According to a poll taken in the last few days, 71% of Americans just want to get the damn thing done and over with.
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I took the quizilla test and the results were hardly unexpected:  Libertarian – You believe that the main use for government is for some people to lord it over others at their expense. You maintain that the government should be as small as possible, and that civil liberties, “victimless crimes”, and gun ownership should be basic rights. You probably are OK with capitalism. Your historical role model is Thomas Jefferson. Which political sterotype are you? March 14th, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Today I got an e-mail from Alex Singleton. I asked him if I could put it up here, and had no objection. I asked this because, as I said to him, it reflects very well on the Liberty Club and its activities up there in Saint Andrews University.
There’s no report on the Liberty Log as yet, but there may be something soon. Meanwhile I’ve nothing to add to Alex’s report, except to say that this is just what intellectual activism and indeed life at a University is, or should be, all about. My congratulations to all concerned. March 13th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unless you have been living on an isolated desert island for the past three years – not an entirely bad thought – you would have read of how the collapse of scandal-ridden firms like Enron and WorldCom contributed to the bloodbath in the world’s stock markets. As the tales of corporate accounting hijinks and outright fraud surfaced, the Cassandras took to print and the airwaves to inform us of how these tales proved that the equity-crazed Anglo-Saxon form of capitalism was vulnerable to such behaviour. Of course, what these tales proved was that the world’s modern capital markets can and will punish malefactors harshly. They certainly did. Well, corruption is hardly the sole preserve of corporations. And surely there are few more corrupt institutions that the European Commission, as shown by this story in today’s Financial Times newspaper. But whereas businessmen at Enron and elsehwere were swiftly brought before the courts, it seems that corruption in the bureacracy of the EU is proving much tougher to clean up. To which I would add, why is anyone surprised?  March 13th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic comes as no real surprise to me. Serbia is now reaping the cost of failing to follow up the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic with a systematic and ruthless process similar to the ‘de-nazification’ of West Germany that followed World War 2. As the new regime failed to use the opportunity to wipe out (literally) the nationalist/socialist thugs responsible for much of the calamity in the Balkans, these same thugs have retained control over chunks of Serbian society the way they always did… with violence and terror. Zoran Djindjic will be remembered as a reformer and the man who gave up Slobodan Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. However it has been suggested on Samizdata.net before that surrendering Milosevic for trial by foreigners was a serious error. The end of Mussolini at the hands of Italians would have been a far better model for the Serbs to have followed. March 13th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
For an anarchist libertarian, things are easy. Of course government folk find ways round every effort to limit the powers of the state – government is a malignant cancer and limited state people and minimal state people are just fools. For those people (such as myself) who have doubt about anarchism things are difficult. We tend to fall back on ideas about Constitutions to limit the power of government – and the record of such things is not good. Firstly few Constitutions even try to limit what things government can spend money on, and even those Constitutions that do try and do this by listing what government can spend on do not tend to hold back the state. In the case of Australian Constitution there were amendments to the Constitution to allow the government to spend money on various welfare state programs (it is, of course, the welfare state or ‘entitlement’ programs that constitute the vast majority of government spending in all Western nations). In the American case the Constitution was simply ignored. Some Classical Liberals and libertarians regard the fact that United States Constitution was not amended to allow for the growth of the government as a sign of hope (“the Constitution still exists, all we need to do is enforce it”), but I tend to agree with the anarchists that the fact that the United States Constitution has been used for toilet paper (without any real resistance) is deeply scary. And make no mistake the U.S. Constitution has been smashed. Take the example of paper money. The Founders all opposed the concept of making unbacked notes money simply by government order (they had the example of the ‘Continental’ to remind them of some of the problems with the idea). And the Constitution seems clear enough. → Continue reading: Limited Government and Constitutions March 13th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just seen an item on a cable news channel in the USA, concerning the return of asylum seekers from Iraq.
All fair and reasonable. During WWII Britain was host to many asylum seekers from invaded countries, such as France and Poland. With very little encouragement, these folk formed regiments and joined forces with the Allies, and were keen to see service in the liberation of their native countries. They were among the most dedicated soldiers, and earned many honours for bravery, after all, they had the best reasons for fighting against the invader. As we have some 150,000 ‘asylum seekers’ from Iraq, in the UK, would it not be a reasonable idea to form an Iraqi Regiment, so that these Hussein haters could take an active part in liberating their own country? Maybe they could join forces with ‘asylum seekers’ from other countries, who must all surely have good reason to oppose tyranny, to form maybe an Iraqi Division. I am sure that the skills that they have, with just the language alone, would help during the fighting, and also be of great help in ‘democratizing’ Iraq after the conflict. Maybe I am expecting too much… Ernest Young March 12th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to Fox News Washington House of Representatives Capitol Hill cafeterias now only serve “freedom fries”. So why don’t they just call them by their correct name instead? Chips. March 12th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve know for some time that there was a modernised movie version of Hamlet out there, starring Ethan Hawke. Yesterday, for just £9.99 I finally got my hands on a DVD copy of it, and although I haven’t yet had time to watch all of it, I have watched the first few scenes of it. So far, I’m impressed. For starters, I wasn’t sure if they’d even kept the original Shakespeare text. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the plot but updating the script of a Shakespeare play. It happens all the time. But I wanted it to be the original script by Shakespeare, and it is. The trouble with ‘authentic’ productions, which make it very clear that the original Hamlet lived in earlier times than ours is that although you can revive the old language and the old costumes, you can’t revive the old audience. And that means that actually even the language and the costumes have to change. The more linguistically impenetrable lines get cut, and the costumes aren’t so much genuinely ancient as ancient-looking-to-us. I once saw a production of Hamlet in which they all wore genuine Elizabethan sticking-out trousers. It looked utterly ridiculous. Shakespeare done in merely antique looking (but in fact totally anachronistic) tight-fitting modern leather trousers can look splendid, however daft it would have looked to an Elizabethan audience. But there is a deeper problem than mere costumes. In order to understand all the private griefs and calculations of characters in a play like Hamlet, you have to take their public power struggles seriously and to have an instinctive sense of how important and overbearing these struggles can be and how brutally they can intrude into the would-be ‘private’ lives of the characters. → Continue reading: A Hamlet for our time March 12th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
So government minister Clare Short is against a war in Iraq. That makes the following remarks all the most interesting:
So please will someone tell me… why is she opposed to a war to depose Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq? It seem that her claims that the UN must sign off on a war against tyranny did not matter when it came to Slobodan Milosevic, so what makes Saddam Hussain different? March 11th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are always being told by those who oppose war against Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq of the downside… and although on balance I still support the armed overthrow of Saddam Hussain’s regime, on some of those issues I am all too aware that there is some truth to the fact this open ended ‘war on terrorism’ is also being used as an open ended ‘war on domestic civil liberties’. However, let us also ponder the potential upside:
Always curious to know what US politicos are thinking about these turbulent times, I had dinner with Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) last night and made many of these points to him. Whilst I would not say he was happily endorsing my views, I did not see any grimaces or rolling of eyes from the urbane Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. Although he did not make me a convert to the joys of the ‘Patriot Act’, I was surprised to see the number of issues we did indeed agree on. Of course I am well aware things can always shake out very differently as war and politics have a ways of springing surprises on even the canniest of customers, but sometimes things also have a way of turning out better than expected. Face it, nobody really knows what will happen. March 11th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British Broacasting Corporation, as many readers will know, is paid for out of a tax, the licence fee. And here is further evidence that the BBC, which regards much of the terrestrial television world as its personal fiefdom, will stop at nothing to track down those who don’t believe the BBC has a divine right to permanent existence. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up. March 11th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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