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A few weeks ago, I was talking to a work colleague about the kind of sport shown on the BBC television channels (not Sky or the satellite stuff). One thing that came up in conversation was how little boxing there was on the BBC. Was this just because Sky and the paid-for TV channels had bagged all the top fights? It seemed so, but was there something else going on, like a PC revulsion on the part of the BBC top brass about puglism? It seemed a bit odd. When I was a youngster, there was always some boxing match in the offing featuring the likes of Barry MacGuigan, or Joe Frazier, Lloyd Honeygan, Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno (“know wot I mean, ‘Arry?”) Chris Eubank, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Sugar Ray Leonard… the list was endless. Some of the matches were brutal and there were tragedies: Michael Watson was seriously maimed in a fight; Ali, of course, suffers from a severe form of Parkinson’s which must, surely, be linked to the injuries he sustained. Boxing has always had a sleazy side too; some of the money-men involved in the sport probably have spent a lot of time brushing up against the law. In the early days of the big fights in Las Vegas or London’s East End, there was more than just a whiff of organised crime involved.
But – there is a but here – boxing is more than all that. Competitive pugilism involves a lot of skill, just as martial arts do; it is a terrific way to keep and get fit and it is also a good way for potentially wayward youngsters with lots of testosterone to channel their aggression and learn to act like a man in a fair fight under the guidance of a referee. And for all that boxing can be and is a brutal sport, I have watched some matches that had me sitting on the edge of my seat in excitement: I particularly remember the epic fight, in 1985, between MacGuigan and Predoza. Absolutely electrifying fight. And I defy anyone to watch an old video of Ali, in his fights against Patterson or Frazier, and not admit to be astonished by the man’s athleticism and skill.
British boxing is now in the best state that it has been in for years. Boxers like Ricky Hatton and others are blazing a trail; the countries of the UK look to be able to field a decent bunch of entrants for the Beijing Olympics next year. And even the BBC, which recently seemed to be turning up its nose at the sheer vulgarity and general non-PCness of boxing, seems to be covering boxing quite a lot all of a sudden, invalidating my earlier wonderment about whether the BBC had killed the sport from its programmes. No longer. Good. Boxing has been through a fallow time in Britain over the past few years and there remain legitimate worries about the potential injuries that can be inflicted. But if you accept – as a genuine liberal must – that grown-up adults can and should be able to consensually fight and accept the consequences, there should be absolutely no suggestion that boxing be banned, any more than say, wrestling or other contact sports which can cause injury, including life-threatening ones.
There is also a cultural issue worth throwing into the mix: boxing seems to be one of the few sports that have drawn in young Muslim men in Britain, apart from cricket. That has to be a good thing.
I am not quite as vexed by the writings of former Living Marxism (a bit of an oxymoron, Ed) writers such as Brendan O’Neill, Mick Hume or Claire Fox as Stephen Pollard is – life is too short for such intellectual eye-gouging – but I kind of get Stephen’s general point. Those of us who have toiled away exposing the idiocies of Big Government for decades and plugging the case for free markets, etc, find it a bit hard to take for a bunch of Marxists to claim to be such libertarian souls, when in fact they are just as hostile to the market economy as they ever were. No-one has ever proved to me that you can have a liberal, open society without property rights. O’Neill, writing in this week’s edition of The Spectator, rather confirms Pollard’s suspicions in what was quite good rant against modern “anti-capitalists”:
Of course, Marx wanted to destroy capitalism because he thought it didn’t go far enough in remaking the world in man’s image and organising society according to man’s needs and desire. Today’s sorry excuses for Marxists and anti-capitalists think capitalism has gone too far in its development of the forces of production and encouragement of consumerism. I’m with Marx. Let’s replace capitalism with something even more dazzlingly cocky and human-centric. But let’s first deal with the luddites, locavores and eco-feudalists who have given anti-capitalism a bad name.
The problem, of course, is that the “dazzlingly cocky and human-centric” shiny sort of Marxist future is never spelled out. What would it look like? Does it come with a tester? Are there examples on eBay? Seriously, given the manifold failures of state central planning, and the various incoherent attempts by some thinkers to fashion “market socialism” (another oxymoron), it is not really quite good enough for a chap like O’Neill to pose as some sort of hip and clever critic of anti-capitalists, then to claim that he is still a Marxist, but then to leave a bloody great black hole of explanation of what his sort of society would look like. Consider, the various theories associated with Marx have been more or less destroyed, both by practical experience and logical argument: the labour theory of value (which ignores the value of ideas in wealth creation); the theory of the inevitable clash between the “workers” and the “bosses”; the historical “inevitability” of the collapse of capitalism, the immiseration of the proletariat, etc. While some of Marx’s arguments about class had some interesting points, pretty much all of the central tenets of the Bearded One’s ideas are plain wrong. I mean, as intellectual defeats go, this is the equivalent of a village pub football team being annihilated 10-nil by Manchester Utd. There’s no way back.
