And yes, it is eternally annoying that statists can’t tell the difference between introducing competition and outsourcing a monopoly.
– Squander Two comments on this and it is then copied into a further Blognor Regis posting
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Surprise surprise:
Still, at least this election has given everyone something to grab hold of, and it surely counts for something that Mugabe feels that he needs to fake the result he wants. It is interesting how much more interest the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is paying to Zimbabwe now. It is all because of the Iraq election. Until that happened, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere was understandably pre-occcupied with Iraq, and other misery-spots tended to be neglected. But since the election, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is interested in any circumstance which seems in any way to be being influenced by that election. Suddenly, all political badness everywhere is part of the story, provided only that some locals are making democratic noises, demonstrating, etc. I am not complaining. This just goes to show how right they were when they said, those that did, that the election would make a huge difference. It has. However, this is interesting. It is a piece by S. J. Masty at the Social Affairs Unit blog, trashing the whole idea of spreading democracy hither and thither, in countries to which it is not suited and who have not evolved it at their own speed and in their own way. Instead of having one relatively staid kleptocracy in permanent charge, says Masty, democracy is liable to replace that one kleptocracy with two or three competing kleptocracies. “Predator democracies”, he calls these unfortunate countries. This is well worth a read, and a think. (Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link.) What I think is that Masty may be confusing the messenger (democracy) with the message (lots of people are now rowing about who gets to rule the country). An old fashioned monarchy, by definition, would put an end to the rowing, but can an old-fashioned monarchy survive in a country where so many more people want a slice of the action than in the old days? UPDATE: This is the kind of thing Masty has in mind. April 1st, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A while ago here I speculated that one of the effects of the Internet – blogs especially – will be to focus attention on what major public figures actually say, and not just to harrass them about their various scandals and cock-ups, worthy though that also is. Well, according to the EU Referendum blog, Michael Howard made quite a good speech the other day about defence, which the media mostly ignored. The two main points were: that Tony Blair is too keen on EU integration and not keen enough on the Atlantic Alliance, and that he does not give Britain’s armed forces the resources to do the many jobs he demands of them. Gabriel might even be cheered up a bit. Not a lot, but a bit. Personally I think that Howard’s two points are closely connected. The smaller our forces are, the easier it will be for the EU to swallow them up. You can read the entire speech here. April 1st, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Quiggin of Crooked Timber has posted about a fascinating legal case. Two Chinese players of an online game acquired a valuable virtual sword. What happened next?
Perhaps some Samizdata readers who are lawyers or gamers or both can help him out. (Although F. Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter already have written a paper.) Even more interesting than the legal question is the evolution of the game worlds in ways, good and bad, that the designers don’t anticipate or want. A commenter to John Quiggin’s post, Keith M Ellis, says:
The libertarian angle on that is obvious. Is the Hobbesian outcome that some (apparently rather a high proportion) of the players seem to go all out to make others have a bad playing experience a challenge to our worldview? Yet another aspect is the interaction between the game world and the real world. Another commenter, “asg” says:
For some reason I thought of this from the point of view of the fictional game characters, not the players. The thought of the characters in the game world, forbidden to speak to their enemies, yet finding a way to communicate by going outside the bounds of their own reality, would make a story worthy of Philip K Dick. April 1st, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
One can, I suppose, trace the end of the ideal of limited government in the United States from any number of events. I have heard the Civil War, Roosevelt’s court-packing schemes and the emasculation of Supreme Court jurisprudence on enumerated powers, even (half-jokingly) the extension of the franchise to women. If these are all candidates for the beginning of the the end of limited government, I wonder if we aren’t witnessing the end of the end. Constitutional structure, jurisprudence, and the like were never more than temporary and imperfect restraints on the state, in the absence of real political backing and deep cultural roots for the ideal of limited government. There is precious little sign of either in the current landscape. At this point, one looks around in despair for any sign that limited government has any political viability at all. The Republicans, whose commitment to limited government has been steadily waning for decades, appear to have abandoned it entirely now that they hold the reins of government.
It scarcely need be said that the Democratic Party provides no hope whatsoever for limited government, outside of a few isolated issues. Of the Libertatian Party, well, the less said the better. Many small-l libertarians, pragmatic and incremental reformers such as myself, looked to the Republicans as the least worst alternative, with some hope that their authoritarian and statist instincts could be tempered by the political calculation that they couldn’t do without us. It is apparent, however, that a new political calculation is afoot, one that relies not at all on believers in limited government, and thus consigns them to utter political irrelevance.
