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If you live in the tri-state area, or anywhere actually if you are up for it, please contact the LP team in WV. They are short on people for the final push to get on the ballot.

The LP needs YOU!

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Maybe I'm the last one around these parts to have clocked Pat Condell. If so, apologies. But just in case I'm not and you still haven't heard of this man, well, clock him for yourself, now. He has a YouTube homepage, and I particularly recommend the performance featured here, at the Ezra Levant blog (remember him?), which is how I found out about Condell.

The thing that strikes me about Condell is that if you were to read a transcript of the talk that I've just heard, you might dismiss him as, well, some kind of obsessive, in a word, as a crank. Certainly anyone wanting to dismiss him thus would find it fairly easy. But his manner of talking makes him seem a lot more sane than that, and that makes him a potentially huge threat to the forces of darkness. If I were them I'd be quite bothered, and anxiously trying to think of a way of shutting him up which doesn't risk him becoming a hundred times more famous. Killing him springs to mind, obviously. But what if they fail? And what if they succeed, but turn him into a very, very eloquent cadaver?

Here is an interview he did with The Freethinker which they called Laughing religion off the planet, which I am right now about to read.

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This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Ford Model-T car, the vehicle that changed the face of the automobile business, helping to put the four-wheeled auto within reach of a vast swathe of the American population. Ford's mass-production techniques may not have been totally original, since one can argue that some of the features of mass production used had been employed in parts of the industrialised world before. But the factories that churned out these cars were probably the most famous forms of mass-production in their time, and encouraged a host of imitators.

Here's a nifty slide-show on the anniversary.

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I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the "second-shift / Costco" sense.

- The wonderful James Lileks.

Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse.

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Speaking of Ron Paul... here is a press release I received last night:

If they expected us to retire quietly from the scene, the political elite are in for a surprise.

Today I am making some very big announcements.

First, from August 31 to September 2 in Minneapolis, we will host a handful of events that will shake the political establishment. Everything will culminate on Tuesday with the official launch of the Campaign for Liberty at the Rally for the Republic.

The Campaign for Liberty will be the largest organization for peace, freedom, the Constitution, and sound money in American history. It will launch in grand fashion with lots of special guests and - if the early television and print inquiries we've received are any indication - plenty of media attention.

I would like to personally invite you and your family to join me and thousands of others in Minneapolis for these events and send a message to the Republican Party.

Tickets will go on sale for the Rally for the Republic this Friday, July 25 @ 10AM CST. We want this to be an unforgettable day, so we are holding a ticket bomb all day Friday in the tradition of our famous money bombs. How many seats can we sell on the first day?

In patriotic fashion all tickets will cost $17.76, so you can afford to bring the whole family.

This leads me to the second big announcement. After measuring the excitement and enthusiasm, we decided that the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota was just too small to hold you. Therefore, we are making a significant upgrade. The Rally for the Republic will now take place at the Target Center, the largest arena in Minneapolis !

This promises to be the most spirited and provocative political event of the year! We held some very large rallies during the presidential campaign, but I have never attempted anything of this scale before. Its success rests entirely in your hands.

Later this week I will announce two internationally renowned musicians as headliners for the Rally for the Republic. We'll also be joined by rock star Aimee Allen, NBC's Tucker Carlson, Barry Goldwater Jr., Gov. Gary Johnson, conservative stalwart Grover Norquist former Reagan deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, presidential historian Doug Wead, MTV's Adam Curry, musician Mark Scibilia , and Frank Sinatra impersonator Rick Ellis . Other special guests will be announced soon.

My staff has been working overtime to provide you with three full days of entertainment. Please visit the schedule page of the website and read all about upcoming events. We also have a lodging page to help you find?accommodations in Minneapolis.

Together we are taking back our government and restoring the republic. Please join me in Minneapolis to kickoff the Campaign for Liberty and support our Revolution. Can I count on you to be there?

I hope our LP folk in Minnesota will be out there in force!

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The Bob Barr for President efforts have been gearing up in Atlanta and if you want to see what you can do, you can find out about it here.

I would love to see that fund raiser counter spinning like the Ron Paul one did!

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It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union.

One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:

Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.

That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty.

