I am sure I am not the only one who finds the protests against Iran’s stolen election exhilarating.  They raise the possibility of an end to an appalling regime and the beginning of a liberal, tolerant and progressive Iran and, by extension, a liberal, tolerant and progressive Middle East.  Which would be nice.  It’s just that I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Let me explain.  Ask yourself: what brings down an ideologically-driven tyranny?  In the case of Hitler’s Germany, Hussein’s Iraq and Pol Pot’s Cambodia it was invasion from abroad.  In the case of the Soviet Union (and by extension the Eastern European satellites) it was time.  The ideology had exhausted itself.  And that’s it.  Street protests, as China, Burma and Cuba have demonstrated, just get a lot of people killed.

Ah, you say, but what about Marcos or Apartheid or the Shah?  Just not ideological enough.  And the end of Apartheid - I suspect - had an awful lot to do with the end of the Cold War.

By contrast the Iranian theocracy clearly has a long way to go before it burns itself out.  Which is why it will survive.

So, why do ideologically-driven tyrannies last so long?  Ideas I would guess. Most people are not prepared to kill unless it’s for a cause.  But if you give them the cause…

In Part I I listed out my 1-6.  Here’s the rest:

7. Ascribing beliefs to entire groups. “Libertarians believe that there’s no such thing as society.” How does that feel?  Annoying I should think.  And should hope.  But watch out for statements that go the other way e.g. “The left believe that there is a fixed quantity of wealth.” This is a sort of combination of the straw man and the personal attack.  As a general rule one ought to identify the ideas accurately and then debate them.

8. Pejorative terms.  “Concreting over”, “Gas guzzler"… The use of any term that includes judgement is an attempt to curtail debate.  And any attempt to curtail debate should get the alarm bells ringing.  This is in effect the flip side of Point 6.

9. Numbers.  I am suspicious of any argument involving numbers e.g. the speed limit should be 70mph.  Why not 71?  Or 69?  Because you have to draw the line somewhere?  It makes me wonder if the line has to be drawn at all.  Or, who should be drawing it.

10. What would change your mind? Does the person express any doubt?  If you asked him: what would change his mind, would he have an answer?  And would it be a reasonable one?  Because if the answer is “no” then he’s being dogmatic and eristic and these people are terrible bores and likely to be wrong.

11. Confusing intentions, actions and outcomes.  “When I say I want hard working families to benefit from prosperity [intention] you call me a socialist.” To which I suppose the response should be:  “No, when you advocate socialist policies [action] that’s when I call you a socialist.”

12. Distance.  This is to do with facts.  How much distance is there between you and the facts being used?  I am not just talking about physical distance, more how hard it would be to verify?  Because, if the answer is very hard then this should set the alarm bells ringing.  That is why I prefer arguments that depend on reason and facts either that everyone agrees or are close at hand e.g. the local newsagent is really good but the roads are really bad.

13. Subordinate clauses.  At least, I think that’s what I am going to call it.  Anyway, here’s an example: “Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who sent hundreds of thousands of British soldiers to their deaths...”

    Doesn’t sound very good does it?  Let’s try some substitution: “Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who sent hundreds of thousands of British soldiers to their deaths...”

    Both statements are absolutely true and serve to reveal the author’s prejudices.  An attempt is being made to steer the reader to a conclusion without having to go to the effort of making an argument.  Not good. 

Anyway, that’s my list.  Hope you find it useful.

I’ve been meaning to write this for some time.  It started when, for the first time in many years, I was present at a predominantly left-wing gathering.  It was, if nothing else, a rich vein of nonsense.

It got me thinking.  Are there ways in which you can spot that an argument is nonsense or, at least, suspect?  Are there types of argument that should set the alarm bells ringing?  Would it be possible to look at an argument and say: “Well, that’s an X error and that’s a Y fallacy” etc?  I suppose I had it in mind that if enough people were aware of how to separate intellectual wheat from intellectual chaff then, well - because libertarianism is clearly in the intellectual wheat category - they’d become libertarians without the need for any intervention from me or my ideological soulmates.  How cool would that be?

Anyway, I didn’t get very far that time, but recently I started thinking about it again and started compiling a list.

And then I thought: “I wonder if anyone’s ever had a go at this before?” Hmm, it turns out they had.  Of course, they had.  See, for instance:

A List of Fallacious Arguments
Logical Fallacies: shorter but prettier
Wikipedia

Wikipedia also has pages on propaganda and rhetorical techniques etc.  Even so, there were members of my list that I didn’t feel quite fitted into any of these pre-existing categories.  So, here goes:

1. Vague and shifting definitions.  I hate these.  Shifting definitions - words that are used to mean one thing in one place and another in another are the worst but any word or phrase that could mean more than one thing should get the alarm bells ringing.  “Racist” is a good example.  Do you mean gas-chamber racist or blacks-run-faster racist?  Big difference.

