Many have condemned the ghastly Robert Mugabe for the outrageous policy of seizing land from white people in Zimbabwe. Yet even in Britain it is now possible for a group of people to use the political process to take the property of others against their will.

In what it nothing less that state sanctioned robbery, people on the Scottish Western Isles will be voting to take the property of long standing owners with no more justification that than they want to benefit from it and the state says they can use the force of law to do so. This is nothing less that mob rule of the grossest sort motivated by straightforward greed, abetted by politicians who see their political power benefiting from presiding over legalised land invasions.

A local woman is quoted as saying:

Now we have the democratic process in place to allow people to take control of their own destiny

... by which she really means "take control of other people's destiny" by taking away their property. But she is certainly correct that this is democracy in action, which is why I am so ambivalent about unconstrained democratic politics. Robbery is no more excusable just because the people who benefit from it do so using the force of the state rather than just running the legitimate owners out of town with pitchforks.

Remember this the next time you hear some hypocritical Labour or LibDem politico wringing their hands about the behaviour of Robert Mugabe as he dispossesses farmers who have worked lands for several generations. Disgraceful.

My February last Friday has just ended, and it was definitely one of the better ones. Patrick Crozier spoke about libertarianism and private road ownership. Excellent talk, excellent discussion. The result of Patrick's time writing for and bossing the now only archived Transport Blog, which he has now ended. (He now writes this.)

Among those present was Alex Singleton, and he naturally talked about his newly launched Globalization Institute, which, of course, has a new blog.

It occurs to me that you might expect the word itself, 'globalisation' (I prefer an 's' in the middle there), to be the equivalent, at the global level, of 'nationalisation' at the national level. Yet, while nationalisation means the national government stealing things, globalisation means something quite different and much nicer. If globalisation was the same at the global level as nationalisation is at the national level, globalisation would mean a World Government stealing things.

Does this matter? Well, maybe it does, because we surely do need a word to describe the equivalent of nationalisation, but at the global level. I have been drinking and may have forgotten the obvious, but my impression is: we do not have such a word.

Surely the existence of the word 'nationalisation' made it far easier to oppose the thing itself. Not having a word for this other form of 'globalisation', predation by the government of the globe, makes it harder to oppose, I think.

For a while now, I have reading about how the mighty U.S. economy, heavily in debt, with big budget deficits and a large current account black hole, is headed for the rocks. The dollar is on the skids, inflationary pressures are rising, the Fed has been putting up interest rates, the coming Social Security crunch... you know the drill. And some of these worries are to my mind justified, which explains why, with all the plan's faults, I broadly applaud the efforts of President Bush to overhaul the state pensions system.

Is the situation really as grim as some of the jeremiads claim, however? This suitably wonkish article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal argues that things are not nearly as worrying as some might make out and that if anyone has cause for worry, it is Europe with its shrinking birth rates.

The article concudes with this paragraph, and it seems to hit the mark, in my view:

Only one development could upset this optimistic prognosis: an end to the technological dynamism, openness to trade, and flexibility that have powered the U.S. economy. The biggest threat to U.S. hegemony, accordingly, stems not from the sentiments of foreign investors, but from protectionism and isolationism at home

Indeed.

To strengthen defence, cut taxes and balance the budget is very difficult.

Ronald Reagan managed the first two tasks, but failed in the third. President Bush made no effort to control nondefence spending in his first term and is only now trying to do so - we shall see how how well he does (he does not have President Reagan's defence of the Democrats being in control of the House of Representatives)

However, it is not impossible to achieve all three tasks. Perhaps the most important example in history is that of the Emperor Anastasius.

When Anastasius became Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in 491 AD (the Senate allowed the choice of Emperor to rest with the Empress Ariadne) the Western Roman Empire had already collapsed. Here and there (such as in the Province of Britian) there were local leaders who continued to fight against the Germanic peoples, but the vast majority of the old empire in the west was under various Germanic kings.

The Eastern Roman Empire (which evolved into what we call the Byzantine Empire) was not in a good state. As with the Western Empire taxes were crushing, and yet the treasury was empty and the defences of the Empire were falling apart.

