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I don’t know about Denmark but it sounds as if there is something rather rotten going on in the state of Italy according to this report in the UK Times:
ROMANS are to be offered cut-price family meals in a novel attempt by the city’s authorities to curb inflation that has plagued Italy since the introduction of euro notes and coins at the beginning of last year.
The scheme, called Shopping Sport, starts on October 1 in the city’s 140 street markets. Stallholders will be asked to offer shoppers a basket containing enough ingredients to make a meal for four people, including meat or fish, vegetables and dessert, for €12 (£8.34).
Restaurants, bars, hairdressers, garages, plumbers and supermarkets have also been asked to join the campaign. For example, restaurants will be expected to offer a starter, a pizza and a pudding for €12 — and it should be possible to get a morning cappuccino and croissant for €1.50 (£1.05). The authorities will publish a list of the businesses taking part.
Begging your pardon and all that, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like price-fixing?
Newspapers run stories almost daily on the “real” inflation rate, which some put as high as 30%. Even everyday items such as bread and milk have risen by 16% and a bus ticket by 29% since December 2001, according to Consumer’s Contract, a group that lobbies for consumers’ rights.
Italians voted with their purses last week, staging a consumer “strike” in which as many as 40% of people were reported to have taken part in some areas. Further action is planned around Christmas. Some shops also shut for the day in a sign of solidarity with their customers.
And doesn’t that sound an awful lot like galloping inflation?
So galloping inflation and price-fixing. Isn’t that precisely the kind of Banana Republic economics that the introduction of the single currency was supposed to banish?
[My thanks to
The Galileo space probe yesterday concluded its mission by entering the Jovian atmosphere and disintegrating at 1957 hours GMT. During its 14 year mission, Galileo sent back more than 14000 images, and highlights of the mission involved watching a comet crash into Jupiter and finding evidence of large oceans under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Galileo really tested the ingenuity of the people controlling the mission at JPL, who firstly had to figure out a way for the probe to reach Jupiter despite having to use a much less powerful rocket to launch it from the space shuttle than originally intended, and then later to find a way for it to complete its mission despite the failure of its high gain antenna, meaning that data could only be transmitted at a much lower rate than originally intended.
However, ways were found, and Galileo ended up being an utterly magnificent success. We criticise the present form of NASA a lot, usually with good reason, but this mission is one that was ultimately got right. To everyone connected with it, might I offer a hearty “well done”. I’ll miss watching the photos and data come in.
In my statist youth I was a firm believer in compulsory voting. “We should be like Australia,” I used to say, “and make people vote.” Of course, I would never subscribe to such a draconian policy these days, having indoctrinated myself with the works of Popper, Rand, and Murray N. Rothbard. But until swayed by the wise words of Mr Carr, I used to think it unfortunate that so many British people had become addicted to this growing habit of electoral abstention.
Some British politicians even cry the odd crocodile tear about it, on late-night political programmes. Not that it stops Tony Blair from strutting across the political landscape, like Godzilla, despite wielding only a quarter of the votes of the British electorate, from the 2001 General Election. What people in the ruling class like Mr Blair truly fear, of course, is the growing de-legitimisation of the British state, including all of its political parties, which this increase in non-voting represents. However, despite these fears, non-voting is generally becoming a rational and respectable thing to do.
At least that’s according to one of my favourite Telegraph writers, Tom Utley.
I realise that I am preaching the most dreadful heresy. I know that we are all supposed to pull pious faces and say that the vote is our most precious possession, that men and women have died for it and that to abstain in an election is a grave dereliction of a civic duty. But that has always struck me as a silly argument. If we do not honestly care which of the assorted bores, cranks and exhibitionists on a ballot paper should win an election, then why should we pretend that we do?
Now where I increasingly differ from Mr Utley, after repeatedly failing to hear Oliver Letwin’s outright condemnation of David Blunkett’s plans for a national ID card, is in his proposed solution to the crisis:
People don’t think voting matters, and it is the politicians’ job to persuade them that it does…Elections must be made to matter again. What I am really saying, I suppose, is Vote Tory.
Aside from this hesitant political plug, it’s an interesting article, especially as it’s the first time, as an admittedly irregular reader of the Telegraph, that I’ve seen the rationality of non-voting discussed with any kind of seriousness within its hallowed pages. It seems Mr Carr’s message is getting through.
This is both good news and bad news:
Farmer Tony Martin has accepted an offer from a burglar whom he shot and wounded to drop a claim for damages.
