“American conservatives who want to blame pet villains like the public-employee unions for the insolvency wave in the U.S. are missing the forest for the trees. Those unions are doing nothing but rational minimaxing within a system where the incentives are broken at a much deeper level. And it’s no coincidence that the same problems are becoming acute simultaneously nearly worldwide, because the underlying problem transcends all details of any individual democracy’s history or particular political arrangements. Between 1880 and 1943, beginning with Bismarck and ending with Roosevelt’s New Deal, the modern West abandoned the classical-liberal model of a minimal, night-watchman state. But the redistributionist monster that replaced it was unsustainable, and it’s now running out of other peoples’ money. We are living in the beginning of its end.”
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If you have friends with a fondness for great, acerbic wit and writing, then get them this collection by H.L. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore”. Here is a good article in the Times (of London) about a nicely bound double volume of his writings. I’d love to have seen him get to work on Obama, iDave, and for that matter, Silvio Berlusconi. December 15th, 2010 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If you think the previous leaks were amazing, check out this. December 14th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hello, what is this? BBC comedians (Armstrong and Miller, no less) making fun out of the failure of Global Warming to be … warm? Spotted by the ever-alert Delingpole, who has the video up at his blog. It’s under a minute long and is a must-see, if you’ve not already seen it. I wonder if it was that earlier viral video, the one in the classroom with the exploding kids, that alerted these guys to the comedic possibilities of this debate? The reaction to this latest piece of (I trust) internet virality will be interesting. December 14th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reflecting on the Wikileaks issue – see Perry’s post on Samizdata on Saturday – it occurs to me that one group of folk who must be a bit miffed by the leaks are parts of the anti-war side, especially those of a conspiracy theory cast of mind. For example, where is the leaked memo that “proves” there was some evil Jewish/neo-con/international banker/armsdealer/insert villain of choice conspiracy to blow up the WTC and then blame it on bin Laden? And I note that one of the leaked cables suggests that the Saudis are very alarmed by the geo-political ambitions of Iran, and want the West to contain it. Well, that surely fits with what a lot of those supposedly bloodthirsty neocons around George W Bush had been saying. And so on. The leaks have done damage, no doubt about it, and unlike Perry, I am not so sangine about the overall impact of Wikileaks as far as rolling back the state is concerned. This is one of those things I find hard to be able to prove conclusively one way or the other; generally speaking, the more openness, the better, and the fewer hiding places for governments, the better. I also think, however, that leaks of secrets that may harm self defence efforts of genuinely liberal states against terrorist groups, if they occur, are enough to send such leakers to jail on the grounds of being reckless in offering, however unintentionally, aid to such groups. But it is, nonetheless interesting that none of the dottier conspiracies swirling around 9/11 have yet to appear. The reason is that such conspiracy theories are bunk. December 14th, 2010 | 79 comments - (Comments are closed)
Philip Johnston write that “Vested interests are protecting administrators and forcing cuts to vital services” in an article about PFI contracts (Public Finance Initiative). But for the most part “privatisation” is a meaningless distraction. The only realistic way to reduce state expenditure is to actually shed state functions as the root cause is not which mechanism the state uses: direct employees funded with taxes or outside hired hands funded with taxes. Either way, the people who carry out state functions are creatures of a system funded by taxes rather than subject to the rigours of actual market pressures… until everyone in the chain can go broke as a consequence of their actions, it is still a state structure regardless of who is making the wheels go around. Indeed every time the state bales out a bank regardless of the moral hazard, they spread the decision skewing and insulated-from-consequence disease associated with being supported by taxes. To reduce state expenditure, you need to get the state out of all but its “core business”. You need to remove whole function of what the state does, not just hire different people to do it. The real problem is a century of ‘mission creep’. Until you can countenance that you are not serious about reducing the bloated state. December 14th, 2010 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
But I don’t get the impression that Cameron and his Coalition are any more interested in personal liberty or rolling back the frontiers of state than their predecessors. The “Big Society”, indeed, is a watered-down version of the sort of bogus, grand, unifying scheme employed in the Fascist Italy of the Thirties. December 13th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
My id always said that an article by a Freudian therapist would be a sloppy half-cooked pizza of generalities and buzzwords, and this one in the Guardian by Darian Leader is much as expected:
