We have a mention on the BBC web site in their weblog watch quoting this.
What ever next?
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July 4th, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Popular support for ID cards – never all that evident to me in the first place – has collapsed, according to this story in the Daily Telegraph this morning. The article, citing a YouGov poll, says support has dropped sharply in part due to the likely high cost of the cards. I am of course pleased that Tony Blair and his oafish Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, are facing a serious setback on this issue. Nothing would give me more pleasure than if this most devious of administrations had to abandon this wrongheaded, expensive and oppressive scheme. But I cannot help feel a twinge of dismay that an assault on our liberties may be thwarted not because the UK electorate have grasped the principles at stake but because of the monetary cost. It makes one wonder whether we would happily sell our freedoms if the price were right. I hope of course that I am dead wrong about that. July 4th, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thanks to this Instapundit posting linking to this, and then following one of the links there, I have found my way to tifoc, sports blogger extraordinary, and well worth a read if you like cricket, soccer, F1, or just a different angle on things. His posting of last Thursday refers to an extraordinary coincidence:
However, tifoc did not spot this himself, and nor did the emailer who told him about it. (Unless the BBC reporting the same coincidence in April was itself a coincidence.) Ashes anyone? This bizarre game last Saturday suggests that England are at least in with a chance of doing what they also did in . . . 1981. July 4th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today is the 4th of July, when Americans celebrate their independence and much talk of freedom and constitutions occurs. This day is in many ways an orgy of self-congratulation, much of which is entirely justified (I make no secret of my pro-Americanism Atlanticism). But perhaps, just perhaps, the ‘shot heard around the country’ that was delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States with the Kelo verdict will snap a great number of Americans out of their understandable but entirely misplaced complacency regarding the benevolence of their own nation-state. Not only does Eminent Domain now pose a threat to anyone whose property happens to catch the eye of a well connected property developer, the USA also has outrageous ‘asset forfeiture’ laws that allow suspects to have their property taken by the state, reversing the burden of proof and making the accused (but un-convicted and usually un-tried) person prove their property is not the proceeds of some crime in order to have the property returned (they cannot prevent it from being taken in the first place). So much for ‘due process’. Americans would do well to remember that it was the use of British sedition laws to seize private property from political activists was a major cause of disaffection in the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution in 1776. Moreover those sedition laws were far less capricious and more respectful of due process than modern ‘asset forfeiture’ laws (colonial era sedition laws at least required you to actually be convicted). The fight against Al Qaeda and any who ally with them must go on but the greatest threat to liberty (and in the long run that inevitably means life) facing the people in the United States comes not from without but from within. Until the entire scope of what government can do is radically cut back, Kelo is pointing the way to a grim future. I hope that the Supreme Court’s destruction of the 5th Amendment by allowing the state to take private property for the private use of property developers, will be reversed long before it requires the active use of the 2nd Amendment to make private property secure against those who would rather use political power rather than markets to enrich themselves. Happy birthday America. July 4th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Only this past week, I found myself in a polite but rather pointed political discussion with one my elderly clients about the issue of ID cards. She was all in favour of them because, “we had them during them war and everyone was fine with them”. To which I retorted, “we had rationing during the war, do you want that brought back too?”. Little did either of us suspect that minds infinitely superior to ours…blah..blah..blah:
For some time now there has been a hubbub of grumbling among the chattering classes about the vulgarity of “cheap air travel” with its attendant and intended benefit (or, in their eyes, problem) of modest earners being able to jet off to all manner of exotic destinations at the drop of a hat. “But it’s destroying the planet!” they all exclaim. This is not, I should add, a charge which is ever levelled at the organisers of global rock-concerts for Africa despite the fact that just distributing the various members of the Rockocracy to their appointed warbling-posts consumes enough energy to light up a medium-sized land mass. But saving the planet is not the point or the object. The real cause of this latest drive for forced austerity is the abundance of something that, only a few short years ago, was an expensive luxury enjoyed by the privileged few. But when tattooed builders, single mothers and lowly clerks can spend several weeks a year wallowing on sun-kissed South-East Asian beaches or sampling the epicurean delights of Tuscany then they are obviously living far better lives than they deserve and something must be done to curtail them. But it’s decidedly tricky to wrench people’s luxuries and pleasures from without a good reason. So, enter good reason: “global warming”. If the masses can be persuaded that the future of mankind depends on their austerity then not only will the meekly surrender their wordly goods, they will clamour to hand them over and humbly thank their lords and masters for being so benevolent, wise and caring. Given that so many modern activities involve energy consumption, the political classes need only play their cards right and “saving the plant” can be developed into a tool of legitimisation for almost complete social control. But I’m sure that they wouldn’t dare go that far. July 4th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m watching the BBC Top Gear motoring programme right now and its main presenter, the irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson, is driving a hot-rod Mercedes sports car at high speed along a German autobahn listening to a CD of Margaret Thatcher speeches. How can you not love this guy? July 3rd, 2005 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
