We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I confess I have done no more than skim this paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Xavier Sala”i”Martin of Columbia University and NBER. I will have a go at reading it properly later. I got the link from Tim Worstall, who gets distracted from “ragging on Ritchie” into a rather moving defence of his belief that capitalism is the system that actually works when it comes to lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
I liked the title. I liked it so much I think I will type it out again.
African Poverty is Falling… Much Faster than You Think!
Waitrose sells Horse and Hound magazine.
Huh?
Didn’t they ban hunting, like, years ago? Yes. Yet Horse and Hound is still there on the hotly contested shelves of the Waitrose magazine rack, and in the posh aspirational section right next to Country Homes & Interiors to boot. I suppose some of the reason for H&H’s survival must be down to upping the quotient of writing about Princess Zara and her horse Toytown and downing the quotient about hunting. Even so, it must be galling for the anti-hunting activist community. Not what they imagined back in the heady days of 2004 when they were offering to help the government and police enforce a hunting ban.
At this point I could either launch into a detailed, link-filled account of whatever it is hunts actually do these days or I could just vaguely mutter some half-remembered stuff about how there is some get-out clause that allows them to chase the foxes with as long as they don’t actually kill them, or if they do it’s collateral damage or done for research or something. I shall do the latter and make a virtue of it, because vague half-remembered perceptions and their political consequences are what this post is actually about.
It didn’t stick. Thirty years plus of campaigning, thousands of letters to the editor, millions of Ban Hunting Now badges, at least three private members’ bills, Royal Commissions galore, keeping the faith in the dark days of Thatcher, then the dawning hope that this Bill might be the real deal, First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Third Reading… then that last minute farrago with the Parliament Act when the Lords cut up rough, then finally Royal Asssent (through gritted Royal teeth, yeah)… all that and it still didn’t bloody stick. The hunts are still there, shooting foxes by firing squad or whatever they do, and the sabs are still there cutting off peoples’ heads with gyrocopter blades or whatever they do, and when the Tories get in, as they almost certainly will in three months time, they will repeal the ban.
I will rejoice. I have never seen the appeal of hunting, still less hunt-following, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow-citizens seem to like these pastimes, as their ancestors did, and a large proportion of the human race still do. The anti-hunt argument that does have some power to move me is the one about preventing suffering of a creature who can suffer. I myself prefer not to think too deeply about Mr Fox getting killed by dogs – but I do not see that it differs much from what Mr Fox does to rabbits. It’s a predator thing. As for the argument about humans, get lost. On those grounds the new puritans had about the same moral right to stop their fellow humans hunting foxes as they would have to stop their fellow mammals, the foxes, hunting rabbits. Another thing, it bugged me to hear people who, if they were to learn that Amazonian tribesmen, having been forced to give up their ancient traditions of the hunt, had taken to soccer and Playstations instead, would be heard from here to the Amazon squealing about Western cultural oppression – it bugged me to hear these same people cheering on the Western cultural oppression of their own tribesmen.
As well as rejoicing to see these puritans discomfited, I will rejoice because the repeal of the ban is a retrograde step. When one has gone in a wrong direction a backwards step is a good thing. Every generation or so the progressives have the presumption buried in their name for themselves knocked out of them and the whooshing noise is pleasing. Yet for most of the my lifetime their presumption has been justified. The progressive ratchet slips a little but mostly it moves on. What a liberation it would be to see the clock turn back, just to show it could! What strange new vistas it might open if one bad law were repealed. We could repeal some more. The smoking ban… the European Communities Act 1972… it might even have an effect overseas; at present most people seem to assume that President Obama’s historic achievement in passing the US healthcare bill is just that, historic. A historic change is a change that stays changed. But history turns round sometimes, as the original puritans found out to their cost in 1660.
So the repeal of the hunting ban will be a fine thing, and on that morning even I shall hear something of the
..long-drawn chorus
Of a running pack before us
From the find to the kill.
But the end of a bad law and the good example its end sets will not be the only reasons to rejoice. Sure, repeal will annoy the progressives but – as the fox understands the huntsmen – a law going against them for once in a while leaves their worldview intact. What I really will value in the repeal is that it will be symbolic completion of a process that has already happened. The Royal Assent on this one may be good fun for her Maj, and me, but the really subversive thing is that people will say, “Oh, they’ve got rid of that law… didn’t know it was still on the books, actually. I’m sure I saw Horse and Hound on sale on Waitrose.”
Just read an article by Afua Hirsch in the Guardian called “How can lawyers help Haiti?”
“By going away” was the general opinion expressed in the comments. A little harsh, I thought, given that establishing a more solid rule of law might indeed help reconstruction there. But I am not really interested in that coz my gob just got smacked. In passing, Ms Hirsch mentioned this little fact:
…what is happening to millions of extra dollars pouring into a country that already had a staggering 10,000 NGOs before the earthquake. For an island with a population of fewer than 10 million, there is at least one NGO per 1,000 people.
Blimey. Ten thousand. Not ten thousand people, ten thousand organisations. Of the sort called “non-governmental” although that is a lie. And that was before the earthquake. Ah well, ’tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Just think, had not the earthquake come along all these helpers might have solved all Haiti’s problems and left themselves with nothing to do.
