|
|||||
|
“Nuclear has re-entered the chat because it’s the only energy source that can deliver enough clean, safe, round-the-clock electricity to feed AI. Nuclear is to AI what oil was to the Industrial Age. It’s the fuel for a new era of exponential progress.” – Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, from the Rational Optimist Society. October 12th, 2025 | 28 comments
 (Update, it turns out I was mistaken on the date of Margaret Thatcher’s 100th birthday. It was 13 October, 2025, and not before, as my comments might have implied.) Mrs Thatcher’s 100th birthday was recently marked, and a few commentators, not all of them friendly, have remarked on her influence and the way that she still casts a shadow over our times. Adrian Wooldridge at Bloomberg is a columnist I follow. I like and dislike some of his stuff. (His book on Meritocracy and the co-authored one with Alan Greenspan on American capitalism are both excellent, in my view.) Let’s go:
The idea that Mrs T’s brand of political views were “revolutionary” only works if you have a particular view of what a revolution means. Mrs Thatcher thought that the post-1945 “settlement” – to give it a term, of high progressive tax, high regulation, nationalised industry, powerful unions, Keynesian demand management, state-run schools, socialised medicine, etc, was in broad terms, a disaster. Also, she took the view that the things that conservatives of the large C and small c variety cared about, such as civil society, property rights, ordered liberty, strong defence, and certain values, were damaged by this post-1945 settlement. Therefore, to conserve, one must also sweep much of this away, or at the very least, reform and constrain it. It is a paradox, but not that hard to grasp really. There is more:
Well, leaving a federal union with a demographic deficit with its desire to be a new super-national bloc, is I suppose “revolutionary” in the sense of “revolve” back to where the UK was prior to that development. To plead the case for change necessarily is going to irritate many: not just those of goodwill who thought the EU was marvellous in most respects, but of course to all the lobbyists, special interests etc who were happy to ride on the train. Contesting that makes one come across as abrasive and harsh. Soft voices, and “moderation”, gets one no-where, as several UK prime ministers would find out. Wooldridge then goes on to claim that Mrs Thatcher’s approach led the way to the kind of populist politics on the Right in the US, first with Reagan (although American conservativism was taking a more vigorous turn back in the 60s under Goldwater) and then in particular with the rise of Trump. But that seems a stretch. Trump, a former registered Democrat, fixed on specific grievances, but it was more than that. He also tried to convey a more hopeful message of return to greatness. But there are many differences too. For all her dislike of the EU, Mrs Thatcher also favoured alliances of nation states, and the importance of close co-operation where necessary. And she could temporise when necessary. In another line, Wooldridge repeats Mrs Thatcher’s line about “there is no such thing as society” – condemned as much on the socialist left as it is on the paternalist right – and falls into the trap of so many of not seeing the full quote in context. If I had been paid a pound every time I heard that line to denounce Mrs Thatcher, I’d be able to buy a vintage Ferrari. Wooldridge is being lazy. Here is the quote in full: “There is no such thing as society. [end p30] There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.” However you want to parse that, this is not someone saying that we can live our lives in self-contained boxes, not interacting or engaging with our fellow humans in all kinds of nourishing and supportive ways. She understood Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”. Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights about the voluntaristic energies of the young American republic also tap into the same point. The core of all this is for Mrs Thatcher is that, as much as possible, our interactions are voluntary. Even in the case of care for children, that obligation stems from the choice of having a child in the first place. There is not much else left to discuss in the article, but here is a point where Wooldridge makes what I think is a reasonable point but also over-eggs it:
But how can a tamer, more “moderate” or “Burkean” conservatism have worked in this case? Inevitably, and certainly with Mrs Thatcher, there was only so much she could do in her decade in office. On education, for example, it was a topic that fascinated her, but how far can one political leader go in arresting its Leftward tilt? I have read Charles Moore’s three-volume biography of her and it is clear that she minded furiously about all this. (There is a single-volume version to coincided with her 100th birthday.) And I think that whatever solutions might be applied, they must involve removing government as much as possible from education, not the other way around. That is, in current terms, a “revolutionary” position to take. Caution and moderation are not virtues in and of themselves as it depends what one is moderate and cautious about, and why. Mark Sidwell at CapX has these observations about Mrs Thatcher and her political importance. I like this line: “Thatcher’s politics was all about agency: embracing it, restoring it and trusting it.” Also, if you can hold of a copy, I recommend Shirley Robin Letwin’s “An Anatomy of Thatcherism”, a sympathetic and closely reasoned analysis of what she was about. Happy birthday to the lady. October 10th, 2025 | 14 comments