2. So what? Can often sound rude but it’s a devastating question.  It’s a useful practice when someone makes a point to ask: “Well, so what?” For instance, and I’m not making this up, one criticism I’ve heard made of Austrian economics is that it hasn’t advanced since the 1920s.  Well, so what?  Good theories don’t have to “advance”.

3. Do you understand it? OK, I don’t understand fluid dynamics but I appreciate that if fluid dynamicists hadn’t got their models right planes would fall out of the sky.  But that does not apply to the average political debate.  If you don’t understand the terms that are being used or the argument that is being made it’s probably nonsense.  Brian Micklethwait holds that when it comes to technology if you don’t understand it that is their problem, not yours.  Much the same applies to politics.

   Actually, it gets worse.  If you don’t understand it there’s a good chance they don’t either.

4. Is this the most important thing? I once read an article criticising the career of Winston Churchill.  Nothing wrong with that - there’s plenty to criticise.  But at no point did the author address himself to Churchill’s actions in 1940.  Which was a shame because if it hadn’t been for his actions at the time he wouldn’t have had a reputation worth criticizing.

5. Changing the subject. God, I hate this.  Why can’t people just say:  “That’s a good point, I think you’re wrong but I can’t come up with a good counter argument right now.”?

6. “Key", “strategic”, “essential”. Beware any arguments involving these words.  How would you know if something was key, strategic or essential?  There’s no test.

Part II is here.

It is hugely successful.  It attracts a large audience, a big fan base and a huge waiting list for studio tickets.  It has spawned DVDs, a live show and local versions in the US, Australia and Russia.  Satellite channel, Dave, has based an entire business model around Top Gear repeats.  Stars clamour to drive its Reasonably Priced Car and a nation held its breath when one of its presenters was badly hurt in a 300mph car crash.

Jeremy Clarkson even once got a custard pie in the face from an environmentalist.  High praise indeed.

All this for a show based around two elements, namely: cars and blokes - neither of which the BBC, the show’s broadcaster, particularly likes.

So, why is it so successful?  I think it revolves around two elements.

First of all, it brings out the nine-year-old in all of us.  So, it has the values of a nine-year old.  Speed?  Good.  Power?  Good.  Noise?  Good.  Futuristic looks?  Good.  Gadgets?  Good.  Worries about global warming?  Boring.  Sure Mr Megastar you’re a star but how fast are you in a Suzuki Liana?

But it also asks the questions a nine-year old asks:

• Can you turn a car into a boat?
• Why don’t you have convertible people carriers?
• Can you drive to the North Pole?
• Which is faster, a car or a train?  Or a plane?  Or a boat?
• What happens if you put Boadicea spikes on your wheels or drive into a brick wall?  In a lorry?
• Or if you strap a Reliant Robin to a rocket?

Top Gear has at one point or another asked all these questions usually with results that are as disastrous as they are predictable as they are hilarious.  No wonder “ambitious but rubbish” has become the show’s unofficial motto.

Secondly, and this is thing they keep quiet about, Top Gear is clearly the result of a lot of hard work.  Don’t believe me?  Watch any episode and ask yourself where the camera is.  You’ll quickly realise that that it’s in all sorts of funny places.  The other day I spotted that they’d managed to get on the top of a suspension bridge.  Think of the health and safety forms.  But often it’s a helicopter.  Think of the cost.  Oh, and the co-ordination.

One of the sadnesses of this is that you realise that if the races themselves are not fakes, most of the shots are. 

But the hard work continues.  There is frequently a dialogue between narrator and presenter.  Often the same person.  But often it reveals an extraordinary degree of planning an preparation.  Let me put is like this. Top Gear presenters do not simply jump in a car and ad lib.  They write it down first.  Top Gear is quite prepared to put a day’s work into 5 seconds of footage.

Or, to put it another way, you have to be awfully grown up if you want to be that childish.

Top Gear is also remarkable for the way it survives repetition.  I have watched some of the Dave repeats 3 or 4 times.  This is partly because they are very funny.  Watching a man attempt to negotiate his Triumph Dolomite Sprint over a cobbled road with a collander full of eggs directly above his head usually is.  And it is partly because of the in-jokes that you miss first time round.  It took me ages to realise that there’s one running joke about Jeremy believing that for every mechanical problem there’s a hammer-based solution, another involving James May having no sense of direction and another involving Hammond crashing into May.  I don’t believe for a minute that all this isn’t also carefully planned.

