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Why does Barack Obama hate black people? Don’t get me wrong…I love the minimum wage, because I’m white. My daughter is white, and also has established plenty of work experience. She was offered jobs at more than 40K per year at the age of 20. Minimum wage legislation will ensure that we’re the last to be laid off. We got skills!!! But does Barack Obama really hate black people? Or is he just not very smart? February 14th, 2013 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yes, the Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 is coming to London soon, and yesterday I booked my place at it. This cost me twenty five quid plus a small booking fee, and that price includes meals, so this would be quite a bargain even if all that the product consisted of was the meals. And if you are one of those peculiar people who does not live in London or nearby, and you take the “with accommodation” option, that will cost you a further … ten quid! For two nights of “hostel” accommodation. What that means I am not sure, but if a roof is involved it is also quite a bargain. Common courtesy, however, demands that if one takes one of these amazingly enticing deals, as I just have, that one will also pay at least some attention to the events during the day, in between the eating and the hostelling. So it helps that there is an impressive array of speakers. There are names that are familiar to me, like: Baker, Bowman, Davies, Dowd, Singleton, Wellings, to name but a few of the ones I know well. And there are others I hardly know at all, which you also want when you attend something like this, like Abebe Gellaw, exiled Ethiopian journalist and activist, and Wolf von Laer, Chairman of European Students for Liberty. And there are in-between people, whom I approximately know or know of, but would love to get to know better. Here is the full list of speakers and subjects. (Well, fuller, see below.) The talk I am most looking forward to is the one by libertarian historian Steve Davies, entitled: “Health Costs: Always Up?” Good question. And given what a great speaker Davies always is, great answers are bound to be supplied. Recommended. Given the prices being asked, I would recommend that you consider, soon, if you would like to go, and if you decide that you would, to book soon also. Plus, I just re-read the email I got from Liberty League yesterday, which got me thinking about this event, and it started like this:
They’ll have to talk fast. February 13th, 2013 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
You may be a staunch supporter of the welfare state, socialized medicine, gay marriage, preferential treatment of women and 75 percent taxation of all private income. It won’t help you if you have distanced yourself from the teachings of the prophet. Thus, in the Netherlands, Islam’s critics are also “extreme right-wing racists” – if by “extreme”, “right-wing” and “racist’ you mean gay hedonists (Pim Fortuyn), anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilists (Theo van Gogh) and liberal black feminists (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Whichever of these novel permutations of “right-wing” you fall into, you wind up either on trial (Nekschot, Geert Wilders), forced into exile (Miss Ali) or pushing up tulips (Fortuyn, van Gogh). Likewise, the artists and comedians I met through Lars in Copenhagen had been variously arrested, subjected to death threats, had homes firebombed and a family restaurant shot up. And in the final indignity they’d wound up sharing a stage with a right-wing loon like me because their leftie pals weren’t there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty International fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – they all stayed utterly silent. C’mon, nobody’s asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled Tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax. February 13th, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not much impressed with Roger Bootle’s drearily conventional arguments for what the UK economy needs.
Preposterous Keynesian fallacy at work. It presupposes that money allocated to some project via the political process is more likely to create a ‘multiplier’ than market driven uses of that money… and it assumes that the money taken by the state by force would not have been invested in something more worthwhile in aggregate if the decisions were left to its original owners before it was confiscated by the state. But of course as it is easier to see something like an airport rather than the myriad of other uses the money would have gone to had it not been forced into that project, so somehow the big flashy ‘infrastructure’ protect is claimed to have driven knock-on investment and is therefore an obvious Good Thing. As Bastiat put it “That which is seen versus that which is not seen”. Ain’t necessarily so and given the record of government decision making versus the more diffused decision making of markets, usually ain’t so. February 11th, 2013 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
“But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.” – John Horgan, giving Sam Harris a bit of a kicking. Read the whole piece. Food for thought.