At this point, I see no hope for limited government in the near or medium term. I don’t see any political home for us, anywhere that we can exert any meaningful influence. We can look forward only to the expansion of the state, until the entire political system is rendered chaotically fluid by some shock or upheaval. The most likely scenario I see for realignment and revival of limited government ideals would be the collapse of the Democratic Party, which would at least create an opening to reinvent the current, sterile Rep/Dem, Conservative/Liberal dichotomy as a new opposition between liberty and the total state. April 1st, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are bloggers. Venetian blinds do not scare us. – Scott Wickstein earlier this (Australian) evening. April 1st, 2005 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now that the animated corpse of Terri Schiavo has finally been allowed to die, some of the fault lines of American conservatism have been brought into sharp focus. The behaviour of quite a few on the left has not been very edifying either but certainly it is amongst the Republicans that the most remarkable behaviour has occured. The term ‘pro-life’ may be a reasonable description for those who oppose killing late term foetuses but the broad political church of pro-lifers (with whom I actually share many positions) includes a section of conservatism which is so obsessed with the physical trappings of life that they have stretched the definition of human existance to the breaking point. The origins of this conservative faction are not hard to see. It came about in opposition to those on the socialist left who treat abortion as not so much something to be tolerated but rather a sacred sacrament which they venerate with cult-like obsessiveness and even demand it should be supported by the tax money of people who abominate the practice. In resistance to this we now see some conservatives developing an equally extreme cult to whom being ‘pro-life’ means treating the intentional death of a fertilised egg as tantamount to murder and demanding the removal of the customary fiduciary role of a spouse in decisions such as the Terri Schiavo case when the spouse does not follow the ‘pro-life’ party line. Moreover these people describe courts which does not intervene in such a civil matter as ‘activist judges’ who should be opposed with force by the executive if they will not buckle under and act like a, well, activist judge. → Continue reading: The American Zombie Cult April 1st, 2005 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian newspaper reports that two-thirds of the world’s resources have been “used up”, so with only a third left, the crunch cannot be far away for Planet Earth. (Let’s hope Hollywood is on the case). The splendid Cafe Hayek blog nicely chews up and spits out this Malthusian argument here. I have a question. If the resources of the Earth are finite and everything eventually succumbs to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then by the logic employed by the deepest of Greens, even if we recycle all our goods and live in mud huts, then at some point, the game is up, we are all doomed, the end is nigh. So my question would be that if this is so, then why not live life to the full and enjoy this “finite” world while we have it? Let’s get those SUVs, build those spacecraft, take those lavish holidays, create those new technologies. It is all going to end anyway, so enjoy! Of course, the idea that resources are finite has been challenged by the late and much-missed Julian L. Simon. The Ultimate Resource is his masterwork. And what is the ultimate resource? You probably have guessed – the grey stuff between your ears. March 31st, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just to stir the pot in the peanut gallery: Does anyone else find the use of the term “undocumented” to describe people who are in the US illegally to be more than a little disingenuous, misleading, and politically correct? March 31st, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an excellent article on the Social Affairs Unit blog called Civil liberties cannot be defended selectively, by Joyce Lee Malcolm. As the culture and meta-contextual assumptions of liberty have decayed amongst the intellectual and activist elements of British society, the institutions supporting liberty for so long have been revealed to have no foundations and are thus unable survive the torrent of events such as Hungerford or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks in another country. As the Joyce Lee Malcolm article points out, the so called ‘opposition’ and even the vast majority of the media have abdicated their role in seriously questioning the disassembly of ancient civil rights for decades, whilst the rights to self-defence, trial by jury and double jeopardy are steadily abridged. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the British system, which for so long survived and thrived by using the custom of liberty as its bedrock, has shown its fatal weakness. Defending civil liberties in the UK is becoming harder and harder because not only have the institutional means for doing so been effectively swept away, so few British people even understand upon what their now largely illusory liberties were based. March 31st, 2005 | 100 comments - (Comments are closed)
Terri Schiavo died this morning. I hope that her husband and family can find some peace, if not with each other, than at least within themselves. Now that the emotional flash point of the debate is gone, I hope that we can have a more considered policy discussion over who should make medical decisions for non-decisional patients, and under what restrictions. March 31st, 2005 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
To hear conservatives indicate that a husband is not the person best qualified to decide what his wife would have wanted indicates a view of what marriage constitutes that seems rather at odds with the usual conservative obsession with the importance and gravity of that institution. March 30th, 2005 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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