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The Stockholm Network people are trying as hard as they can to parlay their Golden Umbrella Awards into something truly significant. So they were pleased when Perry de Havilland did a piece here about the awards dinner last week, and even more pleased when Instapundit linked to that posting. And they were also delighted by this Wall Street Journal piece by John Fund. With awards ceremonies, what matters is not so much the dishing out of the awards as the matter of whether anyone else cares, or can be persuaded to care. This event was good. But it is the response to the event that will surely mean that the corresponding jamboree next year will be better.
Fund, who presented one of the awards, to a Bulgarian by the name of Dimitar Chobanov, begins his piece thus:
The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other free-market Washington think tanks are known to many Americans. What isn’t generally understood is that there has been an explosion of free-market think tanks around the world that are increasingly challenging the conventional view that government is the solution to society’s problems.
Like Perry, I was part of the throng, and in a piece I did about these awards for another European think tank last week, I made the same point about free market think tank expansion. Whereas Fund sees these enterprises spreading beyond the USA, I see them spreading beyond Western Europe, but however you slice this story, free market think tanks are spreading.
In among being impressed by all this, I took photos. Usually, when I take photos at pro-free-market events, my only questions are: How many women are here and how nice do they look? But the photography I did at the Golden Umbrellas focussed more on what was being officially talked about. Those ladies I did snap were snapped because they were on the stage, like Mistress of Ceremonies Karen Horn, Janet Daley and Cécile Philippe. There were plenty of other fine looking women present that night, but I concentrated my picture-taking on the people who were giving and receiving awards. And as well as photographing them, I listened to what they were actually saying. Which you can also do by going here.
Yes, it is true. I am going to go and sign the treaty for the European Constitution on behalf of Belgium.
Now you might well ask yourself, why would Perry de Havilland have the right to sign the EU Treaty (do not worry, I intend to ‘accidently’ tip the ink pot over the foetid thing)? Simple… because clearly anyone can. There are many articles about what El Gordo is going to do and the long running weird protocol spat between Portugal and Belgium over where the treaty must be signed… but that should be academic to Belgium because Belgium still does not have a government, ergo there is no one who can sign on Belgium’s behalf… yet strangely that does not seem to be stopping the former government from doing just that.
If the people who were voted out of office in Belgium months ago can sign the treaty, then why not me too? They have no more right than I do to sign anything on behalf of Belgium. The fact that the Belgian establishment can and have simply banned popular political parties that do not play by the required consensus should indicate that to all intents, Belgium is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. This latest action indicates Belgium is in fact some sort of divine right oligarchy where being a member of the power elite is all the legitimisation you need.
It is gratifying to see mainstream journalists such as Alice Thomson also pointing out what we have been doing here for quite some time: people who vote for the Tory party under Cameron because they are revolted by the legacy of Tony Blair are in fact just voting for more of the same as Cameron and Blair are largely interchangeable.
I met two key Blairite special advisers from 1997 last night, they were as thrilled with the Tories’ progress as they were by recent sightings of Mr Brown’s psychological flaws. One said that Cameron would never treat the garden room girls at Downing Street in the way that Mr Brown does. Another wondered what job Cameron would give Mr Blair when (not if) he becomes Prime Minister.
All too believable.
The screenwriter, Tad Safran (whoever he is), has penned a rather coarse and unpleasant item about the physical pros and cons of British vs American women. It says something about the state of the Times (of London) that they would print this sort of thing at all. There may be some limited truth in his observation that women (or for that matter, men), spend different amounts of time on personal grooming and appearance. But in my experience of travelling to the States, I have seen enough examples, from both sexes, of scruffiness/smartness to reckon that his generalisations are BS.
This is a rather more uplifting study on the wonderful womenfolk of these Anglosphere nations.
Note: in my original item I said Safran was an actor, not a screenwriter. Mea culpa.
From our special correspondent:
“Party boss Ed “bulging eyes” Balls told a respectful yet cheerful gathering of tractor workers in Omsk that the 10-year plan to increase tractor production by 1000% between now and 2018 was achievable. “Men,” he said, his voice quavering slightly as the chill Siberian wind blasted through, “we can and will produce more tractors, of higher quality, over the next 10 years. Britain needs tractors. Tractors need Britain. It is true that despite our heroic efforts, and the massive, Soviet resources spent by Comrade Gordon, that tractor production continues to lag. But let us not be downhearted. We know that tractor production in the past has been held up by the capitalist sympathisers, wreckers and revisionists working for the late traitor, A. Blair. We can and will do better over the next 10 years.”
At least, that is what I thought he said. Maybe it was education instead…….
For some sanity on how to get the state out of education, check out this website.
Update: related thoughts on home schooling and education by David Friedman (son of the great Milton).