To sum up, Top Gear is successful because it deserves to be. 

In Part I I explained how Formula One’s regulations were ruining the sport...

So, the answer is to get rid of the regulations, yes?  If only it were that easy.  Formula 1 has a secret.  No, not a particularly dirty one, but a secret, nevertheless.  They solved the problem.  About 30 years ago (and we’re talking ground effect here again) Formula 1 teams solved the problem of how to go round corners quickly.  Hooray, you might say, and so might I, on a technical level.  But going round corners quickly creates at least two new problems.  First the potential g-forces are greater than the unaided human body can stand and second, if anything goes wrong when the car is cornering (as it did in Ayrton Senna’s case) the car is going to crash at very high speed.  Such things might not matter if F1 was still a largely amateur sport made up of gentlemen racers but it isn’t and the audience that pays the professionals doesn’t want their heroes to be just people who can stand up to high g-forces.  They want them to demonstrate some skill.  Oh, and stay alive.  That’s also quite important.

So, I have no doubt that cars do have to be slowed down in the corners.  It’s just a question of how to do that without tying up the sport in red tape.  My candidate is a weight limit.  Tell teams that they can have any design they like so long as when it leaves the start line it weighs less than, say, 500kg.  As technology improves and cars get dangerously fast simply lower the limit.  Every time this is done teams will have to work out which bit of their car - whether it be the engine, transmission, suspension, wheels or bodywork has to lose the weight.  Each team will answer the question slightly differently leading to a wide variety of designs.

Another way might be to make the cars behave more like ordinary cars.  This might include demanding that all cars be started by the driver alone (they’re not at present), that they be drivable by amateurs (although I am not quite sure how you’d enforce this), that they make their way to the track under their own power.  It’s always struck me as bizarre that cars are allowed to refuel when they like.  Make each team state in advance when they plan to stop for fuel - it would at least be closer to the situation in real life.

He can say that again.  And probably did.  This was the first Times report (that I can find) to cover the Spanish Influenza.  At the time (2 June 1918) it had killed 700 people in 10 days and there were well over 100,000 sufferers.

The disease would appear pretty much everywhere over the next few weeks, go away again over the summer and come back with a vengeance with the onset of winter.  It peaked at about exactly the same time as the signing of the Armistice and ended up killing perhaps 20m people.

And people are worried about swine flu.  Call that an epidemic?  This is an epidemic!

Formula One is in crisis.  As the Depression bites many teams are running out of money.  The cars are dull to look at and the racing is much the same.  Up until this year the same two teams (Ferrari and McLaren) dominated.  And now several teams including Ferrari are thinking of quitting the sport altogether.

So, what should the sport do?  The first thing it must do is to understand how it got into this mess.

But before we do this I would like to deal with a red herring.  People often complain that there’s not enough overtaking and wheel-to-wheel racing in F1.  But there never was, apparently.  And when you think about it, why should there be?  Surely, the best car-driver combination should, under almost all circumstances, shoot off into the distance?  The only real reason why this should change during a race would be either through driver fatigue or brake and tire wear.

Having said that there is a problem with overtaking a slightly slower car.  Modern racing car aerodynamics like to take clean (or laminar) air flows and spew out dirty (or turbulent) air flows.  So, the car attempting to overtake finds that it has to deal with the overtakee’s dirty air rather than the clean air it’s designed to deal with.  The result? Appalling and unpredictable handling.  And difficult overtaking.  Perhaps they could experiment with overtaking lanes or come up with a measurement or the turbulence from the back of cars and limit it.  Who knows.  But, as I said, it’s not as big a problem as people tend to think.

No, the real problem in F1 is regulation.  Want a bigger engine?  You can’t, it’s banned.  Or maybe you want to put a turbo on it?  You can’t do that either, that’s also banned.  Hey, there’s even a restriction on the number of cylinders you’re allowed.  Or what about high wings, fans, skirts, more than four wheels, closed cockpits, closed wheels?  You can’t.  Banned, banned, banned, banned.  It’s no wonder all the cars look the same.  The complexity of the regulations eventually forced Gordon Murray, one of F1’s most talented designers and the man behind the McLaren F1, to abandon the sport altogether.

But while it is easy to see why the regulations make for boring cars it is difficult for many to see why this leads to spiralling costs and a lack of competition.

But that’s what regulations always do.  They always help the big guys at the expense of the little guys.  For instance, in the 1970s Lotus came up with ground effect.  Using skirts to control air flow, ground effect “glued” the car to the ground while cornering.  It was cheap and it was banned.  It then took 20 years of expensive computer modelling and wind-tunnel testing to regain the downforce the ban had removed.  It’s not hard to guess which teams were the first to reap the benefits.

