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Ernest Benn was the uncle of Tony Benn and great-uncle of Hilary Benn. Luckily for us he was the black sheep of the family and pursued a career in business before becoming one of the “great and the good”. And then he decided he didn’t want to be great or good any more, founding the Society for Individual Freedom. As I understand it the Libertarian Alliance – who most here will be familiar with – emerged from that association.
A hundred years ago Benn was compiling a list of good economics books which – seemingly unbelievably – The Times published. It includes – as you might expect – Smith, Bastiat and Mill and – as you might not expect – Spencer and Smiles. It also includes Henry Ford – presumably before he started blaming the Jews for everything. But there is one book that’s missing. Luckily a young Austrian is on the case.
 The Times, Tuesday, 14 April 1925 [I hope this is legible. It’s a bit blurred on my computer but the original is fine. The list is totally blurred if I try to include it inline with the post. All very odd.]
Elliot Keck (who he?) had this recent excellently sharp item over at CapX:
It can be infuriating making the case for free markets. Too much time has to be spent batting away obviously terrible, tried-and-failed ideas. Proposals for a wealth tax are just the latest iteration requiring many a wall to be bashed with many a head. Just in the last few days, a group called ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ has urged Rachel Reeves to consider a ‘simple way’ to grow the economy with a tax of 2% on wealth over £10 million per year. A recent piece in the New Statesman concluded that a wealth tax wouldn’t be straightforward, but it could work. The new director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has also called for a one-off wealth tax.
This is mad. As a TaxPayers’ Alliance study of wealth taxes has demonstrated, they’ve failed everywhere they’ve been tried. When Labour considered one in the 1970s, they concluded it would be unworkable, despite capital being far less mobile then than it is today.
We are already seeing the wealthy flee at a shocking rate (just look at the Adam Smith Institute’s millionaire tracker), forced abroad by changes to non-dom rules, punitive marginal tax rates, shoddy public services, increasing crime and the imposition of VAT on private schools, to name just a few incentives. When this is pointed out to proponents of wealth taxes, as I recently found on LBC, the response is not to dispute the problem but to bemoan the fact that every time the rich are asked to pay their ‘fair share’, they throw their toys out the pram and flee.
Yet now those who have the temerity to be affluent are being told to cough up to clean up the almighty mess made by our political class. It’s yet another reason for the wealthy to line up for the last chopper out of Saigon. Rather than criticising those who leave, we should increasingly be thanking those who choose to stay.
“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
Not just physics, Indigenous Australian physics
Decolonise your mind!
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
Climate change action: “The Science” gives way to “The Physics”
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
I know he trash-talks. I know that much of what he says is aimed at his base, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this is bizarre. Greenland is not part of the United States and has no desire to be. If the USA wants to enter into trade talks that give them mineral rights or even defensive bases, then fine. But talk of taking it is no different to what is going on in Ukraine – a bigger, hostile neighbour taking by force. In reality, they could do it. Greenland could not withstand an invasion, and despite its tough talk, Denmark would be unable to offer much assistance. Denmark, like the rest of Europe, is weak defensively, and the US administration knows it. Despite the trash-talking, I really don’t think he would go that far.
Would he?
As I say, what the Hell is going on here?
– Longrider
In my day job, I have to keep an eye on financial regulations and the compliance regimes such as those of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Switzerland’s FINMA, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and more.
A few years ago, regulators such as the SEC dropped the hammer on bankers and other financial sector folk for using private chat apps such as WhatsApp in ways deemed unacceptable: “The Securities and Exchange Commission has punished some of the biggest names in banking including Citi, Bank of America and JPMorgan with fines totalling more than $2bn since 2021, amid concerns that a boom in services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and WeChat could be letting market abuse go unchecked.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this – this ought to be a matter between the staff of these firms and their employers, in my view – the regulatory authorities come down hard on people using these apps in ways that are seen, however mistakenly, to put certain things (such as record-keeping of important conversations) at risk.
And yet as you know, dear reader, we have seen examples in recent days from US government figures communicating via Apps such as Signal to discuss the pros and cons of military action. It has caused a stink for various reasons, but for me, I am struck by how few people have commented on the very different treatment of those who work in finance, and those who hold positions of power and where lives are at stake. In the UK, a while back, it turned out the government of Boris Johnson was using WhatsApp extensively, with inevitably poor results. This has led to extensive commentary.
I think this gets me to a wider point. Wherever I look, I see a breakdown in trust in our institutions, public and private. The extent to which this is deserved is contested, but at the root of much of it is that those who set the rules and call for them appear not to abide by them: Political and NGO big cheeses flying in private jets to discuss catastrophic global warming, for example, or the cases of alleged two-tier justice that have been such a mark of the UK government in recent months.
But do you consider that there is no security in the policy which we indicate? For here again if you debar us from talking about justice and invite us to obey your interest, we also must explain ours, and try to persuade you, if the two happen to coincide. How can you avoid making enemies of all existing neutrals who shall look at our case and conclude from it that one day or another you will attack them? And what is this but to make greater the enemies that you have already, and to force others to become so who would otherwise have never thought of it?
