Fixing the country - a dilemma

The Heresiarch wonders where the money has all gone. The answer, he notes, is that a great deal of it has been blown on shiny new schoolsnhospitals and bloated salaries and pensions for the Labour voters who work in them.

The capital costs are gone, of course and it's fair to say that this particular aspect of the spending spree will have to be brought to an abrupt halt. Whether the current incumbent of Number Ten has the will to switch the taps off is another matter; perhaps he's going for the scorched earth strategy and reform will have to wait for a change of government.

The fat salaries, and the pensions that can only be described as "obese", are different though. Here, the government can take steps to reduce costs. So, faced with an urgent need to cut back on the costs, what will Messrs Cameron and Osborne do?

If they have programmes of redundancies in the public sector, they will end up with smaller numbers of employees and lower costs, but those left behind will still be grossly overpaid and the services they deliver will inevitably be adversely affected.

Can an incoming government persuade public sector workers to take reductions in pay and benefits, just like the private sector? You can't see the unions taking that one lying down, can you? This road looks as though it will end in tears.

What then? The answer is, of course, full-scale privatisation and the introduction of competition. This is really the only reliable way we have of dealing with overpaid workers. However, when you look at Cameron and Osborne you don't see two men with the character to take these sorts of decisions. They come over as slightly naive fops rather than economic reformers. Will Dave and Gideon really sell off those schoolsnhospitals? Didn't think so.

It's hard to see a way out of this.

Environmentalists trashing the environment (Part 94)

I haven't posted anything on this meme for a while, but Picking Losers has a jaw-dropping article on carbon capture. Our green friends are now proposing to ship liquefied carbon dioxide around the world in search of somewhere to store it.

The left and liberalism

People often criticise the writers on Liberal Conspiracy for their lack of liberalism. "Socialist Conspiracy" would be a better title, they say.

It's hard not to agree since they are so keen on state control - "the absolute authority of the state" as one of their writers put it - and their apparent abhorrence of anyone being able to do anything without their behaviour being "regulated".

I've always struggled to understand the connection between the left and liberalism, so I found this article interesting. Its conclusion that the left is grounded in liberalism, but is trying to move away from it explains a great deal about our current predicament.

In this sense, modern conservatism has always been liberal, and there is nothing particularly contradictory about the fact that ... conservatives are the defenders of classical liberalism... There is also nothing terribly surprising about the way in which the modern left, in the effort to progress beyond liberalism, has often undermined and attacked liberalism.

Is the Nursing & Midwifery Council a tool of government?

So, Margaret Haywood, the nurse who secretly filmed abuse of elderly patients at the Royal Brighton Hospital has been struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. 

The decision makes no sense to most people. What Margaret Haywood did was so manifestly in the public interest, so the decision to strike her off looks bizarre. Of course, we should never, ever make the mistake that professional bodies like the NMC are there to protect the interests of the public, despite what they might say on their websites. They exist solely to protect their members - that goes without saying. And if their members are abusing patients then they will protect them just the same. In these circumstances Margaret Haywood was probably expendable.

There's another interesting facet to the NMC though. Although it is a charity, the NMC doesn't appear to be a candidate for fakecharities.org - its income seems to be derived almost entirely legitimately, from membership fees and so on. But tucked away in the notes to its accounts is this interesting fact:

The Nursing and Midwifery Council is accountable to the Privy Council. The Nursing and Midwifery Order 2001 sets out the nature of the relationship between the NMC and the Privy Council and the reporting mechanisms required. Whilst not accountable to the Department of Health, the NMC has regular contact with the Department on policy and other matters.

Could this explain the bizarre decision in the Haywood case?

The Damien Green affair

Head of Legal thinks the Civil Service are working for them rather than us:

Something very wrong is happening here. The Home Secretary had steam coming out of her ears and agreed with referral to police: had she not agreed, clearly no reference would have been made. Yet Keith Vaz chooses to interpret what happened as entirely the work of civil servants? I don't think the evidence his committee heard justifies what he said this morning, and I suspect him of minimising ministers' role for political reasons. In the worst traditions of loyalty to politicians rather than the public, the civil service will take the rap for this matter as though it had acted on its own; and Labour MPs are happy to whitewash their party seniors, failing in their duty to hold government to account. We need an inquiry into Keith Vaz as much as anything else.

The baroness and the badman

Once upon a time, there was a Baroness. When surveying her kingdom of schools and teachers, she came across a small community of parents who had legally opted to retain their independence...

Read the whole thing.

Jeremy Bowen found to be biased on Middle East

Full story at Harry's Place. If I remember correctly, Bowen was brought in precisely to deal with a perceived bias in the BBC's Middle East output.

This makes the Beeb look extraordinarily inept. Again.

Something to do with the unique way they are funded no doubt.

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."

Another email scandal

Daniel Hannan on another another email scandal: Brussels officials are being told to disguise the extent to which they are being lobbied by corporate interests.

The memo is a grisly demonstration of how the Brussels system is designed to allow corporate interests to override the little man.

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.

Learn from the past

Bruno learns how aberrant bankers were dealt with in medieval Italy.

No post

Been on my sickbed since the end of last week. Still struggling now. Viruses. Yeuch.

Posting will be non-existent.

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.