Anastasius fought many wars, both against invaders and against domestic rebels (mostly Chalcedonian Christians who objected to his austere Monophysite variety of Christianity - although I am not claiming that all Monophysites were austere, and it should also be remembered that Anastasius did not tend to persecute other sorts of Christians - not even Arians, the religion of the most of the barbarian rulers in the West and a religion whose doctrines were further from the "one divine nature of Christ-God" of the Monophysites, than were the "two natures of Jesus" view of the Chalcedonians from which the vast majority of modern Christians get their doctrines), and yet he greatly reduced taxes. Anastasius abolished the "chrysargyon" (a major tax on the urban population) and reduced the "capitatio" - one of the great taxes on the peasantry.

It must never be forgotten that most citizens of the Empire were and had always been country people (the concentration of the written records with city matters misleads us). And it was the demands for ever greater taxation that had led the Emperor Diocletian to tie peasants to the soil - i.e. to turn the bulk of the population into what would in later times be called serfs.

Anastasius was working to a plan to abolish the capitatio (although the land tax would remain - and it had to be paid in gold), but sadly the Emperor elected by the Senate after him (Justin) and the real man of power (Justinian) had other plans. Also if provinces were devasted by war Anastasius would grant remission of their taxes. An obvious policy perhaps - but not every Emperor did this, too often a province might be almost destoyed by war, only for the tax collectors to come along afterwards and finish the job.

At the same time Anastasius rebuilt the army, so whilst it did not become as good as the great Roman army of old, it avoided becomming the sick joke that the Western army had turned into. The army with which the Generals of Justinian won so many victories in their efforts to retake the West was at least in part the work of Anastasius.

Such defences as the great fortress city of Dara (built to guard against the Persians) were also the creation of Anastasius. As was the Long Wall of Thrace - part of the complex of defences that protected Constaninople. A city that withstood siege after siege - not falling till the Forth Crusade of the early 13th century, hundreds of years after Anastasius died (of course, after the Frankish occupation the Byzantines made a recovery of sorts - which was not to end till the capture of Constaniople by the Turks in 1453).

Anastasius also reformed the coinage (the actual minister in charge was named John the Paphlagonian - why should such folk be forgotten), so the East remained a money economy (not collapsing into barter) with coins in the denominations useful to the citizens, and Byzantine coins remained a normally undebased system of exchange for many centuries.

And as for "balancing the budget" - Anastasius left a reserve of 320,000 pounds (weight) of gold in the treasury when he died in 518.

Well "how did he do it"?

There was no magic, just the hard slog of careful cuts in wasteful spending (such as shows to amuse the urban mob - although even Anastasius dare not touch the chariot racing, whatever the of truth or otherwise of the claim that he had the support of the Green faction from the chariot races). And the endless work against corruption (the ways that officials found to get money in their pockets rather than in supplying the army).

The efforts of Anastasius and his ministers (such as Polycarp and Marinus) to reform administrative structures, cut spending and root out corruption have a history among Roman financial managers of the better sort all the way back to Sulla in the days of the Republic (Sulla abolished the Corn Dole, and he smashed the tax farmers [folk who demanded X for the state and X plus for themselves] who had looted the provinces - this made Sulla very popular with folk away from Rome regardless of how many Popularies he killed in the city).

Indeed only half a century before the time of Anastasius the Senate elected Marcian as Emperor - and he abolished a few taxes and charges upon Senators, which he was able to do partly by the bold move of refusing the pay any more protection money to Attila the Hun, and partly by just hard control of spending.

However, in recent centuries only Anastasius had cut taxes for the great mass of people, whilst rebuilding defence, and balancing the budget (indeed building up a directly held reserve that would have made Martin Van Buren proud).

The Republic was centuries dead. Under the Empire "liberty" sometimes seemed to mean a picture of free bread on the coins (part of the destruction of liberty being hailed as liberty itself - a very modern touch), And the ideology of the late Roman Empire was collectivist to the core, yet Anastasius was able to good - indeed vast amounts of good. Individuals do matter in history.

But what is the relevance of me ranting on about ancient history? What an Emperor can do can not be matched by the democatic politics of modern nations. Why even the old Republican Sulla did not get his reforms into practice by constitutional means - he cut down his Popular party ("party" in a loose sense of course) enemies like pork (although the round of political killings in Sulla's time was actually started by the Popularies - a point that many history text books seem to oddly forget) and his reforms did not last long after his retirement.

This is where the example of Philadephia comes in. In the 1930's the United States was fully democratic (yes there were some Poll taxes and blacks in the South could not vote - but by ancient standards northern cities like Philadephia had an almost unthinkable proportion of their population with the right to vote - no slaves, few resident aliens, and even voting rights for women).

