From NRO 'The Campaign Spot':

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

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

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

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

Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes' services - despite his prosecuting them in his day job - and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:

People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else's, period.

John Derbyshire, the UK-born commentator who writes for the right wing US publication National Review, has this comment, which reminds me of why I am not a conservative:

Prostitution, like drug trafficking, is one of those zones where libertarianism bumps up against the realities of human nature.

Wrong. Prostitution and drug trafficking, which are both illegal, demonstrate perfectly the libertarian argument that if you ban trades between consenting adults (children are another matter), then criminals and the plain reckless will provide them, damaging society as a whole.

To a lover of liberty, it is hard to see why a woman shouldn't sell her favors if she wants to. Trouble is, weak or dimwitted women end up in near-slavery to unscrupulous men, and I think there's a legitimate public interest in not letting that happen.

Oh come on. One might as well say that liberty is only for intelligent, smart people who write for right-wing Washington magazines. Of course, unintelligent, feeble-minded people screw up, but the case for liberty is that people are better off if they are presumed to be best able to judge their own interests. The fact that some cannot do this does not overturn that point. Encouraging personal responsibility is good for society as a whole (sorry to use such a collectivist expression) even if it is true that some individuals are not good at taking such responsibility.

The best private sector solution would be a guild system, like the geishas had in old Japan. There'd be entry standards for the guild. Women would have to pass exams, and have some entertainment skills other than the obvious ones. The guild would police itself, expelling miscreants. Freelancing outside the guild could be under strong social disapproval, even made illegal.

He is talking about a form of trade union closed shop for prostitutes, sanctioned by law. But then what about the businesses that try to gouge concessions from politicians to get into these closed-shop deals? How would such 'guilds' be able to start up? What about registration fees? I can see a wonderful opportunity for political and business corruption here.

No, sometimes we ideologues have it right: the simplest, most radical option is also the most practical one. Even if you morally disapprove of prostitution - I do not - as a practical matter, legalising it makes lots of sense. Compared to what goes on down in most parliaments, prostitution is a noble calling.

The United Nations and the various NGOs which operate within its orbit, which naturally sees the world in terms of nation-states, regards statelessness as a 'problem' and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights include the phrase "everyone has the right to a nationality".

Yet as the world becomes more cosmopolitan and globalised, the primary threats to security are themselves non-state based (such as radical Islam) and private trade without the intermediation of states has never been easier in the dawning age of virtualised networked economics. Could we one day see a time in which many see modern narrow concepts of nationality and 'citizenship' of any Westphalian style state as an imposition rather than a 'right'?

Anders Sandberg, gets quoted on the emerging debate on smart drugs and their impact upon the education system in the future. Critics have a dangerous vision of self-medicating nerds plotting to ace their exams and pull ahead of their rivals rather than working out occult symbols, raising D'hoffryn, and attempting to end the world.

“Cod liver oil is taken as a cognitive enhancer,” says Dr Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates how technology will affect the human race.

“Even something as simple as eating a biscuit at the right moment can improve your performance, yet no one would complain about that except your dentist. It doesn’t matter how you bring about change. What matters is the result.

“Surely, anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing,” says Dr Sandberg.

Smart drugs are an emergent tool and the Times Educational Supplement acknowledges that there are forty in production. Modafinil and ritalin are known quantities but "brain botox" sounds really scary. I have this vision that the drug erases all neural wrinkles and a race of golden haired cuckoos reduce their school to ash and then mingle menacingly round the local offy, destroying the effects of the drugs with a liberal dose of cider.

Amusement aside, there is a report expected from government in the next month on the rules that could govern 'smart drugs'. This will be one of the strongest tests yet, of how the government plans to resolve the tension between the right to self-medicate and their horror of self-improvement. People who abolish grammars will not promote cognitive enhancement: they are unlikely to abandon mediocrity after it has taken them so many decades to achieve.

