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Winner libertarianism is about how to make the world better, and how the world is, at least in some ways, actually getting better. Winner libertarianism explains how I can make my life a success. I am free. Yes, governments do bad things, as do others, but they can be confronted, resisted, criticised, and sometimes – quite often actually – defeated. – Brian Micklethwait (PDF) January 17th, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’ve been trying to take out The Motorcycle Diaries from my local video hire shop, but with no success. It seems that the film is particularly popular. It is based on part of the life of Che Guevara, a hero for many young people. When I was at university, there were students who wore Che Guevara t-shirts or who put up posters of the man on their bedroom walls. People never said a bad word against this man. To some, he was their personal Jesus figure. Problem was, no one really knew who the hell Che Guevara was. He was a revolutionary figure, something to do with Cuba. That was about all most people knew about the man. It always seemed odd to me that people wanted to associate themselves with someone they knew so little about. In reality, supporting Che was just about making a statement – of sticking it to companies, America and the West. Making Che Guevara into someone worthy of admiration is the most successful thing the ‘Left’ has managed to do in the past fifty years. This is the man who had no shame in murdering innocent civilians, was a major human rights violator, and put gays (who were ‘deviants’), religious minorities and other undesirables into concentration camps. Some hero. January 17th, 2005 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even if we take only two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, this question is complex. If we take the old John Dewey definition of liberty (at least the definition of liberty that John Dewey tended to use in his youth – as he got older he became a more interesting man), the answer is ‘right now’. Never before have average incomes been higher, most people can buy more things (and so on) than people could in the past. However, for those of us who reject the Pragmatist soft-left FDR ‘freedom from want’ definition of liberty or freedom (no, I am not going to go into possible differences between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’) more thinking is required. First the United States. Slavery may be against natural law (if there is such a thing) as even the Romans accepted (although slavery was not against ‘the law of all nations’ or Roman law itself), and it may be (as authorities for centuries have claimed – for an American example see Salmon P. Chase) against the principles of the English Common Law, but it certainly was not against the statute law of many States. So if we define (as libertarians do) liberty as the non-violation of a person or their goods by another person or group of persons (‘the nonaggression principle’) then the United States was more of a free country after the slaves were freed than before. So the United States after 1865 (not in the first years of the Republic) is at its most free. Government taxes and regulations actually decline after the Civil War (or War between the States, or War of Northern Aggression – or whatever you want to call it), and statism does not seem to rise again till after the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1887 (it is pity that a good free market man like Grover Cleveland was responsible for that – but he thought of himself as using federal regulation to ward off worse regulation by individual States, a rather Madison style move that did not work out well in the end). Oddly enough the Jim Crow laws in the South were not fully underway by the mid 1880’s either (although they were on the cards – it depends which State one is talking about). So the early 1880’s would seem (for all their faults) were about the peak of liberty for the nation as a whole. The trade tax (or ‘tariff’ if you prefer) was increased in 1890 and ‘antitrust’ came in the same year, and Jim Crow got worse and worse. → Continue reading: When was liberty at its peak? January 16th, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have always endured a distinctly uncomfortable ambivolence on the subject of the physical chastisement of children. My rational inclinations are to disapprove of it as a whole. The law protects adults from being physically assaulted by other adults and I find the arguments that seek to exempt youngsters from this law to be flawed and unpersuasive. That said, I know that there are many good and loving parents who sometimes smack their children out of frustration or a temporary flare of temper. It may not be beneficial thing but, rarely does this cause any real harm. Consequently, I view the engagement of the machinery of law enforcement with family life with the utmost trepidation:
The purported distinction is not one in which I have any degree of confidence. Law enforcement in this country is often patchy, capricious and incompetent. I expect that truly serious abusers will slip the net while normally conscientious parents who lash out once in a moment of uncustomary anger will find themselves facing a custodial sentence and ruination. Even if that were not the case (and it is very much the case) the new laws will result in an entrenchment of a culture of fear and suspicion. Children contrive to harm themselves all the time by flying off of their bikes, falling out of trees and sticking themselves with sharp implements. I have already heard far too many plausible accounts of parents who are scared of taking their wounded charges to a hospital in case they are accused of abusing them In another age and in different political and legal circumstances, I would not be too concerned about these new laws. I may even (cautiously) approve. But it is not possible to see these developments as anything other than another step in the process of the gradual nationalisation of the family. Nor will anyone’s life be improved by this legislation. It is enacted, in part, because it serves the interests of the professional welfare classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on this kind of state activism and partly because of the unfortunately fashionable view that people cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs in a satisfactory manner without the external discipline of regulatory control. None of this means that I necessarily approve of parents who smack their children. Generally, I do not. But just leaving matters be is probably the least worst solution. Over the coming years, that object lesson will be driven home. January 15th, 2005 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an article in the Spectator which seems a bit complacent to me:
