Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here’s a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.
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A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein’s recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman. Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense. At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general. Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice. July 21st, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Glad to know that at a time when people are concerned about the economic outlook, crime and so forth, that those chaps at the European Union have not taken their eye off the ball:
I do not know why this story riles me so much, but it does. It is not that I cannot understand the logic of using a metric system so that it is possible to make instant comparisons between say, the price of a hectare of land in France and Britain, which is quite useful to be able to do when looking at the state of our respective economies. But it is the illegality of registering land by using certain measurements that is so barmy. If there is a market in land – well, partially free anyway – surely the persons buying or selling can measure it any way they please, so long as the amounts are agreed and are accurately registered. It is the accuracy of the register, not the units per se, that counts. Apart from anything else, cannot the EU and its minions do some basic maths? An acre is equal to 0.404 hectares. Every time one has to convert the old English Imperial measurements to metric and vice versa, it has the salutary effect of encouraging people to do a bit of maths, which is a good mental exercise anyway. Many units of measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon world have been ingrained in our mental lives. I can – just about – visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare. Far from being fogeyish or illogical, there is nothing essentially better or worse than one or the other. Roger Scruton has a nice discussion of the benefits of traditional weights and measures here. Every time there is an assault on such traditional measures, it is an assault on differences because they are differences, on the eccentric, the quaint, the odd, the unusual, the untidy. Compared to many of the other creeping forms of “harmonisation” beloved of the Eurocrats, this may seem like a paltry measure, and I am sure that is right. But it has really annoyed me. Leave our acres alone, you tidy-minded bastards. July 21st, 2008 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
Good article about the nonsense being proposed in the US about civilian “volunteering” programmes which are not in fact, voluntary. It is worth keeping an eye on this issue because I recall that David Cameron, Tory leader, might be keen on a sort of non-military version of national service as a way to deal with problems of teen crime and lack of personal responsibility. Bad move. See my post below for how it is working in a free market that is what is required. Treat people as free adults: it works July 18th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting “Black Satanic Mills” version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time – 1976-77 – that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since. One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson’s frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left – Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety – view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally. The economics of the Industrial Revolution makes up the background of his programme, which is mainly about crime and punishment. Not surprisingly given his political views, Robinson also gives the standard line that the Industrial Revolution was produced on the backs of “the workers”, but then what is crucial to any fair appraisal of the massive changes that happened at the time is whether most, if not all, labourers were better off than they were in the days of serfdom and the peasant-based, agrarian life that pre-dated it. The Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm may like to present the pre-Industrial age as one full of peasants happily gamboling around in the woods choosing to work when and where they wanted, in order to contrast it with the horrors of industrialism, but this is dishonest nonsense. Without enclosure of land and the more productive agricultural system that sprang from it, and without the industrial wealth that enabled Britain to grow rapidly, it would have been hard to see how the rising population of the time could have adequately fed itself, let alone produce a sustained improvement in living standards. As a result of the agricultural changes and of free trade, Britain was less vulnerable to a catastrophically bad harvest, unlike Ireland, which because of its dependence on the potato and the Corn Laws, was terribly hit by the potato blight of the 1840s. Starvation was a regular feature of European life, even in relatively rich countries, for centuries. But in England, whatever other problems existed, widespread famine was no longer an issue by the end of the 18th Century. There is no doubt that there was much misery and ugliness in the time. When tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were paid off at the end of the Napoleonic wars, for example, there was an influx of labour into the workforce and wages in sectors like farming came under brutal pressure. But what Robinson ignores is to cure such poverty meant that the Industrial Revolution’s primary focus on producing goods for the mass market such as textiles and ironware was right, both economically and for that matter, morally. Within a matter of decades, the idea of even a poor person moving from say, Manchester to Newcastle in a day was not the stuff of fantasy. It was reality. The Industrial Revolution has been, at least in my view, strangely under-covered in much of the mainstream histories that you see in bookshops today. Walk into a Borders or a Waterstones and much of the history sections are full of books about WW2, warfare generally, some social histories of quite recent times, some stuff about the Romans (popular again thanks to movies like Gladiator) and the Greeks. But this crucial phase of British, and world, history, does not really get much of an airing. A few years ago, I praised a wonderful book about some of the men who fashioned the Industrial Revolution, The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow. But such books are remarkably rare. Still one of the