The aborted attempt by Brendan Fearon to sue Mr Martin for compensation is likely to cost the public around £50,000, a friend of the farmer said.
Mr Fearon last week offered to halt his compensation claim if Mr Martin agreed to abandon his counterclaim for compensation for damages suffered when his home was broken into.
Mr Martin today gave his lawyers formal instructions to accept Mr Fearon’s offer.
The good news is that this absurd and fraudulent legal threat from “Mr” Fearon now looks as if it will cease. The bad news is that this deal accepts not only the equality before the law but also of legal outcome of a householder and his burgling attacker. Maybe (maybe), Fearon has suffered enough for what he did to Tony Martin, although I doubt if he has suffered nearly enough for what he has done to lots of others. But Tony Martin has certainly suffered far too much. If this deal makes his life easier and happier, then I’m for it, and of course he knows his own best interests. But the law should never have put him in the absurd position of having to negotiate with this thieving little apology for a man in the first place, just to stop any further predations.
Sting in the tail of the Telegraph piece already quoted from:
Mr Fearon was claiming legal aid for his court bid.
But of course.
Going off at a bit of a tangent, I posted some news yesterday afternoon and last night over at White Rose of another bit of broadcasting done by Sean Gabb, whose efforts on behalf of Tony Martin were featured here in two recent posts, this time on the subject of Identity Cards. I didn’t hear the broadcast, but Sean apparently did very well, with much phoned-in and e-mailed support.
ID cards will do nothing to stop the likes of Fearon in their criminal rampages. ID card forgery will merely be another crime for criminals to commit and another pointless governmental expense, as Britain seems about to learn, and as Nigeria, apparently, already knows. There, the forgeries came several weeks before the real things themselves!
In occasional moments of reflection, I sometimes wonder why the British government is wasting £5 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on the Hutton Inquiry, when we already know the result: the day the report is published, Geoff Hoon will resign.
But this begs another question. Who will Tony Blair replace the hopeless Defence Secretary with, when Hoon takes the Hutton bullet on behalf of the Dear Leader? With Tony rapidly running out of friends in Cabinet, who could the Teacher of the Nation possibly turn to in such a moment of crisis, especially when the locker is bare of mellifluous wormtongues, despite Tony having hundreds of overpaid New Labour backbenchers to choose from, most of whom spend their long dull mornings wandering around Westminster trying to secure free lunches?
Yes, you’ve already guessed it. No, you couldn’t possibly believe it. Yes, my friends, hold onto your bed-knobs and your broomsticks. For the next Secretary of State for Defence will be, yes, step forward please, the former Secretary of State for Transport, a man who made it through the rain, yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the new and improved Stephen Byers!
Please. No tittering at the back there!
After having served more than an entire year on the backbenches, for having serially lied to the British people, rumours abound that Peter “Mandy” Mandelson has decided Stephen “Liar, Liar, my Pants are on Fire” Byers, must be returned to the ruling caste, as the new Defence Secretary, to bolster pretty-boy Tony’s rapidly disintegrating regime. If you can’t follow this link, here’s what today’s Daily Mirror said:
STEPHEN Byers is about to return to the Cabinet as replacement for doomed Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. Byers, 50, who quit as Transport Secretary 16 months ago in a storm over spin, will bolster support for Tony Blair at a time when Chancellor Gordon Brown’s backers are increasing in strength around the No10 table. Mr Hoon is widely expected to go after the Hutton inquiry over Dr David Kelly. Mr Byers has been exiled “long enough”, said a senior source.
Which leads one to think several things may have happened. First of all, Tony Blair has finally gone totally gaga mad. Unlikely, though possible. Second, the new unspun Tony has given up the ghost, and will go the same day Hoon does, handing over the multiplying problems of New Labour to Gordon Brown to fail with. Again, unlikely. Blair has nowhere yet to go, as he’s failed to get us into the €uro, and a daily fix of executive power is a drug few give up voluntarily. Third, Tony has created such a court of Yes-men, that he can no longer objectively discern reality from the sinuous platitudes of his courtiers. My bet is on this third option. It’s that Bay of Pigs scenario again, with Stephen Byers, in this case, being the pig.
Whatever the case, even the kite-flying suggestion that Stephen Byers is a solution to the problem of Geoff Hoon points to a government in mortal crisis, like the proverbial spider about to disappear down the spinning whirlpool of proverbial bathroom history. But with no trusted political opposition in the UK, and falling voting levels in all substantive elections, what happens when such a despised government does collapse? I don’t know, but start writing those libertarian manifestos right now. Our day may be closer than we think. Though I won’t be giving up the day-job, just yet.
