"And as to neoliberalism laid bare. Yes, the industrial revolution is the only way we humans have found of improving the living standards of the average guy in the street. I, as a liberal (even if neo) would like the living standards of the average guy to increase. Thus I support the industrial revolution. Yes, in all its mess and clamour: for it is making things better. I’m out and I’m proud. As a neoliberal I buy things made by poor people in poor countries. For that’s how poor people and poor countries get rich."

- Tim Worstall.

I think I can formulate a new "Johnathan Pearce law". Namely, the presence of the word "neoliberal" in a piece mocking markets and capitalism is almost always evidence that the author of said piece either does not understand what he or she is attacking, or is misrepresenting it, and also regards such ideas as being promoted by some sinister, all-powerful cabal, as suggested by that rather creepy use of the term "neo" in front of something else, such as "liberal".

"More people have heard of Tom Cruise than Ben Bernanke, but that doesn’t mean that Bernanke hasn’t had a bigger impact on their life."

- Matt Zwolinski, a blogger at the recently expanded "Bleeding Heart Libertarian" group blog. He's writing about the benefits and costs of intellectual versus political activism, as relating to Ron Paul.

The failure of Tom Cruise to influence my life is, I guess, something I can live with, although I did rather enjoy the latest Mission Impossible flick.

Mr. Sachs here performs the equivalent of, say, accusing someone who advocates sobriety of thereby being indifferent to other values such parental responsibility, financial prudence, and neighborliness. But just as being sober in no way precludes – and likely promotes – other values such as parental responsibility, being a libertarian in no way precludes any of the values and causes that Mr. Sachs lists. Indeed, libertarians argue that these other values and causes are best promoted by individual liberty, and that too many people who insist that achieving these other values requires the suppression of liberty are cynically seeking convenient cover for their own self-aggrandizement.

Of course, libertarians might be mistaken about liberty’s merits. But that Mr. Sachs presumes that libertarians hold cheap such values as compassion, civic responsibility, and honesty proves that what Lord Acton wrote about Robert Kemp Philp’s description of history applies perfectly to Mr. Sachs’s description of libertarianism: "It were well if he knew his subject as well as he knows his own mind about it."

- Two quotes there from Donald J. Boudreaux (responding to this). There is his own own eloquence, and there is the Acton quote at the end of what he himself says.

I was struck by the tone of an article I recently read by a conservative journalist who simply could not understand why libertarians have not abandoned Ron Paul now that the supposedly deadly leftist power word has been uttered against him along with great waggling of magic wands.

My answer to him and others is that we are a tough lot and I laugh in the face of the PC power words. Unlike Conservative journalists I do not wet my knickers at the thought of someone attempting to tar me with it. Since I know I am not a racist, I simply do not care what anyone says or writes. I am immune, and that is perhaps one of the things which makes people like me and other libertarians even more frightening to the powers that be. We lack proper fear.

Anyone who like myself has been on the front lines of libertarianism for years, for decades even, understands. We have been fighting our battle against hopeless odds with pretty much everyone against us except when it was to their advantage and they felt they had nothing to lose. We are used to losing and then dusting ourselves off and going off to the next battle, and the next battle. Like a horde of Don Quixote's we have continued to attack the blades of the windmill, but unlike him we are having an effect. Every strike of the lance vibrates the blade, every vibration wears on the bearings, and the wear is starting to make the axle wobble. One day the entire Statist enterprise will tear itself apart and send blades cartwheeling over the countryside and it will be in no small thanks to us.

This is not to say we do not hunger for personal tastes of victory, even if in small ways. The Ron Paul candidacy is one of those. No matter what happens now, we have won hugely. Millions of people have been introduced to ideas that will resonate long after they forget where they heard them. The libertarian genie is well and truly out of the bottle. We win with every day that goes by with us in the race. We win with every million dollars the Ron Paul campaign pours into broadcasting our message, a message of freedom and individualism the media has long ignored, filtered, twisted or blocked. Should he take Iowa and New Hampshire the old boys network of the Republican Party will be out in even more force with their friends in the Democratic Party to stop him. The two may be very different in what they want to do, but they both share a common love of power and your money.

Some made the mistake of thinking the Conservatives were our friends. I knew that was not true. They were only interested in us so long as they thought they could use us to their advantage. Has anyone noticed how the Conservative media turned against us as soon as it looked like we might actually have a real effect on the election? Even Pajamas Media has taken a decidly anti-libertarian turn. I must admit that one surprised me a bit, but as to the rest, I fully expected it.

I still do not expect Ron Paul will win, but God Almighty, I do intend to let those Sons of Bitches know we libertarians were there. If you are Conservative and you still do not understand why we fight after reading this missive... you are really rather dense.

It is simple. After thirty-five years, we have finally tasted blood in the political scene and for once it is not our own.

Not long ago, Rob Fisher asked, back at his blog, before he started writing here, whether there is a correlation between an early enthusiasm for science fiction and later being a libertarian, and if so what might be the cause of such a correlation. And I seem to recall the notion finding its way here also, although I can't recall or find where. It may have been in a comment thread. My take is that SF embodies the idea that things could be very different. Maybe a more general version of the same idea is that SF leads to political radicalism of all kinds. There was certainly a huge enthusiasm for SF on the left before World War 2. Think only of H. G. Wells.

I recently mentioned to Michael Jennings that I too went through a big SF phase in my teens and twenties, while in the process of becoming a libertarian, and that although I subsequently stopped reading much SF, I did later become very keen on reading history. I still am. The connection between reading SF and reading history, at any rate in my mind, is that just as SF says that the world can be very different, history is all about the fact that, in the past, the world actually was very different. Things change, from era to era, from epoch to epoch. History and SF both say that very loudly. Libertarianism, and all the other isms, say that also.

As far as history is concerned, I'm thinking of things like how the sea, in the European Middle Ages, far from being any sort of defensive wall (as Shakespeare's John of Gaunt famously describes it - and as it later became) was actually more like a motorway system, for those able to command the vehicles to make use it of. I'm thinking of how very different life was if most of the people in the place you lived in were illiterate, perhaps including you. I'm thinking of how very hard it was even to preserve the great ideas of the past, let alone accumulate new ones with any success, before the printing press was contrived. I'm thinking of what a difference swords and bows-and-arrows and gunpowder and machine guns successively made, and what a difference atom bombs and hydrogen bombs have made to our own time. I'm thinking of what a different world it was when it was very hard to send messages of any complexity (or for that matter human beings) any faster than a succession of very expensive horses could gallop.

Michael's response was that reading lots of SF, then becoming something like a libertarian, then reading lots of history, is a fairly common intellectual biography. So rather than ramble on, let me ask commenters. Does that sequence of interests ring any bells with any of you good people?

Here is the headline:

EU digital exclusion is 'unacceptable'.

The clear implication of the quotes in that headline is that whereas the person being reported doing the talking indeed said "unacceptable", that doesn't mean that the word makes much sense, and in fact it is probably rather ridiculous. Quite so.

But to me the word "exclusion" is at least as much deserving of sneer quotes.

I do not have a car, a smart phone, a garden, a hi-fi system that would enable me to get full sonic value from the quite numerous classical SACDs that I have acquired over the years, a cat, a Kindle, a wife, an exercise bike, an actual bike, any paintings on my walls, a Spurs season ticket (even though I like it when Spurs do well), a snooker table, a Bible (I lent mine to someone and never got it back), a blender (I did have one but didn't use it much and didn't much like it when I did so I sold it to a friend), a yacht, a space exploration company, or a collection of ornamental hippos. Just yesterday, I made the arrangements to get rid of my photocopier. I do have a personal blog, and also write for an impersonal blog (this one), but I use neither Twitter nor Facebook. Of none of these various things that I don't have or don't use does it make sense to say that I am "excluded" from them. I merely choose not to have or use these things, or, in the case of the rather expensive or inconvenient ones, I am put off by the money it would cost to buy or to accommodate them, and the effort that would be involved in acquiring the money to pay for such transformed personal arrangements. (I would really like a cat, but that would mean me getting a different home.)

Martha Lane Fox says that lots of EU citizens not being connected to the internet is "unacceptable". But instead of "not being connected", she says "excluded".

Speaking to The Telegraph, Lane Fox described the gap as “terrifying”.

More quotation marks, signifying more ridiculousness. Evidently Martha Lane Fox is a women who is easily frightened. What on earth is so "terrifying" about people not using the internet? Not so long ago, nobody used the internet, because there was no internet. Life went on.

Martha Lane Fox is apparently something called the "UK Digital Champion". More sneer quotes there, this time from me. She was appointed this by Gordon Brown, and the current government carried on with this stupid arrangement. Should we perhaps start a series here, called something like: Public sector jobs that are stupid even by the usual standards of the public sector.

It all very much reminds me of this excellent posting here not long ago by Rob Fisher, in which he said, among various other wise things:

I imagine that libertarians are very much in the habit of questioning the deeper meaning of words.

This libertarian certainly is. The deeper meaning that Martha Lane Fox is in this case suffering from, and spreading, is the notion that Things Only Happen Because They Are Forced To Happen. I don't have a cat or a Kindle, and that must mean that someone or something or some combination of someones and somethings must have forced me not to have a cat or a Kindle, just as if a gun had been pointing at me. Therefore, if "we" (another portentously wrongheaded word) think that cats and Kindles are good (as is many ways they are good, especially cats) it would be good also if "we" were to change the forces now forcing themselves upon me, and force me instead to have a cat and a Kindle. No more force would be involved. The forces in play would merely have been rearranged a little.

I do not describe such ideas as "unacceptable". The title of this posting is ironic, despite its lack of sneer quotes. I must accept that many stupid people, such as Martha Lane Fox, are in the grip of these ideas, partly because of various words that rattle about in their heads for which they know no better alternatives, even if they might like to, and that as a result I and many others are subjected to force in circumstance where we ought not to be. But just as I choose not have a cat, so too I also choose not to think in this silly way myself.

Just in case you missed it, the last of these Frank Jisms is this:

This morning I started work on my next book for HarperCollins. Thanks to the sales of Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything, I was asked to write another book. This one will be on my solutions for all the problems facing America. Hopefully it will start a movement when it comes out with me as leader.

Earlier in the same posting Frank J quotes (admiringly) from and links to a piece (by him) about how, if cars were invented only now instead of when they were invented, we wouldn't be allowed to drive them. Funny, and probably true.

I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion - that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will be answered - “You yourself are occupied upon it all this time.” Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold.

- from The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (on the penultimate page (54) of this pdf edition)

Ah yes. To fight politics, you have to do politics. And before you know it, you are what you were earlier warning the world against.

Reading this piece, linked to by Instapundit today, we see that politics in the USA, and in fact everywhere, is a trialogue rather than a dialogue. All parties to the trialogue (definitely including me) believe that the other two camps are wrong, and many in each camp believe that the other two camps are actually one camp.

The three camps are:

Camp 1: Capitalism is fine, so long as the government stays in charge of it and does a few more of the right things and a few less of the wrong things. The mixed economy is fine, if only we can just mix it right, and meanwhile preserve confidence that all will be well. No need for radical change. Trust us. No, we're not convinced that'll work either. Camp 1 is very powerful, very clever, very unwise. For now.

Camp 2: Capitalism is an evil mess. This crisis was caused by capitalism - naked, unregulated, unrestrained - being let loose by neo-liberal fanatics. What should be a poodle has become a wolf. Do whatever it takes to make capitalism a poodle again. Yeah, yeah, we need a bit of capitalism, to make stuff, but not nearly as much as we've been having lately. Anyone who gets in the way … boo! We hate you! No, we don't think that'll really work either, even if the people were willing to give it a go. They won't, so boo! And if they did, it would fail horribly, and we'd have to blame capitalism even more. So … boooooo. Camp 2 is very stupid, but horribly numerous.

Camp 3: Capitalism would be great, but what we've had has not been capitalism - unregulated, unrestrained, as hoped for by us neo-liberal fanatics - but capitalism mixed with statism in a truly horrible way. What we've seen in the last few decades has been crony capitalism, capitalism with politicians in its pocket, so that whenever a big chunk of capitalism looks like failing, most notably a big bank, the politicians squirt more money at it. Which ain't proper capitalism. Meanwhile, capitalism even of the crony sort makes better stuff. Capitalism, the real thing, should also be allowed to make better money, the kind that is allowed to fail if it does fail. The adjustment process will be horrific. No, we're not sure that will work either. If we could do it, it would work great. But will we ever be allowed to do it? Camp 3 is right. But maybe not numerous enough or clever enough (maybe not wise enough) to win, and prove itself right.

Like all such glib divisions of reality into this, this, and this, this is an oversimplification. Many swither from one camp to another, and quite a few, I surmise, find themselves in all three camps in one day, depending only on their mood and on the last thing they read. Those who do know which camp they're in still swither about which of the other two is more stupid and more evil, and therefore how to handle the other two. Try to smash them both? Or join with the less worst to smash the most worst, and then win the victorious coalition spat with the less worst? But if the latter, which is the less worst and which the most worst? Or maybe combine with the most worst against the less worst, because that might work better? Pardon my grammar but these are grammar-straining times.

President Obama, as described in the piece linked to above, is a classic Camp 2-er, who is using Camp 1 to try to contrive a victory for Camp 2 which he could not contrive if he merely did Camp 2 stuff over and over again. Camp 1 uses Camp 2 all the time, and no doubt still reckons that it is using Camp 2 man Obama. It may well be right.

My inclination is to shout as loud as I can for my camp, Camp 3, and bugger the other two. They are both wrong, and will both fail. Camp 1 is creating a catastrophe, which it has no idea how to even stop creating let alone clean up after. Camp 2 is catastrophe pure and simple. But, catastrophically, it may well soon combine more publicly with Camp 1 to ruin everything and keep it ruined.

Camp 3 is the right one. It has to win. How it can win, I don't fully understand. But we have to contrive that. My method for contriving victory will be to shout as loud as I can that Camp 3 is right right right. Luckily, others in Camp 3 are cleverer and more subtle than me. They are good Obamas, you might say, adept at using Camps 1 and 2 to contrive steps in the right direction for Camp 3. But are my righteous Obamas numerous enough and cunning enough? It doesn't now feel like it. But maybe they may yet prevail.

James Taranto quotes Thomas Edsall, saying (among other things) this, about the kinds of votes that Democrats are now trying to get, and other votes that they are no longer bothering to try to get:

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment - professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -

Edsall goes on to say that the whereas the Dems have now given up on the white workers, they are still eager to get all the non-white workers to vote for them.

