Booker on the Somerset floods

Being a resident of Somerset, Christopher Booker is in a good position to get into the nitty gritty of the truth behind the floods this year.

This morning he has set out the full case that there was a cold-blooded government decision to allow the Levels to return to nature, with residents left to fend for themselves. The Levels were of course a creation of the state, having been drained and enclosed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at goverment command, and the residents therefore relied upon the state to maintain their waterways and the security of their homes. Now, on a green-tinged whim, the state has tossed them aside in favour of a few wading birds, lives and livelihoods wrecked in the process.

As someone once said, the state is not your friend.

We need to talk about free speech

Where do we go from here?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9605045/What-a-shocking-week-its-been-for-free-speech.html

The forbidden history of unpopular people

This really excellent video about free speech was recently posted up at Jo Nova's site.

With the Leveson inquiry currently looking at regulating the press and blogs in the UK, this is well worth passing on.

Libertarians do carbon taxes

There are two interesting posts advocating carbon taxes doing the rounds at the moment. These have been getting quite a lot of attention because they have been written by libertarians rather than the millenarian hippies and the retired Socialist Worker salesmen who usually promote the idea. I shall hazard a comment on these economic issues, issuing my customary caveat that economics is not really my thing.

First up is Jonathan Adler, who normally blogs at US law blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, but has chosen to set out his ideas at Megan McArdle's blog:

Click to read more ...

It's Big Oil, stupid

John Vidal of the Guardian is getting all excited by a Greenpeace report linking sceptics to...Big Oil. The wicked capitalists in question are Koch Industries, "a little-known, privately owned US oil company" (which just happens to be the largest privately owned business in the world). Now that the truth about their corporate largesse has been revealed by the tireless efforts of Mr Vidal and his colleagues at Greenpeace, we can presumably ignore everything said by...

Click to read more ...

Talking to Brian Micklethwait

If you click here, you can catch a longish interview I did with Brian Micklethwait. For those who don't know of Brian, he is best known as a libertarian thinker, working for the Libertarian Alliance and writing regularly at Samizdata, the biggest UK libertarian blog, as well as his own site. 

We cover a lot of ground, and there is some background on me, for those of you who are interested in such things. (Heaven forbid I should ever gain a public persona). I haven't dared listen to it yet, but I'll give it a bash tonight.

We recorded this in the runup to Christmas, when I was still rather concerned about the book being published while the Climategate story was hot. I guess I needn't have worried.

Legalising drugs works

Everyone knows the effect of making it easier to get hold of intoxicating substances - the country goes to hell in a handcart with the productive members of society sinking into a drug-fuelled haze, drug tourists descend en masse from every corner of the globe, bringing crime and corruption and disease, and civil society collapses into a general malaise from which it can never be extracted.

It's odd then that we haven't heard more about the Portuguese experiment: in 2001, Portugal decriminalised possession of drugs. All drugs: heroin, cocaine, cannabis, you name it. And the results of their experiment have been a trifle unexpected. The Cato Institute has the full story, but here are a few choice extracts:

The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.

Fears of "drug tourism” have turned out to be completely unfounded.

Prevalence rates for the 15–19 age group have actually decreased in absolute terms since decriminalization.

In almost every category of drug, and for drug usage overall, the lifetime prevalence rates in the predecriminalization era of the 1990s were higher than the postdecriminalization rates.

The number of newly reported cases of HIV and AIDS among drug addicts has declined substantially every year since 2001.

The total number of drug-related deaths has actually decreased from the  redecriminalization
year of 1999 (when it totaled close to 400) to 2006 (when the total was 290).

Anyone who proclaims that they are in favour of legalisation of drugs is usually met with an incredulous reply of "What? All drugs?". It now seems that an unequivocal answer can now be given to this kind of disbelief.

"Yes. All drugs."

A no-win situation

Further to the previous posting, there's a story in the Times today of a mother who lost the plot and struck her child with a hairbrush. The boy, who is only 8, has now been taken into care. Without knowing the full details it's hard to be certain, but it sounds, well, mad.

And there does seem to be a bit of a dilemma for the mother here. If the boy doesn't get to school she's jailed for allowing him to truant. But if she uses physical force to make him go, she gets her child taken into care. I suppose there must be something short of hitting him that she could have tried, but at the end of the day it's still physical coercion.

