Even as supplied by an unscrupulous underground market and taken blind by consumers in a variety of unsuitable ways, they really aren't very dangerous:

According to the ONS data, in 2010 there were more helium deaths [32] than cannabis, ecstasy, mephedrone and GHB related deaths put together.

'Helium?' you may ask... It's classed as a drug but no, it doesn't do anything. But it is so hard to buy anything reliably lethal in the UK that helium is a sophisticated means of self-asphyxiation for suicide. So even those 32 cases should not be classed under malign side effect of drug-use. Death in those cases was a positive result.

A disenfranchised population becomes an untrustworthy population, since it loses the habit of making its own decisions. The majority become childish in hundreds of ways, looking to the State as parent, complaining without displaying a willingness to any form of self-determination. The more liberty one has, the more indvidual responsibility is required of one to make rational, well-considered decisions in the context of one's social and personal life. Most of us are educated to think we are not capable of this when, in fact, most of us are thoroughly capable but simply lack either the circumstances or the determination to test ourselves. An authoritarian, paternalistic State encourages us in this belief, by its actions as well as by its rhetoric. By its very nature it creates a morally enfeebled, child-like population. This population in turn 'proves' its inability to control its own fate and consequently 'proves' the need for the paternalism which created it in the first place. There is no fundamental difference between Tory and Socialist paternalism.

- Michael Moorcock, The Retreat From Liberty, 1983

One Catherine Bennet has yet another article in the Guardian about that jam experiment. Hers is called Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?

It is not merely the chorus from anguished parents (and patients), that they cannot exercise choice where there is no spare capacity, that might give a rational education secretary pause, but a growing body of research indicating that too much choice is overwhelming. Gove will know of the much cited experiment with jam, by the US academic Sheena Iyengar, which found consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot if they had to choose from six varieties, rather than 24. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good.

Mr Eugenides says,

So, just to recap: a woman who used to live with a lord in a 365-room mansion, now in a household with a combined income of some quarter of a million pounds a year, has read a PR puff commissioned and paid for to advertise a price comparison website, and uses this as evidence that we should all just take what we're given by the state and shut up.

Ironically, price comparison websites are themselves a market mechanism for making choice easier.

I say, to Catherine Bennett and the next fifteen journalists to go into an ecstasy of servility when pondering this little demonstration that some people find shopping boring, shut up about the jam already. It's jam. The process of choosing it has no deeper meaning. Unless one is a connoisseur of jam, in which case one probably finds choosing between 24 varieties a pleasing experience, as people usually do when shopping for something that interests them.

Look at it this way, Ms Bennett. You have twice to my knowledge chosen a man as mate and helpmeet. Was making that choice from all the prospective partners you could have had ever stressful? There is some literature - like about half of it - to suggest that some people find it so. Some people regret their choice. The evidence suggests that you have at least once. Can we assume that if by any sad chance you find yourself seeking a man again you are willing to let a civil servant choose for you?

... so I would advise anyone of an even vaguely libertarian inclination who gets stressed easily to read no further.

This article by Felicity Lawrence, Nanny does know best, Andrew Lansley, displays the ideology of the Nanny State in an unusually pure and unapologetic form:

Can it be too that Lansley is not aware of all the literature about how individuals' "free choices" are shaped by marketing and advertising. Perhaps we should recommend some urgent remedial reading for his homework, starting with...

The Andrew Lansley for whom Felicity Lawrence is setting homework is the Secretary of State for Health. The fact that he consents to hold this position means that he too must be something of a statist, but nonetheless he recently said, "If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve." It is a measure of how deeply Nanny's rule has been accepted that even this pragmatic, rather than principled, objection to government health lectures aroused fury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy Exchange has just published a "research note" purporting to show that the tax on cigarettes in the UK should be increased, and that "that every single cigarette smoked costs the country money - 6.5 pence each time someone lights up."

If you read the paper [pdf], you will find it is an astonishingly dodgy dossier. Here is how the figure is made up:

Taxation of tobacco contributes £10 billion to HM Treasury annually; however, we calculate that the costs to society from smoking are much greater at £13.74 billion. Every cigarette smoked is costing us money. These societal costs comprise not only the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of smoking related house fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million).

The notion of "cost to society" is a pretty weird one.

Leave that aside for a moment. Add up costs and revenues to the state, which might be one semi-logical way of determining whether the smoking in some sense "runs a deficit", and using Policy Exchange's own figures you get a big surplus for the Treasury. Even if you assume all house fire costs are borne by the state and not partially by insurers and householders, and there are no errors in the headline figures, then you can only get to £3,549 million. (Have you noticed how public policy research generally involves implausible numbers of significant digits, and at the same time utter absence of error estimates?) On that basis smokers are contributing roughly £6Bn annually towards public spending.

But what are we to make of the suggestion that counting "lost output" is meaningful? To my mind the idea that an economic aggregate represents a collective wealth that may be politically attributed and redistributed is repulsive even if it is coherent (which I doubt). The state's royal We, which Policy Echange is channelling here, may in turn choose to impersonate you and me and everyone else, but it only controls the taxed margin of other's outputs. Output and taxation are apples and oranges. It is meaningless to add them together. Unless you want (or deserve) a punch.

And even were it not meaningless, there's an accounting fraud here. If you count output putatively lost to smoking, then you must also count the gains. There is the output of the tobacco industry, distribution and retailing in the UK to consider. Imperial Tobacco alone had a gross profit for the year ending September 2009 of approximately £5.3 billion. The CTC industry consists of tens of thousands of small shops. Honest research, however dubious its theoretical basis, would attempt to estimate the value-added, too. It would also be clear - without referring to a paper cited in the footnotes we cannot tell whether the cost-of-illness measure used in determining those "lost outputs" also includes the gains to third parties in pensions unpaid and public services unused by people dying early. If you are going to add apples and oranges, you should also tell us explicitly whether you have subtracted pears.

But what set me off on this chase was actually just one of those headline figures. Most of the margin of costs over gains in this strange sum is covered by the £2.9 billion allocated to the "output lost to cigarette breaks". How do they know? "[A] number of studies have investigated workers taking breaks in order to smoke, and have tried to quantify this time at between £915 million and £3.2 billion per annum." Hm.

Read through to p13, and you discover that the number of studies was... two. Er, no. It was one... Or some sort of strange interpolative hybrid... I cannot decide. Make your own mind up:

McGuire et al. estimated that £915 million annually is lost on the basis that average smokers spend tenminutes a day smoking, while light smokers and part-time workers would use approximately half of this time. The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) used similar initial assumptions on average smoking time to calculate that some £2.6 billion would be saved through the introduction of smoke-free legislation. Using McGuire’s estimates of 5.2 million working smokers, with the RCP’s estimates of ten minutes a day smoking reveals an intermediary figure of £2.9 billion.

I think that is 'intermediary' in the sense that a magician is an intermediary between a rabbit and a hat.

However they get there, if someone thinks that cigarette breaks ought to be a determining factor in public policy, rather than a matter for negotiation between employer and employee, then I suggest that it would be a good idea if they are kept as far as possible from the levers of power. This lot are said to be influential on the presumptively incoming Cameron team. Oh dear.

The Royal Society for Public Health no doubt sees itself as a worthy collection of people who are axiomatically on the side of the angels. I mean, who could be against public health?

In truth they are a terrifying and truly totalitarian outfit who operate with a presumption that the state has super-ownership of the physical bodies of everyone in Britain. Now I am of the view that defence against infectious plagues is a legitimate role of the state because it is a collective threat... a plague, like a fire or an invading army, does not respect property lines and so this is the whole reason to have a 'nightwatchman state'.

But that is not the view of people like the Royal Society for Public Health. No, they take the view that 'public health' follows on naturally from state run medical care and gives the state the right to decide pretty much anything that can impact on an person's health, regardless of that individual's preferred choices, even if those choices are personal ones that do not place other people at risk.

They have issues a manifesto for nothing less than the nationalisation of your body and the intrusion of the state, on grounds of protecting your health from yourself and others who agree to be around you.

1. A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol sold
2. No junk food advertising in pre-watershed television
3. Ban smoking in cars with children
4. Chlamydia screening for university and college freshers
5. 20 mph limit in built up areas
6. A dedicated school nurse for every secondary school
7. 25% increase in cycle lanes and cycle racks by 2015
8. Compulsory and standardised front-of-pack labelling for all pre-packaged food
9. Olympic legacy to include commitment to expand and upgrade school sports facilities and playing fields across the UK
10. Introduce presumed consent for organ donation
11. Free school meals for all children under 16
12. Stop the use of transfats

Of all these statist policies, number 1 is particularly invidious, with our technocratic masters seeking a sumptuary law on alcohol (i,.e. a tax to stop poor people drinking), number 12 seeks to regulate our choice of what we eat.

But by far the worst of all is number 10, this is the one which tells you everything you need to know about these people and the profoundly, unabashedly thugish nature of their world view... the state can help itself to your body parts by default. Post mortem conscription. Frankly I am all for organ donation, but at the moment, I carry a card expressly forbidding my organs to be harvested post mortem as the very notion these people are presumptive owners of any of my mortal remains is simply intolerable.

But then as they demand the right to regulate everything about your physical existence prior to death, I suppose it is no surprise they think nothing of helping themselves to your carcass after you die.

These people are the very worst kind of self-righteous technocratic curtain twitchers, the true spiritual heirs to the folks who in the first half of the twentieth century had people with birth defects sterilised or has troublesome people lobotomised, on 'scientific grounds' of course 'for the public good'. Naturally such Guardian reading caring sharing folks would see drawing such analogues as a grotesque calumny, but in truth they exhibit the same intrusiveness and obsession with controlling the lives of others, it really is the same psychopathology, just repackaged for the 21st century with the current notions of 'best practice'.

These people must be opposed... but not just politically, they need to be seen socially for what they are and abominated for their desires to regulate the lives of everyone around them. They presume to occupy the moral high ground but they do not and the more people who openly and publicly reject their axiomatic presumption of state controls over the very bodies of people, the sooner we can start to reclaim the culture of people who belong on a psychiatrist's couch to help them deal with their abhorrent desires to use force against those who wish to live their lives without interference and according to their own judgements, with the positive and negative consequences of that accruing to themselves alone, like real adults.

The people behind this manifesto are detestable and they need to be told that to their faces.

Helen Evans, who runs Nurses for Reform, a campaigning organisation dedicated to free-market options for healthcare in the UK, got to meet Conservative Party leader David Cameron a couple of weeks ago. The Daily Mirror [here, here and here] and the Daily Telegraph found out about the meeting and offered their own take on it.

Broadly, I agree that the proposals are in the right direction, although I have concerns about some of the tactics suggested and their formulation, which I deal with later. The bit that was not previously familiar to me was the idea that a barrier to entry should be at least lowered, by amending local planning rules to make it easier to open a new healthcare facility. I'm told the Conservative Party already favours this for schools, so the extension to clinics should not be difficult.

Having read the briefing document presented to the Leader of the Opposition, I disagree with one element of the strategy being proposed, specifically this passage: "the [National Health Service] NHS should be renamed the National Health SYSTEM and that under its auspices patients should benefit from a universal right to independent hospital care and treatment."

A "universal right" is something that a government could be justified in declaring war to defend, like "freedom from slavery" or freedom from the use of confessions extracted under torture in criminal trials. It could certainly be a pretext for new taxes, a new bureaucracy, more regulations, and the restriction of other "non-universal" rights. Sadly, this call for declaring that privately-provided healthcare is a right could become the very instrument for imposing regulations (such as US Medicare-style price controls, or French-style government control on where doctors can practise [link in French]) that violate patient and physician freedom. To give a specific example: could a private clinic be fined for not providing 24-hour accident and emergency access? I would expect a government agency to do just that. Meanwhile, of course, government facilities which operate "in the public interest" would be excused.

A second concern comes in a later paragraph: "health censorship must be outlawed and patients must be empowered with greater access to information." Outlawed? Must be empowered? By what agency, regulation, funded by what taxes or levies, with what powers of inspection and control?

These may seem like quibbles, but the law of intended consequences suggests that the wording of reforms can be as important as their spirit. Consider the US Constitution's First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does it say that Congress cannot give money to the Food and Drug Administration to hunt down anyone making claims about the alleged benefits to cancer patients of drinking grapefruit juice? No it does not. It means it, I think, but can I prove it to the US Supreme Court? Probably not.

It might be more boring to do, but the best way to remove censorship would be to revoke the clauses of those laws and regulations that allow it. As for "empowerment," if this comes from the government it will mean a Department of Truth in Advertising demand for a quarterly report from all private providers as to how they inform the public, with fines for not reaching a wide enough audience.

On the positive side, Nurses for Reform finds that the ownership by a government department of most of the UK's hospitals is a potential conflict of interest. There is the temptation to hide problems, to restrict information about alternative (often newer) treatments, the cozy relationship between the government employees in the NHS and those of the Department of Health who are supposed to watch them.

