Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.
Steve Martin. (My favourite Martin film is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine.)
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“I like Canary Wharf. It is where Dr Who fought against the Cybermen.” A friend of mine, who as you can tell, is a Dr Who fanatic. I will never be able to think of London’s new financial district in quite the same way again. July 16th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In his defence of classical liberalism and critique of 20th Century state welfarism, F.A. Hayek argued that one of the dangers of socialised medicine (Michael Moore, please note) is that if health care is not rationed by price and expanded by the freely chosen actions of patients and doctors, then some other means of allocating scarce resources, and making them hopefully less scarce, will be needed. That “other” way is state coercion and control. Because healthcare is delivered in Britain free at the point of use – of course it is not free at all – the individual patient does not directly see the price of the health care he or she receives, such as in the form of an insurance premium. There is no price incentive, therefore, for a person to, say, cut out smoking, cut the beer and the beef burgers, get in shape by frequenting a gym, etc. I wrote some time ago about the scarcity of human organs such as kidneys and livers, and how much of the western world suffers from a strange form or hypocrisy: we say it is great that people volunteer to donate organs (the libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has done just that by donating a kidney to a friend) but we recoil in horror at the idea that a person might ever be persuaded to sell an organ or be paid for such a donation, even though there is, in some countries, a commercial market in the business of using such organs and the related human tissue. (There is some legitimate worry that very poor people who do not realise the health implications might undergo surgery to sell their body parts, to be fair). I thought again about such mixed attitudes when I saw the front page of the Sunday Times this morning:
But ranting away about the presumptious tendencies of a state doctor is all very well for relieving a bit of blood pressure, but there clearly is a problem with shortages of organs and how to save the lives of people in desperate need. Donation, either for no money or for a payment (with safeguards, if need be), can work only so far. We need to encourage biotechnological fixes: and a good place to see what sort of fixes might be out there is this interesting study by Ronald Bailey. The doctors are right to highlight that there is a problem, but how less depressing would it be if they could think about ways of solving it without recourse to asuming that your body belongs to the collective, just for once. July 15th, 2007 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog, here is this rather amusing item about how French motorists with clean driving licences sell their speeding points online for a fee to drivers who are in danger of using up all their points and then getting banned. Yes, yes, I can see the usual Dudley Do-Rights out there bleating that this is all terribly naughty, a sign of decadence, blah, but in fact what this demonstrates, in a slightly naughty French way, is how if you oppress people enough with laws and taxes over a period of time, it breeds such disregard for the law that even laws that have sense – and driving very fast can be bloody dangerous – get spurned. (It appears the French are smarter at getting around certain rules – look at what happened to former Spurs, Manchester United and England player Teddy Sheringham for allegedly trying to pull the same speeding-point move). I have driven a few times along France’s magnificent, sweeping autoroutes, and am occasionally reminded that France invented Formula 1 motor racing. Maybe there’s plenty of life left in Gaul yet. If only they could do capitalism in a slightly more routine way. Talking of such alternative markets, here is an old article about the market in air miles. July 14th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
They never give up. An article nicely slams attempts by UK neo-Malthusians to get us all frightened about the terrible idea of people wanting to have babies. Selfish, cruel to the Planet Earth, a drain on “resources”: you know the litany. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which I recommend:
Quite. The obsession with their being “too many” people (quite how anyone can work that out is a mystery) is something I find rather malevolent. In any event, as the writer quoted makes clear, it seems a bit weird for the population worriers to go on about supposedly high birthrates when in fact a lot of recent commentary – from the likes of Mark Steyn – has tended to suggest quite the opposite. Indeed, Steyn and others argue that the indigenous population of western Europe, or parts of it, is stagnating and birthrates have fallen below the replacement level (the level required to maintain a stable level). And of course, to enforce strict population controls, even if it makes any kind of sense (it does not) begs the question of how. Does it require China-style policies that lead to mass abortions and an imbalance between girls and boys? I ask these questions now because while watching the BBC television show this morning as I got ready for work, I saw some middle-aged, white-haired woman, a sort of genteel Rosa Klebb, arguing very emphatically against large families. The BBC hosts gave her only the most gentle of grillings. Sitting next to her on the couch was a black couple with 8 children (and very happy and relaxed they looked). The grey-haired lady made all kinds of claims that big families “put too much stress on the planet” and completely dismissed any idea that low population growth, or decline, was a problem. The issue of how to pay for an increasingly ageing workforce and the pressures on pension systems was also dismissed. In the end of the day, rational debate works only so far with these fanatics. Some of them look quite nice, they wear suits or woolly jumpers, but their demand for state power over the most intimate aspects of your life – having children and raising a family – is implacable. They haven’t gone away. July 13th, 2007 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
Great piece today in the Times (of London) asking why businesses are not more vigorous in defending themselves and why they do not demand that people, as individuals, stop looking to the ‘blame culture’ and demand that people take more responsibility for their actions:
Amen, brother. One quick observation from me on this is that the litigation culture, which is still far worse in the United States, has spread to our shores; also, the general desire to blame others for our misfortune is possibly also a side-effect of the Welfare State and encouraged by the MSM. Nice to see such forthright sanity from a major newspaper. July 11th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
