Who cares?

The crisis of kindness in the NHS

by ALKA SEHGAL CUTHBERT

Created through the 2008 Health and Social Care Act, the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) is responsible for inspecting and regulating the provision of health and social services. In short, as its title suggests, it’s meant to ensure that the care on offer is of the highest quality. That, at least, is the idea.

Since the CQC became operational in 2009, however, the reality has been somewhat different. In fact, under the auspices of the CQC, the caring professions have stumbled from one scandal to another. In 2011, for instance, an undercover BBC Panorama team filmed carers shouting at, and slapping, elderly patients at the Winterbourne View care home. Earlier this year, the Francis Report into the high mortality rate at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust hospitals reported that 200 to 300 deaths between 2005 and 2009 may have been caused by negligence.  The report also uncovered appalling instances of neglect, from patients drinking water from vases to being left to lie in their own waste.

And now, following recent revelations that top-level CQC staff attempted to suppress the results of an investigation into the deaths of mothers and babies at Furness General Hospital, the CQC finds itself at the centre of a scandal.

Yet, the response to each scandal, even when it involves the regulator itself, has been uniform: a repeated call for more regulation and transparency in the healthcare sector.

Here are just a few of the latest proposals: establishing an Ofsted-style inspectorate for the medical profession; the publication of consultants’ success/failure rates on the NHS website; and the introduction of ‘new’ headboards on patients’ beds specifying a named nurse responsible for the particular patient and what the patient would like to be called.

The problem with such proposals is that they ignore the real problem here: the crisis of care itself.

Of Owls and Richard the Third

Shakespeare should have the last word

by Theodore Dalrymple 

By far the most important English King for me during my childhood was Richard III; or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Richard III; or, more accurately still, Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. The film captivated me when I was about 10, and I have subsequently found the malignity of evil always more fascinating, emotionally and intellectually, than the beneficence of good. Fictional or dramatic heroes have been to me ever since but pale and uninteresting shadows of villains. Heroes, in fact, tend to bore me as villains seldom do. And this is thanks to Richard III, in the special sense above.

When, therefore, I saw a biography of Richard III (Richard III: England’s Black Legend by Desmond Seward) in the window of a charity (thrift) shop near my home, together with a book about owls, I bought it. Not only did I buy it but I read it, and was somewhat surprised that, in effect, it endorsed the Shakespearian view of Richard’s character. Published on the 500th anniversary of Richard’s accession to or usurpation of the throne, Richard emerges as very much the unscrupulous, hypocritical, treacherous monster depicted in the play.

I believe this is no longer the orthodox view of him. The accusers are now the dissenters. And a friend of mine, who grew up in the Soviet Union and lived there until he was twenty-five, dislikes Shakespeare’s play because of its crude and seemingly propagandistic encomium to Henry VII, of the type to which his upbringing in the great motherland of ubiquitous and compulsory lies had made him allergic. Henry VII himself in truth was no mean slayer of his enemies, at least the equal of Richard III at his worst, but he was the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, reigning monarch when Shakespeare wrote. Queen Elizabeth’s title to the throne depended upon Henry VII’s, and his depended on the right of conquest rather than on any plausible claim by royal descent. That conquest could itself be justified only if Richard III were a bloody and tyrannical usurper of a quite unparalleled type; so that my friend sees the whole play as an elaborate apologia for a current political regime.

The irony here, of course, is that the objection to the play is itself highly political. The sycophantic message at its end – assuming that it was not justified by the historical facts, and that Henry VII did not ‘Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace,/ With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!’ – could hardly efface, neutralise or outweigh the poetic, dramatic and psychological brilliance of what had gone before. And it should be remembered that Shakespeare’s depiction of Queen Elizabeth’s father in Henry VIII is by no means flattering: though of course he was a mere continuator of the dynasty, not its founder, so the question of his character was perhaps less a sensitive matter despite his reign having been more recent.  

There is probably no finer portrayal of the intelligent, charming, plausible, unctuous, ruthless psychopath in literature than that of Richard:

What do I fear? myself? There’s none else by: Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.