Another update: Fabian Tassano has been a tireless campaigner against the odious idea of keeping people in school until the age of 18. His new book is also very good.
This remark was made by some individual called jsbachUSA at the Guardian’s Comment is Free site:
But if the Arabs choose to attack Israel with conventional weapons and Israel loses, so be it. As the cliche goes those that live by force die by force. Even if Israel ceases to exist, as long as it doesn’t nuke the world in a spasm of anger in the process, Jews will still be welcome and prosper in many part of the world, just like they did for thousands of years. The end of the Israel mistake will not be a bad thing.
“Just like they did for thousands of years”.
Priceless.
Some time ago I wrote a piece here about whether Mark Steyn had exaggerated the threat of a fast-growing Muslim population in Europe (I argued that demographic prediction is a notoriously inexact science); I argued, and still do, that it is a bit odd for a conservative skeptic on doomongering scares like global warming to be so keen on pushing a doomongering prediction of his own. But I also maintain that while Steyn may be guilty at most of extreme pessimism, he’s no racist. Islam is a body of ideas (including some very bad ones); it makes universal claims about the place of men and women in the world that are designed to apply to the entire universe. If humans had terraformed Mars, you’d be certain that radical islamists would be keen to convert the people who lived there. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with race.
So to accuse him of racism on the basis of a quote not by Steyn but by someone else is pretty stupid. And to then not issue a short, honest apology but then to more or less recycle the racism charge in a long, meandering post, is even worse. And that is what the blogger, Jim Henley, has done. I used to read his blog quite a bit; I disagree partly with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy although I think his argument that “Hayek does not stop at the water’s edge”, suggesting that intervenionism is as dumb in foreign policy as it is with domestic affairs, is generally wise. But in this latest case, Jim has made a royal ass of himself over this issue and continues to dig a hole in the ground for himself. A shame, because there is a reasonable case to be made criticising Steyn, but this is not the way to do it.
Glenn Reynolds points to an excellent way to help out blogger Mark Steyn in his battle against being muzzled by the Saudi’s: buy his book!
Besides sending copies to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I can think of some other people who should read more of Mark’s work.
I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo’s rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less.
More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive ‘urban renewal’ projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should “shrink to greatness”. I think it would be even better if the Feds didn’t try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar’s article especially intriguing:
And Buffalo’s dismal weather didn’t help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out – and Buffalo isn’t just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.
I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy.
The Times yesterday reported on how well the Bible is now doing in China, both for Chinese readers and as yet another manufactured-in-China export:
One book a second glides off the production line at this joint venture between a Chinese Christian charity and the United Bible Societies, a Protestant organisation. Amity has been printing Bibles since 1986. The new factory will have a capacity of one million Bibles a month, increasing the current output by one third.
… Authorities at the officially approved Protestant and Catholic churches put the size of China’s Christian population at about 30 million. But that does not include the tens of millions more who worship in private at underground churches loyal to the Vatican or to various Protestant churches.
Of the 50 million Bibles Amity has printed, 41 million were for the faithful in Chinese and eight minority languages. The rest have been for export to Russia and Africa. Sales surged from 505,000 in 1988 to a high of 6.5 million in 2005. Output last year was 3.5 million and is expected to rise in 2007.
Does this mean that China will behave more nicely in the future than it is behaving now? An American commenter on the above piece reminds us that Christianity and niceness do not always go hand in hand:
After several visits to China I became concinced that if China ever turned ti the God of the Bible, God would bles that nation. It apears that China is turning and God is blessing. Will China become God’s instrument in brnging destruction to a Western Civilization that is becoming increasigly athiest, immoral and blastphemus toward the God of the Bible?
And its spelling has not been improving lately, either.
God will not long toledrate a society that has denigrated His word and His Christ in ways that are so filthy that it is beyond imagining. God is going to judge America and China just might be that instrument. …
Charming.
Speaking as one of the “athiest” and “blastphemus” ones, I do nevertheless concede that Christian congregations scattered around the landscape can do dramatically good things economically. Small groups of mostly decent people, constantly urged to refrain from frivolous consumer spending and to treat each other with kindly and thoughtful reciprocity, can become hugely productive. This in its turn causes others to join in, perhaps for rather less spiritual reasons than those which animated the prime movers, but in ways which also end up improving the newcomers morally, to the general betterment of economic life, among much else. So this process will surely strengthen the Chinese economy, provided only that it is allowed to take root.
But what will then be done with China’s economic strength? Unlike Islam (which positively encourages it), Christianity offers little justification for war making. But by contributing mightily, in the indirect and rather surprising ways described above, to the making of the means to fight wars, it nevertheless does encourage warfare, indirectly. Christian powers have fought wars because they did become, almost in spite of themselves, Christian powers. They fought, in other words, and fight still, because they can.
