|
|||||
|
Oxfam have, again, come up with a gross misrepresentation of world poverty which fails to line up with everything else we know about human advancement and income improvements. Demonising capitalism may be fashionable in the affluent Western world but it ignores the millions of people who have risen out of poverty as a result of free markets. – Mark Littlewood, summing up why I would never give a toxic outfit like Oxfam a penny. Oxfam is part of the problem, not part of the solution. January 22nd, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One of the great tragedies of the NHS is that it has unnecessarily turned health into a Zero Sum Game. Because it has a limited budget, money spent on one treatment means that it cannot be spent on others. It therefore has to make life and death decisions based on what those running it perceive to be its priorities. January 21st, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A defendant who makes the wrong choice will wind up in jail; a prosecutor who charges improperly will suffer little, if any, adverse consequence beyond a poor win/loss record. Prosecutors are even absolutely immune from lawsuits over misconduct in their prosecutorial capacity. So I think we should give prosecutors some skin in the game. Let juries be informed that they may refuse to convict if they think a conviction is unjust — and, if that happens, let the defendants’ attorney fees and other costs be billed to the government. Also, let juries be informed that, if they believe the prosecution itself was malicious or unfair, they can make that finding — in which case the defendants’ costs should come out of the prosecutor’s budget. (If you want to get even tougher, you could provide that the prosecutors involved should be disqualified from law practice for a year or stripped of their immunity from civil suit. But I’m not sure we need to go that far). January 19th, 2018 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rather than having a “Minister for Loneliness“, how about not having one? How about the state just maintains basic order, fills in a few street potholes & then minds its own frigging business? The state is not your friend – Perry de Havilland January 17th, 2018 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the NHS, unforeseen demand simply results in more queuing and rationing. Given that budgets are largely fixed by the political process, and resources are allocated to different parts of the service based on highly speculative demand estimates, deviations in demand can lead to acute shortages. Of course, on the margin, having more resources can help. An NHS awash with cash would no doubt be under less pressure than it is today. But no reasonable amount of funding would solve these structural economic realities entirely. There is a reason the NHS has these winter crises regularly, and other countries do not January 16th, 2018 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mercantilists literally believe (even when they deny the belief) that money is wealth – that to accumulate money is to accumulate wealth and that to spend money is to become less wealthy. This mercantilist “reasoning” is why, for example, mercantilists applaud exports (because exports are sold for money) and lament imports (because imports are paid for with money). Thus the mercantilist obsession with the balance of payments. Economists counter this mercantilist belief by pointing out that money is valuable only because it can be exchanged for real goods and services. Ultimately, wealth is not money and money is not wealth; ultimately wealth is the use of real goods and services. People who envy Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Dave the hedge-fund manager across town don’t really envy Jeff’s, Bill’s, or Dave’s possession of billions of Federal Reserve Notes (or of pieces of paper or streams of electronic bits that are easily convertible into dollars or some other currency). What the envious envy is Jeff’s, Bill’s, and Dave’s luxurious homes, luxury automobiles, private jets, top-rate medical care, and regular consumption of other real goods and services that are not affordable in the same quantities by less-wealthy people. January 15th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
When there are no unemployed then the various capitalists are in competition with each other to find the labour they wish to exploit. That competition raising the price paid for the labour, that is, wages go up. Full employment really does mean wages rise. It’s worth noting that minimum wages have somewhere between little and nothing to do with this. The current Federal such is $7.25 an hour. Walmart already pays $10 an hour, from next month $11. Competition in markets is thus very much more powerful than legislation, no? January 14th, 2018 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it—because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out. If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me—count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become. I have been fortunate enough to met Amy, and she is quite simply marvellous. Added bonus from Alice Smith on twitter. January 13th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
And yet, given the scale of the backlash against Deneuve, especially against her suggestion that men should have the ‘right to hit on women’, you could be forgiven for thinking she had put her name to a letter asserting that a women’s place is in the home. We’ve had French women’s rights activists denouncing Deneuve as ‘a bit like the awkward work colleague or annoying uncle who doesn’t understand what’s happening’. And we’ve had actor and director Asia Argento tweet: ‘Catherine Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their interiorised misogyny has lobotomised them to the point of no return.’ In other words, if you refuse to fall in line with our victimhood narrative, we’ll casually rebrand you as out-of-touch, ignorant and mentally ill. Nice. It seems the irony is lost on them that the only misogyny being perpetrated here is against female #MeToo dissenters like Deneuve. January 12th, 2018 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is conceivable that Mrs May could, with Labour support, push such a half-baked Brexit though Parliament. But her party would be finished. For most of its advocates on the Government benches, Brexit is about global free trade or it is nothing. Leaving the single market is not enough; Britain must also regain the power to trade freely with the rest of the world. Anything less would not just be a monumental betrayal but would tear the Conservatives apart. The party split in 1846 after the Corn Laws were repealed; it would surely do so again if Mrs May sells out her Brexiteers.” January 11th, 2018 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
So this is how feminism ends – in a room full of half-pissed, half-pissed-off celebrities vying to be the most serious about sexual harassment. This says a lot about how low this once interesting political movement has sunk. These bejewelled movie stars don’t speak on behalf of women, and their words of solidarity ring hollow. Last night wasn’t about making women free – it was about virtue-signalling elites clapping each other on the back. If this is what feminism has become, just another red carpet accessory, then good riddance to it. Now, maybe, we can have a serious conversation about what kind of political movement women and men need. January 9th, 2018 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Public regulation is static by principle. According to his knowledge of the past, a regulator will define conditions for the presence. However, she cannot know what will come in the future. By definition, innovation represents the direct opposite. Innovator cares not about what people did in the past or what the current situation is. Innovation is a projection of the future. The issue arises when these two concepts collide in a concrete case. The regulators then judge the innovation on the basis of the old standards and the innovators judge the regulation based on their own vision of the future. Today the static barriers of government regulations are exceeded by new technological innovations and new entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is necessary to take a step back and look at these issues from a broader perspective. We can also look at this problematics simplistically and see if the new technology fits into the official regulatory box, or not. And if it, by chance, doesn’t fit, we ban it automatically. January 8th, 2018 | 9 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. |
|||||