Today’s Times contained a bitter and, quite frankly, evil editorial by Carol Sarler on the issue of consent within the democratic system.  The issue is a challenging one for libertarians - split between legalists and activists - but I hardly think anyone that supports the cause of liberty can claim to be a Sarlerist.

It must have been mightily crowded last week: standing room only, up there on the higher moral ground, crammed with the bristling self-righteous who prefer, as they always put it, to “opt out” rather than to compromise a “principle”.

The fact that she puts the word ‘principle’ in quotation marks is a damning indictment of her lack of principle.  If she considers principle to be to illusion, maybe she should shut her mouth rather than preach her own principles to those that realise the value of morality.  But onwards to find out what principles she lacks…

Now, jostling for position, comes the JP who is fighting for the right to opt out of family cases that might involve same-sex adoption, the conscience-smitten family doctors who wish to opt out of the entire “process” of abortion – including even referring a patient to a doctor of different stripe – and the sanctimonious couple who have fostered 28 children but are opting out because they have been told they are legally bound to let children think that homosexuals are OK people too.

Snarling Sarler gives us more rhetoric claptrap that belies her complete lack of interest in moral activity or consistency.  I would wager that most doctors are doctors exactly because they are ‘conscience-smitten’, and consider caring to be a vocation.  Certainly, no doctor would work in this country, with its NHS-depressed wage structure, for the paycheque alone.  The same is true of the foster parents; it’s caring that makes them do anything.

I disagree fundamentally with these opt-outs (I think that, to quote a female friend, abortion is the best thing since sliced bread).  However, it is perfectly right for the individual to have opinions, right or wrong, that differ from the majority, and it’s the individual’s right to act upon his or her opinions.  When it is those opinions that make any opt-in possible, like the doctor or foster parents, to criticise compassion is to prove the sanctimony and stupidity that underline Sarler’s bile.

The whole trend is, frankly, social sense stood on its head. Such is our growing timidity of causing offence in the face of the doctrines of minorities that all anybody has to do is to invoke “morality”, “deity” or “principle” for it to appear that it is they who are pristine of spirit and the rest of us who occupy a lower dimension.

I don’t quite think these people are doing it for sanctimony’s sake.  They’re doing it for principle’s sake.  They have a belief that you don’t have - like the well-formed opinion that Carol Sarler is a f***wit - and they don’t want to give it up.  The only way you could be in a lower dimension than them is if you don’t believe in morality or principle.  Oh, wait, the quotation marks again?  Taxi to the seventh circle of hell for Ms Sarler.

The higher moral ground, in a democracy, belongs to consensus drawn from the values of the majority and implemented by the flawed beast that is the law. Those who would exempt themselves from it, no matter how enjoyable the fleeting fame of their martyrdom, deserve no more endorsement or admiration than any other petty delinquent.

As its name might suggest, the moral high ground belongs to those that act morally, not those that follow the word of the immoral man.  By opting out of others’ actions, they don’t necessarily act morally or immorally.  However, to coerce others, regardless of principle or belief, to follow the unprincipled and unbelieved word of the immoral man, is immorality defined.

That is the supposed ‘high ground’ that the majoritarian absolutist occupies.  That ground commands no heights.  It provides no defence from the superior arms of the individualist.  It does, however, pose a threat only by its prevalence as a belief, and by the fact that it is backed by the literal guns of the immoral man.

In the fact of that, these people are made martyrs against their wishes, when all they want to do is exercise a small opt-out that allows society to benefit from their large opt-in.  They don’t do it to become martyrs.  They do it for principle: the very thing that Sarler derides, and the very thing that Sarler lacks.

This morning’s Sunday Times report that a member of the Royal Family has been blackmailed is provoking and amusing in equal parts.  Provoking in that it illustrates (yet further) the fragility of one of the central institutions of the state.  Amusing in that it illustrates (yet further) that not even the monarchy, the font of all legal justice, is content with the law’s definition of ‘justice’.

However, it also provokes me because it illustrates as well a fundamental flaw in blackmail.  That is, if blackmail requires the exchange of money for the non-release of information, that information must be worth something to both parties.

Indeed, because it may instead by released to a third party, that third party must also value that information.  That is, there is a market for that information.  So let’s evaluate that market.

