|
|||||
|
The Italian government, desperate for any additional source of revenue as it beggars the surrounding economy with its imposts, has slapped a fresh tax on the country’s porn industry. It will be intruiging to know just how much this tax raises or whether, as may probably happen in Italy, the tax drives the industry under the bed, so to speak. Personally, I have more regard for people who earn an honest living making racy videos than tax collectors. December 15th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The European Union wishes to legalise the retention of data from telecoms operators and ISPs for the period of one year. We are told that the retention of data will allow governments to conduct counter-terrorist campaigns more successfully and prevent other serious crimes. The retained data could be used in these investigations. The Creative and Media Business Alliance have lobbied the European Parliament to extend the provisions of the proposed Directive. Data would be used for investigations into copyright infringement and, if other new laws come to pass, infringements of intellectual property.
Whilst intellectual property is always a tricky and contested subject, the music media is treading that famous path of fighting disruptive technology by lobbying for a secure monopoly. Only Europe is stupid enough to let them. November 29th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just browsing in my local newsagents brought me face to face with the burning cars that coloured the covers of Time, Newsweek, and other current affairs magazines. A quick flick through left me cold except for one quote (unfortunately unsourced) that made sense. An Italian analyst argued that riots were far less likely to occur in Italy as the country was too corrupt and everyone was working in the black economy. Whereas the French state prevented immigrants from making any money at all and destroyed their aspirations, Italian graft was far more amenable to the hard graft of immigrants. November 16th, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Switzerland is a bastion of efficiency and rationality surrounded by the boiling maelstrom of stupidity that is Europe… and yet even they are falling foul of idiotic political correctness and absurd defensive ‘sensitivity’.
Hardly the end of the world but it is not a good sign that even the dependibly sensible Swiss have this crap to deal with. November 15th, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Flemming Rose, an editor from Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reacted to news that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad, by doing exactly that, putting Denmark’s policies of tolerance to the test by commissioning a series of illustrations of Muhammad. In response thousands of Muslims in Denmark marched in protest demanding the newspaper be “punished”, though interestingly an Iranian woman, Nasim Rahnama, has organised counter-protests in support of the editor, managing to secure one hundred and fifty signatures affirming freedom of expression. As I have mentioned before, when I see more people like the commendable Nasim Rahnama taking a stand then I may conclude that things are improving and perhaps modern Islam is not a blight on any tolerant society it comes into contact with. But as it stands, clearly it is the ignorant bigots who can put the largest mobs on the streets and that is why the actions of editor Flemming Rose need to be strongly applauded. It is hard to overstate the importance of confronting intolerant Islam on a cultural as well as a political level. So when Muslim scholars attack the newspaper for its cartoons:
But that is exactly the point: it is intended to ‘split’ rather than ‘unite’ and the importance of unity is vastly overrated. No one who values tolerant pluralistic western values should be seeking some sort of compromise with bigotry. There should be no attempt to ‘unite’ with the people who marched in Denmark demanding the government ‘punish’ Jyllands-Posten, in fact they must be confronted. And please, the scholar is making a category error because it has nothing to do with ‘democracy’. Even if a democratic majority do not want to see cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad appear in the newspapers, it is still wrong to try and use the force of law to prevent it. Dislike the idea? Fine, do not buy the damn newspaper. The issue here is liberty and democracy is far from a synonym for that. November 12th, 2005 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was about to make this a Samizdata quote of the day, but Scott got there first:
That is our own Natalie Solent reflecting on some comments at the BBC. Of which this was one, from Chadi Bou Habib of Beirut:
Meanwhile, Mark Steyn has this to say about Prince Charles and his ill-timed efforts to get the Americans to stop being beastly to the Muslims:
Although, there is one thing to be said in favour of appeasement, which is that it does allow everyone to grope their way towards approximate agreement about the nature of the enemy, based on what actually is the nature of the enemy, rather than on wishful fantasies. Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened rioters with prison sentences. But this evening a BBC TV reporter ended his report from riotous Paris by saying that the Muslim Parisians who have been chucking bricks at the gendarmerie and torching cars say that the cause of the rioting is Nicolas Sarkozy with his hostile and unfeeling attitude, and that he should say he is sorry. Quite so. The cheek of the man. Anyone would think that those rioters were breaking the law. I guess Chadi Bou Habib has a bit more commenting to do. November 5th, 2005 | 98 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 21st, 2005 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Politicians in Wallonia, the southern part of Belgium, think their region needs “a new Marshall Plan”. Excuse me? The Marshall Plan was designed to help Europe rise from the ashes of World War II. Surely there has not been any war in Belgium since then. So what is the point? This plan would benefit the socialists who govern Wallonia by helping their lagging economy to recover. But to recover from what? Basically, from sixty years of socialist governance. Truth be told, Wallonia does need an urgent boost to its economy. With an unemployment rate of 18% and almost nil growth for years, Wallonia is now on the verge of being outclassed by Poland and Slovakia, countries that started from zero in terms of their economies just 15 years ago. This “Marshall Plan” consists of massive public investments in some parts of the Walloon economy duly selected by the government. But it will