One of the ways to understand the libertarian movement, it seems to me, is that it is an attempt to convert from their present foolishness all those "professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists" whom Edsall so takes for granted. It gives them the "social libertarianism" that they are so wedded to (even if they often don't get what this actually means), but it insists on the necessity of at least some – and in the current circumstances of economic crisis – a lot more - libertarianism in economic matters. Okay, libertarianism will never conquer these groups completely, but it threatens to at least divide them, into quite a few libertarians or libertarian-inclined folks and not quite so many idiots.

Also, demography is not destiny, when it comes to voting. People's "interests" are not necessarily what many party political strategists assume them to be.

The thing is, it is entirely rational to vote for more government jobs and more government hand-outs (a) if you are at the front of the queue for such things, and (b) if the supply of such things is potentially abundant, or not, depending on how you and everyone else votes. But, if the world changes, and you find yourself at the top of the list to have your job or your hand-outs taken away from you, in a world which is going to take these things away from a lot of people no matter how anybody votes, it makes sense to ask yourself different questions, and to consider voting for entirely different things. Like: lots of government cuts, so that you aren't the only one who suffers them, and so that the economy has a chance of getting back into shape in the future, soon enough for you to enjoy it.

The far side of the Laffer Curve is a rather strange place. Different rules apply.

Quite a lot of unemployed British people voted for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, because they reckoned that Thatcher was a better bet to create the kind of country that might give them - and their children and their grandchildren - jobs in the future and a better life generally. (Whether or not they were right to vote for Thatcher is a different argument. My point is, this is what they did, and they were not being irrational.)

There is also the fact that how you vote in such circumstances of national and global crisis will be influenced, far more than in kinder and gentler times, by how you think. For a start, how bad do you think that the national or global crisis actually is? If you think it's bad, what policies do you think will get that economy back motoring again, in a way which has a decent chance of lasting? How you vote depends on how you think the world works. And how you think can change.

At some point last weekend, on a whim, I did some ego-googling, and discovered that maybe I should do this more often. Because, what I got to was a video of me giving a talk, last February, about modern architecture to the Libertarian Alliance, early this year. I of course knew that it was being videoed at the time, but had assumed that they didn't reckon it good enough to see the light of YouTube. But I was mistaken.

I managed to watch the thing all through without too much pain, but there is one glaring contradiction built into it, which is that my account of the emergence of the nineteenth century American skyscraper contradicts what I later said about form in modern architecture never following function. If by "form" is meant how a building looks, then it is indeed the case, as I said, that "form" in modern architecture follows fashion rather than function. And as a general rule, as I go on to say, a building can pretty much be changed from one use to another, depending not on what shape it is but depending on what people want to do in it. Most buildings have floors, walls, roofs, and provided you aren't trying to accommodate a Boeing 747 or a rugby match or some such thing, then for most purposes any old building, plus a bit of indoor rearrangement, will do.

But there is (at least) one huge exception to this generalisation about the tendency of form not to follow function. The function of a skyscraper (the skyscraper and its emergence in late nineteenth century America being central to the entire story of modern architecture) is to fit a lot of people into a small urban area, and the characteristic form of a skyscraper accomplishes precisely that. It is that shape because it has to be. Form follows function. So, bad me.

But then again, part of the reason you give talks is for you yourself to listen to what you said (which is far easier if someone records it for you) and then for you to decide what you think about it.

Chairman David McDonaugh's introduction of me was more an ambush than an introduction, and I floundered about in his trap for a while (be patient please). The title was one thing when I started talking, but they ended up calling it something rather different, and for good reasons. The talk is rather episodic, the episodes towards the end being in a somewhat random order. My attempts to wave drawings in front of the camera were not always as informative as I would have liked. Plus, I refer to my friend Patrick Crozier without making it clear video viewers that he was present, in the front row. (Patrick and I did a recorded conversation about architecture in 2007, which covered similar ground to this talk, and which I listened to again by way of preparation for this talk.)

So, a bit of a muddle. But nevertheless, overall, I am still sufficiently pleased with this performance to want to flag it up here, if only to provoke others who could do better on this topic to go ahead and do so. My belated thanks to the LA both for making the video, and for making it available.

I had a few thoughts over a coffee this afternoon on how to express the difference between a Capitalist and a Socialist society in a short sharp shocking manner. In the Capitalist society, when an individual sees someone who is better off, they try to learn from them and work hard to do even better. In a Socialist world... they just steal it.

The stealing may happen by proxy, but it is stealing just the same.

Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Tim Blair have described the universe. Blair's Law is "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force".

On the 15th November, the Guardian gave over its comment pages to people from Occupy London. Most of the resulting articles were produced by earnest but weak-minded hippies. Two of the articles made the hippies look sensible.

The first of these was sad. It was the last of a set of three mini-articles by Occupiers on welfare, education and law; the law part being by written by a person "commonly known as dom." It is important to him that you use that formulation, including the lack of an initial capital letter. He says,

Most days I walk around the site teaching people about the legal system, about the law, about how they're being enslaved by a body of rules and statutory instruments. The prison without bars is made by bits of paper.

Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright. The legal definition of registration is transfer of title ownership, so anything that's registered is handed over to the governing body; the thing itself is no longer yours. When you register a car, you're agreeing to it not being yours – they send you back a form saying you're the "registered keeper". It's a con. That's why I say I've never had a name.

I must stress that I do not dispute the right of the entity commonly known as dom to call himself what he pleases, and in politeness I shall act in accordance with his preferences if ever I meet him. Apparently he wears one of those jester's hats with bells on it. Later in the piece he suggests that we google "lawful rebellion". I did, and soon it came to me that I had heard that phrase before, on this post and others on the EU Referendum site. That post in turn links to a site called The British Constitution Group. One glance at the site is enough to show its appeal to libertarians, Tory Anarchists and allied trades. I want to like it. I'm usually a complete sucker for a bit of Magna Carta and the Rights of Englishmen. But on reading around the various links within the site, not that complete. Someone has been reading too much Artemis Fowl. In those books, if you recall, a fairy cannot enter a human dwelling unless invited in. In the British Constitution Group website under the heading "CONSENT - The Most Important Word in the English Language" you will see the following:

An essential part of the arrest procedure is to read you your rights and then ask you ‘do you understand’ – the word ‘understand’ is synonymous with ‘stand-under’ – they are asking you whether you are prepared to ‘stand-under’ their authority... and when you answer yes – you are giving your consent.

...And because Persephone had eaten food in Hades, be it only six pomegranate seeds, she was doomed to return there. The concept of the hero being safe so long as he does not inadvertently perform some symbolic act that gives his enemies power over him is an ancient one and has great mythic power, but do not try this on irritable cops late at night.

The second Guardian article, by one Jon Witterick, was more clued-up and more sinister than the one by t.p.c.k.a.dom. Its title is Yes, defaulting on debts is an option. At first I thought it was about the financial situation in Greece and passed on to another story, thus nearly missing the tale of how Jon Witterick has avoided paying his debts and how, he claims, you can too. The key idea seems to be that debts cannot be sold on, and once again we meet the concept that you are safe so long as you do not speak the forbidden words:

I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed

Topping and tailing this admission of fraud and theft are a genuinely pitiable account of what it is like to be pursued by debt collectors and a genuinely repulsive attempt to argue that his decision not to pay what he owes is Iceland writ small. He does not say what he spent the money on, back before he decided it was not real.

Witterick's website, to which I prudishly will not link, contains the following message:

Your Credit Card Agreement is an unlawful contract as it is ONLY signed by you- constituting a unilateral agreement. (Contract Law)

All contracts, in order to be valid, must be signed by someone able to bind the corporation in contract. (Contract Law)

Banks create money out of thin air- they have no money to lend you. (Fractional Reserve Banking)

It is not possible to actually pay the outstanding amount as the currency is based on worthless paper and 'electronic funds' on computers. (Fractional Reserve Banking)

You do not have to pay statements, only invoices. (Bills of Exchange Act 1882)

You are not lawfully bound to pay anything which is unsigned. (Bills of Exchange Act 1882)

The uppercase name on the credit card is not your name, but a 'corporate entity'. (Blacks Law Dictionary)

The banks have been so desperate to get us into debt, that they sold people mortgages, who they knew could NEVER afford to pay them back.

The governments are so desperate to keep this racket going, that they will bail out ANY bank that gets into trouble! Being in debt is one of the consequences of playing the game

Why do you think your government is in debt?

There is not enough Money in circulation for everyone to pay off ALL the debts!

The whole system is totally fraudulent...

There are a few small nuggets of sense floating in a stew of foolishness there. You can see why Witterick was welcomed to lecture at Occupy's Tent City University, and you can also see why it might appeal to some here.

However if anyone reading this is in debt and desperate, be advised that following his legal advice will make your situation worse. (You would be far better off speaking to The Consumer Credit Counselling Service. You will not be charged for their advice, and, for those who care about such things, this body is funded by the credit industry, not the taxpayer.) The strategies Witterick advises might have worked for the first few people who tried them, as debt collectors decided to go for easier targets. But they, and judges, can spot a "freeman" a mile off now. Calling yourself "john:smith" or "John of the family Smith" does not hack it any more. The Guardian partly redeemed itself for publishing Witterick by also publishing this response by a legal blogger. The comments to both Witterick's piece and the response are also well worth reading. Even Guardian readers normally sympathetic to the Occupy movement thought Witterick was a charlatan.

I wish I did not have a presentiment that some people with whom I share many beliefs will be hurt by this post.

... because "This is private property" or any other version of "You have no right to be here" are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
"We were here first" - "Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you."
"We are the 99%" - "We're poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers"
"We represent the 99%" - "Who voted for you, then?"
"We are the official accredited Occupiers" - "We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!"

I have been reading the minutes of the General Assembly of the Occupy protesters who have taken over the empty UBS bank building in Sun Street, Hackney. One area of concern does seem to be people "abusing the space".

If people want to stay over night (sleep-overs) they need (1) to be part of a working group (2) They need to have an on-going task that warrants their stay. There will be ‘monitors’ to make sure sleep-overs are not abusing the space. Individuals that stay over and are found to not be working will be given one warning before being asked to leave.

And if they say no, what then? When a warning is given, it must be a warning of something. Presumably it is a warning that the bigger group of Occupiers will eject the smaller group of Occupiers - because they can.

Unless, of course, they can't. If a fight develops, what then? Call the cops? Problem with that.

Yes, there are a couple of interesting recent postings up at the Adam Smith Institute blog, both involving falling prices and falling profits.

Tim Worstall writes about why the solar power business is not proving very profitable. This is not, he argues, because solar power is rubbish. It's just that making the kit to capture it is not that hard, the price of such kit is falling all the time, and making that kit won't be very profitable.

The other falling prices and falling profits ASI posting is by Sam Bowman, who links to a piece in the Atlantic Cities blog about how a sharp drop in the price of cocaine caused a similarly sharp drop in the murder rate in the USA, during the 1990s. The business stopped being nearly so profitable and became a lot less worth killing for. (The reason the price of cocaine dropped was that smuggling got cleverer.)

I have very little to say about how true either of these claims are. Mostly my reactions are: interesting! Can anyone here be any more informative than that?

I believe in legalising drugs no matter what. But if it is true that a freer market in drugs, and consequent fall in their price, already has reduced the crime associated with illegal drugs, then that surely strengthens the arguments that I can use to support what I already believe in.

As for solar power, is solar power really about to become economically rational in a big way? If so, how much is that reality talking, and how much the politically rigged and politically deranged energy market?

I remember, about a quarter of a century ago, speculating that the way things were heading, in Britain, all "drugs" would eventually be legal, except tobacco. We seem …

All smoking in cars should be banned across the UK to protect people from second-hand smoke, doctors say.

The British Medical Association called for the extension of the current ban on smoking in public places after reviewing evidence of the dangers.

… to be on course for exactly this arrangement:

Ex-MI5 chief Baroness Manningham-Buller is set to call for cannabis to be decriminalised in a speech.

The crossbench peer believes that only by regulating the sale of cannabis can its psychotic effects be controlled.

She is also expected to say the "war on drugs" has been "fruitless".

I am reluctant to urge consistency in these matters. That might mean them banning the lot, which actually seems a rather more likely outcome. And note that the Baroness favours legalisation because illegal drugs are the sort over which They have less control. So both proclamations are consistent with one another, in wanting Them to have more control.

I have long thought, first, that the United Kingdom has for some time been heading towards being the Non-United Kingdom, and second, that this would probably be a very good thing.

If such a separation is indeed happening, then what is causing it is the end of the British Empire. That and what followed around half a century later (i.e. around now), probably as an inevitable next step, namely the abandonment of the English-stroke-British attempt to remain a top ranking Great Power.

The British Empire meant that lots of Scots wanted to be attached to England, to get in on all the deals involved. Then Britain, empireless but still trying to remain a Great Power, needed Scotland to remain in. Scotland provided and still provides military manpower, and projected and still projects British power in northerly and westerly and easterly directions, in a way that England without Scotland will never be able to match. Could England without Scotland (to say nothing of Northern Ireland) have won the Battle of Atlantic? Hardly. Could England then have even threatened to win the re-run of that battle that from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, dominated British naval thinking, and Britain's strategic thinking generally? Again, hardly. For as long as the Cold War lasted, the English plus whichever local allies went along with them, were determined to square up to the Russians and thus keep their seat at that Top Table that politicians are all so very keen to be seen sitting at. A dis-United Kingdom was a non-starter, for contriving all that.

But now? Russia remains a looming monster, or a huge wreck if you prefer the Perry de Havilland take on Russia, which I think I probably do. But even if you think that Russia remains very strong, it no longer fancies itself as a global ideological magnet, bankrolling and talking up every nutter in the civilised world with a mad plan to derange civilisation. It no longer even goes through the motions of attempting to conquer everywhere else. Russia is now just another Problem, along with government debt and bank turmoil, the Euro, the Dollar, the Pound, China, energy shortages or "climate change" (again according to taste), crime, schools'n'hospitals, etc. etc. etc., rather than The Problem.

The global ideological derangement torch has now been seized by Mad Mullahs, and they won't be re-fighting the Battle of the Atlantic any time soon. Nor do they have nearly so many nuclear bombs, or nearly such potent means of chucking them about in the world. They require very different strategies. Given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by the Mad Mullahs, and given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by us, their enemies, I wouldn't now want to call them anything more than just another Problem, among all the others.

Other career paths for English politicians to that Top Table have since been identified, based less on British power and more on personal skills and individual contributions to the new global elite. To put it bluntly, you don't need to be part of one of the old empires in order to participate in running the New World Order.