In the days of the early Republic democrats (whether the political party was Jefferson's Republicans or later Jackson's Democrats - and whether the various democrats happened to like each other or not) had been small government men (Jefferson with his abolition of all internal federal taxes, Jackson and Van Buren with the paying off of the national debt.....). But by the 1930's the people who viewed themselves as "progressive" or "democatic" (whether they were in the Democratic party or not) were deeply collectivist. Also the popular culture was collectivist - in books or films the bad guy was normally a rich man of business (just like today - with a few brave exceptions), and (of course) the 1930s was the period of the Great Depression with up to a quarter of the workforce unemployed and the economy in chaos.

In this period the budget of the city of Philadelphia went from a revenue of 133 million dollars and spending of 163.4 million Dollars in 1930, to a revenue of 127 million Dollars and spending of 127.6 million Dollars in 1940. Indeed in many years of the 1930's Philadelphia balanced the budget - and all without the special "help" of the new hand outs from President Roosevelt's federal government.

In short Philadelphia did not expand government - in the teeth of the supposedly inevitable spendthrift nature of democracy, and in spite of the intense collectivism of the 1930's, the temptation of money from Washington and the longest depression of American history.

For those who may think that there may be special factors involved in the stats I gave above (and prices did fall in the first couple of years of the 1930's) compare Philadelphia's stats with those of New York City:

In 1930 New York City government had revenue of 725.6 million Dollars and spending of 681.8 billion Dollars. In 1940 New York had revenue of 896.7 million Dollars and spending of 1327.5 million Dollars.

In short, spending about doubled in New York city in the 1930's (whereas it fell in Philadelphia) and by 1940 New York city government was spending more than ten times what Philadelphia city government was spending (and no, Philadelphia's population was not only a tenth of the population of New York).

Yes the Philadelphia that had Conservative black newspapers as late as the 1960s is long gone (indeed perhaps it was really killed by the new City Charter just after World War II), and yes Philadelphia did not provide for its own defence (it was not a classical city - for all its Greek name). But it is one example that shows that even in the most difficult of circumstances polticians do not have to be collectivists - they choose to be. Political leaders can fight the growth of statism if they really wish to do this.

It is not "inevitable social trends", the "historical period" or any other factor. Polticians are government growers because they choose to be so, they do not have to be so.

For some of the facts above I made use of the work of the late AHM Jones (on Anastasius his short work "The Decline of the Ancient World", Longman 1966, is still all one needs) and of Bruce Allen Hardy (on Philadelphia). I came upon Dr Hardy's thesis (Wayne State University 1977) recently and it gave me the stats to support something that I had long known (that Philadelphia resisted the growth of statism in the 1930s).

Of course I am certainly not claiming that either the late AHM Jones or Dr Hardy would support any of my political opinions.

I am very disappointed by the options given in this online slashdot poll. Where is the "Built from vast numbers of Nescafe jars" option?

The line here, which I pretty much toe, is that the Olympic Games are an orgy of drug-sodden, politicised insanity, which Britain, London in particular, will spend the next century or more paying for, in the unfortunate event that Britain, London in particular, get the damn things, in 2012. That the politicians all seem to love the Olympics is enough to make me hostile, even though I do have a serious weakness for modernistical structures of the sort that they build nowadays to accommodate sporting events.

Luckily, Paris is now said to be the front runner. But, the news from Paris is deteriorating. On March 10th, that gang of bribe guzzlers known as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) will be visiting Paris, and the local unions, purely by coincidence I feel sure, happen to be agitating at that time against … the future basically:

French unions have rejected calls to shelve strikes planned for the day the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is due in Paris to assess its bid.

Seven unions are to take part in marches and stoppages on 10 March, to protest against government moves to relax France's 35-hour working week.

Meanwhile, Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is up to his neck in a row about some insulting and borderline anti-semitic remarks he made to a Jewish journalist, in the course of his ongoing feud with a newspaper group.

The pressure on London Mayor Ken Livingstone intensified today as Tony Blair joined calls for him apologise for his Nazi jibe to a Jewish journalist.