On some, if not all issues, Rod Liddle is a man of sound views. He loathes the nanny state; he is unconvinced that we need to crack down on freedom of speech in order to avoid giving offence to religious groups. He is a patriot. In this week's edition of the Spectator, where other authors rant away splendidly, Liddle rails against the six-month-old government ban on smoking in all public buildings, including privately owned ones (apart from private homes), such as pubs and restaurants. He makes a good case and some of his paragraphs are cheer-out-loud material:

Of course, one shouldn’t drop a policy simply because the pubs are having a rather hard time of it as a result. But in which case, don’t bother to pretend that they’re not, that actually there are queues all down the street consisting of shiny, happy people who wish nothing more than to drink in a new, healthy, smoke-free environment. Stop lying. Say, instead, that the smoke ban is putting pubs out of business but actually we couldn’t give a toss. Truth is, the government — and the health charities — are caught by their previous, gerrymandered poll findings which purported to suggest that the entire country was in favour of a complete ban on smoking everywhere, when — and again, do a quick vox pop if you doubt this — the reverse was true. People would like to see genuinely smoke-free areas of restaurants and pubs, for sure — but only chose a complete ban on smoking when the alternative on the poll sheet was ‘or would you like your testicles sawn off?’.

Or this:

Perhaps it is true, though, that because of the ban, I shall live for ever, for which many thanks, Dawn. But I doubt it; we will have recourse to one or another means of killing ourselves, such as driving a car (4,000 deaths per year), drinking more (40,000 deaths per year) or visiting a doctor (30,000 deaths per year through negligence or incompetence: never forget that figure. It exceeds the numbers killed through smoking-related illness. And it really, really hacks off the doctors).

But as always with Mr Liddle, the carelessness with which he chucks around numbers makes me wonder if any reader will want to get past his first paragraph:

I am still not sure what I hate the most about this government: its decision to invade Iraq and thus either effect or facilitate the murder of 500,000 Iraqis, or its decision to stop me from smoking in pubs and restaurants.

500,000 Iraqis? Is that correct? Liddle gives no source for this or attempts to do so later in the piece. Now Rod may be right to suggest that the overthrow of a power-mad, dangerous dictator was even worse than letting him stay in power (I occasionally wonder why a certain type of right-winger is so indulgent towards evil men like Saddam). But if he is going to make an argument with statistics as part of his core argument, it is probably not a great idea to kick off an argument with a massive figure based on, whatever.

Oh, in case anyone asks, I don't smoke, except on National No Smoking Day.

The controversial Australian euthanasia advocate and doctor Phillip Nitschke has been arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, and books that he had in his possession have been seized. Nitschke, the moving spirit behind Exit International, had gone to New Zealand to host some 'workshops' on euthanasia.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, this seems to me to be a clear case of 'thoughtcrime', and New Zealand authorities deserve nothing but scorn for this.

I, Perry Anthony de Havilland, hereby declare that in the event I die and my body comes into the possession of the State, under no circumstances whatsoever may the State, in the form of the National Health Service or any other component of the State, harvest my organs on the grounds of implied consent. I explicitly and absolutely refuse consent for my organs to be harvested.

This is because the State's plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive. Consent to harvest my organs for medical purposes may, however, be granted (or refused) by my designated next of kin, and no one else.

I am prepared to believe that there may be some things (though not many of them) that are of such public benefit that they should be provided at the general expense. That is not to say that I think that if something is good it should be compulsory. Let alone that if it sounds like a good, that is justification for its being compulsory.

But when you are dealing with the state, "free" does not mean 'free as in free speech', nor does it mean 'free as in free beer'. It means 'compulsory'. If the government is advertising free beer, it wants everybody drunk; prepare to have your head held under if you don't feel like a tipple just now.

Hence this Guardian headline, a classic of pusilanimity against spin:

Plan to give every child internet access at home

The actual story is somewhat, er... more nuanced:

Parents could be required to provide their children with high-speed internet access under plans being drawn up by ministers in partnership with some of the country's leading IT firms.

[...]

The initiative is part of a major push which could also see the parents of every secondary school student given access to continuous online updates on their child's lessons, performance and behaviour as early as next year. So-called "real-time reporting", which was first mooted in the government's children's plan last month, could be extended to primary schools within two years.

A sub less versed in the cult of the benign state might have abstracted that as:

"Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials."

Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.

Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls's speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn't the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies - in this case a para-Party body - last a long time? It bears close reading:

Excerpt I:

Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.

