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Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):
How come the French all think alike?
Well, OK, the French don’t really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted “no” in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.
This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.
But that’s not all: Even the “private” French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you’re a journalist — or just a “journalist” — you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.
The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that’s as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.
Who knew?
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist
– Murray Rothbard (via Mises Economics Blog)
Home Office minister Hazel Blears has met with certain Muslim leaders and some rather ‘interesting’ things have emerged. In order to assuage Muslim fears, she has said that racial profiling will not be used and all stop-and-searches will ‘intelligence led’.
So a nervous looking Asian man with a backpack who is wandering around on the London Underground will not be examined more closely because there might be no special intelligence? Hopefully that is not what Ms. Blears means, though I am not really sure what she does mean.
Now on one level, racial profiling can actually be dangerous if that criterion is over-emphasised: Muslims are not a race and although somewhat unlikely, a blonde haired blue eyed Muslim convert could indeed be a potential suicide bomber. Yet the reality is that the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are non-white and logic therefore indicates that in order to maximise the effectiveness of scarce resources, a degree of racial profiling in entirely appropriate. In fact, contrary to the Home Office Ministers claims, Ian Johnston of the British Transport Police has made no bones about the fact his officers intend to make race one of the criterion they use when picking people to examine closer, noting: “We should not bottle out over this. We should not waste time searching old white ladies”. Very sensible.
A news segment on television this evening (I think it was SkyOne but I am not sure) even spoke with an Asian man on the London Underground with a backpack who was not unsympathetic to the fact he likely to be searched given the prevailing circumstances. Perhaps that is not so surprising as he is just as much at risk as anyone else if a bomb goes off on his train. Yet I cannot help wondering of this government really grasps the gravity of the situation and how attitude really need to change.
Another interesting and all too expected thing to come out if this meeting with Muslim leaders in Britain is their annoyance that the government will not discuss foreign policy and Iraq. This seems to answer the question I asked earlier if there are any really moderate Muslim ‘leaders’ in Britain. The fact they cannot see how the terrorist acts London, far from making it necessary for the government to discuss foreign policy with the leaders of the very community from which the terrorist have sprung, it make its impossible for them to do so or the terrorist attacks will have succeeded in the most clear cut way possible, inviting only more of the same any time the UK decides to do something that displeases some community.
Rather encouragingly, on the same news programme there was a Muslim ‘activist’ whose name I wish I had caught (was anyone else watching SkyNews?) who said it was a waste of time for Hazel Blears to talk to a bunch of largely foreign born religious leaders in Britain whose mosques had done exactly nothing to combat the extremist memes since July 7th. Judging from his remarks, it is well past time that British Muslims take a hard look at who their purported leaders are and decide if these are the people they really want speaking in their name.
After watching this I just had to do a hatchet job on an old standard:
500 Pounds
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Lord it’s one, Lord it’s two,
Lord it’s three and Lord it’s four,
Lord it’s five hundred pounds upon your head.
Not a shirt on your back,
Not a penny left intact.
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
This-a way, this-a way,
This-a way, this-a way,
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Economic freedom begets political freedom. Democracy alone, a la elections are not enough, we need a liberal democracy that circumscribe the domain of government to what Martin Wolf says “Under liberty, the state protects everybody from predators, not excluding itself”. Property rights begets individual ownership and that in turn promotes individual as well as economic freedom
– Franklin Cudjoe discussing what Africa really need.
I suppose most readers around these parts would reckon that actors should stick to acting, and keep their political opinions to themselves.
But what about these opinions?
“People think more aid will help, but it won’t,” said Ms. Driver, an actress who is working on her second music CD. “Trade is the surest way of decreasing the savage amount of poverty in our world. These countries have got to be able to trade fairly.”
And the point is, by “fairly”, she does not mean being paid artificially high prices; she means getting rid of agricultural subsidies in the rich countries.
It was never a practical project to silence the acting profession. These people are famous. Having acquired their fame, they then want to use their fame to do good, and in the process to become even more famous. This is only natural, especially when you consider that doing good and being heroic is what, according to the entertainments these people spend their lives making and acting in, life is all about. Trying to stop famous actors from expressing what they consider to be virtuous and heroic opinions in public is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the sea from being wet.
No, the task that faces us is not to silence the acting profession from ever opining about goodness. That would be impossible, to say nothing of censorious and unpleasant. Rather is our task to change the definition of goodness that actors of sufficient fame to care about such things reach for when they get to the public virtue stage in their careers, and to make goodness really mean goodness.
Ms. Driver’s pronouncements concerning the superiority of trade over aid as a means of rescuing the world’s poorest people is evidence that some progress is being made along these lines.
Many actors surely already believe such things, on the quiet. But it is still a fine step forward when one of them feels able to say such things in public.
UK authorities may be faced with a bit of a struggle in extraditing a man, now in Rome, for his alleged involvement in the failed July 21 terrorist attacks on the London transport system, according to this report.
So could some nice person remind me what the EU-wide arrest warrant is suppose to achieve, exactly? Oh, er, wait a minute…
The oldest “mini-aircraft carrier” used by Britain’s Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate – as well as helicopters – is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.
As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island’s naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again. The present government wants, so it is reported, to build two new massive carriers but as is usually the case in these matters, the likely date of construction seems to stretch into the horizon, rather like the prospect of England beating Australia at cricket.
