As a counterweight to the doomongers out there, this is a spendid talk on global economic and population trends that one hopes reaches a wide audience. Something pleasant for a Sunday. The video runs for about 20 minutes or so, if my memory serves. It is always refreshing to come across an academic who is not only thought-provoking but also very funny.
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August 19th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents ‘interests’, I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can. – Barry Goldwater, the greatest president America never had. August 18th, 2007 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Russian airforce has recently resumed long range patrols, approaching the airspace of Britain and Diego Garcia… and I am pleased to say the correct response has come from the US State Department:
Amen. This is the comment I left on the Telegraph article:
I think the murderous actions of the Russian secret service in London are far more worthy of harsh responses than the antics of their military. I suspect a reaction to these military flights consisting of broad indifference and maybe the odd embarrassed snicker is far more likely to enrage the Kremlin than shaking a sabre back at them. The Devil does not like to be mocked. August 18th, 2007 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obituary of Bill Deedes, newspaper editor, reporter, humanitarian campaigner and soldier. Rest in peace. August 18th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ruth Lea (thanks to Perry for pointing this out to me) has what is a pretty good analysis of the upcoming regulatory juggernaut to hit the City out of Brussels. I won’t expand much further other than to say that without the City, the UK economy would be a shadow of what it is now. Of course, in the short run, the UK government has been content to let financiers make their big bucks because it pulls in so much taxable revenue. More fundamentally, however, London’s position as a great finance capital on the planet is not secure; while regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley have driven some US businesses to the UK, Brussels-generated laws could hamper the UK and drive that business outside the EU, although natural inertia and the benefits of London’s accumulated legal and financial expertise are strong assets. Never forget the Swiss. The weather is okay, the trains work, the Swiss mountains are great for skiing in the winter and although I am happily married, I have always rather admired their women. If you are a 30-something banker with no ties, London is not necessarily superior. Of course, if the Scottish nationalists were not such lefties, they’d be playing the Adam Smith card and campaign to turn Edinburgh into a sort of tartan low-tax paradise, and take a leaf out of the Irish book on how to revive an economy (no, the Irish economy is not all about EU grants, in case anyone brings that one up). August 17th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, the Fed has cut the cost of borrowing to avert what many see as a financial crisis. There are several ways to view this move, I guess. One view, as expressed here, is that central banks created the current asset price bubble and appetite for dubious credit products like collateralised debt obligations – bundles of bonds and loans – by cheap interest rates. Central banks caused this state of affairs, so they should let hedge funds and other institutions go bankrupt as part of the natural, if painful Darwinian process of the market. It sounds harsh, but a few casualties, while not much fun for the immediate investors, are a useful warning about how investments can go awry. On the other hand, the fall in stock market prices since late July has been so fast that it threatens to cause a wider, systemic economic problem, and the rate cut was justified. I take the former view, by and large. The underlying state of the UK economy, for example, is reasonable, if not great (thanks to the taxes and regulations of our current prime minister, Gordon Brown). But corporate earnings have been strong, consumer spending is okay – it has weakened a bit but hardly fallen off a cliff – and the cost of equities, when set against expected corporate earnings, are pretty cheap by long term standards. (The FTSE 100 index is priced on a multiple of about 12 times earnings, the cheapest since the early 1990s). The Fed, by cutting rates in this way, is more or less saying that stock market bears cannot make money, that the only way to bet is for stocks to rise. This ultimately creates a serious moral hazard by encouraging risky borrowing and lending behaviour. I think we’ll regret what the Fed did today. Whoever said August was dull? August 17th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seriously, can we get this promise in writing? Then again, I am pretty familiar with what politicians consider “leaving [us] alone”. It is akin to saying, “Well, I am still going to bugger you senseless, and I am still going to do it without your consent, but from now on I will not force you to grab your ankles and beg for more.” August 17th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I did not want to write about this at the time when the article came out, since I thought why should I give any more publicity to the fascist – that is surely an accurate description – Neil Clark than he already got. But having thought things through and seen some commentary, such as by Stephen Pollard, I decided to give my two pence on the matter. Clark is clearly fascinated by and attracted to, tyrants. He has defend Milosovic, for example, with a gusto that goes beyond whatever reasonable doubts one might have about who were the bad guys in the Balkan conflict. He has now argued that Iraqi interpreters trying to seek asylum should be left to their often violent fates. I wonder how he would have felt about the German interpreters who worked with the Allied armed forces in the latter stages of WW2, for instance? Clark is a truly strange beast. It is hard to think of him as “left-wing”, still less “progressive” in any coherent sense whatever. He is a socialist in his attachment to state central planning and hatred of capitalism, but then that was a trait of the far right (but then again, do the words left and right in this political sense make any sense whatever?). The unifying trait of this character is a love of violent leaders, so long as they are against Britain and the evil US. Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, demonstrates how often men who like to paint themselves as being on the side of the little guy are attracted to violence. I sometimes wonder whether Clark falls into the same trap. If I were a Christian, I’d pray for his soul. August 16th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tabloids don’t sell movies or help anyone’s career. If that were true, every Lindsay Lohan movie would open to 80 million dollars. – Cameron Diaz, putting the much vaunted ‘power of the media’ into perspective. August 16th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a lovely piece in the Telegraph today about Elvis Presley, who died 30 years ago (Christ I feel old as I type those words). A lot of people get very snooty about the Tennessee lad but I do not. I like most of his early material, am not quite so keen on the Vegas year stuff and have not much interest in reading about his later years. But that he had an amazing voice, charisma and impact on the world of music can only be denied by people who have spent the last few years living on Mars. For nearly a year, I lived at the flat of the late Chris Tame, whom I very much miss both as a friend and intellectual influence. Chris was a massive Elvis fan. His house in Bloomsbury would be either vibrating to the music of the King or some surf guitar dude like Dick Dale (no deep classical music was allowed). Chris was an atheist and no believer in the afterlife, but I bet that if there is one, he is up there, rockin’ to the music of his hero. Not everyone shares my generally favourable view, such as Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian. He repeats the old, politically-correct crud that Elvis only was important because he “stole” blues from black people, etc. Oh please. And if I can make a sort of cultural-political “point” here, let’s not forget that Elvis is probably loathed by the sort of people that any self-respecting advocate of the pursuit of happiness would be glad to be loathed by: religious fundamentalists and nanny staters of various persuasions. August 16th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is some talk of bringing back the ‘fairness doctrine’ in the United States. This, before President Reagan got rid of it, allowed the powers-that-be to force broadcasters to have when was deemed to be ‘balanced’ news and current affairs coverage. In reality, of course, ‘balanced’ means either leftist opinions (the establishment, produced by the universities, do not see their opinions as opinions, they see them as ‘objective’ or even ‘scientific’ journalism – even when they formally do not believe that there is any such thing as objective truth), or a pointless mess of people shouting debating points at each other. In reality it takes several minutes to explain a point of view, and the reasons for it, about most political matters – exchanges of debating points do not achieve much. The destruction of such things as talk radio (by demanding a “right of reply”) would leave the leftist shows, both serious and comic, untouched. Who wants to bet that the “fairness doctrine” would be applied in some God like “fair” way to them? As for “hard news” as opposed to “comment” (not that I fully accept this distinction). The left often attack “Fox News” for claiming to be “Fair and Balanced” and (whilst a lot of FNC is not conservative at all) it is perfectly clear where, for example, Brit Hume’s political loyalties are, which one can tell by his choice of words, tone of voice, body language and in other ways, but the left fail to see, or pretend to fail to see, that their own people (i.e. all the other news networks) are also not “fair and balanced” – because this is not in the nature of man (sorry “humanity”), and that all that the ‘fairness doctrine’ would do is to give their side a monopoly of news presentation. Still, the whole thing is far from confined to the United States. For example, in Britain we have a version of the ‘fairness doctrine’ – which means, in practice, that broadcasters (government owned or private) represent the ‘liberal’ (i.e illiberal) left. Indeed it is almost universal outside the United States. The most recent example I have came upon concerns India: A couple weeks ago I watched a brief report on NDTV about the new ‘content code’. According to this compulsory code stories that were against the Indian “national interest” would be spiked, and broadcasters would not be allowed to “highlight” (i.e. favour) certain opinions. In practice it is a safe guess that the opinions that broadcasters would not be allowed to highlight would be opinions opposed to the Congress party and to the various leftist parties who support in government. However, the NDTV report did not say that broadcasters should be allowed to favour any opinion they wished and that people should be allowed to choose between them. No – the line was that “self regulation” should be supported. The Indian newspapers, the report said, practice this via the “Press Council of India” and broadcasters should be allowed to the same. The government will force its line into regulations – because no one is really opposing this “fairness” line as a matter of principle. Sadly it appears that no one really stands for anything like the US First Amendment, or for freedom in general, in India. On the one side we have Congress and the various leftist parties (trying to gradually introduce more welfare spending), and on the other side we have the religious nationalist BJP (i.e the saffron fascists). The old days when the Independence party stood for freedom (yes it lost every election – but it was there) are long over. The above is not meant as attack on India – things are much the same in Britain. No major political party really stands for freedom here either. Not only not in a strict libertarian sense – not even in a general sense. August 15th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organization of production is a function of national concern, the organizer of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. – Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers. (pp. 135-136) August 15th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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