'Nother Solent

"Railtrack was not our baby,"

says Patrick Crozier, referring to all this.

When writing about Railtrack I feel rather like Lord Palmerston on the Schleswig-Holstein issue who said something like: “There are only three people in Europe who understand it. Of those, one is dead, one has gone mad and the other has forgotten it.”

To be blunt the whole history of rail “privatisation” is so fiendishly complicated and compromised that to discuss the death of Railtrack in isolation is close to pointless.

To my mind, the question that really matters is: is Railtrack an institution that free marketeers should seek to defend? Was it our baby? Should we take responsibility? My answer is no.

Let me explain. I am a libertarian. I believe in freedom. I want to see as little coercion in this world as possible. I want that principle applied to individuals and their property and to businesses and their property.

To that extent I believe that a business should be able to decide who it sells to, how much it sells and at what price. I believe the same freedoms should apply when it comes to buying from suppliers I believe it should be able acquire businesses in the same industry and (should the fancy take it) completely different industries.

But Railtrack couldn’t do any of these things.

Read the whole thing.

Patrick also says my wish is his command, which is convenient for me (you never know, I might want a dragon slain one day), but not terribly libertarian. If I command him to put the newest posts at the top like every other bleedin' blog in the world are you listening boyo, will he obey?

Objectively pro-starvation.

If you care about your fellow human beings, and particularly if you are a Christian who wants to obey Jesus's commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, don't give money to Christian Aid.

When the nice lady comes round to collect the envelope, say why. I'm not suggesting that you be rude - look, I was once a collector for Christian Aid myself - but gently let her know that you don't want any more people to die unnecessarily. If you can't face getting into a debate about how in 1957 the per capita GDP of Ghana was above that of South Korea but look at them now, or asking her why she wants people who are already struggling to have to pay more for their food or their desperately-needed fridge than they do now (for that is what giving poor countries "the freedom to protect their farmers and infant industries" means), then just say, "I prefer to give to charities that don't spend so much on political campaigning." Trust me, that's a conversation-ender that works.

Please. I'm begging you.

The advertisement placed by the "charity" in today's Guardian reads:

It's not called slavery nowadays. It's called free trade.

Case histories illustrating principles of economics

rarely move me much, but Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog has written an account of the effects of the minimum wage on his campsite business that is genuinely sad. He doesn't want to be, but he is being pushed into becoming more like the faceless capitalist of popular legend.

His company's special relationship with its elderly workers wouldn't survive laws against age discrimination either.

Why can't the busybodies let people make their own decisions?

(Via several different blogs. Just one of those posts the good Lord wants you to read.)

"I'm not usually interested in royalty, but this is too good to let be."

Squander Two defends the right of Prince Charles to slag off the press.

So the blackmailers don't even have the decency always to respect their side of the bargain, yet still complain about how their blackmailees are reluctant (reluctant! — oh, how simply awful), and are all in a tizzy because it's turned out that at least one of the royals can't stand them. Here's a question for Jenny Bond: can you think of any reason why Prince Charles or any other member of his family would like reporters? What things do you do that might make him happy?

As he says, royalty correspondents perform a thoroughly unimportant function:

The sham is that this gets reported as if it's news: Prince Charles Goes On Skiing Holiday At Same Location And Same Time As In Every Previous Year.

The phenomenon of monarchy is frequently interesting, what royals do rarely. You could say that I'm interested in royalty but not Royalty. Or possibly Royalty not royalty.

Another thing. It's becoming clear that there is scarcely any human being on Earth whose marriage can stand up to the sustained attention of the world's press.

While trying

to goad Patrick Crozier, late of Transport Blog to comment on the post linked to below, I discovered the most important economics post in the history of time.

Who killed Cock Robin?

"I," said the sparrow,

"With my little bow and arrow,

I killed Cock Robin,"

Who saw him die?

"I," said the fly,

"With my little eye,

I saw him die."

Who caught his blood?

"I," said the fish,

"With my little dish,

I caught his blood."

And just to keep you singing along, Cock Robin killed Railtrack.

This election could be stolen

says the Times. That seems unlikely to me. What seems almost certain is that we will see enormous fraud and enormous resentment when people think (sometimes truly) that their particular seat has been won by fraud. This resentment will have a racial component. Those who think they have been defrauded will turn to fraud themselves. We will also see more of this:

Mr Mawrey himself was obstructed by the Labour Party at every turn. A lone star, he has had to pick his way through scenes that would have astonished a sheriff in a frontier town. The councillors found by police in the warehouse at midnight on the eve of the election in Birmingham’s Aston ward, surrounded by unsealed postal ballots; the box containing postal votes all in the same hand and same ink, and all for Labour; witnesses refusing to give evidence fearing for their children’s lives; a lawless Wild West in which the number of postal ballots had mushroomed from 24,000 to 70,000 in one year.

And this

The first casualties of this disastrous policy have been Asian voters, particularly women. Not only those who have had their votes stolen before they have had a chance to fill them out; but also those who have come under enormous pressure from their families to fill out postal votes in a certain way. A Bangladeshi woman asked the indefatigable Times reporter Dominic Kennedy why she could not vote in the privacy of the polling booth because “everyone could tell you how to vote, but you could decide for yourself on the day”. We didn’t fight to enfranchise women to see their voices silenced by some PR man’s vision of higher turnout and electoral convenience.

We had something precious: relatively clean elections. It has been thrown away. Part of the tragedy is that even the necessary action - banning postal votes for all but the sick, and obliging even them to register separately for every election - will not entirely restore the status quo ante. A bad cultural shift will have taken place.

Can Canada

still be considered a free country? Tim Worstall has some unexpected comments on the case of the US blogger banned in Canada. But, in a quite separate post, he asks, "Can Britain still be considered a free country?"

Vote fraud latest.

Over at Biased BBC I have posted about the recent ruling by a judge that elections must be held again for six Birmingham local council seats following massive postal vote fraud. My B-BBC post concentrates on the BBC's reluctance to deal with the fact that all the councillors unseated are Labour, and, even more of a hot potato, ethnically Asian and (judging from their names) Muslims. Here I will say, all praise to a judge who does not mince words:

Judge Mawrey said evidence of "massive, systematic and organised fraud" in the campaign had made a mockery of the election and ruled that not less than 1,500 votes had been cast fraudulently in the city.

The deputy high court judge said the system was "hopelessly insecure" and expressed regret that recent warnings about the failings had been dismissed by the government as "scaremongering".

One book to rule them all...

Regarding the previous post, JEM writes:

I'd settle for just one: my PowerBook complete with (satellite?) broadband. And a (solar?) power supply.

And Google, of course.