(7)

"Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate."

- Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair's former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.

(16)

"When I hear the word “holistic” I reach for my BAR and don’t worry about the safety."

- Regular Samizdata commenter NickM, over at his CountingCats redoubt. He's talking about Prince Charles. Of course, if Charles wants to revert to an age of Divine Right, witchburnings, absence of notions of individual rights, logic, science and so forth, then maybe he should remove himself to a place more congenial to his outlook.

(7)

Ballet by elephants.

- Mike Carlson, commentating for BBC1 TV during the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, describes the Indianapolis Colts offence as they run in the first touchdown. 10-0 Colts at the end of the first quarter.

(16)

A North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.

- Christopher Hitchens writes about A Nation of Racist Dwarfs

(31)

Given that we think, as most of us seem to do, that the production of such goods as cars, vacuum cleaners, and frozen vegetables should take place in a regime of market competition, why do so many among us nevertheless agree that it makes sense to exclude the production of money from these same forces? Why must the production of money be entrusted to a monopoly called the central bank?

- My thanks to Jerzy Strzelecki for drawing my attention to this mises.org piece by him, written when the recent banking tumult was at its most tumultuous, entitled The School of Salamanca Saw This Coming. Quite brief and well worth a read. You don't have to believe in God to understand phrases like "usurpations of God's knowledge".

(16)

"When one studies the history of money one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them."

F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. Page 33. Published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The book is quite challenging and complex in some of its arguments, but I find the broad thrust of it - that competition is good for currencies as it is for other aspects of economic life, to be unanswerable.

(0)

The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.

Choice quote from Bob Ward "if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something". To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.

- Bishop Hill stays right on top of the ongoing Climategate story. If you have not already done so, order your copy now of the Bishop's recently published book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.

Before Christmas, the Bishop (aka Andrew Montford) talked with me over the phone. Be warned that there are some seriously annoying clicks right at the start of this, but after a couple of minutes they go away and the remaining half an hour or so is okay. That caveat aside, listen to that here.

(25)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(12)

The fascinating thing about this response is that it demonstrates that Cameron, whose only claim to fame is that he is a politician, isn't even very good at politics.

- Richard North describes Conservative Party leader David Cameron's stonewalling response to suggestions that he might want to rethink his attitude towards the climate change debate

(16)

We should not forget, here in the UK, that dislike of the state-financed broadcasting network of the BBC has been going on for some time. Here is Kingsley Amis, the author and lecturer, writing in 1984:

"In television, as in other departments of national life, the consumer, the customer, the purchaser, is faced wiith a semi-benign semi-conspiracy to foist on him what is thought to be good for him, what other people consider he ought to have, instead of what he naturally prefers. In short, the public is brought education when it wants entertainment."

The point, however, is that the focus on entertainment has arguably increased since the late Mr Amis wrote those words back in the era of Mrs Thatcher. As a consequence, the paternalistic intentions of the creators of the BBC have been frustrated to a remarkable degree. When Amis commented on the BBC, he at least was part of a country in which it was assumed that the BBC's controllers felt that they had some sort of mission to educate and inform - not that this justified coercive funding even then. But the paternalism was at least fairly blatant. Now even that sense of mission appears to be more evident in the breach rather than the observance. The contradictions posed by the BBC's funding model are unendurable.

The quote is taken from The Amis Collection, page 257, published in 1990. I am not sure if the book is still in print.

(30)

"Being tried by 12 good men and true sounds brilliant but if, God forbid, you were to find yourself in the dock charged with a crime you did not commit, would you want to be tried by 11 dinner ladies and Trigger from Only Fools and Horses? Or Wayne Rooney? Or Piers Morgan? Speaking personally, I’d far rather plead my case in front of nothing but a judge. I know that some are a bit doddery, and that many live in houses with no central heating, but most are more astute than the alternative: 11 lunching ladies and Benny from Crossroads."

- Jeremy Clarkson

Read on, and he nevertheless defends trial by jury, despite his rather bracing opinions of our fellow men and women. For our non-UK readers, I should explain that Wayne Rooney is a footballer, Trigger is a character from a comedy show, Piers Morgan is a journalist and arsehole, and Benny is also a character from a forgettable soap opera. I hope this information proves informative and enlightening.

(11)

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

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.

