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.

I’ve just been alerted to a ridiculous inept and hysterical editorial by Trevor Kavanagh on the run on the Northern Rock. I really hate having to delve into the Sun more than I have to. Its snivelling little pages, each one filled with more opinion and less fact than the last, make me want to wretch. But, if 3.5m Britons can stomach it, I guess I can, too.

Nobody knows what’s out there. And if they do, they aren’t telling us.

Way to cool the hysteria, Trevor. “Something is happening. We don’t know what, but we know it’s bad, because it’s to do with rich people.”

The facts we do know are both incredibly complicated - and alarmingly simple.

Trevor knows his audience. If you’re interested in ‘incredibly complicated’, don’t read the Sun. If you want alarmist and simplist, read on.

Greedy, immoral bankers dished out cash they didn’t own in reckless loans to millions of poor folk they knew couldn’t afford them.

Bad bankers. Greed is bad. Money is immoral. Sorry, that’s a bit glib. Populist drivel, but glib nonetheless. So, let’s get this straight. The “greedy, immoral bankers” loaned money they didn’t own to “poor folk” - who spent money they didn’t own on new kitchens and holidays in the Algarve.

Heck, the bankers even KNEW the poor people were, well, poor, despite that fact never occurring to Mr and Mrs Ecclethorpe when they were on the 16th green in Albufeira. Man, those credit ratings are good. So the bankers must be the guilty party. Or, maybe it was the poor folk that chose to borrow the money in the first place. The poor folk that knew their own circumstances better than anyone else, and accepted the responsibility for their own actions by signing the contract. Naughty bankers.

Northern Rock is not alone. Barclays Bank is in trouble. So are other global giants.

Barclays is really in trouble. They’re losing money all over the place. And they’re really on the defensive. Yeah, right. Mr Kavanagh read one story about Barclays needing an emergency loan - to remedy a technological bank clearing error - and he thinks it means they’re on the brink of collapse. Leave the business news to the business men, sonny.

During downturns, interest rates were kept low, tempting us to borrow beyond our means as unscrupulous banks offered FIVE times what we earn. And if we exaggerated our income, they didn’t probe too deeply.

You lied to a bank about your salary to secure a mortgage, and they’re the unscrupulous ones?

But, let’s be fair to Trevor Kavanagh. He’s not a business reporter, but a political reporter. Well, I say ‘reporter’, but ‘rambler’ is probably more appropriate. His analysis gets better when he returns to the political rambling.

And governments encouraged us to [borrow ridiculous amounts] despite abundant warnings we were living beyond our means.

Correct. We had abundant warnings. However, the government’s ridiculous low interest rates were set, for political purposes, lower than they should have been, resulting in a spike in inflation. Now, the Bank of England has realised its mistake, increased rates closer to their natural equilibrium position, and dumped everyone up crap creek. Hooray for government intervention in the economy.

Hanging on to our own money, Gordon Brown decided, meant less tax for his stupendously inefficient spending spree on public services.

I don’t even know where the causality is there, but I agree that the supposedly ‘public’ services are stupendously inefficient. And that Gordon Brown is a nonce.

For the first time in a decade, we are hearing doubts about the economy, which is so deeply in debt. The timing could not be worse. Especially for anyone thinking of an autumn election.

If only Kavanagh had said this first. Of course it’s bad news for Gordon Brown. He’s screwed us all over by failing to contain himself in the Treasury, and pressing the big scary red buttons and pulling the big crackling levers that any economist could have told him not to touch. Sadly, Brown was a politics lecturer, not an economics lecturer, because that could have saved us an awful lot of trouble.

The Sun’s argument is weak, and terribly nauseating. Populist drum-beating, propagated by Kavanagh in the editorial, is the worst kind of so-called ‘journalism’. It’s just three bad news stories strung together, and, hey presto: a week’s editorial done and Trevor’s cheque’s in the post. But, it must work, because stupid people love bad news (how else could you explain the Sun’s decision to put Madeleine McCann on their front cover every day for the whole summer?). The problem is, it’s a morass, just like the economy. If only, like Brown, Kavanagh had stuck to politics, rather than venturing into, and screwing up, the economic side.

Since becoming its leader, David Cameron has changed the Conservative Party beyond almost all recognition. Focusing on so-called ’social justice’, he has embarked on a wide-ranging reform programme. In a major policy announcement, Cameron today unveiled plans for the conscription of teenagers into what he calls the ‘National Citizen Service’. This bold action marks the completion of the Conservatives’ metamorphosis: not to acceptable and laudable electability, but to irredeemable statism, socialism, and suicide.