In this case, the blackmailer is said to have tried to extort £50,000 from a member of the Royal Family to prevent the release of the details.  This, it seems, was regarded as a reasonable price by the blackmailer, and an unreasonable price by the royalty.  The end result is that the blackmailer insisted that the price was too high, and went to the police.

Instead, consider the third party, which economists in this country call the ‘News of the World’.  They value the story for the opposite reason.  However, they also value it for vastly more than the blackmailed party does.  Nothing sells tabloid newspapers like a scandal involving the Royal family (unless it involves Keeley).

Let’s say that the appearance of a Royals story boosts the single-day circulation of a tabloid by 200,000 newspapers.  That is, at a retail price of 75p, the News of the World can expect to earn something like £150,000.  When one considers the boost to advertising, one can more than double that.

The News of the World can offer a price up to this and still make a profit off the back of it.  They can offer £300,000, and be better off as a result.  No surprise that they say that some stories can be worth “hundreds of thousands of pounds if not millions“.

Hold on.  That £300,000 that the News of the World could be offering is clearly more than the £50,000 that the blackmailers supposedly sought from the royal in question.  Since this is a market, the blackmailers have a choice between the two, and by resorting to blackmail, they clearly made the wrong choice for their own economic wellbeing.

In cases like this, when the affected party is an individual and the third party is a national newspaper, blackmail is simply a stupid thing to do.  Blackmail is separated from the distinct offence of extortion by the fact that the act threatened by an extortioner is illegal, whereas a blackmailer is threatening to do something entirely legal.  Thus, extortion should clearly be illegal.

But blackmail is simply the offer of a service to a consumer in the market before anyone else.  Put like that, there is nothing morally wrong with it whatsoever.  Indeed, because the criminalisation of blackmail denies the right of the accused of a right to defend him or herself according to the value that he or she places on the information, the current regime is destructive.

Having examined the true nature of blackmail, one can only conclude that it ought to be decriminalised entirely, before this prohibition does any more damage to both individuals and society.  It’s time to end this unwanted and unwarranted censorship.  It’s time to clear the black name of blackmail.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin reinstituted price controls on a range of agricultural products in an attempt to control runaway inflation. Those words, in and of themselves, should strike fear into the hearts of the most indomitable men. Certainly, they do mine.

To counter what Vladimir Putin believes to be politically-unacceptable food prices, the government has slapped price controls on bread, cheese and milk, eggs, sugar, and vegetable oil. In this way, the government now controls, directly and immediately, the prices of all the major staple non-meat food products in Russia.

The government claims this to be a ‘voluntary’ agreement with companies, but this - as almost all claims of innocence by the Russian government - is a sham. One only has to look at the way that oil giants Yukos and Russneft were taken over by the Kremlin or pro-Kremlin lackeys to see what ‘voluntary’ means in Putin’s Russia.

There is no opacity to this ploy. The scheme is clearly and undeniably an attempt by Putin’s government to curry favour with the Russian electorate ahead of parliamentary elections in December by employing what are cynical and economically-misguided populist measures.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that price controls can’t possibly work. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Putin’s premise is right: that prices are ‘too’ high. High prices come about because there is an excess of demand over supply. The institution of price controls only works when they reduce the price paid for by the market. This, of course, increases demands and further restricts supply.

Hence, price controls are self-defeating: driving up the natural market prices, reducing economic output, and creating an official rate-market rate price differential that is exploited by the black market. Price controls don’t work. They don’t respect the rights of the individual. They belong in the Soviet era of direct economic control. They have no place in a free society.

Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living, published 70 years ago, focuses the outcome of price controls, of rationing, and similarly motivated and similarly ill-reasoned policies. What followed, in fiction and in history, was a catastrophic nightmare for Russia then. Unless this government or the next is willing to step back from the edge and reverse this Soviet-esque policy, there can be no surprise when Russia once again finds itself facing catastrophe.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone when FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s comes out with abysmal ideas to ‘improve’ football.  After all, this is the man that suggested that women footballers wear tighter shorts, instituted automatic suspensions for those wrongly sent off, and has arbitrarily banned playing football more than 3,000 metres above sea level.

