Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
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French state schools, unlike the British or American varieties, were founded explicitly to oppose clerical power. They are the most visible and enduring bastions of secularism in France. Originally, the prohibition of religious symbols in schools was aimed against Catholics. Many of the supporters of secularism in the 19th century in France were non-conformist or atheist: often Protestant or Jewish. The antisemistism of such groups as Action Française from the 1890s onwards is in turn a reaction against the French radical assault on Catholic society. In the early 20th century a deal was worked out that allowed religious schools to operate alongside the secular system. The Islamist campaign against secularism is what the headscarf law is about. In some schools, violence has been threatened against girls who refused to wear scarves. Apologists for fundamentalists (ususally socialists hoping to play the race card) condoned the violence and have allowed a climate of terror in French schools. As a libertarian, I oppose state schools. But also as a libertarian, I also support the prohibition of Islamic fundamentalist intimidation. If Islamic schools really allowed freedom to exit, I could back Moslem campaigns for lifting any restrictions the French government might have against their own schools. When I visit a mosque, I take off my shoes, I do not interfere with the religious devotions of the worshippers, and I do not demonstrate my own devotions to eating pork and drinking beer. The person who chooses a turban ahead of an education has got “I’m a loser!” stamped all over him. But the people who organise the headscarf campaigns do not want freedom of choice: they want a licence to coerce. This is not a campaign for religious freedom: Moslems are free to set up their own schools. It is a campaign to separate the public and the private sphere: in the school each pupil’s religious affiliation is a private and not a public matter. Far be it from me to condone the criminal régime of Chirac. But, this is the same fight as the Turkish Army’s fight to defend a secular state against the fundmentalist tyranny. It is a small corner of the War on Terror, and compared with the some of the antics of the Department of “Homeland Defense” a.k.a. Minipax, one worth fighting. It is also a campaign against obscurantism. French people often mock those parts of the USA where it is illegal to teach Darwin, or where Creationist theories have to be accorded equal credibilty in the classroom. January 19th, 2004 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive. The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe’s demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years. Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe. There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace. It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st. The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow. January 18th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit links to this:
Instapundit is pleased because this report says what he and lots of others have also said, that it was American military muscle and the threat of more of it, not merely polite requests to Col Gadaffi to be nicer from Blair or his fellow Europeans. Quite so. The idea that recent American military activity had nothing to do with Gaddafi’s change of heart is very far fetched. But what irritates me is that Blair, the Telegraph, Instapundit, the lot of them, are all talking about “threats” and “diplomacy” as if these were two entirely different and opposite things, when in truth threats and diplomacy go hand in hand, and neither can work properly without the other. Take this particular set of circumstances. How were those American threats communicated, if not through diplomatic channels, and how did Col Gaddafi signal his desire to comply with American wishes if not through that same diplomatic process? And did not the Americans then respond very diplomatically to the Colonel’s climbdown? As for that non-American diplomacy which is imagined by some to have persuaded Gol Gaddafi to change his ways, well, this report illustrates that this too would have consisted of threats, diplomatically communicated and responded to, in this case the threat of not allowing such things as centrifuges to journey from China to Libya on ships controlled by those doing the threatening. An unwillingness to make any such threats would have rendered European diplomacy toothless, and hence ineffective. And that seems to be what happened. But that is not my central point. All I here insist on is the true as opposed to sentimental and ignorant meaning of the word “diplomacy”. Diplomacy doesn’t mean being nice only. It also means being nasty, while explaining nicely – or perhaps not so nicely – what you want in exchange for being less nasty. What does anyone think that diplomats actually say? January 18th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of. Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.  27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.) And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.  Okay, okay, I’m excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?  Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link. January 18th, 2004 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting and deeply depressing article in Time Europe about how EUrope is falling behind the USA in the funding of scientific research. European scientists are flocking the research labs in the USA, where the money and conditions are far better. The article reveals the usual EUro-procedure whenever catching up with America is the agenda. Question asked by EUropeans: how much money is America spending? Answer: A lot. Question not asked by EUropeans: where does all that American money come from in the first place? Answer: by having lots of trade, done by tradesmen. Question also not asked by EUropeans: who is spending all this American money and how? Answer: American research money is, a lot of it, spent by those same tradesmen, who spend it quite sensibly, in ways that produce innovation and profits. Next question asked by EUropeans: what is to be done? Answer offered by EUropeans: EUropean governments must spend a lot more on research than they do now. Result: EUrope as a whole has even less money for tradesmen to spend on anything, and research in EUrope becomes even less sensible and even more stupid. Total spending doesn’t grow very fast, which is just as well, because if EUro-governments spent as much as “America” (i.e. the American government and all those American tradesmen, added together) spends on research, that would bankrupt EUrope completely. → Continue reading: The decline of EUro-science January 18th, 2004 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Government-fetishists are always trying to justify their demands for ever-bigger state by claiming that only the state can ride to the rescue of the public to correct what they call ‘market failures’. So, who is going to come riding to the rescue to put this right?
