(7)

"When I stacked the shelves at my father's grocery store, and I finished bringing the boxes up and emptying them and pricing everything, I wanted to see the shelves just sparkle. I called my dad over - I had a great father - he’d pat me on the back, “Fantastic!"

Ed Snider, American sports entrepreneur and philanthropist, from an interview with Stephen Hicks. This quote, I hope, gives some flavour of the zest and energy of a great, principled businessman who does not seek government handouts or favours. The interview is long but worth a read.

(91)

I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilisation if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.

- Jeremy Clarkson, on the over-policing of midsummer at Stonehenge.

(16)

"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."

Fred Siegel, writing on HG Wells. It is fair to say that the Fabian movement of which this man was such a key part deserves to go down in infamy, given the damage it has done in so many ways.

(11)

If [UK Government] spending since 1997 had risen no faster than inflation, we would be spending a third less than we do now, and could abolish income tax, VAT, and council tax entirely.

- Eamonn Butler, writing in the Daily Telegraph on what I am relieved to discover the Adam Smith Institute has renamed Cost of Government Day.

(32)

All the existing [medical care] schemes, including the present American mixed corporatist/socialist model, represent a transfer from the young and healthy to the old and chronically sick (and to the medical cartel, of course). The way it's used in practice, the phrase "having health insurance" means having the right to place oneself on the receiving end of these transfers. No honest discussion of the situation is possible until the entirely false and misleading concept of "health insurance" is dropped.

- Commenter Ivan

(15)

"We live in a broadly capitalistic society...if Briitish Airways gets into trouble and cannot be sustained as a profitable business, then the government should not step in and bail it out."

Richard Branson, talking about the economic woes of British Airways. I have no idea whether sincerely believes in untramelled laissez faire (one has doubts) or is just dissing the competition, but it was refreshing to hear such comments on the BBC Breakfast TV show this morning. Take note, Messrs Obama, Brown, and the rest of them.

(16)

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

- Milton Friedman

(59)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

- Voltaire, rationalist & satirist (1694 - 1778)

(8)

"It is rare that governments successfully cut costs by first spending more money."

- Tyler Cowen. He was talking about Mr Obama's plans to socialise US medicine. I am sure that when the NHS was set up here in the UK, the advocates of said argued that it would "save" money in the long run. Meanwhile, here is some useful commentary from Arnold Kling.

(22)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

- Winston Churchill

(11)

Drunken sailors generally spend cash that they’ve already earned themselves, rather than running up debt to be paid by others. If our politicians started spending like drunken sailors, it would in fact represent a dramatic improvement.

- Instapundit yesterday. The Bishop likes it also.

(6)

Doubtless politics has always had its dark side. But the depths to which it has sunk over the last 12 years under New Labour has been unprecedented in this country. Of all the legacies left by this Government the poisoning of political discourse is surely the worst. Gordon Brown, foul-tempered and intolerant, has been at the very centre of this mess.

Gordon Brown never was fit for Number 10 and, given the wreckage of the economy, the public finances and the financial regulatory system, was never fit for Number 11 either.

- Ruth Lea adds to the admosphere now being created by the WAGS. Have those Blair Babes finally justified their existence?

(10)

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

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

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

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

(10)

"In many ways, Cameron faces a task far harder than that which confronted Margaret Thatcher. She was elected three years after the IMF bailout, and so the public finances were being restored to health. She was chosen as leader specifically to bring radical change, and had four years to assemble a team and prepare for the ordeal. Mr Cameron originally assembled a team for the political equivalent of a game of croquet; the same people now find themselves dropped on a rugby pitch."

Fraser Nelson.

(9)

"There is an almost universal assumption that the next government, of whatever stripe, will be imposing new taxes to avoid a junk-bond future. This easy option should not be allowed to run its course without challenge, because it ignores the risk of turning Britain into a junk economy of high taxes and low growth. It is no coincidence that the pressure to bring tax havens to heel has become intense over the past six months. So panicked were the finance ministers of the G20 nations about the risk of capital flight from the grabbing State that a campaign of bullying was launched against a small group of nations that refuse to accept that the State has the power to achieve absolute dominion over private wealth."

Carl Mortished. He is writing about California, and the lessons of that indebted US state for the euro zone and Britain.

(36)

"I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table. The only encouraging thing about public reaction to the crisis is that going by polls citizens seem to have more misgivings about some of these policies than politicians or the media. Still, though there have been studies that indicate the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years, what is also clear is it was enormously popular. FDR was elected four straight times, and more than once without ever having brought unemployment down to single digits. An economic disaster does not necessarily mean a political disaster. If we could raise the average level of understanding of economics to what Alfred Marshall had in 1890, the vast majority of politicians would be voted out of office."

Thomas Sowell, interviewed in Reason magazine.

(17)

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom

- Friedrich Hayek

...or perhaps not

(2)

One of the lovely things about the interweb is the complete freedom to post obscure, intractable, thoroughly off-putting essays, revelling in the fact that even if 99.9999 per cent of humanity really doesn’t want to read e.g. a rambling 12,000 word reflection on some little-known artist by a totally unknown commentator - a perfectly legitimate point of view, obviously - well, there’s still the outside chance that someone out there, somewhere, actually will want to read it. And sometimes just the prospect of connecting, probably anonymously and certainly at a great distance, with that one other person is what makes the whole project worthwhile.

- Bunny Smedley comments on a short posting at my place

(19)

The occupation of a member of Parliament would thereupon become an occupation in itself, carried on, like other professions, with a view chiefly to its pecuniary returns, and under the demoralizing influences of an occupation essentially precarious. It would become an object of desire to adventurers of a low class, and 658 persons in possession with ten or twenty times as many in expectancy, would be incessantly bidding to attract or retain the suffrages of electors by promising all things, honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivalling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices or the vulgarist part of the crowd

- J.S. Mill, quoted in The Times on March 13, 1906, discussing the likely consequences of paying MPs for their service. I hope Patrick Crozier will forgive me more more or less copying his post in its entirety, but it really deserves repeating.

(13)

The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.

- John Redwood

(9)

Speaking personally, I can't help wondering why the Left are so ready to believe that everyone who gets a tax bill for £50,000 will just grit their teeth and pay it, but putting 20p on a pint of beer will force average Joes like us to quit drinking. Either incentives matter, or they don't.

- a throwaway thought in brackets in a long Britblog roundup from Mr Eugenides

(23)

They want to manage and control every aspect of daily life. That is not the role of the EU. It is the role of local government.

- A French euroskeptic cheese merchant, interview broadcast on BBC World Service this morning.

19th century romantic nationalism still rules even in places one hoped were civilized: Slavery is not the problem, as long as the master is one of us; being enslaved by foreigners stirs the blood of popular rebellion.

(12)

Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today's Observer:

YouTube if you want to. ...

Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady's not for tubing, it would seem. (LATER: Except that ... she is.) This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don't like it.

And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:

"You are impugning my integrity."

Well, yes.

Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown's protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved - intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind - are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown's moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.

(7)

Some of us do think that designer labels will save our souls. That's bad. But it's a whole lot better than thinking that, say, the Führer will save your soul, or a crusade against the infidels, or nationalism, or a host of other collective salvations. When the inevitable disappointment from consumerism comes, it's a private tragedy. When the inevitable disappointment from a collective salvation comes, it's a national crisis inviting some new, possibly worse, collective salvation. Until humans learn the wisdom of angels, I will remain a great supporter of crass consumerism and conspicuous consumption.

- Roger Koppl. I encountered this by randomly exploring the IEA blog's blogroll. I will now go shopping.

(24)

I put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day, before realising that there already was one. Sorry. But, it's good and deserves plentiful copying and pasting, so here is that posting rehashed, with the quote in question as its starting point:

So, yet again, the courts are faced with a sample of the deeply confusing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and the satellite Statutory Instruments to which it is giving stuttering birth. The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair to hold up their hands and say: "the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find". But it is not for us to desert our judicial duty, however lamentably others have legislated. But, we find little comfort or assistance in the historic canons of construction for determining the will of Parliament which were fashioned in a more leisurely age and at a time when elegance and clarity of thought and language were to be found in legislation as a matter of course rather than exception.

That is the Court of Appeal struggling to make sense of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Found here by him (who has recently resolved to blog approximately every day and whom I recommend) via a comment on this, which is about, among other foolishnesses, the recent fashion among Them for stopping us taking photos of Them.

My dad was a Big Cheese lawyer, and I can remember him telling me stuff like this several decades ago. I vaguely recall him saying that until about nineteen sixty something or thenabouts, there was this bloke who lived in a den in Whitehall and who spent his time rewriting laws so that (a) they didn't contradict themselves, and (b) they didn't contradict each other, but (c) so far as he could contrive it, they managed to maintain the original will of the legislators, insofar as he could divine it. If he could not divine it, he made it up, as intelligently as he could. But then, catastrophe. He retired. Ever since then, the laws have got more and more incoherent and incomprehensible. And of course now, you would need about a hundred of such non-existent paragons of legal non-incontinence just to keep up.

