For those interested in the battles of classical antiquity, today represents an important date. And the name “Marathon” lives on for all those masochists who insist on doing those punishing runs in London, New York and other places.
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“A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.” – Michael Barone. The veteran chronicler of US politics is not given to harsh language, but he’s certainly not pulling his punches today. September 12th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author.” She is having a go at VS Naipaul, and even though I dislike aspects of feminism, I think her argument deserves respect. An interesting piece. September 9th, 2011 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that.” September 8th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Italy last week, where I holidayed, I also attended the ISIL conference with a great bunch of fellow libertarian conspirators, such as Kevin Dowd, Tom Palmer and Detlev Schlichter. One of the talks was by Mary Ruwart, who has worked for many years in the medical field and has first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of the US Food and Drugs Administration. She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects. As Ruwart said, one of the issues that comes up in any discussion about drugs are patents. She disapproves of them – she called the process of getting a patent a “game”; but at the same time she pointed out that if drug firms have no certainty of being able to recoup some of their research costs due to a patent, and those research costs are inflated by the FDA and other regulators, then abolishing patents without first removing such regulators would be bad. In my view, it would be disastrous. I thought about her talk when I came across this rather lame article by the Economist, in which the publication wonders why US drugs are so expensive and why production of them has slowed. Wow, I wonder why that can be? Update: the FDA has been carrying out an absurd attempt to hammer dietary supplements. US citizens who want to stop this nonsense can register their views at this site. September 8th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I get all sorts of emails, and this one, from a fairly well known money manager in the UK by the name of Terry Smith, is worth reading in full. It is the text of a letter he has sent to the Financial Times newspaper. The FT is behind a paywall so I reproduce it in full: From Mr Terry Smith.
I get the impression that this man is not looking to be elevated to the peerage. Good. September 7th, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a typically overheated article at the Lew Rockwell website, is this extraordinary paragraph by Anthony Gregory:
This is a mixture of half truths and downright nonsense. (The “war machine” a “saviour of blacks”? WTF?). Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that “affirmative action” – which is euphemism for racial discrimination – is wrong and violates equality before the law. It is also true that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation have encroached on private property rights. But Gregory surely knows that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation addressed such indefensible acts as preventing black people – who were taxpayers – from gaining equal access to the public facilities they had paid for, as well as ensuring equal treatment for voter registration requirements, and so on. And given the statist abomination of the Jim Crow laws (enacted during the Progressive era), it is surely legitimate even for someone like Mr Gregory and his Rockwellian chums to accept that after such state-enforced bigotry was removed, it was a matter of natural justice to ensure that black people were put on an equal footing with whites in terms of access to public services that they had paid for. It is, of course true in strictly narrow terms that a libertarian defence of the right to life and property does not say anything about how one should use, say, such property, nor should it. But life is so much more than simply focusing on such “negative liberties”; my conception of libertarianism is that it embraces social, not just narrowly legal or economic, freedoms. In my view, a free society is one that encourages “experiments in living”, in encouraging, or at least not scorning, the eccentric, the different, etc, with the key proviso that such experimenters bear the consequences of their actions. And I get a strong sense from Mr Gregory that he hasn’t much time for such things, for all his raving about how the US has been a “fascist” country. The problem is that by using that term to describe something like Civil Rights legislation, it leaves our vocabulary looking a bit inadequate when describing, say, Mussolini’s Italy. On a slightly tangential point, here is Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, defending his recent book – co-authored with Nick Gillespie – from those “paleo-libertarians” over at the Lew Rockwell outfit. What a rum lot they are. September 6th, 2011 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I first saw the headline, I thought this was a touch of exaggeration by the Daily Mail (hardly my favourite newspaper). But it turns out to be fairly solid. Here is an AP version. My apologies to readers as this item is a few days’ old:
Now, the issue of whether or when third parties – not just states – should intervene if children are thought to be at risk is not an easy line to draw. (It is one of those issues that I find can divide libertarians, such as intellectual property and immigration). But this case does seem a particularly egregious example of state over-reach. There is no suggestion that the parents of these children are cruel, or unpleasant, nor is there any suggestion that the children are unhappy, or held against their will. None of the usual markers of harm seem to apply, unless there are facts of the case that have not been issued for reasons of confidentiality or legal reasons. About the most that might be said is that the elders are not very successful in encouraging their offspring to be fit. And that might be fair, but I tend to regard much, if not all, of the current obesity obsession as another of those moral panics about which writers such as HL Mencken famously wrote. This is a bad case, and I hope the children can be restored to their home as soon as possible. It seems bizarre, at a time when, in the aftermath of the riots, we are told about the importance of families, that certain people in governments should be so determined to break them up even where the problems do not appear to be particularly severe. If a child grows up with a loving mother and father and happens to be a bit on the chubby side, that is surely infinitely better than a generation of fit young thugs without fathers. September 6th, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been away for almost 10 days in the lovely Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily, hence my silence. It is a mental health break to be away from emails, internet, TV and the rest. Nothing but good conversation and the company of lots of pulp thrillers, chatty Italian waiters and friendly locals. But I return to work and home with a bump. And of course, we are close to the 10th anniversary of that day of horror in lower Manhattan and Washington DC:
For what it is worth, I am not really very keen on this whole idea of there being a “public intellectual”. Who gets to decide that a person holds this sort of role? Anyway, quibbles aside, it is a good piece. Here are a couple of other paragraphs that stand out:
September 6th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is due to speak in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, later today and according to some of the investment notes that I receive, he is expected to commit that central bank to a third round of credit creation from thin air, otherwise known in these mealy-mouthed days as “quantitative easing.” There are doubters out there about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of this. We can of course expect the usual devotees of hard money to scoff at this, but what intrigues me is how some economists in the commercial world are hostile. Take this from Steen Jakobsen , chief economist at Denmark-based Saxo Bank:
I like his final paragraph:
I can think of a good book on the collapse of paper money that I can send this man. August 26th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I see that overnight, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple – now the largest firm in the US by market capitalisation – has resigned. His health has been a worry for many months and this announcement should come as a surprise to few. Even so, it represents something of a moment in the industry. Of course, the usual “dog in the manger” types will say that many others must claim credit for certain things, etc, etc, and they will have a point, as they do. Even so, given that entrepreneurship represents the only real way debt-laden countries can and will pull themselves out of their problems, it sometimes surprises me how, even in libertarian forums, the real-world business leaders we have attract as much bile as they do. And I am not talking about those who obviously benefit from corporate welfare, such as beneficiaries from tariffs, subsidies, eminent domain rulings, and the like. Even the more obviously free marketeer businessmen seem to get it in the neck from us. Perhaps we ought to step back a bit and realise that if this was so easy, why haven’t we achieved such success? Perhaps that is a painful question too far. August 25th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a long blog post by Timothy Sandefur dissecting the collectivist economics and moral philosophy of Sam Harris. Harris is one of the “new atheists”, who, along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, have developed a bit of a reputation for bashing religion. I haven’t read Sam Harris, and Sandefur does not make me any more inclined to do so. (Of all these men, Hitchens is the best, in my view.) It is interesting that those who criticise religion on the grounds of reason and logic can, as in the case of Harris, make such basic errors on subjects such as trade, notions of self-ownership, justice and the like. It is as if they are craving a secular god to fill a gap left by the traditional one. I must say I was quite shocked at the incoherence of some of Harris’s comments and his failure to examine and demonstrate his premises, such as when he talks about “fairness” without asking what he might mean by that. It is disappointing. On a related point, Greg Perkins, who writes at the Noodlefood blog, had a point about the big gaps in “new atheist” thinking a few years ago. (That link has been updated). I suggest people brew up a coffee for Sandefur’s posting. It is not a 60-second read. Another case, in fact, of how blogging is often where the quality writing is, whatever some sneerers might once have said about this medium. Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, Reason’s Hit & Run blog has a related issue on how supposedly pro-science leftists can make utter tits of themselves. August 23rd, 2011 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
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