That is what our Bill sets out to achieve - new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people - and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ....
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:

* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.

But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.

Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement - very much a last resort - but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.

Phew - not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be - they'll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, "building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights...". It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?

Don't you love that "our young people"? Völkisch, nicht wahr?

Excerpt II:

The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more - GH] is advice and guidance - so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.

First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.

Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.

Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.

Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area - setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.

So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.

Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers 'will not be jailed' (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance," ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what's offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people's children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others.

Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn't include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?

Teenagers who refuse to stay in education until they are 18 will not face jail, Schools Secretary Ed Balls insisted ahead of new legislation to raise the leaving age.

The reform - hailed as one of the biggest in education for half a century - will be included in the first Queen's Speech of Gordon Brown's premiership on Tuesday.

Mr Balls said the legislation, which will raise the age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, will be backed by a "robust regime" of support and sanctions including spot fines and court action.

Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls!

The BBC is reporting one of the most grotesque things I have seen for a while...

Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain "sleepwalking" into a crisis, a report has concluded.

So, you are not responsible for what you stick in your own damned mouth. Think about that and the implications that pulse out of those words like a neutron bomb's radiation.

I have long said that in the western world the fascist approach to control (you may 'own' the means of production but you must used them in accordance with national political directives, i.e you are completely regulated and thus have liability without control) has completely triumphed over the socialist approach to control (the state, euphemised as 'The People', directly owns everything and you are simply a politically directed deployable unit of labour). And of course 'labour' means you and what you do with your body. This particular means of production is already only 'owned' by you provided you use it in a politically approved manner. And that will soon include what you may eat or may not eat.

This BBC article makes me wonder if the time to start throwing rocks could be closer than we like to think.

Pondering some of the recent stories about changes to UK inheritance taxes (the government's 'cut' is in fact less impressive than it first appears), it occurs to me that there is one fairly respectable argument for worrying about huge inheritances, namely, that if people who work incredibly hard watch as other folk sail into positions of power and business wealth through the pure luck of having a rich family inheritance rather than through merit, it can be demoralising and encourage resentment against the broader capitalist system. Hence, so the argument goes, even though inheriting wealth per se is not wrong - it is the right of X to transfer legitimately acquired property to whomever he or she wants, period - it is sensible to foster an economic environment in which people feel they get a fair shake at what life has to offer.

I once was quite attracted by this idea of taxing inheritance to encourage some sort of 'level playing field', but I am no longer so sure. For a start, if an economy is expanding rapidly, it is hard to see how the presence of rich kids really demoralises less fortunate people. The economic process is not a zero sum game. Arguably, a sense of anger ("I'll show those rich bastards") may even spur the latter group to work incredibly hard to overtake the former. Rich kids may find they have to work harder, too, to impress people in certain ways who resent their wealth, and so on (I have seen this in action).

If a society is a closed one and the state controls most, if not all, of the key parts of an economy, then the existence of a small but influential case of rich people able to pass on their wealth without hindrance might also be a problem, but the solution to that is not to tax inheritance, but shrink the state.

A final point worth repeating over and over is the old example provided by the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher. He famously trashed egalitarian attacks on inherited wealth by rejecting the model that egalitarians use of society as a justification for their views. He said, if memory serves, that egalitarians tend to view life as a closed circuit, like an athletics track, and that if a person inherits a fortune, it is like an athlete starting a race 10 yards ahead of his fellows. But there is no fixed end to which people in society are racing, as they are in a 100m sprint. Instead, society is simply the short-hand term we use to describe the network of relationships between people exchanging things with each other to get what they want. To say that if I inherit my father's dashing good looks or wealth means I have an "unfair" advantage over X or Y is meaningless in the context of an open society.

There are many practical, utilitarian reasons to object to inheritance tax (although other taxes are arguably even worse). But the moral case against it also needs to be made and the collectivist, zero-sum assumptions on which anti-inheritance views are made also need to be challenged for the errors they are. We cannot expect that job to be done by George Osborne.