As Rob, the above mentioned blogger quotes another commenter saying:

We are told that 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' but how can it not be an excuse when even the courts are unsure of what the law is?

In practice, I think I notice that, recently (i.e. during the time since that old bloke my dad talked about retired), They have evolved a relatively sensible way of enforcing Their laws (senseless though the laws themselves frequently are), which is based on distinguishing between real laws and arbitrary laws. The real ones, against things like murder, assault, robbery and so on, still get you arrested at once, provided They catch you at it. But the vast mountain range of arbitrary laws and rules and regulations, often in the form of policy directives from On High about what various Acts of Parliament actually mean (given that as originally written they are quite often gibberish) according to On High, are enforced by you first being given a warning. You may not park on that purple line. You must have a permit to hand out leaflets here. You can't wear that hat or that suntan lotion or eat that sticky bun or drink that drink in that sized glass or call that an artichoke. You are obliged to fill in this form. You must send it to us (i.e. Them) within one month. Etcetera, etcetera, et something angry cetera. Which means that, in practice, ignorance of the law has become the obviously reasonable defence that it obviously now is, with regard to almost all recently concocted laws. If They were to insist otherwise, They would get repeatedly involved in huge fights with people who don't want to break the law, but who don't know what it is. I.e. with everybody.

I now live my life certain that I am constantly breaking laws of this or that recently invented sort, and as far as I am concerned it is up to Them to tell me about which laws actually matter to Them. I will then, if I think that Their particular commands or demands make some sense, or if They are sufficiently menacing about them, obey them. Or, I will carry on breaking whatever idiot law it is or that They have just made up without troubling Parliament with the petty details, but a bit more carefully. I still take photos of policemen, for instance. I am just a bit more careful about letting them know I'm doing it, and am careful while doing it not to Look At Them In A Funny Way.

Decade after decade, to mention another example, I have failed to register to vote. Occasionally I read somewhere or see something telling me that this is illegal. Is it? I don't know and I don't care. Nobody menacing actually tells me that I must register and threatens me with actual trouble if I don't. So from where I stand, the mere law of the matter can go jump into the Serpentine.

If They want me to be more respectful of "the law" (which is how They typically now describe Their laws), They should reduce the number of - and reduce the incoherence and arbitrariness of - Their laws, to the point where the laws that remain mostly make sense.

(15)

"Democracy is nowadays a greatly over-hyped blessing, particularly by Americans, who have no pre-democratic history to provide a perspective. It is clearly less important than freedom, the rule of law and constitutional government, which ideally it should entrench, but may well not do so."

- Nigel Lawson, former UK finance minister, journalist and more recently, a fine debunker of global warming alarmism. His children such as Dominic and Nigella seem to have done okay as well.

(14)

"There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who "starve for want of luxuries." But it is always easy to regard another man's things as superficial and another man's pursuits as greedy, while one's own belongings have sentimental value and one's own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access."

- Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing.

(13)

"Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate...The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy."

- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week's terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long.

(19)

You are now signed up to this petition. Thank you.

If you'd like to tell your friends about this petition, its permanent web address is: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

- This is what you get as soon as you click on the second of the above links, fill in your details, and then confirm it all by clicking on the link in the email they immediately send you. I was impressed by the ease and speed of it all.

(16)

Of course, it’s been half a century since Cuba has had a real new leader. This is one of the down sides to life extension.

- Rand Simberg

(64)

Obama’s speciality is shaping up to be particularly dangerous because it’s hard to dispute given the average American’s sensibilities. No call for liberty and constitutional principle seems convincing when Obama is arguing that those relying on government giveaways should have to follow government-set rules. That is, once you’ve allowed them to go ahead with the handouts, the political game is almost over. Under the guise of “managing the taxpayers’ money", Obama and his crew are rewriting mortgages, deciding executive compensation, tossing out CEO’s. And note carefully that his plans for where taxpayers’ money should go continue to swell, from healthcare to the environment to energy policy to expanded “national service” programs. When taxpayers’ money is everywhere - and Obama is doing his best to make sure it is - then Obama’s control is everywhere. The Octo-potus is claiming his space and flexing his grip. As far as he’s concerned, it’s Barack Obama’s country. We’re just living in it.

- Brian Doherty

If all those 'libertarians' who dallied with The Community Organiser had been reading our own Paul Marks, who was onto Mr Obama's agenda months ago, they would have saved themselves a lot of buyer's remorse.

Welcome, Instapundit readers. Some rather grumpy folk out there wondered where there was a link to one of Paul Marks' comments (the archives on the side of this blog, so please use them!). Anyway, here is one reference.

(12)

I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.

- Simon Heffer

I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling.

(13)

"There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers."

David Thompson.

(8)

Classic:

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can't now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido's commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn't. Not yet, anyway.

The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.

Brown's problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.

The BBC's caption under the video of Brown's latest bout of self-strangulation says this:

Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics

LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.

You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don't care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what's happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.

See also: this.

(10)

"There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest."

- Blognor Regis

And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.

(1)

"When you keep a kennel of attack dogs then I guess you can't entirely claim ignorance or absence of responsibility when one of them bites several passers by."

- Andrew Neil

(5)

"Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particuar job."

- Brian Clough, the late English club football manager who did not suffer from the national trait of false modesty.

(6)

I wasn't lying on purpose.

- Derek Draper on Channel 4 News (already nailed down as the defining soundbite of today by Iain Dale)

(7)

Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.

- Commenter Chris H

(10)

[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

(17)

The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday's Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.

But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:

The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).

Yes, that's certainly how I remember the story.

. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.

I don't think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis's plot are strange. "Modernising Labour governments" think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can - capitalism.

See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.

(39)

I am not suggesting by any means that the gold standard was perfect, but if we judge it by its record, it achieved much better price stability than the disastrous inconvertible paper money standard that replaced it.

The results were catastrophic, but Keynes was right about one thing. Modern governments were not like Roman emperors or medieval kings: they were much worse, and produced much greater inflation rates than their predecessors ever managed to achieve. There is a limit to how much inflation you can create by clipping the edges of your coins and putting them back into circulation, but the sky's the limit when you can just speed up the printing press or add additional zeroes to your notes.

- a characteristically forthright moment from Kevin Dowd's Chris Tame Memorial Lecture entitled Lessons from the Financial Crisis: A Libertarian Perspective, delivered on March 17th, already reported on here by Johnathan Pearce, now published by the Libertarian Alliance as Economic Notes No. 111, printable out as a .pdf but (more to the point for bloggers) copiable and pastable as an .html

(5)

“The Federal Reserve...along with other central banks, is a legal counterfeiter."

Paul Kasriel, economist at Northern Trust, the US bank. He is in favour of all this "quantitative easing", by the way, but he is far too honest an economist not to identify what that euphemism actually stands for. And he predicts that it certainly will trigger inflation later on.

(16)

Two splendid snippets facing each other in today's print edition of the Times. First Chris Ayres's Los Angeles notebook:

California's decision not to ban black cars should by no means reassure anyone that the Golden State is now run by sane people.

I think that they have looked back at 5,000 years of human history - at pestilence and famine and disease and degradation, at genocide and civil war, at fear and loathing, at bigotry and ignorance, chauvinism and dictatorship - and concluded that our biggest problem is... shopping.

[...] I have struggled to get to grips with the idea - and maybe I am doing them a disservice - but I really think the notion that they are advancing, once stripped of all their posh words, is this. I go to the shop and buy a new television. The archbishops think that this impoverishes my soul, the G20 protesters think I am destroying the planet and exploiting the workers, and Oliver James thinks that I am making myself mentally ill.

He is really not doing them a disservice. The common motivation is a sort of snobbish distain about vulgar ways of enjoying the material world; and the same thing finds its head in the circles of power, too, as a sort of neo-puritan obsession with work, regulation and oversight of individuals to make sure that no-one is getting away with the sin of unapproved lifestyle.

(3)

"It is perfectly possible for inertia to be beneficial and an improvement, if the alternative is poorer. It is the same fallacy as the claim of the current Government concerning the current economic crisis, that 'doing nothing is not an option'."

- Former England rugby player and man of firm views on the sport, Brian Moore. Now a television commentator and newspaper pundit, Mr Moore sees parallels between the rule changes in rugby - some of which have been a retrogade step, in his view - and the reaction of certain governments to the credit crisis.

(5)

The cognitive dissonance you speak of is found on the right as well, it is not confined to the left. Actually, the problem is, there is no dissonance, there is an honest and fair dinkum doublethink, with no internal conflict.

- CountingCats, commenting here.

(1)

"Those who are incapable of earning our respect often end up demanding it."

- A commenter called Chris on this blog post.

(27)

What the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism. In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed upon them by the totalitarian state.

- The Spectator.

(12)

I work for the Police and I for one think this is a fantastic idea along with every other scheme that is or is threatened to be brought in ot fight this insidiuos and invisible fight against terrorism. I can't wait to change my title from Constable to Stasi...

