We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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(I focus on the UK here in this brief commentary; needless to say, readers in the US and other countries such as Singapore or parts of Europe will have plenty to add. I remember reading about how water rights and arguments over it has been a huge issue in the US Southwest, for example, for decades. Chinatown, the old Jack Nicholson film, is a favourite of mine.)
There are restrictions on water use in the UK at the moment, which has been through one of those long, hot summers that are great for a few weeks as people get out the barbecues and soak up the Vitamin D, but become a pain when folk have to work when the country cannot seem to manage air conditioning. And then the âgreen and pleasant landâ goes the colour of cafĂ© au lait. There are issues about whether, if such weather remains a regular feature, that certain crops such as wheat have to be irrigated. (Much wheat is grown in East Anglia, where my Dad had a farm and is the driest part of the UK, being on the eastern side of the country.)
From a free marketeerâs point of view, the water business is a bit of a challenge. The system of pipes, reservoirs and meters put in place can, to some extent, have business features and use the price mechanism to allocate resources (water meters, for example), but it is not all that feasible or politically easy to have different water firms competing to supply the stuff over rival pipes, dig out rival reservoirs, or desalination plants, etc. Digging a reservoir typically will require a compulsory purchase power, or what in the US is called Eminent Domain, and that is not something that is easily granted to a wide variety of suppliers of water.
So in the eyes of many, much of todayâs water sector is what economists call a ânatural monopolyâ. (The competitive bits might include supplies of bottled drinking water, home equipment for filtering water, private water storage, etc.)
Monopolies tend to be abused by those running them unless there is a realistic prospect of competition to keep people honest. The cluster of firms running the water organisations in the UK, such as Thames Water, are in some cases listed firms and pay a dividend, or they are owned by other listed firms (sometimes classed by asset managers as “infrastructure”). The salaries of their senior executives are the subject of much angst in the press, including the supposedly pro-capitalist ends of it, never mind those reflexively hostile to business. Because of the natural monopoly aspects of these firms, they are regulated by a quango called The Water Services Regulation Authority, which sets certain standards including pricing. From time to time there are calls for water utilities to be renationalised, although it is worth noting that in the last big drought in the UK of 1976, utilities were state owned, and that certainly did not prevent all kinds of water bans and restrictions. (Here is a paper written 21 years ago from the Institute of Economic Affairs about water utilities and competition.)
So what should classical liberals and libertarians think about this? Are there examples from around the world on how to inject genuine competition into a field deemed always to be a monopoly, or should water supply be a sort of minimal state function like law and order, akin to how one might think about the cardiovascular system of the body? Would an anarcho-capitalist order be able to handle these questions (rival agencies running packages for water/power, etc with different pricing regimes all competing against one another?)
It does seem to me that there should be more opportunity for innovation and change that could put water companies under healthy pressure. For example, building several desalination plants (they donât have to be even very big â nuclear-powered submarines use them) might be an idea for a commercial provider who could offer to supply cheaper water into the system, but I am guessing the price incentives would need to be big enough to justify the costs, depending on how expensive a plant is or whether they can be build in sufficient amounts to achieve economies of scale.) There is even a specialist market in small desalination/reverse osmosis tech for producing water for folk such as sailors, etc. (See an example here.) And see here for an interesting article from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
One could, I suppose, have a system where water suppliers compete to supply water into a series of reservoir hubs for an agreed amount; the water could even be shipped or piped from wetter parts of the UK such as Wales and Scotland, and be a nice source of revenue for those places. Maybe it is time for Scottish nationalists to spend more time figuring out how to get rich by using this resource instead of bellyaching about the evil English. Also, very large users of water â agri-businesses irrigating land, or industrial users â have the bargaining power to negotiate prices and hence could even build mini-reservoirs of their own, assuming governments allowed it.
There may be plenty of other ways to think about the limits, but also the potential, of making the business of water more competitive and businesslike. Because it strikes me that if those arguments aren’t made in a constructive way, the usual calls for State control will be ever louder. The past few years, such as over COVID-19, have taught us, surely, that fear of bad things happening plays all too often in one, clunky direction.
(I havenât mentioned global warming yet, but while that issue has obviously been raised a lot by those who extrapolate trends from a period of weather, I think the issues here arenât dependent on whether man-made global warming is true or not, or bad or not. For once, I am parking that subject to the side of the road.)
Everything the Tories did to crash the economy, Labour criticised them for doing too little of.