The Fusing/Meeting of Extremes

Red Fascism

by Paul Austin Murphy
It’s interesting to note that it was probably anarchists, not the Right, who coined the term 'red fascism'. They did so when they realised that not only did the Far Left and the Nazis/fascists often behave in the same ways; but that they believed many of the same things too. This is not a surprise if you bear in mind the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, followed by Trotsky and other Communists/Trotskyists the world over, often fought and killed anarchists (e.g., at Petrograd/the Kronstadt rebellion/massacre, which Trotsky was largely responsible for). This particularly occurred during and after the Bolshevik Revolution and even during the Spanish Civil War. It was during that war - despite the Leftist hype about his activity in it - that George Orwell realised that the Left often behaved worse than the fascists they were fighting against and that they believed similar things too. Despite that, many Trotskyists have attempted to claim Orwell for themselves. Nonetheless, Orwell was never a Trotskyist and he soon realised that Trotskyists could be as violent and unscrupulous as the pro-Soviet Communists. Consequently, there is as little to connect Orwell’s socialism, or even his anarchism, with Trotskyism as there is to connect it with Stalinism.

The anarchist Emma Goldman summed up this often bogus distinction between Trotskyism and Stalinism (or between Trotsky and Stalin) as follows:

“In point of truth I see no marked difference between the two protagonists [Stalin and Trotsky] of the benevolent system of the dictatorship except that Leon Trotsky is no longer in power to enforce its blessings, and Josef Stalin is… I must, however, point out that Stalin did not come down as a gift from heaven to the hapless Russian people. He is merely continuing the Bolshevik traditions, even if in a more relentless manner.”

Perhaps Jurgen Habermas, the German sociologist and philosopher, belongs to this tradition of the anarchist critique of the Left.

Plainly, Habermas reacted against the frequent use of violence on the Left and instead emphasised 'rational discourse', democratic institutions and the reliance on 'conflict theory' to end political violence. Of course allied with that Leftist use of violence is its hatred of democracy and free speech; things which Habermas also noted. In fact, Habermas was an early user of the term 'left-fascism'.

The term ‘left-fascism' also refers to a Leftism that often contradicts or goes against the allegedly 'progressive ideals' which are supposed to motivate the Left generally. This can be shown by alliances with Islamists, misogynist and homophobic Muslims, support of terrorism and 'street violence', Jew-hatred and so on. 

Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the Law of Freedom

The Conservative Mind

by Bradley J. Birzer 

Sixty years ago, Russell Kirk (1918-1994) published his stunning and culturally and politically shattering work, his barely revised dissertation, The Conservative Mind.  Knopf had accepted it but the prestigious publishing firm wanted the relatively young author to pare the manuscript down significantly.  In response, Kirk submitted the full manuscript to the Chicago publishing firm founded only a few years earlier by Henry Regnery.  Arriving on bookshelves on May 11, 1953, The Conservative Mind enjoyed a popularity that stunned its author and its publisher.  Nearly every major newspaper, magazine, and journal in the English speaking world reviewed it, sometimes twice, and Kirk became nothing less than a major celebrity for the next decade.  Time magazine even went so far as to label the Michiganian one of the fifteen most important intellectuals in America.

It can be argued rather effectively that without Kirk and Hayek, the Goldwater movement could never have emerged in the fashion that it did in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s.  As almost every writing and scholar, regardless of political disposition, agrees, if Kirk is not THE founder of the post-war conservative movement, he is one of its most important architects.  Additionally, almost everyone agrees that The Conservative Mind gave creditability to the budding conservative and libertarian movements, post World War II.

Kirk’s literary output throughout his adult life is nothing short of astounding.  During the sixteen years prior to his marriage, 1948-1964, he published nine books of history and cultural criticism, his first novel, over four-hundred articles, twenty-six reference articles, sixty book reviews, seventeen book introductions, and ten short stories.  He also founded and edited two journals–Modern Age and the University Bookman–over the same time period.  Between 1962 and 1975, Kirk also wrote close to 3,000 syndicated newspaper columns.  Covering every topic imaginable—from the encouragement of defacing billboards to the condemnation of Barbra Streisand as a no-talent hack made popular only by massive corporate marketing—Kirk’s “To the Point” syndicated column reached millions of readers.  And, the record of publication does not cease here.  During his married years, 1965-1994, Kirk published fourteen books of cultural criticism and history, 408 articles, 32 original chapters in edited books, 182 book reviews, 2 novels, and 8 short stories.  Political scientist W. Wesley McDonald properly claims that “Russell Kirk has written more, it would be fair to say, than the ordinary American has read.”

