Students for Freedom

I think that headline pretty much says it all.  California has one of the world’s worst overcrowding problems in its prisons, with facilities running at twice intended maximum capacity.  As a result:

Federal judges on Monday tentatively ordered California to release tens of thousands of inmates, up to a third of all prisoners, in the next three years to stop dangerous overcrowding. As many as 57,000 could be let go if the current population were cut by the maximum percentage considered by a three-judge panel.  Judges said the move could be done without threatening public safety — and might improve a public safety hazard.

Holy crap.  They want to release fifty-seven *thousand* prisoners?  That’s approximately the entire prison population of the UK.  Released.  Anyone that thinks that will eradicate a public safety hazard is insane.  After all, what about the rights of innocent people?

A lot of people that use that very line will also say that prisoners have no rights, that they’re scum that deserve to rot in overcrowded dungeons, and all that nonsense.  They’re human beings, ergo, they have rights.  People are locked up to stop them harming the public and to provide a disincentive to abuse others’ rights, but that disincentive surely cannot involve shoving them into modern Black Holes of Calcutta.  Thus, it is right to ensure that prisoners are kept in reasonable conditions.

But the ‘rights of the innocent people’ is still the key factor.  Not innocent people threatened by swarms of prisoners released onto the streets, but the innocents that are currently rotting in California’s sardine-can jails.  California is the leader in the US, and therefore the world, in locking up innocent people.  I am talking, of course, about drug users.

I don’t really want to rehash the arguments about drugs (geddit?).  If you think treating like a criminal someone that consumes something oneself, of one’s one volition, that one has bought oneself, without harming anyone else, is correct, you have a very different idea of ‘freedom’ to me, philosophers, or the dictionary.

California has 30,000 prisoners incarcerated for non-violent drug-related ‘offences’.  Probably the same again are imprisoned for violent offences related to the drugs trade that one suspects would not be committed if that trade were legalised and done by more upstanding drugs gangs, like GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, or Pfizer.  If the Constitution says California has to reduce its prison population by 57,000, there’s a pretty simple way of doing that.

But, of course, they won’t be the ones that will be released.  Under its absurd so-called ‘War on Drugs’ - which, like all wars, is actually waged against people, not an abstract noun - both the US government and ours treat drug users as scum.  They will not be first on the list of people to be released just because they’re harmless.  In fact, they will probably be the last to be released.  The first will be the true criminals: the street criminals that terrorise South Central LA to the home invaders of Oakland.  Coming to a home near you.  Maybe even yours.

California’s voters had a chance to free 18,000 of their falsely-imprisoned fellow citizens in November under Proposition 5: the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act.  Going against the tide of the rest of the country, they rejected it by 60% to 40%.  One can’t help but feel that, if they were presciently aware, or perhaps just not so myopic not to realise, that judges would rule that they had a choice between letting out 18,000 non-violent people and letting out 57,000 violent offenders, they’d have voted differently.

Britain and America waste too much taxpayers’ money, tens of billions a year, fighting a losing moralistic crusade against people that simply have a different hobby to the ruling elite.  Now, with 57,000 real criminals about to hit the streets because of it, it’s time once again to ask: can this insanity really continue?

Listening to BBC Five Live just after Iain Dale’s appearance in defence of Twitter, and hearing Dr Alan Maryon-Davis, President of the UK Faculty of Public Health, defend his ridiculous article ‘Why we need more nannying‘:

Is the government ‘nannying’ us too much? Is it trying too hard to micro-manage our health? I say firmly - no. … On the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence that people want to see the government doing more to help us avoid big killers like heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Of course, if you ask people a suitable question - “Do you want to regulate smoking more heavily?” - people will say (firmly) yes!  Why?  Because most people don’t smoke.  The same applies for almost any activity one can name. Tyranny of the majority is no defence.  In totality, most people oppose the nanny state - hence it becoming a pejorative term.  I thought that was obvious.

But the doctor went on in his radio address from the People’s Broadcaster:

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a libertarian.  But we accept rules about seatbelts.  We accept rules about driving with mobile phones … Perhaps we should think about banning [smoking with kids in the car].  Some people would suggest we should ban smoking in cars altogether. … I wouldn’t want us to be overly health-and-safety and the rest of it gone mad.  I just think we should think about this, about the regulations and laws, that allow people to make the good choices, the healthy choices.

We already allow people to make the ‘good’ choices.  It’s called ‘not banning lettuce’.  People aren’t stupid enough to think that lettuce isn’t good for them.  They just decide not to eat it because the pros do not outnumber the cons.  Those pros and cons are inherent to the nature of lettuce, and nothing can change that.  Maryon-Davis’s argument thus falls apart.

