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The Cato Institute has the report.
South Park could not even come up with these characters. March 20th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This is pure genius. I must say that things are going sour for The Community Organiser quicker than you can say the words “Andrew Sullivan”. March 20th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“‘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.” 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. March 20th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I know how the Duke of Wellington (attrib.) felt. The problem for a rational civil liberties campaigner is often not that you do not know who your friends are, but that you do – and that you worry whether, given what they actually think, they will be let out for the day and not talking to buttercups when you need their help. Here is a breathtaking non-sequitur in the comments of the Guardian Comment is Free: The comment is however appended to a piece of splendid news. The entirely sane Mark Thomas has managed to persuade the Metropolitan police to delete him from the National DNA Database. March 19th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“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. March 19th, 2009 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
As promised, I have some thoughts following on from the talk given by Kevin Dowd, a professor at the Nottingham University Business School and a noted advocate of what is called “free banking”. He gave his talk at the annual Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture as hosted by the Libertarian Alliance. (The LA was founded by Mr Tame, who died three years ago at a distressingly young age after losing a battle against cancer.) Professor Dowd covered some territory that is already pretty well-trodden ground for Samizdata’s regular readers, so I will skim over the part of the lecture that focused on the damage done by unwisely loose monetary policy of state organisations such as central banks, or the moral-hazard engines of tax bailouts for banks. March 19th, 2009 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
The wonderful world of web provides us with a way to check what happens to the CAP aptly described by a European leader:
via Charles Crawford March 18th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“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. March 18th, 2009 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tyler Cowen has an interesting post up about the whole business of pundits betting their own money on their views. Economics students may remember a particularly satisfying one involving the late, great Julian L. Simon and the alarmist writer Paul Ehrlich. Simon, who might be thought as a “cornucopian” writer, bet that the price of a basket of commodities would not, when adjusted for inflation, rise over a certain period. Erhlich had been claiming that commodities were running out at an alarming pace and their price would therefore skyrocket. He lost the bet. Simon suggested they have another go but Erhlich, being at least not totally stupid, decided not to accept the offer. The affair has not blunted his views, a fact that demonstrates the incorrigibility of some so-called academics. I wonder if there controversies over which you’d be prepared to stake a few pounds, dollars or pints of beer? March 17th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
To date, we have been fortunate. I say that because, given the consistently submissive nature of the British public, we have been blessed (yes, I do mean blessed) with a ruling political class that has been, relatively speaking, both modest in its ambitions and cautious in its actions. If they only realised how much more they could get away with we would, by now, be living in a hell on earth. This is why I say that we, so far, been very lucky. But luck always runs out and I think ours is about to do just that:
Another database for the sake of it? Well, possibly. But I think we all know that it will not stop there. This is, of course, a prelude and a ‘softening up’ process for the eventual introduction of a requirement for exit visas (Soviet style). So, a word of advice to any of my compatriots who are planning to emigrate abroad: settle your plans as soon as practicable and make your move within the next 5 years. After that, you may well find that your escape routes have been walled off. March 17th, 2009 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Regular Samizdata commentator Ian B made a good point on this comment thread (scroll down) about the issue of economic cycles. As he says, many of the boom-bust cycles have been associated with new products and markets where there is scanty information about how large a market might be. For instance, the technology boom of the 1990s involved an area – the Web – which was still unknown territory to most of us. Yes, most of us now are familiar to the nth degree with the Internet but that is because a lot of bold, not necessarily reckless, investors, geeks and entrepreneurs took a punt. With hindsight, some of these investment propositions were pie in the sky. Well, without perfect knowledge of the future, malinvestments get made. The same can be said of the 1840s railway boom. There were shysters and boosters like the 19th Century financier George Hudson, but out of the inevitable mistakes and broken dreams came a country that was criss-crossed with railways. Out of the bust of the tech boom came the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and Facebooks of today. These technologies, for instance, have changed how I can do my job in all manner of ways, almost all of them for the better. Out of the hundreds of automobile companies set up at the start of the last century came the motoring titans of today. The examples multiply. As Ian put it, if people don’t want these busts, then maybe they are expecting the impossible if they also want to get still all the good things that a boom can produce. For sure, it would be good to stop fuelling mad cycles with fiat money, and that is why I want genuine free market banking, and not the quasi-statist dog’s breakfast, instead. But I am most certainly not in favour of the “calm” that comes when there is no change or disruptions at all. That is to demand the peace and quiet of the grave. Update: via the National Review’s Corner blog, I came across this in a similar mood to my point. March 16th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC does not even pretend to be impartial these days. Iain Dale, the blogger for those junkies of Westminster politics, notes that for the second week running, the Andrew Marr Sunday politics show did not have a single guest from the opposition Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. There may be a suggestion that the broadcaster is going along with the government’s refusal to put on any ministers if their opposite numbers appear on the show. I happen to think this is, unwittingly of the BBC perhaps, a good thing. By making the bias of that channel so blatant, it advances the BBC closer to the guillotine. At least when Fox News puts “fair and balanced” on its strapline, we know it is having a bit of a snigger. March 16th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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