- Robert Pangborn, a commenter on an article Social network sites 'monitored'

(24)

It's been an open secret for years that Israel possesses nuclear capability. It's an interesting comment on the genuine - as opposed to rhetorical - threat that the Zionist Entity is deemed to pose that it's only now, when Iran is on the verge of joining the nuclear club, that other Middle Eastern and Arab countries get concerned about developing their own programs.

- Mick Hartley

(1)

People used to hand me the hymnbook and insist on finding me the place.

- Rt Hon David Blunkett PC MP, on Radio 4's Sunday programme today, recalls being at church in Sheffield as a blind boy... and provides a perfect metaphor for his party's philosophy of government.

He went on to explain that he would play along with the pointless drama - pretending to sing from the book. Compliance is not approval; nor is it evidence that the 'enabling' state is doing good.

(3)

There is no stated national consensus that as a country we should substantially reduce overall masturbation, but such a reduction would benefit the health of many who wank – and those affected by passive wanking- the concept I invented a few sentences ago and am now treating as a genuine problem.

Here is a graph to illustrate how many people are killed by masturbation. It actually represents something completely different, possibly cat food sales, but I'm guessing that most of you are actually too stupid to actually look at the graph in any detail ...

- some Unenlightened Commentary sadly not actually supplied by Sir Liam Donaldson (with thanks to Obnoxio the Clown)

(10)

"'Cant' is a four-leter word we don't use much now. Most people of my generation have never heard of it, never alone use it in conversation...to apply it to someone is to accuse them of sloppy thinking, if you are being kind, or, at the very worst, of a total lack of sincerity."

Ben Wilson.

Of course, when it comes to sincerity, one should remember as Milton Friedman once put it, that sincerity is a much overpraised virtue. People can sincerely believe in all manner of utter rubbish, while others insincerely pay tribute to things that are right and true. Oh, the crooked timber of humanity.

(25)

"I am not in favour of any parental choice in education. You will go to your local school."

- Former London mayor and Hugo Chavez buddy, Ken Livingstone. Not too up to speed with the concept of choice, is he? No wonder the unions loved him.

(22)

"It was John Maynard Keynes, a man of great intellect but limited knowledge of economic theory, who ultimately succeeded in rehabilitating a view long the preserve of cranks with whom he openly sympathised."

F.A. Hayek, Choice in Currency, a Way to Stop Inflation, Institute of Economic Affairs (1975), page 10.

Prof. Hayek was usually a restrained and polite demolisher of nonsense but in this quote, I think we get a sense of the rage that he must have felt at how Lord Keynes, with his easy charm and confident manner, could persuade politicians of what they wanted to hear anyway - that you can create wealth by spending other people's money. But even later on Hayek tries to argue that Keynes would have been alarmed at how his ideas have been used as cover for monetary insanity. I think that is a mark of how basically decent an intellectual opponent Hayek was.

Meanwhile, following on from Kevin Dowd's lecture last night - which I thought was very good - I will have more to say about his talk later on.

(25)

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

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

- David Farrer

(12)

General Edmond Rasolomahandry . . . President Marc Ravalomanana . . . opposition leader Andry Rajoelina . . . Colonel Noel Ndriarijoana: newsreaders everywhere are praying for a swift resolution to the crisis.

- Mick Hartley notes the possibility of civil war in Madagascar

(15)

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

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

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

(9)

Those in power in the Capitol – as well as many local politicians – make skillful use of those who rely on government services to advance their spending agenda. They use children, the disabled, the elderly and others who appear vulnerable to justify increasing taxes. When reasonable arguments are made that higher taxes in an already high-tax state could lead to fiscal ruin and less for everyone, politicians and bureaucrats use these dependent classes as human shields.

- Jon Coupal

(via John Beck)

(49)

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

- Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, page 291.

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

(11)

It is said that pragmatism trumps ideology in a crisis. What actually happens in a crisis, certainly in this one, is that the ruling party gets to rechristen its ideology as pragmatism.

- Christopher Caldwell

He is talking about the Democrat's addiction to protectionism. But it is happening all over, and not just with ruling parties, but with would-be ruling ones. The wicked world is disintegrating, and it is all the fault of an evil which whatever commentator you are reading especially hates, and offers a superb opportunity for the bees in his bonnet to rebuild the social honeycomb so that mankind can buzz happily in unison ever after.

I am reminded of the Trotskyist red-greens I met in the 80s, who had the merit of putting it very clearly. Unlike the merely conservation-minded, or deep-green nature-worshippers, they welcomed a predicted ecological collapse: chaos and mass-starvation would turn people to The Revolution out of desperation. A lot of those purveying their own patent medicines for the depression seem to be unconscious that they are engaged in the moral terrorism of the transitional demand.

(23)

Regular commenter here Nick M takes a wack at Vernon Bogdanor:

Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia's. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing "progressive" about being progressive.

I was going to put that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but I reckon the feline enumerator has his sneer quotes around the wrong "progressive" there. Still, good stuff, albeit sweary.

Talking of which, I do wonder about this swear-blogging thing. The bad news is that respectable bloggers who might give particular (swear-)blog postings of merit lots of new readers are put off by the swearing from linking to such postings. (Telegraph Blogger Alex Singleton recently told me exactly this.) On the other hand, a lot of people are very angry just now, not just, you know, in a state of respectful disagreement with the powers that, for the time being, be. Such angry persons deserve voices around which to rally, voices which communicate their feelings rather than just their thoughts.

Swear-blogging may also mean that, by assembling all the angry ones in a cursing, seething internet mob, in a way that completely alienates our present version of Polite Society, the angry ones will achieve a far greater degree of tactical surprise come the storming of the Winter Palace, or whatever will be the equivalent event or events during the next few years. Polite Society just won't see it coming, because it simply cannot now bear to look. It will consequently swing in far greater numbers from lamp-posts (or again, whatever will turn out to be the modern equivalent) than would otherwise have happened. Which just might be a rather fucking good thing.

(7)

"If you have a mortgage and are celebrating record low repayments, then enjoy it for now. Ask what the consequences will be for your household budget of interest rates of 10 per cent or higher, which will be needed to tame the rising prices that will result from this mad experiment. But there is another great British consensus emerging around the idea. "It is essential," say analysts. "No other option," sighs many a fiscal conservative. "Everyone" is in favour of it, we're told. I have just about had enough of "everyone". It was "everyone" – most economists, politicians, etc – who thought that the bubble would never burst. They were wrong then, and are now. "

Iain Martin, on the Bank of England's descent into monetary madness. Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.

(10)

"What did you do during the recession, Daddy? I installed solar panels and wind turbines. If only Franklin Roosevelt had thought to put millions of Americans to work during the Depression doing make-work jobs that were gee-whiz futuristic.... Oh, that's right. He did. And it didn't work then, either. But this time is different, you know."

- Nick Gillespie, at Reason's Hit & Run blog.

(40)

"The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false. It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World? The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate."

- Jamie Whyte.

(8)

"It is noteworthy that in all the glaring headlines and TV news media’s Pecksniffian commentary about Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion scam and now R. Allen Stanford’s multi-billion dollar gold brick, not one word has been heard about the federal government’s own ongoing confidence scheme. The recent “bailouts” of banks, mortgage companies and automakers, together with the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation and the $75 billion home mortgage “rescue” plan signed by President Barack Obama last week, share the same attributes and methodology as Madoff’s and Stanford’s, and differ from them only in scale. Compared to Congress, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the myriad perpetuated entitlements such as Medicare, Social Security, the Federal Employees Retirement System, confidence men Madoff and Stanford are mere small-time grifters."

- Edward Cline.

He's right. Ponzi schemes and much public sector pension/benefits systems are more or less identical. I guess the caveat is that with Mr Madoff and others, they were allegedly claiming, falsely, to be running funded schemes with actual investments in real assets. But the broad point is valid.

(7)

There are no jack boots here, that's too obvious, perhaps at some later point more overt force if there is too much "selfish" foot dragging by you or me, though the powers and aggression of the government's already-existing "force" is sufficiently threatening to anyone who might resist. Make no mistake about that. The speech (2/24) by Obama was a seemingly soft yet determined Declaration of War against free exchange, against the natural and beneficial chaos of the myriad of human transactions (spiritual and economic - which cannot be rationally or logically separated by the way!). He is simply doing that which popular mainstream philosophy and pop culture point to and in effect "authorize."

- 'Mister Integrity'

(24)

"Whenever someone complains that libertarians are just pie-in-the-sky utopian (or distopian) intellectuals, just ask them again about the real world consequences of the War on Drugs, and see who gets all pie-in-the-sky right quick".

Randy Barnett.

Mr Barnett clearly did not get the memo from former UK prime minister Tony Blair that all that talk about liberty was so 19th Century, dahling.

(23)

Love doesn't scale.