Here’s another one:

Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical.

Huh?

But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic.

The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap.

Read more.

He goes on:

One of Hayek’s most original contributions to economic theory is the insight that economic systems are based primarily on information rather than resources. To plan an outcome and to direct economic inputs and outputs toward this outcome is to stifle the emergence of a spontaneous, democratic response to the needs of the individuals who make up the community—a response that will necessarily have winners and losers, but that will not privilege the vision or depend on the limited information of a governing elite, and that will encourage further experimentation.

That is a pretty good summary. I’m buying.

He points out that any economic master plan would necessarily have to delegate so many important issues of policy to non-elected technocrats as to be inherently antidemocratic, and that a society in which the value of goods and labor were defined according to their utility to the plan would necessarily allow no room for individual choice and subjective valuation.

Yep.

Today, these observations are merely obvious. Yet it is worth pointing out that Hayek understood at least one very big thing: that the vision of a perfectible society leads inevitably to the gulag.

Yep.

The absence of any consideration of more libertarian, less top-down approaches (the socialisms of Luxembourg, Kropotkin, Proudhon, many others; or of the possibility of nontotalitarian models of social democracy, like those that emerged in Europe after the war) should alert the reader to Hayek’s limitations. Admittedly, Kropotkin’s ideas had little impact on the world of 1944, Stalin’s a great deal.

That comes across as a bit disengenuous. I guess Hayek probably did know about these other, “bottom-up” forms of socialism, but as he, and his mentors like Ludwig von Mises pointed out, such “libertarian socialism” is an oxymoron since it ignores whether a member of a “voluntary” commune would be allowed, in practice, to leave with his or her share of accumulated capital and strike out on their own. If the answer to that is yes, then you would quickly find quite a lot of ex-commune dwellers reverting to old-fashioned entrepreneurial capitalism. If these “bottom-up” socialists prevent this, or demand that the profits of the break-aways be wholly or partially confiscated, it is hard to avoid the conclusion of the late libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick that socialism involves the preventing of capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Mr Larner trudges on:

Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom).

That is not right at all. Hayek wrote a lot about traditions, the benefits of inheriting cultural values via institutions such as the family, and so on. He certainly did not think if collective benefits of things like laws and defence of freedom as clashing with liberty; in fact he made it abundantly clear that law and liberty were intertwined.

And:

He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek’s view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society.

He did reject it, for the very reason – as Mr Larner knows perfectly well – that is a question-begging term. Social justice requires, as a premise, that wealth somehow exists “out there” and that the collective of humanity has some prior claim to said. But that puts the cart before the horse, as Hayek explained. He also pointed out that terms like “social justice” smuggled egalitarian, illiberal concepts into more neutral terms, and this was a pernicious thing, since it disabled clarity of thought.

Perhaps it is because of this outlook that Hayek does not, in Road, address collectivism as a spontaneous, nongovernmental, egalitarian phenomenon.

He probably does not address it as, to the extent that any collective effort involving more than one person is freely undertaken by said, there is no need for it to be addressed. Individuals band together to form foundations, charities, firms, clubs, whatever. So long as they are free to leave and their property is not seized, what is the issue? There is not one. What Hayek was against was coercively shoving people together into collectives not of their choosing.

Even a brief survey will show that there are all kinds of imaginative ways in which libertarian collectivism can coexist with capitalism and markets.

If that is true, what is the problem? People can and do share ideas for free – as on the internet – or band together to form common cultural, economic and political groups all the time. This is the paradox of a liberal society; far from being a cliched world of individuals pitted against each other in a war, a free society allows enormously complex and rich examples of co-operation. The market is, in fact, the most remarkable example of co-operation that there is.

It is a bit chilling to read the words of the British socialists quoted by Hayek—E.H. Carr, C.H. Waddington, Sir Richard Acland, H.J. Laski—who, when Hayek wrote, were calling complacently for what can only be read as an enlightened totalitarianism, even in the shadow of Hitler. And Hayek is very convincing, and most interesting, when discussing the romantic roots of German antiliberalism and of the illiberal statism of the left and right. But this does not mean that public disbursements in the social interest necessarily start us down a slippery slope to the totalitarian state, and Hayek, in suggestively conflating government spending with government planning, pulls a bit of a sleight of hand in Road.