Riiight. So the author of this piece, Ross Clark, thinks that the case of Tony Martin, the west Norfolk farmer jailed for killing an intruder at his farm and injuring another, is just a freak, a one-off case which need offer no special insights into the rights of self defence. The Spray case, as is clear, still resulted in the householder being convicted, albeit not having to serve a term of imprisonment. Clark’s piece is not without merit. He argues that the United States has achieved a large fall in crime due, he claims, to such factors as ‘zero tolerance’ policing, tough sentencing and the like. No doubt these have played a part but it is a distortion to suppose that America’s much lower level of aggravated burglaries is not partly linked to widespread ownership of firearms and a different approach on the part of the courts to householders using force to defend themselves. Clark is correct to state that hard cases make bad law. He is, however, dead wrong to suppose that apart from the Tony Martin case, there are no examples of homeowners having been prosecuted for self defence. And it is abundantly clear that burglars have got the message: raiding a person’s home is a low-risk activity in Britain, as Perry de Havilland’s former neighbour, the late City financier John Monckton, found out last year. Fortunately, we have the historian Joyce Lee Malcolm to set us straight on the real lessons to be learned from recent trends in British and American policy on self defence and the law. I urge everyone interested in this issue to read her book if they haven’t already done so. UPDATE: In thinking through the Spray case mentioned above, I do accept that it was right for the householder to compensate a man mistaken for a burglar, but the suspended jail term strikes me as quite wrong although I have not studied all the particulars of the case, including whether the householder had been the victim of multiple burglaries in the past, like Tony Martin. January 15th, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results. One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.
The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.
The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative. This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind. January 15th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
This post is will ultimately turn into a photo-essay about visiting a Japanese supermarket and having a very fine Japanese lunch in London, but before that it will be long and rambling in my preferred way. People who are just here for the sushi should go directly below the fold and scroll down One peculiar thing about the novels of Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson is that he has often felt the urge to set large portions of his novels in two cities: London and Tokyo. I have one or two ideas as to why this is so, because, as it happens, these are my favourite two cities as well. Why is hard to describe, though. One aspect of it is that these are cities with tremendous amounts of fine detail or structure. Looking carefully at a street and the buildings on it, and what is sold in shops, in both cities one can see legacies of hundreds or thousands of years of history. (In Tokyo’s case, the fact that much of the city has been covered with concrete has somehow failed to destroy this. In London, the builders of 1950s public housing did do a good job of eradicating it in certain parts of the city, but a great deal none the less still remains) Both cities are collections of villages that have gradually merged into greater agglomerations, a process which was completed by a period of rapid urban railway building. But in both cases all these villages retain very distinct characters of their own and it is very hard to describe precisely where the centre of the city is. Visiting Camden in London or Harajuku in Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon somehow feels similar (although Camden is much grimier). There is a feeling that global youth fashion is somehow emanating from here, and in both places there is an interesting mix of the spontaneous and the commercial, as street markets sit right next door to international brand names, and the relationship is somehow a beneficial one to both parties. Both cities have a media hipness about them – for some reason London and Tokyo are the two cities in the world that produce the most interesting television commercials, although the programming itself on television in both places has rather less to recommend it. And there is just a buzz that I get when I am in London or Tokyo that I don’t get elsewhere. (I get it to some extent in New York and Hong Kong, but not quite to the same extent. And not quite in the same way). And this buzz goes deep. When I am in a foreign city I like to visit suburbs as well as the centre of the city, and in both London and Tokyo I still find the buzz almost everywhere I go. I am not going to speculate any more why these two cities are like this. (Well, not much. Both are great ports which are the capitals of Island countries separated from their continents. That must have something to do with it?). In any event, though , I am not the only person to feel this. And I