A Meddlesome Foreign Policy Establishment

Changing the ways in which others live is impossible

by Angelo M. Codevilla    

The Egyptian people’s rejoicing over the armed forces’ overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s looming dictatorship was mixed with…anger at the American people – anger sure to trouble our relations with the Muslim world’s vital center; trouble which our foreign policy establishment richly earned by playing sorcerers’ apprentices in Egyptian politics. This meddling is neither new nor confined to Egypt. Breaking this half-century old destructive habit is essential to restoring our peaceful relations with the rest of mankind.

The Egyptian people have been mired in despotism and poverty since the 1950s. They might have done that all by themselves. But they did not. In 1953 our CIA helped a combination of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army to overthrow the country’s British-backed constitutional monarchy. Thereafter the Army, under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, jailed and hanged the Brotherhood’s leaders and set up a ruinous dictatorship. In 1956, when Nasser seized the Suez Canal (property of Britain and France), excluded Israel from it, and prepared war against it, the US government saved him from Britain’s, France’s, and Israel’s invasion. That meddling resulted in Egypt becoming an ally of the Soviet Union for a generation.

When, in 1975, Nasser’s military expelled the Soviets as their grip was tightening around them, the US government treated what was an act of self-preservation as if it had been a favor to America and began to subsidize the Egyptian military to the tune of some two billion dollars per annum. The military dictators – Anwar Sadat followed by Hosni Mubarak – repaid us by merely refraining from only the worst anti American excesses. They continued to ruin their country, while giving their people the impression that their policies were guided by America. As anti Americanism grew in Egypt, military dictators who were suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood’s domestic activities tacitly encouraged the Islamic extremists to focus their hatred on America.

Are We Egyptians?

No Denial: Once Americans, now Egyptians

by Ken Masugi

Was the anti-Morsi coup in Egypt justified on liberal and democratic grounds? The distinguished legal scholars Ilya Somin and Michael Rappaport agree that democracy cannot be defended on the ground of majority rule alone, and I add my voice to theirs but for different reasons. In making their respective critiques of Morsi, Rappaport emphasizes long-run majoritarianism and consensus; Somin the protection of classical liberal principles. Put them together and you get something close to the American founding but still not quite there. I would advance the arguments of Thomas Jefferson articulated in his First Inaugural Address that is crucial for understanding Egypt and, more important, our own democracy.

Confused reaction to the Egyptian coup (or attempted re-refounding) reveals that it is we Americans who are Egyptians, in an older sense. It is as though we were Jews who have become assimilated to Egypt (cf. Genesis 49-50) and lost our faith and our identity in foundational American political documents. Democracy cannot be identified with elections, but neither is it reducible to a set of classical liberal values.

As Rappaport puts it, “A single election can be thought of as democracy, but few thoughtful people would defend it as such.” This was precisely the situation that America found itself in following the establishment of the Constitution, the two terms of Washington, and the term of John Adams. The 1790s brought America close to civil war over regime issues—thus Jeffersonians denounced the Federalists as “monocrats,” crushing the States, favoring Britain, and erecting a monarchy.  Hamiltonians responding in kind by accusing the Republicans of being “mobocrats,” minions of the French Revolution’s terror, atheism, and despotism.  Over American politics loomed the horrors of the French Revolution. (By far the most penetrating thoughts are found in the significantly titled work by John Zvesper, Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics.)

Yet Jefferson described his election as “the revolution of 1800” (letter to Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819). For it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.” For the first time in modern history, the elected leaders of a government surrendered power merely because they were voted out of office. The election thus helped complete the words and deeds of 1776. Lincoln’s election in 1860 and his Civil War statesmanship represented another step toward a “more perfect union.”

The Divine Comedy And Islamic Philosophy

The Uncanonical Dante 

by Paul A. Cantor

The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments.

                                --   Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

The case of Dante provides an excellent opportunity to open up the question of the Western canon. In one sense, Dante is the perfect example of a canonical author. His name is one of the few certain to appear on anybody's short list of the truly central authors in the Western literary tradition. But in another sense Dante can be regarded as uncanonical. In his own day he was widely suspected of being heretical in his religious views, ¹ and a careful reading of his works does indeed raise serious doubts about his being the pillar of orthodoxy he is often taken to be today. ² Out of this interplay between the canonical and the noncanonical Dante, I hope to show that the issue of the Western canon is more complicated than either its defenders or its attackers generally present it.