In the capital, there were fears that the continuing row over Mr Livingstone’s outburst – in which he likened the journalist to a concentration camp guard – could damage the city’s chances of hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Well, it certainly could, and the French press is presumably spinning this story like a nuclear powered top. But, a possibility that does not seem to have been much discussed is that Ken Livingstone's attitude during this ruckus might be what it is not despite the attempt to get the Olympics for London, but because of it. The initial insults sound less than calculated, but politicians like Ken Livingstone are nothing if not good actors. What if Ken picked this particular fight deliberately? Okay, that may be somewhat farfetched. But the aftermath? After Ken had had time to think things through?

Israel has called on Ken to apologise. "International" people, like the people in the International Olympic Committee, are just going to fall over themselves to obey Israel. Not.

Tony Blair wants Ken to apologise. And he is another focus of adoration throughout International land. Again, not.

I do not know the political attitudes of the IOC people, but I bet Ken Livingstone does. And what if he calculates that hanging tough, in the face of all this pressure, adding further insults to the original insults, will actually get him more points with these people than backing down?

The threat to civil liberties in Britain posted by the Labour government, with laws that make the Patriot Act in the USA seem like a mere trifle, is finally regularly getting the sort of attention it deserves, at least in the Daily Telegraph.

The notion that a politician would dare to try and take powers to deprive people of their liberty without recourse to courts and without even presenting evidence because they 'know' that they pose a threat is astonishing. It should also should answer all those people who shrug their shoulders and say "why get worked up about ID cards? We can trust the state." House arrest without trial and without the ability to confront your accusers... and of British subjects on British soil. And the people who want to do this expect to just be trusted without at any point being required to present proof of a crime or threat to national security. If this is allowed to stand then truly, Britain stands on the brink of something truly dark.

I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:

An online protest Tuesday of Iran's crackdown against bloggers made an impact – even on Iranian officials.

So says a leader of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the group that organized the effort to decry the jailings of Iranian bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad.

Reuters on Tuesday reported that Sigarchi was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country's leaders, a move probably linked in part to the timing of the protest, said Curt Hopkins, the committee's director. "I think there's got to be some connection," Hopkins said.

A message left with the Iranian mission to the United Nations was not immediately returned.

Hopkins' group – whose deputy director is Ellen Simonetti, the former Delta Air Lines flight attendant fired over photos of herself in uniform that she posted on her blog – asked those who maintain Web logs to call attention Tuesday to the plight of Iranian bloggers through posting banner ads and contacting government officials.

Some notable members of the blogging community took up the cause. They included Jeff Jarvis, who runs the BuzzMachine site, and Glenn Reynolds, who's behind Instapundit.

Hopkins said the response was just as impressive around the world. Hits on the committee site jumped from a daily average of about 500 to about 3,000 just during the Asian daytime hours. "It's been going like gangbusters," he said. "We've had people from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and Russia."

Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated.

As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also.

Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like "... out of the question ...", it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching.

I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now.

Well it seems that today, short little link-pieces are okay, so here is a short little link piece, with links to these mealy-mouthed trimmers, arguing for a flat tax, and to me, arguing that mere flatness is not the point. Just having a flat roof to the graph is a hideous compromise. It must be flattened until it is zero-height roadkill. (Metaphor muddle there, but I hope you get the picture.) Seriously, this is one of my best diatribes ("THE TOP RATE OF INCOME TAX SHOULD BE CUT TO ZERO") from my time as a Libertarian Alliance pulpit banger, and I recommend that you read the whole thing, even if it is only a .pdf.

When the world in due course sees the wisdom of this proposal and enacts in universally, the result will be that there will remain a top rate of income tax, but that whatever money you earn above the level at which the top rate of income tax kicks in, you keep. All of it. These flat-raters say that it should be fifteen percent or whatever for everything you earn. I say, once you have paid your share of the rent, you should keep the lot.

Sorry, I went on a bit there.

For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.

Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience's attention.

For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.

I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.

In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie's quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.

The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.

That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.

The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.

I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.

I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.

I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.

What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.

As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.

And Chris Barrie's Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a "right let's start this thing up", but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: "let's rock". Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.

So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.

This is the question asked by Anthony Daniels over on the Social Affairs Units blog. His article conveys the sense of mounting unease that I certainly share. Read the whole thing.

I thought a few more images from the splendid Capitalist Ball last week in Brussels would not go amiss...

And whilst in the Heart of Darkness, there were some anti-Bush protesters in town (well, I know most of the people who work for the EU fall into that category but that is not what I mean... and as a result security was somewhat tighter than usual. Someone I always imagined Berlaymont, the HQ of the European Commission, as being a place that has a great deal of barbed wire in its future.