finest and most succinct accounts of the early phases of our industrial life was written more than half a century ago by T.S. Ashton. About the only other time one sees anything about the Industrial Revolution on the television, meanwhile, are things like the programmes about old machines by the late Fred Dibner or Jeremy Clarkson’s excellent programme about Brunel. It seems to me there is a gap in the market for an account of the Industrial Revolution written by someone who is not reflexively hostile to it, as was demonstrated last night by an ageing comedy actor. It is about time the record was set straight. Here’s a good essay on the standard-of-living debate and the Industrial Revolution. July 18th, 2008 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am currently watching the head of Equitable Life, the UK life insurer that made massive losses a few years ago, demanding that you and I, the UK taxpayer, put our hands in our pockets to compensate EL’s policyholders for their losses. They are complaining that mistakes taken by government caused many of the problems it suffered. Leaving aside the ins and outs of the case, in general principle, I think it is outrageous that anyone claiming to be a senior manager of a commercial business like Equitable Life should have the brass neck to demand that governments, ie, taxpayers, should bail them out. Yes, some of the rule changes made by governments can harm a business – the tax changes on pensions by Gordon Brown in the late 1990s are a classic case in point. There may, as a result, be something to be said for demanding repayment of taxes wrongly levied on a company, for example. But why should a taxpayer, say, who has no likelihood of a decent private sector pension, be taxed to save the blushes of business executives on six-figure salaries or affluent policyholders who have lost a portion of their pensions? There seems to be no awareness of the perverse, and often regressive, redistribution of wealth that is entailed when these demands for compensation emerge. It is true that Equitable Life has done quite a bit to honour some of its debts. However, asking the UK general public to put right the rest of the mess is a step too far. And there is another reason for objecting to such corporate welfare, since every time taxpayers foot the bill for another financial Snafu, it creates a fresh moral hazard, and encourages financially inept firms to imagine that if anything goes seriously wrong, the taxpayer will put everything right. July 17th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC, anticipating the upcoming school holidays in the UK – lasting several weeks – has a news item up about the soaring cost of providing facilities for children to give them something to do. The story does not address the crucial question of why the cost is soaring. Is it increased regulation of child-care staff, or what? But beyond that, there clearly is a problem here, particularly for youngsters who are entering their teens and quickly find themselves getting bored after the first flush of pleasure of having free time wears off. When I was a kid, I was incredibly lucky to be brought up in a part of the world where I could help my parents run our family farm. At the age of 13 or 14 I was allowed to drive some of the farm machinery during the annual harvest. Under current UK health and safety regulations, all this would be made illegal, I suspect. I was paid an actual weekly wage based on the hours I worked on the farm. I remember thinking how cool that was. Many of my mates at school had summer jobs of various kinds, played some sports, went biking up to the coast, etc. It seems to me that in part of the discussion about what “should be done” about feral kids armed with knives, there ought to be a recognition that one of the main problems that young people face in and outside school is boredom. And that can be cured, possibly, by working. We have to overcome our strange squeamishness over the employment of minors in actual jobs. I think that the rules and regulatory burdens should be relaxed so that apprenticeships become much easier for an employer to provide. I think some, if not all, of the young tearaways who are so worrying policymakers might actually feel proud of having a job, of earning money, of being able to brag about this to their lazier friends. And please, dear commenters, do not tell me that all this is optimistic pie-in-the-sky speculation. We have a significant problem in the UK of young people who are a, being forced to stay in school well beyond the age at which they wish and can learn anything, and b, denied the opportunity to work, and c, becoming attracted to the fake charms of gangs and violence. By rejecting our horror of teen-labour, we might help to fix some of these problems. July 16th, 2008 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is sometimes quite a lot in common between the world of professional sports and the investment and wealth management industries. When a talented individual leaves a bank or a football team, it can cause a lot of news and chatter in the industry, prompting fans or clients to change their bank or fret over whether their club has a shot at winning games. I have worked in the financial sector long enough to know that there is also a similar sort of pecking order with banking and sports: there are “league tables” of fund managers, for example. Getting a top ranking as a fund manager with an investment record for beating the S&P 500 can be like the equivalent of winning the Player of the Year award, scoring the most goals in a season, etc. Which nicely brings me to the subject of a certain Mr Cristiano Ronaldo, the Manchester United forward who has made a very public, and much criticised, effort to leave for the warmer climes of Real Madrid, the famous Spanish team that has won the European Cup (now the European Champions League trophy), more times than any other club: 9 times. He is blessed with wondrous dribbling skills, is brave, fast, good with both feet, can head the ball, can float around the front of the pitch and has the ability to turn a game in a flash. He scored a hatfull of goals last season, and is undoubtedly one of the best players in the world. He is also very well paid for his efforts. No argument from me on that: he is in a free market for talent and I do not begrude him a penny of his wages. But – and this is a rather big but – he has four years left to run on his contract at Old Trafford. Naturally, his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is very unhappy at the prospect of losing him, although a