“At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done. Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks.”
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Dan Mitchell, of the CATO Institute and an excellent defender of those much-maligned tax havens, has a list of predictions for 2012 about the global scene. I agree with all of them apart from the sports one. Here are mine: Obama will be re-elected by a whisker, but the GOP will cement its control of Congress. Hopefully, a credible, free marketeer Republican will be chosen in the next election who does not carry some of the baggage of Ron Paul regarding his more unusual supporters or his flaky views (in my opinion) on foreign affairs. But in fairness to Paul, his achievement in getting the libertarian message out there on issues such as the economy, role of the Fed and the bailouts will continue to resonate, for which he deserves great praise. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged will continue to sell lots of copies; Detlev Schlichter will continue, hopefully, to spread good sense among the financial community and among some policymakers. China’s property market and wider economy will slow down markedly, though I think it will avoid a hard landing. I am not sure that the country will fully float the yuan in 2012, although it should do so. The UK coalition government will struggle on, although at least one high-profile Lib Dem minister will resign. I hope it is Vincent Cable, who is an idiot. Brazil’s economy will continue to grow rapidly. The Latin America economy will gain momentum, apart from such wrecks as Venezuela. The London Olympics will go off largely without incident and as predicted, the British taxpayer will be paying for it for many years. Boris Johnson will try and milk it for his own political purposes, probably with some success. Sarkozy will lose the French presidential elections unless the economy improves. The French National Front will again get a lot of votes. Mobile technology will continue to change the banking industry. Italy’s public finances will remain a mess. And yet in spite of it all, the northern part of Italy will continue to be the rich, beautiful place it often is, confounding some of the doomsters. Greece will leave the euro; possbily one more country may do so. Turkey’s efforts to join the EU will continue to founder. The issue of the “education bubble” will remain one of the biggest domestic policy screwups in nations such as the UK and US. Policymakers will tinker with it. Cheap flights will remain one of the main positives about living in Europe. Pope Benedict’s failing health (he looked absolutely shattered in his Christmas address) will become more of a talking point. AGW alarmists will continue to lose ground. A major politician in a big country will take on the Green lobby. (Well, we can hope so). There will be continued big advances in areas such as nanotech and medicine, mostly shockingly under-reported. Parts of Africa will get more prosperous. Commercial space flight will loom even larger as a reality. Hooray! Piracy in the Indian Ocean might abate as countries adopt harsher methods to deal with it. More merchant vessels will be armed or escorted by vessels that are as insurance premia adjust. Argentina will occasionally make sabre-rattling remarks about the Falklands, which will be largely ignored. England might actually do quite well in the European Championships soccer tournament; England’s cricket team should have a decent year. People from Northern Ireland will continue to win lots of golf majors. Roger Federer might – as he has shown from recent form – win Wimbledon again, confirming he is the greatest sportsman of our time and the most famous Swiss person in the world. Lady Gaga will start dressing demurely as a way of shocking her fans (I am one of them). The quality of driving in Malta will continue to get worse. Latin will make a comeback as a subject in UK state schools. Finally, more of a hope than a prediction: Hollywood will make a decent hard science fiction movie this year and Ipswich Town will avoid relegation, just. Happy New Year to you all (apart from the trolls). January 1st, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Here is an interesting article about growing fear-mongering about nanotechnology. Of course, even one of the founding fathers of the nanotech idea, Eric Drexler, has warned about the underside of this technology. December 30th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“One of the more unexpected things I discovered as CEO of a pharmaceutical company was that I had to think as much or more about the federal government than I did about our competition. I had known on an intellectual level that government was involved in the private sector in a great many ways, but it was only when I was actually in business that I felt the full impact.” Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, page 253. He is describing his time in the private sector during the late 70s and 80s, and emerges as quite a firebrand for supply-side economics (he got to know Arthur Laffer). Whatever you think of Rummy as a defense secretary (under the Ford and George W. Bush administrations), he comes across as a formidable man of US public and commercial life. Here is something that I wrote about the FDA and associated drug regulation issues a while ago here. December 28th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Excerpt from an article in Wired, the tech and futurism magazine, about a Swedish investment firm, Recorded Future, that is taking the use of social networks and other systems to new heights in its attempt to get a jump on the market. In the process, it sheds new light on how the intelligence-gathering process works. Here’s another couple of paragraphs:
The businesses was founded by a chap called Christopher Ahlberg, a former member of Sweden’s special forces and a serious entrepreneur. In its own way, this article is just another example of how Sweden is not quite the socialist nation that it is sometimes said to be, either by its starry-eyed admirers or detractors. There is a lot of entrepreneurial zest up there in the frozen north, it seems. December 23rd, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I head to London’s Heathrow Airport en route to Malta for the holidays, I see this item during a spot of web-surfing. It is a piece by Gerard Baker, in the Wall Street Journal. Baker has spent a fair while in the US, and clearly, he’s been infected:
I must say that “soccer”, at least in how it is played these days in the English Premiership, tests my loyalty due to the real and alleged antics of the players as much as anything. Further afield, I am still spellbound by such players as Barcelona’s residing genius, Lionel Messi, but in general, I am not as much interested in soccer as I used to be. As a result of my general soccer fatigue, I have become more interested in following rugby union and cricket (it helps that England is playing good cricket at the moment; not so the rugby guys). As for American football, I have never really watched it much (I went to a game in Texas in 2004 but that was about it). As for other sports and events, I can admire the courage and physical endurance of those taking part, such as horse racing jockeys, Tour de France cyclists and the downhill skiers. I can admire a gladiatorial game of tennis between such giants as Federer and Nadal, or, for that matter, watch nervously as a great golfer slugs it out on the greens against a rival. And non-PC though it is, a great boxing match can hold me in its thrall. For me, there are a whole group of sports that I like, and for different reasons. I like watching certain motor sports, but that is more a “spectacle” where the whole event – scenery, noise, colour and adrenalin – come together (as in Le Mans, which I attended this year with a bunch of friends). December 21st, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or striven to win favour by telling them that from the Crown or from Parliament that could be got which could not be got from themselves, by themselves. I would impress upon you this. What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of distribution. Better by far that you should save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse of the State your earnings of which only part can at best come back.” December 21st, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every so often, when I hear people tell me that the Cold War is a long-lost issue and that we need to “move on”, to use that cant expression, I remember that there are, unbelievably, people out there who still think that the Soviet Union and its empire was a benevolent force and no worse than that of the NATO alliance that successfully helped to bring it down, and who therefore regard people who helped thwart the Soviet regime, like Vaclav Havel, as bad men. Case in point is this creature by the name of Neil Clark, writing in the Guardian newspaper:
Absolutely. Presumably, that explains why there were millions of downtrodden, poor people attempting to enter the Soviet Empire from such hellholes as West Germany. That explains why East Berlin erected the Wall, to contain the flood of people trying to enter it. Yes, that must have been the reason. (Sarcasm alert). I guess the fact that the Soviet System created a two-tier society: the Party and Everyone Else, must have escaped Mr Clark’s gimlet-eye attention. Perhaps the Gulag, the shootings of political opponents, the construction of the White Sea Canal (with slave labour), etc, were in fact all features of ensuring that the “needs of the majority” came “first”. For what it is worth, on a more theoretical level, the horrors of collectivism can be summed up in Marx’s dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. For if you believe that the needs of the majority trump such pesky issues as rights or liberties, then so much the worse for such liberal principles. But in practice, of course, the history of the Communist world was littered with stories of shortages, famines and shabby, crappily produced goods and services. I had actually forgotten about Neil Clark’s existence. Alas, his ghastly prose now comes back to haunt me. I remember reading about this character about five or six years ago, when writers such as Oliver Kamm and Stephen Pollard tore this man’s sophistries to pieces. Thanks to Michael Blackburn for the pointer. Christina Odone also rubbishes Clark. And here is a useful roundup of links for deniers of socialist brutality. Clark makes the list, unsurprisingly. December 20th, 2011 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It was Havel who helped, as much as anyone, to put across the idea that Communism was built on an illusion and that, once people began to doubt the illusion, it would collapse.” – Ed West It says much about this great Czech that he had the signal honour of being sneered at by Noam Chomsky. I still haven’t got round to visiting the Czech Republic yet, although I have relations across the border in Germany. I must get around to dealing with this oversight soon. December 19th, 2011 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unfortunately, not even the Gray Lady was able to extend the lifespan of this essayist and controversialist beyond his age of 62. Farewell, Hitch. December 16th, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.” Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing. It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available). As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film. I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross. December 15th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“All corporate taxes fall on households in the end. Companies might be convenient places to get cash from but they are not the people actually carrying the economic burden. It is some combination of shareholders, workers and consumers that are carrying the burden: those getting the social services which they are unable to fund.” – Tim Worstall, dealing with yet another piece of nonsense from that over-blown socialist buffoon, Richard Murphy. I have to admire Tim’s stamina in how he relentlessly mocks and refutes the rubbish from Murphy. But someone has to do it. December 15th, 2011 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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