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

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

(4)

"It says something about our prospective future prime minister that when he decided to respond to accusations of being a lightweight, he did so by granting privileged access to the “most fashionable man in Britain”, and that the subsequent book that was produced (for which he was paid £20,000) and the subsequent articles that continue to be produced (Jones recently wrote a 3,288 word piece on Cameron for The Mail on Sunday), have resulted in revelations such as the fact that Cameron doesn’t really like Pot Noodle, that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, that he has “small flecks of grey in his thatch” and that his karaoke song of choice is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles, because “even I couldn’t muck up a song like that”.

- Sathnam Sanghera

(2)

This development may horrify the old guard, but peer-to-peer review was just what forced the release of the Climategate files – and as a consequence revealed the uncertainty of the science and the co-opting of the process that legitimizes global warming research. It was a collective of climate blogs, centered on the work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, which applied the pressure. With moderators and blog commenters that include engineers, PhDs, statistics whizzes, mathematics experts, software developers, and weather specialists – the label flat-earthers, as many of their opponents have attempted to brand them, seems as fitting as tagging Lady Gaga with the label demure.

- Patrick Courrielche, discussing the circumstances by which the Climategate e-mails came to light and were analysed by independent parties. Parts two and three of his article are unnecessarily on separate pages. I confess that I do like the phrase "Peer to peer review". I am struck by how much of the progress here has been made by the so called "lukewarmers" - people who are (or at least were) open to the idea that global warming was real and human caused, who often had relevant expertise, and wanted to look at the data for themselves. After all, many interpretations are always possible.

(First link via Bishop Hill).

(19)

We don't have to show the slightest respect for other people's views – just for their right to hold them. Respect, after all, must be earned. It's only freedom of speech that's a right. When someone says something which you find stupid or offensive, you can say something back. You can tell them to fuck off. They don't have to, but they've still been told.

- David Mitchell, writing about the self-publicising Islam4UK. As Mr Mitchell says, we should have the right to be offensive, and we should have to put up with being offended sometimes. A pity that we don't.

Freedom of speech has ceased to be a right in Britain. In practice you are no longer permitted to be offensive, if you are within the grasp of the authorities. You may be threatened or arrested, have property seized, or forced to defend a criminal trial. Sell or wear a mildly rude T-shirt, and you may find public order legislation stretched to make an example of you. Write down "inappropriate" fantasies in a blog, or a poem, and prepare to defend a serious criminal charge. Quarrel with someone, a planning department, say, and if they can even suggest you hinted at forbidden speech, they can use the police to intimidate you.

(11)

"I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved."

- Arnold Kling. The quote is equally applicable to the UK.

Read the whole item. It contains interesting commentary on a new book by Thomas Sowell. By the way, the question of the influence of an "educated class" begs the interesting question as to whether this class is all that well educated in the first place. Surely one of the hallmarks of a traditional, liberal education was understanding certain lessons of history, such as the dangers of concentrations of power in a few hands with few checks or balances. Just a thought.

(67)

"The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness. In truth, sexual conservatives wants to make everyone else pay for their own dark thoughts."

- David Aaronovitch.

(25)

"Our exercise program can dramatically improve a woman's sexual performance," says Olga Nikitina, 40, the founder of the School for VUM-Building in central Moscow. "She can transform herself from a slow Russian car like a Lada into a Ferrari." To disguise the fact that the equipment really does look like it belongs in a car-mechanic's workshop - it's all pressure gauges and rubber hoses - the school's two rooms are painted pink and blue; stuffed animals model phallic devices.

"Once a woman reaches optimal fitness, she can shoot a fountain of water up out of her vagina in the bath," boasts Nikitina, a ponytailed blonde in a leopard-print top. The core device is a small silicone balloon that is inserted in the vagina and inflated with a pneumatic pump. "You squeeze against the balloon and measure the pressure on the attached gauges," says Nikitina. Fine-tuning can be achieved by learning to shoot out pebbles onto a metal target.

- Russian women learning how to get - and to keep - rich and generous husbands (with thanks to Instapundit)

(8)

Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words.

- Richard North responds to a lawyers' letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have.

(12)

"And what should our mood be? The population restrictionists say we should be sad and worry. I and many others believe that the trends suggesst joy and celebration at our newfound capacity to support human life - healthily, and with fast-increasing access to education and opportunity all over the world. I believe that the population restrictionists' hand-wringing view leads to despair and resignation. Our view leads to hope and progress, in the reasonable expectation that that the energetic efforts of humankind will prevail in the future, as they have in the past, to increase worldwide our numbers, our health, our wealth, and our opportunities.....Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solving those problems."

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, 2nd edition, page 588.