On violence

There's a brilliant post at renegade parent on the subject of violence and children in which Lisa takes libertarians to task for advocating traditional approaches to child-rearing (enforced schooling, traditional subjects, corporal punishment and so on) which are, on the face of it, not exactly in accordance with libertarian ideals of self-ownership and non-initiation of violence.

I'm sympathetic to many of Lisa's points. For example, she says that children should follow their own interests and we have certainly found that putting educational materials in the way of the kids has been an easy way to get them to learn things - they simply pick them up and absorb them when they are ready, with Spanish, Geography and History proving very popular. I agree that children are not inherently stupid, untrustworthy or lazy - they are highly intelligent on the whole. I think they just don't know very much. (See the difference?).

It's also worth pointing out, however,  that just because someone advocates schools run along certain lines, doesn't mean that they support schooling per se. The decision to school children is effectively made for us by government when they tax us to support school-based education. Those who can afford to HE regardless (or are willing to make the personal financial sacrifice to do so, or who can bring themselves to live off benefits while doing so) are a minority. So if we are effectively forced into having schools, the question then becomes "how do we best get them to work", to which the answer might well be "traditional subjects, rote learning" and so on. I've written before about how coercion breeds coercion and this is another example of the same thing.

But Lisa's objection to corporal punishment is a mistake. There is nothing in libertarianism that says that harsh punishments are not permitted. Libertarians are against initiation of violence, but are quite comfortable with "giving as good as one gets", and then some.  Corporal punishment in fact is probably the most liberal approach to retributive justice there is. So when it comes to child rearing, I would have thought that "physical chastisement" is quite appropriate in certain circumstances. For example, when little Jonny bashes little Jane, and particularly if the social niceties of bashing have already been explained to little him, it would convey an important lesson about the real world. After all if we accept that children are intelligent human beings (which we do) then surely we have to accept that they have to take responsibility for their actions?

That said, use of corporal punishment for non-violent transgressions such as "answering back" is probably wrong. Once though, I applied my hand to bottom of one of the offspring for running across a road without looking. Did I do wrong? There's a question here of legitimate authority and its transgression that I need to get my head around. In the meantime, there's plenty to talk about.

Nazis versus libertarians

There's an interesting post and a good comments thread over at Letters from a Tory. It will be of interest to my home educating readers.

Here's Hannan again

This time interviewed on Fox News in the US.

This seems like the first time anyone has put forward the free market solution to the banking crisis. That's a damning indictment of the Conservatives, and it's interesting to hear Hannan speak about the "two main parties" as if he were not a member of one of them.  This looks to me as if he is a Tory member in name only - his thinking is far more Whiggish or Libertarian and he confesses to being a Ron Paul fan too. How did someone like that ever get elected on a Conservative ticket?

Passing on the libertarian message

Large son and small son were having a conversation in the bath.

Large son: Do you know why we have Guy Fawkes night?

Small son: Err. Yeeesss.

Large son: Why then?

Small son: Errr. Don't know.

Large son: It's because there was a man called Guy Fawkes who wanted to blow up Parliament. That means he wanted to make it bigger.....

The message isn't getting through, is it?

Abolition of income tax

Well, nothing like arriving with a bang.

The UK Libertarian party has issued its first policy - the abolition of income tax.

It's radical, and I fear it will allow opponents to portray the party as lunatics, but who knows, maybe people are ready for something radical?

Anarcho-capitalism in Somalia

Here's a really interesting story.

Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.

I'm not an anarchist, but stories like this one, and this older one too, sometimes make me wonder if there isn't something in it.

(Somalia story H/T LPUK) 

Libertarian party

The have been rumblings in the liberal parts of the UK blogosphere ahead of the impending arrival of a Libertarian party.

A new website went live on January 1st and a forum has been set up. I've been in two minds about LPUK, as it potentially splits the libertarian support over even more parties than it does at present. You can find people who think of themselves as libertarian in the Tories, LibDems, as well as UKIP. Throw in the Liberal Party and the Classical Liberals and you potentially have a terminally split party.

But with the Tories and the LibDems seemingly irredeemably statist and the others unlikely to reach the dizzy heights of "also-rans", I think a libertarian party might not be a bad idea, if only to draw attention to liberal ideas.

Let's see how it goes.