“It’s not too much to say that if Israel had taken Mr. Biden’s advice, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and the rest of the Hamas-Hezbollah leadership would still be alive.”
– Wall Street Journal editors.
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October 18th, 2024 | 17 comments
 “When competence is rewarded, you get more of it. When the ability to play internal politics is what gets you ahead, then you get more of that. SpaceX has clear goals, short deadlines and clear lines of responsibility. Boeing’s culture, once one that revered engineering, has become one that worships byzantine corporate politics — where you’re more likely to get fired over DEI infractions than over job performance. And it’s not just Boeing; in Oregon, a top forestry official was put on leave after a DEI officer complained he was “seeking only the candidates most qualified for the job,” without emphasizing their “gender and identity.” Ditto the federal government, which has created a self-perpetuating culture of incompetence: It’s virtually impossible to get fired, and failures often bring more resources to the agency, not less.” – Glenn Reynolds, New York Post. October 15th, 2024 | 5 comments
Well, maybe this is a sign of the times. A Communist dictatorship, which has gone after pesky entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma and many smaller firms, realises that this is bad for business. Who would have imagined that? It is a bit like Lenin realising, in around 1921, that shooting and jailing entrepreneurial people was not smart, so we had the New Economic Policy for a few years until Stalin turned the repression back on to full power. The question I have, however, is whether this is a temporary change, and bad habits will resume: China is cracking down on behaviours from law enforcement seen as detrimental to the ordinary function of private businesses, a crucial step in restoring confidence as the country embarks on a whole-of-government effort to ensure a steady, sustainable economic recovery. – The South China Morning Post ($). October 11th, 2024 | 15 comments
One detail that perhaps got lost in the recent UK decision about the Indian Ocean group of islands containing Diego Garcia – taken very fast and over the heads of the Chagos Islands locals (which hardly fits with ideas about decolonisation) – was that President Biden applauded the move. In way this isn’t surprising. Pr. Biden doesn’t particularly like the UK, and like a certain kind of American politician, has a grudge about the old, post-imperial network of relationships and territories that the UK has, or had, around the world. More fool him. In this transfer and lease deal (which is not, as far as I know, formally signed and there has been no formal debate or legislation about this in Parliament) the UK is transferring taxpayers money in a payment programme to a tax haven (Mauritius). If the Tories had done this, the tax haven angle would have been constantly mentioned. It seems ironic that Labour, a party not exactly known for its love of tax havens (unless Tony Blair uses one) or such international conduits, feels it is okay to deal with Mauritius financially in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I am for tax havens, and the more of them the better, because they deter otherwise high-tax governments from going crazy when capital is mobile, although as UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is proving, that’s not a solid protection. Tax hikes are likely in the 30 October UK budget. People are leaving. Biden’s support for what’s happened should give pause, given what a poor President he is on foreign affairs, in my view. Also, he hasn’t made much disguise of his distaste for Brexit and the UK’s independence out of the bloc, and neither did Barack Obama. There’s no enthusiasm from that quarter for the UK to engage in new trade and other deals with countries outside the EU. And Biden’s own recent judgement about foreign affairs is spotty at best: half-decent on Israel and Ukraine, and shockingly inept over Afghanistan, with the rushed departure and loss of billions of dollars of equipment. Those on the Republican side are, apparently, far less happy about the Chagos islands deal, and the potential risk to security of the Diego Garcia airbase jointly used by the UK and US. They know how porous leasehold deals can be, and have seen that Mauritius has used all legal pressure to change the terms of its independence settlement with the UK of 1968. The US Air Force has used the base in recent conflicts; if it wanted to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, and do so via Diego Garcia, the situation becomes dicier than it might have been. One has to wonder about the role of China in all this (Chinese money flows through Mauritius.) This whole saga also shows that if the UK is to pursue a more “blue water” foreign policy in future as it expands trade links with countries outside Europe, particular in Asia, that getting its defence arrangements locked down is essential. And we need to lose our illusions about how special our relationship with the US really is at times. Daniel Hannan has this excellent overview of just what a shockingly poor transaction the UK has made with Mauritius. Hannan argues that Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the islands, a fact that is so shocking it is hard to argue how on earth we reached this point and how the Mauritius government thought it could bully its way ahead on this. However, a future, different UK government should certainly revisit the terms of this deal, and press hard on Mauritius if, for example, that country’s anti-money laundering standards are questioned in future. Time for a bit of nastiness behind the smiles. It may be too late now to change course on this specific, shabby deal, at least under the current Starmer government. I fear it is. And now there’s speculation about what happens to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. The UK has shown itself to be weak. People tend to notice. October 9th, 2024 | 13 comments