Following his Radio 5 Live spot about ID cards last night (see the post below for links and email info), another email from Sean Gabb arrived, to the effect that the programme went well:
… All I had to do this evening was state the main heads of opposition to compulsory identity cards, and then sit back and listen to the callers as they made their own points.
All but one of the callers was against the idea. I spoke to one of the production people, who told me about a flood of e-mails and text messages that ran 20-1 against. …
Sean says he was particularly grateful to the lady who …
… gave me the point about perfect copies of ID cards on sale in Lagos weeks before the real ones had begun dropping through letter boxes.
He continued:
Quite plainly, the speakers for the scheme were drunk on technology that they didn’t understand. None of them could answer the often fierce questioning from the callers about how retina eye scans could be made secure against forgery.
I said less than I normally do. I didn’t get properly on to the civil liberties aspects. But it was the callers who made all those points, and with impressive fluency and conviction.
I was unable to hear this programme myself, but it sounds like it went well, doesn’t it? Sean is working on a system to have all such broadcasts up at the Libertarian Alliance website.
Good show.
Email from Sean Gabb:
I have just been contacted by BBC Radio 5, to go on air tonight (Sunday 21st September, 10-11 pm BST) on “Late Night Live”, to discuss the principle of compulsory identity cards. I am not sure yet if the discussion will go ahead, or with me taking part. However, people often complain that I do not give enough notice, so I am sending this out as soon as I can.
You can find Radio 5 at 693 and 909 Khz on the AM band. Otherwise, it is available as streaming audio from this this website.
If you want to contribute with moral support – and this is one reason I am sending this message out! –you can telephone the studio on: 0500 909 693
You can text messages to: 85058 (search me what these digits mean)
Or you can e-mail questions and comments via this web page.
Needless to say, I do welcome support. I shall probably be faced with dozens of the usual sheeple, insisting that they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. You may not be able to get on air, but if you can send supportive e-mails, the weight of these will be measured.
I will make a recording of the debate, and in due course make this available as a sound file from my web site and that of the Libertarian Alliance.
By the way, the Tony Martin broadcast will go up, I hope, in the next five days.
Many regards,
Sean Gabb
Director of Communications
The Libertarian Alliance
Sunday 21st September 2003
sean@libertarian.co.uk
Which is to say, a politician I respect. Now I do not always see eye to eye with Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican representative for Texas, when it comes to dealing with tyrants and other nastiness outside the USA, but I do respect him nevertheless and given my views on politicians as a breed, that is saying something. When he is correct, oh my, is he correct:
Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act.” This legislation prohibits US taxpayer dollars from being used to support or promote any United Nations actions that could infringe on the Second Amendment. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act also expresses the sense of Congress that proposals to tax, or otherwise limit, the right to keep and bear arms are “reprehensible and deserving of condemnation”.
[…]
Secretary Annan is not the only globalist calling for international controls on firearms. For example, some world leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac, have called for a global tax on firearms. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council’s “Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms” calls for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control and praises the restrictive gun polices of Red China and France!
[…]
Mr. Speaker, global gun control is a recipe for global tyranny and a threat to the safety of all law-abiding persons. I therefore hope all my colleagues will help protect the fundamental human right to keep and bear arms by cosponsoring the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act.
Damn, that is almost enough to turn me into a Republican! Now if that party could just do something about its mercantilist anti-market trade policies, repressive sexual policies in some states and nasty tendency to vastly increase the size and scope of state whilst claiming to be the party of small government…
There’s an article in today’s New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won’t find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”.
The predominant color scheme of Hitler’s “bright, airy chalet” was “a light jade green.” Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, “a droll raconteur,” decorated his entrance hall with “cactus plants in majolica pots.”
Such are the precious and chilling observations in an irony-free 1938 article in Homes & Gardens, a British magazine, on Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A bit of arcana, to be sure, but one that has dropped squarely into the current debate over the Internet and intellectual property. This file, too, is being shared.
The resurrection of the article can be traced to Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers in Britain, who says he was given a vintage issue of the magazine by his father-in-law. Noticing the Hitler spread, which doted on the compound’s high-mountain beauty (“the fairest view in all Europe”) at a time when the Nazis had already gobbled up Austria, Mr. Waldman scanned the three pages and posted them on his personal Web site last May. They sat largely unnoticed until about three weeks ago, when Mr. Waldman made them more prominent on his site and sent an e-mail message to the current editor of Homes & Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, pointing up the article as a historical curiosity.
