Sean Gabb has penned an obituary of Chris Tame in the Independent.
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Congress is up to it again and it just gets worse and worse. This time they are, in a subtle way, outlawing parties other than the Republicrats. The quickest way for me to get this information out is to just give you the entire post from Jim Babka:
This set of laws basically outlaws the Libertarian Party. We have for years joked it was easier to get on the ballot in Nicaragua under the Socialists than it was in the USA. Now it will be impossible. We have long used paid canvassers in States with the most onerous anti-democracy laws. On top of which, they set the bar for signatures impossibly high. We rely on individual donations because we are an individualist party. They wish to make that illegal. They will make the only allowable source of funding that which is sucked from the Statist teat. On moral grounds the Party refuses to take government funds for campaigns. This should be a call to arms for any who love liberty. I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but everything I have heard indicates this law is the death knell for diversity of opinion in America. Although some measures seem tailored to kill the LP, they may also take out the Green Party and others as well. The incumbents want a closed system. While they would probably prefer a one party state like the commies had, they are willing to settle for a two party party where they can get on with their graft and theft undisturbed. Is there a difference between Republicans and Democrats in the long haul? In a world where they do not even have to worry about someone popping up and taking votes from them? I think not. Closed systems are nice for those inside them for a time… but they ultimately lead to disaster and bloodshed. March 23rd, 2006 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One of my least favourite UK firms is Capita (unaffectionately known as Crapita in some parts), a firm that provides the systems that help run things like the BBC television licence (boo!) and the London Congestion charge (qualified hiss), and which may, perhaps, be involved in operating a proposed national ID card (that would qualify for hurricane force boos all round). Well, in the light of such observations, this is rather interesting, is it not?
It is important to remember that businesses like Capita are hardly paragons of capitalist virtue, in my opinion. Capita makes money from things like the licence fee, which essentially extorts money from people who own a TV set, even if they do not watch BBC programmes. If I were an ethical investment fund manager, I would refuse to own its stock on principle. By the way, the idea of naming and shaming businesses, politicians and individuals involved with intrusive businesses like Capita was mentioned on Samizdata last summer. It will be interesting to see what else happens in the loans-for-peerages affair. No wonder Blair looked miserable on Budget day yesterday. March 23rd, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Basque separatist terrorist organisation Eta has announced a permenent ceasefire. If this is genuine and this holds, and Eta genuinely does stop killing people, then this is obviously good thing. One minor issue though.
Why the delay, precisely? Are they planning on blowing some people up tomorrow for old times’ sake? Do they have some semtex that they haven’t used that they don’t want to waste? Enquiring minds do want to know. March 22nd, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fans of the great Stanley Kubrick satire, Dr Strangelove, will struggle to suppress a wry smile over this story:
Maybe all that stuff about flouride in the water being a crazy Commie plot may not have been so nuts after all. On the other hand… March 22nd, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last week, Umair Haque (bubblegeneration) predicted that Europe would prove to be the next innovation leader–not because of any forthcoming shift toward a culture of entrepreneurialism, but because the day is coming when content will be key, and Eurpoeans simply remain more, ah, cultured than Americans. This pronouncement that drew numerous responses (including my own) that ranged all the way from ‘Huh?’ to ‘Excuse me?’ Innovators in Silicon Valley like Chris Yeh took particular exception. Since then, Haque has taken the debate on the relative values of financial vs. social capital further, yea, invoking the spectre of Wal-Mart:
The debate on Bubblegeneration is a significant (in that it’s particularly cogent) articulation of the Euro-centric argument for a managed economy – the twist being that the stated protectionist goal is the preservation of ‘culture’ not jobs per se. But looking closely, Haque’s argument contains the seeds of its own undoing: in the world of hypercompetition he speaks of, it’s true that creativity driven by passion and commitment will dominate – which is exactly what entrepreneurs like Chris Heh and his rather cultured friends in Silicon Valley embody. The truth is that while the world may have fewer (and probably better) mom and pop bakeries moving forward, that level of creative energy is being re-invested in other more dynamic areas of human endeavor and achievement – i.e., the mom and pop software shop. March 22nd, 2006 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rand Simberg has pointed out an excellent speech by Tony Blair about the global war we are fighting. Here is a short excerpt:
Well worth the read. March 22nd, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine’s correlation to B12 levels, then we’d all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis. To play devil’s advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO’s criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness. There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web – people who can understand that markets are conversations – can not seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures. Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more… → Continue reading: The non-obvious utility of patents March 22nd, 2006 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage”. This quotation was always attached to emails many of us used to get from Dr. Chris R. Tame, Libertarian Alliance founder, who died earlier this week. I find it a highly appropriate quotation. March 22nd, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to a statement by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX:
I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas Day… March 22nd, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday Wal-Mart announced plans to quintuple its workforce in China, adding 20 new stores to the 56 it already operates. It is very libertarian chic to be pro-Wal-Mart these days, mostly for good reason. But while ‘big box’ retailers like Wal-Mart deserve credit for job creation and for the truly innovative supply-chain efficiencies they have created, the trouble is that discount retailers in the US have always functioned in an unhealthy state of symbiosis with government, often with huge leverage at the local level, where tax incentives can often overrule ‘the market.’ It’s pure back-door socialism of the most cynical kind–not evil, just kinda co-dependent. Which is why it’s so fascinating to think about what Wal-Mart will do in China. Like joining the Communist Party? In 2004, Wal-Mart agreed under pressure to allow its Chinese stores to ‘unionize’–the only Union in China being the Communist Party. Okay, I’ll give them that one, as it seems hard to avoid. But where is it all headed? I can see this whole Wal-Mart in China thing going a couple of ways: In the ‘Hell’ scenario, Wal-Mart, which grew up suckling on the (relatively) vestigial socialist glands of the United States will absolutely flourish in China, due to abundant access to the unpasteurized milk of communist kindness. In this version of the story, communism, coupled with the superior economic and organizational model brought to bear by Wal-Mart, actually experiences a revival and renaissance, Wal-Mart providing the missing link – a viable economic model – and the Chinese government providing the regulatory breeding ground for a thousand years of centrally-planned, iron-fisted, prosperity in which the retail ethic of ‘choice’ ineluctably replaces the value of ‘freedom’. This is the scenario in which it will be necessary for the crew of the Starship Enterprise to travel back through time to Earth in the 1950s to kill Sam Walton while he’s still a fresh-faced young bootstrapper. In the ‘Heaven’ scenario, Wal-Mart and the Chinese manage to civilize each other without symbiosis, resulting in the kind of benign, socialized capitalism Schumpeter dreamed of in his dotage – a world where everyone is so prosperous that capitalism naturally comes to admit socialized services because things like food shelter and healthcare are of such marginal relative cost that, like water and power, that they flow as easily from the Mongolian Steppes as do the milk and honey and human kindness. Did I mention that in Heaven, Wal-Mart’s goods are delivered faster than ever by a fleet of highly compensated, well-insured flying pigs? A third scenario? Wal-Mart fails to ‘get’ the Chinese market, the Chinese fail to ‘get’ Wal-Mart, and neither time travel nor genetic engineering become necessary after all. March 21st, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
That is the conclusion of research published today by Mischa Balen. Over a billion people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion people have no sanitation facilities. More than two million people die each year from diarrhoea, and over six million people are blind as a result of trachoma, a disease strongly related to lack of face washing. In Sub Saharan Africa, 42% of the population lacks access to decent water. This state of affairs, he finds, is caused by state failure in water systems. What can be done? Where the private sector has been called in, it has prevented wars and conflict by creating a system of property rights and acting as an incentive to conserve; increased access to clean water; increased the treatment of sewage, thereby lowering infant mortality; cut politicisation from the supply of water; promoted sustainable development by reducing wastage. That is great. Unfortunately, ideological opponents of markets are campaigning heavily against the private sector. They choose, he says, “not to compare private provision in reality with state provision in reality, but private provision in reality with a mythical, utopian state provision which does not exist in the real world.” No change there, then.  March 21st, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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