic Undergrounder 2: "Woah, cool! One day I hope we're as free as that in the USA!"

Of course, I am just imagining that discussion. I am sure nothing like that ever happened.

(13)

There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor's murder that caught my eye.

Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village's only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.

[...]

"He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible," he said.

I regard it as a truism that 'the state is not your friend', but it is easy to concentrate one's attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate... well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.