The interesting things about the protesters for me were...

... firstly their very small number and secondly, their fascinating choice of protest placards which decried US military action against a mass murdering fascist regime in Iraq, a mass murdering fascist regime in Yugoslavia, in support of a democratic regime in Bosnia, against a right wing dictator in Panama ...

Very revealing, would you not agree?

I bought a DVD of Nabucco the other day. It's the usual story: boy meets girl; girl's father attacks Jerusalem; Hebrews carted off to Babylon. "Sack, burn the temple," says the King of the Babylonians. "This cursed race shall be wiped from the earth." But first, let's all have a sing-song.

I saw it in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It was the Latvian National Opera, so I was watching Latvians, in China, pretending to be Jews in Babylon, and singing in Italian. Well that's all right. I can take a joke.

- Harry Hutton last Friday. More about Nabucco here.

Alex Singleton says that this is good news:

The Royal Mail will lose its monopoly on delivering Britain's letters on Jan. 1, an industry regulator announced Friday - 15 months earlier than originally planned.

Regulator Postcomm said that from the beginning of 2006 private companies will be able to bid for licenses to deliver letters, previously the sole preserve of the state-backed Royal Mail Group PLC.

Postcomm chairman Nigel Stapleton said more competition would create "a more innovative and efficient postal industry."

"This is only the first step in a process which the commission hopes will eventually see market forces replace regulation as the main driver of an efficient and effective mail industry," he said.

Bulk mail delivery is already open to competition, but domestic letter services are the exclusive domain of the Royal Mail.

I agree. I have no problem with the principle that postal services ought to be competitive rather than monopolistic, and most of the arguments I hear which allegedly defend that monopoly strike me as misguided. For instance, I have never understood why sending a letter to people living at the far end of beyond in the deep, deep countryside, should cost no more than sending a letter from a dweller in a city to another dweller in the same city. If a competitive postal delivery service wants to have a one-price-fits-all policy, as many do, for simplicity's sake, fine. If it wants to deliver non-urgent packages sent by me to someone half a mile from me by sending them to Birmingham and back, again: their problem (and their solution) rather than mine. But if other postal services want to 'skim', that is, do only easy deliveries (and maybe do them really, really quickly), and thereby force a little product differentiation into this market, well, again, why not? Making a bicycle is easier and cheaper than making a luxury car, and bikes accordingly change hands for far less. Where is the problem with that? Why should both cost the same?

Add all the obvious advantages associated with competitors competing with each other to establish reputations for reliable, efficient and really clever service, and you get a compelling case for a free market.

There is also the point, which I was only reminded of when deciding whether to label this as being about "globalization", that postal services these days cry out to be global, rather than merely national with global stuff treated as a bolted-on afterthought.

However, I believe that I do see one problem with this particular exercise in demonopolisation.

I recall a few years ago getting one of those cards through my letter box, saying that some non-governmental, acronymic, postal delivery service had tried, but failed, to deliver to me a package. There was a phone number on the card, and although I did not feel in any way obliged to, I did ring it.

I was told that I would have to make my way to Battersea to collect the package.

Excuse me, I said. You have promised someone else that you will deliver a package to me, and I am somehow obligated to go to Battersea to collect it? Who is it from? I mean, if it sounds good, I might come and get it. Oh, no, they said, we could not possibly reveal that over the phone. Well then forget it, I said. You can try to redeliver the thing, if you want to, but I do not promise to be in when you call again. Or, you can tell the person who gave you the package that you have failed to deliver it, and it will then be between you and them.

They were amazed. Such insubordination from non-customers was apparently unheard of.

(I think I may have told this story here before. If I have then my apologies to all those irritated by the repetition.)

The problem here is that final bit of the journey, people's front doors. As more and more people go out to work, and at more and more unpredictable hours, fewer and fewer households can conveniently guarantee to have anyone present all the time to receive incoming clobber.

Is the answer to give every postal service that wants it a key to the front door of my block of flats, and of every other block of flats in Britain, such as the monopoly Royal Mail now seems to have? Somehow, I think that might be a bad idea.

But meanwhile, does the Royal Mail retain its privileged ability to open the front door that I share with my neighbours? There is a lot to be said for someone having this right.