Ms. McKenzie-Price, citing copyright rules, politely requested that he remove the pages. Mr. Waldman did so, but not before other Web users had turned the pages into communal property, like so many songs and photographs and movies and words that have been illegally traded for more than a decade in the Internet’s back alleys.
Still, there was a question of whether the magazine’s position was a stance against property theft or a bit of red-faced persnicketiness.
Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that’s what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they’ve written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought.
This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place.
Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it.
But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed. → Continue reading: Hitler’s home in Homes & Gardens
Despite recent cabinet setbacks, Big Blunkett is determined to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.
The BBC Reports that he intends the legislation to be announced in the next Queen’s speech.
When pressed about whether they would be compulsory he said: “my own view is that the minimum is you can’t actually work, or draw on services unless you have the card”
That sounds compulsory to me.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Alas, the drinks really are starting to run out now, in the UK’s socialist Wonderland. As the world price of crude has started dropping, because the UK and US Coalition Allies have finally got the Iraqi oil pumps flowing again, instead of passing any resultant economic benefit onto the British people, the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown is about to pass this benefit onto himself by raising UK petrol prices by up to five pence per gallon. A splendid back-door tax effort, I think you’ll agree.
But one would’ve thought he’d learned his lesson during the UK Fuel Crisis, three years ago. However, our Gordon is wiser than we mere mortals. He thinks he can slip this tax rise in when the pump prices are dropping, thereby fooling we gullible British people into not noticing the difference ‘twixt cup and lip. But what happens, Gordon, when some unforeseen event pushes pump prices back up again? Will you reduce your tax-take? Or cut your spending? Or will you steel yourself for the UK Fuel Crisis Mark II?
I really don’t think you have a clue. Because, idiotarian though you are, you’re a highly intelligent man. And you know if you allowed this price cut to be passed onto the British private sector, instead of keeping it to pay for all your new lesbian nicotine-awareness counsellors, it would stimulate economic growth and increase your long-term tax-take. But you don’t care about the long-term tax-take, do you Gordon? When the British economy is heading over a waterfall, as you recently told the Cabinet, let’s just get that oar in the water and start paddling as hard and as fast as we can. The long-term future will just have to take care of itself.
And it will, Gordon. It will. Let’s just hope that you and your kind aren’t in it.
There are times (rare, it must be said) when I feel a pang of sympathy for our politicians.
Well, no, perhaps ‘sympathy’ is too strong a word. Let’s just say that I do occasionally recognise the thorniness of the predicaments in which they find themselves. Such as this one:
“We have quite a lot of evidence that illustrates that the council tax is very near the limit of acceptability in a number of areas,” said Mr Raynsford. “The increases in the last two or three years have really taxed the patience of a lot of people. They have been very substantial increases and we have to look at options for change including the possibility of finding other sources of revenue.”
Mr Raynsford’s remarks are evidence of Government concern that soaring council tax could severely damage Labour’s popularity in the run-up to the next general election.
The increases have led to threats of civil disobedience by pensioners in Devon who say they cannot afford the rises on their fixed incomes and are refusing to pay.
So what’s the problem? Just lower the taxes, right? Ah, well if only it was as easy as that. See the politicians realise that onerous taxes are making them unpopular but the only way to reduce that burden is to slash public spending and that will make them equally (if not more) unpopular. What’s a government minister to do?
Truly this is almost a picture perfect snapshot of a schitzoid nation. The common folk are always grumbling menacingly about the taxes they are forced to pay but at the same time they are not prepared to entertain even a suggestion of a reduction in the size of government (national or local) nor any diminution in the level of state largesse which they demand with an unquenchable vigour.
Oft-times this infected body politic breaks out in pustules that send the political classes scurrying around to find a less tender part of the body onto which to shift the burden. I suppose that method of treatment has a limited shelf-life.
It is slightly worrying that even after the Thatcher years there still seems to be no clear understanding that state activism comes at a high price. The British people appear to want low taxes and big government without appreciating that they cannot possibly have both. Until such time that sufficient numbers of them have settled on which one they want, these techtonic plates of expectation are going to continue grinding against each other, leading to frequent tremors and occasional quakes.
[Note to non-UK readers: ‘Council taxes’ are property-based taxes collected and spent at local level.]
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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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