(Update: over at the left-wing blog Crooked Timber, a contributor argues that the focus for inheritance tax, which is regarded as a good thing, should be on the beneficiaries, not the bequesters. But of course; if you are an egalitarian, it is natural to want to push the focus away from the right of people to dispose of their property to those that receive it. But the comment makes no reference whatever to why inequality that may arise from inheritance is in and of itself a bad thing. Such inequality is just assumed to be a bad thing, period. No actual argument, from first principles, is given as to why).

There is one thing more wicked in the world than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.

- W.K. Clifford (1845 - 1879)

In the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 there is the following letter from Lesie Watson of Swansea (in Wales).

Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all introduced smoking bans without problems. But we read "thousands of smokers defy [English] ban" (report, July 2). What does this say about the English?

If the report is true Lesie, it means that there is still sometimes a reason to be proud to be English.

The most invidious part of 'health authoritarianism' is that it takes a very reasonable aspect of a state's responsibility, that of defending against the truly collective threat of infectious plagues, and debases it to interfere with non-infectious diseases which only pose a risk to people who voluntarily enter private property where certain very obvious conditions pertain.

And so we have the smoking ban on enclosed non-residential private property in Britain being imposed by classifying private property as 'public places'. Never mind that you do not have to enter that privately owned property if you do not like the smell of it, or that the owners should be able to exclude people they want to exclude (such as smokers or for that matter, non-smokers) or that employees who do not like the working conditions can quit and go work somewhere else.

No, the political class loves the idea of eliminating emergent civil society and extending political control ever deeper into people's lives (this is usually described as making things "more democratic"), and the idea that private property is actually private is an intolerable obstacle to those whose world view is based on violence backed control of the lives of others.

Many people have a deep seated psychological need to see others controlled, not because they are genuinely threatened by them but because they simply get off on controlling other people. The world is full of curtain twitching busy bodies who feel enlivened by calling down the power of the state on those of whom they disapprove for no other reason that it 'empowers' them (it used to be 'queers' who got reported, now it is different types of nonconformists). No totalitarian system that has ever come to power has been able to sustain itself for long without appealing to this all too common psychologically defective demographic, relying on denouncement and informers to perpetuate a political order.

And the only way to resist is to, well, resist. Find ways not to obey the rules. Subvert the meaning of statutes. Do not accept the 'rightness' of the prevailing bigotries. Speak out against the orthodoxies of though that underpin the control freaks. Call them what they are. Just find ways to be awkward, find ways not to cooperate, and confront those who assume they on on the moral higher ground and pour contempt on their world view. Just do not meekly cooperate.

It is a story told of more than one matinée idol, and no doubt actionable, so let us call him The Star.

The Star was rumoured in a big Hollywood prostitution case to have been one of the most regular [I almost wrote "biggest"] clients of the latest martyred madam. An interviewer caught up with him.

- "Mr Star, is it true you hired call-girls."
- "Now I'm not going to comment on the case, and I never had any contact with Miss X; but it is no secret I have used call-girls plenty of times in the past."
- "But Mr Star, you are known as one of the sexiest men in the world. You could surely have all the girls you want for free. Why pay anyone for sex?"
- "I didn't pay them for sex. I paid them to go away afterwards."

It seems our madly interfering government now wants to police our private lives a bit more closely, and thereby make them a bit riskier. According to The Times:

Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.

The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body. It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.

Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them. [...]

The reforms would apply to both opposite and same-sex couples in “an intimate relationship.” But the Law Commission emphasises that the plans are about granting individuals a remedy, not rights, when they split, and says that the measures will not undermine marriage but make the law fairer.

A marriage or civil partnership is a clear, deliberate, decision. I don't think the state should control the form of family that is possible, but at least those particular controlled forms are optional, and formally delineated. This opens the way for officialdom to delineate and the courts to investigate any relationship for an actionable degree of intimacy, and for divorce lawyers to open a whole new field of speculative actions. Divorce lawyers will just love the idea that there's no minimum length of 'intimate relationship' involved, and that unilateral reliance by one party can create a liability for the other. And they've been agitating for it for years (e.g. in Solicitors Family Law Association, Fairness for Families: Proposals for Reform on the Law on Cohabitation, 2000 - sorry, can't find that online).

It would be an impressive feat on behalf of the state to make both marriage less attractive (some of its appurtenances - for those who want them - would come free) and at the same time to make sex and friendship outside marriage more risky - and possibly more risky the more affluent you are.