I would be willing to wager that the ‘prime interest’ of Margaret Hodge is Margaret Hodge. As for the thousands of parents who may have had their children abducted by the state, well, tough titties. Live with it. What the government puteth asunder, let no man join together again. January 18th, 2004 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
When the French government decided to place a prohibition of overtly religious symbols in state schools (or ‘the headscarf ban’ as it is more widely know), I bet they thought that they were removing a splinter from the soft tissue of the body politic. But it looks like the wound is beginning to fester:
And that view is not confined to French Muslims either:
I get the feeling that this one is going to run and run. January 17th, 2004 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bruce Bartlett has one of the most thought-provoking columns on economic history that I’ve seen in a while. In recent months, we’ve seen a number of lame attempts to compare Bush to Hitler. (Blogger Stephen Green is doing a good job of documenting these things.) I’ve seen a number of sites that display a series of Bush photos, each juxtaposed with a photo of Hitler in a similar pose … Bush is seen here eating a ham sandwich, and here’s Hitler eating a ham sandwich in 1937. Here’s Bush talking to some children, and here’s Hitler doing the same. See? Bush = Hitler! QED. Self-indulgent celebrities and hard-left ideologues have picked up on this tiresome Bush = Hitler meme, and the wave of moral equivalence crested with the recent controversy over MoveOn.org’s anti-Bush ad contest. Meanwhile, Bartlett is seizing on this theme to take issue with some, both on the left and on the right, who want to compare Keynes to Hitler. He starts with Alexander Cockburn, quoting his most recent effort in The Nation:
Then, to pick an example from the opposite end of the spectrum, he points to an August 2003 column by Llewellyn Rockwell, longtime chairman of the Mises Institute. Here is the full text of the Rockwell piece that Bartlett is citing. While I admire the Mises Institute and enjoyed the time that I spent at the Mises annual seminar in ’96, my take on Rockwell is that his writing style often loses focus due to its underlying anger. This is a classic example. And note that even he can’t help but juxtapose images of Keynes and Hitler, striking similar poses, just as those sophomoric “Bush = Hitler” websites do. The money quote from the Rockwell piece, which Bartlett cites in his column, is this non sequitur:
I don’t see how the quote from Keynes is tantamount to “admiration of the Nazi economic program.” Taken in full context, Keynes is just pointing out that it would be much easier to implement an activist fiscal policy in a state that is already centralized and forceful than in a state that was characterized by decentralization and federalism, a point that I would take to be obviously true. How this is supposed to represent Keynes’ “admiration” of the Third Reich is not clear. Yes, Nazi Germany, in a roundabout way, did employ policies that Keynes would have prescribed if he had been running Germany at the time. This does NOT mean that Keynes’ idea of “public works” was building prison camps. Bartlett is correct in concluding that there are enough substantive problems with Keynesianism that we don’t need to resort to ad hominem criticisms of the man himself — just as there are plenty of ways that one can oppose the policies of Bush without resorting to the same. I disagree with a lot of the policies of the Bush administration (campaign finance reform, Medicare “reform”, on and on) but I have better things to do than try to fit this opposition into some tortured “Bush = Hitler” framework. To put the shoe on the other foot — Rockwell was against the war in Iraq, and so was Noam Chomsky, but that doesn’t mean that “Rockwell = Chomsky!” or anything close to it. It doesn’t mean that Rockwell “is an admirer of” Chomsky, or that Rockwell also agrees with Chomsky’s denial of the holocaust, or even that Rockwell would use his brakes if Chomsky was crossing the street in front of his car. Now, when are we going to see the article that says, “Bush used Keynesian fiscal policy, and so did Hitler, therefore Bush = Hitler!” January 17th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peter Briffa catches Polly Toynbee talking sense:
Very good! PT of course intends that all these very good questions should be answered with:yes. Yes, southerners should pay for the northern angel, yes ballet-haters should pay for ballet, etc. And yes, higher education despisers should pay for other people’s higher education. But for once, I like the cut of her jib. Asks Briffa mischievously: Is the penny finally dropping for La Toynbee? No of course not. She is incorrigible. But might not some of her readers find their brain cells being prodded into unfamiliar directions by all this flagrant logic. This spasm of Toybee sanity reminds me of when people say that I should oppose some little government tyranny not for being tyrannical (that being perhaps too difficult or unpopular to do effectively), but for being inconsistent with some other not-so-tyrannical arrangement. Beware of asking for consistency in such circumstances, I reply, you just might get it, in the form of consistent tyranny. Toynbee starts by arguing for consistency and immediately finds herself sounding for the duration of her point like the purest sort of libertarian. Heh. January 17th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Given the global prominence of this brand, I find it quite surprising that only now are Starbucks about to open their first branch in Paris:
They better hire some burly security guards as well. If they manage to get through the first month without succumbing to a Jose Bove-led sit-in protest they will be able to consider themselves fortunate.
Now this is a different matter. If Starbucks fails to ignite the interest of the Parisians then so be it. The market rules and, in as much as he is basing his dismissal on his understanding of local market conditions, then Monsieur Quartier has got a point. After all, if your idea of a good night out is lashings of Sartre and dollops of Foucault washed down with litres of bitter café noir and a lungful of Gitanes then the child-friendly play areas and sanitised chirpiness of Starbucks is probably not for you. → Continue reading: Would you like guilt with your coffee, sir? January 17th, 2004 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve just done a posting at Samizdata about the phenomenon of excessive regulation, so excessive that even if an organisation wants to obey it, it can’t. It’s just too voluminous, too complicated, sometimes even too contradictory. (One of the Samizdata commenters told of how his encryption duties seemed to require some sort of infinite regress and were un-obeyable.) The White Rose Relevance of this is, Cicero apparently said:
Which means that in practice the law becomes whatever those in charge decide to make it. And that is the point at which White Rosers should sit up and notice, because that is when people who make trouble for the authorities by saying things that the authorities disapprove of, get prosecuted not for their wicked sayings (which might be a rather hard charge to make stick and would anyway draw attention to the sayings) but for non-compliance with plumbing regulations, for failure to fill out the proper forms concerning employee sick-leave, for baking bread of the wrong size and shape, etc. The completely we are all likely to be breaking this or that law, the more completely they have us by the proverbials. T. M. Lucas also commented as Samizdata, drawing the attention of its readers to a series of posts his blog has on these themes. January 16th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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