It looks as if some reporters who wrote about the late British comic actor, Norman Wisdom, have learned – assuming they actually gave a shit in the first place – that using Wikipedia as your source for information is a high-risk strategy.
Doh.
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This is a headline in the leftist New Republic magazine, over an article lauding any kind of US government spending, by Jonathan Cohn: “Wanted: More Fraud, Abuse in Government Spending” Here’s a paragraph to show just how far down the Keynesian rabbit-hole parts of the pro-stimulus crowd have gone:
So “throwing away” money – which is ultimately not the government’s to “throw away” but belongs, or is claimed, from individual citizens – “creates” jobs, does it? So if the US unemployment rate is stubbornly holding just below 10 per cent – a miserable result – then what is needed is yet even more spending, more money printing. These guys remind me of what was said, not always fairly I might add, of WW1 generals, who, when faced with the failure of their latest mass infantry assaults against the German army in Flanders, were urged for one more push, one more bout of bloodletting and hence on to victory. Einstein once defined madness, I recall, as the repeating of an error and failing to learn from such errors over, and over again. By that measure, parts of the media and commentariat in the US are out of their conceited, Keynesian minds. October 5th, 2010 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.” It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters. October 1st, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I don’t know what organically grown chickens are; I’ve never seen one.” – Tony Curtis, one of the greats, who died this week. October 1st, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s something really quite joyous about a woman so ignorant of business that she bemoans the advertising, the commercialism, the specific slicing and dicing of the market to maximise the value of those ads, when that same woman’s salary is paid by the advertising, the very specific advertising in The Guardian’s jobs section for example, which is carried by the newspaper in which she writes.” – Tim Worstall, writing about comments from Zoe Williams, the Guardian writer. I have a simple explanation for the issue that Tim confronts here: folk like Williams believe they are above the fray of grubby advertising, and are free of being persuaded by the evil, silent tricksters of the ad trade. But the unwashed plebs, with their love of glossy magazines, game shows and the rest, need to be protected by their betters, you see. Sometimes, it comes down to simple arrogrance of a mindset that is hostile to the idea to freedom, to the grubby, glorious vulgarities of the market. It is a mindset that is common to “liberal” Hampstead and High Tory Lake Poets in the early 19th Century. September 30th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reading this item over at National Review’s Corner blog, which relates to recent attempts by Al-Quaeda types to attack targets in Western Europe – apparently foiled for now – got me thinking. One of the possible targets, judging by the comment, was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It makes me wonder when the “blame-the-West-First” crowd are going to understand that it was always idiotic to claim that 9/11, or the Madrid atrocities, or the London bombings/etc could ever be described as the West getting some sort of “blowback” for its allegedly dastardly deeds against Muslim lands. Whenever this argument is made, the implication, explicit or not, is that the appropriate policy to adopt is the equivalent of hiding under the bed. France, let’s not forget, has more than its fair share of bad relations with some Muslim lands – Algeria in the 1950s being a case in point – but in recent years, the country’s government has been at pains to distance itself from the supposedly “cowboy” policies of Bush/Blair, although possibly things might have hardened a bit under Sarkozy. But it makes no difference. Whether you are an isolationist, multilaterialist, or neocon interventionist, the outcome is the same: the Islamists will try and kill you and your fellow citizens without discrimination. We can try and placate the crocodile, but it is ultimately a futile strategy. It is occasionally necessary to remind people of this grim fact. September 30th, 2010 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few days ago, I linked to an article that seeks to frame some, if not all, of Obama’s political ideas within a sort of anti-colonial setting. It is fair to say that not everyone is buying it, and this article brutally takes on that thesis. And the writer, Heather MacDonald, is no leftie. At all. She writes for the Secular Right blog, which as its name implies, is a site written by those of a generally conservative bent who are not religious and generally regard the Republican Party’s involvement with the Religious Right as not a Good Thing. She does not pull her punches. And she has a point, although I still think the anti-colonial angle has some traction. It does, I think, explain things such as Obama’s apparent no very great affection, that I can see, for the UK. Even so, in general my take is that Obama is a hard-left politician who has – at least for a while – bamboozled a lot of people into thinking of him as a centrist. But it is worth pointing out that his Big Government views are not really so odd in a nation once ruled by the likes of Roosevelt, LBJ, and for that matter, Richard Nixon (who brought in wage and price controls, let’s not forget). Anyway, read the whole piece. September 29th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is fascinating, and must strike the Briton of today, with the UK’s draconian restrictions on the use of guns, as a very alien sort of blog post. I got some insight into the sort of ideas and methods he is discussing when I did a 4-day defensive handgun course in Nevada back in the September of 2002 with an American friend of mine. One thing that strikes me is how some of Eric’s observations on the need to be “tactically aware” of your environment when seeking to be safe can apply not just to anyone thinking about firearms, but more generally. For instance, when I have entered a nightclub or pub, or thought about entering one, I tend to avoid those places where I cannot see any easy way to get out, or if there are folk in there who almost radiate menace. It does not have to be an issue of physical appearance, either – the tone of voice often sets my alarm bells off. And one good piece of advice in the comment thread: if you want to drink booze, do not carry a gun. It seriously interferes with reaction times. And even in the UK, where you can still do stuff like shooting clays, avoid the sauce if you go on a sort of jolly day out. I have heard of some right twerps getting nearly killed because they were guzzling alcohol on driven game shoots, etc. September 27th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The author of the economics high-seller, The Black Swan, has given a fairly fierce denunciation of US government fiscal policy in recent years. In fairness, he probably is not just beating up the current holders of office, but previous ones too. September 25th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night, I attended a very entertaining Adam Smith Insitute event at which Eamonn Butler and guests talked about Austrian economics. Mr Butler has a new book out and it is an excellent, succinct summary of what this form of