- Eric S. Raymond (spotted yesterday and discussed by Joshua Herring)

(22)

A propos of my earlier post on what recent legislation we should try to repeal in order to reclaim our lost civil liberties, I was struck by the thought that it might be easier to simply repeal every piece of legislation introduced since 1997.

- Bishop Hill

(27)

Did politicians rumble the trade? Did governments, or international forums or symposiums, provide the sharp instrument? Did academic research and expertise expose the dodgy product? Did statutory regulators apply the pin? No, the free market wised up and pricked this bubble. Politicians and finance ministers (if they had had the power) would have tried to keep it inflated. The market puffed itself up, and then, without intervention - despite intervention - the market let itself down. The speed with which this has happened has been awful, but however inconvenient for many or catastrophic for a few, correction is not a failure of the market, but a success.

- Matthew Parris

(36)

I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:

Political professionals have little time for activist true believers and their pesky principles. Freedom of speech is one of those fundamental principles in a free democracy. It requires that you especially defend the rights of those with whom you disagree. Guido has gone to the trouble of watching the Fitna video, it contains no call to violence, in fact it condemns violence.

In the past and at great cost diplomatically, a Conservative government defended Salman Rushdie's freedom of speech. It is therefore profoundly disappointing that the Tories have chosen to be officially agnostic about Geert Wilders. The decontamination strategy has turned into moral cowardice.

However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn.

Two further quick thoughts:

First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing.

Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy.

Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé.

(72)

"We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous."

Theodore Dalrymple. The problem is the idea that we need "rulers" at all.

(9)

"...when things go wrong, we seek bogeymen rather than face up to our own shortcomings. We expect instant, painless solutions to self-inflicted problems. Britain's booze culture is blamed on the slick advertisements of drinks companies and the cut-price tactics of supermarkets. Our obesity epidemic is the fault of junk-food outlets and confectionery suppliers. And our personal indebtedness, the highest it has ever been, is the result of a pernicious campaign by greedy banks to enslave their customers. Oh yes, and the crash was caused by beastly Americans."

Jeff Randall, economics columnist and broadcaster.

(5)

Look, I don't blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do.

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man's failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone's health - and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

- Andrew Stuttaford, referring to this.

(4)

... the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy.

Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.

- Jacob Burckhardt, from lectures on the history of the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries given at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, later included in Judgments on History and Historians.

(12)

We saved the world. I say we party!

- Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Is it just me, or is the thought of Gordon Brown attempting to party even more frightening than the thought of Gordon Brown trying to 'save the world'.

(1)

"There is as much or more reason to be afraid of bigotry, narrow-mindedness and capricious censure in a village than in a large and complex society. It is worth noting that those who complained of a present or impending "age of cant" never thought that their minds would become less independent - it was always directed at opponents and, principally, down the social scale."

- Ben Wilson, Decency & Disorder, 1789-1837, page 444. One of the most arresting and entertaining works of social and cultural history I have read for some time. This quote is particularly relevant in our own time when one occasionally hears people bemoaning the loss of "small, tight-knit communities" and the supposed soullessness of urban life. In fact the ability to choose one's networks of friends rather than get lumbered with whatever is on offer in a small community is one of the unacknowedged joys of modern life.

(17)

"The folly and immorality of the “stimulus” plan passed today can be attacked on many fronts. For one thing there’s the awe-inspiring irony of a Democrat-dominated Congress and a Democrat president spending taking nearly a trillion dollars from the hardworking middle class people of this country and giving it to corporations and businesses—and precisely as a result of the apparent improprieties in which those same businesses were engaged! Honest liberals who resent corporate welfare must really have a headache at this point."

- Timothy Sandefur.

(4)

It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively.

- Fraser Nelson, The Spectator.

(10)

IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering... I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.

- 'Sonja Aaberg', the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak

(39)

In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.

- Brian Micklethwait

(9)

"Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane."

- Bryan Appleyard. Those squirrels cannot catch a break.

(8)

"Politics is all very well in its place, that place being very much on the periphery of life."

- Tim Worstall, who has had an impressive year on his own blog, and seems to have quite marvellously upset one of the main figures of the Guardian's columnists.

Excellent.

(3)

"The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay."

William Graham Sumner, from his essay, The Forgotten Man. Its relevance for our own time is unmistakable.

(4)

I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies.

- A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash.

I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people's annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are - and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don't bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: "You can't win an argument."

(6)

Un despote a toujours quelques bons moments ; une assemblée de despotes n’en a jamais. Si un tyran me fait une injustice, je peux le désarmer par sa maîtresse, par son confesseur, ou par son page ; mais une compagnie de graves tyrans est inaccessible à toutes les séductions.

[A despot still has good moments; an assembly of despots never does. If one tyrant mistreats me, I can get round him by means of his mistress, his priest, or his page-boy. But a staid company of tyrants is impervious to temptation.]

- Voltaire. A remarkable characterisation of the monotonic puritanism of modern democratic government, but written in around 1760. I wonder whether C.S. Lewis's better known pronouncement on those who torment us for our own good has its origin here. It is similar both in the thought expressed and the cadence of its expression.

(10)

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder

- Suketu Mehta, author of a splendid book on India's most wicked and exhilarating city, getting properly to the point, even if asking for a responsive government is getting into "Be careful what you wish for" territory.

(5)

The arrest of Damian Green is quite appalling and so ridiculously Orwellian that I am almost tempted to vote Tory. I mean it.

- a commenter here

(5)

I love to go to Washington - if only to be near my money.

- Bob Hope

(3)

"There is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than that of draining money from the pockets of the people."

- The Wisdom of Adam Smith, page 194.

(5)

"In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly "thinking people" who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression. In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many."

Thomas Sowell, the Vision of The Anointed, page 260.

His analysis applies - with the odd exception - to the political/intellectual elites responsible for the expansion of government for the past 100 years or so.

(9)

To the authoritarian mind, freedom and chaos are synonymous.

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

(45)

Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later

- Barbara Follett, Minister of Kulture.

(8)

Haringey had a beautiful paper trail of how they failed to protect this baby.

- Eileen Munro, London School of Economics, as paraphrased by Simon Jenkins.

(15)

"Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to "go left." Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter."

Mark Steyn. As he points out, the upcoming US government bailout of General Motors and god-knows-what-else should nail the idea that the US is the land of "unregulated capitalism".

Update: PJ O'Rourke writes in similar vein.

(8)

Times have changed, voters want the pendulum to swing back from spending towards tax cuts. Rumours are circulating in the Westminster Village that Gordon and Alastair are preparing to announce tax cuts. Which will, even if they are only rhetorical tax cuts, in a stroke make Dave and George look ridiculous as both Labour and the LibDems promise tax cuts and the Tories are left high and dry stranded on the high tax centre ground ...

- Guido

(8)

Times have changed, voters want the pendulum to swing back from spending towards tax cuts. Rumours are circulating in the Westminster Village that Gordon and Alastair are preparing to announce tax cuts. Which will, even if they are only rhetorical tax cuts, in a stroke make Dave and George look ridiculous as both Labour and the LibDems promise tax cuts and the Tories are left high and dry stranded on the high tax centre ground ...

- Guido

(1)

Is all change good? No. Only good change is good.

- although probably more quote of yesterday from Alice Bachini-Smith
PLUS: I just noticed this
PLUS: I also like this (via here)

(8)

But what's not open for debate, after tonight, is the sheer futility of trying to build a coalition from the center out. Because the center won't stand still for any candidate.

- Dan McLaughlin, as pointed out by commenter Andrew X.

(6)

The only other thing I would add is that I am in the advertising industry and most of the ads for sub-prime loans had dried up before the recent bail-out bill. As soon as that went through the volume for these ads went up 10 times. Whatever the government did to "fix" the problem ain't working because all they did was just give everyone who didn't make money the first time around another shot at the craps table.

- from a comment by "Ben Franklin" on this Belmont Club posting spotted by David Farrer

(6)

There is no "responsible" route out of recession - we need radical action to rescue the economy. We need a growth package and we need it fast, the sooner it is in place the quicker we will be out of recession.

- Guido Fawkes was underwhelmed by David Cameron's latest speech

(10)

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take everything you have

- Barry Goldwater

I stumbled across this evergreen Goldwater remark on Gmail, where it is also quote of the day. A somewhat surprising choice for them, considering Google's rather obvious political biases.

(4)

"In addition, one should not minimize the great economic achievements of the past 25 years in the form of rapid growth in world GDP, low world inflation, and low unemployment in most countries. Perhaps these achievements will be overshadowed by a deep world recession, but that remains to be seen. If the impact of this financial crisis on the real economy is not both very severe and very prolonged, and time will answer that question, the combination of the past 21/2 decades of remarkable achievement, and the economic turbulence that followed, may still look good when placed in full historical perspective."

- Gary Becker.

Like Professor Becker, I think fears of a repeat of a 1930s-style depression are unwarranted. What is a serious concern in my mind is the likely explosion of poorly thought-out regulation by politicians who seem to have forgotten how it was often such regulations, as well as lax monetary policy, that is at the crux of the current turmoil.