But none of these threatens to fundamentally alter the way the game is played (except in Bolivia, where the altitude rule is not going down well).  By contrast, his plan to indigenise all the football leagues of the world, by putting absolute limits on the number of foreign players that a club can field, is a characteristic absurdity that uncharacteristically threatens to undermine football globally.

No matter what the justification, there is a name for placing quotas based upon the origin of an employee: racism.  I’m staunchly opposed to so-called ‘equal rights’ legislation that bans companies from hiring whomever they want; if a club wishes to prosecute a policy of hiring only English or British players, that’s for them to decide.

Overseas, Athletic Bilbao’s cantera policy, of signing only Basque players, is much lauded for improving links with the local community and developing Athletic’s identity.  However, such a policy should be decided by each club, each business, by itself.  To do otherwise is to force individuals to make decisions that hurt themselves and that - in the aggregate - can only hurt the game of football, particularly at its top levels.

But, then again, maybe that’s just my own self-interest talking.  My season ticket at Arsenal sets me back over £1,200 a year: a steep price for a student, and one that I’m only willing to pay because it allows me to watch the most attractive and (for the moment) most success football in the world.  Arsène Wenger’s first-choice XI has a grand total of zero British players.

If the club is required to field five players eligible for the England team, as Blatter suggests, I, along with thousands of other fans faced with a hefty bill to watch top-flight football, will chuck it in and retire to my sofa.  That’s clearly not in the interest of me, of the players, of the club, of the Premiership, or of football as a whole.

To create a quota for home-grown players is fundamentally contrary to the principles of liberty and individualism, can only hurt the game of football by reducing the enjoyment by the fans, and will destroy what is otherwise a highly successful industry.  Furthermore, it institutionalises and promotes a form of racist autarky that will serve to move countries and peoples away from, not towards, each other.  Sepp Blatter, head of an international body with more members than the UN, should know better than to charge head-first into such a disastrous intervention.

When most people hear that I study economics, they say, “Oh, a good, solid, libertarian subject”.  However, having been rejected by Cambridge after trying to teach Partha Dasgupta* about the Laffer curve, I don’t exactly hold my own subject in the highest of regards.

Today’s ‘Macroeconomic Theory and Policy’ tutorial kinda proved my point.

[The government] printing money has no negative effect on the economy: only good.  In the Western system, with the separation of politicians from central banks, this is not possible.  However, [PR] China, which is my country, we have this without negative effects.

Squeamish Westerners.  If only our government was more like the Chinese and risked over-inflating our economy just as theirs has done.  And if only our government was more hard-nosed and cared as little about deliberately keeping down the value of private assets as they did over there.  Darn bourgeois property rights getting in the way of sound economics…

A balanced budget policy cannot help an economy in a depression.  In a depression, the revenue goes down, but expenditure goes up, because unemployment benefits go up.  Thus, to try to balance the budget makes a bad situation even worse.  That’s stupid for the government to do so, because it relies on the government cutting spending or raising tax.

Yes, balanced budgets are incredibly stupid.  After all, we’ve already established that running a structural budget deficit is no problem, so long as the government is capable of printing its way out of trouble.  Just to correct my tutor here, if the economy is as described, the best way a government can correct its deficit is exactly to balance the budget: by scrapping the afore-mentioned unemployment benefit and getting people back to work and back paying taxes to fund the government’s assumed largesse.

After my scrape at Cambridge, I sometimes wonder if not knowing the first thing about economic public policy is considered a requisite ‘talent’ for teaching the subject in our universities.

*A lefty development economist who is (and this is not unrelated to the first factor) nailed-on for the Nobel Prize.

When you cross the Independent with a man with a name like ‘Le Grand’, you know it’s going to be an uncomfortable morning’s reading.  But when the rubbish said newspaper and said man spout are as rancid as that that corrupt the minds of the nation this morning, we could be excused for choking on our cornflakes (it’s lunch, but I was hungover at breakfast, so I’m having cornflakes now anyway).

The ‘Le Grand’ in question is Professor Julian, chair of Health England - whatever that is - and professor at LSE.  Speaking to the Royal Statistical Society on Monday night, he suggested that the way to end the health crisis was to introduce:

a smoking permit, which smokers would have to produce when buying cigarettes, an “exercise hour” to be provided by all large companies for their employees and a ban on salt in processed food.