“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note than in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent hold less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p per cent (where p is greater than n) and so forth. They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered. On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at the distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends upon how the distribution came about.” (page 232) – Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick, First published in 1974. I wonder if any of the leaders of today’s political parties in the UK have read it, still less understood the profound way that the late Harvard professor eviscerated egalitarian “patterned” ideas of justice more incisively than arguably anyone else, before or since. Somehow, I doubt they have. In this day and age of talk about wealth taxes and other horrors, Nozick is well worth reading again. October 1st, 2025 | 14 comments
“…there is surely no doubt that politics has a bitter tone, a harsher edge, a public unpleasantness that occasionally spills over into crisis or just onto the streets. Why is this so? It’s nothing to do with social media. It’s nothing to do with “populism”. It’s none of the fashionable solutions. It’s simple. Politics is more polarised than ever before because more is at stake in politics than ever before. When is a lot is at stake, people argue more loudly. They are less willing to accept defeat. They want their views pressed hard.” – David Frost, Daily Telegraph (£) His article is entitled “Blame the Big State For Our Polarisation Crisis.” September 26th, 2025 | 11 comments
“Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.” One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense? Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”. Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it. All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours. But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation. September 9th, 2025 | 20 comments
“There is no ‘right’ to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed — a state created as a haven for a people nearly annihilated, and after a defensive war they won. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed right of return, there will be no peace and certainly no two-state solution. Because the refusal to abandon this made-up ‘right’ means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.” For those interested, I can recommend this overview about some of the issues from a pro-Israel, but not uncritically so, writer – Noa Tishby. Another book by two authors, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, dissects, in painstaking detail, how the “right of return” claim lies at the heart of why two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestinian conflict have foundered in the past. Here’s a review of that book. September 4th, 2025 | 26 comments
I came across this interview with US academic Cass Sunstein, whose views on behaviouralism – including the area known as “behavioural economics”, have been immensely influential on governments in the past 25 years or so. The idea of “nudging” people via policies to doing certain things (auto-enrolment in savings for retirement, messaging about the dangers of certain lifestyles, etc) has become a default piece of wisdom. It accords with the tendency of a managerialist political class that sees the wider population as only partially rationally self-interested. Sunstein, as shown in this video (conducted by the Hoover Institution in the US) notes how he disagreed with the Chicago-based economics folk such as Nobel Prize winner George Stigler and others about the idea of rational expectations. The behavioural school thinks that human motivation is not like that; in the financial services space, for instance, there is a school of thought known as behavioural finance that looks at crowd behaviour in times of stock market booms, busts, etc. And there are temptations to try and “fix” these behaviours. I see a few dangers, and maybe Sunstein does too now (it is worth seeing the whole video). For example, it is easy to see how a government, even if democratic and accountable, can grow into a monster if driven by even well-meaning people that think that people aren’t necessarily fully rational, and need to be nudged, or guided, into doing the “right thing”. This helps explain, in some ways, why the “administrative state” is what it is. It would not have got so big had it been a clearly evil project. Most people who drive all these changes and programmes think they are doing the right thing. Some might be bad but most aren’t. And yet here we are, with a bloated set of governments in the West, with skyrocketing debt and all the rest of it. I think a major flaw in behavioural economics is the hubris of the “nudge” advocates about how they think they can handle all this. And as we have seen, politicians who lean towards tax-and-spend policies love some of these ideas because they can sit alongside what they want to do anyway. I am not even sure it makes sense to describe these as “liberal” because some of this “nudge” stuff does not seem to accord with ideas about treating people as individuals who need to be held accountable for their actions. It is arguable that the “nudge” crowd hew to a form of soft determinism, or maybe “soft paternalism” – the notion that we are not really volitional creatures with agency, but buffeted by internal and external forces, and often emotional first, rational second. But even if that latter point is true, a rational person with choice-making capacity can realise that he or she is prone to making unwise/foolish choices, and like Odysseus who lashed himself to a mast to avoid being tempted by the Sirens, adopt rules and protocols to not screw up. (I know an alcoholic who avoids parties and certain events to avoid getting into trouble, to give one example. Another might be a stockbroker who turns off the noise of the daily news and makes better investment decisions over the long run.) Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and all that.