– Guy Herbert
Assume all public bodies have the same goal â and it isnât what it says on the tin. You might think the Committee for the Promotion of Postage Stamp Collections is obsessed with postage stamps, or the Sewage Treatment Works Agency is fascinated by sewage. Actually they both do the same thing: they grow their budgets. They do this by talking about the vital importance of postage stamps and sewage, yes, but building their empire, creeping their mission and employing more people is the main thing they strive to do every day. Evidence for this comes from their public pronouncements which are dominated by demands for greater budgets, and their private conversations, ditto. In all of recorded history, there is probably no instance of a quango requesting a smaller budget.
– Matt Ridley
When I first saw this story, “Daughter who buried father in illegal woodland pagan funeral avoids jail”, my outrage-meter went off the scale at the apparent violation of religious freedom. Unnecessarily, it turned out. Eirys Brett was not in court for conducting a pagan funeral. She would still have been in court had the funeral service been the Order for The Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. She was in court because she did not register her father’s death and because she buried him in a place not set aside for that purpose:
Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard that frail Mr Brett made last requests that he wanted to be buried in woods in a medieval non-Christian style near his farmhouse home, in Aberedw, near Builth Wells.
The judge was not without sympathy. He said,
“Everybodyâs entitled to their beliefs and make no comment about yours. But you should have gone about it in a different way.
“You could have achieved the same objective by following the law and that is not simply where you think or where he thinks is appropriate but where you are permitted to bury him and to register the death – those were the two things you failed to do.”
It is not clear to me whether the woodland area where the late Mr Brett was buried was on his own land. If it was, I can see no reason why he should not be buried there. However, if the vaguely specified “woods” were not his woods, I do see a problem. If I found out that someone had buried their dead relative in my garden I would be disconcerted, however well they cleared up afterwards.
It is the second charge that interests me more. She failed to register his death. In the UK it is a criminal offence not to register a death.
Why?
As an inveterate reader of detective stories, I can think of some good reasons for this law. But as a libertarian, I feel obliged not to simply accept it because it is a law that goes back to the days when the State laid fewer burdens on us than it does now.
What do you think?
Remember this? “Glastonbury 2017: ‘Ohh Jeremy Corbyn’ chant sweeps festival as revellers get political”
Last year, it was the universal disdain for the Brexit vote, myself waking up to megaphones announcing David Cameron had resigned and Boris Johnson may take the PM position.
This year, though, the people of Worthy Farm have a new hero, one to bring everyone together: Jeremy Corbyn.
Barely a moment goes by without someone chanting the Labour leader’s name to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’.
I had forgotten the link to “Seven Nation Army”. The Glastonbury set are fine with army-themed song titles – armies that actually fight, not so much: “Jeremy Corbyn urges west to stop arming Ukraine”
Jeremy Corbyn has urged western countries to stop arming Ukraine, and claimed he was criticised over antisemitism because of his stance on Palestine, in a TV interview likely to underscore Keir Starmerâs determination not to readmit him to the Labour party.
âPouring arms in isnât going to bring about a solution, itâs only going to prolong and exaggerate this war,â Corbyn said. âWe might be in for years and years of a war in Ukraine.â
Corbyn gave the interview on Al Mayadeen, a Beirut-based TV channel that has carried pro-Russia reporting since Vladimir Putinâs invasion of Ukraine.
âWhat I find disappointing is that hardly any of the worldâs leaders use the word peace; they always use the language of more war, and more bellicose war.â
The ex-soldierâs supposed crime? He had posted a trans-BLM-swastika on social media. This emblem was originally designed and posted by Laurence Fox and re-posted by many others â including the Daily Mail. Its purpose was to highlight the authoritarianism of âtrans-activistâ groups such as Stonewall, whose influence runs so deeply in the police (and in Whitehall, local government, universities and employers) that one of the attending police officers was even, according to Harryâs report, wearing a rainbow badge saying âHampshire Policeâ on it.
Harry is right to say that the rainbow flag is a political symbol, and that the police are legally obligated to be impartial (but they arenât). Imagine the situation at some Hampshire Constabulary office where these same officers were sitting down assessing the complaint theyâd apparently received about the ex-soldierâs post mocking the rainbow flag â which is a lawful statement in common law and also protected by Article 10 of the ECHR. They can hardly have been unbiased â one look down at their rainbow badges would have told them what to do. They simply cannot claim that they acted impartially when they themselves wear as insignia the very symbol being mocked.
– Ian Rons
And by the way, I think this is the swastika giving the wokesters the vapours…
The video embedded in this tweet from Laurence Fox apparently shows someone being arrested for tweeting. I cannot see the video, but the top comment says,
“Chap shares a post by @LozzaFox and the police arrest the chap, even though Laurence is actually stood there đ
This is disgraceful. People upset by hurty words need to turn the Internet off and remember the old children’s rhyme – Sticks and Stones.”
