This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.
– Attributed to Adolf Hitler, 1935
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September 9th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. September 8th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I don’t think philosophically there’s a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
You might think that being your brother’s keeper is fine. But when Tony Blair says that he is his brother’s keeper, what he actually means is that he wants to force everyone else to be this. The statement isn’t about him at all. If he really subscribed to the moral code he advocates, surely he would donate most of his income to the poor. Then again, when you hear middle-class socialists demanding higher taxes, and you ask them how much extra they personally should pay, they often reply back that only “the rich” – people richer than they are – should pay more. September 3rd, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Judging cultures is not the same as judging races. One’s race is unchosen; no-one can be condemned for membership of a racial group. However, culture is chosen, so a person can be condemned for their acceptance of an immoral culture. The equivocation of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it is based on the racist view that one’s race determines one’s ideas and outlook. August 28th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
— Mark Steyn’s advice to people who would send him e-mail. August 26th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did. August 25th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
This constant intervention by government in tasks that belong to the (with thanks to David Goldstone) August 16th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I leave university and get a job, I want to live and die by my own efforts, but if they are especially productive, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour without being penalised by the state for my success. I don’t want to see people starve, or to go without basic needs, but rather than having the state steal my money and use it to pay them to stay poor, I want them to have the opportunity to work, earn and live for themselves. I also want, through free charity, to be able to decide for myself in whose aid the money I donate will be spent: perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription; perhaps I won’t think that the fact that one has been born in closer geographical proximity to me gives them a greater claim to the money I worked for. I don’t want these choices to be taken from me and decided centrally, by those whose very jobs require them to please as many local people as they can. – David Bean, part of the St Andrews Liberty Club’s new committee, writing on The Liberty Log August 12th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
…that can be found over on www.bureaucrash.com  Which reminds me of my favourite picture of Che Guevara, that achingly cool totalitarian pop icon… 
As you sow, so shall you reap August 11th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most of academic economics is polluted by the dangerous notion of ‘perfect competition’. It is dangerous because it is so utterly unlike the real world. Capitalism’s great duty is the taking of risks. Success is measured not so much by the virtues of the product but its place in a subtle flux of prices and alternatives. Perfect competition, with its associated poetry of ‘equilibrium’ is a romantic folly. July 23rd, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
One reader complains that he could never see why we use the word ‘service’ for public monopolies such as health, education, the post office (and even the ‘civil service’) when they deliver such rotten products. Then a local farmer mentioned he was getting a bull in to service his cows. After that, our reader recognised that it was actually a pretty good way to describe the relationship between public producers and the taxpayers who have to fund them. July 21st, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 20th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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