The other day, Perry de Havilland took aim at those who would use the violence-backed power of the State to restrict human population. The late Julian Simon had no time for the neo-Malthusian mindset. Among other things, he did not regard wealth as somehow fixed and that if there were more people around, there would be less for each person. We are richer now than we were 100 years ago, and there are more of us. If you want a book that cuts through the crud of the gloomongering cast of mind, this book still ranks up top as one of the very best.

(73)

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

PJ O'Rourke. (Page XXii of Parliament of Whores). Of course, now that the Democrats are led by a Chicago machine "Community Organiser" who is prepared to throw inconvenient former allies under a proverbial bus, it is unclear if O'Rourke's relatively charming portrayal of the Democrats really holds any more. But hey, any excuse for a Christmas reference.

(16)

Declaration of interest - I know a guy who works on an oil rig. That's my credibility shot then.

- Bishop Hill muses on how any link to Big Oil however tenuous means that your climate scepticism can be ignored by the AGW True Believers.

(3)

... people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state

- Chris Mounsey

But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people - and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong - who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one's own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one's own pigeonhole.

It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. "You may think I'm scum, but at least I'm not one of them."

(Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine)

(5)

"There is no reason to doubt that Mr Brown's statement that he went into politics because of his horror at the effects of unemployment. Unfortunately, he forgot one of the few laws of political economy: that the road to unemployment is paved with work creation schemes. He is likely, therefore, to go down as something like the patron saint of unemployment."

- Theodore Dalrymple, from "Not With A Bang But A Whimper", essays on current affairs, page 79. The whole chapter from which this paragraph is taken is a brilliant summary of everthing that is wrong about the current prime minister.

(6)

"The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown's plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of "global governance." Right now, if you don't like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you're sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don't like "global governance"? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?"

- Mark Steyn.

(8)

It's not enough to be rich and famous if you're not somehow "relevant". Whether it's Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: "Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants".

- Simon Scowl

(2)

The UK state sector is two large banks with a medium sized government attached.

- John Redwood. Funny, but the UK government is not really medium-sized at all. This is still a big country on most measures. And the government's share of GDP, our overbearing officialdom, and state colonization of civil society, are each now uncomfortably upper-quartile among democratic states and heading rapidly upwards. We are arguably now more governed than France, the home of dirigisme.

(20)

"The science is so settled it's now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of - to pluck at random - enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching "youths", are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens - if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach "consensus" at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don't."

- Mark Steyn.

(14)

So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn't watch to find out what's contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we'd read it for ourselves.

For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.

- Small Dead Animals describes how the mass media of Canada finally got around to noticing Climategate. Thank you Counting Cats.

(15)

"Leute wie Sie standen auf den Mauer-Wachtürmen der roten Sozialisten, Sie überwachten die Wachtürme der braunen Sozialisten. Und, ..., Leute Ihres Schlages werden auf den Wachtürmen der grünen Sozialisten stehen und deren Umerziehungslagern zu klimatologisch korrekten Staatsbürgern."

("People like you stood in the guard towers of the red socialists' wall, they stood in the brown[shirt] socialists' guard towers. And people of your stripe will stand in the guard towers of the green socialists and their reeducation camps for climatologically correct citizens.")

- Commenter Frank39, who appears to have lived in East Germany, responding to another commenter on a post on Climategate from the German "Science Skeptical" blog. My thanks to the anonymous correspondent in Germany who pointed this out and provided me with the translation.

(4)

"When someone asks him how his day is going, Jack replies, "Previously, on 24..."

I came across this line here.
There are some hilarious one-liners in here.

(10)

I am almost surprised that we were treated so moderately by our captors – apart, that is, from the tragic, largely unexplained, decision to kill Tom Fox, the American Quaker.

- Norman Kember, writing in the Guardian.

(3)

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something "we always do".

- C.S. Lewis, from an essay called The Inner Ring. I was reminded of this by David Foster of Chicagoboyz.

(9)

From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It's reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.

- Recycled to a separate posting today by ClimateGate blogstar Bishop Hill from among the comments on his earlier and ever expanding posting entitled The code. The Bishop adds: "Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct."

(14)

"But another real benefit is that once you have registered no-one can steal your identity"

- Home Office minister Meg Hillier, explaining the benefits of getting an ID card. Good to know that the science is settled, there.

Seriously, though. What are these people smoking?

(6)

The state does not wither or even shrink when it pays charities to do its work. It merely decentralises the provision of services while expanding the centre's command and control into new areas of public life.

- Nick Cohen

(4)

This trend toward prescriptive behaviour is a direct result of abandoning the Rule of law for a "Law" of Rules.

