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Over at the Adam Smith Institute’s Weblog, Madsen Pirie says:
There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.
In other words, if politics (i.e. the scramble for the favour of the majority) becomes less important, voting goes down.
Many libertarians, notably Perry de Havilland of this blog, believe that the same idea in reverse is true – that by not voting we can reduce the politicisation of our lives. ‘Let them wither away to irrelevance,’ he says. I’m not so sure. It might be one of those nasty paradoxes such as the one whereby safety breeds lack of vigilance, which makes us less safe.
Perhaps the first to stop voting are those who have achieved relative independence, leaving disproportionate influence to those still at the trough. Have any studies been done on this? And does anyone know what percentage of those eligible to vote in, say, 1900 when the State was very weak, actually did so?
I don’t believe we picked up on this, from from silicon.com on the 1st of this month.
A “perfectly secure” electronic identity card will be in use in France by 2006, French Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy has announced. The card will carry a chip which will combine “the standard type of personal data you get in this type of document and an electronic certification system”. A digital authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used to guarantee the authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.
But when it comes to whether the card will contain biometrics, Sarkozy said it is still too early to tell but underlined that the card is still in the project stage. For Sarkozy, the potential applications for the card are far clearer, however. Citizens will be able to use the card with central government, local authorities as well as businesses, he said.
This next paragraph makes this sound particularly nasty:
The minister also announced that “a strategic blueprint for electronic public services from 2003 to 2007” will be published in the coming weeks. “It’s no longer up to the citizens to come to e-government, it’s up to e-government go to them”, he said.
They’re coming to get you.
But the question of the protection of personal data hasn’t gone away …
No indeed.
In Defence of Global Capitalism
Johan Norberg
Cato Institute, 2003
Another welcome book in the Simon, Lomborg line, this time from Sweden, an auspicious sign. The Preface was reprinted in Liberty, where I first read it and where it makes a good summary of the argument of the book. In 1988 when the author was 16, his party – the Anarchists – got the largest percentage of votes, 25%, in the school mock-election, running an agin-the-government campaign. His position has changed somewhat – capitalism has difficulty working without a legal system and transparency in transactions – but is basically the same.
He starts by insisting that over the past three or four decades things have got better, particularly in the poorer “developing” countries. Income per capita has increased and mortality been reduced. This he ascribes to opening of the countries concerned to “the market”, both internal and external. He is, moreover, strongly against national barriers, not merely to trade, but also to migration, though here he doesn’t take into account our xenophobia. The case against tariffs is succinctly put by the quotation: “Either a branch of enterprise is profitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection; or else it is unprofitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection (p. 152).”
Although not explicitly against the EU as such, his analysis of its CAP agricultural subsidies and protectionism (pp. 148-) is damning, and it is even more shaming that so-called pro-Third World anti-globalisation protesters do not target them.
There is a separate chapter on “The African Morass” (p. 98-) where per capita GDP has actually decreased since the ’60s, though I think the statement that “The African countries have inherited a hierarchic, repressive political structure from the colonial powers” needs to be modified: what they did inherit, according to Bauer, was a late move to a command economy and a socialist intellectual outlook. The situation has been exacerbated by international aid, and debt cancellation would only be an encouragement of the behaviour that brought the bankruptcy about
The author refutes the prevalent belief that world inequality is growing, either between (p. 53) or within countries. He also points out that social mobility means that “the poor” are not the same people from one year to the next (p. 76). This, incidentally, is the factor most frequently, in fact always, omitted from discussions on poverty, whether absolute or relative; in fact, only 4% of the US population remain in the “poor” bracket (20%) for as long as two years, though some will remain longer.
Radley Balko has an article in Fox News today on a subject near and dear to my heart. Senator Fritz Hollings is at long last ending his dismal career.
This is the same Senator who in 1986 attempted a media grand stand play over the graves of the seven Challenger Astronauts. He is the luddite who can not deal with the modern world of technology and information and who wants us to return to a post-WWII world of backbreaking labour. He is the Senator who wants to make the internet safe for Disney and the RIAA.
For decades he has been the best Senator money can buy. I’m sure someone will miss him, but it certainly will not be me.
Speaking of medical privacy, time for a little light relief. The BBC reports that Philips has invented underwear that can monitor your vital signs and dial 999 in the event of a problem.
Apparently the hi-tech spy underwear can be washed and ironed as normal. Just be sure to take it off first.
There is nothing a power-freak likes better than replacing a muddle with a slab.
Natalie Solent
Here’s a White Rose Relevant speech in the House of Representatives, from April 16th of this year, by Representative Ron Paul of Texas. Apologies if it’s already been flagged up here, but I don’t believe it has. Paul is not the kind of man who gets to decide the law, but his opinions still count for something.