You know we have a greedy government. Even if they cancel the debt, it will not help if the government is greedy. Senior government officials should cut their salaries first. July 3rd, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The original Live Aid back in 1985 was something I supported. I watched it, gave them my money and continued to vote for Margaret Thatcher in the next election because, just like in Africa, extreme statism needed to be opposed in the country I lived in too. Back in those days the Tory party had at least some intellectual coherence. Live Aid was a very specifically targeted project: there was a catastrophic famine in Ethiopia and regardless of the fact that it was the result of a war vastly exacerbating the effects of a drought, I felt at the time that specifically aiding civilians with emergency assistance was neither going to destroy the local economy (it had already collapsed to less that subsistence) nor would it significantly enrich the Marxists at the top who were in no small way responsible for that state of affairs. Most importantly, Live Aid was asking for private money, and as it was mine to give, I gave some. This time things are rather different and far less straightforward. It is not all bad, mind you. The Live 8 extravaganza has quite a few people associated with it making demands for the developed world (of which Russia is not truly a member, it should be noted) to open their markets to the Third World… and this is rightly targeted at the G-8 leaders. Quite so. What the hellholes of the world need is more globalization, not less, if they are to lift themselves out of their dire conditions. But alas the main thrust of what Live 8 seems to be about is to induce the governments of the G-8 to take money from their taxpayers and assign it to nebulous and frequently counter-productive projects in Africa, often in effect propping up the regimes who are the single biggest cause of their own nation’s problems and directly responsible for local poverty. As with any large gathering of the music illiterati, coherence and cogency are going to be as rare as pelicans in Perthshire. Yet some of the people listening to the streams of babble at this event will come away with the simple idea lodged in their brains that making trade freer is one of those things that would make the world a better place. So whilst I have no interest in supporting Live 8 myself and I had better things to do than watch it yesterday, perhaps some good will come from it in spite of the toxic statist message at this event’s core.  July 3rd, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Next time you see a starving African child on the television, remember the culpability of Make Poverty History. MPH’s will cause more poverty and more deaths than would otherwise have occurred. Socialism is killing the third world and Make Poverty History is going to make it worse. In a report by the Globalization Institute called More Aid, Less Growth, we learn that “for every 1% increase in aid received by a developing country, there is a 3.65% drop in real GDP growth per person. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the aid industry, the study finds that even where recipients have good governance, the effect is also negative.” So there you have it. The increase in aid prompted by Make Poverty History is going make things worse, not better. July 3rd, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been waiting for the left to come out in support of Mugabe. After all, they worship Che Guevara, the warmonger and homophobe. They wear CCCP t-shirts even though that regime murdered 60 million people. So I was not at all surprised to read this John Vidal article in The Guardian this week:
In other words, the Guardian is saying that Mugabe is not so bad after all. Remarkable. July 2nd, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yours truly, my fiancee plus regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor, have returned from a fine and patriotic day out in Portsmouth for the “International Festival of the Sea”, an event which at its core commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Trafalgar in fact was fought in October, but the organisers are no doubt exploiting what passes for the English summer to put on all manner of events for sailing nuts like myself. There has already been a fair amount of media coverage of the events linked to the Trafalgar bicentennial, although arguably the BBC has underclubbed its coverage, giving more attention it seems to Wimbledon tennis and the Live8 music event. For anyone who wants to know the human cost of defending this nation’s liberties, however, understanding what Lord Nelson and his forces achieved is important. As an island nation, our livelihood is crucially dependent on our peaceable enjoyment of the high seas. For more than 100 years after Nelson crushed the Franco-Spanish forces off Cadiz, the Royal Navy dominated the world’s oceans, enjoying a naval mastery to an extent not seen until the modern U.S. navy and its vast carrier fleets. Nelson instilled in the Senior Service an esprit de corps, a sense of confidence that was to carry on until the First World War, at which point Germany and Japan began to challenge Britain’s mastery. There are many excellent studies of Nelson’s life and achievements, and I would recommend in particular Alan Schom’s study of the countdown to Trafalgar, which gives credit not just to Norfolk’s most famous son but also many of the other actors of the time, who ensured that the Royal Navy was raised to a high pitch of excellence. Tom Pocock’s biography of Nelson is also a rattling good read of this brilliant, occasionally vain and charismatic man. July 2nd, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
… hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit. Physicist: What happened? Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! — I fell and broke my leg. Physicist: You stepped… off… the balcony? What on earth for? Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure? July 2nd, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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