- commenter R. Richard Schweitzer

(13)

From time to time I get into a lot of trouble with my allies because I express skepticism of the value of prescriptive rights, regulation or transparency. In fact am inclined to think (though there may be tactical advantage in their reception in law) human rights are an ornamental distraction from the pursuit of liberty, Gucci belts for those who think buying trousers is disgusting.

One of the reasons we are in such a terrible mess in the UK is that those on the left who used to care about personal liberty became utterly infatuated with the legalism, having been given the Human Rights Act as a pretty distraction, and now spend all their time defending its importance.

- Guy Herbert

(17)

"The first World War is one of the topics in history that interests me the most. I really think that if more people focused on leadership during that war, the concerns over "market failure" and the faith in political leadership would decline. I challenge anyone to come up with a group of business villains who caused as much death and suffering as the "legitimate" political leaders of 1914. My proposal for Veterans' Day observances is that they should include a re-telling of the history of World War I along the lines of the Passover re-telling of the Exodus. My goal would be to help inoculate people from believing in the wisdom of the ruling class."

- Arnold Kling

(1)

"...how will the media blame it on the failure of capitalism?"

Well, you know, China started market-friendly practices, it goes belly up, nothing bad ever happened in Mao's China, and so on. The editorial in The Guardian writes itself.

- Commenter 'Dom'

(19)

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

- George Orwell

Yet strangely I do not think Orwell actually knew David Cameron.

(10)

"I can easily see how there's a connection between individualism and depression. Once you manage to throw off the social-collectivist hive-mind and think for yourself, you cannot fail to see how deeply into-the-shit 'society' has got itself."

Tanuki, a Samizdata commenter, writing about this.

(2)

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

UPDATE: Anthony Evans website, articles, blog.

(10)

I am the only libertarian who has read all six VAT directives

- Philip Chaston.

(1)

The trouble is rules based safety nets often end up subsidising what they are supposed to be alleviating.

The big advantage a charity has is that they do not have to give you anything if they do not think you actually deserve it... the state on the other hand operates (quite rightly) not by using discretion but by following politically derived formulae. To get things from the state all you have to do is understand the system. This has all manner of unintended consequences when you (in effect) nationalise charity and replace private institutions with public ones... in short, when you replace charity with an entitlement, you completely change the rules of the game.

- Perry de Havilland

(9)

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

- Lord Acton, from The History of Freedom in Antiquity

...with extra added bonus quote from the same:

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime...

(9)

"What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it."

"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."

- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

(13)

“The Japanese government did absolutely everything the Austrian theory suggests it should not do in order to fight recession. It engaged in every single activity that Keynesians like Paul Krugman recommended. As a result, its slump went on for a decade and a half. Keynesians continue to recommend these very policies for the United States, as if the debacle in Japan never occurred. In late 2008 financial newspapers in the US actually began to speak of a revival of Keynesian thinking (claiming, absurdly enough, that the present crisis gave the ideas of Keynes, one of the twentieth century’s collection of inexplicably respected crackpots, a new lease of life) again with no mention of Japan.”

Thomas Woods, Meltdown, A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Page 84.

This book is full of great passages like this. I have already quoted a nice line from Mr Woods mocking the contention that the enormous expansion of government spending in WW2 helped “solve” the Great Depression. Incredibly, there were people who actually defended this absurd idea on our comment boards. It never fails to amaze me that people overlook a basic fact of economic life: we work to produce stuff that people want to consume. The kind of state domination of a country during war, with its rationing, government direction of labour, and of course, mass conscription, hardly sounds like the sort of policy that anyone interested in increased prosperity should favour.

There is one point where I disagree with Mr Woods. He says the veneration of Keynes is inexplicable. It is in fact pretty easy to understand: he had a sort of superficial plausibility, and of course his ideas were meat and drink to politicians looking for intellectual cover to expand their powers. Even so, I do kind of wonder if Keynes would be embarrassed by some of the people who claim his name as justification for their views.

(6)

Encourage adults to consume alcoholic beverage in a bar setting. Set an arbitrary closing, thus to encourage rapid consumption during the final 15 minutes. Throw out on to the street, inebriated, disenchanted drinkers, mostly young males. And here’s the clincher, all at the same time. Ensure that all other bars in the immediate area follow the same pattern. Then act surprised when incidents of violence and criminal damage spike.

Suppose for one perverted moment that an increase in violence and criminal damage were the intention. The present arrangement could hardly be improved upon.