Fair enough.  I mean, not fair - they’re stupid, stomach-churningly abysmal ideas that deserve to be lined up against the wall and shot one-by-one, and anyone can see right through that - but we’re used to this sort of shit from the government and its incompetent and intellectually illiterate advisers.

But what really gets me is that, apparently:

The idea, dubbed “libertarian paternalism”, reverses the traditional government approach that requires individuals to opt in to healthy schemes. Instead, they would have to opt out to make the unhealthy choice, by buying a smoking permit, choosing not to participate in the exercise hour or adding salt at the table.

What the f***?  “Libertarian paternalism”?  How the f*** is this libertarian?  Who the f*** dubs it ‘libertarian’?  This is about giving the government complete control over our lives.  It is about shifting the assumption of innocence to the assumption of guilt.  It is about making ourselves - the people - subservient to them - the state: those that we created to help us, not the other way around.  That is the opposite of libertarianism.  It is totalitarianism.  The ‘traditional government approach’ of allowing people a choice is not ‘traditional’.  It is essential.

Professor Le Grand may use his credentials to spit fascistic political bile at us, under the guise of a ’statistical’ analysis of the health problem, but so can we.  We, true libertarians, refuse to let you use that word.  We refuse to let you steal our clothing.  We refuse to let you drape the terminology of freedom and tolerance over your policy of slavery and intolerance.

Le Grand can piss off back to the LSE.  He can give us back our clothing, and he can piss off.  God help him if he runs into the Hayek Society any time soon.  If he does, he might just want to get some new clothes designed with those with second arseholes in mind.

A couple of months ago, this blog made a plaintive call for the people of Poland to throw out their authoritarian government in favour of the Civic Platform, and for David Cameron to distance his Conservatives from the reactionary politics of President Lech Kaczyński.  Last night, the Poles came up trumps.

In elections to the national parliament, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), dominated by the Kaczyński twin brothers, were absolutely thrashed by the resurgent Civic Platform (PO), under pro-business Donald Tusk.  Both parties greatly increased their share of the vote, but whereas the PiS saw theirs increase by 5%, the PO’s jumped by an astonishing 17%, catapulting them into a large plurality of seats.

Moreover, the parties that have lost out are the very ones with whom the PiS’s association had caused classical liberals the most consternation.  Having dropped out of the governing coalition with the PiS, the right-wing Catholic nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) and the left-wing ’sons of the soil’ Self Defence of the Republic of Poland (SRP) merged their lists.

And were annihilated.  Whereas the two major parties increased their shares of the vote by a total of 22%, the combined fascist-socialist LPR list won a miserable 1%: down from a notional 19% only two years ago.  I might well laugh.  I do.

The new government, under Tusk, will look vastly different to its predecessor.  First, the PO can form a coalition with the centrists, avoiding the disparate coalition that collapsed so spectacularly this summer.  There’ll be no vested interests forcing the government to adopt crazy pet projects on hammering homosexuals, banning Sunday trading, increasing farmers’ payments, and so on.  Instead, the PO can be held to its manifesto programme.

And what a refreshing programme it is.  A flat income/corporation/sales tax of 15%, independence for the central bank, decentralisation of budgets to local authorities, curbing labour cartel power, privatisation of large parts of healthcare and higher education, stripping MPs of their parliamentary immunity to reduce corruption, and liberalising abortion and divorce laws.

And, yet, the main issue that the international media focus on is the Europhilia of the party.  Do we not realise how backwards Poland is?  How threatened it was by the threat of a Piłsudski-worshipping fascist government sending the country back into the dark ages?

Given that, a more favourable approach to the Euro is a small price to pay, particularly when most of the regulation and oppression suffered by Polish people comes from domestic government.  Maybe, when the Poles give themselves freedom - as Tusk promises - they’ll realise that the EU is a hindrance, and adopt a more strident line towards supranational interventionism.

For that to happen required a change of government.  Fortunately, Poland has just that: out go the old guard of nationalists, socialists, and agrarians united, and in come the suited business-friendly liberty-lovers of the Civic Platform.  Given the programme on which the party ran, Tusk has a lot to live up to, but one thing’s certain about his performance: it can’t be worse than his predecessor’s.

