Here are some interesting thoughts via Prof. Stephen Hicks about the death of one of the Mongols and what it meant for Europe back in the time of the invasions.
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October 5th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Steele, at his Unforseen Contingencies blog. Hmmmm. I agree with much of this although it is worth repeating that being a skeptic about the claims made for catastrophic man-made global warming is not the same as being some sort of incorrigible “denier”. I would also add something else. Libertarianism is no different from any other secular or for that matter, religious creed in having its fair share of nutters, heretics or those who say or do things that are just plain embarrassing. But even nutters can say or do things that open up debates that more “reasonable” people shy away from. Consider just how shockingly radical Mrs Thatcher’s brand of conservatism was made to appear 30 years ago, for example. Long ago, I learned to stop worrying about this so long as the core message of respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness came shining through and so long as the majority of people who held such views seemed to be, and were, decent people. The problems start when that does not happen. October 4th, 2012 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome – plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: Small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American Midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.” Page 170 of Accelerando, by Charles Stross. (First published in 2005. ) Whatever you think of Stross’s non-fiction views, such as on libertarianism, his fiction often includes hilarious passages such as this. October 3rd, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Hobsbawm’s implacable refusal to recant his views when faced with their grotesque consequences tells us something about the belligerent mindset of the wider British Left. But the eminence that he and his fellow travellers have enjoyed also speaks to the bovine complacency with which, since Mrs Thatcher, the Conservatives have allowed such dubious figures licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and our universities.” October 2nd, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I tend not to bother much these days with the dead-tree press but occasionally I’ll pick up a paper on my journeys on London’s Underground to one meeting or whatever. Yesterday, Anthony Hilton, writing in his regular column in the Evening Standard, absolutely crushed the argument, as floated by the mis-named Liberal Democrats and its leader, Nick Clegg, that what Britain needs is a “wealth tax”, given the existence of current state grabs of our wealth upon death:
Absolutely. Hilton continues:
And he plunges a stake into the heart:
Of course, it is entirely possible that Clegg and his allies are only giving the impression of wanting to enact such a tax in exchange for agreeing to more, supposed spending cuts, and in reality, they realise how pointless and self-destructive such taxes could be. But it is also a sign of how far away we are from any coherent notions of tax in the first place. Consider: the current government recently sought to attract foreign investors to the UK by offering accelerated visas for those investing serious amounts in the UK; it has, it says, sought to clarify rules about domicile and residence. Last year, finance minister George Osborne vowed to cut the top rate of income tax to a still-high 45 per cent. Imposing a wealth tax would blow such limited moves towards commonsense out of the water. September 27th, 2012 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Steele, a US blogger writing about some wretch by the name of Eric Posner, a tenured law professor who believes the US 1st Amendment is so just 18th Century, daaaahling. September 27th, 2012 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is easier to search for your own solutions to your own problems than to those of others. Most of the recent success stories are countries that not get a lot of foreign aid and did not spend a lot of time in IMF programs, two of the indicators of the recent indicator of the White Man’s burden…Most of the recent disasters are just the opposite – tons of foreign aid and much time spent in IMF constraints. This of course involves some reverse causality….the disasters were getting IMF assistance and foreign aid because they were disasters, while the IMF and the donors bypassed success stories because those countries didn’t need the help. This does not prove that foreign assistance causes disaster, but it does show that outlandish success is very much possible without Western tutelage, while repeated treatments don’t seem to stem the tide of disaster in the failures. Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.” The White Man’s Burden, pages 345-346, by William Easterly (2006). Easterly is a US-based economics professor and has been a senior economist at the World Bank, as well as a columnist and regular commentator. His book, which despite the title is anything but a piece of Western triumphalism, is an example of a man who is prepared to discard ideas, however seemingly noble, if the results don’t stack up. And it is a book that ought to be compulsory reading for Britain’s coalition government as it continues to pour billions into overseas aid, despite the questionable results and even more questionable assumptions behind it. For far too long, the late writer and economist, Peter Bauer, was, like John the Baptist, a “voice crying in the wilderness” when it came to government aid programmes. Let’s hope more people wake up to the nonsense that a lot of so-called “aid” actually is. September 23rd, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Steele is a blogger I like to follow and he links to some terrific coverage of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. What surprises me – although I should not be surprised – is how this has just not registered much in the mainstream press, but then considering how much of the MSM is covering for Barack Obama, there is no surprise, really. On the other hand, if Mitt Romney – who is hardly my idea of a great candidate – makes a correct (sort of) comment to the effect that a large number of people who receive subsidies from the state are unlikely to vote for him, the MSM goes berserk. Colleagues in my office in London were remarking how stupid and nasty MR obviously is. When I quietly pointed out that he merely touched on how hard it is to reform entitlements when almost half the country is receiving them in some shape or form, it produced a few furrowed brows. In their mindset, only a Republican commits “gaffes”; if Obama calls the the Falkland Islands the Maldives, for instance, or gives an execrable speech at the expense of entrepreneurs, it is laughed off. “Everyone is human, we all make mistakes, you got him out of context” etc. Update: I love this piss-take of the MSM via Andrew Klavan.
September 20th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
From one of my daily reads, the excellent Tim Sandefur. He ‘s knocking down a piece of nonsense on land rights from the hopeless Matthew Yglesias:
Absolutely. When debating collectivists over issues such as property ownership, I sometimes come up against the “but the original owners of land stole it” line, except that even if true, it seems absurd to suggest that every subsequent transaction, however free of coercion, is somehow tainted in some way. So a caveman beat up his neighbour and took a patch of territory – that hardly means I am not the legitimate owner of my small apartment in Pimlico. Update: Related thoughts from Bryan Caplan. It includes an example of Murray Rothbard at his very best. September 20th, 2012 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“After all these years of endlessly repeating the same tired tropes on the New York Times op-ed page, taking Maureen Dowd’s columns seriously requires a suspension of disbelief that is normally only needed to watch science fiction.” September 18th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
First of all, I think it is fair to say that no-one who wants to be taken seriously should use the words “Arab Spring” without heavy irony.
Matt Welch, stating what is alas not obvious to officials at the US State Department. Meanwhile, I note – as have others – that the killing of the US ambassador in Libya only made it on page 4 of the New York Times. All the news that’s fit, to, er, print. Okay, I understand the limitations of print journalism, but something tells me that a journalist and editors goofed. A US ambassador got murdered, FFS. The US elections got a lot more interesting, alas, for horrible reasons. The ghost of Jimmy Carter hangs over it. Some wise comments, I think, from Walter Russell Mead. He is even-handed in how he regards the options for Obama and his opponent:
And this:
As he says, we are living through a period where there is a lot of what finance geeks and others call “event risk”. There is a lot of it about. I am off to Turkey tomorrow. Gulp. September 12th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool. My own prediction: Obama’s finished. September 7th, 2012 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
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