The best way to create a happy, healthy society, is to incentivise good health.  That requires an end to the absurdity of ‘unlimited, unconditional healthcare, free at the point of use’.  Just as guaranteeing bank deposits incentivises risky lending, guaranteeing good health incentivises risky lifestyle choices.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but, as a doctor, I thought Maryon-Davis would recognise the words of Hippocrates: “First do no harm”.

Until he puts that principle first, and advocates truly sorting out our healthcare crisis, I’ll thank Maryon-Davis for not bad-mouthing the movement by association.

The NUS advertises for a new regional organiser for the South West in the best place to find well-paid non-jobs: GuardianJobs.

£29k AND a car?! Compare that to the average university lecturer, who earns £31,840 a year, and obviously no car (duh!).  For the £29k of students’ and universities’ money that the NUS is throwing at its representatives, universities could pay for 700 hours of teaching at that pay grade at the suggested £41.23 an hour.  Each of my eight courses has 100 or so students, and has forty hours of ‘teacher-student interface’ time a year.  That is to say, for the cost of the NUS hiring a regional coordinator to peddle its trash to the South West of England, 219 more students could have been taught for a year.

Thanks for standing up for students’ interests once again, NUS!

Simon Heffer has chastised David Cameron for using the term ‘moral capitalism’ in his speech at Davos:

My first thought was the quizzical one about Mr Cameron’s speaking on this subject in the first place. In pure terms it is a tautology. Capitalism is deeply moral and hardly needs the adjective to qualify it. It is moral because it is about the exercise of free will between buyers and sellers: and few things can be more moral than allowing someone to be free. Capitalism is about the link between effort and reward. It is about the creation of wealth according to the quality of one’s enterprise. Without wealth creation there is no scope for the taxation that enables the functions society deems moral: a welfare state, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of law and order. So anybody who feels he needs to make a speech about capitalism while qualifying it in this way at once raises the suspicion that he is being in some degree specious.

He is correct to criticise the terminology.

Simply, capitalism is the free exchange of goods or services with another individual.  The only legal transactions are those to which all parties involved consent: and all such transactions are legal.  Exploitation and slavery are illegal: if you don’t like the other party’s offer, you can always reject it.  Thus, as a system devoid of immorality, it is inherently moral.  That’s why we support it: and why we applaud the work of the SOAS Capitalist Society to promote capitalism as morality on campus.

The problem is that people, including Heffer in the passage quoted above, often use inferior arguments for capitalism.  They say that it is proven to be the most efficient system (which it is: proven by Kenneth Arrow).  They say that it is the most productive system (which it is: proven by Ludwig von Mises).  They say that it leads intrinsically to democracy (which it does: proven by Friedrich Hayek).  But these arguments are all flawed in that they are complex.  One cannot sit down the public and make them read the Planning in the Socialist Commonwealth, the Road to Serfdom, and hardly expect them to read Arrow and Debreu’s 1954 article on competitive equilibria, no matter how important its conclusions!

We can, however, talk about consensus.  Everyone wants consensus, but think that it is unobtainable, yet capitalism works only by consensus.  That is the key to promoting capitalism as moral.  Not by apologising for capitalism, and then butchering, ruining, dominating capitalism by government until consensus is dead.  That undermines the source of its morality: and is exactly what our leaders are trying to do to us.  No matter what happens, capitalism must survive, and that relies upon people perceiving it as moral.

Not before time, the King’s College London ‘occupation’ in support of Hamas has collapsed. A statement from the college’s Principal states:

Senior colleagues and I are pleased that the recent occupation of a lecture room has now come to an end … I very much regret any distress that has been felt by any part of our diverse College community, in which naturally there is considerable variety of opinion on these matters. I do hope that the College can continue to debate the issues of the day in a balanced and constructive manner. As an international place of learning with a long tradition of expertise in international relations, we have a duty to do so.

I joined the King’s Jewish Society, protesting outside King’s on Friday against the rise in anti-semitism on campus.  They don’t have a corporate view on Gaza or the King’s ‘occupation’, but they do on anti-semitism: and that has skyrocketed since the start of the ‘occupation’.  When asked to make a statement against anti-semitic violence or threats, the leaders of the protest refused.  That says most things you need to know about the protest.

However, no act is illegitimate by its definition alone. It can be immoral, of course, and I think this is for the above reasons. But it does not become illegitimate because it is illegal. What is illegitimate is if, by the act of protesting, one extracts a concession that absolves one of responsibility for the protest. That was one of the terms set by the ‘occupation’, and one which King’s administration has conceded.

