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Recently the Democrat Mayor of Chicago (Richard Daley) vetoed the higher minimum wage law proposed by the (Democrat) city council and they have failed to overturn his veto.
The proposal was quite wrong headed, both because it discriminated against large employers (such as Walmart) who were the only employers who were to pay the new ‘living wage’, and on the general grounds that (all other factors being equal) increases in minimum wage law (over the amount of money already being paid) levels cost jobs (in accordance with the law of demand).
However, the Democrats are making great play in the mid-term elections with both Walmart bashing and with minimum wage level law increases generally (if they get their way, most States will have higher minimum wage level laws than the Federal level) and for the best known Democrat Mayor in the country to veto such an increase (and an increase linked to Walmart bashing) both points to the absurdity of Democrat policies and shows the Democrats to be disunited as well.
Meanwhile in California the Democrats are pressing for universal government health-care (basically a version of the plan Mrs Clinton proposed in the early 1990’s) and the Republican Governor is pledged to veto the proposal.
This may seem to be a winner for the Democrats, but people who support universal government health-care (with all the increase in taxes, health rationing and the decline in the quality of health care that it means) would vote Democrat anyway. Whereas many Republicans were considering not voting for ‘Arnie’ on the grounds of his wild spending on building projects. The Democrats in California have given the Republicans (and independents and moderate Democrats) a reason to turn out and vote – vote against the Democrats.
Also by beating the drum for more government health care (on top of Medicare, Medicaid, and all the rest of it) the Democrats risk turning attention to places where it has already been tried. Such as Louisiana (where the long established system of government hospitals are a terrible mess) or Tennessee where even the Democratic party Governor has admitted that ‘TennCare’ did not turn out too well.
If they go on like this the Democrats could well save the Republican House of Representatives. Otherwise the Republicans’ wild spending (on the ‘entitlement programs’ and other such) might well have led to many pro-liberty voters staying at home (giving the Democrats the House, if not the Senate).
“I do worry that spokespeople for the Fairtrade movement suffer from a myopic romantic vision of the coffee farmer in a co-operative, whereas in truth such an existence is backbreaking and mired in exploitation.”
– Alex Singleton (via Owen Barder)
What the hell is one supposed to make of this?
The point at which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decided that London should serve as a model for services and governance in Caracas was not immediately apparent. He came in May, visited City Hall amid much controversy and fanfare, and was soon gone.
But the result of his visit is likely to be an extraordinary deal struck with London Mayor Ken Livingstone that would see Caracas benefit from the capital’s expertise in policing, tourism, transport, housing and waste disposal.
London, meanwhile, would gain the most obvious asset the Venezuelans have to give: cheap oil. Possibly more than a million barrels of the stuff.
South American diesel would be supplied by Venezuela – the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter – as fuel for some of the capital’s 8,000 buses, particularly those services most utilized by the poor.
This is gesture politics at its most contemptible. It is particularly bad given that the poor of London are, by any meaningful yardstick, considerably better off than their counterparts in the South American nation. The idea that Venezuela, a nation led by a thug who’s democratic credentials could be best described as flaky, is some sort of benefactor to the oppressed masses of London, is an utter joke. It is also particularly ironic that as part of this “deal”, London will “help” Venezuela’s tourist industry. No doubt Venezuelans cannot wait to discover the joys of the British welcoming service ethic.
We tend to dismiss the antics of Ken Livingstone as political theatre. If he wants to stand on platforms with Irish Republican murderers, we giggle. If he provides platforms for gay-hating Islamic preachers, we are all supposed to roll our eyes in amusement. Good ol’ Ken, what a laugh.
Incidentally, I wonder what the British government thinks about this?
Canada has much stricter gun laws than in the United States, and so, one would assume, is a far safer place if one believes in the idea that the way to make society safer is to reduce access to items that can be used to kill. Well, generalisations are of course always dangerous, but I am not quite sure how this horrific story from Canada quite fits inside the gun-control argument. On the BBC television news this evening, the news announcer explicitly referred to the contrast between laws in Canada and the United States and expressed great puzzlement over the Canadian shootings.
UPDATE: here is another account of the story, with an update on the number of injured.
“It had always bothered him to see waste; to see Gas Giant atmospheres not mined for their wealth in hydrogen; to see energy from stars spill into the void, without a Dyson Sphere to catch and use it; to see iron and copper and silicates scattered in a hundred million pebbles and asteroids, instead of a smelter or nanoassembly vat.”
– The Golden Age, by John C. Wright, page 261.