It might do some good of course, undoubtably there are people who are mistreated by partners or mistaken about their rights. But to punish every other single person in Britain for the cruelty or ignorance of a few is an appalling way to go. The parade of motivated winners tells you what you need to know: mad clingy girlfriends, scrounging scrubs of boyfriends, family lawyers, smug marrieds, investigators, officialdom, and prurient tabloids.

I can see a spin-off gain for the proprietors of anonymous, deniable, premises for lovers' assignations. (Brighton?) Perhaps the Argentinian or Japanese speciality hotel businesses would get emulated here. But that would still be risky for the rich and famous. The only people certain to come out with improved credit (in both senses): proper, professional, prostitutes.

Some people get disgusted - I guess it is the 'yuck!' factor - at the idea that a person can sell his or her own kidney for money, for example. We seem to live in an era of warped values about the donation and use of human body parts, as this article in Reason makes clear. It appears that in some jurisdictions, just about everyone is allowed to make money from the business of using human tissue and bone for medical purposes - except the people from whom the tissue and bone is taken (I think we can take it as read at a liberal blog like this that killing people for their body parts is wrong).

Virginia Postrel, the US-based writer, underwent surgery to give one of her own kidneys to a friend and made sure said friend is alive today (what a great woman Virginia is). As a classical free marketeer, Postrel does not understand why it is so terrible that such acts should be done for financial gain. She has a long and typically thoughtful piece on the subject here. She responds to those who fear that poor or gullible people might be led into selling their body parts out of financial desperation, but that is an argument about curbing poverty, not reducing human freedom. Ultimately, I own my body, and not the state, not the rest of the UK population, not Tony Blair, not god or the Great Cheese Monster in the sky. Of course, a "market in organs" may attract shysters and unscrupulous doctors, but as the Reason article I alluded to makes clear, there are plenty of shysters in the system now.

Of course, in a country like Britain where a lot of the population drink like fish, it is debatable whether anyone would want to buy our kidneys, or even take them for free.

The Edmonton Aging Symposium was held at the University of Alberta last weekend, and a number of important anti-aging scientists attended , such as Aubrey de Grey and Gregory Stock. The Symposium discussed the prospect of developing and implementing many anti-aging technologies, with the Methuselah Foundation and the Supercentenarian Research Foundation providing positive positions on the technology.

The Symposium featured a debate between Gregory Stock and Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for Bioethics, on the virtues and vices of anti-aging technology. Callahan's bioethics appears to be a code for denying individuals choice on the grounds that society has more urgent goals:

Dr Daniel Callahan, a renowned bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for bioethics, argues that focusing economic resources on aging science would be negligent for a society that’s faced with so many other pressing problems.

“Are there any present problems in society that would be helped by longer life? Global warming? Terrorism?” he urges, adding that “individual desire [for a longer life] is not legitimate.”

Callahan further speculates that although we may be able to extend life, we are unable to predict what the quality of that longer life would be. He suggests that there are other means to pursuing health in old age, and that pouring money into radical life-extending science might not be the answer.

“Most of the improvement in the health of the elderly is coming from the background socio-economic conditions …. something like 60 per cent of the improvements have come from that directive, rather than from medical care or medical research. It seems to me that there would be a fundamentally greater value of putting money into improving our understanding of prevention, lifestyle and behaviour issues,” he asserts.

Gregory Stock provided a reported response that did not reject the bioethicist's assertion that research funds, usually paid for by us, be redirected to societal goals:

His opponent, Dr Greg Stock, director of the program Medicine Technology and Society at UCLA, predicts exactly the opposite economic situation. He contends that the economic gains achieved by eliminating the diseases and detriments of aging would outweigh the costs of research.

“The savings in [medicare and social security] of extending the human health-span would be … so immense that that they would justify the rather modest amount of money that would be spent on research,” Stock states.

These incidental benefits would be byproducts of the research. Yet, we should be grateful that anti-aging research is tarred as immoral by bioethicists. Research into lifestyles and prevention is a code for science that justifies directed diet and behaviour. This will ensure that controls are placed on those behaviours, foods and enjoyable activities which conflict with the list of societal goals, as decided by the state.

