That there are now more overweight humans than starving humans is one of mankind’s greatest achievements.
– Damien Counsell has said it many times. Good for him.
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Here is a fascinating YT documentary on Liechtenstein, that remote Elysium high on the young Rhine, with a long interview with the Prince himself, starting just before 6 minutes in, and running mostly to the end, in all 38 minutes. Some fascinating commentary from him on his policies and his country’s history, including the slightly farcical Nazi ‘March on Vaduz’ of 1938. Having started as a ‘rotten borough’ in the Holy Roman Empire, the first Prince to live there moved in as late as 1938. He is a fan of being in the EEA, unlike the Swiss, but he got it through via direct democracy. Every village has the right to leave the nation. He found inspiration for local democracy from Switzerland and the United States (at the State level one can infer). They have a system where 11 municipalities (villages) engage in tax and regulatory competition with each other. He says that he is trying to make government work. (He’s not done badly). He wants them to deliver services with low cost and therefore low taxation. Are you listening Mrs May, or are you changing your slogan to ‘Brexit means Anschluß’? There is direct democracy, where you have to explain your policies. That actually means that people discuss government proposals and it provides stability despite the low threshold for proposing changes. He also has his royal veto power, last used in 1961 for a hunting law. The only law he can’t veto would be the abolition of the monarchy. Some less ‘royalist’ politicians note with almost heart-breaking sadness in their faces that by popular vote, the royal veto was retained, so they cannot prevail. “…One kept taxation as low as possible so as to attract business…” He asks why should taxes support banks. He notes that people are getting detached from governments, and states can get over-centralised. GDP per capita: $139,000 (USA $59,000). Of course, the people and what they do are what make Liechtenstein what it is. By God, it looks like a decent place. June 8th, 2018 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I like this, about Jordan Peterson, in Esquire, by Wesley (good name, considering his subject) Yang:
The next paragraph solves this puzzle:
The more rabid leftists call anything they don’t like Nazi. And the thing they dislike most is The West, which they want trashed. The West’s power, and everything good that The West stands for. Anything – anything – which is anti-West, they support. Jordan Peterson is preaching virtues, public and personal, virtues which are the total opposite of Nazism and which might, unlike Nazism, greatly strengthen The West, by persuading a generation of Western and Westernised wastrels to sort themselves out, and to have good lives with good consequences. Therefore Peterson must be denounced as a Nazi, regardless of what he says he is, and regardless of what he actually says about the Nazis. May 1st, 2018 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, you can be sure the global elites, the media, and Trump’s ideological enemies at home and abroad will do everything in their power to downplay, ignore, or misrepresent Trump’s role in whatever progress is made on the Korean peninsula from hereon. Like those who can’t bring themselves to accept that Reagan’s policies were instrumental in bringing about the end of the Cold War rather than leading to nuclear Armageddon, those who claimed Trump was recklessly endangering the world will be incapable of acknowledging he’s probably made it safer. How much safer remains to be seen, but let’s recall Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing except winning the presidency after George W. Bush. Nobody is ever going to award the Nobel prize to Donald Trump even if he permanently eliminates war and suffering by tomorrow night, but Obama could at least gift him his. April 28th, 2018 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Labour’s plan to tackle inequality can revive the ailing development sector”, writes Nick Dearden in the Guardian. Clicking on Mr Dearden’s name took me to a link that said, in true Grauniad style, “Nick Dearden is director of the Global Justice Now (formerly World Development Movement)” The faltering fortunes of “the Global Justice Now” and similar organizations in what is called the aid “sector” (as if were part of the economy rather than a drain on it) distress Mr Dearden for understandable reasons. No man likes to see his prospects of a secure and comfortable living imperilled. I do not see why the rest of us should care. I would be quite happy to issue the development sector with a one way ticket to Switzerland. Mr Dearden writes,
And the problem with this was…?
