Via the Norman Geras blog (and in turn via Glenn Reynolds), is a long letter that challenges head-on the disgraceful spectacle of Iran’s conference of December 2006 to “debate” whether the Holocaust existed. Good. It is a letter that reminds us that thousands, maybe millions, of Iranians do not subscribe to the same claptrap as its leaders. It is welcome and important that such views get an airing. I hope it happens a great deal more often.
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Sometimes you see a set of numbers and they really make you sit up and gasp:
Nice work, Messrs Sarbanes, Oxley and Spitzer. February 21st, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Bryan Appleyard has a terrific piece in defence of 4×4 vehicles, often dubbed as “Chelsea Tractors” on account of their often being driven by well-heeled west Londoners in the narrow streets of said neighbourhood rather than being driven in muddy village lanes. He says what I suspect has been the obvious point, which is that class hatred and the current puritanical culture explains what fires the dislike of these vehicles. The amount of petrol consumed per mile has, I expect, not got a lot to do with it.
I can sympathise, however, with some, not all, of the annoyance that these vehicles provoke. Their drivers are often terrible, imagining that their being surrounded by massive lumps of metal means they are somehow absolved from the rules of the road. They gobble up a lot of parking space, which is at a premium in highly-taxed London. They have a higher centre of gravity than most cars and yet some drivers do not adjust their driving to take account of this. And I occasionally do wonder quite why a person needs such a large vehicle to take little Johnny to school or do the shopping. But whether I think people should or should not “need” to have such a vehicle is beside the point. I have an opinion, but the Greenies want to use the coercive power of the state to limit our motoriing ambitions, and I very much doubt that concern for the welfare of the planet has much to do with it. Talking of politics of envy and massive City salaries, this article is worth a look. February 18th, 2007 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been keeping an eye on the French Presidential race, if only because it is high time perhaps that that great, sometimes infuriating country had the sort of leader who might unleash the entrepreneurial energies that do exist. (Entrepreneur being of course a French word). We like the witty French economics writer Bastiat at this blog and it would be lovely to think that some of his classical liberal spirit might return to that country. Alas, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Gaullist candidate, has already signalled that he is as hostile to capitalism as any Sartre-reading socialist:
Hedge funds, which are investment pools usually registered in sunny Caribbean islands, have become a bugbear for protectionist-minded politicians, who fear the ability of these folk to quickly move in and out of a company’s stock, a currency or bond to make a profit. Hedge funds typically amplify the size of the market positions they take by what is called leverage – borrowing to you and me – and from time to time their bets go badly wrong, as happened during the Russian debt default crisis 9 years ago. On the whole, though, hedge funds make markets more liquid and efficient by increasing the number of buyers and sellers in a market and their arbitrage skills remove inefficiencies in how assets get priced. They also, on a more venal level, generate enormous revenues for financial centres like London and Wall Street. They often put pressure on underperforming company boards to raise their act, which is hardly a bad thing. Like private equity buyout funds, however, hedge funds sound mysterious and a bit dodgy; they prefer to operate in secret and their PR is often awful. For most people, a hedge fund manager is a guy with a slicked haircut shouting into a telephone. The French business culture, despite a few improvements, is overwhelmingly dirigiste, and can ill afford to give the finger to some of the sharpest financial talents around. If Sarkozy wants to market himself as a sort of French proto-Thatcherite, this seems hardly the way to go about it. Bashing speculators is the oldest and one of the grubbiest tricks in the political book. It plays on public ignorance about economics, it plays on envy at great wealth, and panders to the out-dated idea that wealth is only real if you can hit it with a hammer or or dig it out of the ground. Sarkozy should do his underperforming republic a favour and read some Bastiat instead. February 14th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I love the BBC TV programme Top Gear but even great men have their weaknesses. Jeremy Clarkson takes the ‘Borat’ route by making fun of folk in America’s Deep South. How jolly original of you, Jeremy. Is not the whole “These guys from the South are thick, whisky-swilling in-breds with mullet haircuts and guns” a bit tired? Oh well, even the good guys have their off-days (thanks to Andrew for the link). Clarkson should stick to driving insanely quick Bugattis and cheering us all up. February 12th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
A certain amount of media interest, as we English put it in our understated fashion, has been stirred by the revelations that David Cameron, leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, supposed Conservative, windmill advocate and former PR consultant, took drugs while at Eton (for those living outside Britain, Eton is an incredibly posh and expensive English public, ie, private school). Cameron has so far said little about this. There have been rumours, of varying degrees of believability, that Cameron has taken drugs, including cocaine. This saga tells us a lot about how the debate about whether the state should ban adults from injesting substances of their choice. Had this story broken 20 years ago, then Cameron would have been reduced to burnt toast. Remember, this twerp once chided wicked capitalist retailers from flogging chocolate oranges to obese Britons, and yet, if the allegations are correct, Boy Dave was quite happy to partake of South American exports and in quite impressive quantities. I personally am not a prig on this issue: I have smoked the odd joint and felt pretty bad afterwards. I once took coke and talked at about 150 miles an hour about some incredibly meaningful subject and later felt like a bit hazy. I did not repeat the experience. I find that champagne is frequently cheaper and legal. I suspect that quite a large percentage of people of my age – professional, reasonably intelligent, have had the same experiences. To listen to the Daily Mail type persons out there, most people should never touch anything stronger than Italian coffee. I think drugs should be decriminalised, believe the War on Drugs has been an unmitigated disaster and would hope that Cameron’s alleged behaviour might, just might, lead to a more sane political conversation about such issues. But although the Tory leader may inadvertently encourage different views, he has a continued problem. Cameron, after all, is in love with a drug far worse than cocaine, LSD, Qaaludes (what the heck are they?) or dope. He is in love with power over other people. He suffers from hallucinations about how the Tories will win power by conceding Blairist ideas of the role of the State. He suffers from the extraordinary idea that Oliver Letwin is a great thinker. Compared to Bolivian marching powder, that is heavy shit he is smoking. February 12th, 2007 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a website for the film Amazing Grace, due for release soon. It centres on the life of William Wilberforce, friend of great British Prime Minister William Pitt, and the man most people will associate with the abolitionist movement. The campaign to end slavery lasted for years before eventually succeeding in the first decade of the 19th Century, although it lingered as an institution in the colonies for many years before ending in the conflagration of the US civil war. I have no idea whether this new film will be any good and what sort of “point” it will make, but if there is a point worth making on a libertarian blog like this, it is that slavery in all its forms is an abomination, a stain on humanity and should be resisted. Furthermore, man since ancient times has known that slavery is an evil but for many centuries was either resigned to the institution, or was cowed into thinking that it was part of the natural order of things. I have read comments on this blog – by an individual who thankfully no longer bothers us – that slavery was a product of its economic times and it would be quite wrong for us to “lord it over” our ancestors by condemning the practice. This is moral relativism, pure and simple. Some people have tried to argue that the British slave trade proves the wickedness possible through capitalism, although I think it demonstrates a quite different point. Kidnapping people from their homes and then forcing them to work in conditions as appalling as a plantation has not, as far as I know, got anything to do with consensual acts of commerce as classical liberals might understand it. Quite the reverse. What slavery shows is that trade without respect for the rights of individuals is in fact a form of thuggery. Here is an article I wrote over a year ago about a less well known opponent of slavery, Thomas Clarkson. On the 200th anniversary of Britain’s outlawing the slave trade, let’s celebrate what these men achieved. February 11th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I always felt this country was going down the tubes when the television folk replaced Basil Brush with Roland Rat.” My dad, with his finger on the pulse as usual. Here is a tribute page to television’s most superior fox. February 11th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Richard North has a terrific review of the book “Affluenza” by Oliver James. Even reading the cover of this book while browsing through a Waterstone’s shop the other day, I could tell that a book called “Affluenza” was bound to trot out the argument that we comfortably-off westerners were being ruined by too much of a good thing. Flumoxxed by thousands of choices of toothpaste, CDs, breakfast cereals, cars, wallpapers, books, foreign holidays and designer clothes, we just cannot cope. All this stuff, all this wealth, is crippling us. North will have none of it:
Well, since “selfishness” is often a pejorative way of saying that people wish to be happy and prefer to breathe and have a good time rather than be miserable, I usually automatically tune out criticisms of capitalism on the grounds that it fosters selfishness. Even if one is not a great admirer of the late novelist Ayn Rand, I think it is fair to credit her with re-connecting with the old Aristotelian tradition in pointing out that happiness, enjoyment of the material things of life can and do go hand in hand with virtue and goodness. Well all is said and done, when a collectivist/socialist/fascist/some other bully attacks liberalism for “selfishness”, what they are really demanding is that we live our lives according to their – selfish – desires for a particular utopia. → Continue reading: A great demolition of a very, very silly book February 8th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
A U.S. politician wants to pass a law that would make it a crime to cross the road while listening to an MP3 player or some other device that presumably screens out the noise of approaching traffic. For one’s own safety, naturally. People who wear iPods while walking around are a menace to themselves and this sort of bad behaviour should be banned immediately, naturally (sarcasm alert). Alas, the story I have linked to does not give any examples of where a pedestrian was run over by a car because the person happened to be daydreaming while listening to Mozart or for that matter rocking to ACDC. Music, it’s the new menace. February 7th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start any sword fights. I’m over that phase. – Captain Malcolm Reynolds, one of the many fine characters in the television series, Firefly. February 7th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is the latest Papal Bull from the European Union:
It used to be the dream of socialists and utopians of varying degrees of malevolence or stupidity to want a world state. In a world state, pesky local regulatory differences would be obliterated and replaced by a rational grid of laws from which no escape was possible. In true ‘watermelon’ fashion – green on the outside, red in the core – the Greens are embracing the instruments of a pan-national state to enforce their ideas. There is a superficial plausibility to this. Pollution knows no barriers. If a German coal-fired power station emits carbon dioxide and other things, that will not just affect the Germans living near to the station but other nations. If a Swiss chemicals firm accidentally spills toxic material in to the Rhine – this has happened – then people in Holland get affected, and so on. But what these sort of cases do is not to suggest that we need to give a centralised, international body coercive powers over people living across a whole continent. Rather, we should keep reminding people that rigorous enforcement of existing property rights, and creation of such rights in hitherto unowned resources, allied to the incentive structures of markets, provide the best route for tackling real environmental problems such as pollution. In any case, with certain emissions, it pays to remember that a pollutant for one person might be a positive benefit – or “externality” – for someone else. The global warming/pollution/generally-we-are-all-doomed agenda is a significant threat to our liberties at the moment, so I make no apologies for going on about it. February 7th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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