Supporting anti-aging research is a private and public good.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has increasingly wielded its regulatory powers in recent years, as infertility treatments have become more common and diverse. Some of the regulator's decisions have been criticised as arbitrary or inappropriate, using an ethical calculus to coerce parental choice when it is not required. Their latest intervention is controversial, though based upon clinical outcomes.

At present, multiple embryos are implanted in the womb to increase the probability of a successful birth. This has potentially undesirable consequences if the health of the mother or the children is impaired. Studies have monitored infertility treatments and demonstrated these drawbacks.

Half of the mothers of IVF twins give birth prematurely and the babies are below the minimum ideal birth weight of 5lb. They run a much higher risk of dying, lung and heart problems, having cerebral palsy or developmental difficulties and facing chronic conditions as adults. Many spend time in special neonatal care units in hospitals. Mothers who conceive more than one baby after IVF are far likelier to suffer a miscarriage or dangerously high blood pressure than women who have one child naturally.

This should be viewed as additional information that clinicians would take into account when advising their patients and making a diagnosis or a recommendation. If the regulator had drawn attention to these studies and noted that inspectors would wish to see these taken into account during diagnosis, no observer could criticise such diligence. However, we live in New Labour Britain, home of targets and micromanagement:

Shirley Harrison, the HFEA's chair, will this week defend the decision to put medical safety above the rights of childless women to choose how many embryos are transferred. She will cite research showing that having just one embryo implanted does not reduce a woman's chance of conceiving.

Doctors will retain the freedom to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman rated a 'poor responder' to fertility treatment should still get two embryos. Clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF over time from 25 per cent to somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.

This is a decision that should rest between the doctor and the patient. If the patient is aware of the risks and responsibilities, they may then take the difficult decision required in this matter. It is not up to HFEA to usurp clinical practice and private judgement in this matter.

I read the headline of John Lloyd's article in the FT Magazine this week, and I read it again, and again. Every time it seemed to make less sense than before:

Personal politics: There are times when the government is right to intrude into the realm of private morality

Regardless of what it is or is not right for the government to do, state intrusion means something is no longer a matter of private morality, or morality at all. It is certainly not private, once the state is involved. And regulation displaces morality. The capacity for choice is required for morals to play a role.

Reading the article was even more perplexing. To the extent Lloyd's piece is about the Catholic/gay-adoption argument, it is as tedious as most of the vacuous discussion on the question. What engaged and enraged me were his premises. Mr Lloyd in this discussion treats the state as a kind of super person, possessed of its own opinions and moral sense, and that hectoring people who do not conform to those pseudo-desires is legitimate.

The morality of the welfare state depends on contribution and responsibility. Since some people don't contribute and many are irresponsible, the choices of those who do contribute and are responsible is [sic] either to tolerate the free riders, refuse to pay for the effects of their irresponsibility or trust the state to educate them.

False dichotomy and all, this is the authentic voice of the New Labour branch of civic republicanism: 'citizenship', which is to say personhood, defined by duty to the state-collective. He notes entirely accurately that:

[T]he British state has progressively, and under New Labour very significantly, delved deeper into both the prejudices and the private behaviour of citizens, and sought to reform both [...] ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order.

The square brackets there stand for the omission of two and three-quarter paragraphs, so apologists for the New Labour point of view may object that the last clause refers only to removing some disadvantages from homosexuals. But I am not being unfair. Ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order is the key to the project.

Despite there being other theories of the welfare state that I and other Samizdatistas might reject but that are less repugnant to human autonomy, we are now offered a Hobson's choice: be treated as drone in the sense of a worthless idler - or become a drone in the Borg sense, actually not a fertilising drone but a sterile ergate, emptied of all capacity for moral choice.

What is the eGovernmental equivalent of soft hands, marking the unproductive drones out for hounding to destruction of their dronish identity? Inadequate contribution. Failure to comply with whatever compliance is required.

You will not will incorrectly. You will comply.

In Australia, the federal government's propaganda tends to condescendingly heckle citizens about various issues that are pretty much always best left to the individual's discretion - not unlike the output from NuLabour's Ministry of Truth - similar beast, albeit with a more sinister bark. So in Britain you get this (probably one of the more egregious examples), and in Australia, this (ditto).