economics is all about. And he touches, very briefly, on the issue that seems to be getting some people worked up into a tizzy: fractional reserve banking. FRB is an issue we have already had a good working over on at this site and a good comment thread. A brief summary of my view is that I don’t think many forms of FRB would be able to survive in a pure free market without bailouts, “too big to fail” protections, government deposit protection, etc. But it should not be banned: if folk want to take the risk of depositing money in an FRB account, then that is their business, like smoking, off-piste skiing and unprotected sex. With currency competition and removal of legal tender laws, such FRB banks would have to be run with ruthless attention to risk control. So I don’t see the need for any restrictions. However, what annoys me about the reaction of fellows like this is that they seem to be supposing that the current banking system, the system that has recently been brought almost to its knees, with such shining examples such as Northern Rock, the Dunfirmline Building Society, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, etc, etc, is somehow basically okay. Riiiight. They are saying that those pesky Austrians, with their “loopy” ideas about how two people cannot simultaneously hold the same claim to the same money at the same time (which strikes me as a perfectly sensible view, in fact), should shut up. Well, they are not going to shut up. I have to say I find the sheer gall of these “why don’t these guys shut up?” line of analysis to be pretty unedifying. If FRB – at least as it currently operates – is so splendid, and if banking really is about “borrowing short and lending long”, then maybe the defenders of the current form of banking could explain to the taxpayers of the UK quite why we have had had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds in the recent banking clusterfuck. Just asking. September 24th, 2010 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
I can think of few greater contemporary British journalists than Christopher Booker. He is the AGW alarmists’ waking nightmare. In fact, he inflicts sleep deprivation on all manner of promoters of scares, seeing, as HL Mencken once realised, that scares are a means by which power-hungry folk can persuade benighted citizens to sign up to the latest safety measures. And yet even great men have their off days. In last week’s edition of the Spectator (which is behind a subscriber firewall), he writes, on page 20, that there is a dastardly campaign by the Darwinian establishment to crush any signs of dissent from those who subscribe to some form of Intelligent Design (or what might be more accurately known as Creationism). He then goes on to liken the plight of these poor, oppressed ID advocates with AGW skeptics. And yet the parallel strikes me as absurd. AGW skeptics fall into various camps: those who simply want to trash any suggestion that AGW is a problem; those who say that AGW is a problem but who are unsure about its effects, and those who realise that AGW is probably happening but who debate whether it can be mitigated, reversed or adapted to, and who want to know about the pros and cons (think of the likes of Nigel Lawson, or Bjorn Lomborg, etc). A lot of AGW skeptics pore over immense amounts of data to highlight their doubts; and some of them, such as Lawson, employ powerful economic and related arguments that draw on known facts. But ID advocates do not have the same kind of facts, as far as I can see, to conclusively press their case. What they have instead is a sort of “We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we’ll assume a Creator got involved”. Not terribly convincing, is my reaction. I accept that some scientists might be sympathetic to ID without losing any integrity, but what Booker’s article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be “created”. All they do, it seems from Booker’s article, is to state that because there are “gaps” in fossil records, etc, that therefore the gap must imply that some outside agent (like a God), caused X or Y. But his article does not go beyond that to explain what sort of processes these ID folk imagine happened. And the reason for that is simple: they don’t know. By contrast, AGW skeptics seem to a far more persuasive lot and are able to throw out all manner of facts and data to back their case up. I am just not convinced that Creationists come remotely close. In fact, a recent comment on this kind of issue by someone called bgates on Samizdata nicely captures a key issue here, because it might explain why a lot of people treat evolution theory and creationism as being on an equal footing:
And in conclusion, for all I support Booker’s general stance on free speech and resistence to any thought control, I think – as a AGW skeptic myself – that is not really smart for Booker to lump AGW skeptics into the same supposedly “oppressed” category as creationists. If creationists come in for abuse, they need to raise their game and employ the same rigour, if they can, as those who have looked at the AGW issue, and cried foul. Sidepoint: Timothy Sandefur had some interesting thoughts about science and freedom of expression, and the role of the state, here. September 23rd, 2010 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
I guess it will be interesting to see whether there is any pressure among backbench Tory MPs – or at least some of the more intelligent ones – for the government to try and edge out “Vince” Cable from his post as Business Secretary, following a terrible speech that has been monstered in many quarters, such as here, and here. The funny thing is, had Cable said something on the lines of “risky gambling by banks and hedge funds has been a problem and has been encouraged by irresponsible central banks”, he’d have a very good point. Had he, in his attack on monopolies, attacked the regulations, taxes and other government moves that drive up barriers to entry, he’d also be correct. But he does nothing of the kind. He’s a sort of economist who, trained from, I suspect, neo-classical textbooks full of elegant supply-demand curves rather than real human beings, imagines that any market that does not have a vast number of identical players with no pricing power or edge is “imperfect”, and therefore in need of correction by government. He ignores how it is the very “imperfections” of the real world – such as differences in tastes, values, levels of knowledge and so on – that give markets their raison d’etre, as understood by the “Austrian” school, with its view of competition as a discovery process, not as a static game full of omniscient Gods. In fact, the government actions that lead to less flexible markets continue to get worse, which is something Mr Cable seems not to be dealing with. At the moment, the Financial Services Authority, the UK financial regulator, is rolling out a programme of “reforms” called, excitingly, the Retail Distribution Review. The aim, which sounds very noble, is to raise the standard and independence of financial advice. The effect, however, will be to drive hundreds of financial advisors out of business – some industry figures predict that as many as 20 per cent of UK IFAs could go by the time the RDR takes full effect in 2012. This, of course, only worsens the problem of how financial advice is often something that ordinary UK citizens rarely use. Here is something I wrote before on attacks on the City. September 22nd, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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