Well I do not know. I think that although the direction of socialism that Hayek predicted may not have been entirely accurate. But Larner is surely missing a point that frequently exercises the likes of us at Samizdata: what might be called the regulatory form of socialism. Under this form, one might nominally own a house, or a company, or whatever, but there are so many rules telling you what to do that you might as well have nationalised ownership. This is a much harder form of socialism to fight. I am certain that Hayek would have addressed this issue. He would have been horrified by the loss of civil liberties in Britain and the constant demand for a government “solution” to this or that problem.

There are glimmerings of respect for Hayek here in Mr Larner's article, and this is by far from being the worst left-of-centre review of Hayek that I have read. Mr Larner clearly respects what the great Austrian thinker stood for, and has the good grace not to engage in gratuitous name-calling. But there remain problems. Oh well, this is the sort of person that libertarians need to patiently cultivate.

Read less.

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As of July 15th, it is no longer possible for a European to fly in a vintage DC-3. Air Atlantique ran a very successful farewell tour around the UK and its flights were sold out.

Perhaps one continent's loss is another's gain and these passenger-worthy classics will find a home across the pond where they can continue to bring the joy of flying in the most marvelous working airplane every built.

Maybe we should start a tradition like that of the Muslims, but instead of bowing towards Brussels at a given hour each day, we could give them the other end to show the full depth of our respect for them.

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Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here's a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.

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A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein's recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.

Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.

At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.

Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.

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Glad to know that at a time when people are concerned about the economic outlook, crime and so forth, that those chaps at the European Union have not taken their eye off the ball:

The acre, one of Britain's historic imperial measurements, is to be banned from use under a new European directive. The measurement, which will officially be replaced by the hectare, will no longer be allowed when land is being registered. After being agreed last week, the new ruling will come into force in January 2010.

I do not know why this story riles me so much, but it does. It is not that I cannot understand the logic of using a metric system so that it is possible to make instant comparisons between say, the price of a hectare of land in France and Britain, which is quite useful to be able to do when looking at the state of our respective economies. But it is the illegality of registering land by using certain measurements that is so barmy. If there is a market in land - well, partially free anyway - surely the persons buying or selling can measure it any way they please, so long as the amounts are agreed and are accurately registered. It is the accuracy of the register, not the units per se, that counts. Apart from anything else, cannot the EU and its minions do some basic maths? An acre is equal to 0.404 hectares. Every time one has to convert the old English Imperial measurements to metric and vice versa, it has the salutary effect of encouraging people to do a bit of maths, which is a good mental exercise anyway.

Many units of measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon world have been ingrained in our mental lives. I can - just about - visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare. Far from being fogeyish or illogical, there is nothing essentially better or worse than one or the other. Roger Scruton has a nice discussion of the benefits of traditional weights and measures here. Every time there is an assault on such traditional measures, it is an assault on differences because they are differences, on the eccentric, the quaint, the odd, the unusual, the untidy.

Compared to many of the other creeping forms of "harmonisation" beloved of the Eurocrats, this may seem like a paltry measure, and I am sure that is right. But it has really annoyed me. Leave our acres alone, you tidy-minded bastards.

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Freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. ... Unless it is resisted, the erosion of civil liberties will continue until there is no such thing as liberty and all opposition to authority will have become crime.

- Germaine Greer

(5)

The Rocket Racing League will be doing flight demos of the Rocket Racer in Oshkosh later this month, between July 28th and Aug 3rd.

The RRL team has been working overtime to meet its goals for demonstration flights planned for three days during the convention. The flights, planned for July 29, August 1 and August 2, use aircraft based on Velocity Aircraft homebuilt canard designs. It marks the first public flights of these aircraft, which were first introduced in April.

I have heard (unconfirmed) as many as three RRL members may have their racers present. The development work on these craft was carried out by XCOR Aerospace at which a number of our readers work. Some of the Rocket Racers may use an engine from John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Because of the use of different fuel combinations a real race will see rockets with long colored flame tails behind them. Armadillo has been working on the injection of trace chemicals to allow an even wider range of colors for what many of us hope will become the most spectacular sport of the 21st Century.