On balance, the naff Australian stuff is the lesser of two evils, but it is still deeply irritating, patronising bilge. Take the abovementioned 'understanding money really pays off' campaign the government is running via billboards and television commercials. Thanks so much for spending my tax money on delivering that sterling piece of advice - let me just make a note of it on my invisible typewriter. The most wasteful entity in society is wasting more of our money by telling us to mind our pennies! That is rich - even if we are not.

Still, it is exactly the sort of hypocritical, wealth-destroying enterprise one would expect the government to embark upon. However, it is pretty depressing when your (private sector) employer gets in on the act. I arrived home today to find the company I work for have decided to post me a brochure titled 'Safety At Home'. Apparently "every day is Safety Day - think safety 24/7". It is full of handy tips along the lines of "don't hold any part of your body over a boiling kettle - steam can be hotter than water" and "read labels before use...take notice of cautions and warnings" and "try not to stick your head in the oven when the gas is on but not lit - unless you feel suicidal. If you feel only slightly suicidal, keep reading this brochure and you will want to get it over and done with in no time at all." And in the foreword from our CEO:

We have produced this booklet as a reminder of the simple [really, painfully, embarrassingly simple - JW] things that we can all do outside the workplace to make sure we're thinking safety 24/7 (...) stay safe and keep well.

Where does a nice big steaming hot mug of "fuck the hell off!" flung at your nether regions fit into your Safety at Home recommendations, Mr CEO? And get the hell out of my house while you are at it, you finger-wagging ponce. Shareholders bankroll enough useless expenditure via the taxation system as things are; corporate nannies are not welcome. Give us our money back.

... on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty's Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph's legal editor explains:

[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.

Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been "involved in serious crime" - anywhere in the world.

To be "involved", you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.

And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.

Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.

Among the useful tasks accomplished on the Christmas visit to my mother's house was dealing with (i.e. disposing of) most of my old correspondence. They say that the difference between a radical and a conservative is 20 years. So what should I make of this?

Saxmundham, Suffolk. 14th March 1987

The Editor
The Independent

Sir,

If, as your profile today suggests, the tabloid papers have rehabilitated Boy George as a symbolic "victim of the pushers" then they do drug-users, and the rest of us, who have to support the costs of drug abuse, a great wrong. For they hold out to the user the most powerful and deceptive of excuses: "It isn't my fault; he made me do it."

Pushers only supply someone's demand, and taking a new drug is still a positive decision, even if the first one is free. Continuing a habit requires a long series of decisions to take one's poison rather than to do other things with one's time and money. It may feel like a forced choice, but the first step to freedom is to recognise that there is a choice involved. [We might elevate that to a general principle - GH, 2006]

The child's excuse can still apply: "But I didn't know... He lied to me. He made me do it." No pusher is under an obligation to be honest, no in-crowd to evaluate and announce the risks of an essentially exciting-because-surreptitious activity - why believe the authorities about this when it is palpably part of their desire to control you, and they lie about everything?

The greater the repression of drug-use, the more ruthless and dishonest will be the surviving suppliers. (Far from being the Mafia's enemy, the Drug Squad is its greatest friend, cutting down the competition and making control easier.)

No, the Great and the Good (and the tabloids) have it wrong. The cycle, of horror stories leading to unjustified fears, leading to repression, to ignorance, to gangsterism, more horrors, fears... obscures the relatively simple danger for the user, and vastly inflates the problem for everyone.

There is a step - and a difficult, but the only one - which can reduce in the long run the ignorant bravado, addiction, mess, disease, expense, accidental poisoning, purposeful deception, and organised crime stemming from heroin; the one which throws back all responsibility to the user, who must be able to say, "my decision," and "I made a mistake." Legalise it.

Yours truly,

Guy Herbert

Though there are some ways my opinions have evolved (I no longer accept, even for rhetorical purposes the mirror-magic conception of "organised crime", for example), I am still making the same point to a deaf establishment 20 years later. So, very nearly, is George.

Is there no mellowing path for a libertarian? Am I a singualar case of arrested development? Or is the generational reversal thesis sense when applied to musical and fashion-sense, nonsense on social and political questions?

