MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.
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U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney wounded a fellow shooter of quail in an accident. Well, I guess it shows what a gulf now exists between the U.S. government and our own. I cannot imagine a single senior Labour politician who would spend time out shooting. (Imagine John Prescott doing it. Actually, don’t). The story reminds me of another deputy leader, the late William Whitelaw (a decorated soldier in the Normandy WW2 campaign), who managed to fire some buckshot at someone during a grouse shooting meeting in the Scottish highlands. Many politicians in the past have enjoyed the pastime of shooting game. Many MPs were landed gentry, who could not wait to get out of smelly London in the summer months and, once the game season started in August, would blast away at hapless birds, bagging them in prodigious quantities. And several paid the price. Robert Peel, Prime Minister in the 1840s, suffered a nasty buzzing in one of his ears after a gun went off too close. Salisbury and Churchill shot game, as did Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home. Across the big pond there was no greater hunter of game, of course, than Teddy Roosevelt. All that tradition is fading out. I cannot imagine Tory leader David Cameron shooting game (imagine how that would jar with his trendy image) although his ancestors probably nailed whole flocks of pheasants in their time. Anyway, the lesson of all this is that if you find yourself in the company of a politician holding a shotgun, stand well behind. February 13th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Thanks to modern safety improvements, motor racing is not quite as dangerous as it used to be – although it probably still takes nerves of steel to hurtle around a circuit in a modern F1 car – but if there is a sport that for me demonstrates sporting bravery at its most extreme, it has to be the downhill skiing and bob-sleigh events I am currently watching at the Winter Olympics near Turin. Being only a moderately competent skier myself, I bow in awe when I see the pros hurtle down icy slopes at speeds touching 100 mph. Wow. February 12th, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“As an old Sci-Fi fan, I firmly believe that we will encounter alien races someday. These conversations are good practice. I would imagine there will really be some different worldviews when that happens, esp. if they’re hydrogen breathers.” Comment by regular Samizdata contributor calling himself VeryRetired, who describes what it feels like to debate with apologists for radical Islam: ie, the sheer inability to bridge a gulf of understanding between those who support the open society, free speech and enquiry, and those for whom the statements contained in a book written over a thousand years ago contain the sum total of wisdom, the criticism of which should be dealt with violently. I certainly do tend to think that understanding of how to cope with radical Islam can be usefully supplemented by reading Robert A. Heinlein, say, or Vernor Vinge rather than the editorial pages of the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph. February 12th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sir Freddie Laker, the man who took on the nationalised airlines in the 1970s with his cheap “Skytrain” airline, only to go bust, has died at the age of 83, according to this report. Laker was, despite the failure of his venture, a hugely influential figure in the airline industry by daring to suggest that flight need not be the preserve of the wealthy. He laid down the model to be copied by the likes of Southwest, Easyjet and Ryanair. His tough business battle with BA also inspired Sir Richard Branson to have a crack at the privatised national carrier’s transatlantic business. The economics of airlines has fascinated me, not least because as a business it has attracted some of the largest egos and some of the few remaining examples of buccaneering entrepreneur. Perhaps that is why we like them or even if we don’t, find them fascinating. They stand out from the grey suits. None more so than Sir Freddie. On the subject of cheap airlines and their globalising impact, here is an excellent piece from a year ago by Matt Welch in Reason magazine. February 10th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
This item from America’s satirical Onion site is too funny for words. Would advocates of “intelligent design” get the joke? February 9th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The above passage relates to when one of the central figures in Stephenson’s marvellous Baroque Trilogy enters the-then famous Leipzig fair. What struck me about this section of the book was Stephenson’s brilliant description of the sheer fun that markets can involve. (Yes, the curmudgeons out there will start muttering about the triviality of reducing market economics to fun, good heavens). His description even reminded me of a more modern market: the futures exchange in London’s Cannon Street. I used to visit the LIFFE building and would look down from the gallery to look at the sea of men – not many women – trading odd-sounding things like short-sterling futures and options, gesticulating at each other in small groups, more often resembling folk on the verge of a pub brawl