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Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. – Milton Friedman June 20th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire, rationalist & satirist (1694 – 1778) June 18th, 2009 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is rare that governments successfully cut costs by first spending more money.” – Tyler Cowen. He was talking about Mr Obama’s plans to socialise US medicine. I am sure that when the NHS was set up here in the UK, the advocates of said argued that it would “save” money in the long run. Meanwhile, here is some useful commentary from Arnold Kling. June 16th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. – Winston Churchill June 13th, 2009 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Drunken sailors generally spend cash that they’ve already earned themselves, rather than running up debt to be paid by others. If our politicians started spending like drunken sailors, it would in fact represent a dramatic improvement. – Instapundit yesterday. The Bishop likes it also. June 10th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Doubtless politics has always had its dark side. But the depths to which it has sunk over the last 12 years under New Labour has been unprecedented in this country. Of all the legacies left by this Government the poisoning of political discourse is surely the worst. Gordon Brown, foul-tempered and intolerant, has been at the very centre of this mess. Gordon Brown never was fit for Number 10 and, given the wreckage of the economy, the public finances and the financial regulatory system, was never fit for Number 11 either. – Ruth Lea adds to the admosphere now being created by the WAGS. Have those Blair Babes finally justified their existence? June 8th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The left should be sensitive to inequality, the left should never accept liberty on a playing field that is unequal. – Conor Gearty. Quoted in this account of a debate on liberty at the Hay Festival by Afua Hirsch (do I detect an elegant lefty lawyer’s eyebrow raised in, “There was no competition for this position…”?). Every time I hear Prof Gearty or another human rightist of his water argue for a policy with which I agree (banning torture, say, or permitting freedom of expression), I have to remind myself that they are proceeding from an entirely different foundation. The position is coherent, but coherently alien. —- June 2nd, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“In many ways, Cameron faces a task far harder than that which confronted Margaret Thatcher. She was elected three years after the IMF bailout, and so the public finances were being restored to health. She was chosen as leader specifically to bring radical change, and had four years to assemble a team and prepare for the ordeal. Mr Cameron originally assembled a team for the political equivalent of a game of croquet; the same people now find themselves dropped on a rugby pitch.” May 28th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is an almost universal assumption that the next government, of whatever stripe, will be imposing new taxes to avoid a junk-bond future. This easy option should not be allowed to run its course without challenge, because it ignores the risk of turning Britain into a junk economy of high taxes and low growth. It is no coincidence that the pressure to bring tax havens to heel has become intense over the past six months. So panicked were the finance ministers of the G20 nations about the risk of capital flight from the grabbing State that a campaign of bullying was launched against a small group of nations that refuse to accept that the State has the power to achieve absolute dominion over private wealth.” Carl Mortished. He is writing about California, and the lessons of that indebted US state for the euro zone and Britain. May 26th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table. The only encouraging thing about public reaction to the crisis is that going by polls citizens seem to have more misgivings about some of these policies than politicians or the media. Still, though there have been studies that indicate the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years, what is also clear is it was enormously popular. FDR was elected four straight times, and more than once without ever having brought unemployment down to single digits. An economic disaster does not necessarily mean a political disaster. If we could raise the average level of understanding of economics to what Alfred Marshall had in 1890, the vast majority of politicians would be voted out of office.” Thomas Sowell, interviewed in Reason magazine. May 22nd, 2009 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom – Friedrich Hayek …or perhaps not May 17th, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the lovely things about the interweb is the complete freedom to post obscure, intractable, thoroughly off-putting essays, revelling in the fact that even if 99.9999 per cent of humanity really doesn’t want to read e.g. a rambling 12,000 word reflection on some little-known artist by a totally unknown commentator – a perfectly legitimate point of view, obviously – well, there’s still the outside chance that someone out there, somewhere, actually will want to read it. And sometimes just the prospect of connecting, probably anonymously and certainly at a great distance, with that one other person is what makes the whole project worthwhile. – Bunny Smedley comments on a short posting at my place May 16th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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