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The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq decries the abduction of women for a life of rape and servitude under the black banner of the Islamic State, doomed to supply jihad al-nikah, or “sex for the pursuit of struggle,” but the organized feminists, so eager to complain of abuse, such as having to pay for their own birth control, are strangely silent. – from a Washington Times editorial. August 18th, 2014 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 To paraphrase Hayek, then, the curious task of the liberty movement is to persuade citizens that our opponents are the idealistic ones, because they believe in unicorns. They understand very little about the State that they imagine they can design. – Michael Munger August 14th, 2014 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Keynesians were initially mystified by this dramatic breakdown in the supposedly stable and manageable relationship between growth (or employment) and inflation. Their models said it couldn’t happen, so they looked for an explanation to deflect mounting criticism and soon found one: The economy had been hit by a ‘shock’, namely sharply higher oil prices! Never mind that the sharp rise in oil prices followed the breakdown of Bretton-Woods and devaluation of the dollar: This brazen reversal of cause and effect was too politically convenient to ignore. Politicians could blame OPEC for the stagflation, rather than their own policies. But an objective look at history tells a far different story, that the great stagflation was in fact the culmination of years of Keynesian economic policies. To generalise and to paraphrase Friedman, stagflation is, always and everywhere, a Keynesian phenomenon. – John Butler, on the Cobden Centre website. August 5th, 2014 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Barney Frank famously said: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” The key to understanding that is to know that “we” in Mr. Frank’s quip is “the looters”. – Perry Metzger of this parish. July 26th, 2014 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you read the catalogue of spy tools and digital weaponry provided to us by Edward Snowden, you’ll see that firmware on your device is the NSA’s best friend. Your biggest mistake might be to assume that the NSA is the only institution abusing this position of trust – in fact, it’s reasonable to assume that all firmware is a cesspool of insecurity courtesy of incompetence of the worst degree from manufacturers, and competence of the highest degree from a very wide range of such agencies July 24th, 2014 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh halp, we need to keep them furners out! July 22nd, 2014 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
I too have acquaintances who, whilst aware of and loudly bewailing the many many failings of the NHS, and the unnecessary deaths – sometimes thousands of deaths – that it causes, will in the very next sentence say something like “but aren’t we lucky to have it, if it wasn’t for the NHS I’d be bankrupt and dead” or some such piffle. They are so brainwashed that they cannot even conceive that there might be any other way of organizing things – even though alternatives are all around us, and all of them without exception produce better outcomes. Astonishing. July 15th, 2014 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Suddenly we’re told there’s a brand new bill that looks like it was written by the National Security Agency that has to be passed in the same manner that a surveillance bill in the United States was passed in 2007, and it has to happen now. And we don’t have time to debate it, despite the fact that this was not a priority, this was not an issue that needed to be discussed at all, for an entire year. It defies belief. July 13th, 2014 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are some libertarians who believe there may be something to AGW, and see using markets the way to mitigate the consequences. There are also libertarians (and conservatives and lefties) who think AGW is a preposterous fraud, and who naturally have no interest in finding solutions to a non-existent problem. But AGW per se is not a ‘libertarians vs. non-libertarians’ issue. You can still be a libertarian and think there is something to AGW, you are just going to see the ways of dealing with it very differently to command-and-control statists. – Perry de Havilland Bonus SQOTD, also from the same raucous beer and grappa fuelled discussion the other night… Let me answer by rephrasing your question: “Do I trust a bunch of lay observers more than I trust a bunch of academics… academics whose professional acceptance and funding will be put at risk if they commit heresy against the True Faith and suggest AGW might not in fact be the indisputable truth?” July 10th, 2014 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
No legal document can save a society from appointing its own slave masters if enough people are determined to do so. Laws alone are not enough. – Perry de Havilland, discussing constitutions. July 7th, 2014 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 4th, 2014 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The purpose of the NHS is political, not medical. In the UK, in our Coronation of the State as our Bountiful Lord, it is the Crown, the dole is the Orb and State Education is the sceptic sceptre. Those who question the State threaten to leave you without medical treatment, leading to a horrible death, or starve or be illiterate. Yet a Slaughterhouse like the Mid-Staffs can kill on a scale that an early 1940s German bureaucrat might admire, and nothing happens until hospital the pile of corpses becomes too obvious for excuses not to be shuffled out. – Samizdata commenter Mr. Ed June 19th, 2014 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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