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“Democracy is nowadays a greatly over-hyped blessing, particularly by Americans, who have no pre-democratic history to provide a perspective. It is clearly less important than freedom, the rule of law and constitutional government, which ideally it should entrench, but may well not do so.” – Nigel Lawson, former UK finance minister, journalist and more recently, a fine debunker of global warming alarmism. His children such as Dominic and Nigella seem to have done okay as well. April 30th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who “starve for want of luxuries.” But it is always easy to regard another man’s things as superficial and another man’s pursuits as greedy, while one’s own belongings have sentimental value and one’s own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access.” – Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing. April 28th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate…The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy.” – Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week’s terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long. April 26th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
You are now signed up to this petition. Thank you. For news about the Prime Minister’s work and agenda, and other features including films, interviews, a virtual tour and history of No.10, visit the main Downing Street homepage. If you’d like to tell your friends about this petition, its permanent web address is: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/ – This is what you get as soon as you click on the second of the above links, fill in your details, and then confirm it all by clicking on the link in the email they immediately send you. I was impressed by the ease and speed of it all. April 24th, 2009 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Of course, it’s been half a century since Cuba has had a real new leader. This is one of the down sides to life extension. April 23rd, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obama’s speciality is shaping up to be particularly dangerous because it’s hard to dispute given the average American’s sensibilities. No call for liberty and constitutional principle seems convincing when Obama is arguing that those relying on government giveaways should have to follow government-set rules. That is, once you’ve allowed them to go ahead with the handouts, the political game is almost over. Under the guise of “managing the taxpayers’ money”, Obama and his crew are rewriting mortgages, deciding executive compensation, tossing out CEO’s. And note carefully that his plans for where taxpayers’ money should go continue to swell, from healthcare to the environment to energy policy to expanded “national service” programs. When taxpayers’ money is everywhere – and Obama is doing his best to make sure it is – then Obama’s control is everywhere. The Octo-potus is claiming his space and flexing his grip. As far as he’s concerned, it’s Barack Obama’s country. We’re just living in it. If all those ‘libertarians’ who dallied with The Community Organiser had been reading our own Paul Marks, who was onto Mr Obama’s agenda months ago, they would have saved themselves a lot of buyer’s remorse. Welcome, Instapundit readers. Some rather grumpy folk out there wondered where there was a link to one of Paul Marks’ comments (the archives on the side of this blog, so please use them!). Anyway, here is one reference. April 21st, 2009 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job. I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling. April 18th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers.” April 17th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can’t now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido’s commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn’t. Not yet, anyway. The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him. Brown’s problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar. The BBC’s caption under the video of Brown’s latest bout of self-strangulation says this:
LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far. You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don’t care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what’s happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look. See also: this. April 16th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest.” And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton. April 15th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When you keep a kennel of attack dogs then I guess you can’t entirely claim ignorance or absence of responsibility when one of them bites several passers by.” April 14th, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
“Rome wasn’t built in a day. But I wasn’t on that particuar job.” – Brian Clough, the late English club football manager who did not suffer from the national trait of false modesty. April 13th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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