But what about this year? I hear you ask.  They’ve changed the rules and all of a sudden it’s the little teams that are prospering.  Just you wait, I say.  Give it a year and the big boys will be back.

See here for Part II

Topical books, they’re a bit rubbish aren’t they?  Let’s face it, any book written to cash in on an issue of the day is bound to suffer from the need to get it out before the hot topic starts to cool.

Which was pretty much my thinking when I forked out for Tom Woods’s Meltdown, a free market take on what I like to call the Greater Depression.  I wasn’t buying it in the hope of greater wisdom, more in the way you might buy a Watford replica shirt - to show support, to egg the team on.

Well, I was wrong.  “Meltdown” is a triumph.  It chronicles the boom and the early part of the bust before explaining how it all fits into Austrian Business Cycle Theory.  In doing so it manages to to explain that theory better than I’ve ever seen it explained and (I’m pretty sure) expand on it.  Oh, and it’s short.

One bit I was particularly impressed with was Woods’s description of money.  For him, and now me, money is a claim on real resources. Now, Woods is not being particularly original here - Mises said this - but it’s something - and I regard myself as reasonably au fait with Austrian economics - that I hadn’t heard before.  It’s importance lies in the way it explains why any form of funny money - whether in the form of central bank notes based on nothing or fractional reserve bank notes - er, also based on nothing - are so economically damaging - because they deceive people as to what precise resources they can command.

Or, to put it another way - you think you can build the Empire State Building but actually you can only build half of it.

But that’s only one example and “Meltdown” is full of them.  This really is genius.  To have produced a book that combines topicality, lucidity, and theory is a breathtaking achievement.  If Woods didn’t sweat blood writing this I don’t believe he’s entirely human.

I found this in The Times of 13 March 1906, a time when MPs didn’t so much as receive a salary let alone expenses.  A W.S.Lilly quotes J.S.Mill on the subject:

The occupation of a member of Parliament would thereupon become an occupation in itself, carried on, like other professions, with a view chiefly to its pecuniary returns, and under the demoralizing influences of an occupation essentially precarious.  It would become an object of desire to adventurers of a low class, and 658 persons in possession with ten or twenty times as many in expectancy, would be incessantly bidding to attract or retain the suffrages of electors by promising all things, honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivalling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices or the vulgarist part of the crowd.

Hmm…

The Fall of Rome v1.0 went something like this:

1. They created for themselves a welfare state (think: bread and circuses)

2. They went bankrupt

3. Gazillions of barbarians brushed past the army which hadn’t been paid and sacked the place.

It would appear that in the West we have met Condition 1, are about to meet Condition 2 and have the barbarians (I use the term in its literal rather than pejorative sense) for Condition 3 in the form of gazillions of actual and would-be immigrants.

Can anything be done about it?  Well, if the ideas of Mancur Olsen (I believe it’s pronounced Man-Sir) are to be believed, not much.  Now you understand I haven’t actually gone to the effort of actually reading anything Olsen wrote but I am reasonably familiar with his ideas.  Or, at least what I think are his ideas.  If they are not his ideas then there’s a good chance they are my ideas which is even better.  Anyway, his argument (or, at least what I think is his argument) is that over time societies introduce ever more layers of regulation creating ever more interest groups.  These laws and interest groups form a tight web that not only stiffles progress but is highly resistant to change.  The only way it can be changed is through the total collapse of the state as in the case of the Soviet Union or Rome.

It is not difficult to think of examples of the kind of thing he’s getting at.  I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be a reforming Transport Minister.  Let’s say I wanted to liberate the railways.  I might, for instance, want to close down loss-making lines but I would be greeted with howls of protest - not to mention the considerable bureaucratic obstacles in the way.  I might wish to end price control and would get much the same response.  If I wanted, heaven forfend, to allow train operators to own the tracks on which their trains ran, first the UK would have to leave the EU - which would mean repudiating a treaty. Big stuff.

And so on and so forth.  And that is just an area I know about.  It’s bound to be repeated right the way across government.

So, a collapse of the West seems inevitable.  But is it a bad thing?  The Dark Ages do not get a great write up but that’s mainly because they didn’t get any sort of write up (great or otherwise) at the time.  It is possible that it’s inhabitants were experiencing a land of milk and honey.  Certainly, it is one of the complaints that my immigrant colleagues make that the West constantly claims how free it is but you just try building yourself a house…

The litmus test will come when the barbarians try to feed themselves.  Given the complexity of modern agriculture with its technology, financial systems and distribution networks we can only hope they succeed.