Dr Evans is therefore absolutely right to suggest the immediate transfer of ownership of NHS hospitals out of "public ownership," and she is also correct that the "Secretary of State for Health must no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed."

On the issue of advertising, or freedom to communicate with the public in general, the major benefit would be that people could get an idea of which were the better brands (either cheapest, or best quality, or best balance between the two). If we think of how Aldi and Lidl can co-exist with ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and independent grocers, we can see how variety of branding can lead to beneficial competition: new treatments, more options and probably less queues.

Personally, I see no point whatsoever in delaying the reform of NHS funding: it merely prolongs unnecessary suffering and provides more opportunities for opponents of change to mobilise, like Gorbachev's "perestroika" versus the liquidation of the soviet system. Having little expectation of any progress under a new Conservative Party government this coming year, it would be a pleasant surprise if Dr Evans' proposals came to fruition. But at least no one can now claim that the case was not made.

[UPDATE: corrected link for Daily Telegraph article]

If you are rich enough, you will be able to circumvent the prohibition and obtain the right to select the sex of your child. The Human Fertilisation and Embryological Authority bans the practice here, though their grounds are weak:

Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority remains cautious, citing public opposition to sex selection. “In the US there is no official regulator to monitor clinics and no legal obligation to offer the counselling that is an important part of treatment,” a spokesman said. “Those who choose to go overseas for their treatment should make themselves aware of the laws and consider what impact there may be on any child that is subsequently born.”

Public opposition is cited, alongside a nannyish presumption of in loco parentis. Public opposition is not a sufficient reason for curbing reproductive freedoms and gives a veto to lobbies who invoke the 'yuck' factor. The HFEA model of regulation never succeeded and medical practices should be allowed, except in cases of safety.

If Parliament wishes to outlaw a reproductive technology,then let it do so: otherwise, the presumption of freedom should prevail.

Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.

- 'National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis - Outcome', the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.

The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.

[I]n much the same way that political control of statistical data can grant the holder control over the policy agenda, so control of an individual’s personal and sensitive information can grant dominance over the individual himself. It is precisely this that, in the information age, makes identity theft such a harrowing crime: the dual sensations of violation and helplessness arising from a realisation that one is no longer in control of one’s own life. The fact of the matter is that our personal and sensitive data are the core statistics of our own unique lives and, by extension, the wholesale collection, retention and sharing of our data by government is equivalent to a state-sponsored and thereby legitimised form of identity theft.

- The Earl of Northesk

If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don't have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them - especially if you have a Labour MP.

Here is Phil Booth:

At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID's request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any "information sharing order", a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .

Please tell yours too. It's important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now's the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.

Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a 'compromise', but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can't be allowed to merely "dilute" it. Clause 152 just has to go.

It's imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.

If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).

--
Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.

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

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

Random link-chasing brought me here. "Leg-iron" writes:

I have a pack of tobacco with no hideous picture. Instead it has a phone number and the words:

Choose freedom. We'll help you get help to stop smoking.

Freedom? Really? That would be nice. I don't have the freedom to smoke in a bar, at a bus stop, bus station or on the open platform of a railway station.

There is more, please do read it. I should explain for foreign readers that British cigarette packets must by law bear an anti-smoking slogan such as "smoking kills" or "smoking causes impotence" and often, these days, a repulsive picture showing the bad consequences of smoking. I do not smoke so I do not often need to look at these pictures, but nothing about their appearance repels me as much as the fact that our laws force people to publish material designed to humiliate themselves. Truly, that does repel me. I neither like nor dislike cigarette manufacturers or those who work for them as a category, but when I imagine whichever bureaucrat thinks up these rotating slogans sneeringly transmitting the latest one to some servile flack in a cigarette company along with orders to start the print run - then I feel a faint echo of the shame someone living in Mao's China must have felt at the sight of a wretch bearing a placard saying "I am an enemy of the people."

I scrolled down Leg-iron's blog and found another good post on the same topic:

On the first one I bought was one of those pictures that are supposed to terrify us into stopping smoking. This one shows a pair of eighty-year-old hands with the slogan 'Smoking causes ageing of the skin'.

Interesting. I was under the impression that ageing was the main cause of ageing of the skin.

After ruminating on the lameness of these propaganda efforts, Leg-iron writes that it is almost

...as if ASH have realised that, should we all give up smoking, they'd have nobody left to torment and they'd all be out of a job.

ASH refers to a body called "Action on Smoking and Health." It is a fake charity - in fact, I learn, it is the original fake charity - receiving just 2% of its money from voluntary contributions. The rest of its money is paid to it by the government. It exists in order to allow the government (I should say "the State" since it has been the tool of several successive governments of both major parties) to pretend that when enacting new forms of repression it is merely responding to popular demand; in other words, it pretends to be servant the better to be master. There are many such. Some call themselves charities, others "NGOs". As the EU Serf asked years ago, "I always thought that NGO meant Non Governmental Organisation. How come any of them get money from the state?" Some are funded by the British government, some by the European Union, although trying to to establish the extent, if any, to which the former category is not a subset of the latter, would not be a good use of anyone's time.

Devil's Kitchen is sick of fake charities. He has put forward a modest proposal, and has registered the domain name http://fakecharities.org/ in order to put it into practice. His co-blogger, "The Filthy Smoker" wrote about the staggering dishonesty and corruption that the existence of these shills brought to a Department of Health "consultation process" here.

All these lies and deceptions spread out and reinforce each other - until we come to a stage where someone can force someone else to publish the words "choose freedom" and feel no shame.

Tim Worstall justifiably gets angry about this plan to force owners of coastal properties to allow the public to have access to the properties, and without compensation. I weighed in with the comments on the board and deciding not to let the discussion go to waste, I wanted to quote a character called Kay, who comes up with what I might call the "brute utilitarian" argument one hears for compulsory purchase/eminent domain laws here and in other nations:

Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock. That ridiculous stance may be taken by some who posted here, but the rest of us would rather live in an advanced civilisation with electricity, railways, roads, public limited companies, etc.

I sense that this argument is nonsense, but there may be something in it. It is interesting that the commenter mentions limited liability corporations - we have been over that issue before at this blog. But is it really the case that say, electricity could not be easily conveyed across the UK without coercing landowners into letting this occur? I assume, of course, that if many landowners refused point blank to do this, that the situation would result in lots of very small, easy-to-move electricity generators being built. But in practice, the vast majority of landowners want easy access to electricity, water and roads like everyone else, and with a bit of inducement - shares in revenues from tolls, rental payments for pipes and pylons - would agree to things being built on their land. There may be "extreme cases", where landlords hold so much sway that they try to strangle beneficial technologies across a vast tract of land, and I suppose this is possible, but it strikes me as not very likely. I'd be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.

I think the problem with the "brute utilitarian" argument is not simply its undertone of "We want - we take". It is also its deafness to the fact that most people, most of the time, have sufficient rational self interest to act in ways that benefit not just themselves but most of the rest of us. The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently. I have heard people express admiration for the Continental, Roman Law-based system which supposedly is so much less messy and fuddy-duddy than the Common Law one in this respect. When people start to invoke "efficiency" and so forth, guard your wallet and front door.

Meanwhile, for a good discussion on the tricky issue of how property claims can be arrived at justly in the first place, this book is worth a read. One thing that bugs me about discussions about property is when some character will argue that "X or Y stole the land from poor benighted natives in the Year xxxx BC so all property since is tainted", as if that somehow justifies looting now. It does not.

As an aside, it is also worth noting that compulsory purchase laws, particularly when used to turf people off their property to create other, supposedly more valuable economic outcomes, is a vehicle for corruption.

Update and side-observation: it is only fair to say that some - in my view misguided - libertarians have tried to argue that land, because it was not created by Man, should be taxed more heavily than income or other things, and for some people, this sort of tax is a sort of "rectification" of any previous injustices inflicted by the acquisition of property. The name of 19th Century writer Henry George occasionally comes up. I was once quite taken with the idea but there are weaknesses to it. For a start, a person who makes more use of land than was the case before because of his entrepreneurial vigour should not, in my view, be penalised for thereby raising the value of that land, which is what a land-tax, if based on land values, would do. There remains this view, widely shared, that land should not be ultimately owned by any individual because land and minerals, or indeed the sea, is "just there", an inert set of substances that we can manipulate, but not create new value from. That seems to undermine the very notion of wealth creation per se, in my view.

Oh, and here is an item from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on eminent domain.

Another update: Devil's Kitchen shares my opinion but does so in a more, ahem, salty way. Check out the comments, where Samizdata regular Ian B takes on Kay Tie. In boxing terms, the judge would have had to stop the fight to protect Kay from serious injury.

I have just returned from a short business trip to Geneva in Switzerland and apart from the usual chatter about the disasters that have befallen the banking system - including such titans as UBS - the chatter in the cafes was about voters' recent decision to allow heroin to be given to drug addicts in medical centres. Switzerland's experiments with a more liberal approach to drug use has not been without unfortunate result: I remember that some time ago, there was a park in Zurich that got the unfortunate title, "needle park", on account of the number of folk who used to congregate there from all over to get their fix of heroin. But perhaps that is a sort of example of how, if you have "public spaces" - owned by the nation and hence owned by no-one in particular - what might be a matter of private behaviour can lead to "negative externalities". The solution, maybe, is for drug users to indulge their habits on private property with the consent of the owners of said; then the issue ceases to be one on which the polity feels a need to express a view one way or the other.

But the Swiss are nothing if not contradictory and the locals do not seem to share a very coherent conception of what the state can or should be able to tell people to do, but I do sense that there is less of a nanny state culture than in Britain. The locals tell me that there is, still, more of a culture of self-responsibility than in some other European nations. But the contradictions are odd: while approving the heroin measure, Swiss electors rejected a proposal to make marijuana legal and to be able to grow it for personal use. And yet this is a nation where smoking continues to happen in restaurants; firearms ownership is far more liberal than in the UK; ditto things like knives and swords; bank secrecy, while not quite as solid as before, remains; and the nation, to its credit, remains cussedly uninterested in joining the EU or allowing itself to be bullied by tax collectors in places such as Germany and the US.

And the chocolate tastes pretty good as well. Yummm.....

Ah, the children of the night! What sweet music they make:

Plans by Gordon Brown to make everyone a potential organ donor unless they actively “opt out” will be roundly rejected by the Government’s official advisory body next week, The Times has learnt.

The Prime Minister and the Chief Medical Officer for England believe that thousands of lives could be saved by introducing “presumed consent” – where everyone is automatically placed on the organ donor register unless they or their family object....

The recommendations are not binding on the Government and ministers may still bring legislation forward.

Of course they will. They must feed.

The BBC thinks the state should own your organs.

No, it is not a streamlined version of the answer to life, the universe and everything. It is the maximum number of aspirin in a bottle available at the local Clear Pharmacy. According to the Pharmacist on duty, that is the largest number sellable without a prescription.

I am sure I looked perplexed with my jaw hanging open during the few speechless moments before I came out with the only answer I could think of: "You must be joking."

Before you get too uppity about freedom in America... the last time I bought 24 Hour Cold Capsules in Manhattan I had to sign a register so the government could make sure I was not going to use them to make 'speed'.

"We're from the Government. We're here to help you."

Not.

PS: Can anyone confirm this is really, genuinely true? I am still having trouble believing it myself. It is just, too absurd.

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 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. On her blog, Virginia writes:

The transplant establishment is, unfortunately, all too accustomed to managing the shortage rather than expanding the supply of organs. Too many powerful "experts" consider a donor who is moved by a particular stranger's story to be a generic "altruistic donor," for whom one stranger should be exactly the same as another. By their lights, favoring someone you've read about over whoever's first on the list is "unfair."

If you have ever seen the benefits of online conversation, through blogs or journals or message boards or chat rooms, think about that. The human kindness extended to you by another individual in that context, according to these hospitals, is somehow tainted.

I thought things were bad enough with the creepazoids who want to violate every human's civil liberties at birth by reversing non-consent to make organ donation an opt-out rather than opt-in personal decision ("You think your body belongs to you? Think again, buster. It's just government inventory..."). This outright hostility from hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation towards methods which would resolve the shortage and save lives is downright evil.

(Cross-posted to JackieDanicki.com)

It is part of being a good citizen to prove who you are day in, day out.

- Andy Burnham MP

The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted 'Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep'. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.

To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?

As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:

1. Home Office makes suggestions for changes in public policy...
2. ...'evidence' is taken from interested parties including police in search of promotion, contractors in search of contracts, and researchers seeking posts on the new quango to be created...
3. Home Office considers, announces its plans have 'general support', ticks box marked 'public consulted' and carries on with making legislation for parliament to approve.