England's Great Power-ish inclined warriors and foreigner-scarers, of greatly varying social grandeur from Air Marshals to ex-army pub landlords to army-fan dog-owning T-shirted denizens of south of England housing estates, are being presented with a fait accompli. This warrior tendency has traditionally been very pro the Union with Scotland, but is now being being starved of resources and humiliated by its consequent failures to make very effective uses even of those resources that it does still receive. Its last serious throw of the dice was the Falklands War. Since then, Britain been militarily "powerful" by supporting America, which is not nearly so satisfying, or so impressive to spectators. Britain's more recent military escapades, against those Mad Mullahs, seem to have accomplished, and to be accomplishing, less and less with each passing year. Chasing terrorists in foreign parts is all well and good, but it seems foolish to be trying to impose democracy upon such places as Afghanistan, given the problems we now have domestically. And even if you don't agree about that, you can hardly deny that most English people surely now do think thus. The Will to Great Power, to adapt Nietzsche, seems more and more to be lacking in Britain. Too costly. Not worth it. Time to consign all that to the history books.

And with it, the overriding imperative for England and Scotland to remain politically attached to one another.

Meanwhile, that strand of English opinion which favours trade, free markets, and so on, is, in the absence of any continuing great power logic to justify union with Scotland, likely to become ever more irked but it. This tradesman tendency, so to speak, of free market inclined businessmen, City of Londoners, shopkeepers, and bookish students who like reading Hayek and Friedman and, these days, clicking onto mises.org, has lately suffered a severe dose of Scottish moralistic … I don't think anti-Englishness is too strong a phrase for it, at the hated hands of Gordon Brown. More and more they (and count me in too) now think: well Jock, if you want out, then you just go ahead and get out. We might then get the sort of government we want, instead of having our choice vetoed by you all the time.

The above thoughts were triggered again in my head just last week, by a recent report (thank you Bishop Hill), which said that if Scotland does go independent, it will as a direct consequence have to stop being nearly as crackpottedly ridiculous as it is now about "renewable" energy, i.e. the sort of energy of which there is not now and for the foreseeable future never will be enough. Suddenly, I found myself becoming a passionate Scottish Nationalist, if only to put the wind up the idiotic wind-farmer tendency. Although, Bishop Hill jokes that such greenery in Scotland is actually a plan to keep the Union with Scotland going, by making Scottish independence impossible.

For wind-farming in particular, read Scottish economic thought and policy generally. Libertarians like me have another reason to want to see Scotland separate itself from England, which is that once the indignity of being told by annoying English people like me to favour more rational economic theories and economic policies has been removed, the Scots, once independent, will then almost certainly become far more ready to tell each other to think and to behave in an economically more sane manner.

If Scotland goes independent, then Scotland will, for reasons of sheer economic self-preservation, have to stop being a huge drag on the global pro-free-market tendency in general and the libertarian movement in particular, and might even become a net contributor to such tendencies. Again.

Final thought. Where will all this leave UKIP? Changing its name for a start. But then, as the EIP, much more likely to get what it wants. And that's another reason for England to eject Scotland from its union with England. It would then be a lot easier for England to eject itself from the EU.

When young beautiful and really smart girls are on your side, you know you are winning. Check out Token Libertarian Girl's Youtube channel

You will not regret it.

In my youth, we libbos used to go to P.J. O'Rourke for American libbo laughs. Now that mantle - of American, deceptively profound, politically right on the money laughs - has passed on to IMAO man Frank J. Fleming, whose book, Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything is coming out quite soon now.

Good recent Frank Jism:

Things often overwhelm and underwhelm, but seldom do things just whelm.

You see? It's funny (I think), but it also gets you thinking. Where did the word "overwhelm" come from, from which the word "underwhelm" has recently been derived (because as soon as you say "underwhelm" everyone immediately understands)? "Overwhelm" means that "whelm" must once upon a time have meant something too. But what? Is it an upper class mispwonouncing of "realm"? Does "whelm" have a future, as a word? I'm not trying to be funny (although that is one of the standard methods of actually being funny). I'd really like to know.

This is good too:

I support double standards. I expect better behavior out of conservatives than I do liberals.

And this:

You know how everyone has their idea of what a fair tax plan is? Well, I have now unveiled the "Frank J. Fleming Super Double Extra Fair Tax Plan" at PJ Media and it is the fairest of them all. I mean, it’s crazy fair. You’ll recoil in horror and scream, “No! Too fair!” That’s how fair it is.

I need something to end this with, now. I know. Here's my funny yet deceptively profound and right on the money tax plan: The Top Rate of Income Tax Should Be Cut To Zero. If FJ's tax plan is too fair for you, that might be just right.

Earlier this evening I attended a libertarian get-together in the upstairs room of a pub (the Rose and Crown in Colombo Street, London SE1), organised by Libertarian Home, and in particular by leading LH-er Simon Gibbs.

If what you would like would be a convivial evening in a London pub where, if you are not a libertarian you are going to have to explain yourself, whereas if you are you aren't (unless you feel like it), then why not get in touch with Simon Gibbs and invite yourself along to the next one of these things. If my experience this evening was anything to go by, you will be made very welcome.

Here is a photo I took of the other end of the table from where I was:

And here's another snap from the same spot, moments later, after I'd asked if I could interrupt everything, and "take some photos":

I am surprised what good photos these are, technically, given the light. If you are surprised what bad photos they are, technically, then clearly you don't know my photos.

These photos do not include anything like everyone who was present. They are accurate in suggesting that the gathering was youngish (certainly compared to me), and bright, but inaccurate in suggesting that this was an all male affair. It's just that the ladies present were seated nearer to me, and my lens is not wide-angle enough to have included them.

In particular, missing from that snap are two of the people who, it so happened, I spent a bit of time conversing with. For the first time ever, I got to meet Trooper Thompson in the flesh, whose blog I have long had a liking for. And, I also got to meet "Misanthrope Girl", whose blog I have not properly noticed until now. Trooper Thompson got chased out of the Samizdata commentariat for saying something rude about a gun (I think that was it), approximately a decade ago, which, having finally met the guy, I now think is a shame. Misanthrope Girl would also fit in here very well.

I had to leave earlier than I would have liked, but I am still very glad I went. I heard about this gathering by attending the Liberty League Conference, where Andy Janes (mentioned here recently already because of that Zimbabwean bank note), who also helps organise these evenings, suggested I might like to attend the next one. Perhaps, I thought to myself, and perhaps not. But then Andy gave me a physical copy of the leaflet that he had been handing out at the Occupy London occupations. These guys, I thought, maybe have something about them. (See also this open letter to the London occupiers.) Maybe they do. We shall see.

This evening I attended the E. G. West Memorial Lecture, which was delivered by James Tooley, one of my favourite public intellectuals. The audience was large, and our response was attentive and at the end, enthusiastic.

Tooley started by describing the discoveries of E. G. West concerning the huge contribution to education in nineteenth century Britain made by the private sector, which had pretty much licked the problem of mass literacy and mass numeracy, only for the state then to come crashing in, crowding out the private sector and stealing all of the credit for what the private sector had accomplished.

Tooley then described how he has personally been finding the exact same story unfolding in the Third World right now. There too, the private sector is running state education ragged.

In the course of his lecture, Tooley presented this complete and comprehensive list of exactly what the state should be contributing to the funding, regulation and provision of education:

As often happens with my photos, people who care about such things will quibble about technical adequacy and artistic impression. But, I trust you get Tooley's message.

I realised while listening to Tooley talk that I have been somewhat losing track of what he's been up to lately. So when I got home, I ordered a copy of his book, The Beautiful Tree, which he mentioned in the course of his lecture, and in which I hope to learn many more of the details of what he's been finding out about one of the great success stories of the world now.

During the Q&A after the lecture, Tooley was asked what Britain's politicians should be doing about it all. What reforms ought they to be trying to contrive? Tooley said he expected very little from our politicians, predicting instead that if changes along the lines he would like do come, it will be because of foreign educational enterprises opening branches here, offering a cheap and effective alternative to state education at very little extra cost. That, said Tooley, will be when the good educational stuff starts happening in Britain, again, if it ever does.

LATER: A few more pictures here.

I've said it here before and I am sure I will say it here again. Steve Baker MP is a remarkable man.

Last week, Steve Baker published, in a new Spectator venture, this list of books that he admires, with very brief notes saying why. The list contains several books by authors of the sort that no normal MP would admit to admiring, whatever he might privately claim. Nozick, Jesus Huerta de Soto, Schlichter (Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse being Baker's answer to the question: "What book best describes now?"), Nigel Ashford (an excellent populariser and clarifier of libertarian ideas), Bastiat, von Mises (the books of those two authors, along with the King James Bible, being the ones that Baker would snatch from a British library fire). Amazing.

I thought I would die before I witnessed a British Member of Parliament publishing a list of books like that, as opposed to merely chatting about such things between ourselves, dear boy. Baker is out and proud about it. He knows what are the big ideas that matter the most just now, and he doesn't care who knows that he knows.

Community and collectivism are opposites.

- Eric S. Raymond (via David Thompson)

Time was when Ford was the model for corporatism and seen as a template for the State.

But that was before we got to a situation where Communist China's state media castigates the US federal government for wasting money on welfare programs and over-borrowing.

I like the fact that Ford let Chris choose his own words to explain why he wouldn't buy a government bail-out car. Very Post-Fordist.

Or should we deal with it at all?

Sean Duffy targeted the relatives of dead teenagers with defaced pictures of the teenagers and offensive messages. His victims were unknown to him. He has been jailed for 18 weeks.

What is the opinion of Samizdata readers on whether he should have been jailed, and if not, whether there are any legitimate means of stopping him? (I trust it is already the opinion of Samizdata readers that he is a foul excuse for a human being.) If he had sent personal emails to the relatives, then I think most of us could, with a sigh of relief, invoke concepts of private property and harassment. Actually, having just written that I have become unsure about it. Moot point, anyway; as far as I can see he either posted his offensive messages on Facebook pages open to all or made his own websites. Some of his messages were also libelous - so much so that I cannot understand why he has not been prosecuted for libel - but others were not, despite their malice. It is the latter category that present the difficulty for believers in free speech.

Or perhaps all I have done is demonstrate that I am not such a strong believer in free speech as I thought.

Another possible get-out clause is that the web hosts, or Facebook, or the Internet Service Providers should 'do something'. I am almost fanatically opposed to making them do something, but I agree they should. But what if they won't, or can't, or can't quickly enough?

Another line of thought: there has long been a catch all in English law of "conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace". That could work, but I do not like the way it makes the test whether the victim of outrageous speech is likely to turn violent. It puts the most peaceable or timid victims at a disadvantage.

Similar questions arise regarding the calculated offensiveness of the extended family cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. One solution was an emergency law:

In January 2011, Westboro announced that they would picket the funeral of Christina Green, a 9-year-old victim of the 2011 Tucson shooting. In response, the Arizona legislature passed an emergency bill to ban protests within 300 feet of a funeral service, and Tucson residents made plans to shield the funeral from protesters.

The law seems to have done the job it was intended for ... but it and similar laws remain on the books setting a dangerous precedent.

The common factor that takes Duffy and the Phelps family beyond the level of politically offensive speech (such as the Muslim provocateurs who disrupted the commemorative silence in honour of the victims of 9-11 held in London on Sunday) is the targeting of individuals.

In a typically overheated article at the Lew Rockwell website, is this extraordinary paragraph by Anthony Gregory:

"More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector – not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America’s past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best."

This is a mixture of half truths and downright nonsense. (The "war machine" a "saviour of blacks"? WTF?). Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that "affirmative action" - which is euphemism for racial discrimination - is wrong and violates equality before the law. It is also true that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation have encroached on private property rights. But Gregory surely knows that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation addressed such indefensible acts as preventing black people - who were taxpayers - from gaining equal access to the public facilities they had paid for, as well as ensuring equal treatment for voter registration requirements, and so on. And given the statist abomination of the Jim Crow laws (enacted during the Progressive era), it is surely legitimate even for someone like Mr Gregory and his Rockwellian chums to accept that after such state-enforced bigotry was removed, it was a matter of natural justice to ensure that black people were put on an equal footing with whites in terms of access to public services that they had paid for.

It is, of course true in strictly narrow terms that a libertarian defence of the right to life and property does not say anything about how one should use, say, such property, nor should it. But life is so much more than simply focusing on such "negative liberties"; my conception of libertarianism is that it embraces social, not just narrowly legal or economic, freedoms. In my view, a free society is one that encourages "experiments in living", in encouraging, or at least not scorning, the eccentric, the different, etc, with the key proviso that such experimenters bear the consequences of their actions. And I get a strong sense from Mr Gregory that he hasn't much time for such things, for all his raving about how the US has been a "fascist" country. The problem is that by using that term to describe something like Civil Rights legislation, it leaves our vocabulary looking a bit inadequate when describing, say, Mussolini's Italy.

On a slightly tangential point, here is Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, defending his recent book - co-authored with Nick Gillespie - from those "paleo-libertarians" over at the Lew Rockwell outfit. What a rum lot they are.

One of my little hobbies is spotting when words change their meaning, often to the disgust of (over?) zealous grammarians.

"Refute" now seems merely to mean disagreeing, rather than disagreeing successfully and persuasively, which is what refuting an argument definitely used to mean.

"Sophisticated" has, for many years now, meant admirably and subtly complicated. But in Shakespeare's King Lear, Lear himself uses the word sophisticated (here 1899-1900) to mean complicated in a bad way, as in over-complicated, affected, over-elaborate, over-socialised.

"Disinterested" now merely means "not interested", in many mouths.

A fellow Samizdatista whose hospitality I enjoyed this afternoon reminded me that the words "hack" and "hacker" have also been on a bit of a journey, following the quite recent invention of the word to mean the various things it means now (as opposed to just hacking meat from a bone or some such thing). Hacking used to mean merely acquiring an understanding of a complicated, often computerised of course, system. It meant sussing it out, working it out. It still does, among the people who still use the word this way. But those of us not familiar with the hacker fraternity typically regard hacking as computerised breaking and entering, and thieving, of information. Hacking, to us non-illuminati, means the same as hacking into. What started out as a morally neutral, even admiring, word has taken on a meaning that automatically includes wickedness.

Earlier today, while wallowing in England's cricketing success yesterday against India, I think I may have spotted another of these walkabout words, here, although in this particular case I hope not, because this is a word I would personally like to stay put:

England demolished India at a delirious Edgbaston to usurp the tourists at the top of the world Test rankings.

