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The other week, I wrote about the Bridge card game ploy known as the Yarborough – taken from the third James Bond story, Moonraker. The names given to various card game gambits can be wonderful. Consider this one:
Well, I rather liked her. June 21st, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A week or so ago, Ross Clark, the eminently sane columnist who writes for the Spectator, defended globalisation and attacked what he sees as a growing hatred of rich people. We see it in the endless bleating about the supposed Evil of private equity and hedge funds, or of financial speculators generally. Much of the reason, I think, for this hatred, is not that the rich are so much better off in relative terms than the poor – the poor probably don’t have the time or the inclination to spend time hating the rich – but that the rich are a lot better off than the broad middle class. In my experience, many anti-globalistas are middle class intellectuals, not poor folk living in state subsidised housing. As it becomes more difficult for middle class folk, for example, to educate their offspring privately without going into massive debt, and to buy a house for the same reason, naturally the Man on the Clapam Omnibus – or his US version – gets a bit cheesed off if he sees City financiers buying swanky homes or sending children to nice schools with ease. But this hatred of wealth is dangerous and it draws on economic illiteracy. To demonstrate a good case of such dunderheadedness, in the print version of the Spectator (16 June, page 26), is this letter from a Mr Edward Collier, of Cheltenham, a traditionally genteel spa town in the west of England famed for its posh girls’ school and a rather fine horse racing festival in March:
I could quote more from this character, but you get the idea of where he is coming from. So let’s spell it out for this Sage of Cheltenham: if more people spend money on luxury goods, which typically often require more intensive labour to produce, such as fine leather handbags or Breitling wristwatches, this increases the profits of the people who make these things, and in turn, increases the demand for the skilled labour required to make them, and hence, raises the real wages of the persons who make them, and so on. If a luxury leather handbag really does require no more skill to produce than a bag one could buy for a fiver, then presumably this letter writer might have a quarter of a decent point, but he does not. He merely asserts that the “same people” produce high-value goods as cheap ones, and uses this to dismiss the argument that when rich people spend their milions, it recycles wealth back into the economy. In fact, even John Maynard Keynes’ argument of stimulating demand to encourage production presumably was based on the notion that if people spend money in the shops, it creates jobs, and therefore is a good thing. What this character seems to be saying is that no matter how much money rich folk spend on luxury goods, it makes no difference whatever to the people who make them. Apparently, the money never reaches the poor downtrodden producers, but ends up in a few capitalists’ pockets. But presumably, if more money is spent on goods than before, then, other things being equal, the prices of those goods will rise or output will have to be increased. To argue that none of this process filters through into the living standards of people is quite extraordinary. Meanwhile, this story, if it is true, is not going to help the blood pressure of Mr Collier, I fear. I am looking forward to this book by Ross Clark. June 19th, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I missed this sharp and wise article by US columnist Jonah Goldberg a few days ago – but I had the excellent excuse of being on holiday – but his piece, which nicely sums up what is happening in Britain from a US perspective, demonstrates how some Americans are waking up to what a nannied country Britain now is. Of course, north American readers of this blog have been aware of this progressive infantilisation of the UK adult public for some time. The question that keeps coming up, and which makes an appearance in Jonah’s article, is exactly when will the conveyor belt of nanny-state interference in our liberties stop? When, exactly, does the excrement hit the fan? Just how bullied do we have to be before something snaps? I am still none the wiser as to whether we really know the answer to those questions. June 18th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Make sure you are well-scrubbed, your nails are clean and your hair is washed. Remember that girls are as nervous around you as you are around them, if you can imagine such a thing. They think and act rather differently to you, but without them, life would be one long rugby locker room. Treat them with respect.” From The Dangerous Book for Boys, page 127. Sound advice on every page. The book is a non-PC work of genius that has tapped into a sense among many folk that life has become too obsessed with safety and avoidance of risk. June 17th, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:
Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell. But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no? Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk – Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind – might have had enough of reading about the feats of “The Greatest Generation” and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller’s book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well. But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view. June 16th, 2007 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have travelled to a lot of cities in the world in my relatively short life (Paris, San Francisco, New York, Cologne, Geneva, Milan, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Vienna……) and there are quite a few more that I want to knock off the list before I step off this mortal coil. Well, this week, I did just that and spent a wonderful day ambling around the old southern French town of Montpellier. The city is a university town with a strong commercial base, oodles of history and some of the swankiest French urban architecture outside of Paris. Access to the city from Britain is easy: a one-and-a-half-hour flight from Gatwick. I know that there is a lot to gripe about with France: the taxes, red tape and as we know, considerable problems with a large and angry underclass, made worse by a lack of assimilation of its Islamic population. However, from my point of view, if newly-elected Nicolas Sarkozy manages to cut taxes somewhat and reverse some of the daftest labour market restrictions, then any advantage to living in Britain rather than France will look increasingly slender. (I see no sign that Britain’s petty brand of health and safety puritanism has completely taken hold). I am not the first person to make that observation, of course. Mind you, the beer is alarmingly expensive, but you can buy wine for a Euro a litre – and it tastes good. Emigration never felt so compelling. June 13th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 9th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff. June 7th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is not the State that creates a healthy society. When the State grows too powerful people feel they count for less and less. The State drains society, not only of its wealth but also of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best. Our aim is to let people feel that they count for more and more.” – Margaret Thatcher, 10 October, 1980. Taken from the rather good tome, Great British Speeches, a collection compiled by Simon Heffer. Perhaps out of an impish desire to annoy, the book contains Blair’s ghastly and embarrassing ‘forces of conservatism’ speech, perhaps the ugliest statement of political authoritarianism in recent British political history. May 30th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be ‘free’. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot – and I doubt that – he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free – it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life ‘ought’ to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, “Why should health, clean water or defence be free”? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all. To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be ‘free’ is not, alas, all that easy in today’s politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a ‘right’, then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army? I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about “the right to free health care”. Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a ‘right’. Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of ‘welfare rights’ and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism. May 30th, 2007 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
This startling story from France even made yours truly, who has become a jaundiced observer of French political life, sit up and take notice. Apparently, a bunch of people styling themselves as protectors of the Gallic wine industry have issued an ultimatum to new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, that unless those evil cheap imports from countries such as Australia (the horreur!), New Zealand (Rainbow Warrior, anyone?), South Africa (enough said), America (the Great Satan) and other places are stopped, then supermarkets, offices and other places will be dynamited. Suppose that people in such venues get killed. I think that such a terrible outcome might begin to get across to the politically and economically uncommitted the true nature of the thuggery that sometimes accompanies protectionism and any form of coercive interference with voluntary economic exchange. Ultimately, such folk believe that you, the consumer, or worker, or entrepreneur, are beholden to buy, produce or sell not on the basis of freely consenting exchanges with your fellows, but on account of some state of affairs that the protectionists deem right and proper. In this case, the wine industry of France, or at least the mass-produced bit of it, is under threat from the cheaper stuff from other parts of the world. (I think it is safe to assume that the producers of Latour or Lafite are unlikely to be worried). I am actually off to Southwestern France in early June for two weeks’ much-needed holiday and the Languedoc region is one of the places where these thugs hail from, apparently. I tend to notice that whenever I visit France, which is quite often, it is hard to see non-French wine in the shops. So if these thugs are getting upset at the arrival of a relatively small amount of foreign imports, they would go totally batshit if they saw the mixed wine-racks in Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s in a standard English town. Sarkozy’s time in office is unlikely to be a quiet one. May 28th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Libby Purves, the Times columnist, has a nice appreciation of the Cutty Sark, which was partly destroyed by fire yesterday. The burning of the Cutty Sark clipper ship appears, judging by some reports, to have been started deliberately. I have long since given up trying to fathom what goes through the minds – for want of a better word – of the pondlife who get a buzz out of torching old monuments like this 19th century vessel. An active hatred or pranksterish contempt for the past soon spills over into a defilement of the present and eventually, lack of interest in the future (very Burkean, ed). Some time ago, I reflected on how the clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were a demonstration of how globalised the 19th Century was in terms of trade. Anyway, let’s hope the vessel can be restored. It is certainly one of the finest sights in Greenwhich, in the eastern part of London and a major tourist attraction. May 22nd, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
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