This is one of the big reasons why 'offices' still exist. An 'office' is a place that is, among other things, sort of definitely, going to be open from 9 to 5, to receive incoming stuff. And phone calls, and visitors of all kinds.

Maybe the answer for incoming mail is to have an 'office' which specialises not in fronting for all the work done by a particular business, but which instead specialises in receiving incoming clobber for lots of businesses, and more especially for lots of people, people who live near enough to be able to drop round whenever anything shows up for them. What might such places be called? 'Post offices' perhaps? Maybe the combined urges of the newly liberated private sector in postal delivery will come together to create such places.

But what if some people are unable to make even this small journey? This is where privileged access to front doors might still be a good thing. But, I suppose I give privileged access to my bank card details to Amazon (and to many other enterprises) such as I would not give to just anyone. (And with regard to Amazon, see also the afterthought about globalization, above.)

Maybe the Royal Mail will decide to specialise in being the universally trusted British deliverer of last resort, so to speak, trusted to open shared front doors, and achieve final delivery of all mail, both its own stuff and everyone else's, should the need arise.

The problem with that being that during the last few years, and this is one of the more depressing things to have happened to Britain during the last few years, the Royal Mail has become, in many areas and in many ways, seriously unreliable. The worry must be that if this demonopolisation goes ahead, the Royal Mail's descent into criminality and chaos will become vertiginous, before the private sector has learned to sort out all the problems which the Royal Mail used to solve, re front doors and re everything else.

By the way, let no one claim that in the age of email, internets, blah blah blah, that postal services no longer really matter. Why, that most modern and internet-blah-blah-blah-based business, Amazon, depends for its very existence on efficient postal services to deliver the stuff you have ordered by such modern means.

Well, I dare say the private sector will solve this and similar problems if it sincerely wants to, which I think it will. One should never regard one's own failure to solve a problem in twenty minutes as proof that capitalism will never solve the problem ever.

In particular, there are no doubt places beyond Britain where they faced all such problems and solved them decades ago, perhaps because their version of the Royal Mail has been run by corrupt thieves from the start, and they have always had a free market in postal delivery.

Nevertheless, I do foresee some, let us say, transitional difficulties, with this particular exercise in demonopolisation.

To generalise, the move out of politics and towards commerce is a political process as well as a commercial process, and we all know that political processes can go very wrong.

Or, in other words, see also this hockey stick posting.. This explains that the current decline in the quality of service offered by the Royal Mail was probably a precondition for the decision to demonopolise postal delivery in the first place.

It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy.
-The anonymous source who took the story of Paris Hilton's hacked BlackBerry to the press

If Samizdata has been a bit quiet of late, you can blame it on the fact that so many of the contributors have been in Brussels for the Centre for the New Europe's 2005 Capitalist Ball. (Some of you may remember David Carr's eye-pleasing entry about last year's soiree.) Many of last year's attendees were present this year - including the tall, glamourous Texan from David's 2004 entry - and the whole event was nothing short of splendid. To be in a room with hundreds of people who broke into enthusiastic applause when one of the speakers quoted Father Juan de Mariana's assertion that any individual citizen can justly assassinate a king who imposes taxes without the consent of the people, seizes the property of individuals and squanders it, or prevents a meeting of a democratic parliament was, to put it mildly, very refreshing.

Brussels itself is a somewhat drab - if not totally miserable - town. Upon arrival, I was surprised to see a workman on a ladder in the train station, doing a bit of welding - without a properly fitted protective mask, and with sparks raining down mere inches from passersby. This total disregard for the cult of 'health and safety' was an oddly pleasing sight.

We took it as a good sign when the two flags flying right outside our hotel room window were the Union Jack and the American stars and stripes. Even more cheering was this sticker on a lampost near - I kid you not - Rue du Gouvernement Provisoire (Provisional Government Street):

It is the "as much as possible" that made us smile. Keep trying, scumbags.

And speaking of scumbags, it seems the local communists know they have a bit of a PR problem, to say the least:

Roughly translated, they are trying to sell the line that being against capitalism does not necessarily mean being in favour of the gulag. I suppose that may be true, in much the same way that being against breathing does not necessarily mean that one is in favour of a horrific death, but...Again, keep trying, scumbags. The pro-liberty contingent that gathered in Brussels this weekend are not the only people around who know you are full of crap. From the looks of the city's Grand Place, a European stronghold of capitalism since the 17th century, it would appear that the denizens of Brussels have had that one figured out for quite a while. With any luck, and exposure to the free market principles celebrated at the CNE's Capitalist Ball, the young communists of Belgium will get on the winning side of things any day now.