(48)

I'm at the point I was at a month ago: the two tickets consist one one old guy who frankly should have been put to pasture, two leftist asshats who belong in prison, and a lady who's the only one of the four who's worth a damn

- Commenter Sunfish.

(0)

"Instead of thinking of the pending bailouts and financial regulation as a new era of government supervisions of markets, think of it as preserving the system in which a Harvard elite controls other people's money. In fact, very little is likely to change. Reading the news stories about how Secretary Paulson plans to implement the bailout, it seems as though the same people will be in charge of the money. Print some new business cards, change the logo on the front from "Goldman Sachs" to "U.S. Treasury," and everything else continues as it was. It's just that it becomes a lot more difficult for ordinary people to opt out of using the elite's money management services."

- Arnold Kling. He is not exactly a fan of the US financial bailout.

(7)

People sometimes say they wish the politicians would get together and agree, instead of bickering and arguing. I wish the politicians and political parties would disagree more about the issues, so that actions and policies can be properly tested and choices evaluated. Consensus often breeds the worst errors.

- John Redwood

(8)

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

- John Adams.

(28)

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he brought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service….The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income.”

- A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, page 1. Quoted by Alvin Rabushka in “From Adam Smith to The Wealth of America, page 80. The latter is a particularly good book, written very much from the "supply-side" school of economics with a strong account of developments in UK 19th century politics, Hong Kong, and the Reagan presidency.

(8)

"The investment business is based on people being able to do what they want with their money. They may want to do some odd things. "People put their money where their thoughts are," said one investment banker I interviewed. This means that there are a lot of men who are, so to speak, in financial topless bars, sticking millions of dollars into the G-strings of lap-dancing debts and equities."

- PJ O'Rourke, Eat The Rich (page 27).

(9)

Mr Kim and his elite did not wilfully seek the deaths of ordinary North Koreans, but they accepted them as collateral damage resulting from their need to maintain power.

- from the Economist yesterday

(12)

I have been reading this book, by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV. King Henry ascended the throne of England after successfully deposing Richard II, and his own reign seems to have consisted of one attempt after another to depose him. Yet Henry IV died in his bed of natural albeit very painful causes.

One of these failed rebellions against King Henry, at the beginning of the year 1400, involved a certain Sir Thomas Blount.

Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor's death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount's execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. 'No, for I do not know where I should put it', he replied.

I had no idea that the people who suffered these frightful deaths were able to say anything at this late stage in their ordeal. I guess the executioners were trying to be as nice as they could to Sir Thomas, against whom they presumably had no personal animus, rather like Michael Palin in this. But, talk about too little, too late.

(1)

The country's gone to the dogs, the economy's going down the toilet, crime is through the roof, I'm on half the wages I was two years ago and am barely keeping my head above water and crossing my fingers that I'm going to even have a job in six month's time, like lots of others no doubt, and all these assorted wonks do is wiffle on and on about which interchangeable dipstick is going to which interchangeable, ineffectual government department next.

Who the chuff is Alan Johnson? Who the chuff is Ed Balls? Who the chuff cares? Just clear off the whole damn lot of you.

- Blognor Regis gives his opinion yesterday about some recent reshuffle speculation

(15)

Happily, you can still blame [Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher] Cox for something. He went as far out of his way as he could to enable the brokerage firms by harassing the small group of informed financial people who have been trying to tell the truth to the markets: the short sellers. They bet against the stock price of a company and so have always had a bad reputation with the public. But in this case, they are the closest thing we have to heroes.

- Michael Lewis, simultaneously making the points that having efficient markets in which it is easy for nay-sayers to short assets is likely to moderate the creation of bubbles and that government regulators have a horrible tendency to turn into cheerleaders for the industries they are supposed to be regulating.

(8)

"It can't go on for much longer," says one Cabinet member who described yesterday's meeting as "excruciating: an embarrassment".

The minister adds: "Gordon is now measuring his survival in two-week horizons. It's humiliating for everyone."

- Anne McElvoy - quoted here, and I should imagine, there and everywhere during the next few days

(11)

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

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

(13)

Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?

The answer appears to be "because some congressman negotiated to have some money spent in his district" (which possibly precludes sanity) but it still rather boggles the mind.

(28)

I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

- Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason

(14)

"In general the most important effect of the government attempt to shield itself and its clients from uncertainty and risk is to place the entire system in peril. It becomes at once too rigid and too soft to react resourcefully to the new shocks and sudden challenges that are inevitable in a dangerous world."

- George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 235 (1981). His comment ought to be on the walls of every state regulatory authority and central bank.

(67)

So there are many women voters who do indeed want to vote for a women. Just as there are many black voters who want to vote for a black person. After all Senator Obama does not get 90%+ of the black vote because most of these people say to themselves "I really like Barack's interpretation of Karl Marx via Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, it is much better than the interpretation of ..."

I doubt that one voter in a hundred even knows that Senator Obama is a Marxist - certainly the mainstream media have not informed of this.

- Paul Marks

(37)

But if Republicans want another Reagan, they should recognize that he didn't come from nowhere, and work on their farm team.

- Glenn Reynolds. I am not quite sure about the expression "farm team", but I am assuming that is an Americanism. I agree with the general sentiment, for all of Reagan's drawbacks. There is no one on the political right in the English-speaking world who comes close to the Gipper. That is a shame.

(58)

So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they've appeared, and I'm hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I've found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn't read the latest book on Lincoln, or on - as Bush refers to him - the "first George W." I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.

"Well, so Bush reads history", one might reasonably observe at this point. "Isn't it more important to find out how he uses it?" It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested - as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time - in how the past can provide guidance for the future.

- John Lewis Gaddis

(28)

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

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

(5)

"We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?"

Dirty Harry's Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.

(8)

"Never brush your teeth if you're dressed in black. Don't trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Always put the shower curtain inside the bath. Life is forever teaching us lessons, and here's another that I learnt last week: it's impossible to be mates with celebrities."

- Sathnam Sanghera

(6)

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

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

(29)

Men do not like tits because they buy Zoo. Men buy Zoo because they like tits.

- mr eugenides comments on Michael Gove's aside about men's mags in this

(1)

“I thought I'd begin by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”

Spike Milligan

(7)

The moment that a policy "war" is declared these days, you can guess it's doomed to gradual failure.

Jenny McCartney.

(10)

"We all know that politics is a con some of the time. It has begun to feel like politics is a con almost all of the time."

- Camilla Cavendish.

Well, some of us have never thought much of politics in the first place, certainly not politics as a professional job.

(41)

"Weren't the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn't even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic...Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an inalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley."

- PJ O'Rourke

(11)

I often wonder how different individual lives in Britain would be if alcohol had never been invented. Just imagine all the couples who would never have got together without a little encouragement. All those unsent text messages and undeclared intentions. Can you imagine dancing, let alone pulling, in a sober club?

- Iain Hollingshead, Twenty Something: the quarter-life crisis of Jack Lancaster

(7)

Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing "bubble", which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don't discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time.

- Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog.

But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying!

(7)

I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the "second-shift / Costco" sense.

- The wonderful James Lileks.

Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse.

(29)

Freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. ... Unless it is resisted, the erosion of civil liberties will continue until there is no such thing as liberty and all opposition to authority will have become crime.

- Germaine Greer

(17)

If you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is ... well ... shit.

- with his usual tact and sensitivity Devil's Kitchen hints at a reason why the voters of Glasgow East might just consider not voting Labour any more

(33)

I think the United States is the greatest country that's ever existed on earth. And I think that it is difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It's the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect; it certainly is not. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad - and I think if you do that on a rational basis and make a fair assessment - I think it's hard to say that there is anything better. I wasn't born in America - but I got here as fast as I could.

- Elon Musk during an interview for "From Paypal to Outerspace", TCSDaily, 2008-06-16

(13)

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

Jeff Read defends Disch thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, ...

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

(5)

There was coffee. Life would go on.

- William Gibson. The Winter Market.

In truth, the anthology Burning Chrome contains some very fine short stories. I tend to think that it is a shame that Gibson gave up publishing stories pretty much immediately after he published his first novel, however iconic that novel might have been.

(10)

Liberty is always dangerous - but it's the safest thing we have.

- Bob Geldof That is pretty good; but liberty is not a thing. It might be better to say it is the safest choice we have.

(49)

One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma. For many a year we have been enjoined to cease stigmatising the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads, because it really isn’t their fault — and as a result an important means of combating these social ills has been thrown away. Stigmatising has a point; it is not just fun to shout abuse at fat people, it is socially useful too.

- Rod Liddle, who talks some sense, although he is a bit of a yob himself.

Update: some people have asked if I support all of his argument. I do not. For a start, obesity is not something one can define precisely; secondly, it can add to the generally authortarian, bullying atmsophere in which we live if it is deemed acceptable to make all kinds of fun of the largely-built, or whatever. But Liddle is quite correct to locate the issue of personal responsibility and to get away from the victim-culture angle that is so often exploited by the medical profession and their political friends

(19)

The possibility that China could become a fully industrialised and urbanised society, with living standards akin to our own, has become the ultimate environmentalist nightmare.