I was distracted this morning by Mr Blair’s predictable difficulties with the TUC, and nearly everyone else seems to have missed it too. There was nothing in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph or the early edition of The Evening Standard about this. But this is the important UK story today. Congratulations to the Financial Times on actually reporting the plan to abolish privacy.
It was trailed a little way back by a selective leak to The Guardian, but now seems forgotten. The Information Commissioner is playing dead. Or perhaps he has been reduced to a depressive paralysis by the tedious presentation and appalling implications of HM Government’s Data sharing vision statement [pdf].
This Government wants to deliver the best possible support to people in need. We can only do this with the right information about people’s circumstances […] That is why Government is committed to more information sharing between public sector organisations and service providers. […] We recognise that he more we share information, the more important it is that people are confident that their personal data is kept safe and secure. The Data Protection and Human Rights Acts offer a robust statutory framework to maintain those rights whilst sharing information to deliver better services.”
I’m really not much reassured by assurances about “proper respect for the individual’s privacy […] supported by ensuring the security and integrity of personal information both before and after it has been shared”. How about not sharing it?
If you actually have privacy, you don’t need government Codes of Practice to tell bureaucrats how to ‘respect’ it. If you actually have privacy, then the private sphere is beyond regulatory intervention and ‘support’. If you actually have privacy, you actually have freedom.
The press has covered the walkouts by the brothers, and where friendly to the government has characterised it as ‘brave’. But Tony Blair’s advertised last speech to the Trades Union Congress was fascinating in itself, calculated in a cartoonish way. Who was it for?
Who would be entranced by the sententious, treacly opening, claiming some sort of credit for sympathy with the victims of terrorism and war?
Before speaking to you today, I want to remember all those who died, including the many British people, repeat our sympathy and condolences for the loss of their loved ones and rededicate ourselves to complete and total opposition to terrorism anywhere, for whatever reason.
Who would be persuaded by the windy pseudo-rhetoric, the clichés set in shattered sentences, and exhibition of truism as valuable policy insight?
We have to escape the tyranny of the “or” and develop the inclusive nature of the “and”.
The answer to economic globalisation is open markets and strong welfare and public service systems, particularly those like education, which equip people for change.
The answer to terrorism is measures on security and tackling its underlying causes.
What, addressed to trades unions, was the point in half the time to international affairs, and Mr Blair’s role on the world stage?
Peace which threatens its security is no peace. But on the right terms it must be done.
Yesterday’s announcement of a government of national unity in Palestine is precisely what I hoped for. On the basis it is faithful to the conditions spelled out by the quartet – the UN, EU, US and Russia – we should lift the economic sanctions on the Palestinian Authority and be prepared to deal with the government, the whole government.
Then, piece by piece, step by step, we must put a process of peace back together again.
Is this really carefully scripted? Is it aimed at an English-speaking audience? What on earth does it have to do with congress?
And who could miss, or be fooled by, the manipulative slide from lachrymose anectote about exploited foreign workers to the hint (immmediately contradicted) that they might be stopped from coming here at all (and thus from competing for work with union members… er, being exploited…) by magic biometric border controls?
I know this answer isn’t popular, at least in some quarters. But I tell you, without secure ID, controlled migration just isn’t possible.
You can have armies of inspectors, police and bureaucrats trying to track down illegals but without a proper system of ID – and biometric technology now allows this – it is a hopeless task.
And as identity abuse grows – and it is a huge problem now across parts of the private as well as public sector – so the gains for consumers and companies will grow through a secure ID database.
And we all want effective armies of inspectors, police, and bureaucrats, don’t we, children? The whole thing (offered by The Guardian here) is extraordinary. The relevant bits – attacks on protectionism, allusions to Labour’s success in enacting union-friendly legislation – would be a perfectly good TUC speech. Short, but to the point. One might not agree with it, but one could see it as a piece of working political machinery. But that speech is suspended in a mush of late-Blair messianism that is much more instructive.
He’s going to fix all the world’s problems. All it requires is for all the great powers to come to a final lasting peace agreement in which he is playing a vital role, defusing the grievances that (alone?) drive global conflict(s), and monitoring all activities of everybody who lives in or visits Britain using a big database.
So who was the speech for? It was the calling-card of a War Leader for the lecture-circuit, some cynics may say. But this cynic suspects the speech was mainly for Mr Blair himself – that this is how he sees the world, and how he wants us all to see it too. It is a preamble to rants to come.