than a place where gazillions of pounds, dollars and euros were being transacted. We are so used to critiques of capitalism from people who decry the supposed coldness and soulnessness of markets, unlike the supposedly warmer and more fulfilling communal lifestyles they claim to favour. And yet as Stephenson has reminded me, the market is that supreme example of social interaction and co-operation, often gaudy and loud, alarming even, but never dull. February 8th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Techie and futurism magazine Wired has a delightful article about how the toy company Lego is harnessing the best minds of the computer software industry to make its toys even cooler and intricate than before. I used to love playing with the stuff back when I was a small boy and generations of kids have had fun playing the brightly coloured building blocks, fashioning them in to planes, cars and houses, rather as an earlier generation used to play with Meccano kits. In its way, it helped probably fire enthusiasm for a whole generation of engineers and builders. And the kicker is that Lego is Danish. If you have children or friends with youngsters, perform a nice gesture and buy them a pack. February 4th, 2006 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the advantages of having a comments section is providing me with new ideas to write about, even when the comment in question is so flat-out wrong that it makes me gape with amazement at the screen. In my recent post about the economic fallacies surrounding immigration, a commenter opined that Indian immigrants into the UK were leeching money out of this country by not re-investing it in new businesses but merely writing cheques to “inactive” folks back in the old homeland. It is a lousy argument on a number of levels, and I am not even going to dwell long on the obvious dangers of inciting distrust and hostility towards economically successful immigrant groups and accusing them of not being sufficiently “patriotic” by not spending all their profits in Britain. The argument also fails because it ignores the subjectivity of economic value. If a businessman earns a million pounds in profit from a drycleaning business in Birmingham and sends the odd cheque back to his aged relatives in Bombay, then how is economic value being destroyed? In the eyes of the businessman, helping his loved ones is worth more to him than investing that money in something else, even though other people might disagree with that decision and think him to be deluded. It is none of my business to force a change in that decision. Also, that businessman is doing something that supporters of a liberal civil society have traditionally supported: philanthropy. How can it be wrong for a man to steer a portion of his wealth to his dependants, educate them, feed and house them? Who gives any entity the right, least of all the State, the power to say yay or nay to that decision? The argument that such transfers are wrong is an echo of the old Bethamite notion that the State is entitled to seize wealth if that maximises the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. A final point. No doubt large sums of money are paid by immigrants and migrant workers back to the points of origin all the time. This has happened for centuries. These transfer often sustained people in great hardship. I have come across some dubious economic arguments in my time, but the idea that immigrants paying money to their folks is some sort of parasitical waste has to be one of the weakest. February 1st, 2006 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, (as quoted in The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, page 347, also well worth reading). That passage, while written in the 1940s, carries a certain resonance now, I think. January 31st, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Japanese are working on a robot that can operate as a butler. Hmm. If they can create a character that can talk like Stephen Fry portraying Jeeves, make the perfect gin and tonic and do my ironing, I might consider one. Second thoughts: I’d probably be irritated as hell with the thing after a while. January 30th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anthony Browne, writing the main feature article in this week’s Spectator, says policymakers have underestimated, or quite possibly fibbed, about the scale of immigration into the United Kingdom from Eastern Europe. I do not want to get into all the cultural arguments that have been aired a lot here in recent months. Suffice to say that Browne makes some good, if slightly alarmist, points about the ability of a small crowded island like Britain to go on taking more and more people, never mind from often very different cultures. He seems to make the mistake, however, when discussing the impact of immigration on wage rates, of what is known as the “lump of labour fallacy”: the notion that there is a fixed amount of work to be performed in an economy. It seems a bit odd that Browne, who calls himself an economic liberal, should fall prey to this fallacy. After all, as surely the late economist Julian L. Simon pointed out, every additional person is not just another mouth to be fed, but another brain and pair of hands to create wealth. January 28th, 2006 | 115 comments - (Comments are closed)
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