If you thought that going to the gym allowed you to burn off that stress and get away from the office, think again. A new hi-tech gym means you can type away on a keyboard and do an aerobic workout at the same time. Not quite sure this is going to work when it comes to pumping the weights, though.
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I have just finished reading James Bartholomew’s fine book, The Welfare State We’re In, which lays out, in tightly argued detail and a welter of colourful character sketches, the disaster wrought by state welfare in Britain. One of his chapters deals with the state’s actions in the area of pensions, now a red-hot controversial area for politicians not just in Britain, but in much of the industrialised world where populations are greying and birthrates falling. Today, it appears that Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, may have pre-emptively stiffed a report, due out next week, from the Pension Commission panel. The Commission is thought to be advocating measures such as tackling the disincentives to saving caused by means-testing, and in raising the state pension age to 67 or more. Whatever happens, Bartholomew’s diagnosis of our ills is a powerful one and lays out the brutal fact that our political class, if judged by the same laws as applied to financial firms like insurers, banks or fund managers, would be indicted for fraud on an epic scale. It makes one weep to think of the opportunity that was lost in the destruction of Britain’s fast-growing private savings culture prior to the First World War. I can also strongly recommend Bartholomew’s blog. November 24th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have devoured pretty much most of John Le Carre’s spy stories, such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, A Small Town in Germany and Smiley’s People. His novels have a chilly, grittily believable quality that stands in contrast to the sophisticated romps of Ian Fleming (Who is actually a pretty good read, as Anthony Burgess once said). More recently, Le Carre, bereft of a Cold War to provide his theme, has turned his attention in a different direction. He has turned it towards the supposed evil of global capitalism and big drug firms. The Constant Gardener, a film which hammers the allegedly rapacious activities of drug companies, has now been turned into a film starring the British actor Ralph Fiennes (whom I once saw live giving a somewhat histrionic performance in London in the Ibsen play, Brand). The Social Affairs Blog, has a fine demolition job of the book and film here by UK academic Kenneth Minogue. Minogue’s treatment of the film is brutal. Now I can see why, as pointed out on this blog concerning the firm Pfizer, some drug companies get a deserved hammering. But what I don’t quite understand is the sheer venom directed at drug firms in general by people who presumably must realise that developing and researching drugs can be highly expensive. If drug firms cannot be sure that their products won’t be instantly copied by other manufacturers, who can be sure that drugs to combat AIDSand other killers would make it to the marketplace? The issue of intellectual property rights does of course remain a very tricky issue among libertarians, but do the opponents of any such property rights imagine that we can or should leave drug development to the State, given the experience of our own Soviet model of national health care? It seems as if the attacks on drug firms stems from a desire to seize the hard work and graft of others because one has a “right” to curative drugs. But if, as Le Carre and others contend, we should give drugs to the poor of the Third World for nothing, the bill for this could be enormous. I don’t really like the idea that the wealth creating capabilities of people should be held in partial ransom by the open-ended needs of billions of other people. On the subject of AIDS, it is always worth reading Andrew Sullivan, who has HIV, on why he loves drug companies. November 23rd, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be “genuinely bowled over” by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK’s own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about “shortages” or X and Y and then not realise that one person’s shortage is another person’s entrepreneurial opportunity. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past. If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis. A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term. For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here November 21st, 2005 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like Brian Micklethwait, I have been at the annual conference of the Libertarian Alliance , held at the National Liberal Club, a glorious Victorian building erected at a time when Britain’s ruling Liberal Party (formerly the Whigs) was genuinely liberal in the classical sense of that word. Among the topics to fuel the mind: libertarian approaches to the environment, a debate about whether limited-liability companies were a good thing; the contribution to libertarian thought of Ayn Rand and reflections on private enterprise and defence. An excellent collection of subjects. As some regular readers will know, the founder and director of the L.A., Chris R. Tame, has been fighting cancer and made a great effort to be present throughout the entire conference. Anyone