Then he whinges away about how his woo is going to be regulated, and throws in a couple of digs at the “market-led vision of human life” for good measure. While complaining about being regulated. Boo Woo Hoo. There is only one thing stopping me having a really good laugh. His complaint is just. His concern is justified. (And, unusually, Tim Worstall, whose blog is linked to by the word “woo” above, is wrong.) If people, for reasons that seem good to them, want to pay to spend time with a therapist, what right does the Health Professions Council have to force the interaction into a tidy format of input and output? Who asked them to the party? There seems to be a growing belief among our dear protectors that whenever money changes hands then their guiding presence is necessary. They generously allow us to speak more or less as we choose to our friends, lovers, and random blokes on the Clapham omnibus, but as soon as a cheque is written, they say, away flew an invisible invitation to make a threesome: me, you, and the government. I see no logical justification for this. Some people might end up paying for therapy and then feeling they had wasted their money. That is sad. It is also sad that in my time I have wasted good money on dresses that looked bad on me, plays that I left during the interval, and exercise machines. Come to think of it, money you can get back. Time is irrecoverable. I am still traumatized by the fact that in 1978 I watched 17 episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica thinking something interesting might happen. Some people who have experienced therapy say it was a waste of time; others say it saved their sanity. My only opinion on the matter is that the Health Professions Council has no right to an opinion on the matter. Certain clear categories of abuse or fraud by therapists have long been forbidden in law. If someone’s beef with their therapist is big enough for them to sue, then the State might just have a role. Other than that, the bureaucrat should not intrude. December 13th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 12th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
This started off as a reply to a comment on Samizdata but by the time I reached the fifth paragraph, I realised it might as well be a full blown blog post. Below is the remark to which I was replying but this article is now really about explaining why I have moved from tentative opposition to inescapable support for Wikileaks.
This is actually the very core of the ‘systemic attack’ that Assange has made on nation-states. It is precisely by attacking their ability to informally and easily exchange casual and often banal information that has such remarkable implications on the ability of states to act the way states act. It does not need to be “the date of D-Day” kind of revelations (the kind I too want to remain secret) that can significantly interfere with a state’s ability to act as a ‘conspiracy’ (and not in the “Grassy Knoll” or “Bilderburg” or similar gonzo conspiracy theory sense)… indeed I wish Assange had never used the word ‘conspiracy’… I have long described the Green movement ‘Warmists’ as a ‘confluence of interests’ rather than a ‘conspiracy’… but I actually mean the exact same thing when discussing the Greens as Assange means when he describes Government as a ‘conspiracy’… But if you are someone of the view that the modern regulatory welfare state has vastly too much power over its subjects, and that these states are unreformable from within the ‘democratic’ systems… the very systems that have been in place during the growth of this overweening state power, then a valid way to oppose that power is to carry out systemic attacks on the very networks that allow that ‘confluence of interests’ to express what those interests are and to thereby find ways to achieve that confluence. → Continue reading: Why I support Wikileaks December 11th, 2010 | 146 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet? – Ron Paul December 11th, 2010 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jim White at the Daily Telegraph has a good piece about the recent unjust – in my view – sacking of Newcastle Utd manager Chris Hughton. Apparently, Hughton’s “mistake” was that he was a “nice” person: straight-talking, honourable, considerate towards his players and unwilling to suck up to the owners of the club. White points out that it is silly to suggest that “nice guys” cannot do well in sports management or sports more generally, and cites examples such as Andrew Strauss, the England cricket captain, whom I have met and thought was a very likeable person; tennis gods Rafal Nadal and Roger Federer, two gents who are brilliant players, and for that matter, the late Sir Bobby Robson, football management great and all-round fine man. I hear stories that Sir Alex Ferguson, the gruff-appearing Scotsman who manages Manchester United, takes a fatherly concern for his players, especially the younger ones. Another example of a nice guy doing well in sports management is Harry Redknapp, currently doing great things at Spurs and presiding over a very entertaining team. I think the same point about decent people able to achieve greatness because, not despite, their niceness applies in the realms of business, too. Generally speaking, some of the best business people in my experience are certainly hardworking and committed, even aggressive, but they are not nasty pieces of work. That is how anti-businesspeople imagine business people should be. Alan Sugar, the front man for The Apprentice TV show, hams it up by coming across as a total monster, which is presumably what the TV producers want. In reality, any businessman who behaved like that would lose a lot of talented staff. Being a tosser is not a great business strategy, as far as I can see, but there obviously exceptions. In politics and sport, I can, of course, see why aggression, even nastiness, can be a winning strategy given that politics and sports are, in some ways, zero-sum. If politician A achieves office, he or she does so by pushing B out of the way. And that sort of eye-gouging gets worse the greater the stakes are, such as in totalitarian systems. Hence FA Hayek’s point, in the Road To Serfdom, about why “the worst get on top”. Anyway, I hope Hughton gets another job in football management from a club that values his qualities. No wonder Newcastle Utd fans are steamed. December 10th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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