August 29th, 2025 | 50 comments
“Mr. Merz is doing what no one else in the top ranks of Western politics seems willing to do, which is broach the fundamental dilemma of the modern West. Nations have built welfare and entitlement states that are so large they have outstripped the ability of slow-growing economies to pay for them. Yet because the entitlement cushion is so broad and reaches deep into the middle class, it has become nearly impossible to reform. This is true among conventional politicians of the left and right. But it’s also true of the supposed radicals of the populist right. From Marine Le Pen in France to the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, the AfD in Germany and Donald Trump, the populists dodge difficult reforms of the broken welfare state.” – Wall Street Journal ($) editorial, reflecting on the recent statements on the German welfare state by the country’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. August 26th, 2025 | 25 comments
“We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.” August 23rd, 2025 | 8 comments
Following from my post of yesterday about the attacks on inheritance, and attitudes around equality more generally, I took another look at the Lewis Goodall attack on inheritance. Goodall, a journalist, argues that he is in favour of capitalism – he wants to cut income taxes – and therefore he is not just some malcontent Leftie who wants to hit people on the head with tax. There is also a sort of intergenerational justice argument going on here. Quantitative easing and other forces have inflated asset values; Boomers have, to some extent, enjoyed final-salary pensions and been able to retire in their early 60s, if not before. Most Gen X (that includes me), Millennials and the Zs will have to work for longer. (Given hopefully rising healthspans, that might not be a bad thing, however.) True, those who were young adults in the 50s, such as my Dad, had to do military service, and there were other nasties to deal with that we younger adults did not have to handle. But still, there’s a sense of grievance that those who had “never had it so good” got to have the best of times, and their offspring have got the dirtier end of the stick. That’s certainly part of what is driving some of this anti-wealth/inheritance narrative. Switching gears here, there are structures that people have, over the centuries, sought to form to stop inheritors becoming obnoxious and lazy, and also to hold families together so that they don’t fall out, as in the HBO series, Succession.) For years, in my day job, I have wrestled with the trend of a multi-trillion dollar/equivalent transfer of wealth from the Baby Boomer generation. In the wealth management sector, particularly in the US, there’s a whole field of advisory work that goes on to help guide ultra-wealthy families about how not to spoil their children. The debate is often framed in the question of “how much is too much?” in transferring wealth. We have seen the rise, in their thousands, of what are called family offices. These are structures – operating around the world – that act as a sort of trusted point of control for a family’s private wealth. FOs operate in North America, continental Europe, the UK, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other developed countries. (I predict a big expansion in India, as many businesses there are family-owned.) Sometimes FOs emerge from the executive suite of a family-run firm; they run the liquid wealth of a family, and that becomes a sole focus once a firm is sold or floated on a market. FOs are designed to hold families together – they even have their own “constitutions” and governing procedures – and create a sort of structure through which families handle payments to different members, run investments, deal with philanthropy, personal and cybersecurity, bill payments, and more. Once obscure, the family office industry is a large, multi-trillion sector. The original FO was, arguably, founded by J D Rockefeller, the oil tycoon. Today, the likes of Michael Dell and Bill Gates have them, as do the founders of Google, the governing family of Walmart, Home Depot, shipping dynasties in Denmark, Mittlestand firms in Germany, and many more. (Germany has many family offices, most of which are obscure.) Families that are far less wealthy than the foregoing can create family offices, although they aren’t economically efficient to run if assets under management go under $100 million. Another structure for we lesser mortals is the trust. These are creatures of the English Common Law, and are extensive in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and biggest of all, the US. Trusts remain an incredibly useful tool for ensuring orderly transfer/control of assets by families. If people such as Lewis Goodall are worried that inheritors become spoiled brats and lose a work ethic (if that is his genuine concern, it is a fair one to have), then trusts can, or could, be structured so that a beneficiary only receives payouts from it if certain terms and conditions are met. Governments sometimes try and clip the wings of trusts. In 2006, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown moved against the trusts sector, on the specific issue of inheritance. The use of trusts in the UK has, on balance, shrunk, but they retain their uses. If people fear that inheritance saps the ambition and energy of inheritors, then trusts and other structures can be set up by parents and others to avoid that from happening. In a way, this sort of discussion is not so different from those that come with Universal Basic Income – what happens if we turn the entire working-age public into a bunch of loafers? To some extent, considering the impact of inheritance on inheritors – or UBI recipients – are empirical questions, based on an understanding of incentives, behavioural issues, values and so on. The morality of it is a different one. UBI is funded via tax – a coercive move of money from the individual to the State. Inheritors of legitimately acquired wealth are receiving something that was legitimately held and transferred by consent of the transferrer.
