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“We’d rather like people not to live on flood plains. Because, you know, their existence is evidence that that’s where it floods sometimes. Not being able to insure your house against floods if you live on a flood plain is what is known, in technical language, as a “fucking clue” that perhaps you shouldn’t be living there. Surely to God at least one person in government knows someone at Lloyds of London?” – Tim Worstall. I love it when he gets justifiably riled. July 12th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematic violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.” July 5th, 2012 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
“In order to punish Barclays further, they should have to start life again as a third division Scottish football club.” Mark Littlewood, boss of the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a private communication via Facebook. It is so good that I don’t think he’ll mind me quoting him here. He is talking about the resignation, announced today, of Bob Diamond as CEO of Barclays. That bank has been fined a total of £290 million by US and UK authorities for manipulating the inter-bank interest rates known as LIBOR. Criminal prosecutions are high possible and the net could widen very far indeed. Barclays is one of those UK banks – HSBC being the other big high street one – that did not receive, nor ask for, bailouts by the UK taxpayer. However, that bank, like all the rest, did benefit from the privilege of being able to get access to cheap Bank of England funding; and it also benefited from state-backed guarantees. The point cannot be made too often: we don’t have a proper capitalist banking system but at best a hybrid. But it also needs to be recognised that even in a world of total laissez faire and no funny fiat money, there might still be market conventions for setting a benchmark reference rate for interest rates between banks, just as there is a daily “fix” for the gold price in the London spot gold market. Such market benchmarks arise, like a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order, because they are useful for other economic actors in pricing products of their own. However, when a bank or other institution fiddles the prices submitted for these benchmarks, it erodes confidence in the system and the reputation of the miscreant will be badly damaged. In a crude sort of way, what has happened is a good sign that organisations which screw up suffer. Update: Guido Fawkes weighs in, and points out that the manipulation of interest rates has also been government policy for years. July 3rd, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
There might be a tendency, I think, among some world-weary types to say that this whole “Fast and Furious” disaster now unravelling is nothing more than the US equivalent of the sort of “Westminster Village” obsessions that we Brits got engrossed over more than a year ago. Nothing much to see here, please move along, etc. But I don’t see it that way. The use of executive privilege to squash oversight of key decisions made by this administration seems to be a serious matter that ought to concern the wider public, not least as people got killed and hurt. Jennifer Rubin weighs in on the subject of the lamentable US Attorney General, Eric Holder:
Bear in mind this appeared in the Washington Post, the same newspaper that we associate with the Watergate scandal, and hardly a bastion of the “vast rightwing conspiracy”. June 28th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a great video featuring “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, talking to John Tierney, . Lomborg discusses his views about how any debate on improving lives of the poor around the world requires us to understand that resources are scarce, and that being obsessed by “sexy”, attention-grabbing issues means we ignore the less glamorous, but often far more severe issues. Of course, the media and political world tends to push attention towards the “eye-catching initiatives” (to use Tony Blair’s formulation). But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for this. Lomborg is terrific. No wonder he drives deep Greens nuts. I recommend pretty much all his works, especially his book, Cool It. June 27th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a brief comment I left over at Tim Worstall’s blog, regarding fractional reserve banking and supposed journalistic illiteracy about said:
June 25th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Brian Micklethwait wrote about this “Fast and Furious” scandal some time ago here, but the story – which has not really caught fire in the MSM and has barely registered over this side of the Pond – has now gone into another level, according to Michael Graham (H/T, Instapundit):
President Obama has invoked something called executive privilege to prevent certain documents emerging about this case and how it has been handled. This is pretty serious stuff, as the guys at The Volokh Conspiracy blog argue. In fact, it is unconstitutional. (Not that the POTUS seems overly bothered by such considerations). The irony is rich, of course, because it has been claimed that the administration has been more than willing to leak details of things such as the US moves to capture OBL, and other targets, to its friends in the media and even Hollywood. Now, I am not going to pretend that the Republicans are much better, if at all. These are politicians we are talking about here. The point, though, needs to be made loud and clear to those still operating under the illusion that the White House is occupied by someone with any consideration for the limits of power. It also shows that he is not all that smart: he’s given the GOP a nice big scandal to raise hell about between now and November. What the f**k do they teach at Harvard these days? Update: Good comment by Mark Steyn. Very apt:
June 22nd, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“If you want others to pay more tax, then you should be consistent and pay as much as you possibly can yourself – you should even consider paying more than you have to by making a donation to HMRC or to government-owned institutions, such as NHS trusts. Those who believe taxes are moral in of themselves – a commitment to the common good – should practice what they preach. Yet if the allegations of massive, albeit legal, avoidance involving Carr are right – he hasn’t denied them – a man who specialises in ridiculing others, often in the cruellest of ways, may now end up as the butt of others’ jokes.”