February 10th, 2013 | 102 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many months ago I recorded a BBC documentary called “Health before the NHS”. Not having much of a stomach for statist propaganda I had been putting off watching it. The other night I finally got round to doing so. Now, you will be shocked (shocked I tell you!) to hear, that the conclusion they reached was that the creation of the NHS was a very wonderful thing indeed. The problem was that if you actually looked at the evidence they presented – without making allowances for cherry picking – you’d have to reach precisely the opposite conclusion. This is what the BBC thought counted as evidence:
Something they did not cover was the introduction of a state general practitioner service in 1912. This was the real beginning of the NHS. At the time, I assume, no one in government thought voluntary hospitals particularly important, so they were ignored and, of course, they went on to transform healthcare. It really is amazing what a little freedom can do. It was only in 1948 that the government realised its “mistake” and nationalised the voluntary hospitals as well. The BBC even opined that the NHS “integrated” healthcare (whatever that might mean) and managed to give the impression that it brought forth infinite resources for its activities. You have to admire their chutzpah.  Hospital subscribers in 1916. For further info see here. February 10th, 2013 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Kim Jong-un is looking at things, just like his father! The Kim is dead, long look the Kim! – commenter Alisa February 9th, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is officially calculated that, between 2005 and 2009, up to 1,200 patients at Stafford Hospital died needlessly. Let us imagine that a comparable disaster occurred in any other institution or enterprise in this country. Suppose that hundreds of customers of the cold food counter at Sainsbury’s or Tesco died of food poisoning. Suppose that, at an army barracks, large comprehensive, steelworks, bank, hotel, university campus or holiday theme park, people died, and went on dying for years, at rates that hugely exceeded anything that could be attributed to the normal course of nature. What would happen? In all cases – though more quickly in the private sector than in the public – the relevant management would be sacked. Indeed, the very idea of unnecessary deaths taking years to notice is almost inconceivable. Criminal charges would be brought. In many cases, the offending institution would close down. But this is the National Health Service, and so we approach it with superstitious reverence, as if the fact that Stafford Hospital performed so many human sacrifices is so awe-inspiring that little can be done about it. For all its rhetoric of condemnation, this week’s report of the Mid Staffs inquiry by Robert Francis QC argues, in effect, that those in charge should stay in charge. February 9th, 2013 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
This might be a bit of a cheap shot, you might say, but the benefit of cheap shots is that they often hit the target and are not expensive to fire. This guy appointed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, an organisation that, remember, did such a splendid job in preventing the 2008 crash, Bernard Madoff, and so on, has the perfect name for the job. Have a good weekend everyone. February 8th, 2013 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 8th, 2013 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
And speaking of short videos, here (with thanks to Instapundit) is Rand Paul, complaining about the new toilets the government made him buy. February 7th, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few months ago I gave a talk to Libertarian Home, of the sort that happen regularly at the Rose and Crown in Southwark. (They have a speakerless social at the same venue which I intend to be at, tomorrow.) My talk was … well, to put it kindly, it was somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It had its moments, but it didn’t add up. Worse, the more I struggled to pull it together, the longer it went on and the more incoherent it got. But something good may yet have emerged from this muddle, because Libertarian Home’s Simon Gibbs and I recently agreed that it might make sense to rescue (i.e. for Simon Gibbs to rescue) one of the somewhat better bits of this talk and make it into a video short. Simon has now done this, with added graphics. The subject is something I have already blogged about here, namely the tendency of statist measures to start out quite good, only later going wrong and then ever more wrong, and on the other hand the tendency of a truly free market, when a particular bit of it starts, to be a mess, and only somewhat later to start getting seriously good and in the long run superb. Two intersecting graphs, in other words, one going up and then down and down, and the other going down and then up and up. My first label for this phenomenon involved hockey sticks, but when it comes to graphs the hockey stick is well and truly taken, and now I’m calling my graphs “alpha” graphs, because that’s how they look when put together. Alas, even this bit of my talk could have been a whole lot more eloquent. For starters, I should have waved my arms around in a way that fitted how the graphs would look to the audience. As it was, I got them the wrong way around, sideways I mean, and hence somewhat clashing with what Simon does with them in his superimposed graphics. Nevertheless, the basic idea survives, I think, and is usefully provocative of further thought, as Simon demonstrates with his own further thoughts. My own main further thought about the Alpha Graphs (here’s hoping those capitals catch on) is that the Adam Smith Institute should be mentioned in connection with them. One of the ASI’s basic tactical insights from way back is that there are indeed often many advantages to be gained and gamed by politically well-connected individuals or organisations or companies, from statist policies rather than free market policies, but that with a bit of cunning these tendencies can be countered, for instance by making the arrival of a competitive market very much to the advantage of a few big early participants, or with right-to-buy, right-to-sell arrangements with regard to such things as public housing that goes back into the market. It’s a matter of how you sell the new market, and to whom. Instead of just using Public Choice Theory (the Alpha Graphs being a tiny part of all that) to excuse libertarian policy failure; use it to point you in better (because more politically effective) policy directions. That isn’t the complete answer to the problems described by the Alpha Graphs, but it is certainly a part of it. The other thing I want to repeat in this posting is that I think that short videos are an excellent way to go, when it comes to spreading libertarian ideas, provided only that you know how to produce them adequately. (The technique has recently been used with great effectiveness by the Adam Smith Institute’s own Madsen Pirie to explicate basic economics.) I hope Simon Gibbs produces many more such video quickies in the next few years, and helps and encourages others to do the same, both in the form of excerpts from other bigger performances (by no means only from performances that he himself has recorded), and in the form of original creations of his own. Such a program could be a great developer of future libertarian star performers, as well as a chance for older libertarians like me to add their pennyworths. February 6th, 2013 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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