Also on the near horizon is the third flight of the Spacex Falcon 1. The best information I have to date is it will occur no sooner than July 30 when the Kwajalein range again becomes available.

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Did you know DC v Heller was a Libertarian plot?

The case that became D.C. v. Heller was the brainchild of three lawyers at a pair of libertarian organizations, the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice. All were busy with other matters, so they hired Mr. Gura. "Alan was willing to work for subsistence wages," Cato's Robert Levy tells me, "in return for which he got a commitment from me that if the case went anywhere, it would be his baby. It turned out that that commitment was very important."

My hat is off to James Taranto for getting the story right. Perhaps one of these days my New York schedule (and that of one of our journalist readers) will fall out in such a way that we can toast our natural born right to carry a BFG.

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If you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is ... well ... shit.

- with his usual tact and sensitivity Devil's Kitchen hints at a reason why the voters of Glasgow East might just consider not voting Labour any more

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Here is a fascinating teaser for a Janes subscription only article:

US military pinpoints date for HELLADS ground test. The United States military told Jane's it is on schedule for a 2010 ground test of a lightweight high-energy laser that could be installed on a tactical aircraft to destroy missiles, rockets and mortars. The laser, known as the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and General Atomics, along with several other contractors.

It is all coming together about as I expected, although perhaps a little faster than I really believed.

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Coffee House has a posting today which says something we may be hearing more and more about in the next year or two: "Scorched earth". If what Fraser Nelson says is true, then I certainly hope we do. Nelson says that Gordon Brown is now borrowing and spending like there's no tomorrow, for him, but in a way that Prime Minister David Cameron will have to find the money to pay for. Nelson harks back to a Brown proclamation from way back, which went like this:

"I can give you a guarantee that is our fiscal rules, that we must uphold. And that is the basis of... and that discipline is the basis on which I think people have seen this Government as competent."

That policy, says Nelson - linking to an FT piece which is, alas, stuck behind a registration wall - is now being forgotten about.

The assumption Fraser Nelson seems to be accepting is that in addition to hurting the country (party political blogs don't tend to dwell on that aspect of things very much), this will hurt the next Conservative government (a much weightier consideration). Instead of pulling back on government spending, the way that other more responsible national governments are now doing, Brown, egged on by the trade unions upon whom the Labour Party now depends financially, is hell-bent on borrowing still more. Not content with wrecking his own administration, Brown wants also to wreck the next one.

Like a retreating army, he doesn't want the advancing Cameroons to have any advantage at all. ...

And then Nelson continues:

... Debt is a boring subject, but it means we'll all pay more taxes for longer.

Debt is a boring subject. Hm. I'm not now in debt myself, thank heavens, but I suspect that debt is something that the people of Britain understand better and better with every week that now passes. Boring? Scary, more like. And if the Conservatives keep saying, as Fraser Nelson just did: more debt means higher taxes, that will surely get everyone's attention. Tax increases are not boring, we already know that. Look at the damage that the recent income tax increase did to the Prime Minister's standing and job prospects.

I suspect that, if Gordon Brown continues to send out signals like this, to use that phrase that politicians are so fond of, this may actually play right into Cameron's hands, politically. Cameron has made a point of not ruling out tax increases. This is not because he likes tax increases, he is now saying, but because the British economy is now such a huge mess. Brown is now smashing up the nursery, and Cameron and his oh-so-fiscally responsible Conservatives will have to tidy it up.

Meanwhile, if the Labour Party as a whole does not either restrain or dump Gordon Brown, it will stand accused at the next general election of having brought about this disaster, perhaps even deliberately. Labour already faces electoral carnage. This could make it a lot worse for them.

The one thing that the Conservatives might do to save Labour would be if they kept quiet about this until the election campaign, on the grounds that they don't want Labour stealing their policy of fiscal semi-sanity. Such an attitude would be too clever by half. If the Conservatives keep even relatively quiet, and then try to make this kind of mud stick only after colossal further damage has already been done, they too will stand accused, deservedly, of having contributed to the disaster. If, on the other hand, the Conservatives loudly denounce Brown for this borrowing-and-spending right now and keep on denouncing him, it will be a win-win game for them. Either the Labour Party listens, and the Conservatives don't get landed with too horrible a bill when they duly become the government. Or the Labour Party stuffs its fingers in its ears, and gets wiped out for a generation at the next election, and maybe for ever.