- The hilariously pseudonymous commenter 'Mustapha Jihad'

(10)

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

- Benjamin Disraeli

(25)

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 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 that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can

- Barry Goldwater

(21)

"If you want to be a conservative in an England broken by revolution, you need to look beyond a rearguard defence of forms from which all substance was long since drained.. The conservative tradition may have been dominated since the 1970s by Edmund Burke. But it does also contain the radicals of the seventeenth century. And – yes – it also has a place even for Tom Paine. If you want to preserve this nation, you must be prepared for a radical jettisoning of what is no longer merely old, but also dead. The conservative challenge is to look beneath the plumage and save the dying bird."

- Sean Gabb. He pulls no punches in condemning what he sees as the poor conduct of the British monarchy in signing off on a host of liberty-destroying legislation, including its apparent silence over the Lisbon Treaty. Strong stuff, and I urge folk to read the whole piece.

(21)

"Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."

- Anita Dunn, White House communications director and fan of the greatest mass murderer in history.

So one network for the Republicans and three for the Democrats then.

(32)

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it

- Terry Pratchett

(15)

Upon reflection, I think all the mockery will cease when Barack Obama walks across the Atlantic Ocean to accept His prize.

- Robert Bidinotto

(15)

It is the lack of hope in this world that drives so many desperate souls to bigotry, violence, and terror. Barack Obama has now struck a telling blow against this, by giving literally billions of plain people across the globe a ray of hope that - without any elitist demands for actual diplomatic achievement on their parts! - a genuine Nobel Peace Pony may yet be theirs.

When, next year, he finally resolves the Middle East conflict, and is borne shoulder-high through Jerusalem by an ecstatic crowd as Netanyahu and Abbas lead a mass conga round the Temple Mount, we shall just have to give it to him twice. Unless he fails, in which case I guess it can always go to Paris Hilton.

- Gray Woodland of Goat in the Machine commenting here.

This was too good to leave languishing in our comment section as it had us literally weeping with laughter at Samizdata HQ.

(3)

"The fact that there is some populist anger in the country these days is not a shock. The surprising thing is that there is not a lot more of it."

Arnold Kling.

(30)

Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald's is worse

- An anonymous art historian at the Louvre in Paris, reacting to the news that a McDonald's will soon open at the famous museum. Come to think of it, when I visited the Louvre earlier this year, I discovered an exhibition devoted to "The Da Vinci Code". Might I suggest that this is much, much worse.

(22)

There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined

- George Orwell on his discovery of the writing of H.G. Wells, as quoted by Cynthia Crossen of the Wall Street Journal, in a context that is quite worth reading, as is the follow up discussion at io9. Come to think of it, these sorts of "respectable people" (along with those who believe that housing is not a high risk investment and therefore expect to be bailed out with my savings when this turns out not to be so, those who are in favour of the television licence fee, and...) may be what I have in mind when I proclaim how much I despise the middle class, as I am prone to do.

(29)

To look at this from a UK perspective, I have given this a lot of thought as we have a general election next year (Civil Contingencies Act permitting). Abstention or a vote for a party other than Cameron's "Conservatives" runs a real risk of preventing the eviction of the Labour party that has done so much damage in the past 13 years. Given another 5 years they could add incalculable damage to an already impressive list.

The question I asked myself was: do I think Labour can do more damage in 5 years than Cameron's "Conservatives" can in 10, 15 or more? My answer was no, another five years of Labour is less threatening than an indefinite period of Cameron "Conservatism". Once defeated Cameron would be dropped like the proverbial hot brick and then it will time to start working for a new leader with Conservative beliefs.

- Commenter MarkE

(10)

Can an individual, or body of people, acting without thought, in a mood of crowd-pleasing over-excitement, amid a succession of equally superfluous and ill-considered acts, be said to have consciously intended anything at all? In an ideal world, there would be effective safeguards against such people.

- Catherine Bennett, on the will of parliament, in Britain the manner of exercising and dispensing absolute power.

(33)

"To anyone who pays more attention to Ben Bernanke than Ben Affleck, walking away from a prime gig like Palin’s was virtually incomprehensible, signalling either imminent scandal or incipient dementia. To the rest of America, Palin’s move made perfect sense, firmly cementing her status as perhaps the one politician who truly feels our ennui. First she cheerfully admitted that she had no idea what the vice president actually does all day (just like me!) Then she stared blankly when asked to reveal her thoughts on the Bush Doctrine (the what?) Then, after earning even higher Nielsen ratings in her first big prime-time showcase than the American Idol finale, only to return to Alaska and the dull reality of mulling over potential appointees to the Board of Barbers and Hair Dressers, she bailed. Sorry, politics, she’s just not that into you."