August 22nd, 2025 | 17 comments
On a friend’s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK’s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong? I wrote:
Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly. I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice. One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race. And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.) On a related note, Thomas Sowell is good on this sort of topic. His book, A Conflict Of Visions, is an example. Update: The UK journalist Lewis Goodall – he appeared on LBC the other day – says inheritance should be confiscated. No ifs, no buts. His argument is that no-one should have any wealth they haven’t “earned”. But that takes one down some very murky philosophical paths. We did not “earn” the good fortune to have been born in the current era, with its modern healthcare, high-speed travel and technical marvels. We could have been born in the Dark Ages, for instance. We did not “earn” this or that. We haven’t “earned” our genes, or for that matter, been “punished” for them, either. They just are. An inheritor is entitled in the narrowest sense of that word to X that is handed down because the person handing it down was the legitimate owner of it. As Andrew Lilico in the Spectator argues (paywall, sorry), taxes on inheritance are attempts to block people from using their property as they choose. But what’s the point for many people in amassing significant wealth if they cannot transfer it to their nearest and dearest? Also, if the likes of Goodall claim that they are for capitalism, they cannot decide that this or that form of wealth is “unearned” and have the State seize it. The acquisition and transfer of property is an embedded feature of a free society. As ever, F A Hayek was excellent on this sort of topic. See “Equality, Value and Merit”. August 21st, 2025 | 48 comments
There’s a pattern: the foolishness unfolding under the Starmer government often gestated under the previous Conservative ones. The Online Safety Act is probably the most egregious example (although some Tories attacked it at the time, to no avail). Another might be that the UK embarked on the idea of offloading the Chagos Islands – a strategic blunder that may yet be countered by the Trump administration – under James Cleverly (then foreign minister). (Cleverly has, with some level of brass neck, since denounced the Chagos fiasco.) Another example is creating a football regulator. The UK pioneered football (aka soccer) more than a century ago, and it has become a global phenomenon. The English Premier League is a big and profitable brand (judging by all the people I see watching games on TV when I am on business trips in Singapore, New York or Dubai). Yes, there have been controversies about players’ taxes, and crowd behaviour. But that’s what HM Revenue & Customs and the police are there for. But apparently the “beautiful game” requires supervision from a regulator. The usual warnings about “regulatory capture” apply, and one assumes that Conservatives might have been aware of such a risk. But no. The former administration proposed it. And unsurprisingly, the incoming Labour government liked the idea, because it likes regulation almost as an end in itself. In the fag-end of the last government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt signalled that if re-elected, he would scrap the UK’s resident non-domicile tax system and replace it with a residency-based system. Hunt probably thought he was being clever in trying to “shoot the fox” of Labour, which has railed about non-doms for years. But he could have changed the narrative and challenged the economic illiteracy of those who want to hammer wealthy foreigners. Instead he conceded to Labour the terms of debate, which a good general never does. Another case: shotgun licensing. The UK now requires that an application for a shotgun requires two referees, not one as before. This move was initiated under the past Tory government, reacting to a case of a shooting in Plymouth, southwest UK. While designed to stop problems, it also makes it that much harder for a farmer, for example, to obtain one to shoot game and vermin with such a weapon. And so on and so on. Hence why you hear people refer to Labour and the Conservatives as a sort of “uni-party”. Even when that is a bit unfair, because differences genuinely exist, there is an edge to the criticism because it does speak to a genuine problem. The Tories contain a lot of people who are at base paternalists in how they think of the role of government, and also share some of the same post-colonial cringes of those on the Labour side. There is also, arguably, a failure of nerve and self-confidence that goes very deep. August 20th, 2025 | 34 comments
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||