This particular Labour government was elected because it was going to be different. This Labour government was, above all, not going to do, well: this. Fiscal responsibility was the big promise of 1997, repeated and repeated during the years after 1997. Gordon Brown was during those early New Labour years the very personification of this supposed new rectitude. This was the very thing that made New Labour so particularly New. So if this Labour government ends by doing ... this, again, not only will it be all the more frightfully punished for its big lie, but the lie will linger in the electoral memory for decades. This Scorched Earth moment could be the difference between a mere electoral stuffing, such as Thatcher's opponents, and then Blair's opponents, all had to live with so painfully until the political weather changed, and something altogether more complete and permanent.

I hope, for the sake of my country, that the Labour Party, alerted or not by the Conservatives to the oblivion they now face if not to the mere damage to Britain that they are doing, sees the logic of this argument (in other words I hope that others besides me put this argument forward) before too much further damage is done. I realise that it is dreadfully naïve to be thinking of something as politically beside-the-point as the mere good of the country, but I live in hope.

But not expectation. The short- and medium-term prospects for the British economy now seem appalling.

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Good article about the nonsense being proposed in the US about civilian "volunteering" programmes which are not in fact, voluntary. It is worth keeping an eye on this issue because I recall that David Cameron, Tory leader, might be keen on a sort of non-military version of national service as a way to deal with problems of teen crime and lack of personal responsibility. Bad move. See my post below for how it is working in a free market that is what is required. Treat people as free adults: it works

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I think the United States is the greatest country that's ever existed on earth. And I think that it is difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It's the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect; it certainly is not. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad - and I think if you do that on a rational basis and make a fair assessment - I think it's hard to say that there is anything better. I wasn't born in America - but I got here as fast as I could.

- Elon Musk during an interview for "From Paypal to Outerspace", TCSDaily, 2008-06-16

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Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting "Black Satanic Mills" version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time - 1976-77 - that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since.

One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson's frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left - Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety - view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally.

The economics of the Industrial Revolution makes up the background of his programme, which is mainly about crime and punishment. Not surprisingly given his political views, Robinson also gives the standard line that the Industrial Revolution was produced on the backs of "the workers", but then what is crucial to any fair appraisal of the massive changes that happened at the time is whether most, if not all, labourers were better off than they were in the days of serfdom and the peasant-based, agrarian life that pre-dated it. The Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm may like to present the pre-Industrial age as one full of peasants happily gamboling around in the woods choosing to work when and where they wanted, in order to contrast it with the horrors of industrialism, but this is dishonest nonsense. Without enclosure of land and the more productive agricultural system that sprang from it, and without the industrial wealth that enabled Britain to grow rapidly, it would have been hard to see how the rising population of the time could have adequately fed itself, let alone produce a sustained improvement in living standards. As a result of the agricultural changes and of free trade, Britain was less vulnerable to a catastrophically bad harvest, unlike Ireland, which because of its dependence on the potato and the Corn Laws, was terribly hit by the potato blight of the 1840s. Starvation was a regular feature of European life, even in relatively rich countries, for centuries. But in England, whatever other problems existed, widespread famine was no longer an issue by the end of the 18th Century.

There is no doubt that there was much misery and ugliness in the time. When tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were paid off at the end of the Napoleonic wars, for example, there was an influx of labour into the workforce and wages in sectors like farming came under brutal pressure. But what Robinson ignores is to cure such poverty meant that the Industrial Revolution's primary focus on producing goods for the mass market such as textiles and ironware was right, both economically and for that matter, morally. Within a matter of decades, the idea of even a poor person moving from say, Manchester to Newcastle in a day was not the stuff of fantasy. It was reality.