In discussing the issue of the canon, it is important to sort out at the [End Page 138] beginning what we do and do not mean by the term. A canonical work may merely be a work that has been accepted into the literary canon, one that has become a touchstone in the reading and teaching of literature. But the term canonical can suggest something else, that the work is orthodox and somehow represents a central authoritative position in Western culture. The word canonical is so loaded with religious connotations that it is difficult to separate the relatively neutral first meaning of the term from the loaded second meaning. Dante is a case in point. When people refer to him as a canonical author, they usually do not simply mean that he is widely read and taught. Most discussions of Dante today treat him as representing an authoritative cultural moment in the Western tradition, as the supreme embodiment of the medieval mind. Viewed that way, Dante becomes an emblem of everything contemporary critics of the Western canon bitterly hate and reject. The reason they feel that they must attack authors like Dante and displace them from the center of literary study is that these authors have come to stand for orthodoxy and thus seem to enforce the hegemony of Western culture.

Critics who wish to champion various forms of non-Western culture have a particular axe to grind with canonical authors like Dante. The contemporary debate over the Western canon seems to be premised on a sharp opposition between Western and non-Western cultures, as if they were complete and irreconcilable antitheses, and even wholly unrelated. One of the principal charges against the Western canon is that it is Eurocentric, that it remains confined within a narrow orbit of European ideas and beliefs, thus excluding all other views of the world. A corrolary of the idea of Eurocentrism is the concept of Orientalism, developed by Edward Said. ³ Said argues that throughout its history, the Occident has defined itself in opposition to the Orient, basing its elevated self-image on a debased vision of the cultural Other. In Said's argument, the Occident views itself as rational as opposed to an irrational Orient, as emotionally disciplined in contrast to an emotionally uncontrolled Orient, and as masculine over against a feminine Orient.

What's Right with Malthus?

More than enough

by ROSS EMMETT

If . . . we come to the conclusion, not to interfere in any respect, but to leave every man to his own free choice, and responsible only to God for the evil he does . . . this is all I contend for.

                 —Thomas Robert Malthus

I am constantly surprised that defenders of liberty and free markets love to bash Thomas Robert Malthus.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but consider this: Robert Malthus (his friends called him “Bob”) was one of the primary interpreters of Adam Smith for the generation after Smith. Indeed, a lot of people who pick on “Thomas” Malthus get Bob Malthus wrong.

That’s not to say that Malthus was right about everything. But even more than Smith's, Malthus’s economics built upon the idea that all humans similarly respond to incentives, and he thereby rejected the idea of natural hierarchy. Writing in a country that had excessive restrictions on labor markets—take a look at the poor laws—Malthus was an advocate of free labor markets. And Malthus argued that private property rights, free markets, and an institution that would ensure that both parents were financially responsible for the children they bore (that is, marriage) were essential features of an advanced civilization.

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Are we talking about the Malthus who claimed back in 1798 in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population that population growth would decrease per capita well-being? Isn’t this the guy who argued that the combination of population growth and natural resource scarcity would create catastrophic consequences, including disease, starvation, and war, for much of the human race? And didn’t he miss the benefits of entrepreneurship and innovation, blinded as he was by the fallacy of land scarcity?”

That Malthus—let’s call this one “Tom”—is more a creature of the ideological opponents of markets than of Malthus’s own writings. So maybe we should revisit Malthus and see what he actually said.

It all begins with a thought experiment: What would happen to human population in the absence of any institutions?

The answer is the population principle, which is the only thing most people know about Malthus. And it’s largely correct. In the absence of institutions, humans are reduced to their biological basics. Like animals, humans share the necessity to eat and the passions that lead to procreation. To eat, humans must produce food. To procreate, humans must have sex. If there are no institutions, human population will behave like any animal population and increase to the limit of its ecology’s carrying capacity.

The biological model is simplistic; it treats humans as mere biological agents. It is this biological model that produces all the results people usually associate with Malthus’s name. And it’s not very far off from people’s conditions when their institutions have suddenly been disrupted by things like conquest, revolution, or war. (Consider the dual problems of war and drought that resulted in famine for Ethiopians in 1983–85, for example.)

The Missing Middle-Class Case

Yes, the middle-class has been disappearing, but they haven’t fallen into the lower-class, they’ve risen into the upper-class

By Mark J. Perry 

The chart above is based on Census Bureau data on “Money Income of Families–Percent Distribution by Income Level, in Constant (2009) Dollars” from 1967 to 2009 (Table 696) for the family income categories: a) $25,000 and under, b) $25,000 to $75,000 and c) $75,000 and over.

The chart and this post were inspired by a comment made by Ken on this CD post earlier today on middle-class incomes over time and the myth of middle-class stagnation. Ken points to Census Bureau Table 696 as evidence that the reason the middle-class appears to be “disappearing” is because that income group is actually “disappearing” or moving into the upper-class, and not falling into to the lower-class as is typically claimed.

Here’s what the family income distribution data in the chart above show:

1. In 1967, almost 62% of American families were earning between $25,000 and $75,000 in constant 2009 dollars, an income range that might accurately describe America’s “middle-class.” Also in that year, fewer than one out of six (16.3%) American families had income above $75,000 (upper-class), and 22% of families were earning $25,000 or less, an income category that might be described as “lower-class.” In 1967, there were almost four American families earning a middle-class income ($25,000 to $75,000) for every high-income family earning above $75,000.  Further, there were almost three “middle-income” families for every one “low-income family,” so the middle-class American families earning between $25,000 and $75,000 clearly represented a significant share of US families.

Here’s what happened over time:

2. The share of lower-income families fell over time by 4.2%, from 22% of all US families in 1967 to only 17.8% of all US families in 2009, while the share of middle-income families decreased by 18.6% during that period, from 61.8% in 1969 to 43.2% in 2009.  So where did those 22.8% of families go that disappeared from the lower-income and middle-income categories in the 42-year period between 1967 and 2009? They “disappeared” into the upper-income category of incomes above $75,000, which increased by 22.8%, from a 16.3% share of American families in 1967 to a 39.1% share in 2009. Whereas “middle-class” families were so numerous that they outnumbered “upper-class” families by ratio of almost 4:1 in 1967, so many American “middle-class” families have moved by the 2000s to the “upper-class” by income, that those two groups have been almost equally represented for their shares of the total number of US families over the last decade (see the convergence of the blue and red lines in the chart above).

Bottom Line: In other words, America’s “middle-class” did start largely disappearing in the 1970s, but it was because they were moving up to a higher-income category, not down into a lower-income category. And that movement was so significant that between 1967 and 2009, the share of American families earning incomes above $75,000 more than doubled, from 16.3% to 39.1%. On the previous CD post, Ken commented that although “Many prominent people like Paul Krugman claim that the middle class has been in decline since the 1970s, that assertion is incredibly and verifiably wrong.” And according to the percent distribution of family income data by income level (in constant dollars) in Table 696 from the Census Bureau, I think Ken is exactly right. 

The deposit illusion

No, Virginia, Nothing Is Really Risk Free

By Alex J. Pollock

It is impossible to make riskless deposits out of the inherently risky business of banking. But governments everywhere insist on trying to do it anyway.

The financial world confronts us with ineluctable uncertainty and risk. Its future is unknowable, not only for borrowers, lenders, and investors, but also for governments and central banks. No matter how hard anyone might try, risk cannot be made to disappear; it can only be moved around. 

People all over the world long for their bank deposits to be risk free. Governments attempt to satisfy this longing by creating deposit insurance and by bailing out depositors and other creditors of failed banks. Of course, as in Cyprus this year, the government itself may be broke. Historically speaking, this is a common occurrence: there have been more than 250 defaults on government debt since 1800, up to the notorious defaults by Argentina in 2002 and Greece in 2012, which gives us a long-term average of about one default on government debt per year.

Governments constantly strive to promote “confidence” in the banking system, whether or not such confidence is warranted. They wish to induce what we might call “deposit illusion” — that the safety of deposits is unrelated to the soundness of the banks’ assets. But the inescapable fact is that deposits fund banking assets, which are inherently very risky, and these assets are subject to periodic losses which are unexpected and of magnitudes previously not even thought possible.

The President’s Broken Window Fallacy

Carbon Policies and Jobs

By Benjamin Zycher

In my earlier essay discussing President Obama’s speech on climate change and “carbon pollution,” I noted the weakness of the evidence on the effects of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) and the poor predictive performance of climate models. I also noted the trivial prospective temperature effects of even draconian anti-carbon policies regardless of what one believes about the underlying climate science, and the obvious implication that wealth redistribution, essentially from red states to blue, is the real underlying goal motivating these policy proposals.