“The past year has not been a Palestinian war against Israel, nor an Arab war against Israel. It has been an Iranian war against Israel, fought directly by Tehran’s own military and through its numerous terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraq and Syrian milita groups. And behind the terrorist storm troopers lies Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.” – John Bolton, Daily Telegraph, writing today on the grim anniversary of the 7 October progrom inflicted by Hamas on southern Israel last year. My thoughts with those who grieve for the loss of their loved ones. October 7th, 2024 | 15 comments
“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you. The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.” October 6th, 2024 | 15 comments
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk. The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.) As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984. The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.) As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place. October 6th, 2024 | 2 comments
“The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?” Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.” – Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($) October 2nd, 2024 | 35 comments
“We have not built a reservoir since 1992 or a nuclear power station since 1995, but we have raised the age of using sunbeds to 18.” – Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph. September 29th, 2024 | 15 comments
In my second country of Malta, which I visit regularly, it is hard to miss the fact that the island’s national flag bears the George Cross. The GC was awarded, collectively, to the island during the Second World War by the British government because of how Malta had withstood the bombardments of Italian and German air forces. The bombing of the island from 1941-43 was greater in total than the ordnance hurled at London during the Blitz. Malta was a major British naval base: it was able to intercept and destroy Axis shipping to North Africa and hence was key in tipping the scales against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in its attempted invasion of Egypt. Malta mattered. It appears today, in these “decolonisation” times, that some of the citizens of Malta – a country sadly tainted by issues such as corruption and the murder of an investigative journalist in 2017 – want the GC symbol to be removed. On a Facebook page that I follow, a person (who will remain nameless), put up this comment: If we really and truly want to celebrate this important milestone [Maltese independence], all we need to do is remove that stain from our national flag and send that bloodstained cross to Buckingham Palace. I will volunteer to act as a courier pro bono. I was glad to see that the vast majority of responses from the locals were hostile to this person, if not enlightening. I tried to raise the tone a bit, because the person concerned might be stupid as a bag of rocks, but it is good to put these points into places where someone might pick up on them:
I can recommend Sir Max Hastings’ book about the Operation Pedestal convoy as a good study about what was at stake in the Mediterranean campaign. Here is a decent history of Malta for those who are interested. September 21st, 2024 | 33 comments
Politicians of all stripes like to talk about “sustainability” – although I’ve noticed that some of the enthusiasm for this when it comes to the “green” angle has been dented by rising energy costs and worries about how we keep the lights on when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine. The realities of how to produce energy when fossil fuels are off the table and nuclear is not taken seriously are going to bite us, and hard, in the years to come. Even so, sustainability is a useful word, and it is a shame that it gets tainted as the word “liberal” does by association with bad ideas. (The same goes for “progressive”, while we are at it.) Well, one point I come across in my day job in covering business and finance is how family-owned/run firms can often show superior returns, when compounded over time, and be more robust, and more sustainable, than those that don’t have a family connection. That’s not cheesy sentimentality about how a business is better when Grandad, Mum and the cousins are around. (There can be very tricky succession and control issues with families; wealth advisors often earn big bucks advising families in how to resolve conflicts. And we’ve all seen Dallas.) Even so, for all the caveats, family businesses are important. They employ millions of people. In countries such as Germany and Italy, family-run firms have been the norm; the fashion houses, specialist sportscar firms, and many others, have deep and long family connections. Same goes for agriculture and