- Claire Fox

(10)

On that miraculous Saturday, therefore, when the Vulcan took to the skies again – there was perhaps only one regret – that the bomb bay was not filled with ordnance, with the destination Brussels via Westminster.

- EU Referendum. The author had been to watch the magnificent example of Cold War aviation take to the skies once more. Here's a link to a site about this splendid aircraft.

(11)

Thousands are dying every year thanks to Britain's health service not delivering the standards people expect and receive in other European countries. Billions of pounds have been thrown at the NHS but the additional spending has made no discernable difference to the long-term pattern of falling mortality. This is a colossal waste of lives and money. We need to learn lessons from European countries with healthcare systems that don't suffer from political management, monopolistic provision and centralisation.

- Matthew Sinclair, TaxPayers' Alliance (via Helen Evans)

(15)

I began fully-listening when Ellis Cashmore appeared as a 'witness'. Cashmore is 'professor' of Culture, Media and Sport, surely the Andrex of academic disciplines. You can listen to him on the website - it's the programme about celebrity - he appears at about twenty minutes. You may need a new laptop as these machines don't take kindly to being flung across the room. The gist of what Cashmore said was contained in his line 'Cultures are no better or worse than each other'. Right then, Prof, here's my time machine and, woosh, here we are in Tiananmen Square during Mao's Cultural - geddit? - Revolution. You, being an intellectual, are about to be stamped to death for the entertainment of the peasants. Luckily, I am on hand to, first, console you with the thought that all cultures are equal and, secondly, to operate the time machine and whisk you off to Germany in the thirties. I, having a Jewish mother, am being dragged off by Brown Shirts, but, luckily, you are on hand to console me with the thought that all cultures are equal. Sadly, you cannot operate the time machine. ... Who are these people? What are they for?

- Bryan Appleyard listens to the BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze

(5)

To succeed in modern politics you should take care to be a bland, self-preserving, sober, drugless, funless, dull-witted bore for years beforehand.

- Libby Purves, discussing leftyluvviedom's cultivation of the Two Minutes Hate¹ against Boris Johnson.

----
¹The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
- George Orwell, '1984'

(17)

"I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go – although presumably once he's lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there."

- Mark Steyn, who despite his recent legal hassles, has not lost his sense of humour.

(5)

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people's (by which I mean Government's) assumptions about a 'digital divide' are a myth. I think they have visions of a bunch of poor, obese black kids sitting in a council house eating turkey twizzlers, cleaning their guns, just wishing for the day they could access this internet thing that people are talking about.

- a friend who works in local government in UK, responding to Social networks may subvert 'digital divide'.

(6)

Liberty is everywhere evident in licence and injured by licensing.

(8)

I’ve spent more than a decade working as a nightclub doorman. I’ve been involved in hundreds of violent incidents, including many away from the club. I can state unequivocally that in situations where some of these punks decide they’re going to pick on myself, or someone with me, with the intention of stealing our property, terrorising us or just for shits and giggles, on the occasions I’ve been armed, the situation has suddenly resolved itself when I produce a weapon.

A doorman, quoted at the blog of Rob Fisher, occasional commenter over these parts.

(6)

"The fundamental story about consumer taste, in modern times, is not one of dumbing down or of producers seeking to satisfy a homogeneous least common denominator at the expense of quality. Rather, the basic trend is of increasing variety and diversity, at all levels of quality, high and low."

- Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: how globalisation is changing the world's cultures, page 127.

(17)

"Freedom is participation in power."

- Mike Gravell, on Thom Hartmann's Air America show.

"O, RLY?"

- Commenter Sunfish, when he heard that.

Yes, Sunfish, 'Freedom' is the freedom to join a gang and fight over who gets plundering rights on 'your' turf, I thought everyone knew that!

(21)

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

- Gordon Brown on "Liberty and Security"

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

(12)

I do not believe, as Ministers continue to insist, that there is some trade-off between our liberties and the safety of the realm. What makes us free is what makes us safe, and what makes us safe is what will make us free.

- Increasingly loveable leftie Diane Abbott MP, who was unfortunate to be trumped by David Davis's melodramatic flourish.

(17)

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

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

- David Davis MP

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

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

(27)

I know that ID cards will help me to prove more easily who I am

- Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP, the Home Secretary, proving to us what she is.

(28)

"I'm not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit - the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such as Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call."

- Stephen Pollard

(17)

"Happily, we were indestructible. We didn't need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn't require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn't need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without being reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn't have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively."

- Bill Bryson, The Live and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, page 106.

I adore this book.

(17)

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we formed angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer that question.

- Thomas Jefferson, quoted in a recent book by Christopher Hitchens.

(28)

Okay - it's like this. There's a tribe living by a river, and in the river there are crocodiles. The tribe has one particular piece of wisdom passed down through the generations. It goes like this: if you happen to meet a crocodile, don't stick your head in its mouth. Every now and then - and who knows the reason - people ignore this advice. Which is sad. Because they die. But very stupid because they were warned. They had a choice. The moral of this story is - you can't afford to be stupid. There are crocodiles.

- The words of Steven Moffat, as spoken by Julia Sawalha, in the final episode of Press Gang. Few things recently have pleased me as much as the announcement that Moffatt will be the new showrunner of Dr Who. The rumour today is that Neil Gaiman will be writing for the show, too, so there is lots to look forward to.

(4)

Greedy, greedy, lying, incompetent, untrustworthy, crooked bastards.

- From the first comment in response to Guido Fawkes's latest revelations about how much MPs are now deciding to pay themselves

(9)

Meaning is a bit like happiness, the more you go looking for it the less you find

- The incomparable Lucy Kellaway

(9)

In Third Way Britain both the bureaucrats and the nosey neighbours get to spy on you sunbathing nude in your garden.

- A line from a gloriously rude review of an absurd book by our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.

(5)

This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online - as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:

Newspapers employ "fact-checkers", but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that "The moon is made of green cheese" it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.

This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.

(14)

There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.

- Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.

(19)

So that's it. The argument is over... Low tax-low spend economics is finally threatening to become not just irresistible in terms of rational debate and empirical evidence – which, in fact, it is has been since at least the 1980s – but something far more devastating in electoral terms: it is poised to become cool. It will now be unthinkably unfashionable at dinner parties to defend the notion of the state as the monopoly supplier of virtue and fairness.

- Janet Daley in a Telegraph blog

(45)

"Two substantive political issues are the federal budget deficit and the war in Iraq. Now, if you're electing Democrats to control government spending, then you're marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains. This leaves the Democrats with one real issue: Iraq. And so far the best that any Democratic presidential candidate has been able to manage with Iraq is to make what I think of as the high school sex promise: I will pull out in time, honest dear."

- PJ O'Rourke. He is still the greatest.

(3)

I just came across this. What's happened is that they've discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:

Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn't there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.

Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn't actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.

(12)

Actually, it is even worse than that.

- An unnamed BBC news journalist with whom I unexpectedly found myself drinking on Saturday, when asked if the BBC really is the Stalinist bureaucracy it is reputed to be.

(8)

"If the BBC was given charge of a three star Michelin restaurant, it would puree all the food and feed it to its customers through straws."

- Stephen Pollard.

(66)

To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture - to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques - it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim's mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam's mediaeval ass?

- Mary Jackson quotes from a Spectator article by London's newly elected mayor Boris Johnson written just after the July 7th attacks on London (but Boris backtracked during the recent campaign)

(6)

"The Tories are free-marketeers – they have a mechanism to get rid of their leader on a wet weekend. Labour are central planners, so adopt protectionist policies."

- Fraser Nelson, over the Spectator's Coffee House blog. His quote makes a fair bit of sense, even if you, like yours truly, wonder about the free market credentials of David Cameron's Conservative Party.

(6)

The following choice quote has perhaps already been recycled here. It has surely done the rounds elsewhere. But just to be sure, here it is for Samizdata readers, either again or for the first time:

"After five years in government, I now have the same respect for politicians that the pigeons of Rome have for statues."

Which, I think you will agree, nicely sums up the Samizdata attitude towards politicians, whether we have been "in government" on not. Usually, just having a particularly governmental bit of government done to us is sufficient, and it does not require five years of it to happen before such enlightenment is arrived at. And you certainly do not have to be a politician for half a decade to find out how nasty politics is.

This was said by Antonio Martino, Italy's Defence Minister from 2001 until 2006, at the 2006 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Guatemala. It was quoted by Charles Murray at the start of this speech, which was given in Washington just after that MPS meeting.

I came across this speech by Murray because I was looking for a picture of him to use in a posting at my education blog, about this article by Murray entitled The age of educational romanticism.

(21)

How do we trust a guy who says he knows about London, when he's just taken three of his kids out of state school and put them into private schools?

