Opt-out organ donation expands the state’s power over the individual. There may be a shortage of donors, and doing more to encourage people to sign up is no bad thing. But a person should never have to opt out of state control. It is individual rights and choice that should always be the default position.
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It’s as if the Conservative Party no longer believes in itself. Or better still, it no longer knows what there is to believe in. No market-based economics; no law-and-order ideal; no sense of tradition. And it is this ideological lack and its accompaniment — complete political incoherence — that fuel the open, petty infighting we have witnessed over the past few months, with every over-promoted non-entity loyally lining up behind May, knife in hand. After all, who can blame them? In the modern Tory Party, there’s nothing – no idea, no principle – to be loyal to, apart from one’s own career. Hence the endless interventions from foreign secretary and leader-always-in-waiting Boris Johnson. As the Stupid Party is all that stands between us and the Evil Party, the Tories desperately need to get rid of Theresa May, a woman who should not be a member of the party, let alone leading it. This needs to happen without delay. October 6th, 2017 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.” This quote appears in an article pointing out that present UK Conservative Party seems to have more or less given up on making the case for liberty. October 5th, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best. – Robert Nozick. This essay is several years’ old and it remains in my view one of the very best explanations of why universities and other such places are full of persons so hostile to the open market economy. Given current angst over why so many young graduates, especially in fields such as the arts, are all keen on the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, its certainly worth thinking through. October 2nd, 2017 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Then last week we got news that “Russians” had placed adverts on Facebook during the presidential election, paying in the region of $50k-$100k for them. As Streetwise Professor points out, Hillary spent $400 million on adverts. And she still lost. Whatever the causes of her loss, a hundred grand on Facebook adverts wasn’t it. October 1st, 2017 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The best way to make people bad and poor is the illiberality of communism and fascism, and even the slow if sweet socialism of over-regulation. Women among the theocratic despots of Saudi Arabia are quartered at home, unable to flourish so much as driving an automobile. The economic nationalism of the new Alt-Right is impoverishing, and anyway closes us to ideas from the wide world. If betterment is slowing in the United States — a widely held if doubtful claim — we need the betterment coming from newly enriching countries such as China or India, not cutting ourselves off to “protect jobs” at home. Protectionist logic would have us make everything in Illinois or Chicago or our local street. Breakfast cereal. Accordions. Computers. It is childishly silly as economics, though stirring as nationalism. September 30th, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce. Now this might seem screamingly obvious, yet even the UK is full of people who are either utterly oblivious to this self-evident and often demonstrated fact, or simply do not care, as equality via privation-for-all is actually their objective, with Venezuela’s example on that score being much admired. September 26th, 2017 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next. September 25th, 2017 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not paying corporation tax is an advantage to those who don’t pay it as against those who do. Which is what we’ve been saying about corporate and capital taxation all along. If you tax corporations then there will be less investment in them in your economy. This makes everyone poorer – the deadweight costs are high. This is indeed exactly the same reasoning which leads us to insisting, as a result of optimal tax theory, that we shouldn’t be taxing the corporations at all. Which is interesting, even amusing, don’t you think? The EU’s justification for why they just must tax companies is the very reason basic theory says we shouldn’t be taxing corporations at all. September 24th, 2017 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an important law of which government bureaucracies would take cognisance if good government were their aim: that once a method of measurement is used to set a target, it becomes so corrupted that what it measures bears no relation to what it is supposed to measure. […] A further force for corruption is the accelerating overproduction of people with higher degrees compared with the number of opportunities there are to employ them in their field. This increases yet further the pressure to publish, the majority of what is published consequently being of doubtful quality. September 22nd, 2017 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Commenting on the case, Sue Hemming, head of the CPS’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said: ‘People should not assume they can hide on social media when stirring up hatred and violence.’ Evidently, they cannot. But to what end? What is the benefit to society of banning the expression of bad and hateful ideas? Surely we want these ideas out in the open so that we can combat them with better ideas and better arguments. Censorship won’t change anyone’s mind. September 17th, 2017 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
University is not a training centre to teach young people ‘correct’ ideas – that would be an indoctrination camp, not a university. Richardson understands that academics have a duty to challenge conventional wisdom. You might say that academics have a duty to offend, and to make their students intellectually uncomfortable. It’s only through challenging what we believe that ideas change and knowledge progresses. September 16th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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