The OR may not be exclusive, folks.

I must say that I like the style of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Rather than playing the game with mealy mouthed statements so typical of a lot of think-tanks, they push their ideas with a catchy boot-to-the-goolies like "Smoking is healthier than fascism". Not surprisingly this is available on a tee-shirt from those most righteous pranksters, Bureaucrash.

I feel a purchase coming on...

Ordinary Britons struggling to get on with their lives are being menaced by a small number of bullies who do not care about the rights of their victims. These 'Tsars', as they are sometimes known, impose themselves and their lifestyle choices on others with an almost psychopathic disregard for other people's viewpoints, and regardless of all attempts by police and others to maintain traditional values.

When the Government's antisocial behaviour tsar was out on patrol with the police on a housing estate last week, she was amazed to find that the officer was handing out sweets rather than enforcing Asbos.

- according to The Independent on Sunday

"Family intervention projects - I really believe this is the approach that will work," she said. "It ain't cheap and it also isn't easy. Basically it's the end of the road."

"The priority was to do families, because they have children, first. But we are working on doing something for chaotic adults where the same approach will be taken."

Ms Casey added she was working with Whitehall to adapt the centres to cater for single people.

She said other measures to tackle anti-social behaviour included plans to extend parenting courses across the country, and powers for imposing compulsory parenting orders.

"If you are not going to take parenting help then we are going to make you take parenting help," she said.

As the same interview is (puzzlingly) slightly differently reported by the BBC. Anyone would think that the Indy report did not sound tough enough, and was re-spun for presentation to the Beeb.

This anecdote from Ian Brown is just too much fun not to share: Killer wasp brings passport office to halt.

Any wasp-trainers out there? Your country needs you.

The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults - one third of the adult working population - will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.

It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing.

The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain "barred lists" preventing listed individuals from engaging in "regulated activities". "In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed." [cl.2(5)]

As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions.

Now things are slightly better, but there's a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case - the core of what the IBB would do - is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)].

The schedule of "regulated activity" is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you'll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested.

The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first.

Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient - even if you don't value your privacy, and are confident that theree's nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else - you'll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state - which is of course always perfect.

The government's plan to help the disadvantaged was outlined in its Social Exclusion Plan on Monday.

The moral basis of the Plan was "rights and responsibilities". That is, the right of the government to interfere in the lives of people it thinks don't know what's good for them, and the responsibility of these "customers" to acquiesce.

Mark Ballard pins it down precisely in The Register.

Where the people of Malaysia would be without their government to do their thinking for them, I really do not know.

Malaysian authorities have published a list of undesirable titles to prevent parents giving their children names such as Hitler, smelly dog or 007.

It is a classic 'Samizdata' story which allows us to make fun of the silly politicians but behind it is the serious point that the Malaysian government is arrogating for itself the right to have a say in what a citizen calls him or herself. A person's name is at the heart of their identity in many ways, and it is sad that governments think they have the right to interfere with whatever name a person chooses to call themselves.

Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:

David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.

At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”

Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.

Virginia Postrel, who recently donated an organ herself, writes:

Expecting people to take risks and give up something of value without compensation strikes me as far more blatant exploitation than paying them. I don’t expect soldiers or police officers to work for free, and I don’t think we should base our entire organ donation system on the idea that everyone but the donor should get paid. Like all price controls, that creates a shortage - in this case, a deadly one.

Further:

The issue of lost wages is a significant one, especially since kidney patients and their friends and families are disproportionately likely to be of lower socioeconomic status. In many cases, people who might be willing to serve as living donors simply cannot take the chance of financial ruin posed by losing a few weeks of pay (and that's assuming their understanding bosses would give them leave).

The National Kidney Foundation is shamefully, unbelievably trying to put a stop to any discussion of the use of market mechanisms to reduce the national organ shortage. They even wrote a letter to the AEI, urging them not to hold a debate on the matter.

Virginia has also written a column for Forbes (not available online for free, sadly) about how some prominent hospitals are actually refusing to do kidney transplants for people who have found their donors online or through other media. Hospitals which are denying patients legal, nonexperimental, life-saving surgery for ideological reasons include