The New Tory plan is for all 16-year olds to take part in a six-week social engineering programme at the end of compulsory education, which the Tories rightly believe should end at 16, and not 18 as Labour intends to make it. During the programme, the participants would be forced to do rather pointless things like paint community centres and mow grass verges in a vain attempt to gain ‘inspiration’ and ‘respect for others’.

Cameron hasn’t done much to mask the collectivist ideology underpinning and undermining the new policy. Its name says it all really; ‘National Citizen Service’ combins connotations of the socialism of the National Health Serice with the nationalism of national service conscription, adulterated only by submission to the state for participants, and submission to second-class citizenship for those that deign to argue.

The policy has been heavily promoted by today’s Sun, which congratulates Cameron and itself for succumbing to the populism that the Sun has long espoused. Big government, nationalism, and slave labour in the guise of preserving law and order are the Sun’s favourite cocktail.

It will mix people from different backgrounds. North and south, black and white, rich and poor. They will be putting something back into the community.

And if they want to put something back into the community, they’ll do just that, by working through charities, the Scouts, religious groups, or other similar volunteer programmes. This method intrudes on people’s lives, forcing them to do the bidding of the state, regardless of circumstances, regardless of choice. Cameron’s message is, no matter where you live, no matter what your skin colour, no matter what your parents income, you can’t hide from Big Brother.

It will be away of learning respect for our country and each other, just like national service was.

National service was about forcing people to do what the people with guns said: a way to get cheap meat for the grinder of the expected apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union. If you think that’s a fair comparison, Mr Cameron, you dig your own grave.

Whether individuals are leaving school, moving on from their GCSEs to another qualification, or have dropped out of the system altogether, our national programme would take them out of their comfort zone, provide them with a chance to mix with others away from home.

Take people of ouf the comfort zone? So the New Tories think that it’s the role and responsibility of the state to make people’s lives uncomfortable? Misery may be the currency of oppression, but it certainly shouldn’t be the raison d’etre for it.

The Sun picks up where Dave leaves off.

Bookish swots will be shown there is more to life than just exams.

The dangerous intellectuals must learn the values of national solidarity and service to the greater ideal that they can’t learn in books. Well, except in books that were banned during the Second World War. In fact, let’s just burn all the books to prevent subversive decadent ideas like ‘liberty’, ‘education’, and ‘personal betterment’ spreading.

Teenagers will not be forced by law to take part in the NCS. … Instead, it will become so attractive it will become a natural part of growing up.

So the state will force people using ’soft’ power. It’s already been implied that employers will be forced to give preference to participants. They’d probably ban all non-participants going into higher education. They might increase the tax rate for those that refuse to bow to their demands. Or they might just make it compulsory further down the line when people have stopped caring. I wonder who it was that did that…

Der Stürmer’s own editorial urges us to ‘give it a chance’.

The Boy Scouts offered this sort of community training for more than half a century. The Duke of Edinburgh scheme and Outward Bound courses have been amazingly successful.

And, despite the Sun’s ignorant use of the past tense, they continue to be. For a century, the Scouts have done all that Dave wants to accomplish. And they’ve achieved it all without the heavy hand of the state forcing them.

… not all youngsters are tearaways looking for someone to mug. The vast majority are decent, considerate, and appalled by bad behaviour.

After a two-page spread of belligerent idiocy on the part of the world’s favourite newspaper, we get some sense. Not everyone is a tearaway. Most aren’t. So why does the government think it’s its responsibility to employ this one-size-fits-all national service? By forcing teenagers to work, they do nothing but alienate and belittle them: telling them that their libery is a luxury that the state won’t afford them, and that their future will be a future of compulsion, slavery, and misery. When the outlook’s that bleak, no wonder we have so much under-age drinking.

When Cameron told the world, “There is such a thing as society. It’s not just the same thing as the state”, I rejoiced. Not that I disagreed with Thatcher’s assessment to begin with, but it was refreshing to hear that a politician whose very value comes from his centrism was espousing a fundamentally libertarian argument.

This monstrosity of a policy undermines that. It is a concession by Cameron that individualism is dead, and that liberty has lost. It is a surrender of the big citizen to big government. It’s sad that this leaves no major party’s leadership willing to stand up for rights. Fortunately, it matters not one jot to the friends of freedom that Cameron has thrown in the towel. To us, it only proves that we can’t rely on others to make the case for so long as we have voices ourselves.