"Usurp", to me, says that there was something illegal or improper about England's arrival at the number one test match cricket spot. The implication, to me, is that maybe an English cricket delegation - perhaps those two Andrews again - somehow pressurised the custodians of the ranking system into declaring England the top team despite England not actually having enough points, or whatever it is you must have the most of to be the top team for real. But nobody - not the writer of the above sentence, Sam Sheringham, nor anybody else - is suggesting this. Not on purpose anyway. Also, you usurp a title or a throne, not the person who previously held it.

Is Sheringham perhaps wanting to imply (infer?) that, given their lofty status in the world of cricket - because of them having by far the most cricket fans and, until now, a stellar batting line-up, still a stellar line-up if you go by the mere names and their test match achievements in the past - India have some sort of divine right to be the top team? Well, some vague thought along these lines may be why the word occurred to him, and why his editors didn't change it. But what Sheringham is really reporting is that India used to be the top team, but now England have toppled them, fair and square. "Supplant" or "replace" would have been better words for his purpose. My video recorder tells me that earlier this evening Mark Nicholas, finishing up a highlights show of the series so far, on Channel 5 TV, used the word "toppled".

Personally, I like the fluidity of language. I like how we can all invent new words, which immediately get across something otherwise hard to explain. I like "walkabout" for example, even if nobody outside of Australia knew of this word two centuries ago (although perhaps they did, I don't know). And I regard the loss of good words as the price that must be paid for the widespread right that we Anglos all enjoy to make up new words, or acquire new words from each other. The common point of both word destruction and word creation being that together, we do it, rather than being told what's what, verbally, by some damn committee of self-important academics in London.

I love that "television" is a mixture of Latin and Greek, and that - or so the story goes - an irate newspaper correspondent once argued that because of this linguistic abomination, the thing itself would never work. I had no idea, until I found my way to this collection today, that there are so many such Latin/Greek hybrid words in common English use.

I also enjoy, from time to time, concocting sentences without proper verbs in them. What's that you say? Not allowed? Hard cheese.

I also enjoy turning nouns into adjectives, as English allows as a matter of routine.

Even so, all that being said, I would be sorry to see the word "usurp" ceasing to mean, well: usurp. It's a good word and a useful word, and a word with a significant history. I think we should keep it meaning what it has meant for centuries. If we do not, a lot of history will have to be laboriously rewritten.

"Usurp" should not, that is to say, be usurped.

August the 4th 1789...

The day when the serfs (the few serfs there actually were in France) were freed and the day that all the old taxes and feudal restrictions were abolished.

Yes I know that what went before this day was evil and what came after this day was evil - but the day itself was good.

The one good day of the French Revolution.

Although (before the pedants start to bash me) I know the repeals did not fit into exactly this 24 hour period.

But the 4th of August has become known for the pro liberty moves.

Better (a thousand times better) an athiest who believes in objective truth than a “religious” person who does not.

- our very own Paul Marks

Reading about the arrest of what appears to have been an extremist planning an attack on Ft Hood, Texas, I was struck by the contrast with the Oslo attack last weekend.

Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, was arrested Wednesday after making a purchase at Guns Galore in Killeen, Texas, the same ammunition store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapons he allegedly used to gun down 13 people and wound 32 others on Nov. 5, 2009.

The point being that a legal gun shop owner is more likely to call the police than a black market arms supplier would. Now if we could only get all the gun rights people in America to realise the advantages of legal outlets for drugs as well...

“I close this sermon with these words: Avoid anger, recrimination, and personal attack. Those with whom you are angry are probably (taken by and large) at least as filled with or as empty of virtue as you. Moreover, they are the very ones you might wish later to welcome as your allies. Avoid panic and despair; be of good cheer. If you’re working in freedom’s vineyard to the best of your ability, the rest is in the hands of a higher authority anyway. If you can see no humor in what’s going on (and even at times in your own behavior) you’ll soon lose that sense of balance so important to effective and reasoned thought and action. Finally, take comfort in the thought that the cause of freedom can never be lost, precisely because it can never be won. Given man’s nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defence during that short period of time when we were potentially a part of that struggle.”

- Can Capitalism Survive? Benjamin A. Rogge, page 300. Originally published in 1979 and republished by that splendid organisation, Liberty Fund.

Bohemia has been banned.

- David Hockney denounces the smoking ban.

I am not entirely happy about an article, which is fine as far as it goes in defending libertarians from the idea that we are all callous brutes who would rather walk by the other side of the road, so to speak. I agree that that is wrong. Of course, there are one or two so-called libertarians who might not give a damn about anyone else but themselves, and they are happily avoided. In my experience, however, the vast majority of libertarians are not just right-thinking, they are fine individuals: generous, creative and benevolent to their fellows. But this is a rationally selfish thing. Think about it: if you believe freedom is a good thing because of the wealth and opportunities that it leads to, you will realise pretty fast that it is inconsistent to want freedom for yourself but not for anyone else. Not just inconsistent, but dumb.

However, for all that the article does make that sort of point, citing fine groups such as the Institute for Justice, the article is somewhat spoiled by this rather silly paragraph:

"There are a lot of libertarians working on issues that could be construed as self-interested - lowering taxes is the obvious example. There are even some hard core Ayn Rand sycophants who embrace little more than themselves. Find that repugnant? Have at 'em! But you're just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves. Often they do so more consistently than some of the liberals who sneer at them."

He's making a fairly basic mistake here. The pursuit of rational, long term self interest - the words "rational" and "long-term" are crucial - is totally congruent with spending time and money to support the genuine freedoms of others. After all, as any Rand "sycophant" would argue, if we do not defend freedoms with a bit of effort, and go into bat to defend causes that are important, even if they are unpopular, or appear weird, then they will find themselves in a very lonely place if their own freedoms are attacked. A genuinely selfish person, who holds his own life and flourishing as his ultimate value and cultivates the virtues to achieve it fully (reason, independence, honesty, pride, productiveness, justice and integrity), will want to see freedom expand. The cost of spending a bit of time lobbying, arguing and campaigning is, for such a person, outweighed by the long term benefits. The individual benefits if the total sum of liberty is increased, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. For the Rand "sycophant", the real stupidity would be to ignore the wider world and its problems. By the same token, libertarians understand the Law of Unintended Consequences: a lot of supposedly "altruistic" government interventions, for example (I use the word altruist in the usual, not Randian sense) make many real or imaginary problems far worse (examples: the War on Drugs, Prohibition, state education, etc).

One example of "selfish activism" might illustrate the point. For a long time I have been going along to events hosted by FOREST, the UK-based pressure group that defends the rights of people to smoke in privately owned places such as pubs. I don't smoke, in fact I dislike the stink of tobacco and ask people not to spark up in my apartment. But I defend the libertarian line on smoking because I realise that if such freedoms get eroded without protest, then things I want to do could be banned next. For similar reasons, I'll defend the right of people to publish hateful remarks (so long as they don't demand I have to republish them), or practice non-conventional lifestyles I might abhor (so long it is consensual), and so on. For me, the long-term payoff - more freedom - is the point. I don't see campaigning for justice or freedom as intrinsically good. It is much more important than that - it benefits me.

Another way of putting it is that life is not a zero-sum game. I obviously cannot spend all my time trying to defend freedoms or other issues; I have my own business and personal life and various interests to pursue. (My golf swing needs a lot of attention). But if I can, by my advocacy of hopefully good ideas and opposition to bad ones, make the world a marginally better place for myself and others, then I cannot think of a more truly selfish objective than that. In other words, I am not a classical liberal because it is an unchosen duty. I enjoy it and see the benefits.

And let's not forget, another reason why libertarians defend the causes they do is that, despite the odd glitch, we get to meet some excellent people and make good friends. Some of my greatest mates are those I have encountered through such networks.

“The serf first obtained chattels and then land in property; on them he won his first power, and that meant his first liberty – meaning thereby his personal liberty. His title to these things, that is, his right to appropriate them to his own exclusive use and enjoyment, and to be sustained by the power of the state in so doing, was his first step in civil liberty. It was by this movement that he ceased to be a serf. This movement has produced the great middle class of modern times; and the elements in it have been property, science and liberty. The first and chief of these, however, is property; there is no liberty without property, because there is nothing else without property on this earth.”

- The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner, “On Liberty, Society and Politics”, (Edited by Robert C. Bannister), page 247.

Koran burnings predictably lead to murders.

So what. Free speech kills, we knew that. The lack of it kills more. Blame the murders on the murderers.

It should be allowed, but is it, or can it be, right to burn the Koran? In general I have contempt for those who deliberately insult what another holds dear. The fact that I uphold the right to say anything should strengthen, not weaken, my willingness to judge what is said. I despise Pastor Jones. I despise the members of Al-Muhajiroun whose insults to dead soldiers gave birth to the English Defence League.

However now that Jones has burned his Koran, and it has led to murders by Muslim fanatics as he must have known it would, I now see an argument that further murders will be made less likely by further burnings. If they keep happening it will have a desensitising effect.

Yet I still think burning someone's holy symbol is a contemptible act. To hurt a group (and hurt feelings are a form of hurt) because some of its members are bad people is just another instance of the collectivist error. I would not do it. I suppose what I am saying is that given that it will happen somewhere in the world fairly regularly, this fact should be publicised. Eventually the mobs will get tired of assembling yet again.

There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom - no longer.

Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.

I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.

A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you "liberals". But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side's definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky's haste to explain Loughner's murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan's murders here.

Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, "What is government if words have no meaning?" At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.

A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of "treatment" (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient's will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.

And yet - there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. "He should have been locked up before this" does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.

Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.

Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.

Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish's probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.

That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?

Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you're a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren't we? What's this - you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid... oh, you are a Muslim. That's OK, then.

I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple's dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.

Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.

But can we dispense with the State altogether?

Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?

Instapundit quotes an emailer (Ed Stephens), on the subject of the TSA and its intrusive gropings at airports:

Remember how not long ago the President was so upset about the possibility of people being stopped and asked for “their papers” while going to get ice cream? It was the height of living in a police state. Yet we’ve not heard a peep out of him while TSA goons grope the general public (including nuns and little kids) on the way to grandma’s house.

If we are expected to put up with this, asking to see “your papers” suddenly seems a less onerous request.

Which was perhaps always the idea? Getting libertarians to beg to have to show only their papers. How perfectly statist is that?

This is how you get what you want in this world, whether you are trying to expand the powers of the state or to chip away at them. Demand something that is, to your enemies, totally outrageous. Then, with a great show of reluctance, settle for something only moderately outrageous. Repeat indefinitely. Sadly, for the time being, the expanders of the state are more numerous and more powerful than us chippers-away.

The secret of chipping away successfully is to continue to discuss the dynamiting of the whole damn mountain. How might that be contrived? How nice would that be? Then settle for dynamiting only half of it ...

Remember Paul Chambers?

Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction

The man convicted of "menace" for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the "foolish prank", had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers's appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

....

As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.

This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.

Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown 'stoning' tweet

Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.

...

The message – now apparently deleted – said: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really."

...

Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: "It's really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It's really scared us."

You've brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.

"You just don't do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It's incitement. I'm going to the police – I want them to know that a law's been broken."

She added that she regarded Compton's remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.

"If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I'd be arrested immediately. I don't think the nasty Tories went away."

Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness - that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.

Many pixels have given their life on this site in discussions about how supporters of constitutionally limited government must 'compromise' to achieve their goals. Such people urging compromise are usually 'sensible conservatives' but see us wild eyed 'libertarian' types as potentially useful 'fellow travellers' if only we would learn to be more pragmatic.

And my view is usually to find out if the person telling me to compromise supported Bush or McCain, if American or Cameron if a Brit. And if they did, I try to discover if they are having serious buyers remorse... and if not, I tag them not as a 'fellow traveller' but as a political enemy to be opposed at every level.

But as in the USA there is at least a viable opposition movement to the Leviathan State whereas in the UK the now out-of-office Demonic Party and the ruling Stupid Party/Stupider Party coalition agree on all the Important Roles of the State, I will confine my remarks to America-centric ones because the vast majority of folks in the UK seem to rather enjoy the whole 'circling the drain' sensation and after all, the NHS is 'the envy of the world'.

It seems clear that the best chance for 'small staters' (which means small-L libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives) in America is taking over the Republican Party and that is exactly what the Tea Party is all about.

However the self identified libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives within the Republican Party over the last 15 years have not been the solution to anything, indeed they have been the root of the problem...

...why?

Because in thinking that they must compromise on even the fundamental core principle of constitutionally limited government, large numbers of ostensibly pro-liberty people have voted for and abetted Big State Republicans like George "I started the bailout" Bush and John "I support the bailout" McCain. If you can 'compromise' to that extent, you are either lying about being in favour of limited government or you have no conception of what the word 'limited' means. 'Limited' does not mean "vast-but-growing-less-than-the-other-guy".

It is the very fact so many people who want a smaller state refused to ever say "THIS IS A DEAL BREAKER"... and really mean it... but rather kept endlessly holding their nose and voting for The Lesser Evil that made it possible for the state to keep growing remorselessly under Republican governments.

But the Cold War in over, we won, so Reagan's excuse no longer applies.

I have nothing against compromise with fellow travellers and usually see little value in obsessive purity tests, but the key here is compromise with fellow travellers (such as libertarians compromising with conservatives and visa versa), but what has happened over and over and over again is endless 'compromise' with people whose objectives are in fact antithetical.

So in short, what oh so many 'small staters' have been calling 'compromise' when they hold their nose and vote for a Big State politician just because he is running as a Republican, is not "compromise" at all... it is surrender.

What possible reason did the likes of Bush or McCain have to accommodate the views of 'small staters' when they knew they would vote for them regardless of how much they grew the state? No reason at all. None.

You want to know the problem? Look in the mirror and the problem will look back at you. That was the realisation that spawned the Tea Party and I was calling for that before the Tea Party even existed.

Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism – and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones – is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily (approve) of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.

- James Delingpole, with his obvious typo corrected.

Great essay by Sean Gabb on the UK government and supposed plans to reduce public spending. The article contains a lovely line in relation to Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister.

Along with Sean and others, I will be at the two-day Libertarian Alliance annual conference tomorrow, held at that ancestral seat of 19th Century liberal politics, the National Liberal Club.

More up-to-the-second analysis from the fourth estate:

Dennis, a wealthy businessman and investor who says he's been a Republican for more than 25 years, has a strong libertarian streak and supported Rep. Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential race. But ask him how he would have voted on the most important bills that came before the House in the last two years and you'll get a pretty Republican answer. Obamacare? He would have voted against it. Stimulus? Against. Auto bailouts? Against. Cap and trade? Against. Wall Street reform? Against. He also favors making all the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Byron York apparently does not understand Libertarianism.

(H/t: Drudge)

Errrr... I have news for you, Cato Institute... Barack Obama was lying.

He never had the slightest intention of going about eliminating Federal government schemes or aspects of such schemes, in the hopes of reducing the overall burden of government.

On the contrary his entire political life has been spent trying to increase the size and scope of government - and to do so in the most corrupt ways possible. Only someone who knew nothing about Barack Obama's time in politics would be surprised by the hundreds of pages of detailed corrupt wasteful schemes in the "Stimulus" Act, and in the Obama Care Act - and in every other Act he has had passed (the details of which written by such old comrades of his as Jeff Jones - a man who repents of his Communist terrorism as much as Bill Ayers does, i.e. not at all).

Let us say I am wrong - and that Barack Obama is not trying to destroy America and the West in general on purpose (as part of the Cloward and Piven doctrines of spend America to the destruction of "capitalism" that he was taught at all those Marxist conferences he went to whilst a post grad at Columbia)...

...Even if the question of motivation is put on one side, the facts of his record both in the Chicago Machine, and at State level, and then in the United States Senate, where he managed to be even more corrupt and wild spending than Christopher Dodd (one of the two main supporters of the ultra vile "Financial Reform Act" that Obama has just had passed - the other being a creature called Barney Frank), something that might be thought to be pretty much impossible... well, it seems pretty damn obvious what to expect from President Obama.

"But they always knew that Paul".

No, "with all due respect" the Cato Institute (like Reason magazine) contains some people, not all - but some, who really believed Barack Obama in 2008 - people who never bothered to do the slightest research into the record of Barack Obama - and were abusive (very abusive) to anyone who tried to point out their errors.

"You are supposed to be a Christian Paul - Christians forgive".

Forgiveness comes after repentance.

"Left libertarianism" (i.e. the gross denial of objective reality) has not gone away - as some recent writings show.

Christian I may be - Saint I am not.

Until the good people at the Cato Institute drive out the bad, I will not be putting any trust in them.

While you have people on your staff who continue to have fantasies about Comrade Barack (and the good intentions of the MSM - and the nobility of academia and...) and regard (for example) Tea Party people as fit only for hatred and sneering contempt - then you are not to be trusted.

"But we are atheists" - so what?

People turn up to Tea Party events with Ayn Rand banners (not as gate crashers - but as respected parts of such events) - people go on to the Glenn Beck show and deny the existence of God.

And such people are treated with the respect that the smug "libertarian left" never shows to anyone - bar the left itself (and I do not mean the libertarian left).

This is not a question of atheists versus religious people - it is a question of decent people, versus people who were up to their necks with the Obama crowd (with the MSM, and academia - and the rest).

Until such people wash themselves clean (till they really repent - and that need NOT be a religious thing) then they are active danger to liberty.

Watching the re-make of Battlestar Galactica I came across a thought-experiment in practical ethics that seems to me far more interesting than the rather trite runaway-train examples I knew from university ethics classes.

The situation for the thought-experiment is this:

The last remnants of the human race are fleeing their robotic exterminators. Owing to what the (human) military commander perceives as a poor tactical decision, the lawfully-elected civilian President has been incarcerated and martial law has been declared. With the support of civilian and enlisted sympathisers, the President has escaped immediate custody and is on the point of disappearing into hiding amongst the populace, supposedly accompanied by her immediate staff and a few abettors amongst the military.

Up until this point, by the nature of television drama, the focus has been on the President herself and senior military officers, both sympathetic and antagonistic. At the last moment, however, it is made clear that even flunkies and acting extras have an independent moral choice, when the President's principal aide unexpectedly reveals his personal moral dilemma.

"Madam President. I understand what you're trying to do...but, it's going to divide the fleet. At the very best it's going to create an insurgency against [the military commander]; at the worst, civil war. Taking part in that is a line that I will not cross."

This strikes me as troubling, but far from unrealistic. I am genuinely unsure what is the morally correct action here.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let us accept without question the idea that our protagonist fully believes the President is the rightful and best leader for the human race. Let us assume he is convinced that the best outcome, both morally and practically, would be for the military dictator to quietly step aside and reinstate the President. Let us also assume he genuinely believes that that will not happen, and that internal opposition will materially reduce the prospects of survival for the remainder of the human race.

If we left it at that, most people would agree that he had no choice but to submit to the military in the interests of the survival of our species.

However, this character is clearly thoughtful and reasonable, so let us add in another opportunity for dilemma. Let us suppose, as is strongly hinted at, albeit not explicitly stated in this drama, that although he genuinely believes all the above, he recognises the possibility that he might be wrong.

This creates a genuinely realistic and sophisticated moral dilemma. His best outcome would be for the President's insurrection to be swiftly and painlessly successful. The worst outcome would be a protracted civil war.

Should he give precedence to his admittedly fallible assessment of the President's chances, betray her, side with the military dictator he considers illegitimate, in order to swiftly put down the President's opposition, in the hope of avoiding the total destruction of humanity at the cost of casting humanity into autarky for the foreseeable future?

Or in the alternative, would it be better to be true to his convictions and back the President, in the hope of preserving a free society, even though he believed that in doing so he was placing the survival of our species at greater risk, but recognised that he might be in error in this assessment? In short, the question is not the commonly poses but simplistic one of "should the moral or the pragmatic choice prevail?" but its more sophisticated child: "Given uncertainty about the future, should we cleave to moral certainty despite grave fears of the likely outcome, or betray our preferences for fear of utter calamity?"

To me, these ten seconds in Battlestar Galactica seem far more interesting than almost anything in my undergraduate ethics course. But if this seems too obscure, or too adolescent, treat this posting instead simply as a comment that there is more serious ethical debate in ten seconds of a popular commercial sci-fi drama than in a month of 'Newsnight' interviews.

I've known about the Kochs, and about their legendary wealth and about their massive support with some of it for the US libertarian movement, ever since I first became a part of the London libertarian scene in the late 1970s. (Although, I'm still not sure how they are pronounced. Cock? Coke? Kotch? (Coach?)) So the idea that their support for libertarianism is now or ever was some kind of covert operation, rather than just rich people spending their own money trying to do and spread goodness as they saw it, is, to me, utterly ridiculous. One of the Kochs even ran for vice-President, I am reminded here. Was that secret too?

Well, I guess it sort of was. What happens is that you spend two or three decades generally stamping and shouting and raising all kinds of heaven and hell, saying that every bit of sex and drugs and rock and roll and free marketeering that you can think of should be legalised, and they ignore you. Finally you start making some rather big waves, in some way that doesn't involve them helping in any way, even by them deigning to denounce you, and they then call you "covert". It wasn't even that they couldn't get you on the phone despite trying, twice. No. You couldn't get them on the phone, ever.

Personally I think it's a very good sign that they are now attacking libertarianism, pro-capitalism etc., by pointing out that there are these rich capitalists who are in favour of it. This tells me that they feel they are running out of actual arguments. It also tells me that they don't think that them drawing attention to the libertarian movement, by banging on about how these evil capitalists support it like this, can draw much more attention to this movement than we are now contriving for ourselves. In short, we are now up and running as a force in the real world beyond that of mere ideological intercourse among consenting ideologists, and they know it.

...cos they mix it up with lies to make it all taste good!!!

Frequent samizdata commenter 'Jaded Libertarian' wants to ask a question:

After a number of years dwelling on the matter I think I have just about got what I personally believe straight. The guide I have used to get there is what I believe to be both moral and just. I am not particularly well read in this area, but have thought myself to a fairly classical liberalism - nothing that has not been said before. No man has the right to transgress another's liberty unless he is causing physical harm to another's person or property - that kind of thing. I now know what I believe and that is great. I never tread on another person's autonomy if I can help it. So how do I get the rest of society to extend me the same courtesy?

Here's where I have run up against a wall.

To effect political change that would enshrine the rights of the individual would require imposing this system on a great many people who do not want increased personal autonomy - and what is more they do not want me to have it either. It scares them. Much as I disagree with them, it is not for me to seek to impose upon them a life they do not want, even if they do not extend me the same courtesy. To do so would be most illiberal.

The only way in which some good could come of such thinking would be if someone was willing to degenerate the rights of naysayers in order to enshrine the rights of everyone else. This seems to have been what (partially) happened in the USA, and many still reap the benefits. But it would be unwise to try and repeat the process. First of all it seems morally dubious at best. Secondly, history has shown us that political revolutions almost always result in dictatorships and tyranny. America was an aberration never to be repeated.

My own thinking thus far is that knowing what I believe and how I will act is, for now, enough. Society is after all made up of individuals. If by some bizarre chance every single person resolved to respect one another's liberty, we would find ourselves in utopia overnight. Of course that is not going to happen, but then everyone else's motivations are none of my business and it is not for me to criticise.

I try to live by the words of Burns:

Then let your schemes alone, Adore the rising sun, And leave a man undone. To his fate

Sadly although it eases my own heart, it does not get me away from the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. I am compelled to live under collectivist tyranny, something which I would never wish upon another.

How can libertarianism ever be anything more than a nice intellectual exercise to put yourself through if it cannot be acted upon by its very nature?

The following was posted as a Samizdata comment by the pseudonymous 'Jaded Libertarian', but it deserved to be an article in my not so humble opinion, and so...

I read in the paper today that after subjecting 500,000 people to mandatory face to face interviews, the government denied passports to eight for fraud.

This is the thing that most do not get. The big evil does not justify, never justifies, the small good. Causing inconvenience, misery and transgressing the privacy of half a million people in order to catch eight fraudsters is absurd.

And our society is full of such absurdities. Millions of adults are denied the "gift of giving" into their children's lives by "child protection" policies. There is this assumption that any adult watching children swim is potentially sexually aroused, for example.

I would contend that the people who make such laws have dirty minds. I find it nobler and better to live life as though perverted degenerates do not even exist, for they are thankfully rare. And on the rare occasions where monsters abuse society's trust, why, we should quickly and simply hang them in the town square and then return to life as before.

This is the model for transgressing only the liberties of the lawless, and not those of society at large. If you have to tread on the freedoms of innocent people to catch the lawless you're doing it wrong.

"If it stops one fraudster, if it saves one life and if it protects one child it will all be worth it" the statists cry. These thoughts are supposed to make us feel warm inside as we queue to be inspected by the passports office, as security cameras follow us down the street and as police demand to know what we are doing for no particular reason. We are to lay our personal freedom on the alter of society in the name of the common good, and feel heartened by our sacrifice. As bizarre as it may sound, there are "true believers" in this cult - I see them all the time.

Down that road lies 24 hour policing of the entire population, and lives that are not worth living for all but the party elite. Basically 1984 made real.

And it all began when we passed that first law that mildly inconvenienced many in order to wheedle out the wicked few...

(((:~(>



This is my entry to "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". It is scarcely original, and the less original the better, I guess.

I take no pleasure from violating other people's taboos. It is not polite and I wish to be polite. In ordinary circumstances if I want to do something that will annoy others I am willing to put up with moderate inconvenience in order to do it out of their sight. These are not ordinary circumstances. People are being threatened, harassed and sometimes murdered by fanatical Muslims for exercising free speech. The media and academia, fearless defenders of free speech so long as there was nothing to fear, have by and large caved in. So maybe it is time for ordinary people to step up. Lots of them. Spread the risk.

Incidentally, it was good of the Pakistani authorities to help so much with the publicity.

Incoming from Michael Jennings, alerting me to this:

UK survey calls iPhone 'more important than space travel'

The headline could equally well have said: UK survey calls Sky+ 'more important than Post-it Notes', but the iPhone and space travel were what they zeroed in on. Fair enough.

I agree about the relative triviality of space travel, except insofar as it makes things like iPhones work better. I mean, you couldn't have those maps on your iPhone telling you where you are and where you're going were it not for GPS, as in S for Satellite, now could you? So, space rockets of some sort are needed for iPhones. But space travel? How significant is that? The bigger point, made by all those surveyees but then contested by the headline writer, is that space travel is now rather oversold, compared to how things are - insofar as they are - hurtling forwards here on Earth. Which, I think, it is.

The people who are for space travel keep going on about how Man Needs to Explore the Universe, and no doubt Man does. But is Man anywhere near ready to make a serious go of that yet? The trouble is that there is so little out there, in the immediate vicinity, accessible to actual men, easily and cheaply, now.

I suspect that the problem is that people, especially political people when composing political speeches, automatically assume an equivalance between the expansion of Europe circa 1500, and the expansion of Earth circa now. But the rest of the world in 1500 was full of stuff, much of it really very near to Europe, and much of it right next to Europe. There was continuous positive reinforcement available to any explorer brave enough to give it a go and lucky enough to hit some kind of paydirt. Now? Communications satellites? Weapons? Tourism? Astronomy? All we can yet really do in space is make various very Earthly enterprises work that little bit better. Which is not a trivial thing, and I'm certainly not saying we should give up even on that. All hail Virgin Galactic! Go SpaceX. But for many decades, most of the important space action will be in geo-stationary orbit rather than anywhere beyond.

And as for that constant libertarian refrain you hear about how Earth is becoming a tyranny and we must all migrate to space, to rediscover freedom, etc. ... Please. People found freedom in America because there was this great big place to feed themselves with. America. Settlements in America were, pretty soon, potentially if not actually, self-supporting. Our technology has a long way to go before a colony on some god-forsaken wasteland like the Moon or Mars, without even breathable air, could ever be self supporting, in the event of Mission Control back on Earth getting shut down by something like an Earth war of some kind. Profitable, maybe, eventually. But able to stay alive without continuous contact with Earthly back-up of various kinds? That will take far longer. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any humans who set up camp on the Moon or Mars or wherever will be far more dependent upon the continuing and sustained goodwill of powerful people back on Earth than the average Earthling is. There is no America out there, or China, or Australia or Africa. Those early European pioneers found a world full of land and resources, to say nothing of semi-friendly aliens whom we Europeans could trade with. But now? Just a few little rocks and gas blobs bobbing about in a vast sea of utter emptiness, emptiness that is an order of magnitude emptier than our actual sea, which is a cornucopia by comparison. And apart from that, for decades, nothing seriously big that isn't literally light years away. It's an entirely different state of affairs to Europe in 1500.

I wrote all of the above with my own personal blog in mind, but now realise that Samizdata is the place for it, if only because of all the enlightening and perhaps contradictory comments that may become attached. And since this is liable to be picked to pieces by people most of whom are far more technologically savvy than I am, it behoves me to rephrase it all as a question. Which can basically be summarised as: Is that right? Am I missing something here?

Am I, for instance, getting too hung up on mere distance? Yes the Solar System is almost entirely empty. Yes, the Asteroid Belt is a hell of a way away. But, if you are willing to be patient, is it actually quite cheap to send rockets there? Does all that emptiness cancel itself out as a barrier to travel, because of it being so easy (and so much easier than our Earthly sea) to get across?

I actually would quite like to be told that I am wrong about this. In particular, I really really wish that there was somewhere else nearby where the Fight For Liberty blah blah could be restaged, but on better terms to how the same fight seems now to be going here on Earth. But I just , as of now, don't see that happening any time soon.

Sam Bowman, whom I mentioned in my previous posting below about the IEA, responded by emailing me further proof that he is taking his Cobden Centre duties seriously:

The Cobden Centre Education Network is a new network of students in the UK interested in libertarian and classical liberal economics, especially the Austrian school. Working with the Cobden Centre it aims to connect libertarian and classical liberal students across the UK and help them develop their interests and involvement in classical liberalism and libertarianism.

This summer, the Cobden Centre Education Network will be hosting a series of seminars studying Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, a seminal work in Austrian economics that lays the foundation for further study of the Austrian school. The seminars will take place twice a month at the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, and Cobden Centre board members and fellows will join us for some sessions. Electronic copies of all reading materials and a study guide will be provided.

As well as being a unique opportunity to develop a comprehensive knowledge of the Austrian school, this will give Education Network members a chance to meet some of Britain’s foremost libertarian and classical liberal thinkers.

If you are interested in joining the Cobden Centre Education Network, please email Sam (sam @ cobden centre (all one word) dot org - I trust that will deter at least some spammers - BM) with your name, contact email address, and university and course if you are currently in education. Please also state if you are available to attend events during the summer in London.

Outstanding. And good on the IEA for lending them the place to do this.

Badgering politicians is worth a go, because you can get lucky, and because even if they don't listen, someone else might, especially in an age when letters can double up as internet postings. But politicians will mostly just do their thing, which is fire fighting the fires on their desks within the limits set by public opinion, or by what they suppose to be public opinion, and within the limits that they all set amongst themselves. What matters is the long-term intellectual struggle, that is, the process of creating the limits within which politicians and other decision makers will operate in the future. The above enterprise is a fine example of how you go about doing that.

In the age of social media, blogs, emails and so on, it is tempting to suppose that personal contact is a bit superfluous. But I suspect that the most lasting impact of such novelties is creating and strengthening old fashioned face-to-face contacts, between people who might otherwise never have been introduced.

I wonder if there is an upper age limit.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is the mothership of the free market think tanks, certainly in Europe. Or, it was. Because now, the IEA's reputation is almost entirely based on the stir that it managed to make when it was presided over by the stellar duopoly that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Those two men ensured that the classical liberal intellectual tradition remained alive in Britain, and they brought it, and the developing tradition of Austrian school economics, to bear on the failed Keynesian consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, laying the intellectual foundations for the Thatcherite economic rescue act of the 1980s.

Harris and Seldon had always been very careful, first, to ground their activities in pro freedom scholarship. The intellectual war was what they cared about most. Seldon fought that war. Harris, although also a considerable warrior himself, concentrated on making sure that the war effort was paid for. Second, they were careful not to get too closely intertwined with the Conservative Party, to the exclusion of any others. They always kept their lines open to anyone who was willing to listen to what they had to say and to help them say it, of any party or of none.

However, when age inevitably caught up with Harris and Seldon, the IEA then chose a man called Graham Mather as its new boss, who proceeded to use the place as his personal campaign office to turn himself into a Conservative MEP, while declaring that "the intellectual arguments have been won". Mather was hurriedly dumped, and under John Blundell's leadership the IEA then did rather better, even if it never really lit up the landscape like it had in the old days. To switch metaphors from fireworks to aviation, under Mather, the IEA was crashing earthwards and was about to burn up completely. Under Blundell it glided near horizontally, not at all disastrously, but without any upward impetus that I could see. When I heard that the Institute of Economic Affairs had, however long ago it was, appointed as their new boss Mark Littlewood, whose previous job was as a media relations person for the LibDems, I reacted with indifference. I hardly, that is to say, reacted at all.

Mark Littlewood has clearly always understood what classical liberalism and libertarianism are all about, and has done as much of them as he could, given the day jobs he has had. He has always been a friendly and civilised presence, albeit rather too EUrophile for my liking, at the various Libertarian Alliance events I have seen him at over the years, at quite a few of which he has spoken. Nevertheless, I assumed that in hiring such a person, the IEA was merely going to throw a big chunk of its still impressive stash of money at a pointless media-based charm offensive, which would achieve nothing. Pick a nice chap, with lots of contacts in politics and in what they used to call Fleet Street, hope for the best and get nothing very much. After a few years, Littlewood would move on. In due course, the building would be sold and the IEA would move from Westminster to somewhere or to nowhere. Its few surviving supporters would become even more geriatric. Another member of the Political Class, more unscrupulous than Mark Littlewood and cut from the same cloth as Graham Mather, would move in and hoover up all the remaining money, and that would be that. Way of the world. Old order giving place to new. Such is life. Such is death.

I never really thought any of this through, apart from the Mather episode, when I became tangentially involved as a junior advocate for the team that ousted him. I merely realise, now, that the above sentiments about Littlewood were what I was thinking, insofar as I was thinking anything at all. The point being that as far as the IEA was concerned, and like many others, I had pretty much stopped thinking.

So it was that when I got invited to a Libertarian Alliance dinner about a fortnight ago, at which Mark Littlewood was to speak about how he was setting about his various IEA tasks, I did not, as they say, jump at the invitation. I merely, having nothing else fixed, said yes and went along, expecting little more than some nice food. But as soon as Mark Littlewood started talking, I realised that I had been seriously misjudging him.

He began by talking, not about the media, but about academia. The relationship between the IEA and academia must be reinvigorated, said Littlewood, as indeed it must. Freedom friendly academics must all be identified and made much of. Students, undergraduate and post-grad, ditto. It must be made easy for such people to meet and talk and network and learn, at the IEA itself, and everywhere, amongst themselves.

The thing is, it is useless to talk about relationships with the media, or for that matter about turning the ground floor of the IEA into a meeting place and/or coffee bar, or about whether a different part of London might make better sense as a meeting place and/or coffee bar, all of which Littlewood later did talk about, unless you start by talking about what will be said to the media and in that coffee bar, and by whom. Start with content. If you start only with form, then content will never happen. Soon, form itself will melt away. At the heart of the IEA must be the cultivation of a community of approximately like-minded academics and aspiring academics and intellectuals influenced by those academics some of whom will both establish themselves within academia and others if whom will sally forth into the world outside of academia and shape how it will be run, many of them doing both of course, and all of them been able and willing to dig in for a long intellectual battle. Mark Littlewood, thank goodness, seems to understand all this. I had assumed that the IEA was seeing the academic/media nexus as an either/or thing. The IEA, having spent a couple of decades presenting an intellectual face to the world, but of gradually diminishing appeal, and having spent a couple of decades in a state of obscurity in terms of its media impact, I feared that the IEA was now turning anti-intellectual, in a desperate bid for media attention and nothing else. Happily, this is not so.

Samizdata readers will be pleased to hear that the recent, disastrous identification of the IEA with monetarism, that is, with a particular theory about the exact way to run the nationalised industry that is the world's banking system, got a thorough and thoroughly critical airing. Littlewood's attitude was that the monetarists are part of the broad free market picture, and the IEA need not take sides. It can merely make sure that the argument takes place, in particular at the IEA. I, like most others present, am confident that, provided the IEA does not (as it now does with its disastrous Shadow Monetary Policy Committee) skew the debate disastrously in the wrong direction, the right side in this debate will prevail. And Littlewood had earlier said that when it came to the recent market turmoil, the free market movement in Britain had failed to measure up, or words to that effect, which didn't sound to me like a ringing endorsement of that Committee.

The point was also made from the floor, or rather the table, that the hunt for like-minded academics should not be confined to Britain. There is a world out there, still burdened by many of the errors of development economics. Good point.

Once I had heard Mark Littlewood talk about the academic and intellectual content of the IEA operation, I was then quite ready to listen to him talk also about the media relations angle. Him having spelt out the message, then fine, and given that this is his particular area of expertise, what does he want to say of the media? By now, he had my full attention.

This discussion can actually get quite subtle. The media problem is this. Suppose you round up your free market intellectuals, and it turns out that a surprising number of them are, I don't know, theologians and historians of theology, wanting to research into and write about the history of free market thought among the medieval Christians. Great. Such people must absolutely not be made to feel like second class citizens in the republic of liberty. Quite the reverse. The idea that such persons should be bullied out of studying theology and into writing tedious screeds about monetary policy of a kind that their hearts are not in, is the reverse of what should happen. We need our people, as the late Chris Tame used to say over and over again, everywhere, in every academic speciality, in every institution, in every kind of economic endeavour, living many different lives. And the IEA needs to find people in as many different academic and educational niches as possible. Theology? Terrific. However, as Littlewood pointed out, media organisations are not exactly falling over themselves to interview free market theologians on a daily basis. What they want to know is stuff like: what the hell's up with this credit crunch? And now: how the hell should government spending be cut in a way that is even approximately fair? What Thomas Aquinas might have said about such dilemmas is less high on their list of things to have talked about.

The answer to such tensions between academic inclination and the questions being put by the media, it seems to me, is another twin track approach. Encourage the theologians to continue with their theology, but also ask them, in such places as that hypothetical downstairs IEA coffee bar, what they think about the government's current economic policies. It could be that, having listened to their more statist-inclined theological friends talk foolishly about such things, they have become interested in contesting such foolishness. In fact, which is part of the point of Chris Tame's we-need-our-people-everywhere doctrine, maybe they have already been having such conversations during the informal bits of their theology gatherings, and are actually quite well primed to go on the radio or the telly what they have already said, or at least thought, in the course of personal debate like this. You may say, but isn't that a bit unrealistic? Do such twin-trackers really exist, deep into the political subtexts embedded in Japanese comic books or the history of pre Robert Peel policing, and able to hold their own in a ruckus on early morning radio about bank bailouts or taxation policy? The short answer is: yes.

To illustrate that, let me tell you about someone else I met at that Libertarian Alliance dinner. He must be around twenty, although to my now senescing senses he seemed about fourteen and looked like one of those cherubic boy band child-men who appears on TV talent shows. I'll call him Sam, because Sam is his name, Sam Bowman.

My conversation with Sam began delightfully, for me. He started it by saying, as I recall it: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, that is, for all those Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that the LA cranked out in the 1980s and 1990 in that faraway time when only scientists had the internet, and the rest of us had to make do with paper, and which we then shoved up on the internet as .pdfs for the likes of Sam Bowman and his friends to read and ponder, in some faraway spot in Ireland that I didn't catch. Sam said he and his mates particularly enjoyed reading the stuff about libertarian tactics. This child, I thought, certainly knows the way to my heart. Are you leaving now? Me too. Let's walk.

I asked Sam what he is doing now. The answer turned out to be twofold. He is working in some capacity or other at the Cobden Centre, which is the recently founded advocacy enterprise trying to push Austrian economics into the heart of the UK political policy debate, one of the Cobden Centre's leading spirits being this newly elected British MP, already noticed here in this posting, and another being this guy. Sam made it sound like he makes the tea and answers the phone, and maybe he does do that as well, but his job, its title and description anyway, is actually (I later googlearned) a bit grander than that. But see also the picture of Sam here (he's number three in that list), and you'll see what I mean about the boy band look.

Okay, the Cobden Centre. Great. But, anything else? Any studying? Yes. Sam Bowman is also doing post-grad study of the history of Zaire, the Belgian Congo that was, at SOAS, which stands for School of Oriental and African Studies. I was effusive in my praise for this choice of subject (mentioning this Samizdata posting as proof of my genuine interest in such things), and for the fact that Sam was studying at SOAS, rather than just anywhere, SOAS being a prestigious place, and one which I believe to have foisted some seriously bad policies on a seriously large number of places. As we made our way towards Sam's tube station, I told Sam of the Chris Tame doctrine, and of how Sam studying Zairean history at SOAS was a perfect implementation of it. He seemed pleased about this, hinting that others had said he should drop his Zaire enthusiasm and study something more "relevant" like, I imagine, privatising Britain's railways or cutting waste in the public sector. I said: No! No! No! We need our people everywhere!

Sam Bowman is a perfect example of the sort of person the IEA ought to be making much of, and connecting to other like-minded academic-stroke-political-stirrer people, of his own rank and of all other ranks.

In order to prove to you that the IEA under Mark Littlewood's leadership is serious about cultivating such people, as well as their academic superiors of course, let me also tell you some more about Dr. Stephen Davies. Yes, the very same Stephen Davies who featured in my posting here on Monday, about his lecture to the Libertarian Alliance. Because you see, Stephen Davies has just been appointed the Education Director of the IEA, starting in September. His job will be, among other things, to hunt down potentially IEA-sympatico academics in the UK in particular, and in general throughout the world in such places as the British Commonwealth. Davies will, until he starts at the IEA, continue with the similar job that he has been doing for the last year or two for the Institute for Humane Studies, having previously been a history academic in the UK. After his LA lecture on Monday night, I asked Davies about all this. It all sounds, I said, a bit like a footballer transfer battle. Was it amicable? Yes, he said. The IHS entirely sees the point of Davies moving to the IEA, and he will, he told me, continue to work for the IHS part-time. More to the point, the experience of working as an academic-hunter for the IHS will enable him to hit the ground running at the IEA. In fact, email being email, cheap international phone calls being cheap international phone calls, I would guess that he is already jogging along nicely on the IEA's behalf. This is because the US free market think tanks, and in particular the IHS, now know better than the IEA does, or than it did until recently, where freedom friendly academics are to be found, anywhere in the world. They even know more about freedom friendly academics in the UK than UK think tanks like the IEA do. And if you think that reflects rather badly on how the IEA has been doing its core job in recent years, then I agree with you.

Stephen Davies is the perfect man for this job, I think. As I explained in this recent posting at my own blog, Davies is actually a lot more friendly and good humoured than his rather severe demeanour suggested by my recent photographs of him. He relishes all company, not just company like me that agrees with him about everything. He is very tuned into the way that affinities can develop between intellectuals who are apparently situated in very different parts of the intellectual spectrum, having, like Littlewood, no particular tribal loyalties towards the Conservative Party. So, for instance, in his talk on Monday he mentioned a book called The Fiscal Crisis of the State which, Davies noted, was written by a Marxist. Wrong cure, said Davies, but very shrewd diagnosis. At other points in his talk, Davies mentioned other interesting intellectual linkages that also took us beyond the terrain of the usual suspects, so to speak. This is exactly the attitude, catholic in the secular sense, that the IEA needs to adopt in its outreach towards academia.

It's a plus that Littlewood is not a member of the Conservative Party, any more than Davies is. But Littlewood is a LibDem and there is always the danger, when you listen to a Liberal Democrat say things to you that you agree with, that you are being told what you want to hear, even as others are simultaneously being told entirely opposite things that they want to hear. However, the Stephen Davies appointment tells me that all the talk from Mark Littlewood at that LA dinner about cultivating academics was more than mere talk, more than just a think tank politician telling us what we wanted to be told. This was made clear on the night, because Littlewood told us then that Stephen Davies was about to be appointed to his new academic outreach job, and a few days later this was, see above, duly confirmed. In short, I think Littlewood both thoroughly understands and meant what he said. Which means that there is now considerable reason to be optimistic about the future of the Institute of Economic Affairs. I for one am extremely pleased about this.

Indeed, and here he was just before delivering it, earlier this evening, to the assembled friends and supporters of the Libertarian Alliance, at the National Liberal Club:

His subject was Public Goods and Private Action: How Voluntary Action Can Provide Law, Welfare and Infrastructure – and Build a Good Society.

Academics who are supportive of the free market and the free society tend to be economists. Such thinkers might have based an argument like that one on economic theories concerning the alleged possibility and desirability of such arrangements. But Dr. Davies is a historian, with a wealth of knowledge concerning how such arrangements did exist, and accordingly might again. It is hard to argue with any persuasiveness that voluntarily funded policing, or unemployment insurance, or roads or railways cannot exist, if the fact that these things actually did exist is widely known. The current crop of fiscally disastrous and morally destructive social and infrastructural policies depend for their continuation on perpetuating ignorance of how such voluntary alternatives existed in the past. (Hence in particular the importance of voluntarily organised and voluntarily funded education.)

Dr. Davies argued that the current fiscal crisis of the modern state, not just in Britain but everywhere, means that an historic opportunity now exists to revive such ideas as these.

A fellow Samizdatista asked, during the Q&A that followed Dr. Davies's lecture: Will the text of it be published? Answer: yes. I await this text with eagerness, as do many others. All to whom I spoke afterwards agreed that this was an outstandingly effective and informative lecture.

It's conceivable, although I promise nothing, that I may do some of this "live blogging" thing, come the early hours of tomorrow morning. It depends on my mood at the time, and on such things as computer availability, dongle workability and so forth and so on.

Somehow I doubt that Perry de Havilland will be hanging on every result. And oh look, he just said it again, see immediately below!

So, if none of us here manage it, but if you nevertheless hunger for this kind of thing, how about paying attention this this guy?

If I can keep my eyes open I intend to stay up most of the night and blog about the incoming results.

In particular (and at risk of sounding disturbingly anal) I intend to monitor the fate of those candidates who voted for and against the smoking ban. (Yes, really.)

I shall be looking out for some preferred candidates including Philip Davies, Greg Knight, Robert Halfon, Annesley Abercorn (Conservative), Kate Hoey (Labour), Lembit Opik (Lib Dem), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Martin Cullip (Libertarian), Old Holborn (Independent) and one or two others.

I shall also be passing comment on the election coverage, much of which will be viewed through the bottom of a glass, darkly.

Well, if it's your kind of thing, he says he's going to start around 10 pm. Maybe Perry might even want to give it a glance. He and Simon Clark of Taking Liberties, who wrote the words quoted above and to whom thanks for the email alerting me to this, do seem to be on the same wavelength.

Over at the Stumbling and Mumbling blog, the author asks this question, after watching an interesting TV programme about the sort of free market activities he sees going on in bits of Africa:

"Why is it that the societies that come closest to the libertarian ideal are poor ones, rather than rich? (It would, I think, be a stretch to argue that libertarianism causes poverty in this case). What is it about wealthier societies that brings with them bigger government?"

I think this can be fairly easily explained: as countries get richer, their voters think - naively - they can afford to have big government, at least until they start to hit those sort of problems that we have encountered in the West in recent decades with government overload. In the US, for example, the country became so rich, relatively, after the Second World War that things like the Great Society reforms, or the Space Program, were easier to contemplate and the risks and costs could be shrugged off, at least for a while. I guess what happens is that after a burst of wealth creation - as in the UK's Industrial Revolution - part of the population that has made a lot of money wants to ease up, or wants to turn to the easier, and possibly more exciting, realm of politics.

I sometimes notice that some of the noisiest anti-libertarians, such as many academics in the universities, live in the US, the world's richest nation, and I think the two things are in fact connected. If you have an incredibly wealthy country, it spawns a lot of folk who have the inherited wealth, the time, and the inclination, to make a living outside the immediate commercial system, and hence, will argue for something different. You can see this in certain family businesses: the Alpha Male type sets it up and makes a shedload of money; the son is sent to a posh school and starts to want to be part of the Establishment and is teased by his schoolfriends for being in "trade". The next son may end up in the professions, and as such, will tend to be drawn towards the State, or at least take a more benign view of state power than granddad. And I think this is partly what happened in the UK in the second half of the 19th Century and into most of the 20th Century. Part of the "business class" that might be expected to form the backbone of a free market order got housetrained by a remarkably conservative, ruralist, anti-commerce establishment. (This book makes such a case, for example).

There is also the issue of "correlation is not causation". Just because big government can sometimes be seen in wealthy societies in no way proves that the former helps bring about the latter, or vice versa. Stumbling and Mumbling implies that libertarianism, being what it thinks might be a simple-minded creed, cannot work in a sophisticated, wealthy society. In fact, I'd argue quite the reverse: the more complex a society is with a complex division of labour and profusion of individual tastes and demands, the less effectively big government tends to work. In fact, there are plenty of examples of rich societies with a relatively small government - perhaps Hong Kong being one of the best examples.

The CATO Institute's annual index of freedom report also suggests a pretty close relationship between countries that are rich and where the government focuses on the core, minarchist roles of protecting life and property, enforcing contracts, preventing fraud, etc. That does rather undermine the point made in the comment I link to.

It is, of course, excellent news if it is true that parts of Africa are heading down the pro-market route. But using such examples to make a bit of a dig against the wider application of classical liberal ideas is unfounded.

I recall a time when President Clinton was really quite unpopular, or so it appeared from where I was sat, then as now, in London. It was during his first term. In particular, I recall a libertarian friend who had recently been in America (although he may not himself have been American – not sure about that), sitting on my sofa in my living room, at one of my last Friday of the month libertarian talk evenings, telling me that President Clinton was absolutely not going to be re-elected. Too many people just did not like him. I pressed for details. Are you sure it's not just that you don't want Clinton to be re-elected? No, he isn't going to be re-elected. And the point is, my libertarian friend was sort of right. Clinton wasn't going to be re-elected. At the very least he didn't then look like being re-elected. But then, Timothy McVeigh blew up that big office block in Oklahoma and from then on, Clinton never looked back.

Politics is all about story telling. It is about, as we like to say here, the meta-context. And what this explosion accomplished for Clinton was that it completely changed the story being told at that time about what the state was and is. It turned the state from an economic and regulatory threat to the people, into the leading protector of the people. And it turned right wing grumblers about all those damned taxes and regulations into enemies of the state, and hence enemies of the people. Clinton no longer had to struggle to tell the story that he had been trying all along to tell, of the state as the necessary partner of the people, and of the people who were suspicious of the state as people who, at best, simply did not get this. Timothy McVeigh did that for him. And I remember how my heart sank when I heard about the Oklahoma bombing, and who had done it, and why, because I feared exactly the story switch that then happened.

Now the grumblers against taxes and regulations are back being the people. And the Democrats might yet find themselves losing their epic battle, the one which was supposed, in the words of Kyle-Anne Shiver, to have ...

... delivered the plum of America to the international socialist collective, or at least pushed us past the point of no return.

Even if regular people forget what turned this kind of story around for Democrats last time around, Democrats surely do remember. And just in case anyone has forgotten what a difference Timothy McVeigh made to the story told by President Clinton in particular and the story of America in general, Clinton is himself now reminding everyone.

But Bill Clinton, not for the first time in his life, is taking a chance. The danger for the Democrats is that they risk looking like they want another Timothy McVeigh. As quite a few of them surely do.

However, if the Democrats do get lucky and another McVeigh really does materialise, there is a big difference between now and the time when the original McVeigh did his thing. Then, there was no internet. The story was whatever the then mainstream media decided it was. But that rule no longer applies.

Iain Dale, the UK blogger and wannabe Tory MP, gets himself into a fearful mess in arguing as to why owners of privately owned businesses, such as hotels and the like, should be forced to accept any type of client, even if that offends the moral sensibilities of the owners. Much as I share Mr Dale's dislike of bigotry, he's just plain wrong when he writes:

"This is not about property rights. If you open your house to paying guests, it is no longer just your house. You are running a business, just the same as anyone else, and you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. If you do not wish gay people, black people, Jews or anyone else in your house, don't open it to the public. Simple as that. No one would accept a shopowner refusing to serve a particular type of person, would they?"

He's wrong here. So Mr Dale imagines, does he, that as soon as a person sets up - at their own risk and cost - in business, and chooses to make money in a particular way, that they suddenly forfeit any right to choose with whom they wish to make a living if the powers that be decide that such reasoning is prejudiced in some bad way? How the expletive deleted does that work, Mr Dale? Does this mean, for instance, that a business owner should be forced to serve anyone? Suppose a nightclub, say, insists on a dress code for its clientele (as happens). Does this mean that the scruffy are being discriminated against?

I don't like homophobia any more than Mr Dale, but as a supposed Tory, he ought to realise that the best protection any group of persons have against bigotry is competition and several ownership of private property. In a free, robust market unimpeded by state privileges and taxes, bigotry carries a significant economic cost to the bigot. And I think it was Voltaire back in the 1740s who observed, how people of all faiths, for example, could and did transact in the early London Stock Exchange of the time. Filthy lucre is often the most corrosive solvent of bigotry that there is.

There is also an ancilliary point here. As a free marketeer in favour of honest money and competition in currencies, I think it should be the right of any businessman to refuse to accept payment in certain currencies that he, rationally or otherwise, does not trust. If we adopt Mr Dale's line of reasoning on how a business owner's property rights go up in smoke the moment a client comes through the door, he's all in favour of forcing people to accept payment in whatever the state decrees is the "proper" form.

Sorry Mr Dale, but you just don't accept the concept of free association as it applies to commerce. Property rights is most definitely what the issue is about.

"I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

So says James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory.

Other than the fascism, Mrs Lincoln, he talks some quite good sense. For instance he says that "You need sceptics, especially when the science gets very big and monolithic." I presume he envisages a situation where sceptics are still allowed to talk but not to vote.

It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare.

[...] For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity,[...]

Answer here.

I always knew that something like this would happen, sooner or later, justified by sentiments like this, which are not that different my own. Basically the guy drove his airplane into a tax office, causing his own death in a fireball, and much other damage besides.

This event may mean angst for libertarians like me. So, Mr Libertarian, Do you believe that such acts of violence are justified? Question mark, question mark. And we will prevaricate, like moderate Muslims being challenged to explain Muslim-inspired terrorism. I will, anyway, if asked. No, but. Or perhaps in some cases: yes, but. Personally, I don't see how you can have tax gathering on the scale that prevails nowadays, and for purposes that prevail nowadays, without violent responses of this sort. Frivolous and somewhat incongruous thought, of the sort that pops into the head at such times: will gadgets like this hexakopter make such attacks easier?

I remember how President Clinton's political fortunes took a turn for the better following that bomb attack by Timothy McVeigh. He went from looking like a probable one-termer to a two-termer, pretty much from that moment on, because it perfectly illustrated what loons his supporters thought his opponents were. Will something similar now happen for Obama? His supporters will surely have no problem explaining what they think about this, which is all part of the case against such attacks. How will the Tea Party movement be affected?

Further thought, the body count, including the man himself, seems to be low. Maybe, logically, that ought to make little difference, but low body counts are much sooner forgotten. Another thought: the pictures of this are dramatic. Not so soon fogotten, perhaps.

More here, and here.

Obsessed as I now am with Climategate, I first learned about this drama here.

"The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" Joseph Stalin is reported to have said dismissively. And we all know how that turned out.

Ron Paul, the "Dr No" of US politics for his habit of being the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against some measure to increase federal government spending, debt or power, could witness the repeat of such a peaceful realignment.

Tim Evans, writing on the Cobden Centre's blog, has found that a Google search for "Ron Paul" will find over 28.8 million entries, whereas one for "Karl Marx" will generate a mere 6.26 million. As he concludes: "it is true that these things take a long time to play through, but as a sociologist I am excited by the long-term cultural, political and economic impact of these sorts of numbers" for the cause of a free world.

Presumably, a rise in online interest about Ron Paul, relative to Karl Marx, should translate into tangible results at some point. The election of Scott Brown the Republican challenger in the recent Massachusetts special election to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, was also preceded by a similar gap between the Google ratings of the various political parties' candidates.

The battle over Google and Bing search engines

Google - Scott Brown has been mentioned 53,200,000 times on Google, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 50,600 times on Google, the appointed Senator Paul Kirk has more mentions than the current Democrat candidate for that seat!

Bing - Scott Brown has been mentioned 52,800,000 times on Bing, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 219,000 times on Bing...

It seems that Congressman Paul could put together more divisions than the cause of Marxism. Seems like a cheerful note to end the week.

I see that today's Samizdata quote of the day spot for today has already been taken. By me, but taken. Had it not been, I might instead have offered this:

The main argument now, increasingly, is between those who view the state as an enabler and those who view it as, at best, a sometimes necessary irritant. To employ a massively oversimplified analogy, statists seem to think that the state should act as captain, coach, physio, kitman, ballboy, PR department, groundsman, ticketing department, FIFA representative, the guy with the half time oranges, agent, translator, WAG, turnstile operator, matchday police, the guy selling the big flags outside the ground and the guy confiscating the big flags on the way into the ground. Libertarians just want a guy with a fucking whistle.

As I often have (or at any rate want) to remind people when I shove up an SQOTD, the fact that I think whatever it is to be a snappy bit of prose doesn't necessarily mean that I completely agree with it, even as I usually reckon it to have its heart in the right place.

A complaint about the above quote, for instance, is that it omits to mention the most obviously foolish of all state activities, which is that states now routinely insist on striding onto the pitch and trying to play, like that embarrassing games teacher played by Brian Glover in the movie Kes, even as (like Brian Glover) they continue to be the ref.

I recently heard President Obama say on my television that the job of President is (I quote from memory as best I can) "making decisions and helping people". President Obama thinks that he should be both the referee and a player, in other words. And since he cannot possibly help everyone in the USA, he ends up playing for one side (helping only some people) against the other side (at other people's expense), and his refereeing gets bent out of shape to reflect his competitive preferences.

Presidents shouldn't be helping. They should be maintaining and defending the circumstances within which people can help themselves.

I am slightly wary of trying to rank the freedoms of different countries according to some sort of benchmark, but these things can sometimes have their uses, if only in conveying movement from good to bad and vice versa. This index of freedom, provided by the US-based Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, shows that the US has definitely gone backwards in recent years. There will obviously be finger-pointing at Mr Obama and his Democrat allies, but the Republicans under Bush & co bear some of the blame for this state of affairs, also.

As for the position of Britain, I hardly need to read the link to realise that freedoms are declining.

In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.

To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading "Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March":

That's certainly why I'm supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?

Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:

Join us.

Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.

Mr Devil's Kitchen didn't mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.

I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.

I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?

So how is Zimbabwe doing these days? According to this article, linked to yesterday by Patrick Crozier, things are actually improving. Patrick quotes this bit:

Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products.

While reading this article, I could not shake the feeling that I was really reading a piece of libertarian science fiction. Could they really have done anything so very sensible, and could things really be improving so definitely? The piece does appear to be genuine, so far as I can tell, but if it turns out to be fantasy-fiction, this paragraph will get me off the credulity hook. File under maybe true but maybe too good to be true.

Meanwhile, if the piece really is true, the best bit of all in it is that there is now no "lender of last resort" in Zimbabwe. Could it be that libertarian economic policy - in particular libertarian banking policy - is about to get a serious test, which it will pass, and hence another serious showcase, highly pertinent given the world's current banking woes, to educate the world with? How will socialism and state-centralism get the credit for that I wonder?

If genuine, this piece reminds me of a vivid British recollection from way back. Someone on the telly asked a City commentator, just after Black Wednesday (the day in 1992 when John Major's economic policies collapsed in ruins), what the prospects were now for the British economy. Well, he said, now that the government has not got a policy, rather good.

Snapped by me a fortnight ago, at the LA/LI Annual Conference at which Anthony Evans was the final speaker. I've straightened and sharpened it as best I could. A copyable, pastable and more readable version of the text from which this is taken may be read here. More photos of the speaker taken that same day can be viewed here.

UPDATE: Anthony Evans website, articles, blog.

Researchers are claiming that there is a link between individualism and depression. Some may take offence to this notion but it does not surprise me at all. That said, I am far too cynical to automatically assume that the 'researchers' are not grinding some ideological axe, but nevertheless I find the basic idea quite believable.

Frankly collectivism is a form of mass delusion, an 'opiate for the masses' method of replacing profane objective truth with sacred, subjective 'acceptable' truth... i.e. 'truth' is what the collective wants it to be. Indeed I would say much of the allure of collectivism is relief from the weight of individual responsibility, the sense of moral externalisation that comes from outsourcing choice to a 'higher power'.

Individualism on the other hand is a more lonely path without a nebulous 'them' to absolve you from consequences and that can be stressful. And so it comes as no surprise to me that some collectivist societies may be less anxious (at least for those who actually buy into the collectivist meta-contextual assumptions) because collectivism depends on a view of the world that filters reality through the comforting, blame deflecting, wilfully ignorant lens of what is politically tolerable... and ignorance is bliss.

There is swear-blogging, and then there is this:

Emily Thornberry MP: a very stupid and thoroughly unpleasant person who should be severely punched in the cunt, and then thrown into the sea.

That's way too far over the top of the top for me. Maybe I'm getting old. It's in a posting in response to a posting here by Johnathan Pearce on Saturday, about how giving women rights at work will make them more expensive to employ and consequently cause women to be employed less.

I'm genuinely in two minds about this swear-blogging thing. (See also this blog.) On the one hand, as with the passage quoted above, I think it can be horribly offensive by almost any standard and liable to make a lot of people think badly of something I value, namely the libertarian movement. (If you look under affiliations, you see that DK is affiliated to the Libertarian Party.) I can foresee a time when such passages as the above will be quoted in evidence against us all. If anyone points out that "they" (i.e. us libbos) were writing things like that, and none of "them" complained, well, I did. And if this posting alerts enemies of the libertarian movement otherwise unalerted and it all blows up in our faces, then the sooner the better, I say. Get the argument about swear-blogging over with.

On the other hand, this kind of language does at least communicate just how angry people get about the plundering and bossiness of politicians. If you are similarly angry, read on, Devil's Kitchen is for you. You are not alone. It libertarianism was only written calmly and dispassionately, something important would be lost.

One thing I do know is that if Devil's Kitchen was nothing but the above offensiveness, I wouldn't give a ... flip ... about him. It is because he writes good stuff about important topics, in among the effing and blinding and sometimes worse, that I now ruminate upon the wisdom or lack of it of how he writes. Whatever I end up thinking about this, I am not now recommending and never will recommend that what I might consider to be excessively sweary swear-blogging should be illegal, to read or to write.

An unusual little back page story...

When they forced their way into Miss Kausar’s home, her father Noor Mohammad refused their demands and was attacked. His daughter was hiding under a bed when she heard him crying as the gunmen thrashed him with sticks. According to police, she ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead. She also shot and wounded another militant as he made his escape.

Sweet. The world needs more people like Rukhsana Kausar.

And an addition 'bravo' to all the people across the globe to held up the Mighty Forks and protested the obscene 'celebrations' of the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party taking power.

Fight the power.

Sometimes when problems need to be worked out, the people trying to work it out keep trying to whack the problem over the head with the very thing that caused the problem in the first place.

Gay marriage... or even gay 'marriage' if you prefer... is one such issue. Some argue that if the state recognises heterosexual marriages, then it offends against natural justice for the state to discriminate against homosexual marriages (or 'marriages'/unions whatever). And of course the people who say that are right.

This naturally does not appeal to people who oppose the 'morality' of homosexuality or just feel gay marriage, or gay anything really, is 'yucky' and thus dislike the idea of the state they support with their tax money adding its imprimatur, at their expense, to something they find repugnant. And of course the people who say that are right.

So the obvious solution lies in the root of the problem... the state actually has no compelling need being in the marriage business at all as marriage is just a contractually relationship between two people that requires no involvement of the state at all. Stop the state rubber-stamping any kind of marriage and the problem goes away.

And likewise an issue of separation of church and state in the USA...

It would be easy to miss among the yucca and Joshua trees of this vast place - a small plywood box, set back from a gentle curve in a lonesome desert road. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature billboard without a message.

But inside the box is a 6 1/2 -foot white cross, built to honor the war dead of World War I. And because its perch on a prominent outcropping of rock is on federal land, it has been judged to be an unconstitutional display of government favoritism of one religion over another.

OMG!...hmmm... bad choice of exclamation... a religious symbol on state land! The state has no business allowing displays for this or that religious faction showing their symbolic whatnots on state land! And that is indeed right.

But others say that if this is also a object of real historical significance commemorating the dead of the First World War, then it would be Taliban-style barbarism to simply destroy it or even rip it from its historical context! And that is indeed right.

So... stop it being state land. Make the land the private property of someone who will safeguard this object of historical interest. The problem is not the cross, it is that this land does not actually have any business being 'state land' at all.

There are some problems that simply getting the state out of the picture will not solve. However for the other 90% of things...

Presently people are very angry about Barack Obama's speech to young children (with the, now withdrawn, "how you can help your President" stuff), but the real damage is done in the ordinary days of propaganda - ordinary school days, and ordinary school textbooks, that parents do not even notice. For example, American and British schools teach the "Herbert Hoover and his free market policies" legend.

Barack Obama has given the enemy a face - but what matters more is the collectivist movement (that which has for more than a century worked to gain influence in all institutions in the West). Yet many people can not see past the bogey man Obama and ignore the vast movement without which he would be unimportant. Just a Marxist son of Marxist parents - making impassioned speeches in parks (to no one in particular).

It was the movement that made sure he went to the best universities, it was the movement who gave him the comfortable positions on the boards of the various charitable trusts, it was the movement who supported him in his various campaigns for political office.

Sometimes the movement can become a parody of itself - for example when the "mainstream media" try to cover up for a loud mouth like Van Jones. Being a Communist is fine, but going around telling people what you are is not fine at all - it is astonishing that Van Jones was picked for high office for he lacks basic self discipline (the ability to keep his mouth shut about what he is), a quality Barack Obama has so much of.

Nor is Van Jones alone: The "Diversity Officer" (Commissar) who goes around praising the Venezuelian regime, and explaining (in detail) his evil plan to destroy free speech in the United States, violates the first rule of being a bad guy (do not tell your potential victims what you are planning to do to them - at least not till they are tied up in your underground laboratory): The science Commissar going on record gloating about the prospect of forced abortions: The health Commissar musing about how the old are useless and do not enjoy life and therefore...

Too many of the Commissars go about thinking they can say anything they like without it getting to Homer Simpson (who they see as the typical American voter) - because the mainstream media (both broadcasting and print) will never tell the bald, fat man what they intend to do him and his family. But the mainstream media do not have a monopoly of information these days. The movement should have made clear to Obama that he should not pick people who have film and audio records of what they have said. That he should only pick people who have learned to keep their secret plans... err... secret.

However, overall the movement is very effective - on a totally different level from the pro liberty side (who are like a bunch of cats - moving in all sorts of directions and with plan of campaign, more chaos than cosmos - although it is cosmos, non forced cooperation, that we are supposed to believe in, against the taxis, forced order, of the movement).

Still economic law (the nature of reality itself) is the great enemy of the movement - and it may save the West yet, in spite of the chaotic nature and crass incompetence of the defenders of Western civilisation.

Tom Palmer on the late, Marxist philosopher, G.A. Cohen, who died a few days ago:

Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy "a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism". Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have regretted that National Socialism wasn't nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.

They say it is wrong to speak ill of the dead, or at least, recently deceased. But given the enormity of the evil associated with Soviet Russia - the millions killed, starved to death and generally immiserated - that I consider it to be a moral failing not to call out those who chose to look the other way, or make excuses, for what that regime represented, and what it did. G.A. Cohen was more honest that some Marxists/egalitarians in at least recognising the force of the classical liberal critique of his views; he did, for example, appreciate that the Lockean idea of Man as a "self owner" and the associated right to pursue the acquisition of property was a serious challenge to collectivism. But in the end he brushed it aside. I did not realise that Cohen was an apologist for the Soviet Empire in the way that Palmer describes. That came as quite a shock.

By the way, G.A. Cohen's arguments are nicely and civilly dissected by Jan Narveson's splendid book, The Libertarian Idea. And Tom Palmer's own book looks also to be well worth checking out.

Regular consumption of between 3 and 4 units a day by men of all ages will not accrue significant health risk.
Regular consumption of between 2 and 3 units a day by women of all ages will not accrue any significant health risk.

- 'Sensible Drinking: The Report of an Interdepartmental Working Group' (Department of Health, 1995) My emphasis.

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See your doctor or practice nurse if you are drinking above the safe limits and are finding it difficult to cut down.
What are the recommended safe limits of alcohol drinking?

• Men should drink no more than 21 units of alcohol per week (and no more than four units in any one day).
• Women should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol per week (and no more than three units in any one day).

- Patient UK
---

There is a desperate desire for binary certainty in the authoritarian mind. 'Safety' is not just small risk; it is the absence of any known or projected risk. What is not defined as safe is dangerous. No possibility of a risk is permissable because if anything goes wrong the system could be blamed for not preventing it. That would be a threat to order. What is not expressly permitted is forbidden.

It has often been said that one of the more important functions of blogs like this is to get 'memes' (or ideas, as I prefer to call them) started and then spread around virally. In the spirit, I think it behoves us to begin spreading this idea: that people who work in the public sector should be exempt from having to pay tax. All tax.

And, no, I am not proposing to do them a big favour, though expect that many in the public sector will see it as a favour and that is all for the good. No, what I am proposing is the stripping away of a fig-leaf that disguises the very important distinction between tax-payers and tax-consumers.

Currently, only those who earn their living in the private or voluntary sector are tax-payers and while public sector employees do file tax returns and, on the face of it, pay their taxes too, this is a mere bookkeeping fiction. They are the recipients of tax, adding nothing to the public purse. The number of people who fail to understand this distinction, holding instead that "we are all taxpayers" is alarmingly high. By forcing the public sector to lead tax-free lives, we make their true status not just clearer but undeniable.

It is high time that we made it crystal clear as to who bears the burden of taxation and who enjoys the benefit; who produces the wealth and who gets the wealth handed to them. It is a cheap and easy means of dramatically changing the dynamic of all economic and political debate.

If you like this idea, then tell someone else. Let's start spreading it.

“Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the Earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says: “Let’s give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Jones will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions in the hand of Jones, we will be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.” Surely in that sort of situation, no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule…..it is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of the State that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social protection and defense.”

Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, page 68, quoted on pages 380-381 of Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty. The paperback copy contains a rather barbed piece of blurb by the publisher. The book is far from "hagiographic", but is clearly sympathetic.

Doherty's book is great. It is a bit of a shame that it does not say all that much about what happened in the libertarian scene in the UK, but that is a sort of British bleat from yours truly.

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.

And

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn't want your children wandering alone ...

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Government has never been more popular or more trusted.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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)

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

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?

[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.

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.

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.

Note not just the presumption of state largesse, but the paternalistic trimmings: "appropriate", "compulsory", "full-time", "adequate", "allowed". This is a profoundly conservative version of left liberal doctrine: backward-looking to the golden age of 1978 (precisely datable by its implicit assumption that coming into force of the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 represents the effectuation of an eternal moral insight); assuming the dominance of the state (these "rights" are bizzarely to be judiciable but not enforceable; and throughout unquestioning of the burden of doctrine.

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.

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

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

Liberty is everywhere evident in licence and injured by licensing.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

But because the impetus behind this is essentially political - not security - the government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to over-rule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto.

Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least. But purely for political reasons, this government's going to do that. And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away - technology, development and complexity and so on, we'll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth, 42 days is just one - perhaps the most salient example - of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.

A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.

And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped. And for that reason, I feel that today it's incumbent on me to take a stand.

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.

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.

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'

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.

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).