monstrous transfer fee would ease the pain and enable the club to buy in some new players. United has not been exactly a saint either in nabbing players from rivals before their contracts fall due. But the recent comments that Ronaldo’s contract amounts to a form of slavery is stretching the use of language to breaking point, contrary to what Mick Hume, a self-described “red” both in political and sporting terms, says. If a person signs a contract to work for a bank or football team for a minimum of say, four years, he must serve that contract out, unless there was any clear proof that he signed under conditions of duress. A footballer who signs terms with a club binding him into a four-year contract is not selling himself into slavery. It is not as if Mr Ronaldo was kidnapped, frogmarched into the club and forced to play. It is not even as though he was starving, and so desperate for a job that he was prepared to do anything to get a job. Marxists of old like Mr Hume used to argue that workers, who had no reserves of cash to live off, were “coerced” into signing work contracts and hence exploited, an argument that might have just about held water in the early 19th century when thousands of people were living on the edge of starvation, but hardly applies now. With bankers, it is quite common for executives to sign contracts stipulating that if they give notice to leave, they have to serve out at least six months “gardening leave” and a further period of not soliciting new clients before they can start at a new job. This sounds harsh, but banks have to protect their interests, since if there is an exodus of talent from Bank A to Bank B, the latter bank can grab some of the clients of the former bank who wish to stick with their old managers. For all I know, the same sort of things can apply in other industries. It seems to me that the only way such terms can be likened to slavery is if there is some clear form of coercion involved in signing the contract, and some clear sign of violence or threats being employed to sustain such contracts. I see not examples in the case of the Portugese footballer. July 15th, 2008 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Say what you like about our embattled UK prime minister, but he does at least have good taste in a place to relax on holiday: the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. I am not sure if the locals will be thrilled at all the security types who will inevitably swarm all over the area, though. Southwold is a charming, small place. It is the home of Adnams, the brewery of excellent beer. Now, my recommendation to Mr Brown and his family, in a spirit of generosity, is to pack the complete works of Ludwig von Mises in his luggage, visit the local pubs and go for some nice coastal walks. As a result of all this exercise, reading and drinking, he will return to Downing Street a wiser and better man. Sizewell B nuclear power station is down the coast. You can actually see its massive dome from Southwold beach. I rather like it. One word of caution to Mr Brown’s entourage: a lot of Suffolk folk have guns. July 15th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out. The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult. Apologies if there is no link here – I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos. July 13th, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was intrigued by this:
Up to a point. There is no doubt that much of what James Bowman says here is true. John Wayne-style movies just do not seem to get made any more, but I am not sure that heroism is dying out completely. I love the film, Apollo 13, for instance, for its realistic portrayal of the mental as well as physical heroism involved in getting the Apollo craft safely back to Earth after the craft suffered a massive loss of oxygen. His point about “superheroes” is true: I thought the recent Iron Man film had some heroic as well as downright funny moments. As for other stuff, the last James Bond film, Casino Royale, while also not totally realistic, was a much grittier, tougher 007 film than recently, has at its core the fact that Bond is a hero who takes on the baddies. The trouble is that heroism is often idealised, but I don’t have a problem with this if it involves “supermen” characters, like the last Batman film, which was pretty heroic, not to mention 300, the re-telling of the doings of ancient Greece. Outside of Hollywood, there are all those heroic Hong Kong action movies. Not to mention a film that was actually called Hero. Some of the Japanese anime films also are full of strong, uplifting moral themes. So I do not think the cupboard is bare. But Bowman does make a good set of points about the lack of “real-life” hero films. I suspect that if there is a dearth of heroic figures on screen, some of it is down to how people, in their revulsion against war in general – a perfectly normal reaction – have taken against the military virtues. But as I hope some of the examples show, there is more to heroism than courage under fire. Where I think there is a real problem, which the article does not really touch on, is the lack of any heroic characters in movies about business. I keep banging on about this, but it is a real pity that almost all businessmen and women are potrayed as morally sleazy or downright evil. A shame: I regard some entrepreneurs and their willingness to take big risks as heroes. Quiz: name your top 5 most heroic films, of any genre. July 11th, 2008 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma. For many a year we have been enjoined to cease stigmatising the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads, because it really isn’t their fault — and as a result an important means of combating these social ills has been thrown away. Stigmatising has a point; it is not just fun to shout abuse at fat people, it is socially useful too. – Rod Liddle, who talks some sense, although he is a bit of a yob himself. Update: some people have asked if I support all of his argument. I do not. For a start, obesity is not something one can define precisely; secondly, it can add to the generally authortarian, bullying atmsophere in which we live if it is deemed acceptable to make all kinds of fun of the largely-built, or whatever. But Liddle is quite correct to locate the issue of personal responsibility and to get away from the victim-culture angle that is so often exploited by the medical profession and their political friends July 10th, 2008 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
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