- Greg Beato.

He's talking about how the media/political establishment was befuddled by Sarah Palin's resignation from the Alaska governorship a few months ago.

(7)

"We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers' anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world."

Jesse Walker, talking about how the likes of Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators are being targeted by an increasingly jumpy "liberal center". This is a good article and it has a certain relevance too here in Britain. If something like talk radio or a UK equivalent of Fox were to take off, just imagine the commentary from the MSM.

(15)

"By the end of that summer, I had concluded that the population cannot be divided into an intellectual class and a nonintellectual class; instead, I concluded, everyone is to some extent an intellectual. The college professor is an intellectual who, it is hoped, applies his intellect to his teaching and research. The skillful auto mechanic is an intellectual who uses logic to eliminate various possible causes of an engine's failure in order to narrow it down to the actual cause. Everyone is an intellectual. Compulsory schooling has robbed millions of people of the knowledge of their intellectual birthright."

David Henderson, reflecting on how he learned to be less dismissive of folks who had not been to university. I am glad to say that I have never suffered from that form of snobbery: having a smart-as-hell dad who could have gone down the academic route but who chose a different path does help, of course, in providing a firewall against striking superior attitudes.

The way things are going, not going to university will be a badge of pride.

(4)

If I go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbour, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich. Authority may (and may not) make all men equally rich in purse; it certainly will make them equally poor in all that makes life best worth living

- Benjamin Tucker

(10)

"Part of me hopes that Michael Moore’s movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars and that he suddenly wakes up from the slumber of logic he has been in for many years while the opportunity to choose to help the downtrodden and poor has passed him by. But I now see what Moore truly is in a different light, and success will only encourage him to lie to more people and mislead them about the opportunities that await them, should they only dream. After all, he’s a rich and powerful capitalist. The same thing he’s teaching his audience to hate. Irony, in a word."

Michael Wilson, who has made a film about the rotund limousine socialist. If he ever imagines Mr Moore, a truly revolting character, is likely to have an epiphany when his bank account gets ever bigger, he's in for a long wait. Of course, such things do occasionally happen: to wit, the case of playwright and film-maker David Mamet.

(15)

"Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom. One is torn between wishing that his memory would disappear immediately and wanting his remains to hang at the crossroads as a lasting reminder to others."

Algis Valiunas, on Norman Mailer. One of the most scathing items on a novelist I have read for a while. Ouch.

(1)

"John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad."

John Lennon, as remembered by Ray Connolly. I have mixed feelings about John Lennon - who could support some strenously foolish things at times - but I loved his razer-sharp wit.

(37)

"If your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, he will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Whom do you think he will be dealing with when he needs that hip replacement in 60 years?). Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies the less inclined one is to trust him. And Obama's penchants to lecture us endlessly, to be the center of attention endlessly and to saturate the airwaves and national conversation are clear indications that he believes government is the answer to every societal, religious, economic, and cultural question we face. Why should your kids be immune? . .Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they finally, after decades of neglect, can learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left Chicago's school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate? Honestly, if I'm going to be badgered and browbeaten by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit, as well. "

David Harsanyi, commenting on the recent Obama broadcast to American schoolchildren.

(11)

America has "Czars" because there are still a few respectable people using the titles of "Capo" and "Don"

- Commenter CJF

(21)

The persistent delusion is that the West has a capitalist economy. It doesn't. It has a rent-seeking economy, and the failures of government regulatory agencies are as likely to be a result of their delivering such rents as of their being 'honestly' incompetent. History tells us that the sensibly cautious - not paranoid - way to look at government is with the presumption that it's corrupt.

- Commenter 'Person from Porlock'

(15)

"I think we should not have put off shrinking our financial sector. The result of the bailouts is that we are maintaining credit markets based on false information and artificial prices. You may have pulled the airplane out of the dive, but you are flying with faulty instruments, and I don't think you are going to be happy about where you wind up."

Arnold Kling, reflecting on the financial turmoil and the missteps of policymakers. It is quite a shock to realise that the demise of Lehman etc happened almost a year ago. The ensuing 12 months have gone past very quickly.

(34)

... to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent within the human experience, as many political theorists, including Karl Marx, have done, is very much like postulating an alternative biology without reference to the sort of biological structures that have so far proved viable.

- the late Edward Goldsmith, who, though he fitted very well the formal definition of a barking moonbat, definitely was not as mad as many say. The coherence of his approach his willingness to accept the logical consequence of ecolgism was especially troubling to Greens, who were embarrassed by the outright repudiation by one of the fathers of their church of its latterly adopted New Left values.

