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Tiger Woods (who had a nightmare round at The Open yesterday but who was back to his usual form today with a final round of 65) has recently said some interesting things about freedom of association. He has been defending the right of a men-only club to keep women out. (My thanks to Al Baron of the LA-F for the link to this story.)

Tiger’s line was that this was unfortunate, but that it was their prerogative. The right of people to do something unfortunate, on the grounds of “prerogative”. Impressive.

In this particular matter I’d go further. The right of men, and women, to spend some of their time only with other men, and other women, is something that should be permanently insisted upon, not just as something that is “unfortunate” but which ought to be legally tolerated on freedom of association grounds, but as something that for many can be positively liberating – essential for their peace of mind even. Human females and males are not the same, and at times (or at some times), they (or some of them) need a rest from each other and from all the stresses and strains of competing with their own gender for the attentions of the other one. (Gender and race are very different matters from this point of view, as Tiger Woods gets but as most of his interlocutors seem not to.)

Happily most people realise this, and gender segregation is a relentless feature of everyday life. Most people know that there are some occasions and institutions which are for the other gender only, and that their only contribution is to stay away and leave the boys, or the girls, to do their thing. But it now tends to be only the women whose right to keep the men out on some (or, if they want this, all) occasions is explicitly asserted in everyday “political” conversation.

This is not a blanket assertion that it is always wise for men to exclude women from everything they now control. In particular, it is surely most unwise to exclude the other gender from the administration of an activity, such as a sport, which the other gender has started to play in serious numbers. Here, it is the fact of male and female differentness which says that both points of view should be attended to in administrative decisions. I am glad, for example, that the Marylebone Cricket Club has recently decided to allow women to become members. And I dare say that Tiger Woods was right about the unfortunateness of the particular matter he was being asked to comment on.

But this only made his assertion of the principle of freedom of association all the more impressive. No way should the right to exclude particular people from your company ever be confused with an argument about whether exclusion in this or that case is wise, or necessary, or nice, or logical, or anything at all except the right of those doing the excluding.

For reasons I won’t bore readers with, I could really use a nice fat housing bubble burst in London. Having turned down a chance to buy a house in 1996 on the grounds that it was overpriced and the downturn imminent (one recently sold in that street for five times the then asking price), my judgement on timing the crash is not terribly good.

However, I just came across a comment on a newsgroup about whether the author of a TV series was a millionaire (in US dollars). One respondent mentioned in passing that there’s been a sharp fall in Silicon Valley property prices for the past year. Despite the claims of estate agents and mortgage lenders – both have an interest in inflating reported prices which makes a “House price index” produced by a lender suspect in my eyes – there seems to be a drop in the number of really expensive houses for sale in London (a subjective impression of mine) but rents are clearly crashing (only three times equivalent Paris prices, from four times last summer).

This will no doubt be reported as terrible news for homeowners and the leftist class-hate merchants on Channel 4 news will have a field day. The bigger problem is that the correction in the housing market looks set to occur just when the government gets round to intervening. So there will be subsidies paid to public sector workers, planning controls will protect derelict industrial slums as “monuments to working-class culture” whilst hideous boxes with tiny (eco-friendly) windows will be built on water meadows (to be flooded each spring). Council officers will be sent on “search and destroy” missions to eliminate greedy landlords by regulation, just in time to prevent home-hunters from benefiting from a buyers’ market. And the accursed Housing Benefit, a bigger creator of crime and fraud in Britain than drugs,will be raised, thereby distorting the lower end of the housing market even more.

Isolationist libertarianism is a particularly American brand and trusting elections to prevent civil wars seems to be a British one. Both have their strong points but there are occasions where both are plain wrong.

I wrote (and deleted) a few hundred words on the history of Algerian massacres which go back to the mid-nineteenth century, and have a strong (under-reported) underpinning of ethnic hatred. That and the fact that the Iranian revolution didn’t have the option of elections is part of the reason I don’t think that the comparison is fair on the Algerian Army.

Even with the benefit of hindsight I find it difficult to see how the armed forces of Algeria could have calculated that the FIS wouldn’t be worse than their Iranian counterparts (I recall that Ayatollah Khomeni had only recently died at the time). The Army had no way of knowing what we know of Iran today.

Sorry, can’t locate the Milton Friedman quote, however, for a model example of the justified military coup, see the later stages of series two of Babylon 5. I believe it’s available on DVD. If I buy one of those machines soon, the whole series will be on my first round of shopping.