First two paragraphs:
Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the Patient Privacy Act. This bill repeals the misnamed Medical Privacy regulation, which went into effect on April 14 and actually destroys individual medical privacy. The Patient Privacy Act also repeals those sections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 authorizing the establishment of a “standard unique health care identifier” for all Americans, as well as prohibiting the use of federal funds to develop or implement a database containing personal health information. Both of these threats to medical freedom grew out of the Clinton-era craze to nationalize health care as much as politically possible.
Establishment of a uniform medical identifier would allow federal bureaucrats to track every citizen’s medical history from cradle to grave. Furthermore, as explained in more detail below, it is possible that every medical professional, hospital, and Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in the country would be able to access an individual citizen’s records simply by entering an identifier into a health care database.
Cards on the table. The bosses of this blog are out of town, and although they may be able to stick stuff up here from time to time, they may be distracted. I’m one of the people they hope will keep things buzzing in their absence. So I googled a few obvious things like “surveillance” and “privacy” and got little that was new, and then I tried “Freedom versus Security”, and got to this piece at Mr Blog, from way back in August.
Mr Blog has this to say on the matter:
Defining the debate as “freedom versus security” circumvents the question of whether the various proposals, in fact, improve security. Where is the evidence for this assumption that any of these measures can help ensure security?
He then attacks various supposed US security measures on cost effectiveness grounds. This critique is good as far as it goes. Indeed we do not want to hand on to our grandchildren a society bankrupted by a million futile security measures which weren’t. That’s true.
But I think Mr Blog is making a fundamental error of omission here. The really big consequence of framing things as “freedom versus security” is to smuggle past you the notion that “freedom” can never ever be any good for “security”. Yet plainly it can.
If the populus is numbed into a state of brainless inertia by laws that take away their freedom, and which simultaneously promise to create security, then a major source of security, in the form of individuals protecting themselves and each other, may be switched off, and by the very measures which were supposedly going to make us all more secure. The “cost” of “security” measures isn’t only that they cost us a ton of money, or even that they cost us freedom. What if, by costing us freedom, they also reduce security? That’s the biggest problem with framing this argument as “freedom versus security”.
As I have probably said here before, this debate reminds me of the Economic Calculation debate of a hundred years ago, and Mr Blog is just like one of those anti-economic-planning grumblers of days gone by who complained that planning would be more of a muddle and less of a spur to prosperity than pro-planners fancied, and that it would eat up our freedoms to insufficiently good effect. But that was to miss the vital point about prosperity, which was that in order to get it, you had to have freedom. No freedom, no prosperity.
What if security is the same? No freedom, no security. I think it is, and I think that’s true. And I want some latter day Von Mises to write a huge book which proves it.
Mr Blog’s error is all the more distressing because he frames the question so clearly.
Here is an idea all libertarians can agree with: removing marriage law and regulation from the State.
My only disagreement is they do not go far enough. The State has no place in matters of faith or of love. It is up to individuals to make their own decisions on such matters and self-regulate within the framework of their choice, whether it be church or private marriage registry.
It is nice, just for once, to see a wronged minority calling for a solution requiring less government intervention. The ‘solution’ of problems created by government by demanding more government is sadly the rule, rather than the exception.
I honestly think I have grossly underestimated the entrepreunerial skills of the social-working class. It must take a certain talent to keep inventing new make-work schemes and then successfully sell them to the government.
I cannot imagine how I would begin to pitch this one:
The Government is losing its war against flab after spending £9.6 billion on projects to tackle obesity across all departments.
I just love the idea of porcine civil servants being sent to huff and puff their way around an army assault course but I rather think they are not the intended target of this new ‘war’.
Anyway, it seems the government is losing the war. They cannot make fat people slim again by bureaucratic means. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
The fat epidemic shows no sign of abating.
‘Epidemic’! Now there’s a panic-inducing trigger-word if ever there was one. I bet that was the deal-closer. ‘Minister, unless you write out a blank cheque there’s going to be an epidemic!’.
Obesity is serious.
At £9.6 billion, yeah I would say that’s bloody serious.
It kills 34,000 people a year in Britain…
And HMG is going to keep spending money until the target of Zero deaths from all causes is reached.
…and costs the economy in England £2.6 billion a year, estimated to rise to £3.6 billion by 2010.
How can they possibly know that?
It cannot, however, be tackled by the Department of Health alone.
Well, it might be helped by fat people going on a diet but we wouldn’t want them taking the law into their own hands, would we.
Strategies to deal with obesity in children and adults now involve four Government departments with support at Cabinet level.
The Department of Health and the Health Development Agency, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are all players in the anti-fat campaign.
Defeating the Third Reich didn’t require this many people.
And, therein lies the rub because even this public admission of failure will do nothing to stop the flab-fighting government juggernaut now that it has been sent rumbling forth onto the highway of national life. The conspicuous failure of fat children to shrink to normal size will merely prompt demands for ‘more resources’ to fight yet another phoney war. Problems are not meant to be solved because careers aren’t built that way. Problems are to be fabricated and then carefully nurtured and maintained until…well, ever.