Update: “The real joy is that these people are all Lefties of the worst sort. I don’t just mean they’re pompous, preachy and self-satisfied – God knows, the Right has a few of those as well. I mean they’re the most glaring kind of hypocrite, denouncing their enemies as not just wrong but evil, while committing the sins they rail against. It’s like those class crusaders – Polly Toynbee, Diane Abbott – who send their children to private schools: by their own behaviour, they forfeit any claim to be taken seriously. It may seem gratuitous to rejoice in their downfall, but the moralising morons have fashioned the rods for their own backs. It would be positively rude not to take a thwack or two.” Okay, another update, from Jamie Whyte, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “For those Brits who complain that Mr. Carr is not paying enough towards their state-provided services are not really motivated by moral principles. They simply want Mr. Carr’s money. And Mr. Cameron wants their votes. Their outcries are not the sound of moral indignation. They are the howls of frustrated predators.” June 21st, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Greg Beato at Reason magazine (the July edition) has this nice item, “The Internet vs the NEA”, about how innovative ways to fund creative projects in the arts have become such a hit that they are annoying the advocates for the publicly subsidised (ie, from taxes) sector. He is talking about a crowd-funding project in the US known as Kickstarter:
Such a business model for funding artists and so forth might also demonstrate how people can get certain creative ideas off the ground without the largesse of a single patron, be it a state or person. And because contributions to ventures such as Kickstarter are voluntary, it also means that the donors – many thousands of them – are far more likely to be engaged and interested in what gets created. By contrast, if you were to ask a person on the street about what they thought their tax pounds were used for in funding the arts, some might have a general idea, but many would not have a clue, and certainly not down the level of fine detail. For example, how many of any readers of this blog could quickly come up with ideas on what new sculptors got funding this year? June 19th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Pleasure is a brain wave right now. Happiness is a good story of your life. The Greek word for happiness is “eudaimonia,” which means literally “having a good guiding angel,” like Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. The schoolbook summary of the Greek idea in Aristotle says that such happiness is “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how. – Deirdre N McCloskey, writing about the whole, rather dubious realm of “happiness studies”. The fact that the UK’s paternalistic prime minister, David Cameron, is a fan of this sort of thing does not fill me with confidence. June 19th, 2012 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000. In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.” Via Instapundit. He was quoting from an article by the Wall Street Journal. Of course, such “remote learning” is not quite as new as it might appear: even the Open University system in the UK has been going for more than 40 years. But the internet and related technologies are accelerating developments in this vein. Given all the issues surrounding the need to cut the cost of the public sector and improve standards and teaching, anything that can drive change in a better direction is a good thing. I wish this “education entrepreneur” well. If the best minds in Silicon Valley – and elsewhere – get involved, then this is one of those developments that will be arguably more significant than any amount of public service tinkering that usually makes more noise in the news. Of course, his supreme blog highness, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, has been pushing the whole theme of there being a higher education “bubble” for some time, but being the kind of person he is, does not just complain. He likes to pounce on examples of how to move education in a saner direction. June 16th, 2012 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Historically, remember, Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant; John Roebling, a German one; Nikola Tesla, a Serb who emigrated from Croatia; Albert Einstein was a German immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1940; the great economist, Ludwig von Mises, was an Austrian immigrant; and Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a Russian one. The list could be indefinitely extended. In our day, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, emigrated to America from Taiwan. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is an Indian immigrant; Andreas Bechtolsheim, another of Sun’s founders, a German one. This list, too, could be greatly extended.” June 15th, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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