not work any better than other plans the socialists have come up with over the last three decades. (Some years ago, the same socialists said that one of their plans at that time would turn Wallonia into a “Wallifornia”). What is comforting to learn is that the main goal of the Walloon government is now to encourage the creation of new businesses and to help to develop existing ones. But these socialists need to understand that the creation and growth of companies are not only a question of political will. For businesses to be created and to grow, some basic conditions have to be put in place. Probably the most important two conditions sine qua non for economic vitality currently do not exist in Wallonia: reasonable taxes and a reasonable level of regulation. Belgian taxes are among the highest in the world, second only to France. Not every tax can be lowered by the Walloon government, but many of them could be. Unfortunately, Walloon politicians do not seem to understand the link between low taxes and economic prosperity. The Cour d’arbitrage, Belgium’s Supreme Court, recently struck down a Wallon law raising the rate of the inheritance tax at 90%. The amount of regulation in Wallonia is ridiculously high. In every jurisdiction that it has inherited from the Belgian federal state, be it urbanism or environment, the Walloon Parliament and government have enacted several new regulations to restrict business, often developing new controls in new areas. The idea that the burden of such regulations should be measured, and compared with their merits, is foreign to the socialist elites. That the politicians of French-speaking Belgium understand the need to create new businesses for their economy to thrive is good news. But to expect that anything like would happen without a plan that entails the drastic lowering of taxes and the abrogation of complete areas of nonsensical environmental and city planning regulations? That is just another Belgian joke. August 31st, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic. July 28th, 2005 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
To kill one baby may be accounted carelessness, but to kill four . . . Here is a classic gruesome shock horror well-I-never what’s-the-world-coming-to? story from timesonline. The headline says it all:
Who says they don’t write headlines like that any more? They wrote that one today. No wonder Europe has a demographic crisis on its hands. These people really do not like to have children, do they? To be more geographically selective, what is Austria coming to? To me Austria has long been a rather sinister place. It is one of the two national bits at the heart of Nazism, but unlike the other bit, Germany, it has never properly apologised. (Germany has never stopped apologising.) Very pretty waltzes, I agree. Nevertheless, Austria is, you might say, Japan on the Danube. Hitler, remember, was Austrian, and he incubated a lot of his worst ideas when living in Vienna. If only he had been frozen at birth. More recently we have had to share our planet with the creepy Kurt Waldheim. On the other hand, I have only occasionally been to Austria, and have little first hand experience of its people. No doubt many of them are quite nice, and I do not just mean the Austrian economists. This frozen baby thing happened in Graz.
They do not spell it out, but the implication is clear. The baby freezing was Arnold’s fault! Along with most of the other Samizdatistas, I think Arnold is a good Austrian. However, according to this, Arnold invited Waldheim to his wedding, which I did not know until now. (Waldheim did not attend.) Nor do I know whether this means that Arnold is worse than I thought, or Waldheim better. Maybe it just shows that you get all sorts at weddings. June 3rd, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fact that large numbers of French people are going to vote against the ghastly EU Constitution because it favours too much free trade and does not isolate Europe from competition even more than it already does is almost beyond parody. That most British people will (if given the chance) vote against it because it does quite the opposite just shows that the notion of having both nations as part of the same political structure is truly unsustainable. Similarly the idea that some doctors could call for sharp pointed kitchen knives to be banned without being widely ridiculed in the press for being evil totalitarians indicates that Britain too has some grave social and intellectual deficiencies amongst the media classes. For all their bizarre political notions regarding that big-statist’s charter called the EU Constitution, it is hard to see the French trying to ban pointed kitchen knives from people’s homes. So what will it take to snap people back to reality? Or is it just too damn late for that and the only thing left is to get the hell out and leave the lunatics in change of the asylum? Maybe that is exactly what the US needs too, an influx of liberty seeking (or at least sanity seeking) folks from Europe who have seen the reality of what happened to a culture when it allows all the things the Democrats (and quite a few big-state Republicans) want to do in the USA. Who knows, if enough of them get citizenship they might be around in time to help make sure that Hillary only gets one term in office. Shudder. May 28th, 2005 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s social democratic (SPD) party has been hit hard in regional elections over the weekend, with voter anger at his party over the crummy state of the economy overwhelming an attempt by some of his own party members to whip up a storm of anti-capitalist sentiment in order to cling to power. Good. I honestly don’t know whether we are seeing a transition phase in Germany towards sanity and liberal economics. What is clear is that a country that has suffered double-digit unemployment for more than half a decade cannot go on like this without dreadful strains on its social fabric. Maybe some of the more intelligent parts of the German political class might get this point. We need the once-mighty German economic machine, brought to such a pitch by the late great Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Ehrhard (friend of Hayek) brought to a purring level of growth again. It is in no-body’s interests, least of all ours in Britain, to see that nation permanently in the doldrums. There is a related article here about what has gone wrong in Germany here in the latest edition of the Spectator. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, read the whole thing. May 23rd, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
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. |
|||||
