Liberty - well, no

The group Liberty here in the UK is not far different from the next to non-existent Council for Civil Liberties in New Zealand, which once used to be trotted out by the leftwing (i.e. virtually all) of the broadcast media when it was outraged by some measure that appeared to restrict someone’s freedom. Liberty’s latest campaign demonstrates how little it actually understands about individual liberty, as it fights to force pub owners in the village of Ruddington in Nottinghamshire to admit a patron who they have banned. The eight pubs in the area have banned Graeme Chessum from entering their premises for two years.

Chessum went to the Country Cottage Hotel to complain about the noise, and lost his temper, so the bar owner decided to ban him in order to protect the staff. Liberty believes it breaches human rights regulation, which if it does, is frankly absurd and shows how lost Britain is in terms of property rights.

Pub owners should have the right to ban whoever they want from their premises on any grounds, short of the Police obtaining a search warrant or a bailiff collecting a debt. Private individuals have no right of entry onto private property. There may be an implied invitation, but this can be refused. Liberty should be supporting the pub owners and their private property rights, not an individual who has threatened the staff of one of the pubs.

Chimps prefer their mate's grans

The Times reports that male chimps would rather have female chimps the age of their great grandmother than one their own age. Young ones tend to mate with the weakest and most unwanted males. This is considered to be because chimp females do not go through menopause (so there is no biological problem with them breeding at all ages) and because chimps are naturally promiscuous, so the male breeds and moves on.
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Other wondrous features of the animal sex world (watch the search engine hits go up with that phrase) include:

- The male African golden web orb spider has two penises, both of which break off during sex;
- Male goats are excited by displays of lesbianism (presumably between goats, not Slovak women;
- Ladybirds copulate for up to nine hours at a time (which must surely be months in their lifespan equivalent).

The KGB is back

There is little doubt that following the glory days of the Gorbachev/Yeltsin era of freedom, Russia has been slip sliding towards what can best be described as corporatist fascism. It is freer than the days of the USSR, but political opposition in Russia is low key and nascent, and there is good reason. If you start asking serious questions your life is in danger.
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Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of the Putin regime, is in a London hospital after an apparent deliberate poisoning over the weekend, involving Thallium. Thallium compounds are used in rat poison and only tiny amounts are needed to kill. It is unclear whether the poison was ingested or pass through Litvinenko’s skin, but the message is clear – someone was out to kill him and it is not hard to figure out why.
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Litvinenko moved to Britain six years ago and recently gained citizenship. He went to meet a journalist who claimed to have information about the death of another Russian journalist – Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, who was found shot in the head four times on 7 October. Politkovskaya has been writing an article on the use of torture by authorities in Chechnya, a specialist subject of hers.
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The Novaya Gazeta is the paper she worked for, and it is now owned 49% by Mikhail Gorbachev, who is known to be concerned for civil liberties in Russia.
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The attempted killing of Litvinenko harks back to the bad old days of KGB contract killings in third countries. This was not a monopoly of the KGB, the secret services of other Soviet block regimes also engaged in this activity, North Korea still does. I need not remind intelligent readers of the famous Bulgarian umbrella trick.
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Putin is clearly running a kleptocracy that is subject to little challenge or discipline. He can continue to do so as long as Russia reaps the rewards of high energy commodity prices, and Putin surrounds himself with people who make a killing out of something that they did next to nothing to create. Russians like a strong man who is sober, and Putin has been unafraid to assert himself in the world. However, it is clear that with the strong man comes few opportunities to challenge his power and authority. The assassination of Politkovskaya and attempted assassination of Litvinenko are only the tip of the iceberg. The tragedy will be for Russia to slip further down the path of fascism.

Stupid anti-Bush moral equivalency

Now I’m no friend of George W Bush. I carry no truck for his Christian conservatism, but the USA is not becoming a theocracy or even close. I don’t support the use of torture by any government. I believe there have been some ridiculous reductions in civil liberties in the USA, but regardless of that it is still fundamentally no less free than most other western liberal democracies. Bush’s record domestically in my book is that, while there are some positives in tax cuts, he has increased spending willy nilly and proven himself as much of an interventionist in some areas (education) as his predecessors. He is not a great President.
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On the international arena I support his attacks on Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the succour for Al Qaeda and itself was ruled by a brutal stoneage regime that was highly oppressive, and treated all citizens, particularly women and girls, in virtually Old Testament biblical fashion. While Afghanistan could be have been undertaken better, Bush was a liberator and should be applauded by all liberals for that.
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I supported the action against Iraq. It was justified for two reasons. Firstly, under international law Iraq had broken umpteen UN Security Council resolutions regarding inspections of its weapons facilities. This gave sufficient evidence, particularly given its previous nuclear and chemical weapons programmes (and use of the latter), that it was developing such weapons and would use them. The assurances of a dictatorship that there are no such weapons are as worthless as the piece of paper Chamberlain brought back from Munich. A nuclear armed Iraq would have changed the Middle East balance of power, encouraged Iran to do the same and threatened Israel. Iraq had been warned time and time again that action would follow words, so action was justified, after 11 years of breaches. Secondly, the Saddam regime was odious. It was murderous, barbaric and on its own back, was imperialistic. It started the war with Iran, regardless of US support at the time. Don’t forget the current US administration is not the Reagan administration operating in the Cold War. It also had attacked Kuwait and Israel, hardly a peace loving regime. It executed thousands of citizens every year for opposing the regime or for getting in the way of the Hussein mafia that ran the place. There was no moral justification for the Hussein regime to claim it had the protection of international law, as it was not interested in peace with other states and it treated its citizens as subjects.
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The overthrow of the Hussein regime is something to be celebrated, the commission of the occupation and institution of a democratic government has been a disaster. I could go on about how it could have been done better, and of course, the casualties since the coalition of the willing occupied Iraq. Few notice that the main source of deaths comes from Islamist insurgents, but apparently these are the fault of the USA, which should leave Iraq alone to be overrun by them.

