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BBC should be abolished, not because of blatant bias but because the whole idea of a state broadcaster was a terrible idea on day 1 of the BBC’s existence. And in the internet age, it is now an anachronistic bad idea. Bin it entirely or at least make it voluntary subscription – Perry de Havilland May 14th, 2019 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In between the torturous Brexit process, May’s government has been busy implementing her interventionist vision. Take the minimum wage, first introduced by the Blair government in 1999, which the Tory party long ago dropped opposition to. But now, Chancellor Philip Hammond, supposedly a member of the more free-market wing of the party, is considering hiking the minimum wage from 59% to 66% of median earnings, which would make it the highest in the world and mean that a quarter of British workers would be paid a government mandated wage. – ‘Creative Destruction’ on The looming death of the Tory Party May 13th, 2019 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
An awful lot of climate change people are not climate change people in the sense of people interested in mitigating climate change effects (which almost everyone is I hope). They are climate change people in the sense of people who need climate change to be an irresistible force for social change. The climate ‘crisis’ is a substitute for God’s wrath, the Crisis of Capitalism, and any number of other apocalyptic pretexts that give meaning and direction to the world and them a mission. – Guy Herbert April 26th, 2019 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
They are listening to a 16 year old. This is like some kind of weird surreal art house movie in which a lunatic asylum’s inmates break out, sneak into Parliament, throw the MPs into the basement, take their place… and no one notices. – Perry de Havilland April 24th, 2019 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
To a great extent, the threat to free speech posed by iPlod will depend upon how its employees exercise their discretion and whether they’re politically neutral. Unfortunately, it will be staffed by the same sort of quangocrats that run the Advertising Standards Authority, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and Public Health England, and we know from experience that these busybodies will use whatever powers they have to extend the reach of the nanny state. That nearly always involves enforcing left-wing orthodoxy, whether consciously or not. April 21st, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just as Gutenberg’s printing press awakened the masses to the wisdom of the ancients, and the desktop computer put enormous computational power into the hands of ordinary people, low cost, off-the-shelf space technology is ushering in a new era of entrepreneurial ambition and human self-awareness. An audacity of spirit is sweeping the globe and small business’ ability to produce spacefaring individuals is altering the long arc of human history guided by an invisible hand of invention and adaptation. It is advances like these, placing new creative tools into the hands of empowered individuals and small groups, that have shaped our destiny as humans. Whether it be campfires, currencies, or corporations, nothing so profoundly shapes the destiny and evolution of humankind as those inventions that empower everyday people. Today we are bearing witness to this power being applied to the boundless frontier called space. April 20th, 2019 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Canute’s point wasn’t that he could control the tides and waves. Rather, that fawning courtiers needed to learn the lesson of the limit to State competence. A thousand years later we’re still waiting for the lesson to sink in. April 19th, 2019 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – Frederick Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism April 18th, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University wrote that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That year, food supply in 34 out of 152 countries surveyed amounted to less than 2,000 calories per person per day. That was true of only 2 out of 173 countries surveyed in 2013. Today famines have all but disappeared outside of war zones. April 17th, 2019 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
But in the post-war period, rights have been transformed from negative freedoms to positive goods for the individual, such as education and employment, and then to positive goods for groups, including the protection of identities. With each step there has been a move away from holding the authority of the state to account, towards empowering the state over goods which it is increasingly difficult to guarantee. The result is that the state has become more coercive in its attempts to deliver those goods. April 15th, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, despite all that, I find it difficult to have any sympathy for the man. Perhaps because he is such an incorrigible arsehole? – Our temperate friend Longrider discussing Julian Assange. April 13th, 2019 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ability of the ‘sensible centre’ to define other people’s labels is rapidly decaying as they are mid-suicide collectively & are unaware their sense of rapture is a lack of oxygen to the brain. A Great Realignment is coming & we’ll see some very strange alliances until the new normal emerges. – Perry de Havilland April 1st, 2019 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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