Croziervision, bringing joy and light to the world since 2002.

Libertarians know lots about economics.

The Climate Change debate is made up of two parts: a scientific one - is it happening? if so, what’s causing it? etc - and an economic one - what should be done about it?

So, why is it that libertarians spend their entire time talking about the science and not the economics?

Let me put me like this.  If you could prove that all the statements about the science - that it is happening, that it is caused by humans, that it’s going to be truly catastrophic etc, - were true, wouldn’t that demand a heavy-duty libertarian approach?  Wouldn’t that demand a huge increase in human productivity and wouldn’t that in turn demand a massive scaling down of the unproductive/state-directed parts of the economy?

Frankly, if people were really taking climate change seriously can you imagine that such brakes on human progress such as the welfare state, the NHS, state education and the whole panoply of labour market regulations would last five minutes?

The government is about rack up a truly enormous debt. Which in the normal course of events we'll be paying off for years.

Wouldn't it just be easier for David Cameron to say that a future Conservative government won't pay it? Because if he said that right now (and loudly enough) no one in their right mind would buy the government's debt and the problem would disappear in an instant.

The only attack on Guido in recent days has been that although he broke the story it didn't become important until the MSM took it up.

Which is true.

But it begs the question. Why, assuming that Downing Street's email system wasn't hacked by Guido himself, did the leaker contact Guido? Why not go straight to the MSM? Maybe, he did, of course. But assuming he didn't the reason he contacted Guido was because he knew the story would be published.

Guido: the scandal sheet of last resort. And good thing too.

So, the News of the World runs an article claiming that Gordon Ramsay isn’t the saviour of failing restaurants that the TV claims he is.

So, a huge numbers of commenters, many apparently chefs themselves, come to Ramsay’s defence.

This partly comes from my reading of Murray Rothbard’s “The Mystery of Banking” and a comment I left on Brian Micklethwait’s blog.

Two ideas.  What money really is and what we have come to understand as money.  And the connection?  What we have come to know as money is a perversion of a perversion of that original idea.

The original idea is simple enough.  Money is metal.  Sometimes gold, sometimes silver.  Sometimes cigarettes (which is not a metal at all) but that’s another story.  The point is that a metal like gold is very useful as money: it’s scarce, it’s consistent, it’s durable, it’s divisible.  And that, at root, is all you need.

Until you try to use it that is.  Say, you’re selling Mars Bars and some bloke tries to buy one of your Mars Bars with a lump of yellow metal which he claims to be gold.  How do you know it is what he says it is?  How do you know it hasn’t been mixed with something else, something cheaper?  Sure, there are some tests you can carry out but you need equipment and that is likely to be expensive and bulky and time-consuming to use.  Not really the sort of thing you want to be having to take down to Tescos.

The answer to this verification problem is, of course, coinage.  You take your metal down to the mint, they weigh it, melt it down, add some alloy and stamp it out with some pretty, hard to reproduce pattern.  In other words they brand it, in just the same way that Cadbury’s brand bars of Dairy Milk.  And with much the same effect.  Now everyone knows what they are getting.

At which point we get the first perversion.  Enter the state.  For reasons that are not entirely clear the state has always claimed a monopoly on minting coins.  Roman emperors have their heads on the currency.  It is not difficult to see why.  States always need to raise money.  There are two ways to do this.  The first is taxation.  But taxation is a pain.  You need agents and sometimes people shoot these agents.  The second is inflation.  You take a coin, you melt it down, you add some base metal and you mint two new coins.  Bingo, you’re twice as rich.  And states have been doing this since time immemorial.

The next perversion comes with storage.  If you’ve got a lot of gold you don’t really want to keep it at home - someone might steal it.  So, you take it down to a secure store - known at the time as a goldsmith’s.  And in return you are given a receipt.  Now obviously this receipt is a rather valuable piece of paper, so it has to have many of the properties of a coin - hard to reproduce pattern etc.  The point is that if the receipt is good enough the bearer has a choice.  Yes, he can use it to redeem his gold, or, he can use it as money in its own right.  It is literally as good as gold.

At which point we get the second perversion.  The goldsmith realises that his receipt is now being accepted as money.  This means that year on year only a small portion of the gold in storage will ever be redeemed.  So, he decides to print up some new receipts and lend them out in the hope that there will never be a time when he has to redeem all the receipts (or notes) at once.  On the face of it this sounds like fraud - but your high street banks are doing this every day (or rather were until the credit crunch struck).

