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Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:  The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it “somewhere on Amazon”, so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be. Caption anyone? March 4th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator’s Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are “over-hyped”. Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its “nosey parkers” – as we Brits used to say – and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways. In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified. But I think Clive’s sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does. As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later. March 4th, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The email I got today about it from Tim Evans of the Libertarian Alliance started “Dear All”, so I don’t know how many other bloggers have already noticed and linked to this. But like Tim, I strongly recommend it, having watched it earlier today. It’s an American banker (who is also a follower of Ayn Rand) talking about the financial crisis, why it happened and what to do about it. The circumstances he describes so confidently, convincingly and knowledgeably are American, but the message of the talk is universal. He uses the word “interesting” a lot, by which he mostly means “disastrous”. Apologies for not having any time left over from watching it to add any thoughts of my own. But the thing itself is so good that I am sure I will be forgiven for simply recommending this remarkable talk. I daresay some may even prefer this. March 3rd, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Life for me is hectic right now – for all the right reasons – but I wanted to quickly put up this link to an excellent commentary by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute, concerning the current US government’s drive against offshore tax havens, especially Switzerland. Governments such as that of the spendthrift US, UK and France are getting desperate for cash, and low-tax regimes which respect client confidentiality make for an easy target. I can also recommend Dan’s recent book, co-authored with Chris Edwards, as a fine study of the whole case for tax havens and why they are a thoroughly good thing. Whenever you read someone arguing for ending “unfair tax competition”, what they really in fact want is to create a cartel. Most cartels, if not backed by states, tend to disintegrate in time, but are generally thought of as bad. Tax cartels are a prime example of cartels of the worst kind. March 3rd, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What did you do during the recession, Daddy? I installed solar panels and wind turbines. If only Franklin Roosevelt had thought to put millions of Americans to work during the Depression doing make-work jobs that were gee-whiz futuristic…. Oh, that’s right. He did. And it didn’t work then, either. But this time is different, you know.” – Nick Gillespie, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog. March 2nd, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don’t have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them – especially if you have a Labour MP. Here is Phil Booth:
If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf). — March 1st, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false. It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World? The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate.” March 1st, 2009 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
In an article in its present edition “In Knots Over Nationalization” (page 14) the Economist magazine writes the following about the many trillions of Dollars that President Barack Obama has pledged to spend over and above the wild spending of the hopeless incompetant President George Walker Bush.
Of course the antics of President Obama are not “responsible” at all. If this increase in government spending, not just over this year but over the following years, is “responsible” what would the Economist consider “irresponsible”? Of course there are other articles in the Economist in which the details of President Obama’s tax and spend policies come in for criticism – but the position of general support for his Administration, in line with the endorsement of then candidate Obama last year, would seem to be incomprehensbile for a publication that claims to be a supporter of free market “capitalism”. However, the position of the Economist is not incomprehensible at all – but to understand their articles one must understand some other things first… If I thought that it was a good idea for more money to be lent out than existed in real savings, i.e. all the complex things that are very loosely called “fractional reserve banking”, how would I defend the practice? Actually I do not it is a good idea, I think that all borrowing should be one hundred per cent from income that people have chosen not to consume (real savings), but let us say I did. I would defend the expansion of credit in something like the following way… → Continue reading: What could President Barack Obama do that ‘The Economist’ would consider “irresponsible”? February 28th, 2009 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
The inability of the media or the political class to discuss and analyse our wonderful house of debt February 28th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is great. February 27th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fraser Nelson at the Spectator has an interesting column at the moment about how Britain’s Tories have been influenced by the culture of California, specifically, the northern part of that great state. I think his analysis is fine but I would add some caution, given that the state is, or is about to go, bankrupt. Here is what I wrote in a comment over at the Coffee House blog:
One of the things that I liked about northern California when I used to visit a good friend of mine in Steve Jobs’ back yard of Cupertino was that you might be sitting in a bar, drinking a coffee next to some pony-tailed dude in a Grateful Dead T-Shirt, and that the latter would be tapping away on his laptop about his latest round of venture capital funding before heading off down the gun range to fire in his new Glock. A good historian of California is Kevin Starr. Check this out. February 27th, 2009 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
How to stop this bail-out madness? I think I have an idea that might help. One of the most valuable things that the internet can do is state ideas of the sort that you definitely do want said, but which it would probably not be wise for heads of state or front bench politicians to be saying for definite, for fear of it all getting out of hand. One of the most important memes that the internet has circulated during the last decade has been the extermination option, when it comes to Islam. Extermination of all muslims. Not now, you understand. Just if there continue to be serious muslim-perpetrated terrorist incidents (and especially if there are some much more serious muslim-perpetrated terrorist incidents), and if muslims continue to equivocate about whether they support them, and seriously try to conquer the world with a kind of good-muslim-bad-muslim routine. Which in a lesser way is what they are doing anyway, just not on a scale and with a degree of nastiness that elbows all other problems to one side. But, if you guys crank up the nastiness the way you say you want to and that we deserve, said certain voices on the internet, including certain voices commenting here on postings soon after 9/11 (including my voice), and you’ll get the exact war of Us against You that you are spoiling for, and guess what, we’ll fucking wipe you off the face of the earth. See: Dresden. Don’t make us angry. You really wouldn’t like that. This is not the kind of thing you want Presidents and Prime Ministers to be saying, until such time as things like that actually have to be done. But I sincerely believe that having some people saying things like this, as and when the need arises (therefore including me), is a force for peace and harmony in the world. Seriously. I think the fact that the internet said this stuff to muslims – did a good-infidel-bad-infidel act right back at them – meant that since 9/11 most of the terrorist crap has been strictly amateur. The heavy hitting muslims have confined themselves to propaganda. Good. We can win that one. Certainly we can argue and low-level-fight them to a stand-still. Not everyone on our side believes that, I know, but I do. One of the biggest reasons why major conflicts (and major catastrophes generally) happen is because the participants don’t realise, until it is too late, what they are letting themselves in for. This was one of the major causes of World War 1. They just didn’t realise what horrors they would soon find themselves doing to one another, or (in that case) for how long the horrors would last. Maybe if they’d had the internet in those days, the few people who did realise might have been heard, and that might have caused the contestants to hold back. These apocalyptic recollections have been prompted by the realisation that there is now another extreme meme which the internet now needs to circulate. I refer to the government default option. It needs to be said that under certain circumstances easily now imaginable, many Western citizens would argue, strongly and vocally, that those idiot foreigners who are now lending money to Western governments should in due course be told: sorry sunshine, you ain’t ever going to get it back. Our governments are bankrupt. Why the hell should we and our descendants in perpetuity be paying tribute to you? You knew that the money to pay you back would have to be stolen from us. You assumed we’d just cough up indefinitely. Well, we damn well won’t. You are now a definite part of our problem, and telling you to take a hike is going to be part of our solution. Our thieving class is now “borrowing” money from your thieving class like there is no tomorrow, and we are not responsible for the actions of either gang. A plague on both your houses. We want you foreign thieves to stop lending to our thieves, now. And the best way for us to convince you that you should indeed stop lending, is to tell you that you are extremely liable never to see most of your money back. Which has the added virtue of probably, approximately, being true, already. The usual way such threats are phrased is to talk only, and very vaguely, about how “nobody wants” and “nobody is recommending” the extreme scenario in question. It’s all just too too frightful to think about with any clarity or seriousness. Well, I think that the internet should now aggregate all the voices of those who, like me, think that under certain thoroughly imaginable circumstances the default option would not only be highly likely to go into effect, but also highly desirable. We would support default, argue for default, now. Just circulating this meme in an angry whisper (i.e. in postings in and comments on blogs) will raise the interest rate, a bit, for our thieves, as they frantically mortgage the future tax revenues that they still think they are going to get from us. And that’s good, because it will bring the current craziness to an end that little bit sooner. February 26th, 2009 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
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