food, for example. Here is some UK family business data that shows how big these firms are, in aggregate. Well, it seems that one thing that the UK government is thinking of is ending the business property and agriculture reliefs from inheritance tax. At present, the tax – 40 per cent above a “nil-rate” threshold of £325,000 – does not hit if you inherit a family business, including a farm. In the US, such tax is called Estate Tax, and thresholds are far higher than in the UK. But apparently, Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, is considering sweeping some of these reliefs away. It means family businesses where the stake in a business are high might get broken up and sold, such as to corporations and private equity firms, when a founder or business holder dies. Family-run farms will be a one-generation gig. And corporates, sovereign wealth funds and big groups such as pension funds will consolidate their ownership of business, including the land. Wealth becomes more centrally concentrated, not more dispersed. This seems a very paradoxical outcome from a supposedly egalitarian government. Maybe Ms Reeves does not understand this point or is indifferent to it. However, ignorance is only part of it, I think. There’s a general hostility towards inheritance of any kind in our culture today, from my impression. There is a lot of the “tall poppy” mindset around. Years of central bank QE also inflated asset prices, and certain groups did well, but that’s not really what is going on, in my view, because things such as QE are too abstract for the average voter. I think resentments are given more respect today, when in fact they should be called out. I think we allow jealousy of others’ good fortune to be given the time of day, when in the past that would be seen as a bad thing. There are many good, consequentialist reasons why this dislike has bad outcomes when used as a motor for public policy, but there are important moral arguments against this attack on inheritance: the rights of those of those who own the property and want to give it to this or that cause are being violated. If I want to give my sons and daughters a business, or a 400-acre farm, for example, that’s my affair, period. Whether those persons “deserve” what I give them, in the eyes of some sort of social justice advocate, is irrelevant. If economics is not a zero-sum game, such demands for redistribution are just thieving. What inheritance taxes do, at root, is make it clear that ownership of wealth and control of it is at the sufferance of the State. The justifications of insisting on this servile relationship may vary – sometimes by reference to the flawed ideas such as those of a Thomas Piketty – but the underlying position remains. I see little by way of fundamental critiques of this assault on inheritance of honestly acquired wealth. The Tories, now in opposition, don’t really take the discussion to this level; neither do other supposedly more conservative parties in other parts of the world. But the monstrosity of what attacks on inheritance amount to needs to be more widely remarked on than it is. On the subject of the family and why protecting it is subversive of overweening authority, I can recommend this book, The Subversive Family, by former Downing Street policy unit figure and journalist/novelist Ferdinand Mount. He’s deeply influenced by the Origins of English Individualism, by Alan Macfarlane, for example. On a more prosaic level, the ever-widening burden of tax in much of the developed world, and particularly in the UK, means that even people who are not by any means well off are going to learn about the joys of inheritance tax and all that goes with it. That might ultimately shift the needle against the tax. But a lot of hard work in changing attitudes is also needed. September 17th, 2024 | 24 comments
“The overwhelming issue facing any UK government is: what do we stop doing? Governments over the last two decades have pretended, especially to the media, that they can tackle any issue that either journalists or lobby groups get upset about. But that is patently impossible within current resources of people, money & political consent. So what we get are nonsensical policies to ban advertising of junk food – who knows what that is – online or before the evening watershed. Lots of people waste large amounts of time trying to write & interpret regulations that won’t have the slightest impact on the problem of obesity. This is all displacement activity for governments that are clueless and utterly incompetent. All the signs are that the current government is doomed, both because of the personality of the Prime Minister and the inclinations of his party. Since any outsider can read the runes, why would anyone commit money to underpin economic growth without being heavily bribed to do so? That is not a viable way of turning the ship of state around.” I came across this comment, by a person called Gordon Hughes, in the UnHerd website article about the problems in the current UK government civil service machine and cabinet structure, and thought it was so good and incisive that I take the liberty of sharing it here. Also, I take the opportunity for another plug for a book that I recommend about how a lot of people, including journalists, seem to think about everything today: Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott. September 16th, 2024 | 15 comments
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