The £9.6 billion wasted thus far was merely the appetiser. Small change. Petty cash. Mere peanuts already swallowed up with a forest’s worth of reports, initiatives, projections, surveys, committee minutes and action plans. This is Britain where the new national ethos is to throw good money after bad into the bottomless sinkhole of guilt and paranoia.
If any reader is tempted to laugh out loud at the Swiftian absurdity of it all then I can hardly blame them. But really it isn’t funny, it’s pathetic and it is only a matter of time before it moves beyond the sad to the downright nasty:
One is the Food and Health Action Plan which aims to promote healthy eating in all age groups.
An aspect of this is the schools fruit programme, now being implemented, which aims to give all primary school children in their first three years, a portion of fruit a day.
The second is the Game Plan, a strategy for promoting physical activity with the somewhat vague target of ensuring that 70 per cent of the population is “reasonably active” by 2020.
This is what they call a ‘consciousness raising exercise’, a customary pre-cursor to new expansions of state power. ‘The voluntary approach hasn’t worked’, they will cry. ‘What we need is tough legislation’. And they will most likely get it too and disapproved products will start to be pulled from supermarket shelves and nobody will be allowed to open a bank account until they can produce a ‘Physical Fitness Certificate’. This may sound alarmist but the one thing I have never underestimated is the vanity and ambition of our political classes.
Britain isn’t obese, it’s anaemic. It’s life-blood is being drained from it by an army of worthless, self-propogating parasites.
The problem with using technology to look after children is that it is liable also, in due course, to be used to look after adults.
As part of writing for this, I occasionally buy the Times Educational Supplement, and on page 5 of the most recent issue (October 3 2003) it says this (paper only):
Pupils will soon be asked for a thumb-print instead of a password to enter internet chat-rooms.
A firm in the north-east of England has spent three years developing a scanner that will make it harder for paedophiles to prey on youngsters via the internet.
Think2gether, which is based in Gateshead, says the scanner is the first secure access system for chatroom users.
For about £30 schools will be able to buy the thumb-print scanner, which is already being used at the South Tyneside city learning centre and in Leicester education action zone.
Alan Wareham, director of Think2gether, said the system had attracted interest from as far away as Singapore.
“The problem is that children often tell other people their password, which is something adults tend not to do,” he said.
“A child can pass on this information in all innocence and the adult can then lon on as that child and pretend it is them using the chat-rooms.
“The scanner removes this possibility by scanning the child’s thumb-print three times before letting them in. We are also developing hardware which will monitor and record conversations in chatrooms, as additional protection.”
As so often when someone is quoted, the last bit is the scariest.
If I was a Californian I would be wary about expecting too much from the newly-elected Governor Schwarzenegger. Events may prove me wrong but I rather doubt that he will have much impact on life in California. Or even that much impact on politics in California for that matter.
Some people, however, are expecting the worst. Below is a selection on unedited posts from the forum of the Democratic Underground and I give you my assurance that these are far from being the most lurid:
This nation is jam-packed with starfuckers, let’s face it. No one seems to give a damn about issues that affect their own goddamn wallets, but “it would be soooooooo cool to have a movie star for governor, woo-hoo!!!!!!!!”
There are dozens of reasons why Colly-forn-eeya went for Arnie, but don’t underestimate the power of the starfucker vote. It is very, very closely linked to the booger-eatin’ vote.
But who will speak for the ‘booger-eaters’ if not Arnie?
No way in HELL was that recall legit. NO WAY. I don’t care what anyone says, FIX.
We all know the 2000 Pres. election was a FIX, I’d bet the farm that Jeb being re(s)elected was a fix too (keep in mind this state’s election process is brought to you by…KKKatherine Hairass). And there is NO WAY in hell that such a liberal state like California would vote for a roid freak, sexist, Nazi…unless…IT’S A FIX.
Do you honestly imagine that Arnie would work without a script?
what things would these kind of people do to us?
whenever something like this happens the innocent people always suffer first. it is not just a political enemies thing. hitler did not just go after his rivals, he went after defenseless jews. when bush and rove and that gang finally get the power they need what will happen to normal american citizens?
Ze Democrats vill be deported. California vill be ‘democratrein’. Ze pure-blooded Californian Aryan folk must haf ze lebensraum.
DU is a great place, but it would be too easy to be infiltrated and contaminated here. We need someplace online that is well-encrypted and secure from prying eyes to do our serious planning. We also will want to get in touch with ANSWER and MoveOn, work with them, maybe set up some kind of rebel high command.
And while you’re about it, get in touch with Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They’ve got a score to settle too.
Oh come on, chaps. Stop trying to put a brave face on things. You’re a bit upset, aren’t you. I can tell. I can always tell.
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