Cameron on Personal Freedom

“We’ll start by putting back in place the protections of personal freedom that Labour have taken away.

…

So we will make some important changes. The next Conservative government will revoke the unjustified and unreasonable powers that let people enter your home without your permission.

We will change the law that allows councils to snoop on people for trivial matters.

We will review the use of the Terrorism Act’s Section 44, and the stop and search powers contained within it.

We will change the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to strengthen the right to trial by jury.

And we will review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed and works both ways.” (Source)

Let’s remember that and remind him when the time comes …

The Great Depression that didn’t happen

From David Friedman:

“We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn’t happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it’s obviously the start of a depression.” (Source)

Communitarianism, Obama and The Economist

The Economist’s Lexington column  discusses ‘Obama hatred‘ and turns out to be summarily dismissive of Obama’s critics (see also here). Obama is arguably the USA’s first outspokenly communitarian president, so concern over this new brand of collectivism hardly belongs on the lunatic fringe.
One of the articles The Economist shruggs off is Quin Hillyer’s essay in the American Spectator titled “Il Duce, Redux?“. It makes some points similar to the ones this blog made about New Labour a while ago. Some arguments in this piece are indeed debatable: Obama’s economic interventionism, for example, can just as plausibly be attributed to a desparate attempt at fighting off depression as to an ideologically driven desire to rule the economy. Other points are harder to dismiss:
“Again and again, Obama has called not just for a change of policies, but to “change America” or

Boris Talks Sense on Trade and the G20

“… the near-collapse of the banking system, and the shortage of credit, has encouraged the big Western financial institutions to turn their backs on the developing world. Money is being sluiced back home, to Europe and America, with catastrophic consequences for anyone who wants to get a loan in, say, Nigeria. In these circumstances, it is doubly immoral and disgusting that we continue to restrict the access of the developing world to our markets, and that we continue to use huge sums of taxpayers’ money to dump our products on the Third World.” (source)

New Labour and the End of Innocence

Philip Johnston has some fitting comments on Labour’s decade of legislative diarrhoea:

“We know there has been a tidal wave of legislation, but it is mind-boggling to discover the size of the tsunami. It is estimated that more than 3,600 new offences have been created. But even more astonishing, as Baroness Stern, a crossbench peer, discovered when she asked, is the number of these that can result in a prison sentence. Believe it or not, there are 1,036 that the official could identify. There may well be more.

It is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison

Internet Regulation: Think of the Children!

New Labour seems to be serious about starting to regulate the net more generally rather than in specific cases where real or imagined criminal activity is an issue. The latest idea is an enforced age labelling of websites. As usual, a need to protect the children is at the forefront of justifying government interference. For once, I think the welfare of our children is a genuinely relevant issue, though not in the way that the government has in mind.

The age rating proposed may not sound much like an exercise in censorship

Euro-Feminism: an initiative for centralised social engineering

Der Spiegel, a German weekly, reports that French feminist Gisèle Halimi proposes a rule for centralised feminist legislation in the European Union. A team of researchers has worked under her direction to identify the most pro-feminist examples of legislation in a number of EU countries. Her proposal: all EU countries should be forced to adopt those laws flagged up on her feminist wish list.

Thus all countries would have to adopt

The Economist on the ‘Idealism of the Lynch Mob’

“… it is not always the worst or most culpable people who are targeted for blame or offered up to appease it; it is sometimes the weakest and most expendable instead. And too often the blamers are cynically opportunistic. The Baby P case has instantly been adduced as “proof” that the welfare state, or local councils, or unorthodox family arrangements, are hopelessly delinquent. (Oddly, some of those now crying out for the government to engineer families and emasculate councils have, in the past, demanded that the government be less intrusive and nannying, and that Whitehall give more power away.)

Nanny State vs. Welfare State

Reporting on Alan Bennett’s decision to donate his personal archives to Oxford University Library, the Economist quotes Bennett with the following words: ““I felt in a way it’s a recompense for the education I was given,” the writer told The Economist. “I went to a state school in Leeds. I went to Oxford on a scholarship. I benefited at every stage from the nanny state, as it is disparagingly called. It would be unimaginable now to be a student and free of money worries. But I was lucky in my time and I’m grateful to be nannied.”” (source)

Bennett seems to equate the nanny state with the welfare state –is this correct?

EU Commissioner: Smoking Bans not Draconian Enough

EU Commissioner Vladimir Špidla seems to be upset that not all member states are as draconian as the UK in implementing the smoking ban:

“Smoking bans currently differ widely across the EU. While Ireland was the first EU country to make its pubs and restaurants smoke-free, puffing cigarettes is still allowed in some pubs in Germany and Belgium. And smoking is still common in both bars and restaurants in central and Eastern European countries like Hungary and Romania.” (source)

Clearly, such differences can’t be tolerated. This would be bordering on subsidiarity.