Do you see a pattern ?

The Age of consent around the world

This table should only be used as general guide - please also read the notes at the bottom of this page.

Country		Male-Female Sex	Male-Male Sex	Female-Female Sex
Afghanistan		18/Married	Illegal	Illegal
Albania		14	14	14
Algeria		16	Illegal	Legal
American Samoa		15?	15?	15?
Andorra		16	16	16
Angola		12/15	Illegal	Illegal
Antigua and Barbuda		16	16	16
Argentina		13/16	13/16	13/16
Armenia		16	16	16
Aruba		16	16	16
Australia	ACT	16	16	16
Australia	NSW & Norfolk Is.	16	16	16
Australia	NT	16	16	16
Australia	Queensland1	16/18	18	16
Australia	SA	17	17	17
Australia	Tasmania	17	17	17
Australia	Victoria	16	16	16
Australia	WA	16	16	16
Austria2		14/16	14/16	14/16
Azerbaijan		16	16	16
Bahamas		16	18	18
Bahrain		16/Married	Legal	Legal
Bangladesh		?	Illegal	Illegal
Barbados		18 (but 16 if married)	Illegal	Illegal
Belarus		16/18	16	16
Belgium		16	16	16
Belize		16	Illegal	Legal
Bermuda		16	18	16
Benin		?	Legal	Legal
Bhutan		18	Illegal	Illegal
Bolivia		14f/16m(must be married)	16	16
Bosnia		16	16	16
Botswana		16f/14m	Illegal	Illegal
Brazil3		14/18	14/18	14/18
Brunei		16/18	Illegal	Legal
Bulgaria		14	14	14
Burkina Faso		13	13	13
Burma/Myanmar		16/18	Illegal	Legal
Burundi		18	Illegal	Illegal
Cambodia (Kampuchea)		16	?	?

No bumping for the bumper cars

Advance, Britannia! Er, Strike That. Drive Slowly Around in Circles, Britannia!

"When Sir Billy Butlin introduced bumper cars to Britain more than 80 years ago, it can be assumed he expected holiday makers to have fun on the fairground ride bumping into each other."

By Daniel Foster   

No bumping in the bumper cars:

Staff at all three Butlin resorts in Bognor Regis, Minehead and Skegness are instructed to ban anyone found guilty of bumping into each other in the electric cars equipped with huge bumpers.

Bemused customers who assume that the ‘no bumping sign’ is in jest are told to drive around slowly in circles rather than crash into anyone else for fear of an injury that could result in the resort being sued.

Telegraph columnist Michaal Deacon, who has just returned from a holiday at the Bognor Regis resort, said the experience was like “trundling round an exitless roundabout”.

“I’m not convinced that the dangers were great, given that the bumper cars were equipped with bumpers,” he said. “Seat belts, too. There were no airbags for the drivers, but it can be only a matter of time.”

among these "... rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

In Honor of Jack Kevorkian

By Tibor R. Machan

Jack Kevorkian died. He was unjustly demonized for standing up for the right to assisted suicide, often referred to as Dr. Death. But he also had a movie made about him recently, starring Al Pacino, titled “I knew Jack.”

Dr. Kevorkian’s case epitomizes the radical difference between American conservatives and American classical liberals. American conservatism, by all rights, ought always to include a radical dimension, one that guided the pen of Thomas Jefferson as he composed the Declaration of Independence, but too many conservatives fail to see this. One of the central, if not the central, principles of this document is that everyone has the right to life, simply be virtue of being human. Among the rights that the founders held to be self-evident–for purposes of the Declaration, to be precise–is the right to one’s life. As the Declaration put it, “all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

No sophistry can obscure the fact that by the lights of the American founders everyone has a natural right to his or her life. This means that what one does about one’s life–cultivate it, wastes it, sacrifices it for a cause, develops it, etc.–must be one’s own choice. (It is not whether it is right to do something that is up to one but whether to do it!) Having a right means just that: he or she who has it has a sphere of personal authority or jurisdiction wherein what one does, provided it doesn’t violate another’s rights, is one’s own decision, be this a sound or unsound, a good or bad decision.

The paradox of sovereignty

Government by the ‘experts’

 

“The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. . . . The power of the legislative, being derived from the people . . . [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators.”

                                     “Second Treatise of Government”

— John Locke

Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

The point of PPACA is cost containment. This supposedly depends on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, which is a perfect expression of the progressive mind, is to be composed of 15 presidential appointees empowered to reduce Medicare spending — which is 13 percent of federal spending — to certain stipulated targets. IPAB is to do this by making “proposals” or “recommendations” to limit costs by limiting reimbursements to doctors. This, inevitably, will limit available treatments — and access to care when physicians leave the Medicare system.

The PPACA repeatedly refers to any IPAB proposal as a “legislative proposal” and speaks of “the legislation introduced” by the IPAB. Each proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes — with a three-fifths supermajority required in the Senate — a measure cutting medical spending as much as the IPAB proposal would.

This is a travesty of constitutional lawmaking: An executive branch agency makes laws unless Congress enacts legislation to achieve the executive agency’s aim.

The most dangerous theory of our time

The Trojan Horse of 'Happiness Research'

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo 

A very large literature has built up over the past several decades in the area of so-called "happiness research." Such research is based on several very dubious assumptions: namely, that utility is cardinal and measurable after all; that interpersonal utility comparisons can therefore be made; and that the great unicorn of economic theory – the "social welfare function" – has finally been spotted. Armed with these assertions, socialists around the world believe they have finally discovered their holy grail. Now that governments supposedly know with "scientific certainty" what constitutes "happiness," there can be no argument (or so they think) against virtually unlimited government intervention in the name of creating happiness.

Affluence is actually a disease that generates massive unhappiness, says the Australian author of a popular book in this field, entitled Affluenza. The government of Brazil is in the process of enshrining this notion into its constitution, and similar movements exist in Great Britain and other countries.

These assumptions rest on the proclamation that public-opinion surveys are sufficient measures of cardinal utility. The economists who make such assumptions studiously ignore all of the reasons why economists have disavowed such practices – especially the notion of demonstrated preference – for generations. As Murray Rothbard explained in his essay, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,"

The concept of demonstrated preference is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man's preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale. ... This concept of preference, rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis.

Rothbard continued to explain the folly of relying on public opinion surveys, as opposed to the actual demonstrated preferences of economic decision makers:

One of the most absurd procedures based on a constancy assumption [i.e., the false assumption that people never alter their preferences] has been the attempt to arrive at a consumer's preference scale not through observed real action, but through quizzing him by questionnaires. In vacuo, a few consumers are questioned at length on which abstract bundle of commodities they would prefer to another abstract bundle, and so on. Not only does this suffer from the constancy error, no assurance can be attached to the mere questioning of people when they are not confronted with the choices in actual practice. Not only will a person's valuation differ when talking about them from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth.