Glenn Reynold's has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul's best selling new treatise, "The Revolution: A Manifesto".

He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.

I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.

But you knew that.

One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark's dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases... the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole - though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown's Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark's version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.

A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called 'Big Brother', taking a line from Orwell's 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell's attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.

But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.

Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.

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

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

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

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

Science is a matter of data, experiment and falsification. Nature has no interest whatever in your particular 'ism', whether it be liberal, conservative, left, social, commune, cannibal, left, or libertarian. The universe just is and it does not give a damn what you believe about it.

I happen to feel the science is on the side of human caused climate change, but that is not what I want to discuss. In fact, I am going to strongly discourage that particular debate to the point of removing comments arguing either "t'is!" or "No, t'isn't!"

The discussion I would like to see is about the answers we as libertarians have if climate change is indeed real. Now if you believe as I do that it will happen, then obviously you have already been thinking about this issue. If I am wrong and nothing happens, then so much the better. If you believe there is no change, as I am sure many of you do, and you are wrong... the end result could be a complete loss of credibility and a delegitimization of everything we hold dear. The populace will not suffer gladly those who are wrong, especially if they have lost their homes and livelihoods.

Greenists, leftists, socialists and so forth have policies to 'deal' with the problem. In many cases these policies are simply their same old statist wish lists intellectually applied to the problem at hand. If change does occur, and most particularly if it occurs and appears or can be claimed to have been ameliorated by those policies they will use it against us.

This need not be the case. I am quite sure there are answers (and better ones) to all, or at least as much of the problem from our framework as from any other. Here is a range of scenarios for our discussion:

• We get 1-2 degrees of overall warming.
  
• We get between 1 and 10 meters of rise in mean sea level.
  

As wildcards, with low probability but not low enough probability:

• Fresh water influx from the Greenland icecap modifies the salinity of the North Atlantic deep current and this pushes the Gulf stream southwards, adjusting Europe's climate to match that of the same latitudes in Canada.
  
• A major iceshelf in Antarctica 'ungrounds' and causes really major sea level rises of 30 meters or more over a period of a several decades.
  

The scenario would unfold over time as follows:

• CO2 output hits its maximum value in the late 2020's or early 2030's and then begins to fall, despite continuing population increases, due to technological changes in primary energy and fuel production. I do not know whom the market winners will be, only that some technologies will supplant our current way of doing things.
  
• Population peaks around 2060 and then tails off by several billion by the end of the century. This is based on a UN demographic projection whose trends have been roughly correct for as much of my life as I have been interested in such things.
  
• The total CO2 and other factors causing more energy to be absorbed by the Earth climate system lag the CO2 input maximum by some time and begin to trail off around 2050.
  
• No solar Maunder type minimum's occur, ie, insolation of our planet remains pretty much constant over this century.
  
• Most of the climate changes are neither dramatic nor sudden, although a change in the Gulf Stream might only take a few years if it did happen.
  

Some examples of the questions to ask are:

• How would we handle the disastrous consequences for low lying nations? Would we have a class action suit of the form: 'Individuals Residing in Bangladesh, Florida, The Netherlands, Pacific Islands et al v. Fossil Fuel Using Individuals', for recompense for loss of real estate?
  
• To what extent does amortization of property purchases write down the losses?
  
• There would be winners and losers. For example, the US breadbasket would move northwards into Canada; some areas would become arid that were not; some areas would become tropical paradises that were not. As I have said before, complex non-linear systems can do just about anything when you pump energy into them. We will have to presume the results will be surprising and unpredictable. Some places might become hell hole swamps and others find themselves under glaciers. Mathematical chaos moves in strange ways. How should people deal with these unknowns?
  

Given this set of possible worlds, what do you feel are libertarian solutions which would turn more people towards our ideas than against them? If we do not have and sell our alternatives we are going to see policy decisions by others that we are not going to like one little bit, climate change or no climate change.

As the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared!

Remember, this is not a debate about climate change. Such comments will be deleted to keep things focused. I want discussion to center on how free individuals would deal with the worst, should it happen.

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

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

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

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

He finishes thus:

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

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

Matthew Lynn, a columnist for Bloomberg, has a good and succinct take on the latest nonsense about actions by the German and British government to use information - obtained in highly dubious circumstances - to go after people who have put their money away in tiny European tax havens such as Liechstenstein. Philip Chaston of this blog has already touched on the subject. The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians - if there are many - have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their 'responsibilities'.

At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.

Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may - may - be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers. And as traditional checks and balances are eroded - as they have been in Britain recently - we need all the constraints on national and supranational power we can get. We should therefore see the efforts by EU and other nations to create a global tax cartel as being every bit as dangerous as the alleged cartel deals forged by the 19th Century "robber barons", except of course that this latter group were usually unfairly maligned. Compared to the tax-cartel zealots, Rockefeller and Co. were strict amateurs.

Surveys about happiness also show that people say they are happier when they feel their circumstances are improving. They are less likely to profess happiness in a wealthy society that is static than in a less rich society which is advancing. It is the improvement which counts, not the actual level. Jefferson rightly pointed to "the pursuit of happiness" rather than to any given level of it.

Humans are not the sort to enjoy static contentment. They seek challenges and the thrill of achievement. The peaceful calm of the Lotos Eaters is not for them, and neither are the sheep-pen and the secure pasture. Those who think of happiness as needs satisfied fail to spot that those needs include challenge and change. Humans are aspirational, seeking much more than the provision of necessities. Better a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

- Madsen Pirie reaches 39 in his Common Errors series at the ASI Blog (he has today reached 42)

Considering how many health-scare news items there are these days, it makes me want to smile in a wry way when I also read about the supposed problems caused by an ageing, greying, population. The first and obvious question is: if we are all at such risk from obesity, drugs, booze, stress, pollution or the angst of watching Jonathan Ross, why are we living so much longer than our parents or grandparents? If this is what happens when the sky is supposedly always about to fall in, then what must a healthy population be like? And yet there is something in the human psyche, or our culture, that rebels against the happy prospect of a longer life. We are told, or at least have until recently accepted, that three-score years and ten is Man's rightful due (perhaps a tad longer for women); it is almost a hangover from religion to believe that it is impious, even blasphemous, to want to live for much longer. Andrew O'Hagan, writing in the Daily Telegraph today in a moan about how the elderly are treated in Britain - a valid subject - makes this point:

Growing old is now considered more of an option than an inevitability, something to beat rather than be resigned to, something that is thought to take away from one's individuality rather than deepen it.

I don't really know how death, or its inevitability, adds to one's individuality. I think I know what O'Hagan is trying to say: We are unique, precisely because we are mortal. We cannot be replaced, or copied.

The trouble, though, is that I don't see how one's uniqueness is somehow reduced by living for 200 years rather than say, 100, or 50, or 30. Were the ancient Romans - average lifespan about 35 - more individualistic and unique than a 21st Century Brit? How on earth can one measure this? Also, the desire to keep the Grim Reaper at bay surely attests to a love of life, not a denial of its value; if one believed in a craven acceptance of the inevitable, then why do we have doctors and hospitals?. I value my life rather a lot and am in no hurry to see my hair go all grey, my face resemble tree bark, and my limbs to seize up. Sorry, Mr O'Hagan, but I'd rather not suffer that fate any time soon. I go to the gym and try to keep fit despite my enjoyment of red wine. I have not signed up for cryonic suspension or anything like that but I keep an eye on life extension research and have been greatly impressed by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, among others. (Don't be put off by the immense beard, he's not a nutter). I lost a good friend and intellectual mentor, Chris Tame, nearly two years ago to the horror of bone cancer - he was in his mid-50s - and I am pretty sure this most unique of people could and should have been around for many more decades among us. (I particularly miss his outrageous jokes).

I remain to be convinced of the idea that to value one's life, it must be short, or that we should resign ourselves to it meekly. Meekness did not build the space rocket, the Aston Martin DB9 or even produce modern dental surgery.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has interesting thoughts on this subject. He's been writing on this for some time. Ronald Bailey, whom I met over a year ago during a book tour of London, is also well worth reading on this and related topics. I read this Peter Hamilton novel which touches on rejuvination; it is not one of his best tales, unfortunately (the Amazon.co.uk book reviews are not very flattering).

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is the head of the Church of England and as such, is still - amazingly - considered to be a person of some eminence. Unfortunately, he does not lend weight to that institution. Although the Anglican Church is far less powerful than it used to be - and for good reasons, such as the removal of 19th century electoral discrimination against Jews, Catholics and dissenters - it is still regarded with affection by many of us, even atheists, agnostics or lukewarm Christians. It has given us great thinkers; its liturgy and music are among the great adornments of western civilisation. Alas, Dr Williams is not a great thinker, although he is no doubt a kindly man.

Dr Williams believes that aspects of sharia law - which aspects he does not explictly say - should be allowed to form part of the law of this country. He does not explain what tests should be used to decide what bits of sharia law are acceptable and what are not. For example, in some of the most conservative muslim lands, the death penalty is used for offences far less serious than murder, such as adultery. We are not told what the Archbishop thinks about this; or whether he thinks things such as arranged marriage, etc, are acceptable. But he needs to be clear about what he thinks is acceptable, otherwise, all we can assume is that the fellow is mouthing vacuous platitudes, nothing more.

I do not believe you can operate a polycentric legal order in Britain, at least not in ways that would allow one legal code to allow coerced marriages, sitting alongside the English Common law. How, for example, could one avoid westernised Muslims wanting to be treated under the ordinary law of the land and not to be ruled over by their co-religionists? Without the active support of the State, I suspect, and hope, that many Muslims, particularly women, will revolt and choose to live under the Common Law tradition of this country. I hope so.

Dr Williams means well; a lot of such people do. But frankly, he gives lapsed Christians such as yours truly plenty of reason for wanting the Church to be shorn of its state privileges.

Of course, if people can freely choose to live under a sharia code, and consent in advance to submit to its controls, then I can hardly object to that. An interesting area at the moment is sharia finance; a problem, however, is that a lot of what is called Islamic finance is re-inventing of the wheel: if it is immoral to charge for lending money because money is not considered a legitimate asset in its own right (which is mistaken, as money accumulated by saving has involved sacrificing consumption) it seems odd that sharia does tolerate things like commodities speculation, such as certain forms of derivative contracts. But at least investors can shop around; arguably, some western investors might want to own sharia investments that avoid banks as a way to avoid the impact of the credit crunch. That is an example of capitalism at its best: allowing people of all faiths or none to do business with one another. Voltaire noticed this when he observed the London Stock Exchange in action in the 18th Century. But allowing sharia law to operate in matters such as marriage, divorce or punishment of supposed wrongdoings, in ways that are at clear variance to the prevailing legal code of a country like Britain, is an entirely different matter.

I hope the Archbishop speaks more clearly in the future.

(Update: one commenter complains about my description of Dr Williams as "the head" of the Church; of course, that, strictly speaking, is the role of the Monarch, by law. In practice, however, the Queen, unlike centuries past, is unlikely to have any real authority over this character, although it would be fascinating to know what she thinks of him in private.

This recent enraged attack on John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the LSE, recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, explains that Gray spouts an almost continuous gush of bilge. Gray is described as one who "flip-flops across the old right-left ideological chessboard". But this Samizdata posting by me from 2002 explains the method in this man's madness.

My 2002 piece does contain one error, however. I assumed from his accent when I knew him in the eighties that Professor Gray was from Wales. Apparently he is from the North of England. My apologies to Wales.

This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).

This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will.

- Rush.

It is my birthday, so a little personal reminiscence is in order. The man who introduced me to Rush, 29 years ago, subsequently turned down physics fellowships at both Oxford and Cambridge to become a Baptist missionary. I guess he took his instructions from the first part of the verse.

I am not quite as vexed by the writings of former Living Marxism (a bit of an oxymoron, Ed) writers such as Brendan O'Neill, Mick Hume or Claire Fox as Stephen Pollard is - life is too short for such intellectual eye-gouging - but I kind of get Stephen's general point. Those of us who have toiled away exposing the idiocies of Big Government for decades and plugging the case for free markets, etc, find it a bit hard to take for a bunch of Marxists to claim to be such libertarian souls, when in fact they are just as hostile to the market economy as they ever were. No-one has ever proved to me that you can have a liberal, open society without property rights. O'Neill, writing in this week's edition of The Spectator, rather confirms Pollard's suspicions in what was quite good rant against modern "anti-capitalists":

Of course, Marx wanted to destroy capitalism because he thought it didn’t go far enough in remaking the world in man’s image and organising society according to man’s needs and desire. Today’s sorry excuses for Marxists and anti-capitalists think capitalism has gone too far in its development of the forces of production and encouragement of consumerism. I’m with Marx. Let’s replace capitalism with something even more dazzlingly cocky and human-centric. But let’s first deal with the luddites, locavores and eco-feudalists who have given anti-capitalism a bad name.

The problem, of course, is that the "dazzlingly cocky and human-centric" shiny sort of Marxist future is never spelled out. What would it look like? Does it come with a tester? Are there examples on eBay? Seriously, given the manifold failures of state central planning, and the various incoherent attempts by some thinkers to fashion "market socialism" (another oxymoron), it is not really quite good enough for a chap like O'Neill to pose as some sort of hip and clever critic of anti-capitalists, then to claim that he is still a Marxist, but then to leave a bloody great black hole of explanation of what his sort of society would look like. Consider, the various theories associated with Marx have been more or less destroyed, both by practical experience and logical argument: the labour theory of value (which ignores the value of ideas in wealth creation); the theory of the inevitable clash between the "workers" and the "bosses"; the historical "inevitability" of the collapse of capitalism, the immiseration of the proletariat, etc. While some of Marx's arguments about class had some interesting points, pretty much all of the central tenets of the Bearded One's ideas are plain wrong. I mean, as intellectual defeats go, this is the equivalent of a village pub football team being annihilated 10-nil by Manchester Utd. There's no way back.

Mark Mills, makes some pretty outrageous comments about Ayn Rand in the course of how he prefers to defend free enterprise. I have often wondered what is worse: the cultish "official" Objectivists who cannot deal with the slightest criticism of the woman, or those who claim, with little plausibility or evidence, that she contributed nothing valuable apart from an assertion that it is fine and proper to be happy. I came across this piece of nonsense at a link mentioned at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

According to Rand morality is an illusion and truly great individuals act solely in their own interests without giving thought to their impact on others.

Nonsense. The fiction and non-fiction works of the late Miss Rand, which are widely available, such as Atlas Shrugged, are absolutely rammed with discussion - sometimes to the shrill point of tedium - about morality. One may demur about Rand's version of said, but to claim she had nothing to say on morality is so jaw-droppingly wrong as to wonder what Mr Mills has been smoking. Her view of morality, a code of values, was that morality was essential to the pursuit of life and human flourishing. Her ethical egoism was a kind of progression from the views of Aristotle and an attack on the idea, which stems from the dualism of certain religions, for example, that happiness on this earth and goodness are at war with one another. Rand said this dualism was fatal to both happiness and morality. There is now a large and growing literature on Rand's views on morality and the importance of it in all aspects of human life (an example is here).

As to the point that her morality gave no thought to the "impact on others" of certain actions, what on earth is he driving at? The pursuit of long-range self interest means that one does not aggress against others, hurt them, rob them, etc. Quite the opposite: as Adam Smith realised, it means serving the wants of others through voluntary exchange in the market makes sense because doing that makes you happier in the long run, gets you friends, riches, etc. Mills statement is bizarre. Of course, Rand was an early sceptic about the environmentalist movement and tended to dismiss worries about pollution, etc, but then there is nothing in her body of ideas as such that would mean that a supporter of her would be blind to the problems of pollution, which can be thought of as a property rights problem.

People will recall that when the USA was founded, the Founders spoke about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It says something about the state of ideas when a so-called defender of liberal capitalism regards a woman who championed the pursuit of happiness and attacked statism as some sort of nutcase. Oh well.

The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word.

- Daniel Villey, "Economique et Morale", in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing.

There are times when I almost feel sorry for conservatives and their confusion over libertarian positions on issues and why those positions appear to shift from time to time.

Our position does not actually change though... we just give pragmatic support to one group or another according to what we perceive is the current greatest threat to our principles. There may be disagreements and even splits amongst libertarians over "what should we be doing right now?" These are temporary because the disagreements are over strategy and tactics and fine points of philosophy, not the goals.

A conservative may look at the support of our particular faction of libertarians (Samizdata and friends) for the war and believe we are fellow travellers. They do not understand we see al Qaeda and the mad mullahs as such a grave threat to liberty and individualism in the world that we temporarily find common cause with the State. Defense is one thing most (not all) libertarians agree is a function of even a minimalist state.

There is a certain pragmatism summed up in the old Arab saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". The Islamic faction which clothes itself in blood and the Koran are most certainly something we can not ignore. The longer you leave them alone, the bigger the war will be in the end. It is easier to cut out a tumor than to go after a metastasized cancer.

That does not mean these fruitcakes will always be number one on our anti-hit parade. As their threat subsides libertarians naturally turn their attention to the long term enemy of liberty: The State.

I am ecstatic (guardedly) to see things working out in Iraq. Because of that, I too can turn my attention to the State.

The State has done much to undermine freedom over the last decade, all in the name of 'protecting us'. They really believe it. Sadly, they do not seem to have the same love of liberty we do. This has been brought home to me recently by conservative commentators who have denounced critics who took stands I consider obvious and courageous.

One woman wrote she would rather die in a terrorist attack, even see her child do so than give up their liberties. She did not like the surveillance state that is being put together in the US (and which is a nearly completed edifice in the UK) in the name of 'protecting' her.

Some years ago, not long after 9/11, I said pretty much the same thing to a CIA guy I once chatted with over beers. I told him I would rather die under a nuclear fireball than give up one tiny bit of my liberty. I stand by that. Those who fought and died in our wars did not do so for safety. They died to defend liberty and the essential character of America from foreign ideologues who hate individualism, hate liberty and hate the very idea of limits on governance.

I sometimes wish I could agree with the anarchist wing that we could completely do without a State. My decades of personal experience and historical reading say otherwise. We need that monstrous ravening beast on occasion. Our problem is how do we keep it starved, chained and caged in the interim? That is a question the founders of America wrestled with. All things considered, they did about as well as could be hoped. It is indeed as they said: the defense of Liberty is the work of every generation.

Our job now is to wrest freedoms back from the beast that were taken in the name of defense. (Am I the only one who thinks we should have a Department of War and make it damn clear what it is for?) I consider that excuse tedious and just plain wrong. Defense to me means going over there (like we did) and kicking the crap out of the enemy on their home ground. It also means people at home must defend their liberty by risking their lives on a day to day basis. They must take a personal responsibility for stopping terrorists or at least making them appear failures.

People who whinge and cry into cameras for The State to 'protect them' are simply weak and contemptible. One expects that from dependent children: not from free adults. An adult stares coolly at the distant watching enemy and shows them that killing a few thousand of us will accomplish nothing except get us pissed off and the enemy and his next of kin and entire way of life very dead.

As Heinlein said: "You can never defeat a free man. The most that you can do is kill him."

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

- Sam Harris, rebutting the daft charge that a denial of belief in the afterlife or a supreme being must open the doors to hell on earth.

I started off wanting to cheer this article - an angry denunciation of the rich folk who often back Green causes - but I then began to wonder whether I was falling for what amounts to an ad hominem argument, and felt rather ashamed of myself. To be sure, it is true that many greenies are extremely well off, or comfortable members of a middle class that feels guilty about material wealth - the legacy of all kinds of crap cultural and political ideas - but is it really a killer argument that a cause X or Y is backed by rich folk like Zac Goldsmith or Peter Melchett? What counts in the end is are their ideas right or wrong? For instance, Bjorn Lomborg is a sharp debunker of eco-cant and I think his take on the more extreme forms of greenery is accurate, but what does it matter whether Lomborg is a middle class Danish academic, heir to a massive fortune, or a humble shop worker?

There is a broader point here. At the Libertarian Alliance conference last weekend, I could not help reflecting on the many posh, incredibly rich folk who were old fashioned liberals (or Whigs, as they used to be called). The walls of the National Liberal Club - a fine institution - are adorned with wonderful portraits of gentlemen in frock coats and women in elegant dresses, or stern-looking 19th century businessmen and industrialists. One of the benefits of having an independent income is that it gives a group of people time to think about certain issues that cannot be done by someone working long hours for a salary and who has to please a boss; independence of means also can encourage independence of mind.

So Brendan O'Neil is wrong on this occasion, although I share his skepticism on green scares 100%. I do not give a monkey's whether Jonathan Porritt is posh or not; it is his reactionary ideas to roll back the glories of modern industrial civilisation that bother me very much.

He could have taken his article to this conclusion but perhaps he thought the baggage that would come with it would distract from his intended points. In order for my 'friendly amendment' to make sense, it is important to understand what "multiculturalism" really means. Multiculturalism is not a recent ideology. Only the name is new. Most of you are far more familiar with it as "separate but equal". Wikipedia says:

Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural and religious groups, with equal status.

Separate but equal ... segregationism. Multiculturalism as an ideology is diametrically opposed to integration and assimilation. Some have noted a difference in the formation of terrorists in America as compared with Europe but without necessarily attributing it to America's still comparatively high cultural emphasis and expectation of newcomers to assimilate.

The absence of significant terrorist attacks or even advanced terrorist plots in the United States since Sept. 11 is good news that cannot entirely be explained by increased intelligence or heightened security. It suggests America’s Muslim population may be less susceptible than Europe’s Muslim population, if not entirely immune, to jihadist ideology. In fact, countervailing voices may exist within the American Muslim community.

So what does this have to do with Richard Miniter?

He wrote an excellent article published in The American Legion Magazine reviewing several researcher's findings on what traits terrorists have in common.

Miniter says [my underscore]:

Terrorism is an extension of politics by deadly means. Its goals are inherently political, not economic. The chief aim of most significant terrorist campaigns – from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to al-Qaeda – is to force a government to yield sovereign control to the terror group over some slice of territory. ... These are not economic goals, but political ones.

I emphasized that point because wherever control is extended, whether in the banlieues of France, by withdrawal of troops from other regions by Spain, or communities anywhere in the first world where policing is stymied and made ineffective by a cultural barrier, terrorists have achieved their goal and are ready to extend their ambitions.

In his review of the studies, Miniter makes a list of three phases in the making of a terrorist.

Alienation. Sageman’s sample reveals that 80 percent are in some way totally excluded from the society in which they live. They are foreign students who do not fit in, or they are immigrants to Europe who do not assimilate. Seventy percent of the terrorists in Sageman’s sample joined a terror group when they were living outside their home countries.

This is where multiculturalism excels. By preventing pressures for, and benefits of assimilation, multiculturalism creates and entrenches precisely the metrocosms where terrorism best germinates. Healthy societies embrace newcomers. While sometimes sloppy or crude, this social embrace is always far better in the long run than encapsulating aliens in a cocoon of 'respect'. This misguided segregation and self censorship is the surest way to leave people from other cultures feeling alien and unwelcome.

Personal bonds. Eighty-eight percent of terrorists in the Sageman study are related by blood, marriage or friendship to other terrorists. Sixty percent worship at one of 10 mosques worldwide or attended one of two now-closed schools in Indonesia. "You’re talking about a very select, small group of people," Sageman concludes.

Like this one, perhaps? Once a mindset of terrorism has caught flame, it needs protection and encouragement to develop. It benefits from cultural isolation with highly constrained outside contact and networks independent of the host culture. There must be cultural barriers in place that confine bonding and loyalties to the like-minded. Terrorism cannot thrive in a diverse and interactive community where the structure of the society compels interaction with the larger community. We see this also in some communities in the US where it is considered preferable to shield a violent criminal than to 'snitch' to the outside police.

Group dynamics. Once a network of friendships evolves into a cell, certain group dynamics take over. Cell members feel they cannot betray their friends. The suicide bombers in Spain are a perfect example, Sageman writes. "Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, 'Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.' Individually, they probably would not have done it.

Once the mindset is established and the ambition is formed, it needs to grow, protected, so that it can finish its material and spiritual phase of preparation. It must be located in a place wherethe law and law enforcement is held at bay and, when it cannot be, is at least unable to recognize or understand the dynamics and significance of what little it does see. Terrorism comes from a social group that seals itself against outside discovery and investigation.

Multiculturalism allows each layer of protection to exist like a matryoshka doll. The inner most doll is the terrorist with each of the outer dolls representing another of the necessary shells protecting it. It is this final phase at which most of our interventions are occurring. It should be small consolation to us that we are catching terrorists only after they leave the protection of the many shells and begin taking position for their attack, when we are simultaneously harboring the incubation of a steady supply of them as a consequence of our multicultural policies.

We need to recognize Multiculturalism for what it is. "Separate but equal" in a politically correct wrapper.

Jim Henley has kicked off a fair old discussion buzz on the blogs in asking the question: do animals have rights? My short answer right away is they do not as the term rights only makes sense applied to humans because humans, being actually or potentially rational creatures, need freedom to exercise that rational faculty, which is not automatic, and hence doctrines of rights have evolved. Humans, by their nature, need liberty to survive and flourish because of how our minds work. Dogs and bunny rabbits do not.

Well, that is what I have thought for a long time. But the fuzzy bits that you get with these sort of broad claims have started to bother me. A dog, for example, does not have a 'volitional consciousness' in the same way that a human being does, but the dog can respond to signals and its environment; it may not be able to form complex plans, but it can change its behaviour ever so slightly. So a dog needs an element of freedom to survive, too. So if rights are necessary for the furtherance of life, then perhaps they also apply to some other sentient creatures besides we humans. I still think the answer is no, since rights also entail the capacity to respect the rights of others: a vicious dog is not bothered about such things, let alone a white shark or even - may Perry forgive me - a hippo.

And then of course, if we start to cut off the application of rights for any creature that does not fully fit the Aristotelian concept of a 'rational animal', where does that leave the mentally handicapped, or very young babies that have not yet formed a rational capacity? I think the in the former case, we regard the handicapped as having lost or never acquired something that humans normally would have, but our sheer sense of solidarity and compassion for the frail means we treat the handicapped with respect and care and rightly so. But of course we do not allow severely handicapped people to perform potentially dangerous jobs and in practice, such people tend to be placed under pretty serious constraints about what they can do. The same goes for very young children, or aged people suffering from mental deterioration to do with age.

But I must admit that our attitudes towards animals are strange at times. I do not shoot or hunt animals for 'sport' - if it was sport, they would be able to shoot back - and I despise factory farming, think people who are cruel to animals deserve to have their gonads removed, and think that cruelty to other species diminishes us as human beings. But the problem is, I really, really feel in the mood for a big cheeseburger.

Tibor Machan, the libertarian philosopher - and thoroughly nice chap - gives the standard classical liberal argument for why animal rights do not exist. I strongly urge commenters to take a look at the links on Jim Henley's post I have linked to above.

Is there an afterlife or is death the end?

When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be 'free'. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot - and I doubt that - he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free - it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life 'ought' to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, "Why should health, clean water or defence be free"? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all.

To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be 'free' is not, alas, all that easy in today's politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a 'right', then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army?

I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about "the right to free health care". Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a 'right'.

Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of 'welfare rights' and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libertarians are uninterested in preserving certain old traditions and cultures

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

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

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

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

I am quite a fan of the fiction and some of the non-fiction of Ayn Rand, but I am the first to concede that some of the people who call themselves Objectivists are an assorted bunch, to put it politely. I have little time for some of the "official" Big-O Objectivists, like Leonard Peikoff, although I enjoy the writings of Tara Smith very much. The group of folk who liked Rand's broad ideas but detested the narrow-mindedness and paranoia of some of the "official" group broke off, under the leadership of Dr. David Kelley, to form groups like The Objectivist Center. I like the TOC crowd and have corresponded with a few of them. I subscribe to The New Individualist, the monthly journal edited by the great Bob Bidinotto. What is so refreshing about it is that one does not get lots of shrilll lectures or dense philosophical treatises, but an engaging and assertive writing style coupled with an often impish sense of humour and enjoyment of the good things in life. It is a cracking read, in fact. Bob is also addicted to thriller novels, which puts him in the same bracket as me.

Okay, enough creeping from me, now for the nasty part. In the April print edition - the web version does not appear to be up yet - there are two articles that struck some decidedly jarring notes. The first, by Roger Donway, argues that basically, the late Milton Friedman was not a good advocate of capitalism and individualism, and in fact he used arguments that play straight into the hands of socialists. (I am not making this up). The second article, by Bidinotto, includes a defence of the use of torture in 'emergency' situations, although Bob does not define 'emergencies' very clearly and leaves begging the question about who gets to decide such matters. But I have pretty much argued on this torture issue before and will not repeat myself here. So I will focus instead on what Roger Donway has to say about Friedman.

To try to make this point, Donway argues that Friedman's attack on the idea that firms have "social" responsibilities itself rests on a sort of utilitarian basis. Does it?

Friedman argued that the executives of companies have a duty to create the maximum value for their shareholders, and nothing else. Donway thinks this means that Friedman was saying that a CEO must therefore be the cowering servant of his stockholders. Well, Roger, if shareholders own the company and not the CEO, then it does rather look as if the CEO should be bound by the wishes of those shareholders. Does Roger Donway imagine that if, say, the chief executive of BP or Wal-Mart runs these firms badly and is called to account by shareholders, that such a CEO is entitled to tell said shareholders to sod off? Of course not. If the CEO does not want to be a servant of his owners, then the solution is pretty straightforward: organise a management buyout. This is in fact precisely what has been happening in recent years. Emboldened by cheap credit and a strong stock market, firms have been taken off the listed stock market by private equity firms like KKR and Blackstone, and one of the incentives for businessmen is that they no longer are held account by all those frightfully common shareholders. Donway's argument seems to be an argument against mass shareownership. He seems to be saying that owners of a company should let CEOs run their firms as they see fit and keep their traps shut.

Consider this passage by Donway:

"By Friedman's standard, Walt Disney was not a creative genius who sold stock so that he would have capital to pursue his vision on a grand scale. He was just somebody who had been hired as an "employee" by his stockholders and thus was obligated to do what the majority of his stockholders wished."

Wait a minute. If I set up a company and later, decide to issue stock, I dilute my ownership of the firm. Dilution of ownership is the price one pays for tapping the capital market for capital. One hopes that the owners will appreciate that their own financial self-interest rests with letting the creator of the business run it how he or she thinks fit, but if I am investing in someone else's firm, then I acquire ownership in part of that firm, and a form of control. If a shareholder does not own the firm in any meaningful sense, as in being able to vote at AGMs and object to enormous CEO payouts for crap performance, then Donway is making an extraordinary claim here.

I do agree that Donway might have a point in saying that Friedman tends to make the case for private business and so on in largely consequentialist terms, although judging my Friedman's passionate advocacy of issues like abolishing military conscription, for example, I find it hard to believe that Chicago University's most famous academic was not also driven by a deep attachment to liberty and the idea of the sovereign individual. Just because a man makes the case for freedom on utilitarian grounds does not mean he might be blind to the other ways of defending freedom.

I believe that Milton Friedman is one of the greatest defenders of liberty in our modern times, just as Rand is, in a very different way. I think parsing a few sentences to detect some apparently socialistic or, horrors, 'altruistic' tendencies in Friedman is scholasticism gone mad. I don't doubt that Friedman admired the heroism, skill and creativity of entrepreneurs, but he also realised that businessmen best achieve their goals by persuading people to buy their products and invest in their firms. To persuade, you have to consider what people want. Sometimes, objectivists give the impression that this process is rather demeaning. Actually trying to figure out what people want is often quite difficult. That does not mean that those wants are admirable, of course. A brilliantly successful maker of soap opera TV is still producing what I regard as junk. Not all the products of capitalism are admirable. The point is that what is admirable and what is not does not get decided by the state. And no-where do I think that Friedman argued otherwise.

There has been a bit of a backlash against what might be called the "self-esteem" movement in psychology and education in the United States and elsewhere. Here is an item. It is certainly true that a lot of intellectually vapid rubbish has been written about this. For a lot of the time, it seems, "self-esteem" is nothing more than a desire to be freed from judgement, hard work and effort.