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Beyond Iraq, Bush called North Korea, Iraq and Iran part of an axis of evil. He was wrong to consider them in a way that appeared that the three countries operated in concert, as they do not. However he is dead right. The Iranian theocracy is evil, it completely denies freedom of religion and freedom from religion, it denies liberal democracy and free speech, it engages in imprisonment, torture and execution of political prisoners, as well as executing teenagers for crimes such as having consensual sex with adult men. It is a sponsor for terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories, as well as Lebanon and Iraq. Have no mistake, an Iranian style regime would deny many fundamental freedoms and be a dark deathly oppressive life. North Korea is worse. Kim Jong Il runs and essentially owns a slave state. A state with internal passes, with citizens classified according to loyalty to the regime, and where entire families are punished for crimes against the state, including children. Torture and execution are a matter of course, and there is no freedom of speech of any kind. Absolute control of the media and speech Orwellian style is life in North Korea. It is the closest to hell on earth.
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So this is why I get absolutely incensed when otherwise reasonably intelligent people like Idiot Savant engage in the most stupid and despicable moral equivalency when criticising George W Bush.
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I agree that there should not be restrictions on freedom of speech if Bush visits New Zealand or restrictions on protest, as long as these do not threaten the President. I also believe any state visits should minimise restrictions on freedom of movement, consistent with maintaining adequate security. However to say Bush is “a man who by rights should be in a cell next to Saddam Hussein” is absurd. Bush’s greatest crime has been the use of torture and creeping restrictions on civil liberties. I would welcome the newly elected congress engaging in an inquiry about the use of torture and its use being terminated. However, Bush is not Saddam, Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, not even close. He understands, more than most on the left, what the war against Islamist terror is about. It is not a clash of civilisations, because Islamist philosophy is not civilised - it is a war against people who want society to be a misogynistic stoneage theocracy. Bush is not the greatest defender against this threat, but his use of torture, while a graven and immoral mistake - does not justify him being seen as the likes of Hitler, Milosevic or Saddam.

Mourning Milton Friedman

For all of his critics, Friedman was one of the most successful advocates of economic liberty in the world. The application of monetarism to minimise inflation has been a dramatic success. That change has seen inflation disappear as a major concern in the western world – those government no longer effectively print money to pay deficits, they no longer destroy state debt by engaging in the brutal theft of people’s savings through inflation. People under the age of 30 will not remember a time in New Zealand when inflation was consistently above 10%, motivating many New Zealanders to invest in property to protect their savings from the ravages of governments of both National and Labour who would effectively borrow and print their way out of short term problems.
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He was a man for more than monetarism, he generally was a Hayekian, believing in individual choice over state control, and believing that people who were free would be more likely to better themselves, than those subject to regulation and state provided monopolies. He advocated floating exchange rates, the use of education vouchers so that parents could choose private schools instead of simply public schools and supported replacing state welfare with a negative income tax system.
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However, he should not just be remembered for his economics. He was also a social libertarian, he opposed the military draft and supported decriminalisation of narcotics and prostitutions. He believed in freedom in the personal and economic sphere, and as such was a libertarian, although not as strictly libertarian as myself.
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Friedman’s views got an ear most notably in the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, but also Bob Hawke’s administration in Australia, and in New Zealand with Roger Douglas and the fourth Labour government.
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His critics may focus on his priority of inflation over unemployment, ignoring that inflation unlike unemployment, offers little to no chance for escape. Today in those countries that have implemented monetarism, inflation is both relatively low and so is unemployment.
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For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time, the Clark government has embraced monetarism with a slightly increased inflation target, Jim Anderton, once a strident critic, is part of a government that maintains it. Having been part of a party that opposed it intensely, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown gave the Bank of England independence in meeting its inflation target.
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That is Friedman’s legacy. His advocacy of low inflation has saved hundreds of millions of people from having their savings eroded by government profligacy. We take it for granted now, and there may be a case for a different approach (free banking) in the future – but he is to thanked and it is an indictment on public education that this man is not seen as the hero he should be. Now if only he could now tell John Maynard Keynes how wrong he really was!