In an age when we fret about islamofascist psychos letting off bombs on the Tube, it may be tempting to think that the Senior Service’s role is little more than to patrol the coasts and put on commemorations about the Battle of Trafalgar. How complacent that would be. Given that we are an island nation, still reliant on shipping for a huge amount of our economic and physical wellbeing, such an attitude is fraught with danger. We could run the risk of cutting the fleet so hard that we lose the inner core of skilled men and women needed for the service.
With the exception of anarcho-capitalists, even the most hardcore classical liberal realises that defence is a baseline requirement for a proper state. And for an island nation like Britain with a long coastline, that means having a workable navy.
Yesterday, I travelled as a foot passenger to Calais on the ferry from Dover, as part of a group celebrating the birthday of a long-standing friend. It was ironic to read the Times on embarkation controls and experience the poorly organised efforts of the Immigration Service. After checking in, all foot passengers are taken on a courtesy bus towards the ferry. However, as the embarkation infrastructure was dismantled in 1998 to save money, they have established an ad hoc arrangement. You have to exit the courtesy bus twice, once to show your passport, the other time: to check your luggage. Such practices were not in evidence on the return journey from France.
We noticed that there were two or three Asian men holding camcorders and filming stairwells, restaurants and the maps of the ferry. This may be innocent behaviour but we took photos of them. The photos have been passed on to the Kent constabulary. This could be something or nothing, but vigilance is the purview of the alert citizen, not a monopoly of our less than competent authorities.
Calais, itself, is a nondescript town whose tourist potential is undermined by the large numbers of illegal immigrants who loiter around the parks and telephone boxes. Most appeared to be from the Middle East of the Horn of Africa. For a Saturday afternoon, they did little apart from sit or chat, cultivating indifference to the French or the holidaymakers. When attempting to look at a map of the town of Calais, that a group of them were obscuring, they quickly got out of the way. Perhaps this indicated past encounters with the French police and a fear of transgressing unspoken rules. Whatever the set-up, they have no place to go apart from the public spaces.
The local beer is worth imbibing and we found a well-stocked Irish pub near the main square that deserves patronage. Nearby is the local war museum, housed in a bunker, with jumbled momentoes of the occupation. Calais suffered heavy damage during the Second World War and testament is apid to this suffering with the photos of local landmarks, just situated outside the bunker, surrounded by piles of rubble and destroyed buildings. A vivid and revealing contrast of sixty years of peace.
To conclude, Calais does not cater for the tourist. We had to walk out of the ferry terminal and into town. Unlike any previous country I have visited, there was no sign for taxis or taxi ranks to pick up arrivals. One existed at the local station in the town although we had to wait for some time before a people carrier appeared. One could muse at the unmet demand for transport from strangers which the locals did not appear to consider a profitable enterprise. You could not help commenting that, in Britain, some of those sitting in the parks would obtain work by driving minicabs, and relieving the taxi drought.
Piracy in the Straits of Malacca has been a serious problem for many years now and shipping companies have grown tired of waiting for governments in the region to do something effective to stamp it out.
So they are hiring private companies to do it instead. Sounds like an exciting line of work.
Attempts to use the Kelo ’eminent domain’ ruling to take property in New Hampshire from US Supreme Court Justice David Souter have now been extended to trying to do the same to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
This is splendid but maybe it would be good to extend this to Senators and Congressmen and particularly much lower level local politicians who collude with property developers. Some of these people often have property outside the jurisdiction they live in (and thus maybe be vulnerable to politically or personally motivated grudges from other elected representatives).
The important thing is to make as many members of the political class uneasy that they could be targeted. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Franklin Cudjoe, Director of the Ghanaan think tank Imani, who has been visiting the UK in order to contest the nonsense being spouted about how to solve Africa’s problems by Live 8 etc., gave a fingerclickin’ good talk at my home on Friday. The fingerclickin’ being a reference to the amount of money stolen every second – $4,700 – by African governments. My thanks to Helen Szamuely for also reporting on this event.
Ghana sounds like a relatively prosperous and urbanised country, by African standards, and it was interesting to hear an African talking about the complications of airline deregulation and exactly how much members of parliament get paid per day (enough to keep them snugly on board the gravy train, no matter what they may have said at election time), rather than just famine, malnutrition, etc.
The anti-globalisation crowd say that multinational corporations are causing corruption in Africa. Actually, they often find it a huge barrier to trading in Africa. KLM wanted to run some flights from Ghana to neighbouring African countries, but the bribes demanded of them were too extortionate, and they pulled out. Travelling between countries in that part of Africa seems to involve choosing which bunch of state highwaymen you prefer to be shaken down by. It is understandable that, economically speaking, lots of colonial African countries used to look outwards, so to speak, with most of their trade being organised by their colonial masters. It is not so understandable why this is still the pattern.
I asked Franklin who in Ghana he thinks is doing the most to improve the place. His answer was the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development. What Africa needs is good government. And the way to start trying to get good government is to talk and write out loud with anyone who will listen – especially the next generation – about what that is and ought to be. There as here, in enterprises of this kind, the internet has helped
Franklin sounded a lot like Hayek – which is no coincidence, because he talked about how much Hayek had influenced his early thinking – in his insistence upon the intellectual struggle as the first step in trying to achieve anything more concrete. You get nowhere by nagging politicians direct. You have to change the assumptions within which they work. That takes time but it can be done, and by the sound of it he is doing his best.
Michael Jennings pointed out that all over the Far East, lots of those little upwardly mobile trading niches that used to be occupied by the Chinese diaspora are now occupied by the Ghanaan diaspora. Clearly there is nothing wrong with the talents of the Ghanaan people. They just need the right setting to flourish in.
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