I think there is a danger that in the backlash, that the baby gets chucked out with the bathwather, however. If you think about it, self-esteem is about the idea that as human beings, we are both competent to live and worthy of achieving happiness on this earth. This has nothing to do with a vague, dope-induced "feel-good" sort of sentiment, but is something quite different. Achieving happiness and believing that one is deserving of that is often quite hard. In a culture soaked in guilt about material wealth, where people are constantly told to feel bad about prosperity and "selfish individualism", it is actually quite gutsy for someone to stand against all this. If one thinks about it, self-esteem, properly understood, is a key component of the idea of human rights. If people are entitled to pursue happiness and the good life, then they need rights to protect and advance that.To believe in the idea of the sovereign individual, one has to believe that individuals are competent to decide their lives and also worthy of such. And a self-confident, happy and proud person is surely what a healthy, liberal civil society needs. I fear that a lot of the people now bashing the self-esteem movement are not just sensible skeptics about the latest fads to come out of academia, but also collectivists and authortarians who fear what might happen if people really do want to pursue happiness and self-fulfilment.

This classic on self-esteem is always worth a read, by Dr. Nathaniel Branden. And let's not forget the important Victorian tradition of "self improvement", starting with the great Samuel Smiles' Self Help, which is much more than just getting seriously rich. There is a lot of chaff out there, but a lot of wheat as well.

The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention.

Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one's taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the 'news' that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the 'story' and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a 'story' at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would).

Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class - printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, "So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?", which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, "economics is an emotional issue for socialists", or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word "emotional". Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by "emotion" is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as "emotional" - though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about 'scientific socialism'. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in.

Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain's greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again.

Another episode of "The Trap' has been shown... I gave it a pass given the low quality of scholarship and the high level of 'argument by personal attack' in the first one. It seems this low brow method was used against other targets in the latest episode, this time with the author of Public Choice Theory as one of the targets.

First a basic primer for the recent commenter to my earlier article. The personal life of a creative person has nothing to do with whether their creation is right or wrong. That decision is made in the marketplace of ideas and in the appropriate research journals. Anyone who thinks otherwise has something brown leaking out their ears.

If we judged ideas by the personal life of the creator, we would toss Vincent Van Gogh's paintings in the bin. The man was a nutter who cut off his ear. Obviously his paintings must be garbage. Or maybe the whole basis of cybernetics is wrong! After all, Turing was gay! All those right wing conspiracy types must obviously think anything he created must be wrong! And Einstein? That wild haired fruitcake? Marx? A drunken womanizer!

Argument by ad hominem will get no one anywhere with anyone at Samizdata.

It also helps to have some knowledge of the subjects on which you expostulate, or to at least state your areas of ignorance out front. The idea that public workers do not work to make life better for their families just like anyone else is absurd: and that is what saying 'Public Choice Theory is wrong' means. Suggesting that markets will always 'collapse to a point' is absurd and counter-factual. It is not OFCOM that makes BBC 'better'. It is competition with the high production values of programs from elsewhere that are indeed (more) free market than the UK in this respect. The rhetorical concept which is thus indirectly espoused by our commenter that "REGULATION is INDIVIDUALISM" is just plain silly.

I invite you all to read the comment on that previous article and disassemble the commenter's argument into its weak component parts as I have not the time to do so at the moment.

Since one of our readers has broached the subject... I too have just watched The Trap (a polemical on BBC2). This is an attempt at a deconstruction of individualism which uses some of the most heavy handed propaganda tricks I have seen in a very long time.

I am sure some of our other writers will jump in with extensive articles so I will just set the stage. A presenter, recognizable by their voice... and I will leave the filling in of identity as an exercise to the listener, did interviews of assorted luminaries of the anti-statist fight. He then added voice overs along with music with a very threatening low frequency bass sound and interspersed 'artistic' troubling images to associate them in the minds of the audience with the 'bad ideas' of those nasty individualist anti-state persons.

He goes after Hayek, Laing and Buchanan among others; he demonizes game theory and the 'Prisoners Dilemma'... without ever mentioning Dawkins and how individualistic co-operation falls out of the more realistic 'Iterated Prisoners Dilemma'.

Have at it angry commentariat! There is much raw meat ready to be ground into hamburger and seared on the barbie!

I just picked up Tuesday's Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon 'documentary' Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues - global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality - while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.

He is right. Those are the real issues. He is on the wrong side of them mostly, but they are worth arguing about. When he suggests that the delusional state of politics is caused insufficient democracy, he is wrong about that too as there is actually too much, the principal form of governance in the English-speaking world being imbecility howlback. But at least he has identified the problem.

Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.