Mark Steyn has a characteristically eloquent article in the Washington Times about the “Greek tragedy”, as he calls unsustainable entitlements. Highlights:

“We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest…

The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece. The European Union has concluded that the Greek government’s austerity measures are insufficient and, as a condition of bailout, has demanded something more robust…

So the aforementioned Greek deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, has denounced the conditions of the EU deal on the grounds that the Germans stole all the bullion from the Bank of Greece during the Second World War. Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects. How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off.

Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it…

Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year for Greeks who retire at 58.”

Great article in City Magazine on abuse of “eminent domain” – as Americans call the compulsory purchase of property commandeered for the “public good”.

You may have heard of the Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo v New London case a couple of years ago. It said it was OK for the government to force owners to sell not just to itself, but to a developer.

This article tells of a similar state-sanctioned private landgrab in New York, and powerfully makes the case for full protection of property rights.

While I’m on the subject, and as I’m always on the lookout for libertarian rock songs, I recently spotted the video opposite.

It’s about eminent domain – a fantastic tune as well.

Ian Anderson’s lyrics are here.

The EU will soon be represented by Catherine Ashton, a Briton who was active in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1970s and treasurer of that vocal pacifist group between 1980 and 1982.

Questions over her past have been voiced by some Eurosceptics, including a MEP, and some British papers.

Lady Ashton denied reports that she had accepted money from Moscow, and that was that. She is sure to be confirmed by the European Parliament in the coming days.

What bothers me about this is not that she was in charges of CND finances at a time when the USSR was financing pacifist groups across Western Europe. I’m a trusting kind of guy and am prepared to believe her.

So okay: I accept that Moscow – whose main aim at the time was maintaining military superiority over democracies in Europe – made an exception for the UK, and refrained from funding those agitating against the deployment of short-range missiles there.

But what about the cause itself? You can’t hold someone’s youthful beliefs against them – if they have repudiated them. But in her response, Ashton did not repudiate her CND involvement.

And her supporters in the blogosphere and the media have even defended it, many calling formed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky a far-right witch-hunter for pointing to the CND’s dubious finances.

I am in complete agreement with this online article posted by The Economist after her nomination.

Excerpts:

“IMAGINE a British Conservative politician—call her Catriona Aston—coming from obscurity to gain one of the top posts in the European Union, just as Baroness (Catherine) Ashton has emerged from the Labour ranks to be the EU’s new foreign minister.

Imagine that on closer scrutiny it turns out that in the early 1980s the fictional Ms Aston worked for a cold-war think-tank called something like the ‘African Freedom Foundation’, which campaigned against the spread of communism in Africa.

Imagine that on closer examination it turns out that this outfit enjoyed strong behind-the-scenes support from the then apartheid government in South Africa.

Among its supporters and officials are unrepentant defenders of the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal and even those who said that Nazism had been a lesser evil than communism.

It is easy to imagine what would happen. The hapless Ms Aston would be publicly disgraced and would have to resign forthwith.

How could an EU representative credibly deal with the developing countries when she in the past had been a defender of a racist colonial regime?

Nuance, context and balance would go out of the window. Nobody would ask if all causes supported by the former South African regime were equally evil, or if communism had maybe cost more African lives than apartheid. …

The fact remains that the Kremlin found CND and other “peace movements” useful ways of undermining the unity of NATO, weakening the West’s defence posture and stoking anti-Americanism.

The ex-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an expert in Soviet penetration of the West, says: “the worldwide disarmament campaign in the early 1980s was covertly orchestrated from Moscow. To a substantial extent it was also funded by the Soviet bloc”…

Imagine a 1980s Europe where CND had triumphed, with left-wing governments in Britain and Germany scrapping NATO, surrendering to Kremlin pressure and propping up the evil empire.

Her opponents complain that Lady Ashton is ineffective. As a CND organiser, that may have been a blessing.”

The inglorious qualification of the French soccer team to next year’s World Cup finals at the expense of Ireland (the last-gasp goal was scored thanks to a handball) has triggered an avalanche of anguished reactions in France itself.

Many have taken the form of historical quotations. Jacques Attali exclaimed: “We are all Irish” – echoing the Le Monde headline “We are all American” after 9/11. The sports minister spoke of her “cowardly relief” – a phrase first used after the 1938 Munich agreement between Hitler and the Western Allies.

But why stop here? Here’s my personal list of relevant – or slightly adapted – quotes:

“Vae victis.” (Brennus)
“One more such victory and we’re lost.” (Pyrrhus)
“All is won, except honor.” (Francis I of France)
“It is so cruel to fall at the hand of a Frenchman.” (Duke of Berry)
“France has won a battle, but France has not won the war.” (De Gaulle)
“Ich bin ein Dubliner.” (JFK)

I’m sure there are more. Any suggestions welcome.

