Putin cracked jokes and the audience roared and applauded when an old lady asked him whether Russia would be taking Alaska back from America. Just imagine, though, how Russians would react if German Chancellor Angela Merkel did the same at during a German broadcast when asked about taking back the former German enclave of Kaliningrad from Russia, and then you’ll get a sense of how horrifying the exchange with Putin really was.
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Creating more value in an economy would do more than wealth redistribution to combat the harmful effects of inequality. - Tyler Cowen, in a review about a much-discussed book by Tom Piketty on the subject of inequality. Piketty favours a lot of heavy state activity to control and reduce said inequality. Now, it is easy to just default to the standard libertarian line and say that fretting about such inequalities is just an excuse for a statist power grab. The fact is that the sheer gap in wealth we can see today is a reason why, however mistakenly, idealistic, smart people are fearful of, and hostile towards, laissez-faire capitalism. So it is worthwhile to keep making the economic, philosophic, and political case for why coercive measures to reduce inequality is bad and dangerous. I could not resist adding in this paragraph from Cowen:
April 23rd, 2014 | 4 comments
 Political uniformity is certainly in vogue. A remarkable 96 percent of presidential campaign donations from the nation’s Ivy League faculty and staff in 2012 went to Obama, a margin more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy. April 22nd, 2014 | 22 comments
If Vladimir Putin invades Poland, I’ll eat my hat. It’s not going to happen. Even so, American ground troops are being deployed there as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. This is the West telling him STOP. He’s not going to invade a European Union or NATO state either way, but we’d end up sending a crazy-weak signal if all we did was collectively shrug. Ukraine still isn’t in NATO, however, and probably never will be, so it’s still vulnerable. Putin can slice it and dice it all over again. The US won’t physically stop him for the same reason he won’t invade Poland. Nobody wants to blow up the world, especially not over this. April 21st, 2014 | 32 comments
- Spotted yesterday in the Times (which is behind a paywall) of the day before yesterday by 6k. “Very good” says he. Indeed. April 19th, 2014 | 17 comments
Why be libertarian? It may sound glib, but a reasonable response is, Why not? Just as the burden of proof is on the one who accuses another of a crime, not on the one accused, the burden of proof is on the one who would deny liberty to another person, not the one who would exercise liberty. Someone who wishes to sing a song or bake a cake should not have to begin by begging permission from all the others in the world to be allowed to sing or bake. Nor should she or he have to rebut all possible reasons against singing or baking. If she is to be forbidden from singing or baking, the one who seeks to forbid should offer a good reason why she should not be allowed to do so. The burden of proof is on the forbidder. And it may be a burden that could be met, if, for example, the singing were to be so loud it would make it impossible for others to sleep or the baking would generate so many sparks it would burn down the homes of the neighbors. Those would be good reasons for forbidding the singing or the baking. The presumption, however, is for liberty, and not for the exercise of power to restrict liberty. A libertarian is someone who believes in the presumption of liberty. And with that simple presumption, when realized in practice, comes a world in which different people can realize their own forms of happiness in their own ways, in which people can trade freely to mutual advantage, and disagreements are resolved with words, and not with clubs. It would not be a perfect world, but would be a world worth fighting for. - The concluding paragraphs of Why Be Libertarian? by Tom G. Palmer, which is the opening essay in Why Liberty? edited by Palmer for the Atlas Foundation. Here’s a picture of Palmer waving a copy of Why Liberty? during the speech he gave to LLFF14 at University College London last weekend:
Free copies of Why Liberty? were available to all who attended. April 18th, 2014 | 33 comments
Here is part of slide number one of Christopher Snowdon’s talk at LLFF14 yesterday afternoon, entitled “How the state finances the opponents of freedom in civil society”:
That is from The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, first penned, it would seem, in 1779, and actually passed in 1786. Christopher Snowdon is described here as the “Director of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA”, which means he is their chief complainer about sin taxes. His talk yesterday was based on the work he did writing two IEA publications, Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why and Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society. Both those publications can be downloaded in .pdf form, free of charge. Snowdon walked around a lot when talking, so although I took a lot of photos of him, only this one was any good:
Behind Snowdon is a long list of NGO’s which receive substantial funding from the EU. For legible versions, see Euro Puppets. In the short run, all this money paying for leftist apparatchiks to lobby for more money for more leftist apparatchiks is good for leftism, but I wonder if in the longer run it won’t be a disaster for them. Another quote, about how all causes eventually degenerate into rackets, springs to mind. This is the kind of behaviour that even disgusts many natural supporters of leftism. As Snowden recounted, few people outside this incestuous world have any idea of the scale of this kind of government funding for “charities”, never mind knowing the extra bit about how the money is mostly used to yell and lobby for more money, and for more government spending and government control of whatever it is. In particular, Snowden recounted that when John Humphrys interviewed Snowden on the Today Programme, he (Humphrys) did not grill him (Snowden), he (Humphrys) mostly just expressed utter amazement at the sheer scale of government funding for “charities”, for anything. What this means is that if and when a non-leftist politician gets around to just defunding the lot of them, just like that, he gets a win-win. He cuts public spending, even if only a bit. And he slings a bunch of parasites out into the street where they belong, who are then simply unable to argue to the public that they were doing anything of the slightest value to that public. Insofar as they do argue that they shouldn’t have been sacked, they do not further their own cause; they merely discredit it further and further prove that the decision to sack them was the right one. April 14th, 2014 | 9 comments
So relentless is this brainwashing that it percolates throughout the curriculum, so that even exam papers in French, English or religious studies can ask students to explain why the world is dangerously warming up, or why we must build more wind turbines. In 2012, I described an A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son, after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions. He was given the lowest possible mark, a fail. When his mother paid to have his paper independently assessed, the new examiner conceded that it was “articulate, well-structured” and well-informed. But because it did not parrot the party line, it was still given a fail. I fear this corruption of everything that education and science should stand for has become a much more serious scandal than Mr Gove yet realises. April 13th, 2014 | 22 comments
There was a time when an element of the Labour party was Methodist in a non cocaine, stealing money, and rent boy sense. - Paul Marks April 7th, 2014 | 40 comments
The only thing the West needs to do to see the final end of Russia as the historical threat it has always been is… do nothing. Talk a bit, posture a bit, make a few disapproving clucking sounds when Putin has one of his bare shirted Mussolini cosplay days, but essentially… do nothing. Just wait and watch. Russia’s catastrophic demographics and fragile resource based economics are doing everything the West needs. April 3rd, 2014 | 62 comments
To me, (Britain) now seems a strange, immoral place. For example, I read articles in The Guardian and The Times this week about the abolition of inherited wealth. The Economist also recently wrote about it. It did not even occur to any of these columnists that they were talking about the property of others. They did not create it. They did not inherit it. They have no just claim to it. Yet they have no moral concerns about proposing its seizure. March 30th, 2014 | 27 comments
“There’s nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits.” There may indeed be what US law professor and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls an education bubble in the US (and for that matter, here in the UK). That does not, however, mean that studying a “liberal arts” degree is somehow shameful or pointless, and yet that is the impression I sometimes get on part of the right-of-centre blogosphere. By all means let’s cut the state education establishment down, but that is utterly different from the argument about education per se and ideas about how people should broaden their horizons culturally and intellectually. It is important that libertarians/classical liberals understand that distinction, and make it often. March 23rd, 2014 | 45 comments
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