Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally.
– Daniel Hannan finally admits that he was wrong to have backed Barack Obama for President
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The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU’s current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans. Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:
And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead. All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely’s own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive. Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those “peasants”, including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars. Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929? June 15th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. – James Harvey Robinson, via Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends and Influence People June 15th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian’s George Monbiot is talking about the US Tea Party Movement. Which is it, do you think? Has nobody ever told him about the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, or does he just enjoy winding people like me up? June 15th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I read in the paper today that after subjecting 500,000 people to mandatory face to face interviews, the government denied passports to eight for fraud. This is the thing that most do not get. The big evil does not justify, never justifies, the small good. Causing inconvenience, misery and transgressing the privacy of half a million people in order to catch eight fraudsters is absurd. And our society is full of such absurdities. Millions of adults are denied the “gift of giving” into their children’s lives by “child protection” policies. There is this assumption that any adult watching children swim is potentially sexually aroused, for example. I would contend that the people who make such laws have dirty minds. I find it nobler and better to live life as though perverted degenerates do not even exist, for they are thankfully rare. And on the rare occasions where monsters abuse society’s trust, why, we should quickly and simply hang them in the town square and then return to life as before. This is the model for transgressing only the liberties of the lawless, and not those of society at large. If you have to tread on the freedoms of innocent people to catch the lawless you’re doing it wrong. “If it stops one fraudster, if it saves one life and if it protects one child it will all be worth it” the statists cry. These thoughts are supposed to make us feel warm inside as we queue to be inspected by the passports office, as security cameras follow us down the street and as police demand to know what we are doing for no particular reason. We are to lay our personal freedom on the alter of society in the name of the common good, and feel heartened by our sacrifice. As bizarre as it may sound, there are “true believers” in this cult – I see them all the time. Down that road lies 24 hour policing of the entire population, and lives that are not worth living for all but the party elite. Basically 1984 made real. And it all began when we passed that first law that mildly inconvenienced many in order to wheedle out the wicked few… June 13th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties – Ludwig von Mises June 12th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have not yet given much thought to writing out a piece here on the oil spill – this is, on one level, a complex issue that does not lend itself to quick-fire blog postings. This article over at the Melangerie blog (which I thoroughly recommend) is a great piece, very fair and perceptive, in my view. One issue for us free marketeers is this: we like to talk about how pollution is, in some ways, a property rights issue. When a huge oil leak contaminates a sea and damages vast amounts of marine life and say, fishing industries, it is an interesting question on how exactly that issue gets resolved without some way of apportioning costs and compensation. Is a state needed to oversee this? Can it be fixed by entirely non-state means?. There are some free market environmentalists out there who might have some ideas. Rather than write more, I would be interested in comments. June 11th, 2010 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andy Duncan. Like Andy, I have read Thomas E. Woods’ Meltdown book and I wrote out some thoughts about it here. And here. Glad to see Andy is writing away. Old Samizdata hands may remember he used to scribble for us occasionally. June 11th, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I ran across this article on Thomas Paine tonight and thought our readers might also find it of interest. There is a great deal of detail here about his life that I had never known before. June 11th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via National Review’s The Corner blog, I see that FA Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom is top of the Amazon charts. Wow. Funny how these supposed golden oldies keep racking up the best-seller scores, isn’t it? Mind you, I guess the same phenomenon applies to entertainers. Like it or not, Sinatra and Elvis keep selling. June 10th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steve Baker MP’s maiden speech. Tried to finish a longer piece involving that link, but failed. There’s the link anyway. Now rushing out to a meeting organised by the very organisation that published that blog posting. Such is life. June 9th, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world. They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.” Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal. I am not sure whether it is very smart for the WSJ to have a headline referring to Mr Obama as an “alien” in the White House – that will only reinforce the view, held by parts of Mr Obama’s more extreme fans, that his critics are racist bigots. And it is also far from the first time that a supporter of Transnational Progressivism has held office – think of the dreadful Woodrow Wilson, for instance, or to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter. But it certainly is notable that more and more people are drawing the conclusion that Obama and his associates don’t seem to care for their country very much, or pander to some of the silliest Blame-Amerika-First lines. Of course, had WSJ readers been following Paul Marks on this blog, none of this stuff would be a surprise. June 9th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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