The occupiers have compared themselves to modern-day suffragettes or Gandhis (well, the abhorrent misspelling “Ghandis” - so much for respecting other cultures!).  Those comparisons are patently risible.  When the suffragettes broke the law, they expected to go to prison.  When they went on hunger strike, they expected to die.  When Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse, she didn’t expect to bear no consequences.  They, cowards as they were for waging war against innocents, still bore the responsibility for it.

These people do not.  The college may well have decided to concede to the demands of the occupation, as outrageous as I think that would have been.  But they should also have thrown the book at the protestors by enforcing their own rules: including expelling the ring-leaders.  By reducing the cost of protesting to nothing, by absolving the protestors of fault, it bears the moral hazard of precipitating far more simple protests.  The only way that coercive protest can be limited to only the most heinous of issues is by enforcing the rules.  The law may be an ass, but it must be enforced as such.

In case you’ve reverted to ignoring the news recently under the principle that “if you can’t see it, it’s not happening”, you may need informing that it’s snowing pretty hard in London.  Well, when I say ‘pretty hard’, I mean about the average daily snowfall in Chicago in winter.  That notwithstanding, Britain being Britain, everything has come to a complete standstill.

I received an email at 8:50 explaining that the 9 o’clock lecture was cancelled.  It was annoying that it was made so late, but what can one do?  I, for my part, was never going to go to it, because that would involve waking up at seven the day after the Superbowl.*  I did, however, go to university for my afternoon lecture.  In lieu of public transport, it took an eighty minute walk to get from Finchley Road to UCL.  I found, to my horror, that all classes had been cancelled.

This, of course, is what’s known as ‘f***ing unacceptable’.  What the hell was the university emailing everyone that a single lecture had been cancelled for, when every single lecture in the department was off?  Congratulations, UCL, you just wasted your customers’ students’ day.

Then again, as is becoming abundantly clear, the only way you can have a university that doesn’t act with impunity, and responds to students’ needs, is by giving students real power over who their education: taking power out of the hands of government, and giving it to students.  And that requires lifting the cap on top-up fees.  Until that is done, and students hold real power over universities, the university will treat its students with contempt.  In short, every day will be a snow day.

Update @ 16:36: now I can’t even access journals online.  So the university is physically shut and people can’t access the library resources online?  Great stuff.  Universities need a kick up the arse to sort this stuff

* I pretend that I care.  I’m only really interested in cheerleaders, or, as my cheerleader girlfriend euphemistically calls them, ‘dancers’.  Whatever.

At a time of economic hardship, this is what the government is spending the taxpayers’ money on:

A wonderful picture, I think we’ll all agree.  But £43m of taxpayers’ money?  Are they insane?!  That could pay the salaries of two thousand new teachers.  Yet, instead, it’ll be spent on a painting.

People talk about it being vital to preserve our culture.  That’s not a philistine’s opinion.  Of course, it is vital (dare I compare people that disagree to Gramscians?).  It is imperative to preserve the culture that people want to preserve: and not the culture that the government deigns to preserve by taking other people’s money.  The only way to decide which is which is to let the free market decide what is worth preserving.

The Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, which is an amazing gallery, is completely free: and cost the taxpayer nothing.  Other fantastic collections - from the Wallace Collection in London to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC - were given to the state by bequest, cost them nothing to assemble, and allow free entry.  By having the government waste the taxpayers’ money by bidding against private collectors that would simply put the painting on display somewhere anyway is an absurdity, and a tragedy at the time when our economy is collapsing.

And here we have semantics from the socialists in charge of the strike:

The argument is not against foreign workers, it’s against foreign companies discriminating against British labour.  This is a fight for work.  It is not a racist argument at all.

Which is, of course, nonsense, given that the trade unions want the foreign workers to go home, rather than ’steal’ ‘their’ ‘jobs’.  As anyone that has (very quickly) read Jonah Goldberg’s book, as recommended in the last post, knows, the so-called ‘far-right’ is nothing but the far-left in disguise, separated by a quirk of history and Stalin’s megalomaniacal personality.

Alternatively, for a shorter read, see Ayn Rand’s commentary on the relation between socialism and racism in the Virtue of Selfishness.  Like class, racism is a collectivist ideology, based around grouping - and hating - people together based on a single characteristic of theirs.  Individuals, of course, have more to say for themselves than the colour of their skin or the coat of arms on their passport.  Socialists will never let them open their mouths.

It’s not easy to forgive those that have gone on strike at oil refineries and blocked shipments of fuel that would be a relief at a time the country is covered in snow.  The wave of strikes that have spread across the energy sector, from Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire to the giant facility at Grangemouth, on the Firth of Forth, have threatened to cripple fuel supply just when it’s needed.