Actually, this is a bit of an aside because the really important thing is what happens next.  The government gets involved.  It starts issuing its own notes - in Britain this began with the Bank of England in the 1690s.  Then it bans anybody else from issuing their own.  First by banning the practice within 65 miles of London and then everywhere else.

Now, from the state’s point of view this is not a perfect solution.  The notes are still redeemable for something real - namely gold.  So, what they do is to suspend redemption in time of war eg Napoleonic Wars, First World War, on an apparently temporary basis and then progressively put up ever greater barriers to redemption.  In the 1920s when Britain went back on the gold standard the kicker was that normal everyday citizens could no longer redeem their notes.

And then, as they did in Britain in 1931, they break the link with metal entirely.  The perversion of money is complete.

The Professionals, ah yes, Bodie and Doyle, Bonehead and Foil, bubble perms, flares, dodgy leather jackets, Capris and RS2000s (thrashed).

A bit flash when it’s not totally brain dead. Not really our kind of show.

Well, over the last few weeks, with the aid of the repeats on ITV4, I’ve been able to reassess the bien pensant view of the 1970s cop/shy show.

And guess what?  I, and they, were wrong.  It’s brilliant.

Good plots, good characterisation, well acted, well scripted.  And brain dead?  Heck no.  This is a show that is constantly examining the dilemmas and ironies present in the exercise of state power.

The repeats have also provided a good opportunity to reassess the relative acting merits of Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw.

The general view is that of the two only Shaw was the proper actor.  Which is odd because it is Collins who nails his character right from the beginning while Shaw is constantly struggling.  In his defence Doyle - the heavy with a heart - was always going to be a struggle for actor and scriptwriter alike but still…

Anyway, time for those immortal opening titles:

Sometimes, when I am confronted by one of those thornier political issues I ask myself: "What would happen if there were no government?"

I mention this because that was the question I found myself asking the other day when listening to a radio discussion on civil liberties - specifically about what to do with terrorism. The discussion was between a "civil libertarian" on the one hand - all against snooping - and an authoritarian on the other - all in favour.

I found it a rather confusing debate because while I was in theory rooting for the civil libertarian - a bunch I've never particularly liked - I found myself agreeing far more with the authoritarian.

So, I asked the magic question. What would happen if there were no government?

Answer? Simple. Roads would be privately owned and road owners would have every incentive to ensure their roads were terrorist free. Therefore, they would simply ban anyone they suspected of harbouring terrorist sympathies - not unlike the way the Bluewater Shopping Centre banned hoodies a few years ago. My guess is that this would lead to some lookism plus and ad hoc system of passports and people vouching for one another.

But not a lot of snooping.

If you saw a line of dominoes falling over you wouldn't blame the second one would you? You'd blame the first. So, why, in the current Depression, is everyone blaming the banks?

Or let me put it another way. RBS, BoS, Barclays, Lloyds, they've all been around for a hell of a long time. Hundreds of years. They've always attracted greedy people - heck why else do people become bankers? And yet they've always survived. What's different about this time?

Now, I think the answer is the government's low interest policy but even if it's not it's got to be something big and unusual.

The baby boom.  That’s all the servicemen returning from the Second World War and starting families, causing a huge temporary surge in the population, right?

True, but there’s a bigger one.  Look:

The surge in the 1960s peaks at about the same level as the 1940s and is wider - meaning more people.

Just in case you were wondering, I took 1980 as the date because it shows the 60s boom and it’s before the post-War crowd started to die off in any significant numbers (cancer starts to kick in in the mid-50s).  I am assuming that deaths up to this point among the post-War Baby Boomers were largely confined to pop stars.

I, of course, am right bang in the middle of the Real Boom.  I do not expect to draw a state pension.

All this came from here.  Not the greatest source but I’d challenge even them to get this very wrong.

If Britain was the first country to recover from the Depression last time round, why is it that this time around the British government is seeking to emulate the policies of the United States which was last country to recover?

I’ve noticed that one of the accusations made by the government (and mentioned in this very excellent piece by Sean Gabb) is that those who oppose their (alleged) anti-slump policies would rather “do nothing.”

To which the reply I suppose is that if doing something means stealing from taxpayers, savers and future generations - which after all is what the government’s policies amount to - then “doing nothing” is indeed the better option.

Update The link should now be working.

John Mortimer, the charming leftie barrister/author, died a few days ago. I remember once (I think it was only the once) tuning into an edition of Wogan on which he was a guest. It was in the late 80s or perhaps early 90s - at least at a time when the early-90s recession was beginning to bite. At one point, he contrasted our then-current woes with the situation in the 1960s describing the 60s as a "Golden Age". At which point something happened which I have never seen before or since.

