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“We are about to start reaping the fruits of the 2012 election. They’ll be bitter. I think we’re about to see a full and overt assault on the Bill of Rights and on those who support individual liberty. I hope I’m entirely wrong. But don’t bet on it.” Read the whole thing: it is packed with links to discussions about these issues. I don’t think he is exaggerating. December 18th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Roosevelt’s claim that we can judge the social conscience of the government by how it collects taxes is true in a way he could not have imagined. Contrary to FDR and Justice Holmes, taxes are neither a price (in the voluntary-transaction sense) nor club dues. On the contrary, they are exactions by threat of violence. Some social conscience! How ironic that organized society and civilization itself are said to depend on the government’s threatening peaceful people if they fail to surrender their property as demanded by politicians who presumptuously and self-servingly claim to “represent” all the people. Far from some enlightened institution, taxation began when conquerors realized that formal and continuing appropriation of a subject population’s wealth was preferable to hit-and-run pillaging. For this to work, however, the rulers needed to convince the peasants that the regime would protect them from predators in return for their regular remittances. That’s right: It was a protection racket, from which the racketeers and their cronies profited handsomely. December 11th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…” It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye. The incidents quoted above… others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years… they should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel. – Commenter ‘Bloke in Spain’ December 6th, 2012 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“To some extent the problem is too much rather than too little imagination. With fiat money, and a discretionary central bank, it’s always theoretically possible to have the money stock (or some other nominal variable) behave just like it ought to, according to whichever macroeconomic theory or model one prefers. In other words, a modern central bank is always technically capable of doing the right thing, just as a chimpanzee jumping on a keyboard is technically capable of typing-out War and Peace.” – George Selgin, as quoted at the excellent Cafe Hayek blog. December 5th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades. – The Onion adds an update to its story of November 14th. Mick Hartley explains. December 4th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are two phrases that we rarely hear these days: “it’s a free country” and “there ought to be a law against it”. We do not hear these any more for the simple reason that we are no longer a free country, and more often than not there is a law about it. (link is to the Daily Telegraph so some overseas readers may issues accessing it) November 27th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last year, for the first time, sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies. November 26th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Any statutory regulations/provisions against the press in the UK will most gleefully be lapped up here for use against the local media. The one argument we have had; that the modern liberal democracies around the world have self-regulation rather than statutory laws for the media will fall down should the UK opt to embrace statutory legislation as well to police the press. Such moves will only strengthen the hand of oppressive, regressive governments around the English-speaking world. – Sinha Ratnatunga, Editor, Sunday Times, Sri Lanka November 25th, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
German asparagus in season. Heaven. – Michael Portillo samples the cuisine of Germany in his latest European Railway Journey. I am greatly enjoying this show, and am recording it. I am finding it to be a wonderfully relaxing and entertaining way to soak up a mass of historic trivia, such as (this week – just as one for-instance) how Eau de Cologne got started. I also learned about that upside down railway that I have seen so many pictures of but have never pinned down to a particular place. And not so trivia, because Portillo is focussing particularly on the period just before World War 1. Europe’s last golden age, in other words. Railways were not just for tourists, they were for This week, Portillo was wearing a rather spectacular pink jacket, of a sort that he would never have risked when being a politician. November 22nd, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I never argue. It’s other people who argue with me. – Roger Hewland, proprietor of Gramex, Lower Marsh, London. Overheard by me, this afternoon. November 21st, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many people are ignorant of many things. This is not surprising and entirely forgivable, given how much knowledge there is to be had, and how much of it is highly specialized. What is less forgivable is how people feel free to spout off and propose things without the slightest idea of the complexities they are dealing with. The French revolutionaries blithely imagined they could create a whole new society with its own rules, just by thinking it up. They ended with a bloodbath in a pigsty. November 19th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. – via Bernard Goldberg November 16th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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