So I was gearing myself up to write a piece on the repulsive sight of a department torn between the desire to regulate everything and to maintain PC social norms. Citing the ignominious failure of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts, I was going to pour scorn on the futility of a regulatory regime that licensed brothels while denying the most basic economic rights to prostitutes, and created 'zones of toleration' in an effort to buck the market while punishing the streetwalkers it purported to protect.

The Goverment has shot my fox. And it turns out the fox was packed with explosives. Someone has overturned the (paradoxical) regulatory liberalisers and has decided puritan prohibitions are what we need. The move is instead to be to "Zero Tolerance" of 'kerb crawlers' - and quite without comment, the continuation of zero civil-law rights and next to zero criminal-law protections for prostitutes themselves.

The Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart was quoted yesterday on the BBC as saying that prostitution "is child abuse" because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people's sex lives begin before that arbitary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. Someone, somewhere, is making David Blunkett, who was responsible for the original pseudo-tolerant proposals, look like a liberal.

Does the devil's name begin with B? The emphasis on cleaning up public untidiness by bullying is of a piece with the respec' agenda. And there have been suggestions that the inate liberalism of the Home Office - not something spotted by many commentators before now - is interfering with the operation of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit.

Just another brick in the wall, perhaps. But turning the public agenda on a sixpence, and producing plainly mad arguments for doing so, are ominous. The Head Boy is ever more a dictator, and ever more the apostle of social conformity.

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

- Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday's Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.

Chilling, eh?

I file this under "Self ownership" because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.

Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarantee what happened to Ms. Harriton.

I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive...

Why should a doctor be liable for an 'act of God'? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect.

Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one's fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons.

My previous article seems to have sparked off a discussion amongst the commentariat on the difference between being called a 'subject' or a 'citizen'. To prevent that comment section from digressing too far, I thought it might be interesting to provide an article to revisit the topic even though I have written about it before.

There are some historical reasons why the British have been 'subjects' (as they were subject to the laws of the Crown), whereas Americans have been 'citizens'. The reality is that the British are subject to are the laws of a democratically elected Parliament. As in truth the Royal Assent is nothing more than a historical curiosity, the actual differences between the way individuals truly relate to state in the United States and Britain is less than it might seem. The principle differences of significance are be that as Britain is more democratic at th national level, individuals have less institutional defences against the power of the state, whereas in the United States, with its written constitution and clearer separation of powers, an individual has more structural defences against the excesses of democratic politics, at least in theory.

In my experience most people tend to think they are citizens rather than subjects of whatever nation issues their passport. However I have always though the term 'subject' was a far more honest word to describe the relationship between individuals and the state rather than the prouder egalitarian sounding 'citizen'. We are subject to taxes, we are subject to laws, we are subject to conscription of various sorts (be it military, educational or judicial). Sure, we 'citizens' are empowered via the glories of democracy, but quite how being out-voted and then being subject to some law you oppose 'empowers' you is unclear to me, even if it is a reasonable law. To be a subject may seem demeaning but in truth that is what we are: subjects.

As it happens, I think the term is even more appropriate for US 'citizens' given that at least in Britain and almost every other country, to avoid your particular state making ownership claims on the product of your labour, you just have to leave the country and live somewhere else. States generally do not claim to own you independent of your location, just the territory you live on and part of your labour within that territory in return for its 'protection' (capisce?).

The United States, on the other hand, claims you owe them the obeisance of taxes regardless of where you are physically located anywhere on the planet, although in practice it often makes arrangements with other nations to only impose its demands if you make more than a certain amount (double taxation treaties). Yet the obligation to report your income from overseas and to pay the IRS is still there if they wish you to do so.

So if it is not just sovereignty over a piece of land that the USA claims, it actually contends that it owns part of your labour regardless of where you live, making you subject to taxation for merely having the permission to live in America even if you choose to live elsewhere, then you sure sound like a 'subject' to me.

Spiked carries a fascinating, if frightening, piece by Charles Pither, a private doctor, on the invasive requirements of galloping regulation on those working in the healthcare sector. Just being able to check and list their employees (and their own) slave-number online will no doubt come as a relief.

What I hadn't appreciated, until the man came to make his inspection, was all the personal data that we needed to keep for our staff (in a locked cabinet, of course). Two references, a recent photo, a copy of their passport, copies of their qualification certificates, a curriculum vitae with explanations for any gaps, a copy of their contract and job description.

Including the cleaner? Yes, including the cleaner. 'It's not me who makes the regulations', said the man from the HCC. 'The onus is on you to comply with the statutory requirements as set out in the standards of care regulations.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

What's most disturbing is how suddenly these bureaucratic personal checks have sprung up, and how it has happened with no resistence. The Health Care Commission was created by the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, and started its interfering on April 1st 2004. The Criminal Records Bureau was established under the Police Act 1997, but its functions have been rapidly widened, in legislation on children, education, financial services, and health, but also notably by a series of Exceptions Orders to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Acts that have made the idea of a spent conviction (an old, minor one you need not acknowledge) pretty much obsolete. The operative Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations are dated 2002.

Never mind 1890, it would be nice to get the British state back to the size it was in 1990.

On The Voice of Reason (slogan: "A penny saved is a government oversight"), there is a pretty clear headed little essay of what I think is most the reasonable position on this absurdly emotive case.

For many Americans who see the state as being the central and most important institution there is, the axis around which civil society orbits, the whole idea of 'dual nationality' is deeply disturbing. A person born in a different land can assimilate into civil society, adopt the mores, trappings and affectations of the place in which they now live and even accept being marked as a political subject of the government (become a citizen) but if they do not in fact repudiate being a subject of their previous home, to a statist American the question often asked is "can that person really be an American?"

I have heard people in the US say that of the many Jewish Americans who also hold Israeli passports and now increasingly that question is asked of Mexican Americans who retain ties to Mexico. Cosmopolitanism is seen as somehow dangerous and almost wicked. That dual nationality is particularly disturbing to some Americans is not surprising seeing as how the USA claims a proprietary interest in Americans nationals even if they do not live within the lands within which the US state claims sovereignty over (to the extent that even foreign people with US green cards who are not US subjects and who no longer live within US territory are still supposed to make US tax returns and incur US tax liabilities!). In most of the rest of the world, the moment your cross a national border, the nation you lived in generally looses interest in most of your economic and political activities, making dual nationality rather less emotive an issue other than in times of war between the two nations in question. Being a US 'citizen' is like having a big brand on your arse which stays with you regardless of where you go, making claims that US citizenship is somehow superior because it is not 'ethnic based' somewhat odd... it is more analogous to creating a new ethnicity, at least politically speaking, called 'American'.

But for many, probably more who hold dual nationality, it is just a means of being able to live where they please and cross borders to places where they have friends and family without being harassed by the state's border guards and pettifogging officials. The truth is that for the great majority of people the state is not the axis around which their life revolves and the bit of coloured cloth that flaps over them is really not a big deal.

As a 'rootless cosmopolitan' myself, I make no secret that I see collecting as many citizenships as possible as useful way to dilute the influence that states have over people. That does not mean I am blind to the possibility of political leaders in one country making mischief in another country by appealing to notions of 'Volk' or 'La Patria'... yet political antics can be trumped by simply allowing the natural (yes, natural) process of assimilation to run its course, rather than distorting and delaying that process with crazy 'identity politics' which reward primitive tribalistic attitudes, and social welfare programmes that invert the traditional motivate for people to become immigrants in the first place.

I am currently drinking a glass of gin and tonic. I bought the gin on a recent trip to France, taking advantage of the lower tax. No doubt some will find it appalling that I took advantage of tax competition. It is not just that I was starving Britain's public services, though, by buying from abroad. I was also escaping the UK government's incentive - the incentive to drink less gin.

Is it just me, or are taxes which attempt to change my preferences the most offensive? I really don't see why the state has any legitimacy in encouraging me to switch from gin to, say, orange juice. Should the tax system not try and be as neutral as possible, avoiding attempts to change my behaviour? Or are politicians really just better people than me, more competent in deciding my choices than I am? The government certainly appears to believe it is justified in subordinating my choices to its wisdom. Yet when I think about the nannies, two words come to mind: sod 'em.

... but if you think that means the idea of banning smoking in the UK has been condemned, you would be wrong. The headline appeared in the Telegraph above the article reporting that plans to restrict areas for smokers in pubs were denounced as inadequate last night by campaigners pressing for a ban.

The anti-smoking campaigners denounced the agreement of more than 20,000 pubs in Britain to introduce restrictions on smoking to make around 80 per cent of bar space tobacco-free within five years. Smokers in these outlets would be restricted to specified areas or rooms.

The 'anti-choice extremists' for the smoking ban, apparently encouraged by evidence suggesting that a big drop in tobacco sales in Ireland due the prohibition on smoking in pubs, are pushing for more. Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said:

This is a last desperate throw of the dice by the biggest players in the pub trade. They spin their plans as a smoke-free initiative, but they are nothing of the kind.

They will still leave their non-smoking customers gasping and leave more than half the country's pubs unaffected.

I must be missing something, I did not notice any spin for a smoke-free initiative. It is a question of choice, not an imposition of a health-fascist measure.

Rob Hayward of the British Beer and Pub Association, which brokered the deal, argued with sensible points:

Clearly with the number of non-smokers on the increase companies want to reflect that in the way they run their pubs. We want to see better choice for non-smokers. At the same time we believe in freedom of choice and a policy that will still allow smokers to enjoy a night out with their friends in the pub.

Indeed. I do not like cigarette smoke in pubs, bars and restaurants although I am partial to a good cigar. But I do like the right of owners to let customers do in them what they wish on their premises. And it seems that even a government survey cannot produce better than 20 percent support for a total ban.

Surveys nothwithstanding, the ban in Ireland caused a 15 per cent drop in trade. A similar loss of business in Britain would lead to the closure of 5,000 pubs. And that's got to be a bad thing.

I did a few postings on my Education Blog at the beginning of this month, but these aside I've taken the whole of the month off from blogging. And now, my Internet Connection willing, I am back.

It was not so much that I was fed up with blogging, more that there were other things that needed doing, seriously, with the kind of concentrated attention that daily blogging was making impossible.

My home needed new shelves for books and for classical CDs, and it needed old shelves, laden with Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that nobody now needs, to be emptied and taken down. Mounds of papers needed to be sorted and classified, and space had to be created for them then to be stored in such a way that they didn't just get muddled together again. Two notorious no-go areas (the big cupboard and the space under the desk in my bedroom) were � gone into, and cleansed.

I did do one radio spot about � oh, something or other, and at the end of the month I hosted my usual Last Friday meeting (thank you Paul Marks � excellent talk and an excellent evening). Oh yes, and I did a talk about Classical Music for Tim Evans's Putney Debate on the Second Friday. But basically I took a holiday from pontification more profound than I can ever remember having enjoyed since I got started as a politificator at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. I did carpentry, sorted through papers, and in between times I socialised with friends (including some of my fellow Samizdatistas), undistracted by the self-imposed duty to tell the world what it should be thinking, or even to think about it.

It was a blessed relief suddenly to find myself in a world where the only problems that mattered were my own, and my own to grapple with and to solve. Yes, I have had Internet Connection problems, but I can deal with them, provided only that I get seriously stuck into them. And yes, carpentry can be exhausting. As was taking out about three dozen black plastic bags of rubbish, with about another two dozen still to go. But what a joy to be obsessing only about things that I could personally do something about.

My kind of politics is very anti-political, as is a lot of the politics here. But it is still politics. And there is a world of difference between sneering and jeering at the buffoons who rule the world, or who think they do, or who pretend that they do, and truly not giving these people the time of day, for day, after day, after day. It really was very refreshing, and not, I believe, an experience I will soon forget.

I even stopped reading Samizdata.

Now that I have resumed reading it, I am glad to see that I was not essential to its continuing success. (I would not want to be writing for a group blog that depended on me.) I did read a book or two during August, and I did inevitably do the odd spot of abstract thinking, about this and that. So I return to blogging action with a mind that is not completely blank. Meanwhile, my deepest thanks to the Samizdata editorial team for not nagging me, and for letting me rest in peace.

Advice Goddess Amy Alkon, whose writing is always good for a laugh, has a disturbing piece on her site about how useless the police were when her car was stolen. On one occasion, a friend spotted her car and, when she rang the police to tell them exactly where they could find it, she was fobbed off by a disinterested operator who read from a script and did not send officers to retrieve it. Later, when the man she knew (and the cops strongly suspected) had stolen her car was known to be at home, Alkon called the LAPD and told them exactly where they could pick him up. The police receptionist told her that no detectives were around, and that she'd have to call back the next day to speak to anyone who could help her.

In the end, Alkon had to get her car back from the thief herself, using good old fashioned shame and hostility. She even enlisted her mother in trying to guilt him into returning items that were in the car when he stole it. But few will be surprised at what the real consequences were for the thief.

