Rob's Blog

Ah, the good old days, when Ronald Reagan would warn of the dangers of socialised medicine.

Meanwhile, in the present, my taxes pay for propaganda aimed at getting the whole of Europe to have homogeneous anti-smoking laws.

And don’t miss Ian B’s essay explaining the motives of those who would label our food. This is a good enough reason for me (actually, consequences aren’t necessary for me to reject compulsion, but still):

Now we may also note that once calorie counted menus are obligatory, a lot of spontaneity goes out the window. No more can the chef just whip up a special du jour. It isn’t officially calorie counted, is it? The restaurant can’t modify a dish to the individual customer’s requirements either, for the same reason. As with all state regulation, the diversity and colour of life is drained away, replaced with grim standardisation.

But IanB traces the roots and motivations of the food labellists including the origins of junk food and binge drinking, and predicts the same path for food that tobacco suffered.

I’m watching Who Do You Think You Are from last night, in which Chris Moyles is learning about his ancestors. He has just learnt that his great great grandmother came from a rural shanty town in Ireland that was all but wiped out by famine. She had 15 children of which 10 died, mostly from diarrhoea.

His grandmother lived in a house in the slums in Dublin with several other families crammed in. A historian explains that there would usually be one family per room. A map shows where the outhouses are — there is one per five houses which would have been shared by about 70 people. One in five children died before their first birthday.

Moyles’ great grandmother was admitted to a workhouse infirmary with TB, and died at 33.

I think we can safely say that economic equality has increased since then. Technology has made this possible.

who do you think you are? (uk):season 7 episode 2

The other day I wrote about how Richard Murphy misunderstands libertarians. Now he has moderated his comments so you can see what everyone had to say about it. Many types of defense are made. Some people seem confused; this one made me chuckle:

I have total sympathy with your stance on the libertarians, although I do derive a lot of amusement from surfing their kneejerk, hackneyed comments. They are, for the most part, fifth-rate hacks with a half-read copy of “The Road to Serfdom” in one hand and The Economist in the other. Even when you get someone like Alistair who makes the effort to make a post longer than one paragraph, there’s still precious little content or analysis in it.

You should set up a page somewhere on this site where you post the worst excesses just for kicks.

What I can’t understand, really, is why these guys are contributing to the discussion in such large numbers. Do they really think they’re going to convince anybody from any other portion of the political spectrum – that their worldview is the way forward?

Perhaps the concept of not initiating violence is too simple for some; they are suspicious of anything that does not involve incomprehensible waffle.

Richard himself responds with, among other points, this:

Those of us who think rights do on occasion need to be curtailed in pursuit of optimal freedom for all (for total freedom cannot be created – as any thinking person knows) will be happy to see those who incite hatred – as libertarians do of those who cannot, for any reason, provide for themselves a reasonable standard of living at any point in time – being banned from promoting their cause which can only lead to the undermining of society.

I asked how arguing that a smaller state would be beneficial to the poor is anything like inciting hatred of the poor.

Richard Murphy has another post that presumably is analysis worthy of the commenter I quoted above, in which he argues that government spending reduces borrowing.

But a country can cut borrowing by keeping people in work – by spending in fact to avoid the massive social risk of unemployment and by spending to keep up tax revenues – and the growth it creates does, what is more, actually pay for the borrowing – so spending cuts borrowing, not increases it.

I thought Bastiat would not approve, and commented:

I would argue that if the government spends less, the money stays in private hands where it can be spent privately instead. Why am I wrong?

But I was misunderstood again. A commenter responded:

It is quite possible to leave all the money in private hands, but by doing so, the actual wealth of the country is reduced and all this extra money is worth that much less.

So it would seem that private hands are incapable of creating wealth, only the government can do that.

I did respond but Richard Murphy moderates every comment, making discussion difficult.

Bishop Hill linked to an article by Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK. In it, he accuses libertarians of being callous, violent and being the enemies of civilised society. He seems to think that because libertarians don’t want the government to steal money from people and use it to help people, they don’t want people to be helped. I wrote this comment, which has not been published (he did say “Comments from known libertarian abusers will not be allowed on this blog entry, or any other on this site.”):

I am a libertarian. I don’t know if my comment will be welcome here; but it is your blog and you are free to delete it.

You’re mostly right about how I would structure society. But I’m not callous. Believe it or not, I think that all people would be better off in a libertarian society: there would be fewer poor people and more *willing* charity for the remaining few in need.

There are a couple of timely articles over at Counting Cats. Cats talks about defining libertarianism from first principles (don’t initiate force; obviously not a principle Richard Murphy is familiar with); Nick M weighs in about how libertarians are misunderstood and want everyone to get richer which is the reason they argue against things like minimum wage, not because they are callous.

And all this just coincidentally, because later Nick M spots the Richard Murphy article and responds to it directly:

We are open and honest because we are right. We do not need to finish posts by threatening to shut down the debate because we know we can win the debate. We believe in society. We believe though that is something which emerges from the free interaction of individuals and not something defined from the great, the “good” or the unsufferably smug.

We have won the intellectual debate. All they have left is force but the use of that is what they do best.

I have in me a post about libertarianism and why it is best — I think it is important to make the case concisely so that people on the fence can compare what we have to say to the kind of arguments in Richard Murphy’s article.

This is an excellent music video from a few years back that I remembered for some reason. It shows a day in the life of a woman in infographics.

I might as well quote the description written by the person who put up the video:

Directed by the French motion graphics studio H5. It features a day in the life of a woman working in the London’s Square Mile solely through infographics; this includes labelled close-ups of everyday objects, product lifecycles, schematic diagrams, charts, and is generally illustrated in a simple isometric visual style.

Today was no meat Monday. It’s backed by Paul McCartney so I thought it was something to do with vegetarians, but apparently it’s something to do with global warming. I celebrated by eating an extra large chicken sandwich for lunch and making an enormous spaghetti bolognese for dinner. Mmm, animals taste good.

No meat Monday is also backed by economic genius Chris Martin, who said that shareholders are the worst evil in the world.

My dad visited at the weekend and brought with him a micro radio controlled helicopter, which he gave to me saying, “I bought one for myself, and then bought one for you too!” Jolly nice of him! It’s a proper 4 channel one, meaning you control up and down, forward and backwards; left and right and rudder. It’s tricky to fly but rewarding when you get the hang of it. So far I can just about hover for 30 seconds or so before things start getting out of hand and I have to land. I’m already thinking about graduating to something bigger*. The hobby can involve some pretty expensive and cool gadgets. Oh dear, Chris Martin would not approve.

I am number 66 on this list of Libertarian bloggers, which I think is Brian’s list but sorted by Technorati ranking.

The LPUK blog rightly points out the stupidity of the EU hassling Microsoft about daring to include a browser with its OS.

* There is supposed to be a link here to a video of a guy doing amazing stunts with an RC heli, but YouTube is down. Search YouTube for RC heli stunts instead.

When I visited Israel I noticed that Jews and Arabs get along much better than I had imagined from all the news stories. A friend and fellow blogger who lives on a settlement has a story about how well they get along when it really matters.

The strange birdsong thing on DAB radio has been replaced with a new station called Amazing Radio. They play songs from the music store for unsigned artists called Amazing Tunes.

Anyone can upload songs they have recorded, you can visit the website and rate and tag songs a bit like you would videos on YouTube, and the most popular ones get played on the radio.

Not a bad idea. It wouldn’t surprise me if this kind of thing gradually displaces the large record company approach to selling music.