The Industrial Revolution has been, at least in my view, strangely under-covered in much of the mainstream histories that you see in bookshops today. Walk into a Borders or a Waterstones and much of the history sections are full of books about WW2, warfare generally, some social histories of quite recent times, some stuff about the Romans (popular again thanks to movies like Gladiator) and the Greeks. But this crucial phase of British, and world, history, does not really get much of an airing. A few years ago, I praised a wonderful book about some of the men who fashioned the Industrial Revolution, The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow. But such books are remarkably rare. Still one of the finest and most succinct accounts of the early phases of our industrial life was written more than half a century ago by T.S. Ashton. About the only other time one sees anything about the Industrial Revolution on the television, meanwhile, are things like the programmes about old machines by the late Fred Dibner or Jeremy Clarkson's excellent programme about Brunel.

It seems to me there is a gap in the market for an account of the Industrial Revolution written by someone who is not reflexively hostile to it, as was demonstrated last night by an ageing comedy actor. It is about time the record was set straight.

Here's a good essay on the standard-of-living debate and the Industrial Revolution.

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Such are my internetting skills that I had to go here first, and then to here, before finally getting to here, the final here being a Telegraph piece about the restoration to the people of Britain (or maybe, it's hard to tell, the mere restatement of) the right of forceful self-defence.

Home owners and "have-a go-heroes" have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.

So, if someone breaks into my flat in the dead of night, and I get lucky with my late uncle's old cricket bat which I still keep handy just in case, I won't have to be quite so fearful of legal complications.

There is, after all, something to be said in favour of lame duck governments, desperately trying something – anything – in order to save a few fragments from the forthcoming electoral wreckage.

My guess is they were ploughing through the tedious and now desperately dispiriting rigmarole of yet more focus grouping, with very little to show for it indeed other than deepening hatred of the government, until suddenly someone piped up with something about "if I break the skull of a burglar when all I was trying to do was protect my home I didn't do anything wrong" or "it's ridiculous that old men who fight back with their walking sticks get arrested but not the scumbags who attack them", or some such. And the entire room exploded with unanimous agreement. And then they tried it on a few more focus groups, and got the same response. And since this is an actual policy proposal, and not a mere howl of loathing, and since nothing else seems to be persuading anyone that this government is not a total disaster when it comes to restraining criminals in any way whatsoever, why not give it a try? "I mean, at least we could make an announcement." Which is what I of course suspect this to be. The government screws up the small print in every other law it passes these days, so I expect this law, in the unlikely event that it ever materialises any time soon, to be just as bad, and quite possibly to be yet another few sneaky steps in the wrong direction rather than any sort of step in the right one.

No matter. That this government is even pretending to talk sense about the right to forceful self-defence - instead of the usual evil tripe about waiting several days for the police to show up, maybe, with counselling pamphlets - is a huge improvement in the political atmospherics of my country. Many of this government's supporters will be thrown into well-deserved torment and angst on this topic. Unreconstructed lefties will regard this announcement as just one more reason why the forthcoming collapse of this government really doesn't matter, which is all to the good. Saner lefties, still determinedly wrong about such things as income tax but less wrong about this topic, will feel free to make themselves heard, and to praise their government for this bold initiative. The opposition will scrutinise the proposal for evidence of the duplicity that I pretty much now assume. And, you never know, it just might be genuine.

Meanwhile, am I allowed to say, sotto voce, that I did, sort of, see this coming? I wonder if those who commented derisively on the apparently absurd optimism of that earlier posting saw this latest proclamation coming. Even I am amazed at how quickly the tide may now be beginning to turn. Because, restoring (or maybe just re-stating for the benefit of judges and policemen who now assume other things) the right (itself no small thing) to forceful self-defence leads will lead directly to further discussion, about the means of actually being able to set about doing such defence. I have my cricket bat. So, how about a gun? The principle has now been conceded. Now let's talk practice.

Definitely a small victory, and maybe, just maybe, something slightly bigger than that.

(29)

A couple of months ago, I wrote a long piece here about how British voters, from having been two rather distinct groups of people, with different beliefs and habits and social characteristics and consumer tastes, were converging into a single much-harder-to-distinguish lump, which both major political parties will shun their traditional supporters (the two old separate lumps) to appeal to. Hence the new "political class", and hence the new electoral landslides won by Thatcher, Blair, and now soon (it looks more and more likely) Cameron.