Fred still hasn't been arrested. The case was knocked down to a misdemeanor and so the police can't go into his house to pick him up...So far his punishment has amounted to being forced to disconnect his phone, probably because he couldn't take the telephone harassment from me and, especially, my mother. Still, I don't regret the experience. I had great fun moonlighting as a private detective, I gained newfound faith in humanity, thanks to the Rambler nuts and the other near-strangers who went out of their way to help me, and I'd learned a surprising little lesson: In Los Angeles, crime pays.

Of course this state of affairs is not confined to Los Angeles. Everyone seems to know someone who has been similarly screwed over by police bureaucracy and incompetence. I know some good cops. But pieces like these make it all the more puzzling to me that so many people trust the police so unquestioningly, both to serve and to protect. Do they genuinely believe that the system is stacked in their favour, or is it something people tell themselves in order to feel secure?

Some time in June I was contacted by the production company responsible for making a radio programme called 'Straw Poll' for BBC Radio 4. They asked me to join the panel for a forthcoming debate on the proposition that 'We Should Not Legislate Against Obesity'.

I agreed.

The format of the show is a panel which consists of four speakers, two of whom are in favour of the proposition and two of whom are against. The debate is thrashed out for about 30 minutes or so before the studio audience is given a chance to put questions to the panellists. The studio audience then vote on the proposition.

The programme was recorded last July 19th at a Central London location. My opponents were two doctors representing Orwellian-sounding NGO�s whose names I have not forgotten because I never bothered committing them to memory in the first place. On my side was a very polished and very professional PR spokesman for the food industry.

Prior to the recording we were all asked to prepare 90-second opening statements. This was mine:

Having presumably grown bored with their crusades again tobacco and alcohol, the health fascists and professional busybodies have now turned their attentions to food in what is clearly an attempt to conquer new worlds.

As with previous and similar campaigns, the case against so-called 'fatty' foods is being advanced by means of a toxic mixture of junk statistics, unsubstantiated claims, gross generalisations and manipulative attempts to tug the national heartstrings by claiming that it is all to 'save our children'.

But even if their ludicrous claims had a basis in fact (which I very much doubt) that would still be no excuse for them to browbeat our politicians into passing more laws and regulations. Protecting us from ourselves is not a legitimate function of government and we should all be at liberty to eat, drink and consume whatever takes our fancy and as much of it as we jolly well like without interference from self-appointed guardians no matter how 'caring' they claim to be.

This attempt to hobble the advertising industry is just the first stage in what is sure to prove a long campaign aimed at getting us all to accept government control over our diets. This is a very bad idea but only a part of a general trend towards every greater micro-management of the individual by the various organs of the state. But the more decisions that are made on our behalf the less inclined and empowered we are to make decisions for ourselves.

Unless this creeping tendency is reversed, it is going to result in a nation of infantilised and dependent people who have been stripped of both the will and the capacity to take responsibility for their own lives.

Nothing is unhealthier than that.

I started as I meant to go on. I am rarely minded to compromise and, before the show had even commenced, I had switched myself fully over to attack-dog mode.

I think it fair to say that I gave the producers their money�s worth. They had set me up in the role of Resident Heartless Monster and I set about my assigned task with aplomb and enthusiasm. While the doctor-types dutifully trotted out their stock scary statistics ("Junk food is killing 46.8 innocent children every nanosecond") and my PR ally produced his own data to prove that his industry was already doing enough to encourage healthy eating, I tore into everyone like a Tasmanian Devil, denouncing the food fascist careerists and their manipulative agenda-advancing lies.

I truly, madly and deeply enjoyed myself.

However, the studio audience did not enjoy me. In fact, they clearly despised me. I was advised beforehand that they were drawn from the same database that is used to fill the studio for BBC's 'Question Time' and, hence, our British readers will need no further explanation as to why. By the time we were 10 minutes into the debate I could already hear the hisses and boos emanating from the back of the room. It only spurred me on to even greater heights of 'insensitivity'.

I informed my PR debating ally beforehand that we would lose the vote and lose we did. Crushingly. I think he was not best pleased as, in common with most people in his position, he was hoping to make an impression as a model of compromise and co-operation. Instead I rather think he was peeved about being tainted by my 'extremism'.

But I went home a happy man. The vote is a matter of complete indifference to me. What matters is getting the message out and, as far as I am concerned, the victory was mine because of three members of the studio audience who came forward after the show to express their agreement with me. I gave them all Samizdata.net cards and thanked them for their support. Little by little we roll back the tide.

And the message will be going out again tomorrow evening (August 6th) to a far larger audience when the show is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 20.00 hours UK time (and again on Saturday afternoon at 13.15 hrs UK time). Again, the proposition will be a put to a vote (this time by phone-in) and, again, the result of the vote is of no consequence to me. What matters is that more people will hear what I had to say and, though I will not be on hand to give out cards this time, some of them will at least learn that they are not alone.

I think I have settled on my nomination for Most Frightening Story of the Year. Given the current political climate, the competition for this prestigious title is ferocious but, having carefully assessed the many excellent candidates, I have to put this one forward as the front-runner:

A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.

What they mean is that it will be shuffled in under the same 'health' rubrics.

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

Note the use of the word 'protection'. As if emotions are an affliction from which we need to be spared. I wonder what else can be neutralised? Hate? Love? Anger? Curiosity? Rebelliousness? Will this herald the age of 'Stepford' kids?

The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a special project to investigate ways of using new scientific breakthroughs to combat drug and nicotine addiction.

To add to all the carnage already caused by the psychotic Conservative drug war, it has now provided a legitimising ideology for these fantasies of chemical zombification.

Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:

It must be hard-wired into humans to want a little patch of earth and grass, a peaceful place to sit at the end of the day, or the beginning, and think, ours.

So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many.

Read the rest of Nancy's post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire.

Today I bought a great book in a remainder shop. It is a year by year history of London, strong on strange and intriguing events, not heavy with the theorising. Lovely.

It is a blogger's delight. I have already culled three postings from it - two for here and a 'how very odd' posting here.

Here is another fascinatingly odd factoid, entry number six for the year 1729:

WIFE-SELLING IN THE CITY

It was reported that 'Last Wednesday one Everet, of Fleet Lane sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for 3 shilling bowl of punch; who, we hear, have since complained of having a bad bargain.'

A salutary reminder that 'Christian' men could be fairly primitive to Christian women, not so long ago. Many Muslims still are, of course. But if we Christians can mend our ways, they surely can too.

But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state's often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators.

You think not? Well that is what Georgia's political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than 'citizens') even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA's interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia).

Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends.

(via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis)

The other day I came across this article during some random Web surfing, which contained a fairly familiar conservative hammering of what is loosely defined as the Baby Boomer Generation, that portion of the mostly Western population now on the verge of hitting the age of retirement.

In essentials, the argument runs like this: baby boomers are self-obsessed, adopted some mind-bindingly dumb (mostly left) political views; undermined respect for any kind of authority; addled their brains with drugs during the infamous Sixties and now expect we younger folk to shoulder the burgeoning cost of keeping them in retirement. Blah, bloody blah-blah.

Yes, you may have guessed it - this writer (born in that greatest of years, 1966, about a month before England won the soccer World Cup) is not entirely sold on the conservative critique, even though I share some distaste at the dumb political and cultural stances that were taken by said generation. But one thing which I frequently note is this - the BB generation is often attacked for being self-interested and focussed on acquiring self-esteem. But wait a minute. As a libertarian and unashamed individualist, I have to ask: what is wrong with wishing to improve one's life, exactly? After all, one of the most widely books in that stiff-necked era, that of the Victorians, was Samuel Smiles' hymn to self-improvement.

Surely, anyone who believes their life is their own, and not that of the State, Volk, proletariat, God, Allah, or the Great Green whatever, will embrace the notion of self-improvement. After all, much of the libertarian movement we know today, with all its different strains, acquired a considerable amount of energy during the 1950s and 60s. David Friedman, for example, who is the son of Milton Friedman and a leading exponent of anarcho-capitalism, might be regarded as a baby boomer. A good number of those who were inspired by the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand were baby boomers. The Libertarian Alliance's own director, Dr Chris R. Tame, and LA editorial boss and Samizdata.net scribe, Brian Micklethwait, were of the boomer generation.

To put it another way, let us avoid the groupthink mentality that would bracket a whole generation under one heading. The BB generation contain a fair share of boobies, charlatans and fools. It also contains folk I greatly admire and am proud to call my friends.

That's it, I've had enough. I just could not believe my ears, last night, listening to some po-voiced BBC reporter agreeing with some equally pompous do-gooding UK doctor that British people simply cannot be trusted to look after their own health. They also agreed that Wanless Chinder's HM Treasury proposal, to introduce yet more tax-funded social engineering into British health care, was a desperately needed breath of fresh air.

Jesus H. Christ. Just when will you people get it? When will you get it into your thick skulls that it is your damned social engineering policies, over the last sixty years, which have created all of your alleged problems in the first place? When you take away people's responsibilities for their own health care, by providing them with an MRSA-infested paid-for-by-everybody-else National Health Service, the obvious response is for many of them to start abusing their own bodies, or at the very least to start taking less care of themselves. Why? Because someone else will be forced to pick up the pieces afterwards, that's why. So what the hell, let's eat another cream cake, let's drink another bottle of whisky. Because the NHS will pay for any liposuction I may need, afterwards, and the NHS will always supply me with a new liver, should I need one. And if they refuse to, then I'll sue them for a loss of human dignity.

Take, for instance, asthma patients who smoke. I came across many of these, as a medical student, when I worked in the Northern General Hospital, in Sheffield. So why do they smoke when this lands them in an oxygen tent manned by a medical student making a mess of their right-arm, in his pitiful attempts to take blood samples from them every morning? Because the NHS supplies all of the Ventolin Inhalers they may need, supplies all of the incompetent medical students they may need, and supplies all of the sick notes and hospital beds they may need, to help their damaged lungs recover from their stupid and continuing nicotinic self-abuse. Some of them were even happy to be there, to spend a few weeks away from home, relaxing, getting paid on the medical sick note, watching television all day, and chatting to nurses and medical students. Oh yes, and when well enough, slipping outside for a quick smoke.

Would they abuse their bodies as much, smoking with asthma, if they had to supply their own wages insurance, had to pay the full cost for their own Ventolin supplies, and had to pay for their own hospital treatment insurance, to pick up the pieces, at a special ten times rate for asthmatics testing nicotine-positive on their blood samples? Of course they wouldn't. And will more social engineering and more extravagant government targets make them quit smoking? Are you kidding me? They're in hospital, facing death through smoking, right in the face. And a subsidy on Kumquats funded by a tax on chocolate Kit-Kats is going to make them give up? Beam me up, Nanny. Even an outright ban on smoking would only stop them for a few weeks, until the rapidly expanding tobacco and chocolate black markets got them hooked back in again.

When nanny supplies a comfortable cot and a bottle of warm milk, baby is just going to lie there lapping it up, even if it begins a process of artery clogging. And by the way, just what divine right is it you possess anyway to stick your noses into their lives, even if they did choose to be so stupid? I suppose, you might say, because Joe Taxpayer is forced to fund the NHS, so Joe Taxpayer, in the form of your good selves, has the right to make people obey health diktats. I have a better solution. Let's get rid of the filthy disgusting chippy-staffed NHS, instead, problem solved. And let's not forget the sheer hypocrisy of your leading priests, as they genuflect at the font of the God of Society.

You've got lardy High Priest Gordon Brown, whose fat jowls are now dropping well below his tailored shirt collars, and the even fatter and the even lardier Head Whipping Boy John Prescott, whose broad face is the very road map which highlights the dangers of personal over consumption.

And then, of course, there's Social Engineer-in-Chief and Lord High Defender of the Faith, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a coffee-abusing man who can only carry out his job because there's a team of heart specialists waiting 24 hours a day at the Nomenklatura Hospital, in Chelsea, waiting for him to collapse again through overwork, so they can re-start his heart. I assisted in such procedures, in the Rotherham General hospital. But despite what Blair's aides have reported, even when such heart restart procedures are scheduled, they are never routine. Stopping and re-starting someone's heart, to get it into the correct sinus rhythm, is not something you do either lightly or while scoffing a Kit-Kat. It is always dangerous and it is sometimes lethal. Everyone around the table, especially the man with the shock paddles, gets a big hit of adrenaline when the capacitors charge up. Many people die in hospitals. But it's not every day you get to personally perform the action which kills them, especially when it is the bare chest of a British Prime Minister in front of you, all smothered in conductive K-Y Jelly.

But yet we all have to take lessons on health from this workaholic man, who is driving himself into an early grave through endless political briefs and night-time flights, because he is Social Engineering Superman. Despite heart restarts, which are nature's way of telling you to stop politicking and to start gardening, he still knows better than the rest of us as to how we should look after our own health. He even has the right, apparently, to force us how to look after our own health, through taxation and social engineering, because assorted health fascist Guardianistas, who make their obscene gravy-train living from the health-and-welfare monster that is the British state, say that he has this right, as they float around in a comfortable tax-funded sea of their own, smoking cannabis, drinking Chardonnay, and engaging in dubious STD-inducing night-time practices of sexual self discovery.