Emphasis added. Libertarians and similarly inclined folk often see the Guardian commentariat as being no less daft than the Guardian writers. That is not always true. Nearly all the most popular comments to this piece make pretty good sense and I am going to quote several of them. For instance take this one from someone called ‘Humza’, who says,
Mr Dearden continues,
In other words, Labour’s policy is unworkable.
Neocolonialism! British interference in the policies of sovereign African nations! (Hat tip to commenter ‘daveg861’ for that point.)
In other words, Labour’s policy is unworkable. Wait, didn’t I say that only a minute ago? Yes, I did, but if Mr Dearden is going to repeatedly state that reducing inequality cannot be done unless the Labour party conquers the world I am just going to have to repeatedly point out that it ain’t gonna happen.
Those policies require further clarity in office the way a fish requires further water on the deck of a trawler.
As ‘FatherChewyLouie’ says in the most recommended comment, “What exactly do Labour mean by providing “global leadership” on the refugee crisis? If it’s what I think it means then I can guarantee it won’t be a vote winner.” Meanwhile, back in the The Global Justice Now! universe:
Countries like Britain might have, but Britain grew rich because of the Industrial Revolution before it had African colonies. When it got them it turned out they were a net cost to the British government and were unpopular thereby. The original “Little Englanders” were opposed to expansion of the British Empire for that reason. (I swear, I had already written that when I saw a comment by ‘YEverKnot’ saying the very same thing. Of course it is a fairly obvious point to make.)
Reparations? That might not go down well with voters. However, the point about aid being largesse which can be cut off on a whim is true. And thus Mr Dearden unintentionally makes an excellent argument against government-to-government foreign aid and against the very existence of his beloved “development sector”. March 27th, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The basic facts are given in this Wikipedia page: Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and there is a BBC “What we know so far” piece here. I keep hoping to read somewhere that they are beginning to recover. I keep not doing it. What should the UK government do? What do you think about the measures it has taken so far? Here are some opinions from several different points of view to get you started: What can Theresa May do about Russia over the Salisbury poisoning? – Dominic Waghorn, Sky TV. After the Skripal attack, talk of war only plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands – Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. Alex Salmond: Don’t shut down my TV show over spy attack – Andy McLaren, STV News. March 16th, 2018 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
Have you ever watched someone make a speech and caught the moment when the speaker lost the sympathy of the audience? Those friendly to the speaker wince, suppress it, and lock their heads and their eyes into looking straight ahead. In contrast the hostile part of the audience exchange glances – did you hear it too? There can be moments like that when reading a news story too. Suddenly a detail leaps out. The reader who is friendly to the subject of the story winces, while the hostile reader cannot wait to click on the comments. For the Oxfam story I think that detail was the prostitutes half-naked except for Oxfam T-shirts. Without that the story was and is a bit meh. So men far from home use prostitutes? Meh. They call it “the oldest profession” for a reason. Most people, even those with traditional views on sexual morality, would say that is a private matter. So women in countries stricken by war or disaster turn to prostitution to survive? In that case the power imbalance makes the picture look uglier – but realistically it is inevitable. There was a sweet letter in today’s Times in which the writer suggested that we send the army to administer aid rather than these NGOs. Like the writer, I have a higher opinion of our armed services than I do of our misnamed “non-governmental” organisations, but consider the centuries old connotations of the term “camp follower”. Where soldiers are, there will be women offering to sell them sex. Every story on this seems to include the line that some of the prostitutes may have been underage. Serious if proven, but so far, not proven. No one has put their name to a definite allegation citing times and places. May have been underage. Meh. But this is not meh:
That image has deeply unpleasant associations. There is not even the fig leaf of buying the girl a drink and making a little awkward conversation to make it feel more like an interaction of equals. Black women are labelled as available for white men by brand name packaging. Think how that must rankle in Haiti. But we’re libertarians, right? (I have used this line before.) Indeed we are. Neither guilty whites in London nor resentful blacks in Port-au-Prince should have a veto on two individuals making a deal. Subject to some provisos about promises made by either party to their spouses, to local laws, and to agreed conditions of employment, that is still my opinion. However it is not Oxfam’s opinion. Do a search for the word “Oxfam” on this blog. There were a few sensible noises on free trade from this semi-fake charity fifteen years ago, but in recent years Oxfam has grown fat peddling economically illiterate bullshit on the alleged evils of “inequality” and “speculation”. White guilt and black resentment were its stock in trade. Actual trade was something to be taxed, regulated and eternally prefixed with some veto-word like “Fair” or “Ethical” that showed permission had been given by censorious third parties for the transaction to occur. Live by the sword, die by the sword. February 14th, 2018 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been known to give Oxfam small amounts of my money. I love a bargain, and if I’m passing an Oxfam charity shop I’ll pop in, and if there is a little something that takes my fancy, I’ll spend a quid or two to have it. Er, not in the Roland van Hauwermeiren sense. Call me over-optimistic, but I would like to think that alongside what Liddle rightly calls Oxfam’s “adolescent political grandstanding and weird warping of reality” – a.k.a. “socialism” – the charity has some employees who are actually quite good at getting help quickly to desperate people after an earthquake or similar catastrophe. That’s my excuse anyway. By the way, so long as they are over the age of consent, I strongly oppose prostitution or the hiring of prostitutes being an offence in law. However I believe it was the case that Oxfam made a rule forbidding its aid workers to employ prostitutes, then covered it up when senior employees broke that rule. Much of Oxfam’s sickness comes from its receipt of government money. No longer was it entirely dependent on the goodwill of ordinary people with their naive belief that the money they gave should be spent on medicine or tents or emergency latrines rather than politicking, and their equally tedious preference that their donations not be spent on prostitutes. Freed from all that, Oxfam could branch out into being a political party for people too sensitive to do the hard graft of going door to door and canvassing for votes, and as a bonus it could use government money to advocate for the policies that would keep the stream of government money coming. February 11th, 2018 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been quite a grim century for Mongolia, many decades under the Soviet yoke after the ‘Mad Baron’ von Ungern-Sternberg managed to take over in the chaos after WW1, and write his own grim chapter, and still its capital is called ‘Red Hero’, but despite that name, Mongolia has got itself into the EU’s bad books, not by human rights abuses, but by a lack of them as a tax haven.
The scoundrels, the shame of it, not taxing someone!
OK, how about undercutting or matching them for starters? That would, actually, hurt them. For some reason, the ‘charity’ Oxfam thinks it is entitled to chip in.
Are Oxfam’s shops taxed (or business-rated) in the same way as their commercial neighbours? Can they explain how sanctions (so useful against South Africa under Apartheid) improve the lot of the poor? Since sanctions harm, the corollary is that free trade doesn’t, and yet… But I digress. Let’s hope that Mongolia shows the same defiance before its accusers as the Baron von Ungern-Sternberg did when facing a People’s Court, from ‘Setting the East Ablaze’ by Peter Hopkirk.