who knows and admires this clever, generous and tenacious man will not be surprised at his determination not only to set up this conference but also to set in train plans for future events. He received a surprise award celebrating his achievements on Saturday night’s banquet, and no-one deserved it more. Without Chris, it is probable that Britain’s present libertarian movement would not exist, and I don’t think I am writing out of turn in doubting whether Samizdata would be quite what it is now, either. November 20th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those strange-sounding financial entities known as hedge funds, which are sometimes depicted as the Darth Vaders of the modern market, often have rather odd or dull names. So I was glad to come across a firm in the United States with a name that proudly celebrates the free market with unabashed gusto. The firm has a great merchandise selection, too. November 17th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
A regular commenter on this blog asked the question of whether the present Labour government is the most corrupt UK administration, ever. It is an interesting one. Blair and his wife enjoy the trappings of office, and at the taxpayer’s expense, with a gusto that is certainly hard to take. Cherie Blair’s activities are particularly questionable, such as the fees she reportedly made for speaking on behalf of charity. The recent demise of David Blunkett, who resigned earlier this month as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in scandal about his financial dealings, underscores how socialists are often unseated by money. But is this the most bent government ever? I don’t know. It would be nice if there were some sort of mathematical metric to judge the relative probity or venality of different administrations. The previous Major government had its share of pretty corrupt politicians. In the early 1990s we had the Matrix-Churchill affair concerning arms shipments to Iraq. Mrs Thatcher’s governments were relatively straight, although a few ministers did move remarkably easily into the top jobs of industries they had privatised. The Callaghan government, as far as I know, had few major financial scandals, although the Harold Wilson government had its low points, not least in Wilson’s unfortunate choice of friends. → Continue reading: How corrupt is Blair and does it matter? November 16th, 2005 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Robert A. Heinlein. Sackloads of other quotes by the great man here. November 14th, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
P.J. O’Rourke, the Republican Party Reptile supreme, has some caustic things to say about David Cameron, who may become the next leader of the Conservative Party. He is not terribly impressed:
By coincidence, Cameron has an article bashing Blair in the same edition of today’s Sunday Telegraph. It is not a bad article and correctly identifies much of the arrogance and reliance on a Big Government worldview. Like O’Rourke, I really would like this fellow to live up to his own declared scepticism about government activism and place the government of this country on a more modest, intelligent course. For what it is worth, though, I could not care less about whether Cameron has gone to a smart private school or not. Even O’Rourke clobbers Cameron for this, much to my susprise. Social chippiness ill becomes advocates of classical liberalism. November 13th, 2005 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an “enemy of Islam”, not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let’s hope Prince Charles takes notice. November 13th, 2005 | 107 comments - (Comments are closed)
The leader in this week’s Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:
No further comment required, surely. November 12th, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this year the British government overturned the old “double jeopardy” rule, that previously meant that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence. Today, Reuters reports that the first case of a man to face jurors for a second time for the same alleged crime is to go ahead. This is another step down a slippery slope, precisely because the argument for ending the rule is so seductive at first glance. It is possible to sympathise with victims or relative of crime victims who see a person whom they think has gotten away with it. Many years ago in the course of my then job, I watched several court cases in my native East Anglia and saw people get away with crimes on technicalities. It was maddening. But – the double jeopardy rule existed for a reason. If people can be repeatedly tried for the same crime, it creates a potential very bad and unintended consequence: police and the Crown Prosecution Service will become lazy in the preparation of cases. Why bother to get a case presented as powerfully as possible and with as much care if you think that if X gets acquitted, one can always have another go, and another, and another….? The potential for abuse of power from double jeopardy is at the core of why the rule exists. The law in the United States was based on the English model. Hard cases, however appealing, make bad laws, as they say. This is a bad day for justice in Britain. There have been a lot of them lately. November 10th, 2005 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
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