The audience howled at him.

I mean real rage. I mean real, right-wing rage aimed at a leftie.

Not exactly the sort of thing you'd ever get on Question Time.

I like the Austrian School of Economics. Its theories are simple, logical and almost completely avoid recourse to numbers.  And it also has the best explanation I have come across for the current Depression.

That explanation, incidentally, goes something like this: because interest rates were too low, the money supply increased, bubble activities were encouraged and resources were misallocated. The Depression is the process in which resources are re-allocated but this time to the correct activities.

This is fine as far as it goes.  It certainly goes a long way to explaining what happened in the US where they built too many houses.

But what about the UK?  Here building has pretty much been outlawed.  Sure, there’s been a bit of in-filling going on but was it really enough to cause the downturn?  So, where in the UK is the misallocation?  What activities have been going on in the UK that shouldn’t have been?  I am sure it has something to do with the housing bubble but although prices went up it is difficult to see how activity was altered from what it otherwise might have been.

Since writing those lines it occurs to me that the lack of infrastructure activities: new roads, better railways, power stations etc could be part of it.  They might not be bubble activities but they could well be the other side of the coin: things that should have been done but weren’t.  Also, the huge amount of activity directed by government especially into things like recycling and CO2 reduction.  That looks like a classic bubble activity.

So the Stealth-Taxer General is all of a sudden cutting taxes.  Did be perhaps take a walk in the general direction of Damascus?  Or did he instead read Taxation is Theft and think “How could I have been so stupid all this time?”

Well...no.  Gordon Brown is not someone who lies awake at night wondering if he could, you know, just possibly be wrong.

His problem is with the Depression and his attempts to avoid the unavoidable.

Assets are not worth what they once were.  So anyone who took out a loan on one of these assets is trying to pay it back as quickly as possible and cut their losses.  On the other side of the lending bargain banks are increasingly reluctant to lend.

All this will lead (for complex reasons) to a contraction of the money supply and, hence, deflation or falling prices.  Hooray, you might say.

Alas, modern-day politicians are slaves to the doctrine that deflation is bad.  So they are desperate to avoid it.  So they need to create inflation.  Under normal circumstances this is easy enough - reduce the rate the central banks charge the retail banks for money and let the money supply rip.

But the banks are increasingly reluctant to lend.  Even the ones partly owned by the Government.

So, we get tax cuts paid for by the printing presses which they hope will cause inflation.

There’s another side issue here. If you inflate your currency and on one else does then your exchange rate goes down like a stone.  So, what you need is for everyone to doing roughly the same thing at the same time.  It’s called co-ordination and is the principal reason for the calling of the G20.

Incidentally, I have grave doubts whether this will work on its own terms - it certainly won’t on anyone else’s.  My guess is that anyone given free money will simply put it in the bank.

Following on from yesterday’s posting on Ralph Raico’s article on Churchill, Professor Raico was kind enough to reply as follows:

There is no contradiction regarding the welfare state. The beginnings were in the early twentieth century, as set forth. The cradle-to-grave welfare state was initiated following World War II, also as set forth.  None of this is controversial among historians.

Neither is there a contradiction regarding the British empire. As a libertarian, I’m hostile to British imperialism. But Churcill wasn’t, to say the least. To the extent that participation in World War II contributed to the end of that empire, Churchill acted against his own deepest values.

Of course I did not say or imply that Churchill forced Hitler into implementing the holocaust. (You really should learn to read more carefully.) Again, it was a question of World War II, which, as Goebbels wrote, provided the necessary smokescreen.

The comment regarding the deaths of German civilians owing to the naval blockade is incoherent. Leaders of belligerent nations are morally required not to aim at the death of civilians.

Churchill’s embrace of Stalin during the war helped the Soviet Union to dominate Europe following the war.  Such dominance, however, did not mean that Stalin was aiming at limitless expansion or require a cold war.

David Irving’s earlier historical work was praised by Gordon Craig, among others. You might look up Fuller’s works in the catalog of the Library of Congress to get an idea why he is considered one of the great military historians of the twentieth century.

I am not really inclined to reply further as I think all it will achieve is the initiation of a flame war and flame wars are pretty pointless.  Suffice to say his comments leave me unmoved.

But I’d still like to hear from the commentariat. If you think I’m wrong then please tell me where and why.  And if you think I’m right then tell me that too.  I’m nothing if not vain.