– Thucydides nails it. For once I agree with Rory Stewart, which is disconcerting.
“America doesn’t make anything anymore” is a powerful talking point, but it’s false. We make plenty, including some of the most complex, high-valued goods in the world, from aircraft to pharmaceuticals to advanced electronics. Our workers don’t make many T-shirts or toasters; other countries can do it more cheaply. And the more successfully we produce and export advanced machinery, the more foreign goods we can afford to import. America’s industrial base is not collapsing. It’s evolving—becoming more productive, more specialized, and more capital-intensive. Protectionism won’t bring back the past or revive old jobs. It will just make the future more expensive and shift workers into lower-paying jobs.
– Veronique de Rugy, Reason magazine.
Lest any Trump admirers get all upset about my posting this quotation it is worth pointing out that there is plenty of protectionist guff on my side of the Atlantic as well. The EU has its Customs Union – the aspects of the bloc that I like the least – and it is described in typically bureaucratic fashion, here. This article in the Financial Times contains the claim that the EU is not as comprehensive in its “protective shields” as the US, Canada and Australia. That said, free trade in general terms is in global retreat, unfortunately, and not simply under the Trump administration – previous US governments were hardly much better, although that is not setting the bar very high.
I have jousted a bit in the comments on previous threads with those claiming that tariffs are necessary, for various (and to my mind, fallacious and often self-contradictory reasons): to “protect jobs”; national security and diversification of supply; as a club to hit supposedly foolish and oppressive other countries; to raise taxes and shift away from income taxes, or that comparative advantage on the David Ricardo model does not work if you allow cross-border capital flows. All the arguments are, in my view, flawed and in some cases, just plain wrong. (Here is a good summary of the arguments contra protectionism.)
As it is used a lot these days, here’s a good take-down, from the Hoover Institution, of the “national security” argument for tariffs. I can also recommend a new book, Free Trade In The 21s Century, a collection of essays by folk from the political, business and economics world. It is a big read, but good to immerse in if you want to delve into the arguments.
What I see playing out today in the US – and at times in Europe – is the way that, since the end of the Cold War and the supposed triumph of free market ideas in the subsequent 20-plus years, the argument was not made with sufficient force and the benefits not adequately spelled out. So here we are. And one big problem is that what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” of capitalism meant that the supposed losers of all this commotion, such as car workers in the UK West Midlands or the US “rust belt” did not get, as far as they could tell, much immediate uplift from the greater overall prosperity that open trade brought. Telling them to “learn to code” just riled them up. (Explaining to an unemployed coal miner or machine tool operator that they should learn a very different skill is difficult, at any age, but particularly if the argument comes from a politician who appears to have never had a real job.) And this, it seems to me, is the fundamental issue: how can a culture of adaptability and can-do attitudes be fostered in a world of constant and at times, disturbing change? (Robert Tracinski makes a good attempt to do so, here.) Because if that does not happen, the populists of the left and the right, whether a Trump, a William Jennings Bryan, etc, will energetically seek to fill the market void. (HL Mencken magnificently destroyed Bryan, who was an opponent of gold-backed money and held many other terrible views that are, I fear, still popular in certain quarters.)
This book, Capitalism In America, from a few years ago by journalist Adrian Wooldridge and former Federal Reserve chairman, jazz musician and economist Alan Greenspan (full disclosure: I have met both of them), gives a good overview of the rise and fall and then rise of arguments about free trade, globalisation, the problems with how the losers from disruption can demand destructive changes, and more. If advocates of free trade like me cannot explain all of this, then the protectionist argument will gain ground, to calamitous effect.
As most of you will know, I covered the sentencing of the Southport Killer live on Twitter/X as event unfolded in the courtroom on 23 January 2025.
During the hearing, I created a timeline recounting what happened on the day of the attack, minute-by-minute, so that the public could see the full horror of this attack, and what had been kept out of the media.
This was followed by indirect criticism from Merseyside Police who claimed the families had asked for the details of the case not to be published. This had been a lie, told for the convenience of the Police who did not want a riot to breakout as a result of their lies and inaction.
– Charlie Bentley-Astor
Read the whole thing.
Keep comments relevant.
The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory.
– Fraser Myers
Why? How many real-life, off-screen cases of femicide has Tate actually been provably linked with? Not as many as a casual newspaper reader may be led to presume. Andrew didn’t bomb all those little girls to death at the Manchester Arena a few years back, did he? Mere days after Adolescence went up on Netflix, the UK’s counter-terrorism tsar, Robin Simcox, released a report into 100 convicted UK-based terrorists arrested between 2004 and 2021, analysing their “mindset material”, like social media activity. This found that, of the 100 studied, 85 could be classed as Islamists, 14 as ‘far-Right’ (whatever that even is now) and… one as being an incel. Appropriately enough, really, for such a committed breed of professional loners.
– Steven Tucker (£)
Defining the benefit of spending as who gets the money rather than what gets bought is economic insanity. We might have a little insight there as to why government control of the economy ends up impoverishing.
– Tim Worstall
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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