And, to make matters worse, employees at Heysham nuclear plant and Sellafield processing facility.  They have walked out to protest against ‘foreign’ workers, who are willing to work for less than ‘British’ workers.  The inverted commas belong there because many of the so-called ‘foreign’ workers have lived and worked here for years.  The strike leaders have claimed that the strike is directed at the ‘foreign’ companies, not the workers, but that is simply to mask the truth: that workers aren’t part of some class struggle against the greedy capitalists, but are guided by exactly the same self-interest.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t bother fighting for their own jobs.

The victims of all this are manifold: the owners of the facilities, whose employees are breaching their contracts; the ‘foreign’ workers, who are being driven out of their jobs and their country; the people of the United Kingdom, who rely on fuel shipments to keep them warm, transport them to work, university, or shops (if they can get there); the government, which can’t tax to the hilt fuel that doesn’t exist to pay off the deficit that most certainly does; and the rest of the country, which has to fill in the hole instead.

The strikes are ineffectual.  The ‘foreign’ companies aren’t employing foreign employees because they’re just foreigners scratching each other’s backs.  If anything, the French Alstom probably think that the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese workers they’re hiring are swarthy good-for-nothing foreigners themselves.  However, they employ them anyway.  Why?  Because they’re the only ones that can do the job for a price that makes it worth doing.  Were they forced to pay higher wages, it would lose them money: and they wouldn’t do any job at all.  It’s not them playing God and choosing who to get the job: if both the foreigner and the Briton could do the job at a profit, they’d hire both and make even more money.  They are heartless capitalists just out to make as much profit as possible, after all.

The strikes are immoral.  They are racist: demanding that others not be treated with fairness and equality on the grounds that they are of another nationality.  They are illiberal: demanding that legislation be introduced to tell employers whom they can and cannot hire.  They are socialist: demanding equality.  Racist, illiberal socialists guided by nationalism?  If anyone is undecided as to what that adds up to, I suggest they read Jonah Goldberg’s (unfortunately named) book Liberal Fascism.

And if ineffectuality and immorality are not enough to persuade them of the inappropriateness of their actions, the ‘unofficial’ strikes are, of course, also illegal.  They are not covered by the legislation that gives the trades unions special powers, as union members were not balloted.  As such, employers should feel no compulsion to retain the services of those that lead these strike: be ruthless against those that keep the country in the cold, and the country will back you.

Paedophiles being allowed to go to school gyms.  Gypsies being able to roam the Green belt.  A criminal suspect entitled to fried chicken during a police siege.  These are the sort of cases that get on the nerve of Daily Mail readers up and down the land, and make the abolition of the Human Rights Act the clarion call of that paper.  So, by convention, libertarians should probably oppose such a ridiculous motion.

However, in this case, it would be fundamentally wrong to do so.  The Human Rights Act is an absurdity, and a crackpot case of legalese nonsense.  It rambles on for eleven thousand words, carefully defining what institutions may be bound by it, what the uncontroversial words mean, and what clauses trump other clauses.  Then, it proceeds to neuter itself by couching all the terms in big qualifications.  Apparently, we have the freedom of expression except:

such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of … territorial integrity … for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence…

Territorial integrity?  So if the government bans us supporting an independent Norfolk, that’s fine.  Protection of morals?  So it’s OK for the government to prohibit ‘blasphemy’.  Protection of reputation of others?  So the government could pass a law banning talking about financial news.  Except the government’s own BBC’s Robert Peston would probably do it anyway.

As such, the Human Rights Act manages, somehow, to contain neither the majesty nor the simplicity nor the unequivocality of the United States Bill of Rights: which is one-twentieth as long.  That document would make a fine blueprint for a replacement, with a few changes, of course.  Scratch out the part in the Fifth Amendment that gave rise to the madness of Kelo v New London.  Explicitly state that capital punishment is cruel and unusual under the Eight Amendment.  Remove the part in Article 1(8) of the Constitution itself that allows the government to levy taxes for the ‘general welfare’ (i.e. whatever it wants).  Extend the entire document to cover every layer of government, every one of its tentacles.  That, I think, would just about do it.

All of this would need to be codified, enshrined, and entrenched.  It would need to be, as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were once considered, fundamentally unchangeable documents that reveal the nature of freedom, and which limit the role of government to that which furthers it.  Instead, we have a bastardised version that protects no rights, and takes away many.

The motion was debated at UCL Debating Society on 26 January 2008.  The motion was foolishly defined such that the Human Rights Act would not be replaced by any Bill of Rights “and to hell with the childish concept of tyranny of the majority”.  It was, naturally, consequently defeated by a three-to-one margin.