For some weeks Mr. Cameron’s friends in the media (such as the Telegraph group writer and editor of the Specator, Matthew d’Anconia) have been pointing to an upcoming speech that David Cameron was to make. This speech was intended to show what sort of politician Mr Cameron is, to define him – just as the first major foreign policy speech Mrs Thatcher made defined her (earning her the name the ‘Iron Lady’ from the Soviets – what was intended as an insult became a honoured name).
The speech was finally made on September 11th – on the day that the Iron Lady herself stood shoulder to shoulder with the Vice President in the United States (old, betrayed, hit by several strokes, the Lady still stood and walked ramrod straight – held up by courage alone).
Mr Cameron duly denounced anti-Americanism – it was “cowardice”, but then he said Britain must not be “slavish” in any alliance with the United States, and the American leadership was guilty of”‘sound bites”, lacked “humility” and that the American division of things into good and evil was “unrealistic and simplistic” (and so on and so on).
Leaving aside the point that when someone says that they are beyond good and evil, light and dark, (they are more sophisticated than old fashioned ideas of “right” and “wrong”) it tends to mean that they are evil, it was irritating to hear of Mr Cameron first denouncing anti-Americanism and then indulging in exactly that.
Mr Cameron is free to hold any opinion he wishes, even though I might suspect that his Yank bashing was less a matter of principle than an effort to get a favourable editorial in the Daily Mail (on the correct calculation that this newspaper hates the United States even more than it hates him, although some Daily Mail people such as Richard Littlejohn clearly despise what Mr Cameron said yesterday).
However, it is still unclear what Mr Cameron’s opinion actually is – for whilst he attacked the United States he did not say “the Iraq war is wrong”. David Cameron tried to have his cake and eat it as well, and thus playing to both pro and anti war people in his party.
Now being undecided about the Iraq war is not a crime and opposing the Iraq war is not a crime – I myself wrote against the idea of war, although I believed (and still believe) that once the war had started it must be carried on to victory.
I am not attacking Mr Cameron’s right to have an opinion, or his lack of clarity about what his opinion is – it is not even the general patronising tone of his abuse of the leadership of the United States that I object to. It is the date of his speech that is astonishing.
The anniversary of 9/11 is not the time to make this type of speech (far less to bill the speech as some equivalent of the ‘Iron Lady’ speech). If Mr Cameron really does not understand this it shows that just being born into a wealthy family and going to Eton and Oxford do not make a man a gentleman.
With the newly rigorous airport security, that is.
(Thanks to the ever-reliable The Register.)
Whilst travelling down towards the station in Brussels with some friends, one could not help noticing one street full of coffee bars, frequented solely by the male of the species, replicating a corner of Algiers or Tunis. Whilst new to me, this is not an infrequent encounter for the traveller in the Low Countries or France.
As vast portions of the urban geography continue to be recast in the Maghreb mould, and the demographics of immigration and indigenous wind down play out, I asked myself: which European Union Member State is most likely to join the Arab League (perhaps the Maghreb subset) or Organisation of Islamic Conferences in the next few years? Albania, Uganda and Guyana are members of the latter. This would be the predictable ‘next step’ for democratic structures with a large minority Arab electorate.
As did many many countries, Australia prior to the 1980s had a state owned telecommunications monopoly. This company, part of the Post Office until 1976, after that named Telecom Australia and now named Telstra Corporation, charged too much, took several months to connect new telephone lines, and was generally ghastly and bureaucratic. As was also common in those days, the management of this organisation also had a rather grandiose sense of its own importance and its great civilizing and statist mission to bring telecommunications to all of the people of Australia, wherever they might be. Australia’s capital city of Canberra is a fair way inland, a long way from anything else of significance, and is full of large edifices built with taxpayers’ money. In the 1970s, Telecom decided that it needed an edifice of its own in the capital city, and Telecom Tower was built on Black Mountain (actually a not terribly large hill) overlooking Canberra.
 This was ostensibly a communications tower with a viewing gallery (and revolving restaurant) for admiring the view as well, but was actually a large bureaucratic organisation building a monument to its own Ozymandius like belief that it was an organisation of great permanence and importance. I last visited the tower about a decade ago, and even then it seemed a remnant from another age. There were signs talking about when and where it had been built and about the significance of telecommunications, diagrams comparing it to other structures around the world, a plaque stating it was a member of some global organisation of towers, pictures of engineers shaking hands at the groundbreaking, pictures of politicians declaring the tower open, and an extraordinary lack of humour of any kind. The word that the friend I visited it with used to describe it was ‘Soviet’, and it was hard to disagree.
