Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
– Louis D. Brandeis
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May 17th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Some inconvenient facts surfaced in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries. I will let the good folks from the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription only) tell the tale.
So for whom are these facts inconvenient? Proponents of campaign finance reform, that’s who. State controls on campaign finance are premised (or at least sold) on the idea that money distorts elections, that without state controls elections will be bought by the candidate with the most money, that the gentle hand of the state is needed to ensure a level playing field and a fair outcome. Yet here we see well-connected machine politicians, who raised between 8 and 10 times as much as their opponents, turned out. Not the outcome one would expect from the campaign finance reformers, is it? Damn bottom-up facts. So inconvenient to grand top-down theories. May 17th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Daily Telegraph there was a story about the decay of Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. Paths worn out, litter, and general decay. Even the purple heather is being overwhelmed by bracken (perhaps a lesson to all those who think that ‘Mother Nature’ will always make things nice if she is left in charge). As usual ‘underfunding’ from the government (national and from the local government of the city of Bradford) got most of the blame. But there were some other things mentioned. The pressure of the number of visitors was pointed to (no price of entry, no real owner… ‘tragedy of the Commons’ anyone?). The removal of power from the local town to the city of Bradford back in the early 1970’s (by Edward Heath and Peter Walker the Conservative party ‘modernizers’ of their day – people much like David Cameron and Francis Maude in our own time). Was attacked by some people. Some people wanted to copy the ‘Malvern Hills Conservators’, a voluntary group in Worcestershire (or whatever it is called these days) which has been protecting the Malvern Hills since the 19th century – rather than trust either the city of Bradford or the local town council. And some local people pointed to something of interest. Anne Hawkesworth (now that sounds like a Yorkshire name), from the local town council is quoted as saying “If you stand in the centre of Ilkely and look up, on one side you see the purple of the Beamsley and Devonshire estates, but on the Ilkley side you just see bracken”. J.S. Mill (not a man I admire, as some readers here may know) said that private ownership of great estates could only be justified by the owner acting as a guardian for the people. I believe that such private ownership needs no ‘justification’, any more than Mr Mill should have had to ‘justify’ owning his house or his boots. However, there is no denying that private ownership has proven to be a better guardian of the environment than the state. May 17th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I write this, it is raining in a slight but persistent drizzle outside my Pimlico flat, central London. It has been a mixed bag on the weather front recently: some spells of great warm weather but a fair amount of rain. The cricket match at Lords was briefly interrupted by it. One can bet that the Wimbledon tennis tournament later in the summer will undergo the familiar ritual of thrilling matches being interrupted by rain (although I hear there are plans afoot to put a giant cover over the Centre Court stadium in due course). Despite all this, we are told that Britain faces an unprecedented drought. All manner of water restrictions are threatened, although thankfully, given the less-than-wonderful personal habits of Londoners (any Tube user will know what I mean) it is still allowed for us to take a morning shower. In short, shortages. This appears insane in a country famed or infamous for its damp summers. It is an island in which few places are more than 100 miles from the sea. In a wider context, most of the Earth’s surface is covered in the stuff. What’s the problem? The ‘shortages’ we have now have a number of causes, from what I can glean. There has been a substantial population rise in the southeast of England. Greater affluence means more dishwashers, bigger washing machines. Increasingly, many people will often have more than one bathroom in a house. Other, wetter, parts of the UK like the famously wet area to the west of the Pennines have not seen the same sort of population growth. There is plenty of water in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. → Continue reading: Water and some basic economics May 16th, 2006 | 78 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Smithsonian’s entrepreneurial impulse to exploit new media for profit is a healthy one, at root. The Smithsonian is already a quasi-private entity, where most staff is on the public payroll, while most executives are paid with privately solicited donations. It could conceivably, like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the federal student loan agency Sallie Mae, aspire to becoming a self-supporting entity within the government. So of course, the institution is taking a lot of flack for its deal to produce on-demand, for-pay documentaries in conjunction with Showtime. Congress has even joined in, cutting the institution’s funding while citing the high executive pay as an excuse. The deal is bad, but not for the reasons being stated in editorials. It is bad because of an anti-competitive clause that gives Showtime first-refusal over the ‘right’ to fund documentary projects seeking to use Smithsonian archival material. Far from privatizing the Smithsonian, this makes Showtime a de facto government agency. Forcing documentarians to seek funding from a single source in order to pursue a creative project based on national archival material is an awfully pink concept, and the kind of move that gives privatization a bad name. May 16th, 2006 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
With a monopolistic provider, divided into a number of exam boards, and facing the requirement of meeting the targets set by the government, the A-level is no longer perceived as the de facto ‘gold standard’. Now that the anecdotal tales of remedial lessons in grammar for first year students, and bullet point answers, private schools are searching for alternatives:
A group of private schools and Cambridge Universities International Examinations are constructing a new exam, the Pre-U, based upon stronger syllabi and ensuring academic rigour through the teaching of essay techniques. The centralised state sector is unable to innovate and set up a new examination system due to the demands of the government for greater control over the education system. They can prevent students stuck with state schooling from participating in dangerous ‘improvements’:
However, this new examination has stirred the civil servants to lift a pencil:
Would it not be a fitting amendment for the Tory party to champion the freedom to choose examinations, either at a parental or at school level? Perhaps, if the majority of parents vote for the ‘Pre-U’ or International GCSEs, the school should be forced to honour their wishes. May 16th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The details of this story are still unfolding. Irrespective of these, the Dutch appear to have lost a brave, eloquent and credible voice against the backward Islamic extremism that is threatening their liberal traditions. May 15th, 2006 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ronald Bailey does not pull his punches when dealing with opponents of biotechnology:
His praise for the idea of material progress reminds of me what Brian Mickelthwait wrote a few weeks back on this blog. I also liked this passage, where he refers to the unashamed opponent of material progress, Bill McKibben and others:
Bailey’s book is strongly recommended and I pretty much agree with all of it. A point of his that I would emphasise is that of course, people are entitled to say that if they don’t want biotech or whatever, then they should not be made to pay for it. If biocons want to stop tax-funding of stem cell research, then as a libertarian, I entirely defend their right to refuse such funding but of course my view changes if such folk try to actually prevent private funding of such ventures. Another argument that Bailey confronts head-on is the idea that by penetrating the mysteries of the physical world, we somehow lose our reverence or respect for life. That always struck me as a dumb argument. My amazement at the wonders of space is hardly dented by the insights of a Newton or the glorious photos taken by space probes. Quite the opposite. And whatever some genetic determinists (some of whom are sadly racists) may say, I don’t believe that the argument for free will and Man’s capacity for making meaningful choices in life is reduced one iota by our understanding of genetics. The more we know, the more power that gives us to shape our futures. I think it was a chap called Francis Bacon who said something to the effect that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Bailey is one of the better writers for Reason magazine. I definitely can recommend this book for those looking at controversies in this area, such as this subject. May 15th, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Onion just keeps on getting better. May 14th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ever read something you wrote not all that long ago and pondered how you could have got it so epically wrong? Take this article I wrote last year about forcing the Middle East into a strategic decline. My prescription? Government action – tax breaks, subsidies, strategic state investment; a Keynesian smorgasbord. Ugh! Why did I not think this through more fully? Five years of sky-high oil prices will go an awful long way towards solving the problems mentioned in the article, courtesy of the market. No government meddling required. As it happens, I submitted the essay for a university assignment and received a pleasing mark. A bit regrettable that I felt sticking the bloody thing up around this rather more intellectually rigorous domain was a good idea. May 14th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Liberals often talk about the incremental implementation of their creed, envisaging liberal ideals slowly seeping into the mainstream to eventually supplant the will to plan and the will to coerce. I disagree with this prediction of events. The model of the modern developed state will only decline when a popular perception that it is simply unaffordable exists. I contend that such a notion will only be wholly planted in the popular imagination by a sudden, catastrophic failure of the state, of which I believe we will sooner or later experience. This is not an unrealistic prediction; the state-initiated welfare programmes in all their myriad contortions are by nature self-perpetuating and ever-expanding, and thus the parasite will eventually consume so much of the creative juices of its host that the host will starve. This will result in massive social and economic upheaval for an enormous bulk of individuals who had made provisions for the future assuming the existence of government-controlled and distributed social welfare. Consequently, the modern first world welfare state is in the process of clogging its own arteries. I am envisaging a scenario whereby a critical mass of nonproductive citizens and inadequately funded retirees overwhelm the social security systems of the developed world, causing most (if not all) of these governments to respond in a manner befitting a state hell-bent on survival – namely, progressively increasing taxes. Of course, the majority of future retirees are likely to be underfunded to such an extent that the welfare state, supported by relatively few, could never hope to provide for so many people. However, the period in which this is being realised will see taxes increase, in the vain hope of closing the funding gap, to a level whereby the aforementioned taxes start killing the economic activity that enables taxation revenue to be collected in the first place. Desperately, governments will make increasingly onerous tax imposts on the productive, which will result in collapse – not fiscal equilibrium. I think that the trend towards increasing individual responsibility will find its genesis in a widespread and deeply painful economic catastrophe as severe as any that has gone before; something equal to or greater than the magnitude of the Great Depression, which profoundly and permanently altered the values of so many of those who lived through it. I believe that liberalism’s best chance of popular acceptance will rapidly rise out of fateful ashes like these. → Continue reading: Liberty’s revolution May 14th, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to something I just watched on UK TV, in a survey the public ranked estate agents lower in terms of trustworthiness than any other professional group in Britain… except for politicians. The programme also discussed how increasing numbers of buyers and sellers were doing business via the internet in order to cut out estate agents altogether. As part of the show’s segment dealing with this, some woman from Which? (a statist ‘consumer group’ which acts as a pro-regulation lobby) came on supporting the idea that the state should regulate estate agents, requiring them to be licenced… in other words she wants to trust the most un-trusted group in Britain to regulate the second most un-trusted group in Britain. May 13th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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