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It was written as…
But I prefer to see it as… “KPMG’s tax shelters between 1996 and 2002 saved the public $1.4bn which was used to generate productive economic activity” June 17th, 2005 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 British expats living in Spain are taking to handling their security themselves… and why not? Refusing to just throw your hands up in despair when the state proves unable to protect you is just acknowledging that you, not the state, are ultimately responsible for your safety. Vigilantes? Maybe, but why should that necessarily be a dirty word? Sometimes the reality is that ‘taking the law into your own hands’ is exactly the correct thing to do, and in any case these people are hardly hanging brigands they catch from the nearest lampposts. June 16th, 2005 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing. Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore. Perhaps one should call this the “Yukos Effect.” In many respects the seizure of the oil firm’s assets by Putin’s Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters – its owner was a decidely shady character – but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers. Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet. June 16th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge. Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.  June 16th, 2005 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge. Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up. June 16th, 2005 | Comments are closed
Tom Morris has taken matters into his hands and is asking British Library about its patron privacy policy… The conclusions are not favourable.
I am sure that the ‘if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you have-nothing-to-be-afraid-of’ bridage would completely miss the point on this one too… June 16th, 2005 | Comments are closed
This BBC report about the anxieties and arkwardnesses now being suffered by the EU’s leaders in the wake of their repudiation by the voters of France and Holland makes fun reading for all those of us who fail to see the point of the EU. What is it for? What good and worthwhile thing can the EU do that could not be done just as easily by the separate nations and governments of Europe with a fraction of the fuss or expense or grief? Why must the nations of EUrope homogenise themselves into one nation? For what? Against whom? The EU’s leaders have never explained in a manner that makes simultaneous sense to all of EUrope’s people. Instead, they have tended to fall back on the argument that the EU is inevitable. Yes but is it desirable? That does not matter, because desirable or not, it is happening. It is reality. It is the future. Arguing that it should not be reailty or the future is to indulge in fantasy. If the EU had a desirable and agreed purpose of the sort that the people of the EU might actually be able to get enthusiastic about – some purpose, I mean, other than that of giving the EU elite a superpower to be the bosses of – that would have made quite a difference in recent weeks. In crisis, all fundamentally effective institutions go to their core purpose. But the EU has no core purpose that its leaders are willing to allude to. All that the EU has is its precious momentum, its inevitability, and if it suddenly looks like it does not have momentum or inevitabitlity, then, in the word’s of Germany’s Vice President, a certain Guenter Verheugen, “the ground is shaking beneath our feet”. Shake baby shake, I say. The EUro-momentum will no doubt soon be re-established, and this little democratically induced tremor may soon be forgotten. But while it lasts, I am enjoying it. I can even tell myself that it might be remembered for a while. June 15th, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a general rule, whenever you hear or read that teaching unions are ‘angry’ then you can pretty much bet all your wordly worth that something good and positive is happening in the education sector. I have yet to encounter an exception to this rule:
This hardly means that the (long overdue) commodification of education is upon us but then these public sector mafiosi possess bloodhound levels of sensitivty that enable them to pick up on even the faintest whiff of threat to their vested interests. I wholly expect that even if these academies do start sprouting up around the country, the curriculum will still be politically-mandated and the sponsors will (in common with everyone else in the productive, non-looting sector) have to navigate their way through a miasmic swamp of diktats, edicts and regulations on their way to getting something resembling decent results. But, for all that, they do seem to me to represent the first few, tottering, tentative, baby steps towards the long-term goal of levering the state out of the education business. Good. June 15th, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I remarked in my previous post, Sir Bob Geldof is an annoying gentleman but capable of moments of lucidity. (I was a bit rude about him in my previous post. Sorry Bob). As an act of charity to the fellow, here is a quotation he might like to ponder:
Those words were uttered by Richard Cobden about 150 years ago, a man who saw a congruence between the ideals of personal liberty, concern for the welfare of one’s fellows, and the free market order. For him, like his great Victorian contemporaries like Sir Robert Peel, free trade was a progressive cause to be championed in the interests of the little guy, and not the cause of big powerful interests. It is a message that urgently needs to be understood by those who, no doubt from fine motives in a few cases, rail against global capitalism. If the case for the free market is to be more widely advanced, we have to appeal to the sense of idealism and concern for the downtrodden that animated our ancestors and could still appeal to the decent folk on the left. It is worth a try, anyway. June 15th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is possible some comments are getting nailed by our anti-spam blacklist if the entry contains words that are frequently used in spams. Our genuine condolences if your remarks get unjustly rejected but that is the price we pay for not getting our comments deluged with viagra advert and URL’s to Russian kiddie porn sites. Not having a blacklist is simply not an option for us as administering Samizdata.net takes quite a bit of time as it is and clearning up hundreds of spams per day (which is what we got before the blacklist) is just too time consuming. I will check to see if the blacklist be being overzealous so please e-mail me at admin-at-samizdata.net if you think the blacklist is being too obsessive about some specific word. June 15th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I realise that to do business in China means having to deal with the realities of the Chinese state, but when Microsoft becomes yet another direct collaborator with Chinese repression by adjusting its blog tools to help block online speech using words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” or “human rights,” then clearly Microsoft has become a party to the trampling of human rights in China and is not just a bystander. Next time you hear of all the philanthropic work done by MS and Bill Gates, just keep in mind that there is a very nasty flip side to the Giant from Redmond. It would appear that even Gates has a price at which his principles are clearly ‘negotiable’. Update:: There is some question of whether or not this is actually true according to a commenter who has set up a Chinese MSN Space blog. I will try to contact Voice of America and see what they have to say. June 14th, 2005 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:
Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, “They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem.” I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced. In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors’ foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or “Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries” as they quaintly put it.) → Continue reading: “If you’re a libertarian, how come you’re so mean?” June 14th, 2005 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
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