When I lived in England, not so long ago, one of the minor pleasures of rural life was walking across a couple of fields, along a public footpath through a copse, discovering a small medieval country church, and going inside to contemplate the divine for a few minutes. In those days, the churches were unlocked. They’re not anymore. Presumably there were local lads who would steal from the Lord even then, but not a significant segment of the population who targeted houses of worship. So today there’s wire mesh over the beautiful (one assumes) stained glass to stop thieves pinching the lead from the windows. It’s a small loss, but a telling one. The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it was stolen last Thursday.
– Mark Steyn, on escalating metal thefts in Britain.
Some good news: the price of copper and zinc has fallen hard in global markets, so hopefully my front door-knocker is safer than it was a few months ago. Even so, Steyn’s take on the spate of burglaries is telling. A friend of mine, who lives in south Suffolk, near Sudbury, suddenly found the other day that he could not make phone calls from his landline as copper wires had been stolen. In centuries past, horse-thieves were hanged, as their activities damaged the economic system – horses were vital. We do not hang thieves any more – restitution is arguably a better punishment by getting these folk to put victims right – but such crimes are just not taken seriously enough. In parts of England there are still places where mobile phones do not work very well. If some jackass cuts people off from their landlines and someone has to call the emergency services but cannot do so, stealing copper wires is not just bloody inconvenient, it could play a part in someone actually dying.
Theft of copper wires is not just a British phenomenon…
On the BBC Newsnight television programme on Wednesday evening, the host, Jeremy Paxman, was joined by a Sudanese government official working in Britain, and a young fellow from the Muslim Council of Britain, to discuss the plight of a woman who faces the prospect of being jailed or flogged with 40 lashes for the crime of allegedly insulting Islam.
You can read the details of her supposed misdemeanour here. At the very worst, this woman is unwise for not realising the depths of mental insanity that is gripping the country she has chosen to live in, but she is guilty of nothing in my eyes. Quite what the British government does about this, including the possible use of military action, is another matter. At the very least this country should persuade any remaining Britons to get out of Sudan, break off diplomatic relations.
What I found so interesting about the BBC show last night was Paxman’s performance. He sat in the middle of these two men as they “debated” the issue of whether the thugs of the Sudanese authorities should show “mercy” to this woman. The Sudan government guy, who spoke with a subtle hint of a grin, kept going on about how this woman should have realised the “sensitivities” of the situation; his performance was one of the most hateful that I have ever seen on such a show. The MCB guy, who seemed very young and almost terrified, was pleading in the most abject fashion for the punishment not to be carried out. No wonder, this story hardly is going to make folk think well of his faith, now is it? All the while, Paxman, who is usually an aggressive interviewer to the point of gratuitous rudeness, sat almost dumbfounded as these two men spoke. But maybe it was deliberate: from his body language I could tell that Paxman thinks that Islamists like the Sudanese official are beneath contempt. Sometimes you are glad of Mr Paxman being around for a programme like this.
One potential argument I can see brewing in the aftermath of the latest scandal surrounding the government – over party donations from dubious characters – is that this all “proves” the need for tax-funding of political parties. It does no such thing, of course. If parties receive funding from you and me, regardless of whether we vote for them or not – an outrageous impost – then existing parties will benefit at the expense of new, or yet-to-be-born, parties.
The best option remains that anyone, barring criminals or declared enemies of this nation, should be allowed to give whatever they want to any political party, period. The only proviso is that such donations be placed on the public record. If little green men from Mars want to donate to UKIP or Labour, I have no problem.
I might have a look at a bookie or spread-betting site to see what odds they give for Brown not making it for the rest of the parliamentary term. Might be worth staking a few quid that he will not surive.
I have often wondered why it is that so many super-rich – and they do not get a lot richer than Warren Buffett – feel the need to make out that their enormous wealth is something embarrassing or shameful, or that they would rather they did not have it. Our capitalists of today are sometimes a rather glum bunch. Buffett says he wishes he could pay more in taxes. Well, Mr Buffett, I am sure you can look up the address of the IRS from the Internet and send them a big cheque. If he really thinks that Congress can make better use of his wealth than one of the smartest investors of modern times, well, go for it. Get out that pen and sign away. Buffett has already demonstrated, via his contributions to the Bill Gates Foundation, that he knows how to use his wealth for philanthropic purposes.
Of course, if he wants to give it to me, I have certain needs……
Mark Mills, makes some pretty outrageous comments about Ayn Rand in the course of how he prefers to defend free enterprise. I have often wondered what is worse: the cultish “official” Objectivists who cannot deal with the slightest criticism of the woman, or those who claim, with little plausibility or evidence, that she contributed nothing valuable apart from an assertion that it is fine and proper to be happy. I came across this piece of nonsense at a link mentioned at the Adam Smith Institute blog:
According to Rand morality is an illusion and truly great individuals act solely in their own interests without giving thought to their impact on others.
Nonsense. The fiction and non-fiction works of the late Miss Rand, which are widely available, such as Atlas Shrugged, are absolutely rammed with discussion – sometimes to the shrill point of tedium – about morality. One may demur about Rand’s version of said, but to claim she had nothing to say on morality is so jaw-droppingly wrong as to wonder what Mr Mills has been smoking. Her view of morality, a code of values, was that morality was essential to the pursuit of life and human flourishing. Her ethical egoism was a kind of progression from the views of Aristotle and an attack on the idea, which stems from the dualism of certain religions, for example, that happiness on this earth and goodness are at war with one another. Rand said this dualism was fatal to both happiness and morality. There is now a large and growing literature on Rand’s views on morality and the importance of it in all aspects of human life (an example is here).