Apparently the arrest had something to do with that meme that shows four LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flags (my goodness, “Newsround” has changed a lot since John Craven presented it) arranged so that the triangular inserts form a swastika. Fox’s Wikipedia entry says, “In June 2022 Fox tweeted an image of a swastika made from the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag with the caption ‘You can openly call the [Union Jack] a symbol of fa[s]cism and totalitarianism on Twatter. You cannot criticise the holy flags’. This led to him being temporarily suspended from Twitter for a day.”
This tweet from Richard Taylor of GB News may show the same video.
As you can probably tell, I am not at all sure what is going on. Is my inability to play the video censorship by Twitter, or just my old computer not being up to the job? Some accounts seem to imply that that the threatened arrest was not carried through, although that reassures me very little. As we have all seen, making the process the punishment has been a very successful way for the police to chill free speech while avoiding having to defend their actions in court.
The Tories are skilled marketers of the âfreedomâ side in that equation. Thus, we find Truss promising to âliberaliseâ planning laws and Sunak urging the need for more post-Brexit âderegulationâ. But the main populist element in the Conservative governmentâs mandate cannot be ignored: âtake back controlâ. That means securing the nationâs porous borders, having a zero-tolerance policy for any indulgent woke guff which distracts vital public services from fulfilling their true purpose, repatriating our laws and courts, presiding over infrastructure projects which serve the common good, and rediscovering that whackiest of reactionary notions: that the police exist to suppress crime.
The police in modern Britain may be the best example of control and freedom being abused in equal measure. Soft on actual crime, they take a serious interest whenever a law-abiding person strays from the shackles of political correctness. They will sooner quiz a TERF than catch a thief.
– Harrison Pitt
But which is least bad? We love to say that politicians “are all as bad as each other”, but that is very rarely true. There is nearly always some difference between them. Go on, make me care.
I am in a sulk because Kemi Badenoch is out of the running. She is my local MP. I have seen her in person a couple of times, and once, during the interminable Brexit crisis, I sent her an email. She replied, and although she did not agree with me, it was clear from the reply that she had read my email and was responding to the point I actually made, not the superficially similar point that a lot of people were making at the time. That is no small thing.
I know the spectrum of views on this topic among Samizdata folk varies widely, from “Hell, yes” denialist to, well, me. That is, to someone who climate alarmists would call a climate denialist but who does not self-identify as such.
Anyway, on Monday and Tuesday it was hot. I mean really hot compared to the UK average. I remember 1976, and it was hotter than that. We have often poured justifiable scorn on predicting the climate by computer models and quoted versions of Groucho Marx’s line from Duck Soup: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” – or in this case, your own epidermal thermo-receptors. The evidence of my own senses said it was the hottest two days of my life and that’s still true even if the BBC said the same.
Professor Sowell wrote this article in 2016. Little has changed since then, except that I doubt that today’s Associated Press would dare publish it.
Surely murder is a serious subject, which ought to be examined seriously. Instead, it is almost always examined politically in the context of gun control controversies, with stock arguments on both sides that have remained the same for decades. And most of those arguments are irrelevant to the central question: Do tighter gun control laws reduce the murder rate?
That is not an esoteric question, nor one for which no empirical evidence is available. Think about it. We have 50 states, each with its own gun control laws, and many of those laws have gotten either tighter or looser through the years. There must be tons of data that could indicate whether murder rates went up or down when either of these things happened.
But have you ever heard any gun control advocate cite any such data?
Twenty-two years after 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, her mother and her sister were burned to death in a house fire started by Azhar Ali Mehmood (the 26-year-old who impregnated her when she was 14), the inquiry into grooming gangs in Telford has released a report on the phenomenon of which that was an example.
the authorities dismissed the 1,000 figure as âsensationalisedâ and suggested the newspaper had âmade it up on the back of a fag packetâ. This week, inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC described the Sunday Mirrorâs estimate as a âmeasured, reasonable and non-sensational assessmentâ. (h/t spiked)
It’s another example of how one of the things Blair made it unsafe to say back then was not only true in Telford (and true enough to compete with Rotherham – and with Rochdale, Aylesbury, Oxford, Derby, Halifax, Keighley, Peterborough, Huddersfield, Manchester and Newcastle) but became much more common, much more true, because the resulting politically-correct suppression of anything resembling basic policing “emboldens offenders”.
‘Islamophobia’ is not the only ‘phobia’ restricting free speech. But it has a certain claim to priority in this century’s war on free speech in Britain, so if we want to know what’s coming up for the others, we’d better pay attention to what the effects of hating free speech were as ‘Islamophobia’ permeated culture and law.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, âPorcupinesâ, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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