If a somewhat Christianised China veers away from the warlike pattern set by the West, it will be because the weaponry of all-out war has recently become so much more destructive than was the case when the Christians were fighting most of their wars, rather than because Christianity has become any more persuasive at making people nicer to foreigners of whom they know little.
I occasionally take a look the Observer newspaper to see if that sister publication to the Guardian has improved; sometimes it has good things in it – I like its sports coverage – but its write-ups on business issues never change from a sort of anti-globalista, Keynesian mish-mash. An article in this Sunday’s paper about the supposed crisis of shortages of drinking water is no exception:
The midday sun beats down on a phalanx of riot police facing thousands of jeering demonstrators, angry at proposals to put up their water bills by more than a third. Moments later a uniformed officer astride a horse shouts an order and the police charge down the street to embark on a club-wielding melee that leaves dozens of bloodied protesters with broken limbs.
A film clip from the latest offering from Hollywood? Unfortunately not. It’s a description of a real-life event in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city, where a subsidiary of Bechtel, the US engineering giant, took over the municipal water utility and increased bills to a level that the poorest could not afford.
Yup, those evil foreigners, and worse, Americans!
Welcome to a new world, where war and civil strife loom in the wake of chronic water shortages caused by rising population, drought (exacerbated by global warming) and increased demand from the newly affluent middle classes in the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America.
If water is so scarce (it is not, two-thirds of the globe is covered with the wet stuff) then those evil capitalists would surely be investing like hell to create more of it, by irrigation, building reservoirs, desalination plants, etc. If demand from all those “affluent middle classes is rising” for the good things of life, that seems like a great market to tap (‘scuse the pun). Greater revenues for the water companies, particularly if they are allowed to compete for business rather than protected as monopolies, will surely drive increased investment in water, no? But as far as the author of this article is concerned, the very idea of allowing foreign, private companies to operate such utilities is beyond the pale.
The question for countries as far apart as China and Argentina is whether to unleash market forces by allowing access to private European and American multinationals that have the technological know-how to help bring water to the masses – but at a price that many may be unable, or unwilling, to pay.
If the problem is that people cannot afford to pay supposedly higher water bills, then the problem is lack of income; protecting state-run utilities and resisting the investments of mulitnationals is daft; surely, if the underlying problem is poverty, then the solution is more trade, more capital flows, more investment, right?
As Cochabamba illustrates, water is an explosive issue in developing countries, where people have traditionally received supplies for free from local wells and rivers. But in the past 15 years rapid industrialisation, especially in places such as China, has led to widespread pollution and degradation of the local environment.
“For free”. Well, someone had to dig that well. Someone had to lift the water out of it, transport it, purify it, etc. When people say that water should be “free”, they pay no heed to the expenditure of effort in getting water and conveying it to where people want it the most. Multinationals are rather good at figuring out how to do this.
Max Lawson, senior policy adviser for Oxfam, says: ‘We are sceptical that private-sector involvement is the solution for very poor countries. In fact, there is an argument that much greater public sector involvement and cash is needed to channel supplies to where they are most needed.’
Another pretty good reason for not giving a penny to Oxfam, in my opinion.
Some earlier reflections on water.
With technology, ubiquity is a virtue. People use Microsoft Word because everyone else does. The CD-Rom became a more popular backup device than the Zip, Jazz or SyQuest disk because there were lots of manufacturers involved. And, of course, floppies took far too long to die simply because they were everywhere, despite being evil unreliable and having a tiny capacity. Sony Betamax failed in part because far more movies were available for VHS. JVC was also proactive in licensing the VHS technology to lots of manufacturers. Consumers did not want to buy two different video players, so in the end most chose VHS simply because of its ubiquity.
Today, in the current format war between Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD, it seems that (unlike two decades ago) the Sony-backed format is going to win. This is despite the fact that Blu-Ray discs cost more to manufacture (although, arguably, Blu-Ray is the better format).
Why will Blu-Ray win? Because, firstly, Sony equipped every PlayStation 3 with Blu-Ray capability. Conversely, Microsoft (a major backer of HD-DVD) decided to only make it available as £100 add-on for its Xbox 360. Secondly, according to Wikipedia, as of late November there were 415 titles available in the US for Blu-Ray, compared with only 344 for HD-DVD. A search on WHSmith.co.uk brings up 259 results for “blu-ray”, but only 167 for “hd-dvd”.
Yet over the coming years, some of the companies that have benefited from the economics of ubiquity may find it turns round and bites them. With OpenOffice only ever a free download away, will people keep going to PC World and paying for Microsoft Office? Schools are already questioning whether it is a good to teach on expensive proprietary software in the classroom, when if they were to use open source applications, all the pupils would be able to practice with the same software at home.
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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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