- Arabella Weir, on Boris, in The Guardian's desperate chrestomathy of leftyluvviedom for Ken.

I would say it indicates very clearly that he does know something about London's state schools. More penetrating political insight from woman of the people Ms Weir here. Foreign readers may be aghast at the political culture of central control the latter clip reveals. It is not for the faint-hearted libertarian - or for that matter anyone, conservative or liberal, with a sincere belief in separation of powers and limited government.

(4)

"We've had it with baby boomer politics. We've had it with coteries and courts, dens and sofas. But if we are fed up with that private politics, we are also tired of the public face of politics. We are told that modern politics is about TV studios: that poisonous truth may be about to become untrue. Westminster and Whitehall might yet make a come-back, as bastions of decently-argued policy and its delivery. This is a switch away from post-60s trends. But it needn’t be a backward step to snobbery and stuffiness."

- Richard North

I hope he is right, although I doubt that Westminster and Whitehall have ever achieved a high point of "decently argued policy and its delivery". Rose-tinted spectacles, and all that.

(16)

We are marvelling at the multiple possibilities of Oyster, but come back here in 10 years’ time and we will have chips inserted under our skin or inside our heads

- Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, quoted by Computing

[Those foreign readers who are unfamiliar with Oyster should maybe start here. Those unfamiliar with our dear leader, the mayor, can read his official bio here, but Red Ken is a massive subject, and if you can understand his career then you know more about British politics than I do. Here is a recent friendly (!) blog post. Now if you'll excuse me, it is 6.43am and I am off to vote.]

(46)

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests', I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

- Barry Goldwater, US politician. As cited by David Mayer, over at his excellent blog.

(24)

If we want to build the country, maintain our dignity and solve economic problems, we need the culture of martyrdom.

- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran replies to his critics (also quoted by Mick Hartley)

(4)

"The only way that that Liverpool is going to win the [English Premier] League is if Robert Mugabe is counting the points."

An anonymous commenter on the Guardian's sports pages, arguably the best bits of that outfit.

(19)

It is increasingly clear that much of the current wave of repression is occurring not in spite of the Olympics but actually because of the Olympics.

- Amnesty International which has detailed numerous arrests and the harassment of Chinese civil rights activists

(14)

People say: Is classical music dying? Go to Covent Garden and you can view the corpse.

-Joe Queenan reacts negatively on Newsnight Review earlier this evening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle's new opera The Minotaur

(10)

It is not the level of wealth that makes us happy. Instead, it is the process of betterment - the pursuit of it - that makes us happy. Whether we are twice as rich today as in 1971 has little bearing on our happiness, because it is in the past. Whether people can see their lives improving in the future is what counts. That is why economic growth remains a key component in happiness, despite what the happiness researchers might tell us.

- Alex Singleton, Comment is Free

(14)

AntiCitzenOne comments on this posting at David Thompson's blog, thus:

I think we should give Muslim men with self control problems horse-blinkers, rather than cover women from head to toe.

The posting itself makes a vital point about how to defeat intimidation by Islamofascist zealots, which is not to leave anyone they pick on isolated. Thompson links back to this excellent piece.

This is why a general piling in with the insults against Islam and Islamic nastiness (the former leads directly to the latter in my opinion) is so important. Quite aside from being true and worth saying and a valid contribution to the debate and all that kind of stuff, these insults establish the principle that we can do them, and you can not stop us. There can be a debate. If and when you stop with the death threats, we will make the insults less insulting and more decorous, and some of us will go completely silent on the subject. Your choice.

This also explains why I do not denounce Christianity nearly so often or nearly so harshly. On those occasions when anyone does do this, the Christians do not respond with riots and death threats. So, beyond the occasional polite criticism of their (I think) odd theological views, together with praise for their more positive qualities, leave them alone, I say.

(0)

You should trust us, because we're trustworthy people who would never do anything wrong (please ignore all we've done wrong over the past few years). So, now that that's settled, let's get this baby rolling...

-Mike Masnick interprets Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's response to critics of the planned expansion of the US spy satellite program

(14)

Let's get this straight. The house price bubble has been caused by money printing. In today's world, that means as a result of the Bank of England keeping interest rates artificially low. That's why the money supply is growing at more than 10% a year and this money has to go somewhere. Lots of it has gone into the housing market. And the "solution" from all of the above is more of the same!

Those who are going to pay for this mess are the prudent, those who haven't lived beyond their means. Their savings will be inflated away to bail out the welfare bums, many of whom are economic illiterates infesting the business world.

- David Farrer names and shames a bunch of granny muggers

(15)

Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.

- W. W. Bartley, Philosophia (September–December 1976)

(18)

The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.

- Hu McCulloch

(6)

Politicians are like parents who tell you what time to go to bed but can't put dinner on the table.

- Matthew Taylor, now Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts, quoted in a 2002 article by Janan Ganesh

(19)

Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston's conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don't live on the planet of the apes.

- Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a 'liberal' in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.

(22)

Obama’s speeches frequently include passages that flatter their listeners who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow his thinking actually is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are.

- Stephen Bainbridge. Ouch.

(41)

To hell with constructive engagement. This is a state that imprisons, tortures and kills its political opponents. It is a state that pollutes public discourse with untruths, and that not only seeks to suppress truths, but that seeks to suppress the free exchange of thought between its citizens. It is a state that gives succour to the genocidal regime in Sudan, and has backed itself into the position of casting Buddhist monks as dangerous terrorists.

- Sam Leith, writing in the Telegraph why we should subject China to an Olympic boycott

(7)

'Market' was the sixth word I ever learnt – after 'This little piggy goes to...'

- Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn't it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them?

(5)

Has the Prime Minister got lost?

- The Queen during the Windsor Castle banquet for Sarkozy

(20)

"The Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations." Aren't they? Actually, the Olympics seem an ideal place for demonstrations.

- Anne Applebaum, pointing out the obvious fact that the Olympic Games are highly political by their very nature. I am feeling a greater and greater sense that the Beijing Olympics are going to be highly memorable, quite possibly in the sense that a trainwreck is highly memorable. And I am not sure this is bad.

(5)

"Can you believe this place?" Admiral Driscoll said to me. He sounded like a bit like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt weirdly like a jaded old man who had seen it all even though he is older and more accomplished. I understood then what some American soldiers and Marines mean when they say the top brass lives and works at "echelons above reality". I'm not blaming the admiral. His job requires him to be isolated from nuts, bolts, and the street most of the time.

- Michael Totten

(8)

The BBC is like governments, both local and national. They are always too strapped for cash to be able to do what the public wants, but can always find more than enough money for their own pet projects.

- Morris Hickey of Chigwell, commenting on a blog

(5)

One of this Government's proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq - where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.

- Ross Clark.

(37)

There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don't do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come.

- Madsen Pirie explaining the folly of Common Error No. 61

(15)

Iran is also the theatre of very optimistic developments. Hashem Aghajari is an Islamic revolutionary-turned-history-professor. He was one of the student activists of 1979 who later fully participated in the brutal repression after Khomeini's coming to power. He is now challenging the infallibility of the ruling mullahs and calls upon Iranians to think for themselves instead of blindly accepting whatever is preached in Friday sermons, a piece of advice for which he has been sentenced to death. But he is now supported by the students and professors at most of the country's universities and thousands of ordinary citizens, workers, and cultural leaders.

Where Aghajari wants to reform Islam; the students want a total separation between mosque and state. He wants an Islamic Reformation, but the demonstrators are interested in the creation of a secular civil society. He is a reformer, but they are revolutionaries.

- Ibn Warraq who is both optimistic (as in the above quote) and pessimistic (as elsewhere in the same piece) about whether the Muslim world can become civilised

(20)

[Samantha] Power is gone now - but not for the odd article this post points to. No the lady was fired because she said (to a journalist for 'The Scotsman') that Hillary Clinton was a monster who would do anything for power.

In short the lady was dismissed for telling the truth. After all the Democrats have to kiss and make up at some point.

- Paul Marks

(35)

Even the most hard-bitten student activist would recognise its not an abrogation of his radicalism to get an ID card if it helps him to provide an assurance of his identity to those who provide services to him.

- Ms Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (quoted in Computer Weekly) reacting to criticism by the National Union of Students of plans to hustle and hassle students to register themselves for life on the great and glorious National Identity Register. It is just extraordinary how tone deaf to human life, how uncomprehending of the impulses to privacy and personal liberty, this strange class of apparatchiks is. Jacqui Smith's own concept of radical activism may not extend very far. A friend who was her contemporary at Hertford College commented:

Yes, I remember Jacqui Smith from college but only vaguely. She was a fairly inoffensive JCR/political hack... you know... terribly earnest. I think she may have been president of the JCR at some point.

(6)

These things are only more difficult because the govt has deliberately made them so. Pushing my head underwater, then giving me the option of buying an overpriced snorkel isn't doing me any favours.