The Guardian is serious about blogging, and it is also serious about presenting the occasional non-left piece of writing. (They used regularly to publish pieces by Enoch Powell.) So the surprising thing about this piece about blogging is not that the Guardian published it, but that the name of Iain Duncan Smith appears where the author's name goes. (I share Patrick Crozier's doubts about the piece's true authorship. And when we are talking about blogging, being who you say you are is a big thing, I think.)

IDS (I will assume this to be real from now on) hopes that blogging will revitalise the right in Britain, and notes that blogging has already revitalised the right in the USA, and has utterly deranged the left by causing the left to drag their party away from electability.

I wonder. I suspect that the problems of the Conservative Party are more serious than that, and that blogging will as likely serve to dramatise all the many differences that are now contained, if that is the right word, within the Conservative Party.

The Conservatives now have a hideous problem. Having lost confidence in its own economic nostrums, with the collapse both of the old USSR and of its own attempts to galvanise the British economy by seizing control of it, the British dirigiste left is content to allow Blair – or, I suspect, any likely successor of Blair – to triangulate away into the sunset. Labour knows that for them, it is either New Labour or no Labour at all. Which means that the Conservatives are no longer united by Labour. Instead they are divided by New Labour.

I do not go out of my way to converse with Conservative Party activists or critics or cheerers-on, but every one of such persons I have met with during the last decade or so has had his own distinct plan for the future of the Conservative Party, consisting of his own preferred mixture of policies. Each activist knows that his particular plan is The Answer, and that all that is needed is for all those other Conservative morons to stop with the negativity and embrace his plan without reservation. Easy really.

The Conservative Party should take a firm stand about this (or its opposite), without compromise. But, it should fearlessly compromise on that, by either lying or not talking about it. Go hard with England, Britain, Europe, the Anglosphere, the World (mix and dilute to taste). Be anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant. Anti-ID-cards, pro-ID-cards. Smash the welfare state, buy voters with an even better welfare state. Cut pensions, raise pensions. Support state education, destroy state education. Defend fox hunting, ignore fox hunting. Applaud the Americans, denounce the Americans. (I once thought that the Conservatives could maybe agree about applauding the Americans and leave the rowing about the Americans to the Labour Party. Fat chance.) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Every policy front is a distinct way to destroy Conservative Party unity.

It used to be that the Leader would decide all these things. Now they all want to be the Leader. And if they are not the Leader, and a different mixture of policies and attitudes is propose to their preferred mixture by the bloke who is the Leader, they are about as loyal to the Leader as a basket of low-IQ, but poisonous, snakes. As a result, the Conservative Party is now nigh on unleadable. It is not that they have chosen bad Leaders, or for that matter that they have chosen their Leaders by the wrong methods. It is that they cannot be lead.

I cannot see blogging being much help with all this. On the contrary, I think it will only allow the stupid snakes to hiss louder and louder. Blogging will be a whole new source of indiscretions and vituperations, a whole new way to destroy the Conservative Party. The anti-Conservative journalists could have a field day, and I think the Guardian knows it.

IDS says that blogging will put the fear of God into the "metropolitan elite", and assumes that this will help the Conservative Party. It is just as likely to start a new civil war within it. IDS says that lazy journalists think only of the impact of this or that policy on the opinion polls. Which the leadership of the Conservative Party never does, does it? The title of IDS's piece is "Bloggers will resue the right". But what it blogging rescues "the right" from the Conservative Party?

But, we shall see. Politics is weird. Often something that seems utterly impossible one month, becomes unavoidable a few short months later. Maybe blogging will provoke a big Conservative revival.

Personally I do not much care one way or the other. I agree with Perry that a speedy return of a Conservative government would improve very little, and very possibly make things even worse. My loyalty is to blogging itself. This is where I have placed my bets. If blogging very publicly sweeps the Conservatives back into office, hurrah! If it rips the Conservatives into unmendable fragments, hurrah also!

Or then again, maybe the unanimous ignorance of the modern world and its possibilities will mean that the stupid snakes continue to neglect this new way for them to hiss, and we bloggers will have to spread our enthusiasm for this new and amazing medium by quite other means.