(51)

"I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely."

- Laura Dekker

And she is indeed learning about the world... that states regard people who wish to act on their desire to be free as deeply suspicious. Get out of the Netherlands and stay on your boat, my dear, because the state clearly owns you at the moment.

(17)

"An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."

An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O'Rourke.

(97)

"The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out "crime insurance", which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution. It would be interesting to know whether the net effect would be more satisfactory than the current system, but when you consider the all-but-total failure of the punishment system actually employed in, say, the United States and Canada, it is difficult to believe that it wouldn't be a major improvement. Everyone agrees that we have very far to go in the way of improving our system of responding to crime. It is a sobering thought that getting rid of one of the most spectacularly cost-effective systems in the history of mankind short of war is perhaps even less likely to be seriously considered than is abolition of war."

Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pages 230-231.

(16)

"To kill someone for their class origins is just as bad as killing someone for their religious or ethnic origins. You’re killing someone, d’ye see? That Uncle Joe did it in the name of the proletariat while Hitler did it for some other reason he’d made up does not make Joe less evil, sorry, it just doesn’t."

Tim Worstall.

(8)

"In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie."

Stephen Pollard.

I agree with some of Mr Pollard's analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt "progressive" or "traditional" methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.

(5)

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

- George Eliot

(2)

In the meantime…feel free not to try to "educate" me on anything. Republican or Democrat, you don't need my buy-in to continue wrecking this country.

- Jackie Danicki

(2)

Everyone was quiet: If you’ve got nothing to say, now is a good time to not say it

- the incomparable Michael Yon, reporting on British military operations in Afghanistan from very much up the sharp end.

If you do not regularly read his site, you really should as it is filled with gripping stuff. Please consider dropping your mouse on this link to contribute to keeping Michael Yon in action.

(11)

The government forgets that George Orwell's 1984 was a warning, and not a blueprint

- Chris Huhne

(65)

"Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems. And, by the way, if they come up with a better solution but it can't be cheaper - which, in the beginning, most things aren't - nobody says you have to buy it. If you think this new drug is too expensive, it's not a good deal, we have a crisis, buy the old one. It's a generic now. It's cheap. You can't look at the problem and say, "I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free." It's unrealistic. And people know that about most things. They do. Nobody expects that just because they've made computers better they're going to give them to you free."

- Dean Kamen, warning about how US medicine will be demaged by socialistic "reforms" by Mr Obama. Mind you, I get the distinct impression that health care could turn out to be one of the biggest problems for The Chicago Community Organiser, who seems to be losing a lot of his post-election goodwill. And not before time.

(5)

"I'm nobody's conservative, but I'm pretty sure if I was telling conservatives how to think I wouldn't admonish them for failing to champion limited government within two sentences of praising FDR's pragmatism. It's like, I dunno, lecturing the Labour Party about demonstrating their pro-union bonafides while praising Margaret Thatcher's centrism. Sounds a bit off."

Matt Welch on the hapless Andrew Sullivan.

(18)

"As for politicians' personal conduct, I doubt it is much worse, relative to other professions, than it has always been, and it is not — or should not be — the main cause for concern. Personally, I would much rather MPs had numerous extramarital affairs, their hands in the till, or lucrative second jobs exploiting inside knowledge, than that they cavalierly abolish yet another civil liberty that took hundreds of years to establish. As far as I am concerned, politicians are welcome to be not only greedy, but also dull, unapproachable, ugly, pompous, clubby, elitist or socially inept, just as long as they do not consider it their job to reform society by making up a few more laws and rushing them through parliament as quickly as possible. Sadly, the people who agree with me appear to be a very small minority."

Fabian Tassano. His blog is required reading, in my view.

(10)

"Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of "planetary treason." The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. Converting food crops into fuel drives up the price of food. Driving up the world price of food results in more people in poor countries dying. Krugman is, no doubt, opposed to world hunger in theory. But he has come out passionately in favor of it in practice. Treason or murder, take your choice."

- David Friedman.

(4)

"This coup took place to protect your liberty. Some of you may find this strange, as you currently have less liberty, owing to my regime being a vicious theocratic hell. Well, to use a phrase of a friend of mine, try thinking outside the box. It is well known that to have a large degree of liberty, it is necessary to surrender a small amount to allow for police, security services and the like. We have taken this concept a step forward: since you have surrendered all your liberty, you now have even more liberty to do exactly what I say or die like the filfthy heretic scum you are. Feel free to agree with me on this point."

