“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”
– The Wisdom of Adam Smith, page 194.
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A conservative friend of mine in the USA sent me a link to an article in Weekly Standard called The Sector Formerly Known as Private: how Obama intends to use corporations to effect social change… and I must say that it somewhat surprised me. The following is largely based on the letter I sent him in return.
Let us gloss over the absurd American use of the word ‘liberal’ when they actually mean ‘illiberal’, but my response to “We’re beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like” was… we? Was article author Matthew Continetti not listening to Obama during the campaign? Has he not examined the copious record of the vile man’s public statements ever since he entered politics? Nothing Obama is going to do should be unexpected. For Obama to do anything unexpected he would have to slash public spending and roll back regulation. Is it really only now dawning on some people that Obama ain’t Bill Clinton? But guess what, do you actually think McCain would have shrunk the state and lowered the regulatory interference that not so much led to but actually mandated the sub-prime melt down? McCain is the one who is Bill Clinton, just with zipped flies and less charisma. Let the whole stinking system of patronage politics burn I say because nothing is going to change for the better until the piles of garbage and rats in the streets reality rubs people’s faces in the true cost of voting in a political class who thinks wealth is something that is created by political actions rather than markets. Hell, it does not matter what I think, just look at the numbers as the economy slows, then contracts, and at the same time state expenditure actually increases. Do you really have to be an Austrian School economist to see the implications of that? Never was there a better time for openly authoritarian regulatory statists to be in power, right when the global economy is on the edge of an abyss. There will be no economic growth to mask the expansion of the state this time. Personally I am looking up at them standing on the edge and chanting “Jump! Jump! Jump!” Just at the point where the state’s tax take will nose dive because of the economic slow-down, the USA has elected someone who is going to massively increase ‘public’ expenditure. The money will come from where exactly? Tax the middle class? That kills consumption and the economy tanks even more. Print more money? That fuels inflation and the economy tanks even more. Screw it out of productive sectors of the economy? That makes marginally productive businesses go bust and makes them all cut their labour forces and increases unemployment… and the economy tanks even more. My guess is that by the time he is done Obama will do all of the above. It does not matter that the media will love The One all the way down to the crater, the pain will be spread around so widely no amount of propaganda will be able to shift the blame. If the so called ‘right’ cannot turn that into political success a few years from now then they are worthless fools. A lot of people are going to get hurt and that is just too damn bad. Has the GOP actually run a free-market candidate for president since Barry Goldwater? Well Reagan was at least half way there, but only half way, but I give him a free pass because busting the Soviets actually was worth the money he spent. The GOP is as much to blame as the Democrats for where the USA is now, so a plague on both their houses. The situation now is exactly where ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ voting gets you. Why anyone who wanted a smaller state would have turned out and voted for McCain was beyond me… and of course many did not, they stayed home in droves and quite right too. Guys, you have been voting for the lesser evil for so long you may have lost sight of the fact that you have been voting for evil, just a tiny bit less than the other guy. Well no more easy options, no more putting the day of reckoning off for some point in the future… the day of reckoning has arrived and I for one am delighted. Do your worst Obama… to quote Lenin’s inspiration Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “the worse, the better”. Do not think of it as a disaster but rather an opportunity to actually create an opposition worth voting for. Never has there been a better time to destroy the political careers of really large numbers of Big State Republicans. That is what I think. Have a nice day. November 22nd, 2008 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at Forbes about the connection between wars and the expansion in state power. He argues – quite convincingly I think – that while war may once have been one of the primary causes of increases in state power, that increasingly, it is demand for other public goods and initiatives that drives state power. For example, I reckon that the environmentalist argument is likely to prove a significant justification for such increases in spending, tax and regulation, as will, alas, the current financial crisis. The “war is the health of the state” argument is often one that some libertarians use to oppose any wars, even if such wars might have some legal/moral justification, on the grounds that wars inevitably create costs that outweigh the supposed benefits of toppling some nasty regime, etc. An example of this view comes from Robert Higgs, whom I recommend. But the WIHOS argument is not a fixed law, rather a general tendency with some clear exceptions. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, for example, the UK public sector, such as it was, was retrenched and the income tax was abolished for more than two decades. The end of the Cold War saw significant cuts in military spending. Perhaps what is not so easily retrenched, however, are state controls and regulations over behaviour. Consider World War One. Before 1914, UK subjects did not need a passport; there was no Official Secrets Act and the role of the state, relative to that of our own time, was small. Now it is much larger. WIHOS is not an iron law, but rather a sensible rule of thumb. Alas, there are plenty of other factors besides war that drive expansion of public spending and controls. November 21st, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I am going to do duty as a background extra in a short vampire movie that a friend of mine is starring in. I am to be one of a number of diners in a restaurant. I won’t be paid but I will be fed, and I already know that it’s a very good restaurant because I’ve already been there before. Today I got a look at the email sent out by the production to all whom it concerned, about today’s activities. This was, for me, a glimpse into a whole new world of complexity and managerial drive. Here, just as a tiny for-instance (there are three whole pages of stuff like this), is a list of the kit that will be used by the DOP/Grip/Lighting Department:
I am looking forward greatly to seeing what this all looks like in practice. I suspect that, in reality, it won’t amount to very much at all. My favourite is the “Manfrotto Fig-Rig”. Time was, when faced with a splendid name like that, you just read and wondered. What kind of Rig would that be? And why “Fig”? But this is the age of the internet, and I can immediately tell you the answer:
So hats off to Manfrotto, and it is called “Fig” after Figgis.  This piece of kit costs around £150 quid. I still don’t quite get how it works, but here’s hoping that I find out. November 21st, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 20th, 2008 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening. – David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday. (Hat-tip: The Register) November 20th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a good article by Bloomberg columnist Mark Gilbert on why just transferring billions of taxpayers’ money to America’s embattled automakers is a bad idea, and he has thoughts who might be better equipped to run these firms. As he says, long before the credit crisis hit, some, if not all of the carmakers were suffering from problems. There is a glut of cars on the world market and the spike in oil prices – admittedly now in reverse – has made a number of such vehicles uneconomic. Talking of oil, the black stuff is now below $50 a barrel, down by about $100 from its peak. Wow. November 20th, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across this eye-popping collection of strange building pictures here. Some of them are quite familar to me, such as the Lloyds of London building, but others I have not seen before. Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. His site is definitely worth a visit. This fellow, meanwhile, also has regular nifty pictures on architecture, with a strong enthusiasm for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. November 20th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The weather has been cold this year, yet we did not take proper precautions for the likely consequences. These events should not have taken us by surprise. After all, it is in the data.  On the brighter side, the clear increase in the number of pirates indicates that global warming is receding as a problem. This is good to see. The picture has been very respectfully stolen from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I hope they do not mind. November 19th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every so often, the MSM offers up a nugget of shining truth:
Of course, we have been saying that for years. November 19th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
by Liberty Fitz-Claridge I am the very model of a modern libertarian; The socialists demand that we ought really to redistribute Would say a man’s well-being is his own responsibility, Ideas which stem from this include that school is not compulsory. In short, it is the opposite of life totalitarian, The hoi polloi have rolled their eyes and left us to obscurity, We liberals won’t rest until all state-run works are privatised; It loves us at our own expense – and what when all that love is spent? And surely no one’s worthy of the job of politician In short, I should repudiate the crude authoritarian When I have read von Mises’ massive tomes from end to end firsthand; When I’ve read Hayek, Mill and Smith, my expertise evincible; You’ll say a better libertarian there never was than she, Though mainstream folk are loath to recognize or even tolerate And though the ignorant consensus is authoritarian, November 18th, 2008 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have written about this subject before as an urgent issue of security, and surely the topic of piracy must be at the top of countries’ security agendas now that a large oil tanker has been seized. It makes me wonder what insurers such as Lloyds of London must think: surely, if shipping fleets want to keep insurance premia down, an obvious solution must be to arm, or better protect, such vessels. I do not know what the law is about whether ships, operating in international waters, on carrying weapons on board merchant vessels. In centuries past, vessels of the East India Company, for instance, were frequently as well armed as many naval vessels. They had to be. If this problem gets worse, then it is not just the navies of the western powers, such as those of Britain or the US, that might have to think about protecting shipping routes more aggressively. I think that the rising economic power of India must take on more responsibility to guarding some of the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean. India, after all, is a prime beneficiary of globalisation and global trade. For that matter, China probably will have to think about protecting its shipping more effectively, as must jurisdictions which engage in much ship-borne trade such as Singapore and Australia and Brazil. One of the reasons why a strictly isolationist foreign policy does not work is that in the real world, the web of global trading routes from which we all benefit have to be protected. Free market transactions must be protected against predators. That means things like naval bases or agreements between states to protect certain shipping routes, for example. If states cannot do this, but somehow expect merchant ships to continue conveying the goods which drive the world economy, pressure to let merchant ships carry weapons will be irresistable. Some time ago, I read the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Afghan. I won’t give away the plot but piracy is a key part of it. Any security policy, including an anti-terrorist one, must take account of seaborne threats. It might seem rather obvious to point this out in an island nation like the UK, but a large proportion of our economic produce is conveyed over the wet stuff. If the anti-terror experts have not addressed themselves fully to this issue, they had better start doing so. Maybe this hijacking might have a galvanising effect. Here is what the US navy has been doing. November 18th, 2008 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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