don’t think Gibson is even the only cyberpunk novelist. (Neal Stephenson has just written The Baroque cycle, an immense three volume novel, much of it set in London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in which he is trying to figure out the same thing, I think. Stephenson has written less about Tokyo and Japan, although come to think of it there is a fair bit of Japan in both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, and even a little in the Baroque Cycle. But, anyway, in early 2001 I was living in Sydney, Australia. Although Sydney has great weather, wonderful food, beautiful scenery, and many other attractions, I was a little bored. Life was a bit lacking in buzz. I found a link (probably from slashdot) to this article, in which the London Sunday newspaper The Observer had asked Gibson to describe his fascination with Japan. In it he writes as much about London as about Tokyo, both cities being in his eyes being the world capitals for the otaku – the passionate obsessive. I think he is right. I think the reason I love it is that I can be a passionate obsessive myself. And (back in 2001) looking carefully at the Observer article, I noticed that the newspaper’s magazine had put out an entire “Japan Issue”, an entire magazine full of articles looking at Japan (and mostly Tokyo) from the perspective of London. (The entire magazine is all still on the web, although there doesn’t seem to be an index. The URLs are fairly easy to guess though).. And reading this magazine in 2001, it was a big thing in making me realise how much I was missing my favourite cities – and as it happened I couldn’t hold out very long and before a year was out I had got on a plane for London. (Tokyo was more culturally daunting without knowing the language, and anyway I have visa issues there. There was nothing whatsoever stopping me from just hopping on a plane for London and looking for a job when I got there). In London I did find the obsessive compulsive Japanese-ness I was looking for, in the places Gibson described such as Portobello markets, and elsewhere. (I have a particular memory of sitting in a London cinema in 2002, watching an animated Japanese homage to a great German expressionist surrounded by an audience of very earnest young Japanese people). And in particular, I followed the advice of this article from the Observer magazine Japan Issue, and made a visit to the Oriental City shopping centre, a place of amazing Japanese-ness in the unexpected location of Colindale in north London. Where I go from time to time, and where I went again last Sunday. (Click on for the story and photographs of last Sunday). January 15th, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Baseball player Andres (“Big Cat“) Gallarraga is fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and making a new name for himself by writing a book about how non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma can be fought. As the Baby Boom gets ever older, expect more relatively young celebs to make their diseases public in order to appeal to this disintegrating demographic. India’s Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT has been busy ensuring that ladies trying to become constables do not get unfair treatment in Chandigarh. UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:
Jaguar’s Big Cat is best in show. WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:
Hacienda Luisita’s CAT is Luzon’s biggest sugar refinery, but, says Tarlac News, there is trouble brewing there. At the mill, I should say. That would be in the Philippines, right? A high speed cat, the WestPac Express, is helping out with the Tsunami relief effort in Thailand:
Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop. BMS-CAT is a Texas based recovery firm, and it has been busy in Hawaii, after the flooding there. This story evidently started out with a misprint in its headline. Google has the original link as “USA Today Highlights iPod’s Importance to Cat Stereo Makers”. But they meant car. Jaguars especially? CAT news from Kolkata:
I know what you are thinking. Cats are not machines or acronyms, they are, first, last and always, four legged mammals. So I will end with news about Tropical Storm, son of Storm Cat:
Catisfied? January 14th, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane’s more quickly:
The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge. This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer? If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:
Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world’s various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care. January 14th, 2005 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:
Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.
Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?
Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation? Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does. And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet. January 13th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone’s has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:
My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough. But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone’s decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser. (And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.) For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things. Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together. Maybe Waterstone’s regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it. I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone’s to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books. As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right. January 13th, 2005 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons. However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer. That is what I call good news. January 12th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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