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and one of the most talented and distinguished living scientists in the world, got himself into a furore this week. In an interview in the Sunday Times magazine, he argued that Africa would remain forever underdeveloped, on account of the supposed inferior intelligence of the African population.

Watson’s statement was a travesty of science. However, the reaction to his statement has been a travesty, too. The Nobel Prize winner should have been criticised by fellow scientists, countered in peer-reviewed journals, or simply dismissed professionally as a once-great has-been that has not been at the forefront of biology for decades.

Instead, he has been suspended from his job at a laboratory in New York, forced to cancel his speaking tour (including at the Science Museum in South Kensington tonight), and had his reputation torn to pieces in public without debate or discussion.

A range of scientific opinion came down on him in public like a tonne of bricks, including the Federation of American Scientists, which called his comments ‘noxious’. However, surely the most noxious of the statements was by the Science Museum, which asserted that Watson’s comments were ‘beyond the point of acceptable debate’.

To assert that any scientific opinion is not open to debate is an affront to both scientific and social principles. The scientific method demands the advance of statements that may be right or wrong, their debate, and their test. It the statement is correct, it will victor in the debate, and be proven by the tests. If the statement is incorrect, it will be defeated in the debate, and disproven by the tests. However, to argue that a statement cannot be debated, for reasons of political correctness, runs fundamentally counter to the idea of scientific discovery.

To throw away these principles takes us out of the Enlightenment, and throws us back into the Inquisition: when certain scientific ideas, such as the Earth daring to revolve around the Sun, were deemed so politically unappetising, that any scientist that proposed them was soon brutally murdered.

There are a number of scientific issues that have been settled through a process of political ostracism: either promoted by the political-scientific ‘consensus’ (the anthropogenic theory of global warming being the most prominent) or opposed by it (as Watson’s is).

Regardless of one’s position in the scientific debate, there can be only one position to hold in the political one. The over-reaction means only that free speech is denied, that minority opinions are unheard, and that reason is held subservient to convenience, presenting a critical threat: not just to our scientific future, but to our political one, too.

Despite not being a Lib Dem (who couldn’t tell?), I’m really excited at the prospect of the party’s leadership contest. Since Charles Kennedy dismissed the idea of returning to his old drinking hole, and the likes of Vincent Cable and David Laws ruled themselves out of running, it’s looked more and more like a two-horse race between the ever-stronger Nick Clegg and the ever-weaker Chris Huhne.

Both of these contestants are the new breed of Lib Dems that reject the social democratic premise upon which all the party’s election campaigns (and those of the Liberal-SDP Alliance) were fought. They were both contributors to the Orange Book, subtitled ‘Regaining Liberalism’, which is dedicated to espousing market solutions to the problems traditionally addressed by social democrats with unlimited and unjustified state interventionism.

The Orange Bookers, led by David Laws (the co-editor) and also including the likes of Cable, have flanked the leading Tories, who are afraid to speak against the socialist post-war consensus, and have sat themselves at the vanguard of classical liberalism in this country. Another notable author is Mark Oaten, who… well, the jokes write themselves.

I’m always irked by people that call the Lib Dems ‘the Liberals’, when they’re anything but. It’s been so long since the old Liberal Party was assassinated - 101 years since Herbert Asquith began the socialist reforms in a failed attempt to ward off the Labour Party - that we often forget what it’s like to have a party in this country that puts the ideas of liberalism, of liberty itself, ahead of all others. The Conservatives throw a lot of rhetoric in that direction, but little of it sticks in the form of policy, except when it comes to some details on tax.

If front-runner Clegg wins the leadership election, he will have the mandate to push forward a modernisation programme based entirely upon the Orange Book, with fellow Orange Book conspirator Vincent Cable remaining as Treasury spokesperson. His campaign launch in Sheffield Hallam was filled with the rhetoric and vision of an individualist, and signposted a ‘tough’ programme of reform to take the party out of its ‘comfort zone’ and to regain the mantle of liberalism.