I didn't mention the USA, but I have long had the sense that something opposite is happening over there, with a more homogeneous population being replaced by two much more distinct social groups. Well, what do I know? I've never even been there. But now Terry Teachout has recently done a piece for Commentary called America Sorts Itself, arguing pretty much exactly this, writing about books that paint the same picture.

But the change in the political landscape goes deeper than that. Today, a voter's decision to support one candidate over another may well have little to do with that candidate's positions on specific issues. It is, rather, an ideological fashion statement, a declaration that one is a certain kind of person, whose tastes on a wide variety of cultural matters can be reliably inferred from his political preferences - and vice-versa. "If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," said Ken Mehlman, who managed President Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for Bush."

The now-familiar phrases "latte liberal" and "NASCAR conservative" are expressions of this development. ...

Teachout quotes a University of Texas sociologist saying this:

the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us ... live in counties that are becoming less [politically] competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.

I certainly have the feeling that the "latte liberal" objection to the war in Iraq is not that it is a bad war, but that a hated gun-owning, evangelical Christian cowboy conservative is running it. Were President Obama to take charge of this war, and decide to press ahead with it pretty much indefinitely, the latte liberals would then be quite content, or such is my suspicion. The NASCAR conservatives, on the other hand ...

Two questions. First, obviously, is this notion of much more socially divided and regionally sorted USA true? And second, if it is more or less true, what impact with that have both on the USA's political system, and on the world?

One of Teachout's answers to the local USA part of the second of those questions is that US politics is becoming less gentlemanly, because voters and (perhaps even more importantly) politicians on different sides don't mix with and know each other as much and as well as they used to. They are thus quicker to attribute dishonourable motives and mentalities to one another, as, now, are younger presidential candidates like Obama and Huckabee. The USA, Teachout says, is becoming harder to govern as a single political entity. This may not be such a bad thing, but it will surely have consequences, and not just in the USA.

As a coda, it is perhaps relevant to add that whenever any of us Brit Samizdatistas writes anything bad about Britain or British political trends, as we do quite often of course, as likely as not some US commenter will say: Give up on Britain, mate. Move here. And by "here" he doesn't just mean the USA, he means one of the good bits of it. I have no inclination whatever thus to move, being very content in London thanks very much. I find these calls to give up on my own country insulting. But maybe such comments are part of the process described above, and maybe some people, especially within the USA, find such appeals persuasive. It would seem so. Such anecdotage certainly points up the way that improved communication reinforces such a process of sorting by political preference, simply by making choosing and moving easier to do and to organise. I am, of course, wholly in favour of people being allowed to do this kind of thing.

Such appeals also hint at a possible future for the entire world, of geographical sorting, along distinctly political and sociological lines, rather than just organised according to the mere accident of where you happened to be born.

(5)

I am currently watching the head of Equitable Life, the UK life insurer that made massive losses a few years ago, demanding that you and I, the UK taxpayer, put our hands in our pockets to compensate EL's policyholders for their losses. They are complaining that mistakes taken by government caused many of the problems it suffered.

Leaving aside the ins and outs of the case, in general principle, I think it is outrageous that anyone claiming to be a senior manager of a commercial business like Equitable Life should have the brass neck to demand that governments, ie, taxpayers, should bail them out. Yes, some of the rule changes made by governments can harm a business - the tax changes on pensions by Gordon Brown in the late 1990s are a classic case in point. There may, as a result, be something to be said for demanding repayment of taxes wrongly levied on a company, for example. But why should a taxpayer, say, who has no likelihood of a decent private sector pension, be taxed to save the blushes of business executives on six-figure salaries or affluent policyholders who have lost a portion of their pensions? There seems to be no awareness of the perverse, and often regressive, redistribution of wealth that is entailed when these demands for compensation emerge.

It is true that Equitable Life has done quite a bit to honour some of its debts. However, asking the UK general public to put right the rest of the mess is a step too far. And there is another reason for objecting to such corporate welfare, since every time taxpayers foot the bill for another financial Snafu, it creates a fresh moral hazard, and encourages financially inept firms to imagine that if anything goes seriously wrong, the taxpayer will put everything right.