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.
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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)
The left-wing intellectuals treat Socialism similarly, defining it by its outcome. If it doesn’t succeed in bringing about the said fairness and harmony with production in the hands of the workers, then it can’t have been Socialism. And out of the window goes the real world, the one we live in. If we were to say that Socialism seeks to achieve these goals, we’d be able to judge if it has ever succeeded to any degree. Because it never has, we’d be entitled to conclude that it doesn’t work. Kristian says it’s like performing a raindance. If it is done as an attempt to bring rain, we’d be able to judge how effective it was in practice. But if a raindance is defined as “a dance that brings rain,” then any dance that didn’t do that was clearly not a raindance. March 26th, 2019 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Venue: a very noisy Adam Smith Institute gathering at the House of Lord a few days ago. Her: Putin and Trump are in favour of Brexit, does that make you question your support? March 23rd, 2019 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
There should be no such thing as a ‘hate crime’… If someone gets assaulted & hit with a brick, their identity group should not make the crime more or less of a crime. And stating an opinion should never be a crime (such as what gender someone else is). – Perry de Havilland, discussing this amongst other things. March 20th, 2019 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unfortunately we are at the stage now where the streets (so to speak) need to go visit their MPs, rather than the other way around. Voting is not the only way to express a political opinion. – Perry de Havilland, who is just cheerfully channelling the zeitgeist
March 17th, 2019 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Generally these days ‘liberal’ means someone who supports profoundly illiberal positions. But as ‘socialist’ means someone who wants to replace social interactions with politically mediated interactions, it seems they are named after what they want to destroy. – Perry de Havilland March 12th, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British political firmament as a whole is hardly blessed with a multitude of bold, original thinkers, and such figures certainly aren’t among the fabulous seven, the daring eleven or whatever number of forgettable non-entities currently comprise The Independent Group. All of which is a great pity. As this blog has noted over and over and over and over and over and over again, Britain has entered a period of political discontinuity – a time when the existing political settlement, with its narrow range of policy options, are no longer adequate to the challenges at hand. Such periods of discontinuity require politicians to think the previously unthinkable in terms of policy solutions, not to flee their former political parties in an outrage that people are actually starting to do so. March 11th, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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