A quick plug for this excellent weblog of Daniel Ben-Ami, a freelance journalist who knows his economics. Daniel holds the heretical belief that material prosperity is a good thing and has debunked some of the recent nonsense about how people are made “unhappy” by material wealth. His site is definitely worth a regular visit. July 10th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The presence of Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist and columnist, remains something of a mystery to me in the Daily Telegraph. This week’s offering is a bleat about why we stingy Brits cannot get more excited about the 2012 London Olympic Games:
Ah, yes, we must get our “collective finger out”. We must stop moaning about the cost of these wonderful Games, put on a cheery smile, put a big hand in the wallet and pony up. Well sorry, Mr O’Hagan, that is not quite good enough. If the Games are quite as wonderful as he claims them to be, they should have had no trouble getting funding via the market. Within a few yards of the Games, there is Canary Wharf, with its huge investment banks and legions of financiers versed in the arts of financing long-term infrastructure projects. For example, if the facilities built for the Games could be used for 30 years or more, then why don’t the organisers issue 30-year bonds, rather like in the days of the 19th Century railway boom? It always makes me suspicious when some character like this says what a tremendous idea X is, but then immediately demands public funding for it, as if no one would pay for X out of their free will. And that of course is the problem; the OIympics will not be commercially viable – not if the incompetents who run it can help it. As the late, great Milton Friedman once put it in Free To Choose, it is – I paraphrase – so much more fun spending other people’s money. July 10th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The past weekend, I spent it the way that any islander should – sailing along England’s south coast in an all-too rare weekend of good, if at times blustery, weather. A good chance to practice some rusty sailing skills and practice some navigation. When the sky is a nice cobalt blue and the sea looks inviting, it is all too easy to forget just how violent the weather around the UK coast can be. (The same applies to places like the Med; I have seen some very stormy seas around Malta, for example). I tend to take safety on boats very seriously (there are some people I would refuse to sail with on the grounds that they think horseplay and boats go together). All the more reason to salute people who volunteer to save people in distress at sea. One charity that I have a huge amount of admiration and time for is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. At Samizdata, we like to moan about how certain state-registered charities are being pulled into the maw of the state, and I am one of those moaners. The best way to try and keep the state’s hands off such organisations is to donate generously to charities and urge their organisers to spurn any state “initiatives”. If any charity deserves a bit of help, it is the RNLI. They seem to avoid striking certain platitudes and get on with a crucial task. Here’s to them. July 9th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This comment was left by a person calling herself Jasmine, responding to Sam Leith’s fine piece bemoaning the attitude of mind that led to the UK smoking ban in privately-owned places:
A question I would put to this woman, and quite a few of the other control-freaks out there is this: what gives you the right to tell an adult that he or she should adjust their habits for “their own good”? Does Jasmine think of herself as being some sort of god? Has it never occurred to these people that their obsessive desire to regulate all aspects of existence is in fact a sign of a deep psychological problem, which needs to be fixed? July 3rd, 2007 | 84 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British master of literary parody, Craig Brown – who lives in my old stamping ground of Suffolk – had this absolute blinder of a sendup of the whole, ghastly Prince Diana industry of ropey biographies and kiss-and-tell stories that cropped up after she was killed in that Paris car crash almost 10 years ago (I remember the headlines the following day so clearly, I cannot believe 10 frickin’ years have elapsed). Here’s a sample of Brown in action:
I nearly spilled my coffee all over the desk at that one. I can also recommend this for students of history with a twist. July 2nd, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am certainly not the first person to state what a miserable process travelling by civil aircraft now is, unless one happens to enjoy the use of a private jet (a growing sector thanks to ventures like this one). Even before the latest terrorism problems, the security measures put in place added to the tedium of queuing, increased the tendency of staff to be rude and highhanded towards customers, and added to the cost and expense of flying. The budget airline changes wrought by the likes of Easyjet or Ryanair in Europe certainly have been a massive bonus for anyone who likes to regularly hop over to Porto for a nice weekend or buzz down to Malta to see in the in-laws, in my case. But the fun of flying is pretty much dead. (There is, alas, a similar problem with driving cars today). Airline food is terrible. The safey procedures are a joke – I have never seen any passenger take them seriously. Delays are considerable and getting worse, simply due to the massive amounts of traffic and the lack of airport space. And finally, in places such as London’s Heathrow Airport, the place is a nightmare: noisy, dirty, resembling nothing so much as a grotty provincial shopping mall. What can be done about it? Well, part of the problem is that airport operators like BAA, now owned by Spanish company Ferrovial, operate more or less as a monopoly. There is relatively little competition in the sector and the state regulatory body lacks the market incentive to worry about improving the comfort and enjoyment of passengers. There is something to be said in forcing a breakup of the monopoly of the main airports and encouraging more competition. I personally make it a personal mission to avoid Heathrow Airport at any cost and fly from Gatwick when it is possible, or go to a smaller airport instead. Competition is urgently needed to shake up this industry and put a bit of glamour and excitement back into the business of flying. Glamour is not a word one hears very often about modern aviation. For all that it is fashionable to bash him (his beard and toothy grin seems to drive some folk up the wall), Sir Richard Branson tries his hardest to inject some fun into the process. But not nearly enough airport/airline operators seem to have that spirit. This industry needs a few more Howard Hughes-type characters to kick it hard up the backside. If they don’t, more and more people like me will look for any alternative to taking to the skies in the future. Airlines may think that treating people badly will make them profits, but the long-term cost in alienating people who are seeking alternative forms of transport is bad economics and bad business. Checking some details, I came across this rather interesting site. Well worth a look. July 1st, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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