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.
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Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection. November 23rd, 2007 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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. November 21st, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata readers who are bored senseless by team sports can scroll down – Okay, this evening yours truly watched as England’s football team lost 2-3 to Croatia in the qualifying stages of the European Championship to be held next year. As a result of the loss, England will not take part in the competition; England’s manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to be out of his depth in the role, will either resign – not yet at the time of writing – or be sacked. Many of the players, who often earn vast salaries to play for their Premiership teams, played with a lack of guile and commitment that was embarrassing to behold. I would like to put on an act and claim I do not care about all this, that it is “just a game”, blah, blah, but that would be lying. I enjoy watching football but England’s football team was abject, terrible. I wonder whether there are every any political or cultural implications of things like this – I am not sure. But the crapness of the football team does rather reinforce the glum mood of this country right now: lost data, Northern Rock and a rapidly cooling economy. Football is the English national game – even more than cricket or rugby union. But it might not stay that way much longer. November 21st, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:
No I had not, but now that you mention it….
I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families – it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word “state” is the problem.
Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or ‘tax credit’ (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated. It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning. November 21st, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You could argue, indeed, that the great lesson of the 20th century – desperately hard learned in less fortunate countries than Britain, but tough to swallow even here – is that the state does not have the answer to human problems in the way that so many hoped so naively for so long.” – Martin Kettle, at the Guardian. I love his expression “you could argue”. There’s no argument, Martin. The failure of the state is so total, so widely proven, that it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on. November 20th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I keep telling my wife that she bears a certain physical resemblance to this eyeful. I am not sure if Mrs Pearce wants to spend her life as an opera singer, mind. (Latin dance is more her thing). Anyway, compared with most of the over-rated warblers of modern music, Cecilia Bartoli knocks the competition into the proverbial cocked hat. Her continued excellence helps assuage music-lovers’ grief at losing Luciano Pavarotti earlier this year. It is one of my regrets I never saw him live. November 19th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Quite a lot has already been written about the British government’s demented suggestion that security of public transport will be improved by installing airport-style security checks at 250 “strategic” railway stations (places, presumably, such as Paddington, St Pancras, Victoria and Liverpool Street in London). Bloody marvellous. A hint of the chaos this will cause, the enormous economic damage and ruination of the railway industry that will ensue, struck me this morning as I took a Tube ride from Covent Garden to Victoria on my way to work from an early meeting in the City. Victoria’s Tube station was closed due to “overcrowding on the platform”, according to a public announcement. The crush of crowds was terrible. Now, just work it out, gentle reader. Imagine in say, two or three years hence, if Gordon Brown’s daft idea takes root: massive queues at London railway stations in the evening rush-hour as people struggle to get home, huge groups of people milling around stations waiting to be passed through security. A perfect target for a terrorist, you might might think. You might indeed think that. I bet a few of the more intelligent police and security service folk realise that. But not Gordon Brown. I am no longer convinced that Brown is particularly bright, in fact. We have long been assailed with this image of a brooding, obsessive Scot with his books and his clever ideas. Cleverness? I think his intellect should be regarded like one of those flakier tech stocks in the late 1990s – greatly over-priced and due for a rapid fall. I already sense that this process is under way. Let the selling continue. November 19th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are some wonderfully good photographs, ideal browsing for a grey Sunday afternoon. November 18th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day, flicking through one of those glossy property magazines that get shoved through my letterbox, I came across this article about the Russian emigre, Leon Max, who fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, went to the States and founded a now very successful fashion business, Max Studio. He has recently bought a beautiful stately home in Northamptonshire – Paul Marks’ stamping ground – and I sympathise with most of the sentiment behind this paragraph in the magazine, Country House: “Max admits that England’s favourable tax regime was a factor (in buying the house). He is not apologetic about this. He is an enthusiastic free marketeer and libertarian. In his own self mocking words, he says, “Considering I was brought up under Communism, I am a little to the right of Pinochet.” (There is no web link to the article). Not sure I like the Pinochet argument – he was a torturer although no worse than most Latin American regimes and better in many ways – but I get the general idea of what Leon Max means. Frankly, if more people like him want to live in Britain, bring them on. It may partially counter a trend of emigration among smart young Britons as noted by Fraser Nelson, the journalist, in a recent article. Perhaps Britain’s newest classical liberal think tank, Progressive Vision, should ask Leon Max for a donation. November 17th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The stock market is pure capitalism. The stock you buy doesn’t know if you’re white or black, male or female, old or young, American or French. Prices are dictated by supply and demand and nothing else. It’s global, efficient, wildly volatile, always surprising: raw and beautiful.” Ken Fisher investment management chief and Forbes columnist. November 17th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anatole Kaletsky, writing in today’s Times (of London) has a justifiably ferocious piece about how the “loan” by the benighted British taxpayer to the stricken British mortgage firm, Northern Rock, has encouraged the latter to make all kinds of presumptions about its future behaviour. I knew this would happen. They may wear smart suits and talk the language of capitalism, but the truth is, City financiers can be just as infantilised by the prospect of taxpayers’ largesse as any farmer or coalminer getting a subsidy. At least the coalminers did a job that was physically dangerous. November 15th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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