Well, good luck to you in your private lives. But if you do it, why can't anyone else? Your stupid social engineering, your filthy hospitals, and your unbelievable waste in the NHS, make me, and everyone else, sick. We will all be a damn sight better off, if we simply got rid of all you social engineers, and all of your terrible self-defeating Nanny State works, which make everything worse rather than better. Do you never learn anything? Sixty years of continuing NHS failure and your benighted solution is yet more of the same. It is simply unbelievable. It is time this ratchet was broken.

In the comment section of David Carr's article here on Samizdata.net called Government Property, one of the commenters, Tim Haas, suggested the inimitable Dissident Frogman should come up with a suitable graphic... and indeed he has!

click for larger image

A question for all those people who support the introduction of a national ID card scheme.

Cattle get tagged.

And slaves get branded.

Which one are you?

Ms Shipley, a Labour MP, says allowing the adverts for burgers, biscuits, crisps and fizzy drinks to appear between programmes watched by the under-fives counters the government's efforts to encourage healthy eating. And so she hopes that ministers will listen to her arguments and back her Children's Television (Advertising) Bill, which will outlaw advertising during pre-school children's TV programmes that feature food and drink high in fat, salt and sugar.

My bill will ensure that children's health is placed before commercial interests.

Ms Shipley, responsible for the Protection of Children Act 1999, is supported by more than 100 MPs and 90 national organisation, including the National Heart Forum, Women's Institute, National Union of Teachers and National Consumer Council.

I have been overwhelmed by the massive favourable response my proposals have received from parents, health professionals and the wider public. There is a growing consensus that a ban is the only way forward as self-regulation is demonstratively not working. Unfortunately, some sections of the food and advertising industries have not heeded the public and professional calls for responsible marketing.

Responsible marketing?! But of course! The left honorable Lady knows what's right for our children and if the companies are just not going to listen, well, we will have to do something about that (defiant look, tight lips, chin out). Yes, we shall bloody make it a law so all those disgusting images will not pollute our children's pure souls... and bodies. Bad, bad companies. BAN THEM!

It is a knee-jerk reaction, yet another page from the government's book of we-know-what's-good-for-you-and-we-will-force-you-do-it-even-if-it-kills-you.

I am no fan of junk food that I think is an Abomination unto Gastronomy and neither am I fond of large companies that in their enormity occasionally start behaving like states. But proposing a law that bans adverts of greasy food and sugary drinks is the most stark example of the dellusions governments suffer about their role in the society and individuals' lives. The quote from Brian's excellent post about the menace of government's attempt to deliver outcomes contains the right message:

Government is not there to promote all the virtues. It is not there even to restrain or punish all vices. It is there to restrain and punish a very restricted set of vices, of the kind that cause direct and unjustified hurt to others, of the sort which if unpunished and unrestrained would mean people regularly coming to blows with each other. As individuals, government ministers may regret the fact that so many of us fail to display as much in the way of virtue as they might individually like, but so long as we do not do too much, too obviously, of the vice variety, they will not, in their official capacity, bother us.

Hear, hear, the honorable Lady and Gentlemen.

Bernie Greene wonders just how scientific is the science behind the smoking debate?

Epidemiology began with a fellow called John Snow investigating to find the cause of a cholera epidemic in London in the 19th Century. He had the idea that it might be coming from contamination in a well. So he took a map showing the locations of wells and plotted the incidence of the disease on the map. Sure enough they were mostly in close proximity to one particular well. He had the well put out of service and there were no more new cases of cholera. That is a simple story of logic and surveying intelligently applied to test a theory.

It is very unfortunate that it was so simple to solve. He might then have left a better example for his followers.

What if he had found that the 166 ¹ total cholera cases were scattered all over the map pretty evenly but that they all had pink carnations on their coats? One hundred thousand people wore pink carnations and 99,874 did not get cholera.

What does he do now? Well if he were a tobacco investigator he would petition the government to do something about pink carnations. But let's say he is a brighter boy.

He decides to go and interview the cholera cases in more depth.

He asks them all kinds of questions about themselves and about pink carnations - how many years have they been wearing them? How old were they when they started? etc. etc. He gathers all the data and looks for similarities. He gets a few things and tabulates them. He then interviews other people who don't have cholera but who do have pink carnations. He asks all the same questions again and tries to find something about pink carnations that is consistent among those who don't have cholera and is absent from those who do, or vice versa.

He finds one item in common. The cholera sufferers all work in the City though they live all over London. There are lots of carnation wearers in the other group who also work in the City and don't have cholera. So he knows that working in the City isn't the cause either so he correctly calls it another correlation just like pink carnations. But he now has two correlating pieces of data and a line of enquiry worth following.

He now goes back to the cholera group and asks a single new question. "What can you tell me about working in the City and wearing pink carnations?" They tell him it is the thing to do. They tell him all the ladies like it. They tell him their bosses like it. They tell him they buy them from a vendor right next to St Paul's Cathedral. etc. He notes their responses and tabulates them again. He asks the same thing of the non cholera group that also works in the City. They give him lots of very similar answers but on where they buy them from the answers vary and none of them are anywhere near St Paul's Cathedral. So he now has a third correlation and this one is far more promising as it is entirely absent from the non cholera group. He knows it isn't the cause itself because lots of people who go to St Pauls don't also get cholera but in combination with pink carnations he knows it is a significant correlation.

He gets the vendor to close down for a few weeks to see if it makes a difference to the number of new cholera cases. There are no new cases after 10 weeks where formally there had been several new cases each week. This is progress he thinks. He could stop right here, have the vendor permanently closed down and that might be enough to prevent further cases. But as he still doesn't understand how pink carnations and a vendor near St Pauls can be the cause of a cholera epidemic he continues to investigate.

He sets up a watching station opposite the vendor and sits there for many hours watching him ply his trade. He notices one thing that seems to offer a really plausible cause covering all the factors he has so far noted. A woman empties a huge chamber pot into a hole immediately behind the boxes of pink carnations. The scientist walks over and sees that some of the former contents of the woman's chamber pot have spilt into the boxes holding the carnations. He finds they contain the feces of several cholera victims the woman tends to.

It wasn't as easy a case to crack but it does illustrate what a scientist dedicated to truth and who won't compromise with logic would do.

In the case of smoking research I would say that back when the Hill/Doll study of 1956 was done an honest and worthwhile conclusion would have been:

We now know that most cases of lung cancer occur in smokers of a certain amount of tobacco after a long period of time in a very small number of cases relative to the number of smokers who smoke that amount for that long. Tobacco smoking isn't the cause of lung cancers but it is connected in some way that we don't yet understand. We can predict that many more smokers will get lung cancer than will non smokers. Something like 24 times as many. But we must also say again that there are far more smokers than there will ever be cases of lung cancer. This in itself makes it obvious that something else is involved.

Further because we can predict that a very small fraction of all smokers will account for the majority of lung cancer victims, and that because we don't know why this is so, we must responsibly inform smokers of this increase in risk. We must also inform smokers that the risk, whilst small compared to all smokers, is of a grave disease that is likely to be very painful and also fatal. Obviously smokers themselves have to decide if they want to cut down or quit smoking altogether because, as a scientist, our job is to research and discover threats to life but that it is the individual's responsibility to act on that information as he
sees fit.

We now have something new to discover. Most cases of lung cancer occur in a small number of smokers, but if smoking were the cause of those cases then what is preventing it in so many more cases? If smoking is not the cause of lung cancer then what factor is present in those smokers who do get it but which is not present in those who don't?

That to me would have been a logical, decent and honest approach. It may not have been so easy to understand as "Smoking causes lung cancer" but it would have been a whole lot more honest and the consequences of that could have changed subsequent history in many dramatic ways, and might have led some curious researchers into the field who would have known that there were still very significant questions to get answered, and they may have been capable of getting those answers by now.

Instead they told the government that tobacco was causing lung cancer and demanded that something be done about tobacco! Wrong target and thoroughly irresponsible as scientists in my opinion. That was a defining moment in the history of tobacco and it has been in decline ever since. Unfortunately so has epidemiology.

¹ Don't know what the actual number was. This was to make it closer to what Hill/Doll found with regard to lung cancer and smokers. 166 out of 100,000 after decades of 25 grams per day.

Competing interests: I once worked for a tobacconist shop. I am also a
pipe smoker. I'm not a scientist and I could be wrong. I would
appreciate being shown where with logical rather than ad hominem
argument.

Bernie Greene © 2003 . All Rights Reserved

Tomas at Teekay's Coffeeshop has an excellent post on how the Czech police decided to go after the oldest profession and benefit from register all hookers in a special database. The software for this essential exercise was provided by the UN.

After raiding 475 nightclubs past weekend in a well-meant effort to combat organized slavery, the Secretary of Interior Mr Gross (nomen omen) came up with this idea that prostitutes are to be monitored. The official goal is to find out about the movement of prostitutes within the EU.

Police will enter the data about anyone who looks like a hooker, after checking and recording data on your citizen ID card (it's mandatory to bear it at all times). Main source of data will be nightclubs and bars of certain sorts, but the police isn't limited to these venues only.

Central European babes are not known for their coy dress sense

Apparently, it is enough for a girl to wear something 'crazy' for her to end up in the National Hooker Registry. And there is no recourse, just as there are no rules, no checks, no appeal. Tomas concludes:

The next step will be regulated legalization: with all of them registered and monitored, the State will make a liberal gesture and allow some prostitution. Carefully controlled, with price limits, annual re-registration, you name it. Of course, it will also be much easier to monitor the customers of such services, and that could come in handy, too, right?

I think he may be on to something there...

...the state does, in the person of Mr. Justice Sumner, that is who owns your body.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
- J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Given that so many in the 'free world' are subject to compulsory educational conscription, how many people are in fact 'sovereign' over their own minds? And in an era in which the state can force you to put certain chemicals in your body regardless of your wishes, are you sovereign over your own body? If you are a child, clearly not... and even if you are an adult, clearly not.

The mothers, the sole carers of their daughters, argued that immunisation should be voluntary and it was not right to impose it against the wishes of a caring parent and it would cause them great distress.

The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab but had asked for meningitis protection. Some parents fear the MMR vaccine could be linked to autism, even though doctors and most experts say there is no evidence of a link.

Mr Justice Sumner decided both children should receive the jab because the benefits outweighed the risks.

But her views obviously count for nothing. If you do not truly own the insides of your body, then what are you? "The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab". Is she a slave? A serf? A chattel? I have fulminated before on that particular issue when confronted with people arguing for mandated mass medication... the issue is not one of health but rather 'who owns your body'. What the judges and doctors who would use the violence of state to force other people to change the chemistry of their own bodies show us is not that they care, but rather their totalitarian mindset.

Can it really surprise us that the state does not respect individual property rights or the right of self-defense if it does not even respect the right of individuals to judge what chemicals should or should not be put in your own body? This is not a minor issue because it goes to the very heart of whether your perception of freedom is an illusion or not.

The proposed EU regulation of blogs and other forms of Internet speech being suggested by the Council of Europe (a quasi-governmental think-tank whose views have inordinate sway with the EU's policy making elite) is very revealing about what lies at the heart of The Great European Project.

Steven Den Beste has written a rather good article on why the press is treated differently than broadcast media which use the finite resource of the electromagnetic spectrum. One can argue that as the EM spectrum is finite, it is reasonable to share out its use and as clearly not everyone can set up a radio or TV station, some rules to prevent the use of the media from becoming over mighty are justified. This is not quite how I see that issue myself but the contention is far from absurd.

One can even make the far less supportable assertion that because in reality setting up a newspaper is far beyond the means of most people simply because it is so expensive, the state should regulate the press, at least to some extent. Not surprisingly I flatly reject this notion and think the only defence individuals need against the established press are laws against libel. However the thinking behind this sort of regulation is at least easy to understand and can, if you accept the state as an essentially benevolent neutral institution (which I certainly do not), be seen as a way to prevent abuses of power by an over-mighty media corporation given the vast asymmetry of access to public opinion between a newspaper and an individual.

But when the Council of Europe start urging the EU to regulate blogs like this one, it should be clear that none of the arguments which can be applied to broadcast media and or the press apply here. As I mentioned in my previous article on this issue, if you have a cheap computer and a crummy modem, it still only takes about five minutes and no money whatsoever beyond your dial-up or broadband connection charges to set up a blog. There is no asymmetry of access to the public involved here. Granted, setting up an effective blog is another issue entirely, but simply getting viewable grievances in front of blogosphere eyeballs is simplicity itself.

So if anyone can set up a blog, and there is no finite resource in need of being allocated 'fairly' and there are no de facto capital related barriers to 'market' entry, what are we to make of this Council of Europe proposal to regulate us?

