David Cameron went to his first EU summit last year and agreed to let the European Union take charge of the financial regulation of the City. As far as poor decision-making goes, Gordon Brown’s gold sale was bad enough. History will remember Cameron’s surrender of the City as worse.
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The UK Labour party’s conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future. Given that “journalism” presently encompasses “publishing accounts of things you’ve seen using the Internet” and “taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them” and “blogging” and “commenting on news stories,” this proposal is even more insane than the tradition “journalist licenses” practiced in totalitarian nations. I’m all for hanging up Murdoch and his phone hackers by their thumbs, but you don’t need to license journalists to get that done: all you need to do is prosecute them under existing criminal statutes. In other words, the only “journalism code of conduct” the UK needs to avert another phone hacking scandal is “don’t break the law.” Of course, it would help if government didn’t court favour with the likes of Murdoch, as was the case under Labour (and is the case with today’s Tories). For a party eager to shed its reputation as sinister, spying authoritarians, Labour’s really got its head up its arse. This is so mad it is being noticed everywhere, not just in Britain. Instapundit says they should have a read of Areopagitica. Well, we can hope. Not that they will read Areopagitica, merely that they might not like making themselves look like sinister, spying authoritarians, all over the world. LATER: Lewis’s Loony Licensing Plan Disowned By Miliband. The derision was not confined to the internet. The Labour Conference was derisive too. Good on them. Someone tell Instapundit. September 27th, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The fallacy at the heart of this crisis is that every financial problem has a political solution. – Jeff Randall He’s talking about the euro’s problems, but the same fallacy is at work nearly everywhere. September 26th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the ‘Yeah, but what they’re really saying…’ tendency. The ‘tea’ stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already’ but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it’s against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They’d much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda. – Daniel Hannan, writing about the extraordinary abuse heaped on the Tea Party crowd. Well, they want to cut taxes and push back the State. I guess they must be psychotic or something. September 20th, 2011 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Corporatism in finance has brought ruin onto the world. Letting banks fail is messy, disruptive and ugly (though not as much as people think). But bailing them out creates moral hazard – it gives a blank cheque to reckless banks. Unless bad banks are allowed to fail, good ones cannot take their place. Preventing failure is good for established banks, but bad for everybody else. Cheap credit created by central banks inflated the housing bubble that burst in 2008. The combination of artificially cheap credit and banks expecting a bailout led to the crisis. Money should emerge from markets, not be imposed by governments. Without radical changes to money and banking policy, we will sleepwalk into the next crisis, and it may be even bigger. Somebody needs to speak up for the freedoms of the many against the protections of the few. Corporatism – not capitalism – was at the root of the last crisis and it will be at the root of the next one. Britain needs to reject protections for businesses. It needs a free market revolution. September 19th, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.” – Michael Barone. The veteran chronicler of US politics is not given to harsh language, but he’s certainly not pulling his punches today. September 12th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the 9/11 deniers have two mighty weapons. One is technological. In the age of the internet, if you don’t want to read evidence that contradicts your fantasies, then you don’t need to. Just visit one of hundreds of websites that will supply you with freshly minted “evidence” to replace any bits of your theory that have fallen apart on you. The other weapon is cultural. Thanks, in part, to multiculturalism, facts have been reduced to accessories in the West’s intellectual wardrobe. The postmodern message is that your version of reality is part of you; don’t let inconvenient truths damage your customised worldview and your self-esteem – Damian Thompson. Often when I quote Thompson it is to fisk him but this one hits the nail squarely on the head. September 11th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author.” She is having a go at VS Naipaul, and even though I dislike aspects of feminism, I think her argument deserves respect. An interesting piece. September 9th, 2011 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that.” September 8th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been away for almost 10 days in the lovely Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily, hence my silence. It is a mental health break to be away from emails, internet, TV and the rest. Nothing but good conversation and the company of lots of pulp thrillers, chatty Italian waiters and friendly locals. But I return to work and home with a bump. And of course, we are close to the 10th anniversary of that day of horror in lower Manhattan and Washington DC:
For what it is worth, I am not really very keen on this whole idea of there being a “public intellectual”. Who gets to decide that a person holds this sort of role? Anyway, quibbles aside, it is a good piece. Here are a couple of other paragraphs that stand out:
September 6th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just when we [have] the strongest possible proof that Keynsianism doesn’t work, someone yells for an encore – Commenter “J Cuttance” on the Telegraph September 5th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nothing has changed from the riots and nothing will. As usual after such shocking events, we had two or three days of moral clarity where you could get away with saying things that normally you can’t – like pointing out how many people live lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness. Then we had the essential moment – known as “the Gitmo moment” – providing a cause around which confused lefties could rally (in this case the harmless but poorly expressed mutterings of a TV historian). The next step is to draw ludicrous moral equivalences – burning down shops and killing people is, apparently, no worse than wearing a dinner jacket and getting drunk, or fiddling expenses. I don’t often agree with David Cameron but it was good to see him having a pop on that point at the BBC. Finally you just keep repeating idiocies about how rioters were “deprived” and bringing it all back to “inequality” and such notions. It doesn’t matter how stupid it is if you say it often enough. This is just how it works. In a few months I bet you’ll be able to call it the Tottenham Spring. We’ll “reach out”, we’ll open some youth clubs, our policing will become even more limp-wristed, vendors of steel shutters will do well, and small shopkeepers will, bit by bit, give up to take up lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness. – Samizdata commenter m2p September 3rd, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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