- Paul, a commentator on The Register, merely the funniest of many pertinent comments on this story: 'Boil a frog' ID card rollout to continue until 2012. Regular readers may gather I have been a little busy today.

(29)

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

- Ronald Reagan

(62)

You should see an ID card like a passport in-country.

- Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.

(10)

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

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

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

(27)

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

- Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.

(37)

Some social critics go on about The Permissive Society, but what we are really facing is The Priggish Society currently being created by busybody politicians and other authority figures... Going out for a night in a bar with close friends is now denounced as "binge drinking". Smoking an occasional joint means you are a "drug addict".

- Alex Singleton

(18)

Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do – he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else's terms.

- James Carville, chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign, on Hunter S. Thompson

(4)

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

- Douglas Adams quoted (last month but who cares?) by Kevin Marks

(4)

The number of county court actions for mortgage and secured loans has also risen steeply over the last few years. Between 2004 and 2006, the number of mortgage possession claims has increased by nearly 70% and the number of possession orders actually made by 94%. The number of possession actions in 2006 is now similar to that seen at the beginning of the mortgage repossession crisis in 1990.

- from a Citizens Advice Bureau report just released, quoted today by Guido, who says: "Somebody should dig out that old Labour Party general election poster which blamed house repossessions on Hague and Portillo, changing the pictures to Brown and Darling. So much for an end to boom and bust ..."

(9)

A person has only so much time allotted to him, and I hate to waste it reading tripe. I suppose that's why I rarely listen to politicians' speeches - why waste time that could be better spent scratching my ass?

- commenter veryretired

(7)

I never have seen any of the Rambo movies and who knows if I ever will? Probably not. The day is always full, and they're not on any priority list of mine. Despite all this, the latest picture from Mr Stallone has given me one moment of pleasure. How so? Well, it's being reported here and there that the movie, in which Rambo takes on Burma's military junta, is making an impression with some of the junta's opponents. And this has caused Marina Hyde a moment of irritation. 'Oh, please!' she exclaims. I don't know why I should take satisfaction from it. After all, I have no interest in the quality of Marina Hyde's day; in the normal way of things I'm happy for it to be altogether fine. But there you are: opponents of the Burmese regime don't have the name of some smug little metropolitan liberal on their lips. They enjoy seeing the discomfiture of a tyranny at the hands of ... Rambo. Dearie me, how gross.

- Norm Geras

(23)

I'm seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer ... because the victims are all spammers.

- Charlie Stross

(119)

"One day, there will be a woman worth electing to the White House. But not this one."

- Andrew Sullivan. His observations on the contrast between Senator Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher, are spot-on.

(19)

Every child should have authoritarian parents, because then they'll grow up to be libertarians.

-Oddball Australian journalist Paddy McGuinness, as recounted at his funeral this week by Bill Hayden.

(5)

We’d all play like that... if we could.

- John Coltrane, no mean saxophone player, talking about arguably the greatest of them all, Stan Getz. His cool, silk-like style is the perfect cure for a stressful day at the office.

(23)

I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.

- Will Wilkinson

However I must disagree with Will elsewhere in his article. I see individualism as magnificently and floridly Art Deco.

(24)

Human desire is insatiable. Now, some think this is a bad thing, blaming it on greed and consumerism. But think about Mother Theresa - a saint if ever there was one. Was she greedy? Insatiable? Well, yes, she was. If she could have helped one more person, she would have.

- Russ Nelson, The Angry Economist

(34)

Whilst roaming the interweb and dozing through meetings, I have collected the Iron Laws of Human Behavior:

1. You get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish.

2. The less you know about something, the easier it looks.

3. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

No particular claim to originality of thought is made, but I rarely get through either a political or a business discussion without seeing one or more of them in action. I will caution the reader that noting the application of an Iron Law out loud in a business setting is not without its risks.

Additional nominations and/or corollaries are hereby solicited.

(11)

At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace—and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.

- Victor Hanson Davis, as pointed out by Instapundit.

This point though could be made about any community. There is no country on earth that is not voluntarily in poverty. If you choose to have an anti-wealth creating atmosphere, then you will be poor. If you choose a wealth-creating meta-context in your society, then you will have wealth.

The rise of the wealthy East Asian nations, with almost none of the natural resources that bless the State of California, demonstrate that there really is no excuse.

(18)

First he has no chance whatever of being elected President of the United States of America.

He is a rich kid, yes so is George Bush as well - but George Bush gives a good imitation of looking and sounding like an ordinary Texan, Mitt Romney looks and sounds like what he is.

Americans will accept a Democrat who was born rich - they have more of a problem with a Republican who was born rich.

- Paul Marks, taking no prisoners

(91)

Kill six millions Jews in Germany, your name becomes a synonym with evil. Kill between 44 and 72 million Chinese, you get a café named after you. It's a funny old world, eh?

- commenter Jill Murphy

(59)

Ron Paul is the least objectionable Republican. The second-least objectionable Republican is Fred Thompson, and if he were likely to win the nomination I might be persuaded to switch my support. All the ones who are likely to win are indistinguishable from Democrats (and some of them are Democrats on Fire for Jesus which is just all kinds of not a good idea).

- Blogger and serial commenter Joshua

(25)

The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.

I'm serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain's beardies only because they don't work.

- Jeremy Clarkson

(0)

For, despite the warnings of the accursed health and safety apparatchiks, who enjoy nothing more than closing paths of self-discovery, the human spirit will not be tamed. That is the important lesson of Hillary's life, a lesson that is worth passing on to children growing up in a world where everything must be measured and known.

- Michael Henderson, talking about the late Sir Edmund Hillary, who died last week:

(145)

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

- The Economist reports on the decline and fall of the music studios.

(32)

How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics - either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.

- David Aranovich, who is not entirely impressed by the Barack Obama phenomenon. Count me in on that.

(102)

I'm proud to live in a culture in which I can go for a beer, shag a bird in the alley behind Spaggers' Nite Spot, then go home and look at gay hobbit porn. These are western values. These are things our own ruling class despise.

- Commenter Ian B, who has probably set a local record by having his remarks made into 'Samizdata quote of the day' on consecutive days. Give that man a cigar!

(83)

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

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

(23)

As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat.

- Idle Words in Argentina On Two Steaks A Day

Bonus quote: Upon reading the article Mr de Havilland announced that he's booking a ticket to Buenos Aires...

(25)

It's ultimately kind of sad that the controversial person in the race is Ron Paul rather than Huckabee.

- Jonah Goldberg, who is no fan of Ron Paul, discussing 'Liberal Fascism'. Seeing as we, well I, have 'diss'ed' Jonah in the past on Samizdata, let me plug his new book.

(4)

A smaller state in Victorian terms isn't on the cards. The electorate would take flight at such talk. What the electorate is after, however, is a redrawing of the state's boundaries. There is no fall in demand for collective services like health and education but voters are seeking two clear advances in their freedom from such a redrawing exercise. The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time. The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.

- Frank Field, Labour MP. He is probably right, but once people get into this habit of choosing to live their lives as they please, who knows where it may end up.

(10)

[X-Factor winner] Leon Jackson is more influential than Gordon Brown.

- Alex Singleton

(38)

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.

- Lauren Caitlin Upton, eloquently the making the case for home schooling.

(13)

Why is it always sadder when tragedy strikes hot people?

- Ugly Betty, smuggling profundity in with the fluff.

(13)

Slavery was in fact the very first form of "Renewable Energy". Slavery was green! And, what is even better, slavery was sustainable - it lasted for thousands of years, until the ability to use fossil fuels gave us the liberty to feel bad about it. Whenever someone waxes eloquent about "Renewable Energy", think slavery. Because that is where wishful thinking is taking us.

- Commenter Alice.

(11)

We were thinking of challenging the Taliban to a game of football on Christmas day, but I'm not sure they'd get the joke.

- Sgt Kraig Whalley, 29, Royal Military Policeman

(8)

The welfare state has largely failed as an anti-poverty weapon... Higher welfare payments often encourage students to drop out of school, they often encourage families to disintegrate, and they often lead to lifelong dependency.

- Robert F. Kennedy

(18)

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

- Rush.

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

(15)

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

- Dr David Whitehouse, author of The Sun: A Biography, writing in The New Statesman (via Brian Micklethwait)

(5)

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

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

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

(11)

For I think there's a fault line that runs through "political blogging" which isn't in fact properly appreciated. There are those who blog for a specific group, for a party, for their tribe. And there are those who blog in support of certain ideas, or ideals. The former group will indeed be liable to capture by the centre ("don't rock the boat old boy, not now we've got back into power again") and the latter will continue to scream for their cherished goals whichever party is in power.

- Tim Worstall

(22)

Intelligence is not wisdom, many intelligent people have been seduced by the false rationality of 'scientific' Marxism and many who are 'dumb' have, with simple clarity of thought, seen straight through it. It is not only the simple minded that need fear deception.

- James, commenting on Samizdata here.

(13)

After all "It takes a village"... to burn a witch.

- Paul Marks, paraphrasing Hillary Clinton