Which was why it was interesting to visit another television tower a couple of weeks ago, the tower in Tallinn in Estonia. This can be seen in the distance from many parts of the city, and of course, rather than the TV tower in Australia that merely seemed Soviet, this tower actually was Soviet, so I had to see it. I knew just looking at it from a distance that this had been built as much as a symbol of Soviet domination and power as for actual telecommunications purposes, and that one way that this would be asserted would be through a viewing gallery and restaurant here, also. As I often do I was carrying a Lonely Planet guidebook. As is expected in such a guidebook, the book mentioned the TV tower by sneering at it, suggesting that the writers and readers of such a book would be much too good and much too authentic travellers to go up something as touristy as a viewing gallery in a TV tower, but we none the less have a duty to mention it in the guidebook.
 So, I caught a bus to the TV tower. When I got there I found it to be rather run down. There was an attendant at the gate collecting money, but the lift lobby was deserted and I had to push the button to be taken up myself. However, in the lower gallery were the expected signs explaining how “Expert engineers from the Moscow design bureau” had designed the tower, pictures of workers shaking hands at the groundbreaking, pompous looking bureaucrats strutting around at an opening, diagrams comparing the tower to others elsewhere, and that kind of eerily familiar thing.
 But there was something else, of course. Something much more historically interesting. → Continue reading: On telecommunications, tanks, Soviet housing estates in Estonia, and ethnically complicated shipping containers
The Times newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has yet to really come out strongly in favour of Tory leader David Cameron, preferring to stick, for the time being, with the Labour Party, or at least maintain a sort of studied neutrality. If you can recall that far back, Blair famously courted Murdoch’s media empire ahead of the 1997 election, convincing Murdoch that a Labour administration would not repeat the mistakes of the past. It worked, and the Times gave Blair and his court a remarkably easy ride for the first few years of Blair’s time in office.
Even so, with Labour in deep trouble, Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown at each others’ throats, the position of the Tories appears to be more promising than for a long time. You might think that Cameron, even though he has shown himself to be trend-follower since becoming leader, might take the odd risk by not trying to creep up to fashionable chattering-class opinion on such issues as Iraq, the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict and the ongoing campaign to crush Islamic fanaticism. Instead, as the Times notes today, what we get is a mixture of truths, half-truths and vacuous sound-bytes on foreign affairs.
Apologists for Cameron – some of whom pop up on the comment threads here – like to use the following, rather damning argument. It goes like this: the public will never vote for a small-government, strongly pro-capitalist, pro-America, pro-liberty Tory Party. The English middle class floating voters, so the argument goes, are not exactly the most intelligent demographic on the surface of the Earth, and are convinced that any tax cuts must come at the expense of the poor, the health service and education. Capitalism is cruel and rather naughty. Saving the planet and forcing people to give up their cars is a Jolly Good Idea (for other people). So Cameron, realising that this is what people think, has to appeal to this mindset. Once he is in power, suddenly, he can give up the “hug-a-mugger” rhetoric, tell the Greenies to go hang, slash taxes and regulations, restore in full the English Common Law, stop nagging us about eating chocolate oranges, etc.
Like many cynics, they are wrong. I would have thought that Cameron, if he has any sense at all, would realise by now that unless he lays down a few markers about what he would actually do in power, then he will face a situation where, once elected, it would be hard to push through a radically pro-market agenda particularly if the Tories get a narrow majority. “Where’s the mandate?”, people would cry. And their cries would have some merit. When Margaret Thatcher won power, the Tory manifesto of 1979 was famously thin. There was little mention of the kind of privatisation and large cuts to tax rates that were to follow. But even so, during the 1975-79 run-up to the elections, Mrs Thatcher, along with colleagues like Sir Keith Joseph, did voice a coherent, and sustained attack on things like Keynesian demand management, out-of-control trade unions, nationalised industries, regulations on business and controls on trade. In short, Mrs Thatcher made it pretty clear what sort of administration hers would be like. She gave herself a bit of room to say to the doubters during the hard years after 1979: “This is my platform and the public voted for it”.
Cameron, if he wants to con his way into power, is, I supposed, welcome to try. Britain’s political history is full of adventurers like Disraeli or chancers like Lloyd George. But when I hear libertarian-leaning Tory voters trying to convince me that Cameron is embarking on the mother-of-all deceptions, it sounds suspiciously close to whistling in the dark to sustain the spirits. I am not convinced.
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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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