A human tragedy unfolds: BRITAIN is facing a bankruptcy timebomb with a record number of individuals and companies predicted to go bust this year. Begbies Traynor, the insolvency and restructuring group, reckons more than 35,000 firms could go under this year – equivalent to more than 95 a day. The […]
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“The Pretence of Knowledge”: how economists come to make astrologers look good
(Update: This post is attracting significant traffic, so I have indicated three Austrian-School primers throughout the text. Please click the images for the publications.) It seems everyone is talking about swine flu and the financial crisis, but they seem to be most persistently interested in what has gone wrong with […]
Read MoreA free must-read: Compassionate Economics
Via www.compassionateeconomics.com, a book of the same name, available free. If the received understanding of economics within government is radically incomplete, how much more so is it within society as a whole. We have been brought up and are daily conditioned to think of human beings as the “agents” of […]
Read MoreWaterworld?
What is “Seasteading”? Seasteading means to create permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture above, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean. Why would you want to do that? Because the world needs a new frontier, a place […]
Read MoreWe’re in danger of entering a new Dark Age – Telegraph
As I was saying to Beth only the other day after reading Roche*: Distracted by celebrity, softened up by the education system, we have also succumbed to what you could call intellectual relativism. We have reached a state of affairs whereby people believe that the validity of their views is […]
Read MoreDominic Grieve QC MP on citizens and the state
The opening panel discussion at the Convention on Modern Liberty is now available online. Dominic Grieve speaks passionately and encouragingly from 3:55 on the finite limits on state power, social justice, quality of life and British collusion in torture: A great speech from a great man.
Read MoreBritain now the most invasive surveillance state
Via Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report | The Guardian, we learn that “Britain is now the most invasive surveillance state and the worst at protecting privacy of any western democracy”: A quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID […]
Read MoreThe Guardian on society: It’s broken. So let’s fix it
A Guardian journalist supports David Cameron: A few months ago I might have disagreed with [Cameron]; I might have argued that he was quite simply scaremongering, that the country is at heart, just as Gordon Brown has said, basically “decent and compassionate”. But that was before this week. A week […]
Read MoreLong hours and stress drive lawyers to drink and drugs
The survey, by the magazine Legal Business, also says that there is evidence of “cocaine clubs” in law firms’ basements and of partner-led games of poker and taking cocaine with clients. But it also finds that law firms are ignorant or indifferent to the problem. One lawyer is quoted: “I […]
Read MoreSuch a thing as society, even in London
Today, I had two pleasant conversations with strangers in London. Now this is not unheard of in the north, but who speaks to anyone in the City? People on bikes, it turns out, at the traffic lights. I asked after a bizarre three-wheeled scooter and had a great response from […]
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