“So you live beyond your means and rack up a bunch of bills you can’t cover. So you go to your rich uncle. He’s tapped out, alas. And tired of supporting you. So he goes to his rich uncle who’s even richer and known for his desire to keep the family name unsullied. But what if he’s tapped out? Those are my thoughts when I read this story that Sarkozy is supporting Merkel in getting the IMF to bail out the Greeks. The IMF is the richer uncle. Eventually the other guy runs out of money. We’re going to have to start borrowing from Mars or Venus soon.”
– Russ Roberts, at the Cafe Hayek blog.
When I was a wee kid growing up on my folks’ farm in East Anglia, it was a common sight, in the 1970s and 80s, to see RAF Jaguar and Tornado jet aircraft practicing very low flying over the flat (ish) fields of that part of the UK. Typically, a Jag could fly no more than 100 ft off the deck, so low in fact that you could see all the markings on the side of the aircraft, what sort of stuff it was carrying, etc. The idea was to get under the opposition’s radar. These aircraft were practicing the sort of flying that would be needed against the-then Warsaw Pact ground forces of the time. (The Jaguar was a very effective strike aircraft).
But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with flying as low as this. Ye gods!
Here’s another.
And guess who the new owner of this leftist newspaper is? I wonder how Robert “my brain hurts” Fisk, columnist at that paper, is taking the news.
It was grimly amusing to watch as TV interviewers tried to get some straight answers out of the UK government and the Tory opposition about what items of public spending would and could be cut to get the finances under control. George Osborne, shadow Chancellor, was pretty evasive, as I have come to expect. Well, for those who want to see some sort of shopping list of cuts, the Taxpayers’ Alliance has come up with a handy list of items deserving of termination.
A quick entry from me: take a look at this item via Reason TV spot about the monster of a healthcare bill that passed at the weekend in the US. (I love the Incredibles-style music in it, by the way). As Gillespie puts it, the government underestimates of spending on things like health is not a bug, but a feature. The message that comes through, of course, is one that applies to governments worldwide. Do we honestly expect that politicians who are capable of the sort of accounting tricks surrounding building projects like the Olympic Games in London can be trusted to give accurate, costed predictions on things like healthcare spending, or education, or defence procurement?
Bear that in mind as we read the latest performance by UK finance minister, Alistair Darling, today.
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
– P. J. O’Rourke
“Congratulations, Democrats. Beginning now, you own the health-care system in America. Every hiccup. Every complaint. Every long line. All yours.”
– Kathryn Jean-Lopez.
I wish that were true. Here in Britain, where filthy wards in NHS hospitals, for example, have been a regular staple of the UK newspapers, the standard response is usually to demand even more money, more rules, and so forth. If you challenge the model of tax-funded healthcare free at the point of delivery, then you are political dogfood. And Mr Obama and his allies know that. As Mark Steyn has been putting since before Mr Obama’s election, Mr O. is counting on what the UK politician Sir Keith Joseph once dubbed the “ratchet effect”: ratchet socialism a little more, and make it harder and harder for anyone to push back.
Of course, sometimes this argument will be proven wrong. I do get the impression that a lot of Americans, including those middle-of-the-road voters who gave Obama a chance in 2008, are now very alarmed at the huge debt that his administration seems to be encouraging. So it may be that Mr Obama is a one-term POTUS. But his legacy might take a lot longer to reverse.
On a more philosophical line, here is what I wrote a while back about the bogus nature of healthcare “rights”.
It is a melancholy fact to face that while most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we live our lives by some sort of moral code, and respect our fellows as beings deserving of respect if they do not threaten our lives or property, some people do not live by such a code, nor care. One particular species of maggot in our world is the person who likes to verbally and physically abuse disabled persons.
The issue of care and protection of the mentally and physically handicapped, raising as it does issues of personal autonomy, concerns about abuse of state power and medicine, etc, is too big an issue to push into a blog post. No, the point I want to address is the narrower one of whether it makes any sense at all to create another “hate crime”: the crime, as it were, of hating disabled people. In brief, I think creating such a “hate crime” is foolish, albeit an understandable move driven by those with honorable motives to protect the weak.
Let’s be clear from the get-go that I regard those who hate, and who act on that hate, of disabled people to be scum of the earth. It does bother me, though, that a crime of say, assault on a person and his property should be treated as being far more serious because the state has tried to measure, or establish, the hate that exists in the mind of the attacker. A crime is a crime, surely. If an able-bodied man is mugged in the street, does it make any specific difference in terms of sentencing the criminal, assuming the criminal is caught? The area where physical or mental disability comes into play in sentencing a criminal is where, say, the disability clearly meant that the disabled victim could not defend himself. That is why assaults on the aged and infirm, and on children, are treated – at least supposedly – more severely than assaults on say, the holder of a karate black belt. Of course, in investigating a crime, the fact that a suspect has a motive such as hate of group X or Y might be useful in helping to narrow down a list of suspects. However, as a factor in sentencing, the idea of “hate crime” strikes me as nonsense.
What next – political hate crimes where a person is sentenced for the crime of “hating” those in public office or who are members of certain ideological/political groupings?
It has been urged and echoed, that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare.
[…] For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity,[…]
Answer here.
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