As to the point that her morality gave no thought to the “impact on others” of certain actions, what on earth is he driving at? The pursuit of long-range self interest means that one does not aggress against others, hurt them, rob them, etc. Quite the opposite: as Adam Smith realised, it means serving the wants of others through voluntary exchange in the market makes sense because doing that makes you happier in the long run, gets you friends, riches, etc. Mills statement is bizarre. Of course, Rand was an early sceptic about the environmentalist movement and tended to dismiss worries about pollution, etc, but then there is nothing in her body of ideas as such that would mean that a supporter of her would be blind to the problems of pollution, which can be thought of as a property rights problem.
People will recall that when the USA was founded, the Founders spoke about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It says something about the state of ideas when a so-called defender of liberal capitalism regards a woman who championed the pursuit of happiness and attacked statism as some sort of nutcase. Oh well.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who currently covers economic issues for the Daily Telegraph, wonders whether the €uro zone, faced with a possibly ruinously high exchange rate for the single currency against the dollar and some other major currencies, will embrace the “nuclear option” of imposing exchange controls to prevent the euro rising much further. Evans-Pritchard wonders whether such thoughts are idle. I think he is right but is also right to ponder this issue. If, in order to protect the likes of Airbus and other big exporters, the EU were to halt or control inflows of capital to the euro zone, the impact on places like London, the world’s largest forex market, would be devastating. Tens of thousands of jobs in the money market business would be lost. Such controls would further hammer any idea that the EU had, or ever has had, much to do with free trade. It would set back the cause of global free markets for years. Some defenders for exchange controls might try to argue that they would be less bad than higher tariffs on imports to the EU, but there are plenty of those tariffs already.
The general popularity of the euro at the moment is more because it is – temporarily – seen as a more reliable store of value than the dollar, rather than because of a new-found belief in in the economic prowess of Germany, France, Italy or Spain, for instance. With a large budget and current account deficit, the US has been letting the buck drop to make its exports more competitive overseas and as a result, the euro and the pound have risen, making it cheap for Brits to take their holidays in the States, for example. There is some sign that this exchange rate movement is working (I am actually pretty bullish about American exporters for the next year. I am actually quite upbeat about the US economy, which is always written off, with a hint of anti-American bias, by the usual commentators).
I do not think the EU will embrace exchange controls; such a move would be hugely controversial and unlikely to succeed. Prophets of doom would do well to recall that West Germany, back in the 1970s, lived quite successfully with a strong deutschemark; there is nothing axiomatic about why the EU cannot cope with a strong euro, at least not in the short run. The more fundamental problem, of course, is whether the countries making up the euro zone should have joined it in the first place, given their different characteristics. I think the euro could be a disaster for some nations, or at least a very painful experience. My wife’s country, Malta, is about to join the euro next year. Thank god it does not have a big export market.
Ramesh Ponnuru scoffs at the notion that Ron Paul’s tilt at the White House has, supposedly, encouraged an upswelling of libertarian sentiment in parts of the Republican Party. My rough guess is that he has had a bit of a positive effect and has raised a lot of money over the internet, pretty fast. Some people try to dismiss Paul as a kook but their dismissals seem to amount to little more than smears of half-understood points, such as his championing of gold-backed money (I am not convinced the dollar should be tied to gold but it is not nearly as daft, when you think about it, as the idea that the world’s largest economy can be run by a Federal Reserve bank by an army of economic gods). Despite my own differences with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy, which, pace some libertarians, is not necessarily a logical outcome of the non-initiation of force principle in the face of major foreign threats, Paul is a breath of fresh air. He is no Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater in terms of his name recognition factor or charisma – I bet hardly anyone in Britain outside a small group of political anoraks has heard of him, but his profile is pretty impressive.
Ponnuru points to Ron Paul’s own stance on abortion to prove that he is not quite the darling of the libertarian movement that some might claim. Rubbish: if Ponnuru has read any libertarian authors thoroughly, he would notice that libertarians can and do differ quite a bit on the issue. The issue of how one goes from the axiom of the right to life to the vexed question of when life begins is a difficult one, and I am not sure I am clear myself on this one. Ron Paul is against federal, ie, tax funds for abortion clinics. But that does not make him anti-abortion, it makes him anti-spending, at least on this issue.
Paul Marks has argued on this blog elsewhere that Ron Paul’s record on spending is not spotless – it is hard to think of any politician who is – but I think he is generally a positive influence on American politics.
The prospect of such a man in Britain’s Conservative Party reaching any sort of senior position at present is, of course, nil.
The government has managed to lose data on 25 million people this week. An impressive achievement, you must agree. Question: what information about yourself would you most hate losing? I think my bank account number comes top of that list.
Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.
– Alice Thompson.
The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word.
– Daniel Villey, “Economique et Morale”, in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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