Then they shot him. The full blacklist is:
and conceding the point that taxes create poverty:
December 5th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
What would be the point of a royal engagement without a Guardian article to miss it? In celebration of the forthcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Afua Hirsch writes,
Ever charitable, I had initially assumed that Ms Hirsch was too young to personally remember this furore, by which I actually mean briefly successful effort on the part of a few journalists to keep each other in work by pretending to be outraged at each other’s stories, and that was why she portrayed something that happened in the year 2000 as if it happened in the 1960s. But that cannot be the case. She was nineteen at the time it was published. Perhaps her observations were tinged with a wistful desire to re-enact the heroic days of the Civil Rights era. If so, perhaps I should be more charitable after all; seventeen years ago that sort of playacting was not less common than it is now but was more excusable. Whatever. I too remember Baroness Gavron’s remarks and the reaction to them. The previous week a report had been released by the Runnymede Trust called The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. Lady Gavron was one of the authors. Unfortunately but inevitably the authors had received abusive hate mail from the sort of embittered nobodies who used to send hate mail to people they read about in the papers. (Nowadays we have Twitter for that.) But no, the reaction of the mainstream media to Lady Gavron’s remarks did not include talk of “racial dilution”. Note the absence of any names. All Ms Hirsch tells us is that “Some suspected” a clandestine attempt at getting rid of the monarchy through interracial marriages. Well, yeah, in a population of 56 million as it then was, some will suspect almost anything. But if a journalist on any publication other than National Front News had said any such thing they would have been out of a job the same day. At this point the reader might be asking themselves why if it was all so trivial I am claiming to remember Lady Gavron’s remarks across seventeen years? To answer that let’s look again at this passage from Ms Hirsch’s article:
As I remembered it the reason so many had assumed that Lady Gavron was advocating that Charles enter a loveless strategic marriage was not at all that they found the idea of a love match between two people of different race inconceivable. It was because Lady Gavron had advocated exactly that: a strategic royal marriage not for love but in order to send a message. Worse, she had said that it would have been “great” if Prince Charles had been told to marry someone for political reasons, with the assumption that once he had been given his orders on whom to marry he should obey them. To be fair to her, Ms Hirsch does supply a link to a Telegraph article from October 2000 so that one can see Lady Gavron’s exact words. Here is the link again:
It wasn’t someone black, and it may not have been phrased as a command, but Charles probably was pretty much told who to marry, and for reasons to do with what “message” his marriage would send. It did not work out well. One ancient royal tradition that all should be glad to see extinct is that of marriage as a tool of policy. Of course no one in their right minds would insert such a mad device as the monarchy if they were designing a nation from scratch. It is a historical relic. But history is a powerful force, and this nation is not being started from scratch. I hope and believe the monarchy does still have a role, so long as people can be found willing to play it. I hope the whole royal wedding shebang goes off well and a good time is had by all. If Ms Markle being mixed race makes more people feel included in the celebration, that’s great. More importantly I wish Harry and Meghan a long and loving life together. November 27th, 2017 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
In writing this post I do not attempt to draw any particular moral, merely to share an episode of history I found out about by chance which has some incongruous parallels with the present day. Quoting the Wikipedia article on the West Indies Federation:
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November 22nd, 2017 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh my beloved Malta:
Even if, like yours truly, you don’t think that there is anything necessarily wrong with offshore tax havens (haven is a place of safety, and I am quite keen on being safe from the predations of the State), it is worth getting angry about politicians who talk a good game about compliance with taxes salting – allegedly – kickbacks in far-off locations and hoping no-one will notice. We live in a world where governments the world over, through pacts such as the Common Reporting Standard, are to all intents and purposes creating a global tax “cartel” in pursuit of high net worth individuals’ wealth. Assuming, for example, that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party wins power at the next UK general election, and imposes all manner of controls (including capital controls) then UK residents may now already be thinking of where to park their money. Global anti-tax avoidance/evasion efforts make those bolt-holes harder to reach. So on certain levels I don’t have an issue with Malta being a tax haven, or its citizens being wily about it. What I do, however, have an issue with is the double-standards, and furthermore, the tolerance of bribery and corruption that is not just a by-product of an expansive state, but part of a culture that has become too embedded in certain countries. Malta wants to become an important financial centre; it is already pretty significant in that regard. But it is in competition with rivals such as Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Mauritius, Singapore, etc. All of these places have their faults, but the murder of a campaigning journalist by the use of a car-bomb in broad daylight in Malta represents a shock even to those wearily familiar with the nastiness of current affairs. Final point: whatever her merits or faults, the journalist known to many as “Daphne” was rightly famed for her courage in facing up to some very dodgy people. Such persons have also paid a price in countries such as Russia. If the Maltese were astronauts, they would be saying the equivalent of “Houston, we have a problem”.
October 17th, 2017 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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