Ralph Raico wrote an article attacking Churchill’s reputation.  I thought I’d enjoy reading it as I think Churchill’s reputation probably deserves to be attacked.  But I didn’t enjoy the article.  To be frank I thought it was rubbish and wrote a comment to that effect.  This is what I said:

I’m not very happy with this. Not because of any particular reverence for Churchill but because if his reputation is to be taken down a peg or two then it has to be done well. That means that criticisms have to be consistent and well-justified.

For instance, one criticism is that the Second World War allowed the creation of the Welfare State. But earlier on in the essay we have the criticism that Churchill helped create the Welfare State before the First World War. Well, which is it?

Another criticism is that Churchill helped destroy the British Empire. I thought libertarians were generally-speaking against empires. Or did I miss that memo?

Then there’s the complaint that Churchill was an opportunist. Well, golly, an opportunistic politician, who’d have thought it.

Then there is the whole issue of responsibility. Churchill is responsible for Churchill’s actions. Fine. But who is responsible for Hitler’s? Because the suggestion is made that Chuchill forced Hitler into starting the Holocaust. What god has walked among us? Exactly the same mistake is made when referring to the Blockade of Germany in the First World War - the claim being made that this led to the deaths of 800,000 civilians. OK, but what does that say about the Kaiser? If he had cared about his citizens he could have surrendered at any point. But he didn’t. And if the Kaiser didn’t care for the citizens of Germany why should Churchill have?

There is also the whole excursion into the “If Only” school of history. If only this one decision here had been different then all that nastiness could have been avoided. Maybe but equally, maybe not. Sometimes shit is going to happen no matter where you stand. Actually, not a bad metaphor for the 20th Century.

But really Churchill’s reputation rests on two questions: was he right to continue the war in 1940? and was he right to warn of the Soviet threat in 1946?

The latter should be fairly simple as throughout this essay the complaint is made that for most of the wartime years Churchill was being too soft on Russia. So, how he gets criticised when he sees the light in 1946 I just don’t understand.

On the question of the War there is, I believe, a reasonably respectable view that Britain should never have gone to war in 1939 and should have sought terms in 1940. It is possible that (uniquely) Hitler didn’t mean what he wrote about the United States in the Second Book and it is possible that alone among agreements he would have kept those he made with the UK. But what were the chances?

I think the author takes the pacifist view that all war and even self-defence is wrong. Maybe, but it’s a controversial view and I think has to be thoroughly justified every time it is aired.

I notice that Major-General J F C Fuller (member of the British Union of Fascists) and David Irving (Holocaust Denier) get a mention. You know, if I were going to mention either of these two I would do so with a health warning.

As I said, I think Churchill’s reputation deserves to be taken down a peg or two but this inconsistent scattergun approach riddled with inconsistencies is not the way to do it.

So I start off believing X, the article also makes the case for X but does it so badly I end up believing -X.  That’s quite an achievement.

Somebody has compiled a list of the 10 most irritating phrases and it would seem that I use almost all of them^*, “24/7”, which I guess makes me “fairly unique”.

I will make a defence of “I personally”.  A lot of the time in the media people are not speaking personally they are speaking collectively, in other words on behalf of organisations whether it be the government, business or pressure groups.  So, it is reasonable to make the distinction when the views you are expressing are genuinely your views and not those of the organisation you represent.

^* The one I don’t use is “With all due respect”.  No prizes for guessing why.

My thoughts about the current economic situation are so jumbled up I thought I’d do another podcast rather than attempt to write it all down.  I think it more or less works though at times it’s a bit incoherent.  The good thing is that I felt a lot better after recording it.

It cuts off rather dramatically at the end - in mid-sentence in fact.  Fortunately, that’s the middle of the very last sentence and the meaning is fairly clear.

Oh, this is a goody:

In a time of state-sponsored easy credit all projects get financed by incautious banks with cheap, centrally supplied money. There is no market for cautiously lent money, priced correctly for the risk involved. Why would anyone pay more for funds from a cautious bank when cheaper funds from an easier source are available?

This is why the profits of incautious banks grew, and why their stock prices multiplied.

Meanwhile careful bankers sunk. As Brown (and Greenspan) injected ever more money into the economy the cautious banks began to lose their customers, their managers, their share values, and their independence. This Darwinian extinction of caution is the direct result of a monetary environment which was hostile to cautious bankers; one which favoured those banks with an appetite for cheap money.

Paul Tustain, How Bullion Vault sees the credit crunch (email to Bullion Vault customers)

That is the best explanation I have heard so far as to why the money men went mad: the government made them.  And, yes, I am a customer of these people.

For some time I have been seeing the current crisis as a showdown between the Autrian and Chicago schools of pro-capitalist thought.  So, I was glad when a real economist attempted to explain the differences.

My money’s on the Austrians by the way.