- The Grand Hyrax, newly established God-King-Prophet-Emperor of Urn, the fourth planet of the sun Didcot. From the book God Emperor of Didcot by Toby Frost.

(21)

In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has - to put it mildly - a fatal design flaw.

- Frank Zappa

(13)

"Groupthink was a major factor in the buildup of risk in the financial system in the decade preceding the recent crisis. Top bank executives and regulators ignored dissenting voices from both ends of the political spectrum which were questioning the excesses that were building up in the system. What was once a comfortable consensus about the strength of our regulatory structure has now been replaced by an equally comfortable and equally flawed consensus about how to fix it."

Arnold Kling, libertarian-leaning economist, giving a long report on the problems with how the US administration has sought to deal with the crisis, and why he thinks those moves will make future problems more, not less likely. My fear is that for now, such warnings will continue to go unheeded not just in the US administration of The Community Organiser, but in the UK and parts of Europe, as well.

(35)

Okay, since we are in Lunar mode today, here's another quotation:

“No event in contemporary culture was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-model standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed” – the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual model came shivering from the moon to the screen – and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of the opposite; he spoke of man”. (page 186).

Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason.

For all that I broadly share the sentiment expressed here, I don't think that any of the astronauts, even if they were religious, would have thought of their faith as somehow undercutting the sheer, grandeur of rational thought that got them up there in the first place. For them, I think, belief in a Supreme Being might even have been strengthened by wondering about how the universe came about in the first place, although cosmology comes in many forms. But still, Rand was right to make the point: in a culture that sometimes denigrates science and reason, the Moon landings were a potent reminder of just how far Man has travelled through the use of both.

(4)

The recent embracement of the so-called Reform Treaty, which is in all important aspects identical with the old Constitutional Treaty, is a defeat for all true European democrats and should be interpreted as such. The down-playing of its true essence is intellectually unacceptable and morally inexcusable.

Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming. The recent awarding of Nobel Prize to the main apostle of this hypothesis was the last straw because by this these ideas were elevated to the pedestal of "holy and sacred" uncriticisable truths.

- Vaclav Klaus

(17)

“It is often wrongly assumed that the free market is always on the side of life’s heavy hitters. But sport gives plenty of examples that it is the market which corrects received wisdom in favour of untrumpeted stars. The internet has done something similar in publishing.”

What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith. Pages 88-89.

Brian Micklethwait had thoughts about this short and excellent book a few months ago. A good book to read as the Ashes cricket series continues with the second Test at Lord's starting later today. Bliss.

(27)

“It has always been one of libertarianism’s insights…..that massive concentrations of government power are more likely to be used to benefit other huge concentrations of wealth and power than help the needy or downtrodden…the powerful few who benefit from government action are more highly motivated to work the mechanisms of democracy to their benefit than are the masses who all pay a little – often too little in each specific case to feel it worth fighting, or even knowing about – and thus win in the democratic game of shifting property and wealth from person, or group, to another. If a government were restricted to its libertarian minimums of protecting citizens’ life and property from force and fraud, all a corporation could do is to try to sell us something and we could decide whether or not to buy. It couldn’t tax us for its benefit, raise tariffs on its competitors to make their products more expensive, subsidize bad loans or overseas expansion, or take formerly private property on the grounds that it will make more lucrative use of it than would the former owner.”

Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, page 589.

(16)

Whatever you believe about race these days in the privacy of your own head is pretty irrelevant. Having the wrong opinions about these issues is professional and social suicide so broadly speaking people with a stake in society don't.

The elite's ideas about the evils of racism at least had the virtue of being essentially correct. Most of the other opinions they want to violently foist upon us are not.

- Commenter Jay Thomas, of the Thoughtful Ape.

(35)

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

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

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

(47)

"It's not lack of choice that stops people getting a good education - it's lack of schools and teachers. To say otherwise is pure ideology... Diverting scarce resources into providing voucher systems in a world where 18 million more teachers have to be trained if all children are to get the education they need is simply the wrong answer to the problems that poor people face."

- Claire Melamed, Head of Policy, ActionAid

(7)

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

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

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

(2)

The end result of this incestuous relationship is the same as occurs whenever such closely related bodies become intimate - idiot children. Unfortunately, they're running the country.

It's like "Deliverance" without all the banjo music.

- Commenter 'Veryretired'

(9)

"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.

(17)

"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

(62)

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.

(40)

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.

(26)

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

(16)

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

(37)

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.

(73)

"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