I know it is common, in this country, to believe that our government acts based upon the so-called will of the majority. This leads to another idea we refer to as the “tyranny of the majority”. Unfortunately this set of ideas is completely false in a representative government that is based on the idea of […]
From The Liberty Papers
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
A Fist Full of Euros is taking nominations for the Third Satin Pyjamas Awards. Nominate whoever you wish, of course!
The Englishman awakes from a nap to find that the Amazon rainforest is actually fertilized by a valley in Chad.
Now that we’ve finally paid off our WWII debts, Blood and Treasure asks what we spent the money on originally.
Cobbett Rides Again notes that extra tuition for gifted children is being mooted. Are there any other back to the future programmes we could think of?
Division of Labour notes that arrests were being made for ticket scalping a century ago. So banning the practice doesn’t work all that well then.
Michael Bywater makes the slightly alarming comparison of the way in which Jesus was executed with the way Saddam Hussein was.
And finally, Sobering Thoughts points us to John Stewart’s take upon Time’s Man of the Year.
From Adam Smith Institute
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
I suspect these three items are related; I leave it to you to figure out how.
Exhibit A -
“Most Americans Want Public Policies to Prevent Obesity.”
An excerpt: “In addition, 73 percent said they’d support government incentives for companies that reduced the cost of health insurance for employees who had healthy lifestyles and shed extra pounds. […]
From The Liberty Papers
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
As always, I enjoy reading Thomas Sowell. Many times I don’t agree with him, he is much more socially conservative than I am. But, economically, I rarely disagree. And his most recent piece in the National Review is no exception. It’s on income inequality and he makes some good points in it. But the best […]
From The Liberty Papers
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
We like to think we age more slowly than others. The older woman seeing a new doctor for the first time certainly did.
She was taken into a room and told to “make herself comfortable.” While reading the doctor’s diploma on the wall, she realized that she went to high school with him many years ago.
The doctor entered the room; he was very grey, and slightly stooped with age. He greeted her, “Hello, how can I help you?”
The woman asked, “Did you attend Roosevelt High School?”
“Yes I did,” the doctor answered.
“Class of 56?” she demanded.
“Yes I was,” came the reply.
The woman was delighted, and told him, “You were in my class!”
“Really?” the doctor responded, “What did you teach?”
From Adam Smith Institute
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
Never given to New Year resolution, and blessed with a Celtic temperament which celebrates procrastination, I am reconsidering. In 2007 I must try to be cool. Cool is contemporary culture, if often in the eye of the beholder. For Noel Coward and Gertrude, a black Balkan Sobranie cigarette in a long holder was cool. No longer. Cool is ephemeral.
A sophisticated word in English may be spotted by the difficulty of defining its antithesis. Cool once reflected the aspirations of the middle class to the power and wealth of the rich. But now royalty simulates estuarine English - that’s cool. Gordon Brown as a soccer supporter is cool if implausible - Raith Rovers executive season ticket: £1000, I think. But to proclaim support for a soccer team is so cool.
Sir Nicholas Stern departing the Treasury on the day the Chancellor ignored his climate concerns in the pre-budget statement, was not cool. Substituting religion for science seems to be increasingly cool. Surveys show two-thirds of scientists either don’t know or don’t believe man can influence climate. But the Royal Society and Nature, once flagships of science, embrace consensus among the elite. There is a worldwide campaign to discredit skeptical scientists, so maybe it’s not cool to require scientific rigour. And it doesn’t seem to be cool to avoid fitting a green light bulb because it takes too long to recover the cost, or to have an SUV ‘Chelsea tractor’ in the drive because the children are safer in one. Proclaiming green credentials while practising the opposite is really cool, like the movie stars who ostentatiously buy hybrid cars, but actually travel by private jet. Using spin to overcome economic reality is cool. The large energy companies invest in wind farms for PR reasons, while raking in subsidies to augment their profits.
These things change, though. I think it’s becoming uncool to attribute every event of nature to climate change. The doomsayers were not much in evidence to claim that the UK’s pre-Christmas fogs were man-made. There’s a case for saying that the cool guy has to be one step ahead of the pack, rather than in step. After all, once your dad does it, by definition it becomes ’sad’ rather than cool. Who knows, it might soon become cool to duck the consensus and stand out as different. Adam Smith did that, defying the conventional wisdom of his day, and he was really cool. Given that, I will try to be more cool in 2007.
From Adam Smith Institute
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
Over the years I have known many people who have made it into the honours lists – those who, twice a year (New Year and the Queen’s Birthday) pick up Knighthoods, CBEs and assorted other gongs. Many of them are people we have worked with at the Adam Smith Institute, who have written things for us or spoken at our lunches, seminars, and conferences.
This year’s New Year honours list has been published and although it contains many names I have heard of, it contains just a handful whom I can say that I know, or have met. So I took a closer look at the list in order to work out why that should be.
I think the answer lies in the massive recent expansion of the public sector. Sure, there are a smattering of sports and entertainment personalities which politicians put in to spice up the lists and grab the media headlines. And I don’t object to giving honours to public servants – it is a good way, and a cheap one, to keep their hands out of the till. But the sheer number of civil servants, quango-crats, regulators, tsars, task-force chairs, advisers and other ‘big tent’ residents who now expect (and receive) honours seems to be squeezing out the entrepreneurs, thinkers, and other genuinely interesting people who used to appear now and again.
The list already covers two pages in the newspapers (I’ve stopped reading any further down than the CBEs), so it can hardly be expanded further. So once again, in a rather strange way, the public sector crowds out the private. Story of our lives, really.
From Adam Smith Institute
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
It may be New Year’s Eve for us, but the Chinese have some weeks to wait before the year of the pig comes in. This year it might be the year of the fluorescent pig, since Lester Haines reports that a team of genetic scientists at the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin have inserted the genes that make jellyfish luminesce into pigs. Professor Liu Zhonghua tells us that “The mouth, trotters and tongue of the pigs are green under ultraviolet light.” Their colleagues (and rivals) in Taiwan did a rather more impressive job a year ago by engineering a fluorescent pig with a green skin and internal organs. This means that sausages could become even more interesting from now on, and harder to lose in the dark. I’m sure there must be a Chinese proverb telling us that those born in the year of the pig will shine in later life.
From Adam Smith Institute
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
In Sunday’s Washington Post, George Will writes about a case that may yet begin to challenge the tangled web that is campaign finance regulation:
A three-judge federal court recently tugged a thread that may begin the unraveling of the fabric of murky laws and regulations that traduce the First Amendment by suppressing political speech. Divided 2 […]
From The Liberty Papers
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
The last American President (indeed, I believe, the last American politician) to really remember what the United States was like before the Hoover-Roosevelt Depression and the New Deal died on December 26th.. From now on every one talks or writes of the time when, for example, American farmers got their income from their customers, rather than the government, will be drawing on second hand information from books and so on rather than their own memories….
From Samizdata.net
Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom
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