By marrying the economic liberalism underpinning the Orange Book movement with the social liberalism traditonally associated with the Liberal Democrats, and coordinated with an intellectual consistency so clearly lacking in any Liberal Democrat policy to date, there may finally be a party in the United Kingdom worth calling a Liberal Party.

This last week saw the announcement that the independent Birkenhead High School is set to be taken over by the government, becoming a city academy. The school is the third independent school to become a city academy, after schools in Toxteth and Manchester, and marks another step in the United Kingdom’s concerted drive towards mediocrity.

Birkenhead is currently run by the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), which in charge of 26 all-girls schools in England and Wales. The GDST has found many of its schools under increasing pressure from government, with the state taxing those parents that would sent their children to independent schools more to sink yet more money into our failing state schools.

Given this, it can come as no surprise that the two schools that the GDST has handed over to the government are in poorer areas of the northwest - Birkenhead and Toxteth - while the two schools that they are adding are in wealthier areas of the southeast - Kensington and Tonbridge.

By pursuing their strategy of pressuring independent schools, the people that suffer aren’t the fabulously wealthy, who can afford to pay the spiralling school fees of the major public schools, but the aspirational class that was so feted at the Conservative Party conference. Forcing independent schools in poorer neighbourhoods out of business severely limits the opportunities that children from traditionally-poorer backgrounds have: compounded by the extinction of grammar schools in most areas.

This truth, and others, are lost entirely on the so-called ‘analyst’ on the BBC website, who parades his opinion like nobody’s business.

Have they rediscovered their social conscience or are they just finding new ways to survive in cash-strapped times?

The GDST is a not-for-profit charity. It’s a charitable school. It is much the epitome of a social conscience. The government, particularly this one, is the epitome of a thief.

As it happened the independent schools had little to fear. Far from being savaged, they have been gently seduced.

Gently seduced? They’re having their charitable status revoked, and that’s not savagery? It’s either greater tax revenue or more kids getting a good education, Gordon. Make your choice.

And, of course, the origins of many of today’s top fee-charging schools were rooted in very similar charitable aims. Sometimes those origins seem to have been forgotten.

Forgotten by whom? The BBC? Schools minister Ed Balls? Fellow ex-public schoolboy Lord Adonis? Certainly not the GDST, which remains a non-profit charity, as it always has been.

That is a big difference. It might just help to break the very common misconception that, somehow, educational excellence is something that can only be achieved by financial and academic selection.

Money and ability aren’t important, eh? OK, then walk the walk. Go to a comprehensive school in Birkenhead, down the road from Birkenhead High School, and try to find a kid whose full potential is being realised. Heck, find a pupil that isn’t perpetually under the threat of gun or knife violence in the playground. If you can’t, shut up.

If some of them are now willing to educate all in their local community, irrespective of ability or financial means, then that does look like the start of a revolution. Could it be the beginning of the end for England’s divided school system, which remains one of the most hierarchical in the world?

Perhaps so, but also the beginning of the end for England’s superb public school system, which remains by far the most admired and copied in the world. This ‘revolution’ is not a benign one, but the death of a sort of school that provides hope for children from a certain neighbourhood, and freedom from the low standards and violence that pervades the state sector.

If the government wants to blur the lines between the state and independent schools, whilst maintaining educational standards, there’s a very easy way to achieve that, and that’s by introducing a voucher system. The government would hand out to each parent education vouchers, worth the amount the state spends on schooling, and allow parents to shop around for the best education: with the chance to top up the vouchers with their own money if they choose.

Instead of making it impossible for the poor to go to good schools, it would allow them to choose which school to attend. Instead of having a definite line between the bad state schools and the good independent schools, there would be none at all: the hierarchy would disappear in one fell swoop.

I still don’t think the voucher system is a fantastic way to run an education system (if Eton gets the best results in the country, let all schools be like Eton and privatise them). However, the principled political pragmatist sees the voucher system as a perfectly adequate solution: empowering parents to make choices based on their circumstances, and encouraging schools to improve standards to match those of the existing independent schools.

The alternative is the death of our independent sector by stealth, by the usurpation of their heritage and contribution to communities by the state, and by the statist agenda of the likes of the BBC. That would be a disaster, not the rich that the crusading left want to eat alive, but for the working class that the same supposedly want to help.