I turn now to some of the poor economic analysis in the speech, in particular the jobs promised as an ancillary benefit of costlier electricity, specifically in the form of complementary employment growth in the wind and solar power sectors. As Mr. Obama claimed: "And that means jobs… manufacturing the wind turbines [and] installing the solar panels…"

At a general level, employment created — that is, shifted — as a result of a government policy is a cost rather than a benefit for the economy as a whole, unless the policy improves resource allocation by, say, correcting for some sort of market inefficiency. (Whether or not government policies can be predicted systematically to improve the efficiency of resource use is the central focus of the vast public choice literature). As counterintuitive as that may seem, imagine that a federal policy had the effect of increasing the demand for high-quality steel. That clearly would be a benefit for steel producers, or more broadly, for owners of inputs in steel production, including steel workers. But for the economy as a whole, the need for additional high-quality steel in, say, an expanding wind-power sector would be an economic cost, as that steel (or the resources used to produce it) would not be available for use in other sectors. More generally, the creation of “green” jobs as a side effect of environmental (or carbon) policies is a benefit for the workers hired (or for those whose wages rise with increased market competition for their services). But for the economy as whole, that use of scarce labor is a cost because those workers no longer would be available for productive activity elsewhere.

The extreme weather scam exposed

The Show Must Go On

By Matt Ridley

WHEN the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about "extreme weather".

Part of the problem was that some time towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the Earth's average temperature just was not consistently rising any more, however many "adjustments" were made to the thermometer records, let alone rising anything like as rapidly as all the models demanded.

So those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people - egged on by journalists - have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice. (Scientists are the priests.)

The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. The long Australian drought of 2001-7, the Brisbane floods of 2009-10 and the angry summer of 2012-13 stand out in people's minds. People are reluctant to put them down to chance. Even here in mild England, people are always saying "I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year". One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. "I have never known it so average," I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.

Economics puts limits on people's utopias

The Economics Behind the U.S. Government's Unwinnable War on Drugs

By Benjamin Powell

The late Nobel Laureate James Buchanan was known to say, "Economics puts limits on people's utopias." Unfortunately, the advocates of the U.S. government's war on drugs have failed to appreciate the economics underlying the drug war that makes their utopian vision impossible to achieve through drug prohibition.

Although the Obama administration has softened the rhetoric of prior administrations by talking about treatment rather than an "enforcement-centric 'war on drugs' approach,"1 enforcement budgets remain large and penalties for distribution severe. As for legalization, the administration claims that "drug legalization also runs counter to a public health and safety approach to drug policy. The more Americans use drugs, the higher the health, safety, productivity, and criminal justice costs we all have to bear."2

Regarding violence, in a recent speech in Mexico, President Obama stated, "Much of the root cause of violence that's been happening here in Mexico... is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States."3 However, Mr. Obama failed to specify whether the cause of the violence is drugs per se or the fact that drugs are illegal.

Economics is a science of means and ends. Thus, the question for economics is whether the means—drug prohibition—is effective in promoting the ends of greater health, safety, and productivity, as well as lower violence and criminal justice costs.

The Economics of a Supply-Side War

Both the possession and distribution of illegal narcotics are criminally punishable. However, the penalties for distribution, whether street-level dealing or international smuggling, have always been much harsher than the punishments for possession. Possession—at least for marijuana—is becoming decriminalized in some states. Meanwhile, enforcement devoted to interdiction of imports and the breaking up of dealer networks continues. In short, while there are demand-side penalties, the U.S. government's war on drugs is primarily a supply-side war.

At its core, a supply-side drug war acts essentially like a tax placed on drug suppliers.4 It increases their cost of bringing drugs to market and, thus, decreases their willingness to supply drugs. The result, as in virtually any other market, will be higher prices and a smaller quantity supplied. The key question for whether a supply-side drug war can be won is whether the main effect is an increase in price or a decrease in quantity. If the drug war is to be effective, its main effect must be to decrease quantity rather than to increase price.

The amount of illegal drugs that people use is not very sensitive to price. Many addicts likely continue to consume close to the same quantity even in the face of large price increases. The demand for illegal drugs is what economists call "price inelastic."5 Figure 1 illustrates the effect of a supply-side drug war on an inelastic demand.

Figure 1. Effect of a supply-side drug war on an inelastic demand

The war on drugs shifts the supply of drugs from Supply (No Drug War) to Supply (Drug War) because of the increased difficulty of getting the drugs into the United States and then distributed to users. As a result, the benefit, in the eyes of the drug prohibitionists, is the decrease in consumption from Q1 to Q2.

Big Government Implodes

ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up

by John Henninger 
Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded.

July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog post that the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate would be delayed one year. Something about the "complexity of the requirements." The Fourth's fireworks couldn't hold a candle to the sound of the U.S. government finally hitting the wall.

Since at least 1789, America's conservatives and liberals have argued about the proper role of government. Home library shelves across the land splinter and creak beneath the weight of books arguing the case for individual liberty or for government-led social justice. World Wrestling smackdowns are nothing compared with Hayek vs. Rawls.

Maybe we have been listening to the wrong experts. Philosophers and pundits aren't going to tell us anything new about government. The one-year rollover of ObamaCare because of its "complexity" suggests it's time to call in the physicists, the people who study black holes and death stars. That's what the federal government looks like after expanding ever outward for the past 224 years.

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

Laughably, Barack Obama tried this week to align himself with the new age in a speech calling yet again for "smarter" government. It requires whatever lies on the far side of chutzpah to say this after passing a 1930s-style law that is both incomprehensible and simply won't work. ObamaCare is turning into pure gravity. Nothing moves.

On July 5, the administration announced into the holiday void that because of "operational barriers" to IRS oversight, individuals would be allowed to self-report their income to qualify for the law's subsidies.

If the ObamaCare meltdown were a one-off, the system could dismiss it as a legislative misfire and move on, as always. But ObamaCare's problems are not unique. Important parts of the federal government are breaking down almost simultaneously.

The National Security Agency has conservative philosophers upset that its surveillance program is ushering in Big Brother. What's more concretely frightening is that a dweeb like Edward Snowden could download the content of the NSA's computers onto a thumb drive and walk out of the world's "most secretive" agency. Here's the short answer: The NSA has 40,000 employees. (Some say it's as high as 55,000, but it's a secret.)

Echoing that, when the IRS's audits of conservative groups emerged, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing. Thus both the NSA and IRS are too big to avoid endangering the public.

The End of the Arab Spring

The coup is a disaster. The Arab peoples must now go back to square one.

By Brendan O’Neill

What has happened in Egypt is an unmitigated disaster. On two levels. It’s disastrous that an elected government, voted for by 52 per cent of Egyptians last year, has been ousted by a military voted for by no one, ever. And it’s disastrous that this violent sweeping aside of a democratic government by armed men, which was swiftly followed by massacres of those who dared to express support for the ousted government, has been hailed as a positive development by many Western observers. From the right to the left, from war-lovin’ Tony Blair to self-styled radicals, the coup has been embraced as not a coup at all, but as a glorious people’s sweep to power.

Many in the West are tying themselves in linguistic knots to try to avoid calling a coup a coup. The White House is refusing to use the c-word to describe the removal of Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian president up to 3 July, when he was deposed by his defence minister. Using that word has ‘significant consequences’, it said. ‘A coup, or something else?’, asked a headline in the New York Times. I know that paper is facing financial travails, but I didn’t know things were so bad it couldn’t afford a dictionary. The ridiculousness of some observers’ allergy to using the c-word was summed up in the opening para of that NYT piece: ‘[T]he generals removed the democratically elected president, put him in detention, arrested his allies and suspended the constitution. But was it a military coup d’etat?’ Ladies and gentleman, the world’s most prestigious newspaper.

The shamelessness of the coup cheerers disguised as devotees of democracy is extraordinary. So Mona Eltahawy, the American-Egyptian journalist who was turned by fawning Westerners into the poster girl of Egyptians’ uprising against dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, says baldly of recent events: ‘This is not a coup.’ It seems unaccountable military power is only a problem when it runs counter to Ms Eltahawy’s own interests, not when it’s wielded in the name of her and other Egyptians’ desire to force aside elected Morsi. Laurie Penny, darling of Britain’s collapsed middle-class Occupy movement, said on the day of the coup: ‘The Egyptian people have brought down Morsi.’ This is a commentator who thinks students being kettled by cops in Trafalgar Square for half an hour is a crime against humanity, yet apparently military men using fighter jets and tanks to yank the reins of power from an elected president and his supporters is perfectly okay.

