Some social critics go on about The Permissive Society, but what we are really facing is The Priggish Society currently being created by busybody politicians and other authority figures… Going out for a night in a bar with close friends is now denounced as “binge drinking”. Smoking an occasional joint means you are a “drug addict”.
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The inevitable has happened. The British government has nationalised Northern Rock, the stricken British mortgage lender and bank that got itself into terminal trouble last year as a result of its ambitious, nay, reckless policy of relying on funding itself through the short-term money market. When inter-bank rates spiked, as they did as a result of the credit crunch caused by the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Northern Rock suddenly found it impossible to go on funding its mortgage products. It was ruined. As I have said several times before, the most logical, if painful step, would have been to let the company go bust; depositors would be protected if necessary, but otherwise, the company would be wound up. It would have been a painful, even traumatic example of how unwise lending policies can go unstuck. It would have served, for years to come, as a harsh reminder about the dangers of trying to run a bank without sufficient savings to back it up its lending. Instead, the government’s move to pick up the tab for Northern Rock’s problems will act, however marginally, to weaken the necessary harsh message that should come out of the Northern Rock fiasco. Now, I know that Samizdata readers will not give a brass farthing about the EU angle, but a thought does occur to me, as it has to others: how on earth can the company be allowed to offer highly attractive savings rates, which are more attractive than those of some of its competitors, when Northern Rock is able to enjoy the status of a tax-funded company, when other, rival banks, such as Alliance & Leicester, are not? How, exactly, is the British government going to be able to square its actions with the single market of the EU? Just asking. February 18th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 You have nothing to lose but your place at the trough and a whole world to win! One non-conservative Big Government Republican (George Bush Sr.) praising the ‘conservative’ credentials of another non-conservative Big Government Republican (John McCain). I assume I am not the only finding this more than a little absurd. These guys are not ‘neo-cons’, they are ‘non-cons’. February 18th, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was pleased to read that Allister Heath has been appointed as Editor of City AM, the free daily newspaper distributed in the City of London. The City is generally quite sound, but somehow I think the addition of a noted Hayekian libertarian as editor of this popular freesheet will help the City get even sounder. Allister came on the scene in the 1990s when he co-founded the LSE Hayek Society. During the heyday of The European Journal, a Eurosceptic magazine, it was Allister who was editor. He says that when someone gave him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, he found it full of things that resonated with him. For the past few years, he’s been working on The Business, firstly as Economics Editor, then Deputy Editor and finally as Editor, where he has been a consistent and effective critic of Gordon Brown’s economic policy.  February 18th, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
But not green television the way you think. South African blogger 6000 is “not sure where this came from originally or if it’s true”, but he adds: “But you know, this is SA and people are nothing if not resourceful. It’s a cool story – I choose to believe.” Me too.
Good to know that almost everybody down there can afford to have “spending fever”, even if some prefer to economise on their electricity bills. 6000 has this as a mere scanned image of a newspaper report. I think it deserves the .html treatment. February 18th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
With the occurrence of yet another violent attack on a crowd of disarmed people in the news, Glenn Reynolds suggests we start sueing the universities. If a University or any other organization defines its facility as a ‘Gun-Free Zone’ it has an implied contract duty to protect you, and if it has failed to take measures to do so is in breach of that contract. Think of it this way: you have a constitutional Right of self defense. When a property owner or government makes entry onto that property contingent upon waiving that Right, they imply they will in return defend you against harm. This is not all that different from a situation I faced a decade ago as a C-level manager at a UK ISP. If our net news feeds were wide open, we were a common carrier; but if we put any sort of filtering into effect we were expressing editorial control of content and therefor liable for what we missed, be it child-porn or whatever. Let the fun begin! February 18th, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some people are their own worst enemies. Take, for example, the rather eccentric-looking chap in the photograph below. He appears to have rather clumsily allowed himself to be portrayed as a depraved menace when he is but a makeover away from becoming a card-carrying member of The Great and The Good. 
Does this self-defeating fool not appreciate just how seductive his central message would be to the bien pensant? Indeed, they are treading water just waiting for someone like him (only a plausible, marketable version) to come along. All he needs to do is to make himself a bit more presentable. → Continue reading: Image is everything February 17th, 2008 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Kosova has declared its independence from Serbia and if ever a people have justification for not trusting the political institutions of another, it is the Kosovars. Perhaps this will, as some fear and other hope, start a wave of reasonable and logical separations… starting with Taiwan maybe? February 17th, 2008 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has a superb article up that compares the approach to counter-insurgency followed by Israel under the dismal Ehud Olmert, and that of the US in Iraq under General David Petraeus. What Totten points out is that the policies promised by Barack Obama for Iraq (in essence remove the army and drop bombs on anyone who seems to be the Bad Guys) is essential the same as the demonstrably failed approach used by Ehud Olmert in Lebanon. Israel blew the crap out of Lebanon from the air and achieved precisely zero of its war aims. Read the whole article. February 17th, 2008 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest control freak ravings from UKGov are the impending crusade against bottled water:
Very telling, no? People deciding to spend their own money on something “borders on being morally unacceptable”. Let me what you what is morally unacceptable: that force addicted control freak tax parasites like Phil Woolas have the gall to tell people how to spend their own damn money. “Immoral”? You do not know the meaning of the word, Woolas. I loath almost all canned and bottled soft drinks (or ‘soda’ in American parlance)… vile phoney tasting sweet muck… and so I am delighted that finally the UK has followed long standing European custom and now conveniently sells bottled water almost everywhere. February 17th, 2008 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan [1]. But then, I am a liberal – conservative only in my suspicion of social management and ‘fixing’ things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken. This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:
[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes. February 17th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): “This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn’t it?” It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories’ opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this. Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks – which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project. Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan. Bastards. February 16th, 2008 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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