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“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.” – The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is. June 19th, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing. Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore. Perhaps one should call this the “Yukos Effect.” In many respects the seizure of the oil firm’s assets by Putin’s Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters – its owner was a decidely shady character – but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers. Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet. June 16th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I remarked in my previous post, Sir Bob Geldof is an annoying gentleman but capable of moments of lucidity. (I was a bit rude about him in my previous post. Sorry Bob). As an act of charity to the fellow, here is a quotation he might like to ponder:
Those words were uttered by Richard Cobden about 150 years ago, a man who saw a congruence between the ideals of personal liberty, concern for the welfare of one’s fellows, and the free market order. For him, like his great Victorian contemporaries like Sir Robert Peel, free trade was a progressive cause to be championed in the interests of the little guy, and not the cause of big powerful interests. It is a message that urgently needs to be understood by those who, no doubt from fine motives in a few cases, rail against global capitalism. If the case for the free market is to be more widely advanced, we have to appeal to the sense of idealism and concern for the downtrodden that animated our ancestors and could still appeal to the decent folk on the left. It is worth a try, anyway. June 15th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sir Bob “Make Poverty History” Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event. Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8. If Africa’s economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best. UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example. UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC. June 14th, 2005 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
The following meme has been bouncing around blogdom and what the heck, I’ll join in. What are the five books that mean most to me?
Honourable mentions: Heinlein, Ayn Rand (of course!), John Varley, Vernor Vinge, Ian Fleming, Joseph Conrad, Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh and Wodehouse. June 8th, 2005 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK government has floated the idea of fitting GPS tracking devices into cars as part of a way to enforce road tolls, with a pilot project starting in a few years’ time before going nationwide. One can immediately see how civil libertarians might object to such a setup, given that it could further consolidate the surveillance state. Even so, the idea of charging for road use has a strong free market pedigree, as the Adam Smith Institute blog makes clear here. Road toll systems operated by private firms need not necessarily involve the centralised data collection systems that our present UK government might favour. One little detail of the ASI comment made me grin, in that apparently, road tolls in Hong Kong failed in the 1980s to become law because men feared the toll invoices would reveal they had been spending their evenings down the local bordellos. Okaaaay. June 6th, 2005 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam’s nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force. In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam’s massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning. Israel’s bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid. What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog. But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real. The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:
The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam’s threat was not imminent – though possibly inevitable – there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences. June 4th, 2005 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jonathan Wilde of the admirable libertarian group blog, Catallarchy, argues that poverty, rather than wealth, is “unnatural”, in as much as it is the stupidity of governments, rather than some ineradicable feature of our world, that prevents humans from attaining the opulence (to use that lovely 18th Century word) that we are capable of attaining in co-operation with our fellows. I am not so sure that Wilde is entirely right. Is it only the state that has in the past blocked the path to wealth? Surely the lack of scientific knowledge, limited division of labour and so forth played a part in poverty. Don’t misunderstand me – I think that Wilde makes a good point, but to say that wealth and happiness is the natural state of mankind begs as many questions as it may answer. All the more reason, of course, to ram home the fact that our capitalist civilisation should be regarded as a marvel to be celebrated and defended. June 3rd, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today’s art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced. In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly. Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway. June 2nd, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
French voters go to the polls this weekend to vote on the European Union constitution, with polls so far suggesting that the “no’s” will narrowly win and shaft the wretched project, although one should never, ever under-estimate the ability of the political establishment to scare voters into saying “oui”. My hope, needless to say, is that the French vote against the constitution and throw a great big spanner in the works and prevent the creation of what will be, explicitly, a European superstate. It is pointless at this vantage point to guess exactly what will be the impact on British political life if the French do nix the constitution. My rough guess is that Blair will secretly breath a deep sigh of relief, as will the Tories. I also think that the United States will also be glad about a no vote, although I am just guessing. As Anatole Kaletsky writes in the Times today, the chronic underperformance of the euro zone economy is at the heart of much of that disenchantment (although other issues are important too). Here’s a key graf:
He has a point, although I am struck by the fact that in France, much of the hostility to the constitution is coming not from pro-free marketeers, as is the case in many respects in Britain, but from those who fear that the process will open up France’s high regulated, high-tax economy to the icy winds of laissez faire. The ironies abound. Of course, the fact of mere voters saying no to the EU juggernaut is unlikely to deflect the mixed assortment of deluded idealists, crooks, place-seekers and sundry camp-followers from trying to advance their aims. But a delicious irony would it be if the land of Bonaparte, de Gaulle and Asterix puts a major block in their path. May 26th, 2005 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s social democratic (SPD) party has been hit hard in regional elections over the weekend, with voter anger at his party over the crummy state of the economy overwhelming an attempt by some of his own party members to whip up a storm of anti-capitalist sentiment in order to cling to power. Good. I honestly don’t know whether we are seeing a transition phase in Germany towards sanity and liberal economics. What is clear is that a country that has suffered double-digit unemployment for more than half a decade cannot go on like this without dreadful strains on its social fabric. Maybe some of the more intelligent parts of the German political class might get this point. We need the once-mighty German economic machine, brought to such a pitch by the late great Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Ehrhard (friend of Hayek) brought to a purring level of growth again. It is in no-body’s interests, least of all ours in Britain, to see that nation permanently in the doldrums. There is a related article here about what has gone wrong in Germany here in the latest edition of the Spectator. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, read the whole thing. May 23rd, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Story here that says that far from being a bad thing, sitting outside in the sun for at least 15 minutes a day is good for you, latest medical findings suggest. It certainly is a bit of a change from the period, I well recall, in the 1990s, when it appeared to be the case that any exposure to sun was fraught with danger as a result of the supposed hole in the ozone layer. I recall the constant worries, fuelled in the press and elsewhere, about skin cancer and the dangers of overdoing the sunshine. Sometimes you have to just laugh. Of course being exposed to the sun is good for you in moderation! Mankind was not meant to sit indoors or conceal every aspect of the body all the time. Anyone I know who spends the vast majority of his or her time indoors looks, well, unwell, in my opinion. I always make the effort to break out of my office at lunchtime to get what passes for sunshine in this damp country of ours. It is not rocket science. Coming next: medical experts reveal that regular exercise, eating vegetables and playing sports can do you some good. May 23rd, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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