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Trump has long argued it was unreasonable for US taxpayers to be subsidising Europe’s defence when European governments are unwilling to stump up to defend themselves. It seems that today, many European pundits are now belatedly in agreement with Trump, yet I have encountered quite a lot of annoyance when I point this out. It is hard to not laugh 😀 November 6th, 2024 | 8 comments
 How to tell if the people in Europe making predictions of doom if Trump wins actually believe what they have been saying: Europeans defence expenditures go to 4%+ (i.e. Polish levels) within the next few months. Otherwise it’s just so much verbal flatulence. If Trump does indeed abandon Ukraine and tries to force a de facto surrender of occupied territories on them, and Europe still does not rapidly ramp up defence expenditure, then maybe Trump and the USA was never the problem. November 6th, 2024 | 8 comments
“Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian. I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics. November 6th, 2024 | 16 comments
“Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
And this is typical:
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back. Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided. November 5th, 2024 | 14 comments
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed. November 4th, 2024 | 10 comments
I was just old enough to read the blue sign bearing the word “POLICE” – and I thought my parents had gone mad. We were on a family walk, going past the local police station when, to my horror, my parents stopped. They stopped walking and stood outside the police station looking at the posters and casually talking about grown-up things. Didn’t they realise the peril we were in? Didn’t they understand that at any moment the door could be flung open and policemen could come rushing out to arrest us and drag us off to the cells? Well, time went by and eventually my seven year-old self was able to chuckle at the foolish worries of six and a half. I realised that I had misunderstood what was being depicted in a fragment of Dixon of Dock Green that I had glimpsed despite it being on after my official bedtime. I came to understand that, whatever might have been the case in the time of King Herod or Henry VIII, that sort of thing didn’t happen nowadays. The authorities in modern, civilised countries do not randomly decide to ruin the lives of ordinary people. The young couple who owned Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon probably assumed the same thing.
The alternative possibility – that I was right to be fearful standing outside the police station all those years ago – is not pleasant to contemplate. As a twitter user called “Mason” said,
November 3rd, 2024 | 24 comments
I know, I know. That’s three things. But there are two more items listed later in Peter Walker’s article for the Guardian, which he probably thought of as a list of things not to like about the newly elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Although I have never called myself a Conservative, and have never joined a political party, I do like her. She is my local MP. I have written to her and got a reply that was clearly written with some thought. That is rare. Someone in my family used to be a member of the local Conservative party and I have met her several times at party events, at which she always came across as friendly and convivial. That said, I also like the fact that her smile is not jammed in the “on” position. In their current state the Tories need a leader who will fight – who “would cross the road to bite your ankles” as one of her admirers put it. Sir Keir Starmer had better put on thick socks. Obviously, the incident in 2008 when Badenoch guessed the password of Harriet Harman’s website, hacked into it, and changed it to say that Harman had defected to the Tories and that everyone should vote for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London was an unspeakably wicked assault on Our Democracy and not funny at all. November 2nd, 2024 | 34 comments
November 1st, 2024 | 27 comments
Starmer entered office with “the lowest vote-share that a majority Westminster government has received since the introduction of universal suffrage”. November 1st, 2024 | 16 comments
“The necessity of finding a sphere of usefulness, an appropriate job, ourselves is the hardest discipline that a free society imposes on us. It is, however, inseparable from freedom, since nobody can assure each man that his gifts will be properly used unless he has the power to coerce others to use them. Only by depriving somebody else of the choice as to who should serve him, whose capacities or which products he is to use, could we guarantee to any man that his gifts will be used in the matter he feels he deserves. It is of the essence of a free society that a man’s value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service which is useful to others who can reciprocate. And the chief aim of freedom is to provide both the opportunity and the inducement to insure the maximum use of the knowledge that an individual can acquire. What makes the individual unique in this respect is not his generic but his concrete knowledge, his knowledge of particular circumstances and conditions.” – F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pages 80-81. With yesterday’s revolting annual Budget statement from the Labour government still ringing in my ears, I thought a bit about how this lot treats ideas of “merit” and what is considered “unearned” wealth. For instance, one aspect of yesterday’s measures from Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to add a deceased spouse’s pension pot to inheritance tax (threshold starts at £325,000); IHT is 40 per cent. Any money paid out from the pension will be hit, subject to certain conditions, at 45 per cent for top-rate taxpayers – an effective rate of 67 per cent. This sort of move stems from the idea that certain people don’t “deserve” to inherit X or Y, and must pay their “fair” share to the Moloch of the State. I urge people to read Hayek’s masterpiece, not least for its dissection, and demolition, of much of the argument put forward about why certain wealth is “unearned”, and why we should be paid according to some social formula of merit. That way totalitarianism lies. October 31st, 2024 | 10 comments
“Britain’s deluded politics are downstream of a deluded public. This country simply doesn’t realise how poor it is; the gulf between public expectations of the state and the state’s means of financing itself has widened to dangerous levels. People on relatively high incomes don’t feel rich and therefore assume that there are plenty of actually rich people who could be squeezed to pay for stuff. Entitlement spending, in particular, is eating British democracy alive. Council budgets are increasingly consumed by social care and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) spending, with services cut to the bone. Meanwhile in Westminster, successive governments continually forestall capital investment to avoid tinkering with absurd commitments such as the pension triple lock.” – Henry Hill, writing about the UK Budget statement of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves. (For non-British readers who want to know what the “triple lock” is, it is a safeguard that ensures the state pension increases each year by the highest of three measures: Inflation: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the previous September; Average earnings: The average increase in total wages across the UK for May to June of the previous year; and a minimum rise of 2.5%.) I agree with Hill that many members of the public, and not just the chattering class, are so economically illiterate they have little idea of how screwed the UK is financially, given demography, state bloat, over-regulation and tax, and the rest. And anyone who pushes against it is one of those sinister people known as “neoliberals”. October 30th, 2024 | 17 comments
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