We’re running out of water? Get a grip, greens

The eco-worriers excitably claiming the world is running dry should take a cold shower

by Rob Lyons

You may have heard of ‘peak oil’, the notion that the world has a finite supply of oil and at some point the amount coming out of the ground will start to decline. Then, we are assured by gloomy prognosticators, our oil-addicted civilisation will come to an end and we will need to create a new, low-impact society based on using less energy, exclusively generated from renewable sources like wind or solar. The party will soon be over, we’re told, with disastrous consequences – though it seems there are quite a few activists and commentators who would pop the cork on a bottle of sparkling elderflower wine if oil ran out and the shit really did hit the fan.

The trouble with the ‘peak oil’ hypothesis is that events keep proving it wrong. New, untapped fields are found, as happened recently off the coast of Brazil. More importantly, as oil prices rise, there’s a greater incentive to develop new technology. For example, in the US there are both shale gas and shale oil ‘revolutions’ in progress, where fracking techniques allow gas and oil trapped in rocks to be released. As Matt Ridley noted recently: ‘After falling for 30 years, US oil production rocketed upwards in the past three years. In 1995, the Bakken field was reckoned by the US Geological Survey to hold a trivial 151 million barrels of recoverable oil. In 2008, this was revised upwards to nearly four billion barrels; two months ago that number was doubled. It is a safe bet that it will be revised upwards again.’

We also get better at using the resources we’ve got. So cars have become more fuel-efficient, with the best diesel engines now requiring less fuel than trendy hybrid vehicles, like the Toyota Prius. When a resource is free or very cheap, we have little incentive to think about how best to use it; as it becomes more expensive, we either find more of it, use it more smartly, or replace it with something else - or, more likely, we do a combination of those three things.

Disappointed by the failure of the peak-oil disaster to come to fruition, our doom-mongering, Malthusian friends have alighted on other scary narratives to confirm their suspicions of humanity as a rapacious blight on the planet. Their latest is ‘peak water’.

Free speech dies in the land where it was born

Britain’s Muzzled Press

By Myles Harris

Amanda Knox, the young American who spent four years in an Italian jail for the alleged murder of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, recently published her memoirs. You may or may not think much of Knox, who was eventually acquitted of the murder charge, but you might like to know what could happen to your daughter if, when she was on holiday in Italy, she knocked somebody down in an accident and had to face time on remand in one of the country’s prisons. What it has to say about the Italian penal system is shocking. British readers, however, will not be able to read Knox’s book. It is to be published worldwide with the exception of the United Kingdom. The reason? Knox has already been the object of numerous libel actions in Italy, and, until recently, practically anybody could sue anybody for libel in Britain even if neither party had ever set foot on British soil.

For years, if a British libel lawyer felt he no longer liked the color of his Porsche, he simply had to find a client wanting to bring a libel action and could look forward to a car with a better hue. Unless the intended target was enormously rich, the case would never get to court. Like a visit from the Sopranos, a libel lawyer’s letter was an offer most people couldn’t refuse. In Britain, a defamation action could cost up to 140 times more than one in any other European state. Defendants had to settle or risk an action involving court costs in excess of $150,000 and, potentially, unlimited damages. 

Moreover unlike in America, British libel law places the onus of proof on the defendant, not the plaintiff. While national newspapers with pockets as deep as the Grand Canyon were willing to take on such a burden, practically anybody else who lived by the pen lived in terror of a writ. A single case could be sufficient to close a local newspaper or propel an individual into bankruptcy. Insurance premiums against libel were of the “catastrophic” variety.

Britain has never been an open society. We have no First Amendment and no constitutional right to bear arms. The church is not separate from the state nor the judiciary independent of the establishment. Elizabeth the Second is Chief Magistrate and Head of the Church of England. Guided by frightfully well-spoken men who read classics at Oxford or Cambridge—science degrees are seen as the province of mere mechanicals—and on the advice of her ministers, she appoints judges to put us in prison and bishops to order our consciences. Until recently these Gilbertian arrangements, a mixture of privilege, pomp, and common law, (since Britain has no written constitution our judges are able to make law on the hoof), ensured sufficient protection for ordinary folk. Libel, however, like fox hunting, remained exclusively a sport of the rich.