If I had to pick a single word to describe the root of this move to intermediate the state between on-line free speech and on-line readers, it would be Communitarianism. The notion at work here is much the same as that which I discussed when I rebutted Peter Hain's ideas for a totally political 'society'. If I write something and plonk it on the Internet, I cannot compel someone else to read it just as they could not have compelled me to write it in the first place. Yet the notion of a freely offered opinion via an almost universally available medium and a freely choosing reader assumes that individual choice (mine as writer and yours as reader), rather than some collective political will, is an acceptable basis for social interaction.

What the people at The Council of Europe find so offensive is that this simple process (I decide to write, you decide to read (or not)) is totally non-political. If you read my article and decide to leave a comment, and I decide to delete that comment, and you then decide to start your own blog to decry the things I write, where is the 'political community' in all this? Nowhere of course, because the actions described are purely social. There is no use of the collective means of coercion by either me nor the disgruntled reader. You do not get a vote on what I write and I do not get a vote on what you read... and if you start up a blog of your own to criticise me, I do not get a vote on what you write either and if I leave comments on your blog pointing out the errors of you ways, you can delete them if you choose to.

The understanding that civil society (the several actions of affinity and dis-affinity) and the political sphere (the control the collective means of coercion) are materially different is hardly a new observation. Yet it is the refusal to accept this by people who see force (politics) as the only legitimate means of interaction which lies at the heart of attempts to legally impose certain forms on how people express views on the Internet. It is not about enabling wrongs to be righted, or giving voice to the voiceless, or sharing the means of expression. As blogs are more or less free to set up and the Internet has essentially infinite in capacity to support them, that argument is simply a bare faced lie. This proposed regulation is just a particularly overt example of how the power elite in Europe will not tolerate anything which disintermediates the state because to deny any role for politics in something is to deny them any role. After all, they are not threatening to ban us (provided we comply with their directives), they are just demending we stop acting as social entities, following the customs and manners of the Internet, and start acting as political entities, comporting ourselves according to the politically formats laid out by the superstate's expresion of what they see as the collective will.

This is because if there is one thing communitarians hates above all, it is being ignored and excluded. A communitarian thinks not only is my business everyone's business, but the plurality has the right to use political interaction (which means force backed law) to vote on my every action... there is no real 'private life' to a communitarian, just a political one. In a quite literal sense, popularity is mandatory: you may only do what a plurality allows you to do.

In a perverse way, this policy proposal by the Council of Europe is almost good news: if they want to go to the effort to regulate us, that means they think we humble bloggers actually matter in the overall scheme of things. Our voices are being heard and the powers-that-be do not much care for the discordant non-state approved tune we are singing. Splendid.

Resistance is not futile. We will not be harmonised.

The nanny state is invited to strike again. The British Medical Association (BMA) is proposing a 17.5 percent VAT on high-fat foods like biscuits and processed meats to solve obesity-related problems, which cost the NHS roughly 500 million pounds a year. BMA spokesman Dr Martin Breach informs us:

There is an epidemic of obesity in the UK. You are what you eat and if that is the case the British public have a huge problem. Charging VAT on saturated foods found in processed meat products like sausages, pies and pastries, butter and cream, may help save some lives.

According to government statistics, one in five men and one in four women is obese. Obesity is a serious risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, muscle and respiratory problems and certain types of cancer.

One of the opposing arguments is that a punitive 'tax' on fatty foods would in fact work as a regressive tax since those on lower incomes generally tend to eat larger quantities of cheap, high-fat food.

Belinda Linden of the British Heart Foundation has the solution:

We need to educate people about the benefits of eating healthy foods and make them more responsible for their health. We also have to be sure that a 'fat tax' does not just end up penalising the poor without actually changing eating habits.

That's right. Change their eating habits, educate the masses! Be a nanny to the whole nation!

But the BMA has even a better answer. They say that the tax would hit food manufacturers hard and have little effect on the poor.

A fat-tax will remove food manufacturers' incentive to pump food full of fat. Instead they will fill processed foods with healthier ingredients and better selections of meat. Fat is a cheap by-product of the meat processing industry - they have mountains of the stuff and are desperate to use it, so they use it as cheap padding in foodstuffs.

Yes, let's fool around with the markets, the food manufacturers, supply and demand. That always works! And it is much more fun that finding out what really makes people fat!

They are assuming that their medical conclusions are absolutely right when it come to understanding the way human body processes fat and what its fat consumption ought to be. They are not taking into account results of recent research that more or less vindicated the (in)famous Atkins diet that sees higher consumption of unsaturated fats as positive and desirable. No, they are going to tax fat in one big lump regardless of whether there is any scientific rationale other then three decade of their stale dogma. Atkins may not be absolutely right either, who knows, but rather than finding out, let's mess with the markets, prices and taxes to teach people that they are not allowed to eat what they want.

Ah, but they need to be treated for serious and expensive ailments resulting from their over-indulgence on the National Health Service and at taxpayers' expense. Fine, denationalise the health service and let people carry the responsibility for their actions.

Soon there will be a tax on dangerous sports (serious injuries), driving, cycling or walking in towns (high accident rates), watching TV (makes you fat and stupid), and breathing in London (likely to get asthma and allergies).

This is the world in which the Big Brother marries the Nanny.

Hint: it is not about health and safety...
at least not your health and safety

Who owns you?

Tony Martin will not be released from jail. He will remain inside for the crime of defending his property for the full five year period of his sentance (he was initially sentanced to life).

The people who make up the parole board which has just decided that he poses an unacceptable threat to people who may in the future break into his home are wonderful examples of what Sean Gabb describes as The Enemy Class.

I strongly suspect their treatment of Tony Martin, found guilty of shooting dead a serial burglar in August 1999, has more to do with the fact he refuses to apologise or acknowledge any wrong doing in his act of defending his property from predators. That a group of parole board members whose salaries are paid by the state predating taxpayers should think that way is perhaps not such a surprise.

As I said before, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. As the political process in Britain has decayed to the point that there appears to be no political cost to the established power elite for the de facto criminalisation of self-defence (never mind that the state can gun you down in the street with scarcely a murmur), and de jure criminalisation of defending your own property, be it from the state or criminals (and the difference between them narrows daily), I wonder if people may simply start going out of their way to avoid involving the state in the aftermath of any act of self-defence.

As people seem to be unclear who to blame for the state deciding it is easier to prosecute law abiding homeowners than to go after housebreakers, and thus most seem unclear who are the correct people in need of having bricks thrown through their windows given that voting seems to make no difference, I expect sales of shovels, bin-bags, deep freezers, hacksaws and baseball bats to start increasing in high crime areas. There may even be a business opportunity for specialised discreet garbage disposal companies to assist this possible future trend.

The core of that problem is rooted in the contempt for private property found amongst the statists who make up the majority of the political class in Britain. Never forget that defending yourself is the ultimate expression of self-ownership and that is something the British state cannot tolerate, particularly the overt socialist parts: these people support 'democratic', which is to say political, control of the means of production and that includes your body. Just ask Tony Martin... the state is not your friend.

I have been taking a break from blogging, writing about Iraq and All That this past week in exchange for a much more enjoyable time working for a sailing examination off the south coast of the UK. But a few incidents and conversations with my fellow yachties got me thinking about some connections to this wonderful pastime and political stuff.

For starters, many nautical enthusiasts like me get into sailing because it embodies a form of freedom. For sure, there are thousands of complex rules operating at sea, many of which have accumulated like barnacles on the underside of a ship over the centuries, rather like the evolution of the rule of the English common law. And while they appear to be initially baffling, the rules of the High Seas make sense and actually liberate those who follow them. (Rules such as avoiding collisions and the use of navigation beacons, etc.)

Beyond such rules, what I like about sailing is that you have to obey and respect nature to master it. You are reliant on your own skills and knowledge and the voluntary co-operation of others in the same vessel. A skipper of a boat has and requires authority to operate a boat efficiently, but he or she cannot compel folk to be on the same boat in the first place.

Drawing big cultural implications out of all this has its limits, of course, but I cannot help feeling that those cultures most infected with the spirit of liberty have strong seafaring traditions. Sailing over long distances requires a natural spirit of enterprise. It requires skills and knowledge not best acquired at the point of a gun. It encourages the spread of language, particularly flexible languages like English. And seafaring folk have, in my experience, a robust, independent attitude towards life which sits well with the liberal outlook.

I spent a fair amount of money, not to mention a lot of energy, getting my sailing qualification ticket. I feel mighty pleased to know that I can now charter out a yacht in any part of the world's oceans. That's freedom.

History certainly does have a knack of repeating itself here in the UK. Just as we're about to embark on another war against a mustachioed despot, we're all set to bring back rationing:

"A ban on marketing fatty, salty and sugary products at youngsters is one of the options supported by the study from the Food Commission campaign group.

It also backs those calling for a nationwide promotion of healthy foods and a possible "fat tax" on junk food advertising."

But why stop there? Why not compulsory jogging every morning? Followed by an invigorating dip in ice-water? How about mandatory colonic irrigation, too?

Actually the question is redundant, because, whoever the 'Food Commission Campaign group' are, we all know that they have not the slightest intention of stopping there. They wll get what they want and then move on to Stage 2 (and Lord alone knows what that consists of). And because this is Britain we can all more-or-less write the script for these campaigns now. It is even becoming mundane.

I don't know who these campaigners are but perhaps, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, it will transpire that they have some connection with the WTC attacks. Then the Americans can come and drag them all off to Camp X-Ray.

P.S. Don't forget the hoods!

We all know about those archetypal laws. Parkinson's � work expands to fill the time available for its completion. The Peter Principle � people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. They're useful laws. They answer basic questions. Like: Why all the crap? Why is everything done so badly?

Well, I think I may have discovered another one of these universal laws, which answers the question: Why are so many people who you would think ought to be happy instead so miserable? I give you: Micklethwait's Law of Negotiated Misery.

It starts with the observation that more and more people are "self-managed" these days. Even people working inside giant business or governmental bureaucracies are being encouraged to think of themselves as free trading entrepreneurs, providing services in exchange for payment, in cash or in kind. Horizontal networking, self-starter, internal markets, intrapreneuring, etc. etc. blah blah blah.

Okay. You're a self-manager, and maybe even self-employed.

There are four kinds of work you think about maybe doing.

1. There's work you love and are good at.
   
2. There's work you hate and are good at.
   
3. There's work you love and are bad at.
   
4. There's work you hate and are bad at.

The world pretty soon decides that you must stop doing (3) and (4) and of course, you are delighted to stop doing (4). If you insist on doing (3) you are going to have to do it as a hobby.

Which leaves (1) and (2), the stuff you are good at, and either (1) love or (2) hate.

How much do you get paid to do (1), work you love and are good at? If you are a good negotiator, then plenty, because you are good at it, and demand lots of money.

But what if you are a bad negotiator? You jump at the job and accept bad money.

How much do you get paid to do (2)? Chances are you get paid good money. Why? Because you will only consent to do work you hate if you are paid good money. So, with no great effort, you hold out for good money (even if all you thought you were doing was Just Saying No), and, because you are good at the work, you get paid good money. Eventually, someone makes you an offer you can't refuse, and you take it.

So, if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate.

Bad negotiators can have semi-good lives if they can afford to oscillate between work they love and work they hate. For a while, they do that. But, by the end of that period the only way they know to make good money is to do work they hate.

Then factor in the following circumstance. They switch to a life in which they then have to make continuously good money. Wife, kids, mortgage. Maybe an addiction to an expensive type-(3) hobby. Or maybe the life they lead just happens to get much more expensive. Clang. The gates of the prison slam shut. From then on they must do work they hate, continuously.

Result: An inexorable tendency for the "self-managed" classes to negotiate themselves into lives of permanent misery.

Is this a truth about the world? I think it is. Am I the first person to have noticed it? Surely not. Certainly not in so many words. But maybe I am the first person to have nailed this extremely widespread experience down into a simple law with a simple name.

(If so, hurrah! I love it. And how much was I paid? Bugger all.)

Comments and links please.

Professor Malcolm Law, a leading nutritionist in Britain, proposed a solution to obesity increasingly prevalent among children. As with most health professionals who are given a public platform in this country his proposal reflected the spirit of our statist age. Faced with evidence that Britons are fatter than ever and that increasing numbers of children are classified as clinically obese, he argued that politicians should seize the initiative and force food and drink manufacturers to reduce the size of products.

Professor Law believes that nothing less than an end to the '20 per cent extra free' culture will stave off the kind of nationwide obesity which in recent years has swept across America. He pointed to a study carried out last year which revealed that diners who ate a large meal at one sitting felt no more hungry after eating a smaller portion - if the plate was full, in most the cases the diner felt satisfied with their meal.

"Forty years ago the Government forced the tobacco companies to reduce the tar content of their cigarettes in the interests of public health. A similar approach needs to be taken today with ice creams, chocolate bars and other products."

