I came across this statistic here, stating that there will be 22,000 journalists at the Beijing Olympics next week.
The local bars will be doing a roaring trade, one hopes.
Jesus.
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It is unfair to expect writers to be consistent in their views from week to week. Consistency is the “hobgoblin of little minds” and all that. I am sure that if I wanted to, I could trawl back through this site and find something that jarred with what I write today, and I would not be at all surprised if that were to happen in the future. Even so, it does make me wonder when you read a comment like this, about a recent environmentalist doomongering film. The piece is by AA Gill, who is not exactly my favourite news columnist. The review is actually pretty good, to be fair. But then I remember that he writes that the only main benefit of the space race was to kindle interest in Green issues. So what gives? It might be nice to think that he is learning that the Green movement, or at least its more militant parts, is in fact a menace. Maybe what is happening is that for a part of the London chattering classes, even that bit that likes to be thought of as “hip” and trendy, bashing Greenery is now socially acceptable, or at least no longer an activity that gets one sent into social oblivion. Maybe, just maybe Gill and his friends have picked this up during their dinner parties. “Oh, what about global warming darling?” is simply not clever any more. I bet he has poked fun at all those folk driving around in their Priuses and laughed himself hoarse at the motoring antics of popular TV shows like Top Gear and its merciless mockery of Green prudery. Politics and culture can often shift in subtle ways. What is, and what is not, thought acceptable to mock often sets the tone for a few years. I get the impression, partly because of the darkening economic climate, that the Green movement has lost a little headway or may even be retreating in some respects. Or perhaps I am reading too much into a few scraps of writings. July 29th, 2008 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Janet Daley writes what I think is a wrong-headed article on how, if the Labour government gets rid of Gordon Brown and elects some younger, more “Blairite” leader claiming to support reform of public services, that this will put pressure on the Tories and may even convince enough gullible UK voters to stick with Labour. I am sorry, but the problem with this thesis, which alas reflects how even an astute observer like Janet Daley has become a solid member of the Westminster Village, has little connection to reality. The UK public has had 11 years of New Labour. It remembers how, in the late 1990s, we were told that Labour could reform the Welfare state in the same way that only Richard Nixon could fix relations with the Chinese in the 1970s. Since then, the Welfare State has mushroomed, with its vast increase in the number of officials, a hideously complex system of tax and welfare credits; the education system becomes ever more bureacratic and despite a few improvements, falls way short of what one would expect, given the increase in spending. The NHS remains a mess: I have met quite a few NHS users who have, for instance, suffered from the MRSA bacterium. The public knows this. They just do not trust the Labour Party any more. Of course, they are scarcely more trusting of David Cameron and the Tories. The problem for them is that their leading political figures are – with a few exceptions like William Hague – inexperienced in the world of business or life outside politics generally. Cameron gives me grave cause for concern; he is cast from the same, suffocating centrist mould as Blair. But there is just the remotest chance that some of the statist juggernaut might be arrested if the Tories were to win with a sufficiently large majority. It is a slim hope, but I do not see much else on the table. July 28th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
My comment the other day about a rather imperfect – if interesting – article about the late F.A. Hayek suddenly turned into a comment thread argument about whether religious parents have the right to have the genitalia of their children adjusted (as in the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc cultures). Now, I am not all that interested in the specific health or medical arguments here, although I would be interested if those with actual medical knowledge could give some ideas on the value or otherwise of said. What interests me, as a defender of liberty, is what should be the boundaries on what parents should observe when it comes to raising their children when it comes to actions that actually affect the bodies of their kids. For example, suppose a parent of religion/ideology X decided that he or she really wanted to put a small tattoo on the forehead of their son with the symbol of their family faith? Suppose the operation to do this was painless. Would it be justified? (In my view, no). I put this point because in the comment thread attached to my post about Hayek, one commenter called Gabriel argues that banning such operations on children done for religious reasons constitutes discrimination against his faith. Such an argument is, I think, an example of multiculturalism gone mad. On a related theme of protecting kids, David Friedman – son of the great Milton Friedman – has thoughts. July 27th, 2008 | 100 comments - (Comments are closed)
I definitely want to see the new Batman film (it pays to book well in advance, Ed). Here is an interesting take on some of the politics of the film. Another useful review – without spoilers – is over at Bob Bidinotto’s blog. In a nutshell, he says he liked the film a great deal but felt the film tried to cram too many themes and plotlines into it. Mind you, I am looking forward even more to the film based on the Watchmen story series. Bring it on! July 26th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Weren’t the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn’t even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic…Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an inalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley.” July 26th, 2008 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
One reason I fervently hope that the oil price eventually crashes if new energy sources are developed, is so it will pull a rug under thuggish regimes in places such as Venezuela and Russia:
I would like to think that if the BP executive were physically threatened or harmed in any way, that the full fury of the UK state would descend upon that gangster regime, but of course that is most unlikely and probably unwise anyway, so it is a folorn hope. As long as oil is so strong and countries in Europe are such heavy importers of Russia’s natural gas, this sort of bullying will continue. But it surely is also a reminder that investment in that country is fraught with danger. The hedge fund manager, Bill Browder, was kicked out of the country a few years ago for his role as the asker of awkward questions when it came to investing in Russian firms. If ever Russia hits economic difficulties in future, as happened in the debt crisis of 1998, I hope that when Russia goes asking for aid, that other nations have the good sense to tell that country to perform sexual acts on itself, so to speak. Stories such as this make me convinced that among the “Brics”, Russia is not a good long-term bet, at least not until the political complexion of that vast nation changes for the better. That is going to be a long wait. July 25th, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you can speak and write mandarin Chinese to the extent that you can also teach it, then chances are that this is going to be one hell of a lucrative career right now, according to this report. I fear that this is a trend I am going to miss out on. Even if I had a flair for languages – and I speak French and German a bit – Chinese is a whole different ball game. And at my age – 42 – it would be probably far too late to start anyway. Mind you, an old colleague of mine who is in his 40s had been learning for several years and is how working in China, in the media business. So it is possible if one is determined enough, I guess. July 24th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing “bubble”, which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don’t discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time. – Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog. But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying! July 24th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Ford Model-T car, the vehicle that changed the face of the automobile business, helping to put the four-wheeled auto within reach of a vast swathe of the American population. Ford’s mass-production techniques may not have been totally original, since one can argue that some of the features of mass production used had been employed in parts of the industrialised world before. But the factories that churned out these cars were probably the most famous forms of mass-production in their time, and encouraged a host of imitators. Here’s a nifty slide-show on the anniversary. July 23rd, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the “second-shift / Costco” sense. – The wonderful James Lileks. Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse. July 23rd, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union. One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:
That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty. Here’s another one:
Huh?
The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap. → Continue reading: A civil, but still flawed look at Hayek from the left July 22nd, 2008 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
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