Note the language that our learned friend uses: "If we don't cut down on the size of our portions we will find that in future we have a much higher incidence of obesity and heart disease. There is likely to be a large public health impact."

This is the kind of attitude that has kept the NHS (Britain's National Health Service) in place and indeed as long it exists the 'public health impact' will always be an argument for the health fascists. As long as the taxpayers are required to cover the cost of the consequences of other people's actions, that is, a state-funded health system having to pick up the bill for the treatment of diseases associated with obesity, the 'statist' wolves in 'public health' clothing can make demands on the government to control our eating (drinking, smoking, living etc) habits.

And we know that the state is not your friend.

Capitalism Magazine's article, Abortion Rights are Pro-Life, has convinced me that my position in the debate on abortion is weak. I used to take the view that abortion violated the rights of a child, and that therefore it was immoral (in most cases). On the other hand, I didn't believe the government should do anything about abortion. As Milton Friedman said: "The government solution to a problem is usually worse than the problem." The last things I want to happen are backstreet abortions, mothers killing themselves and so on. It would be morally acceptable for government to protect the rights of the fetus, but not practicable.

The fundamental shift in my thinking is that I no longer believe that a fetus has individual rights - or, at the very least, I'm not so sure as I once was. As the article says:

"what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman's body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish."

I'm very happy for fish and cows to be killed to provide me with food, and the reason is that I do not believe they have the same rights as humans. If a fetus is more primative than these, how can I justify saying its rights are greater?

It appears that not everyone in Britain cravenly rolls over when confronted by authority.

After being fined for a very trivial motoring 'offence', Leon Humphreys reponse was, 'fight me for it':

"A court has rejected a 60-year-old man's attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence."

Not surprisingly, his invitation was declined and the fine increased. Still, you've got to award the guy some brownie points for his sheer cojones.

I am a fairly regular reader of New Scientist for its take on fast breaking technological news. The magazine does have a downside though. It is very... well... representative of UK "liberal" politics.

I have just finished an item in the 29-Nov-2002 issue, "I see a long life and a healthy one..." about entrepreneurial companies making genetic testing available to the consumer. One would think a science magazine would be praising them for taking cutting edge science and bringing it to the consumer in an affordable and appealing way while potentially creating many high paying jobs for scientists in the UK, generating yet another path for massive capital infusion into genetic and health research and adding to UK exports to top it off?

Naaah.

I'll let these quotes from the article stand on their own:

British regulators were caught on the hop when Sciona's tests first went on sale. No one had foreseen that consumers would suddenly be able to learn something about their genes without a doctor's agreement, or even knowledge.

Another option would be to return control of genetic testing to the medical profession, banning companies from providing tests unless requested by a doctor. Companies say this is a step too far towards meidcal paternalism, and argue that people have the right to obtain genetic information about themselves. But [Helen] Wallace [of GeneWatch UK] disagrees: "We need to ensure proper consultation through GP's to ensure that people understand the implications of taking a test," she says

What could I possibly add?

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all
- Nikita Khrushchev

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual
- Adolf Hitler

At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good
- Ted Kennedy, 2002

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual
- Benito Mussolini

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society
- Hillary Clinton, 1993

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person
- Vladimir Lenin

Thanks to James Knowles for compiling these quotes

The image above, which I took about an half an hour before writing this article, shows an employee of Britain's premier cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, standing by the front door having a cigarette. This is a man who works in a cancer hospital and comes face to face with the savage realities of what his habit vastly increases his risk of contracting, on a daily basis.

This picture says something very profound about human nature. One thing is for sure, it says more than any lengthy exegesis I could write about the futility of trying to use the violence of law to mandate behaviour the state feels is in the regulated person's "best interests". Ponder that.

August 17, on this day in 1795 the slave known only as Tula and his friend Bastian Karpata started a violent revolt against their oppressors.

Mad cow disease (vCJD), foot-and-mouth, MMR, salmonella in eggs... the list goes on and on. The reality of life is that no one has a monopoly on insight, intelligence and information. Yet the state would have us believe that in their case when they say something, is somehow of a higher order compared to any other institution or individual. After all, it that was not the case, how could the fact the state backs its views with the threat of violence be justified?

Yet time and time again we are told in patronising tones that the state's experts know best, to the extent the state is prepared to after our body chemistry regardless of our individual wishes. We are told for years "Of course British Beef is safe to eat. Our scientists tell us there is nothing to worry about and reports to the contrary are just scare-mongering"... only to discover it can in fact kill us in the most ghastly manner by boring holes in our brains .

Likewise, the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is still foisted on people by Britain's national Health Service in spite of worries about potentially horrendous side effects. Fortunately, the culture of deference to authority has been breaking down for quite some time as the state finds itself dis-intermediated from the flow of information to people. As yet more information casting doubt upon the safety of MMR comes to light, those who decided to shun the state's advice and err on the side of safety for their children are shown the wisdom of their ways.

Yet the important issue here is not 'if it better to fluoridate water' or 'should I eat more folic acid' or 'should I immunise my children with single jabs or the three-in-one' or 'should I wear a seat belt'?'... but 'Why do I tolerate the state and the experts on its payroll overriding my views on issues which relate directly to my body?'

The fact is fluoride probably does make for better teeth, folic acid for better health, MMR is usually safe and seat belts often save lives. But why on earth entrust these decisions to such a demonstrably fallible institution like the state? We all make mistakes, but the price of individual error is largely confined to the individual making the error or at least to his immediate family or associates... the price for the state making an error however is far wider and much harder to mitigate. When the advice the state gives us proves to be flawed, that can be disastrous, but they it actually makes its views on health as a force backed mandatory law, that should be regarded as intolerable.

In the case of MMR, single vaccines are privately available off the NHS, yet due to the fact people have their money appropriated to fund the NHS regardless of their wishes, the state reduces their ability to actually make meaningful choices independently. In much the same way, you make correctly deduce your children would be better educated either at home or at a private school, yet because the state takes your money and pours it into funding state schools anyway, it greatly reduces the real choice of less wealthy parents to actually opt out.

We are told we have all manner of free choices in the wonderful 'representative' democracy in which we live (pick any western country), yet as long as the state appropriates such a large chunk of the money we earn and depend upon to actualise our wishes, the reality is that for many, choice is an illusion as they struggle to manage what remains of their unapproapriated several property.

Related articles
It is a matter of private choice, not a matter of 'public' health, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Libertarian 'Public Health'?, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
The totalitarian mindset, Sunday, June 16, 2002

I agree that Logan (see previous article) is almost certainly not a totalitarian. However I stand by my contention that there is indeed no such thing as 'public health' except for communicable diseases not because I disagree with his self evident statement that 'The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease' but that 'health' is not in fact legitimately 'public' except in the case of communicable disease (and possibly some mental illnesses as well) as it goes to who owns a person's body.

Most other health related matters are essentially only legitimately private rather than public matters. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone spending non-appropriated monies (such as a philanthropic fund) to preach high and low the virtues of folate in bread/low fat diets/wearing seat belts/not smoking/not taking crack cocaine/wearing sensible shoes/eat more fish/eat less fish/avoid mad cow beef or whatever the health scare de jour is... provided the people being preached to 'for their own good' are free to respond with a loud yawn and a rude gesture if they are so inclined. Yes, it is legitimate to 'educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate'... and to induce (not mandate) companies to produce folate bread... but it is not legitimate to mandate it and it was that I was objecting to.

To mass medicate, such as putting folic acid in bread or fluoride in water in such a way that people cannot realistically avoid changes to their body chemistry, is to suggest that the state and its experts actually have some over-riding ownership of everyone's physical body and they may adjust its chemistry as the likes of Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand see fit. Now it that is not a totalitarian value then I don't know what is. The issue here is not health but who owns your body!

On 27^th of May, two eminent medical professors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand are seriously peeved that the recommendations of the advisory scientific committee on nutrition (COMA) are not going to be supported by the government. Those recommendations are to require by law that all bread in the United Kingdom is fortified with folic acid. This is already mandatory in the USA. In their letter the government funded professors wrote:

We believe that the decision of the Food Standards Agency [not to accept the COMA conclusions] is a mistake and illustrates the structural weakness in our ability to make rational public health decisions. The problem goes further than folic acid. It affects our whole approach to public health.

The contemporary view is that public health is essentially an issue of personal choice. In fact, the essence of public health is that it is a collective strategy that does not require personal choice (it is just there for all to benefit from). At present, individual decisions relating to public health [emphasis added] are a separate issue. We need an agency that is mandated to consider public health in a rational, evidence-based manner, with the authority to recommend policy to government and monitor its implementation. We are, regrettably, far from this paradigm.

We hope that ministers will ignore the view of the Food Standards Agency and implement the strategy proposed by COMA, the Governments's own scientific advisory committee

First off, let me say that I certainly agree that increasing ones intake of Folic acid has beneficial effects (I take a pill of the stuff myself every day). However that efficacy or otherwise of folic acid is utterly irrelevant. By what warped moral value does COMA and professors Wald and Hoffbrand have the right to decide that the entire population are going to be medicated by the state? There is only one person who has the right to decide if I will add chemicals to my body and that person is me. The only conceivable morally justified circumstances in which I might be medicated against my will is that of highly infectious dangerous diseases, on the theory that if I have smallpox (or whatever) then I would pose a clear threat to others.

Yet that is not the case here, and neither is it in the case of water fluoridation. Both are probably harmless and even beneficial yet it would seem that the morality of using the violence of the state to impose the judgement of technocrats like Wald and Hoffbrand does not even get a mention.

If because it is said to be objectively beneficial to force people to ingest certain chemicals, then why not also allow Wald and Hoffbrand to decide what the nations subjects will be required to eat and not eat? High fat low fibre MacDonald's burgers? Why not just make them illegal and require all restaurants to serve state approved menus set by COMA? If these professors have no moral problem forcibly medicating millions of people every day 'for their own good' then why not try to reduce the incidence of heart disease by shutting down the burger joints and pizza parlours? Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as 'public health'. My diet and supplements are none of Wald and Hoffbrand's damn business. How dare they try to put chemicals in MY body without my personal and explicit permission?

Of course the totalitarian mindset demonstrated by these people, rooted in collectivist hubris and moral relativism, sees choice itself as irrational... morality does not even come into it. Yet even on the amoral utilitarian basis under which such people operate and to which they would required us to submit our very body chemistry, we all know how well the state's retained scientists can be trusted regarding 'public health'. Look at how well they did regarding 'mad cow disease'.

You might want to take some time today, of all days, to check out The Centre for Freedom and Prosperity. If you need to know why you should look into the idea of organising your life around off-shore banking and business, then might I suggest you need look no further than what today means for your personal wealth... or at least the part of it you are permitted to keep.

Avoiding tax all together can be difficult for most people but you owe it to yourself to try and minimise the extent to which you are financing your own repression (and mine too). It is quite possible to do it by using the law against itself, though frankly whatever means you have to use when dealing with the state is fine by me. Any oath or declaration extracted under the threat of force has no moral basis whatsoever and breaking it is just a matter of deciding based on risk/benefit analysis, not morality.

Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must 'take him to task' over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of 'citizenship'. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:

To my mind, this isn't a conservative view. It's a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That's what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.

He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes 'citizenship' is indeed 'liberal' (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call 'democratic socialist'). The 'political community' Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is 'The State' because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a 'political' community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.

In a sense I suppose it's not a very big deal. But doesn't this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It's sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn't just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it's something more than that -- particularly in the context of American citizenship.

Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marx with his disdain for 'rootless cosmopolitans'. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a 'Jet Set' of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have 'emigrated' yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact.

However in this era of global communications, it is a simple matter of picking up a mobile (cell) phone whilst out shopping to call your similarly equipped cousin 'in the old country'. I have myself moved continents several times in my life and yet have never thought of myself as an 'immigrant'. It was just that I moved to a place, acquired a house, worked there for as long as it suited me, and then... went somewhere else because that suited me better now. Britain, Ireland, South Africa, India, USA, Canada... so what? Each has their own cultures yet that Anglosphere meta-culture (and not just the language) is more similar than dissimilar on so many levels.

So when Josh says "It's sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom", well yeah... that really is all that we are talking about. A heritage knickknack. The Brits with their flavour of popular culture, Marmite, localised curries, irony intensive humour... the Yanks with their u starved spelling, shopping malls in the middle of nowhere, high fat diets, dynamic business culture... these are interesting and also trivial because compared to the shared cultural connections and similarities that are Anglosphere in nature and essentially trans-national, these other things are just the result of localised quirk rather than the rapidly evolving commonality of assumptions of the emerging cosmopolitanism.

Although I have mentioned before on this blog that I reject the moral validity of the very concept of 'citizenship', as a practical matter I think that because the state likes to insist on the importance of citizenship, well, the more the merrier then. The Smorgasbord approach to nationality is very appealing to 'rootless cosmopolitans' of the rapidly developing Anglosphere meta-culture, for exactly the reasons why Marx (and presumably Joshua) dislike it. Gaining the perspectives of not just Britain or America but Britain and America... and Israel and China and Slovakia and India and Croatia and Italy and Australia and Turkey... this is the 'cosmopolitanisation' process at work and also does wonders to export Anglosphere values of severalty, contract, technological civilisation and civil society to the rest of the world via the web of family and relationships, rather that the directed, force backed arbitration of what 'culture' should be that exclusionary states try to impose.

American civil society is something I admire and which spreads the values conducive to liberty as no other society currently does... but American citizenship particularly (more than any other advanced nation's citizenship) is rather like being branded like livestock. To have that brand means that, unlike almost every other state on earth, the US government will always claim a pecuniary interest in the private property that you acquire, even if you live outside the USA and make your living outside the USA and keep your assets outside the USA. Unlike other countries, which by and large lose interest in you the moment you step outside their borders, the USA actually makes itself your super-owner. The USA do not just claim a territorial monopoly on the means of force, it actually claims to own part of your labour regardless of where you are. It owns your labour not because you are in America, but because you are a citizen. That is the reality of how the US state actually sees its people (i.e. that citizens are the property of the state) even though that is not how most US citizens perceive the nature of the 'relationship'. Yet that is what I think the truth is beyond the perception: The USA does not just control land and what people do on that land (all states do that), it actually claims ownership of the anointed inhabitants themselves regardless of where they are.

The basis of the club and our membership in it is our fundamental equality. And the essence of that equality, as I see it, is that we've all thrown in our lots together. Some of us who were born here do it implicitly others who are newcomers did explicitly. But we've all committed ourselves to this group, this enterprise, this club, this nation. If some of us are American citizens and others of us are citizens of this and another country then we're not quite equal anymore. The basis of our equality and citizenship is challenged.

Indeed. But then I do not regard myself as 'equal' to other people. And nor does anyone else if they are being sensible. I regard myself as interacting within the frames of reference of a society and that, the shared understandings, the common axioms, the cultural shorthand...that is the basis for my ability to engage fellow members of this society, not some coloured bit of cloth or weird hand-over-heart declaiming and certainly not some damn bureaucrat or judge's imprimatur of 'citizenship'. Nor have I 'thrown my lot in' with anyone nor given them the right to presume that I have. When the state requires me to give my monies to others in tax, if I do so it is the vote of force, not some implied social contract. I have thrown my lot in with my friends and business associates, the ones I choose, and their citizenship means less than nothing to me when I judge the value of my relationship to them.

In much the same way that if I ever marry again, I will not even tell the state because I refuse to accept it is anyone else's business, so too I urge people to regard their passports as an imposition, not a privilege. Treat your national passport as a way of getting to stand in the shorter line at the airport and not some sacred document. You do not have to be a citizen to be a member of a society, regardless of what the state says. If I can find a way to marketize citizenship, that might be my next entrepreneurial venture. Hmm... maybe 'Free American Passport with all purchases of fitted kitchens over $5,000: order a fitted Italian marble bathroom at the same time and we will throw in a Italian citizenship and 1,000 Frequent Flyer Miles!'...

Yes, I like the sound of that.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
- J.S. Mill, On Liberty

Charles Dodgson takes aim and fires at Libertarians and our ideas which he clearly regards as ill-conceived and even harmful.

Mr.Dodgson uses an article from the Boston Phoenix exposing the slave trade in Pakistan.

"The bidding starts quickly. About 15 minutes into the bidding, one of the buyers asks for an inspection. The elderly woman removes the girls tunic, fingers the childs breasts, and then shines a flashlight into her open mouth to show that she has a good set of teeth. Bidding resumes with a certain intensity; some of the men can be seen rubbing themselves."

The article paints a truly pitiful vista and I share Mr.Dodgson's revulsion. What I do not share, though, is his rather strange conclusion that this is the kind of thing that Libertarians approve of:

"Libertarians argue for a society in which people solve their problems by making whatever commercial bargains they can, and the government takes an enforcement role, if that. The more radical among them suggest that society would be best off without any government at all, with nothing but private trade to regulate their interactions."

Not quite right, of course, but it is an indication of where Mr.Dodgson is going wrong and he is definitely going wrong even according the article he has used as his source which, further down, advises us:

"Precious few Americans know anything about the history of Pakistan, much less that ul-Haq�s reforms consolidated conservative Islam�s stranglehold on the national imagination. Fewer still know that, in the process of imposing Islamic law on the land, he created a culture of servitude for the poor."

Ah, that explains it then. Would all those Libertarians who are going around advocating the imposition of Conservative Islamic Law please stop doing it because you are distinctly off-message and giving people like Mr.Dodgson the wrong impression. Thank you.

Any genuine Libertarians could tell Mr.Dodgson that our ideas are based on the sovereign rights of individual human beings. A concept which, in both theory and practice, may lead to all manner of interesting and even exotic consequences, all of which are the very antithesis of slavery.

It is often said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. I don't know about that and I don't think that Mr.Dodgson is a man of little learning. The rest of his posting is devoted to taking our Johnny Student to task for his interpretations of the US Civil War in a lengthy rebuttal which appears to be both well-researched and informative.

No, I prefer to think that its a little misconception that is a dangerous thing and, of course, a big misconception is a really dangerous thing. Yes, I 'm happier with that.

...very different things to different people. Let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary:

patriot /n.a person who is devoted to and ready to support or defend his or her country. ../patriotic adj. //patriotically adv. //patriotism n. [F patriote f. LL patriota f. Gk. patriotes f. patros of one's father f. pater patros father]

Of course this also rather depends on what you mean by 'country'

country n. (pl.-ies) 1 a the territory of a nation with its own government; a State. b a territory possessing its own language, people, culture, etc. [...] 3 the land of a person's birth or citizenship; a fatherland or motherland.

And therein lies one of the problems with Patriotism. When some one says 'I am a patriot', what the hell does that actually mean? Let's take me, for example. My mother was American and I have lived about one quarter of my life in the USA. My father was British and I have lived a little under half my life here. For purely accidental reasons, I was actually born in the Netherlands. I feel both/neither British and/or American. So much for the complicated heredity and biology. Now for some ideology: I personally reject as illegitimate any function of the state which is not related to the defence of the individual liberty of people within their area of control, within a broad reasonable definition of those terms. I see the State as, at best, a provider of a service (security) in much the same way as I see the Pepsi-Cola Beverage Company as a provider of cans of fizzy brown liquid. I do not accept the very notion of 'citizenship' as I regard that as tantamount to denying me free association with non-citizens and implies the State somehow owns me in some way.

So can I be 'patriotic'?

To the State? Absolutely not. Try to make me pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the Union Jack or the Tricolour with the intention of extracting an admission of loyalty to the state and I will set it on fire instead. And if it is on a tee shirt saying "Try to burn these colors asshole", the wearer might just get their wish. Try to conscript me and the state will discover that I am not a pacifist and have no problem with using force against someone who tries to impose servitude upon me: starting with the guy who tries to serve call up papers on me.

And yet...

I live in London at the moment but I have 'Old Glory' displayed in my front window for all to see. Try walking down Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea and you will see which is my house. It has been there since September 12^th 2001. I do indeed feel an affinity for what James Bennett aptly calls The Anglosphere. I regard myself as a member of a cosmopolitan, English speaking global community, a civil society far greater than any mere nation state. For all its flaws, that extended society is the best hope for freedom and liberty the world has ever known and that is something worth defending. Unlike British society, which has a myriad cultural and regional symbols redolent with meaning, only Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Star Spangled Banner, truly represents not just the American state but also American society, warts and all. Truth is I much prefer the Gadsden flag (see side bar of this blog) but most people would not know what it means. And so that is why the Stars and Stripes is stuck in my window for all to see. It was not just the people of New York who were wounded, it was all of us and that is a point I think well worth making publicly.

So is that 'patriotism'? Opinions vary.

Last night I was in lovely Prague but tonight I am in more exciting but less lovely Belgrade. So let me tear myself away from my new biMac «hehehe» and give you a Balkan perspective on the articles by Dale Amon and Perry de Havilland regarding hairy John Walker in Afghanistan.

As a person who is not from what Perry interestingly calls the 'Anglosphere', maybe I see this matter of John Walker slightly differently. In what used to be Yugoslavia, people split along largely ethnic lines when the civil war ripped us apart. Yet many people made decisions to not let an accident of birth choose who they stood by. There were Serbs who joined the Croatian HV Army, there were Croatians who supported the Krajina Serbs, there were Croatians who joined the Bosnian 'Muslim' Armia rather than the Croatian HVO. There were Serbs in Yugoslavia who supported Milosevic and the paramilitaries and others who opposed them. Still others everywhere decided to support 'none of the above' and either refused to take up arms against anyone or moved abroad.

It seems to me, a person who turns his back on their ethnic origin and joins with another culture during a conflict is either a person of principle or a traitor. Which you are judged to be is only decided when it is all over. So for example, Croatians who supported the Serbian regime in Krajina are 'traitors' and Serbs who supported Tudjman's Croatia are 'principled'.

Why? Because if anyone can be said to have emerged the 'winner' in the Balkan Wars, it is Croatia. It is that simple. As the US has won the war in Afghanistan, it will be decided that Walker is a traitor. The winners make the rules and they write the history books. The winner is always right. Perry takes a position of pure and very good libertarian principle in this matter, but what Dale says is what will actually happen: the US will throw him in jail regardless for exactly the reasons he says.

It may not be fair or just or moral or even reasonable. But it is the truth. That is how the world works.

Dale's points are well made, particularly the one that when Walker joined the Taliban, he could hardly have reasonably expected to find himself at war with the United States! I have a slightly different take on it, however.

I think many of the comments regarding the dismal Walker begs the question of why is he being regarded as having any particular affinity or duty of loyalty to the USA at all? Just because he originated from there, how does that somehow make him irretrievably beholden? People come from all over the world and emigrate to America and the US has no problem with them 'becoming Americans'. So why is it so hard to see the process in reverse?

For goodness sake, if going to Afghanistan and joining the Taliban does not constitute the complete and utter repudiation of not just the United States but the entire western world, then I guess I don't know what does. When he was captured, as far as I know he was certainly not yelling "I'm an American! I wanna see the nearest American consulate!" Far from it. There should be no expectation that he still owes the US anything or the US owes him anything.

If it turns out he is a member of Al Qaeda, then he is still very much our enemy and should be treated in the same manner as we treated captured members of the SS or Gestapo or Nazi Party after WWII. If he is just a member of the defeated Taliban's army, as seems likely, then just question him and then dump his sorry arse back in the hell hole we found him in. Even if he was involved in the death of CIA man Mike Spann, so what? Walker was a soldier with the Taliban and we were the Taliban's openly declared enemy. People get killed in war. That is what soldiers do. Big deal.

I do not think Walker is 'just a misguided kid'. I think he is a misguided adult who made his choices freely and should reap the consequences of supporting a vile regime in Afghanistan. But his crimes are again the Afghan people who suffered under the Taliban, not the US. Unless he turns out to be a member of Al Qaeda, leave it to to the Afghans to deal with him.

It's a hard call without really knowing what Mr. Walker was up to and why. There is little doubt in my mind that he should be tried for Treason; whether or not he is convicted, whether or not there were extenuating circumstances is a matter for the courts to decide. The fact that he was found where he was found is rather damning evidence but is not "beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt".

What should be done with him if he is found guilty? That again is a matter for the courts. We don't know what he actually did so how can we decide his fate from in front of our comfortable computer screens? For all we know he could have been dragged along by events and lain cowering in the basement wondering at his own idiocy. Or perhaps he went to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance never imagining he could end up fighting his own country. After all, on September 10th how many of us would have considered US forces in Afghanistan as even the remotest possibility? If that were the case he is a soldier of fortune who got caught up in the wrong war at the wrong time. A few years in prison and a slap on the wrist would suffice.

Of course as Glenn Reynolds has suggested a number of times, we could take it as given he has chosen to give up his US Citizenship. We could leave him to the tender mercies of his chosen enemies, the Northern Alliance. An article about his interrogation in Ananova seems to indicate the CIA men were thinking along these lines just before "the balloon went up":

On the tape, Walker is seen being brought to the two CIA men for interrogation. Spann is then seen saying to his colleague: "I explained to him what the deal is" and then tells Walker: "It's up to you." Dave then says: "The problem is, he's got to decide if he wants to live or die. If he wants to die, he's going to die here. "Or he's going to f****** spend the rest of his short f****** life in prison. It's his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys.

If he was there specifically to fight against America, there are no options. He should be put away for a very long time. And if he was actively assisting the al Qaeda... well that is another kettle of sharks entirely. He would, and should, face the death penalty.

Fortunately we have the right President for it.