Excellent leader in The Economist on 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It stressee that political freedom and economic liberty are intimately linked, and that progress in both should not be taken for granted.

A key excerpt:

“At present capitalism is too often judged by the excesses of a few bankers.

But when historians come to write about the past quarter-century, Lehman Brothers and Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin will account for fewer pages than the 500m people dragged out of absolute poverty into something resembling the middle class.

Their success is not just a wonderful thing in itself-the greatest leap forward in economic history. It has also helped spur on other chaotic freedoms: look at the way ideas, good, bad and mad, are texted around the world.

For in the end, no matter what China’s leaders tell Mr Obama when he visits Beijing later this month, economic and political liberty are linked-not as tightly as people hoped 20 years ago, but still linked.

Look forward, and China’s internet-obsessed emerging middle class will surely have an appetite for liberty beyond the purely economic. Change could happen as unexpectedly as it did in 1989.

Even the most fearsome fortresses of repression can eventually be breached. Then it was Honecker and Ceausescu; tomorrow it might be Castro, Ahmadinejad or Mugabe; one day Chavez or even Hu”

Whichever side of the Atlantic you live on, the government is forcing you to ditch ordinary incandescent light bulbs and switch to “compact fluorescent lamps”.

The rationale is that incandescents are wasteful – most of the energy they consume is turned into heat rather, not light – while CFLs are efficient (just try turning on one of each, wait for 10 minutes and touch them: you’ll really feel the difference.)

In his latest column, Jonathan Rauch asks: “Is this a smart way to save some energy? Or, rather, an example of ham-handed environmental grandstanding?”

After weighing various pros and cons, Rauch votes for n2. Expensive low-energy light bulbs have been around for decades, and are now selling mostly by government fiat. A spontaneous choice they are not.

Rauch lists some of the problems with CFLs:

“As someone who has recently made a good-faith effort to switch, I can tell you that fluorescents deserve their not-ready-for-prime-time reputation.

They are slow to come on and slower to reach full brightness. They come in weird, ugly shapes, typically reject dimmers, and don’t even fit in half the places where I need to put them.

Their reliability is spotty. And they contain toxic mercury, making breakage and disposal problematic. That’s before considering their light, which is mediocre at best and ghoulish at worst.”

Rauch goes on to consider various other problems – notably the fact that, as one town in Iowa found, low-energy bulbs can lead to an increase in energy use for lighting, as people keep them turned on in the mistaken belief that they are free to use.

Rauch concludes that it can make sense to reject efficient but costly CFLs in favor of cheap, ordinary light bulbs that are more expensive to use.

People should be allowed to do so, and that choice need not be environmentally detrimental if electricity is priced properly. Amen to than.

Another good argument against CFLs is offered by the French economist Remy Prud’homme, who in a recent paper factors in the heat emitted by ordinary light bulbs.

In summer, that heat is indeed wasted: incandescents are truly wasteful. But in winter – when most of your lighting us takes place – those ultra-hot bulbs reduce your heating bill.

If you take this into account, and Prud’homme has done the sums, a switch to CFLs would INCREASE total energy bills in France by some 7bn euros (the equivalent adjusted for population would be $50bn in the US).

And since heating comes mostly from oil and gas – as opposed to electricity, which in France comes mostly from clean nuclear plants – this would also result in a RISE in CO2 emissions!

So CFLs are bad for users and bad for the environment. They are, in Prud’homme’s words, a “false good idea”.

Iran and Britain, a documentary broadcast this week by the BBC, neatly explores the paranoid style in Iranian politics.

A conspiracy-driven view of the world has been certainly nurtured by the ayatollahs – tyrannies always need hidden enemies to provide an excuse for repression and a cover for failure.

But in the case of Iran, as the program shows, paranoia predates the Islamic revolution.

The best expose of Iran’s obsession with foreign plots was Uncle Napoleon – a 1970s satirical novel, later turned into a hit TV series, written by a diplomat who went to exile after 1979.

Uncle Napoleon is a veteran who fought Britain in World War I and sees the evil hand of the British everywhere.

Of course, Iranians have at times had reason to be paranoid about the Brits – e.g. the removal of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953.

But the documentary’s cool examination of British-Iranian relations over the years shows that ritual denunciation of British perfidy is a security blanket.

The last Shah was convinced that his downfall had been engineered in Whitehall and the corridors of the BBC.

The same mindset was in evidence after the recent protests against Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election.

As the author of the documentary, Christopher de Bellaigue, says:

“A large number of Iranians are still tempted to point a finger at Britain whenever something goes wrong.”

In conclusion, the translator of Uncle Napoleon reveals a deep thuth that applies to many dysfunctional polities:

“The fallback view in Iran of the political world is always that what you see is not the truth. There’s always something underneath it. This is very deep in the Iranian take on world politics, that if you believe in what you’re shown, then you’re just being a naive fool.”

Click here to watch Iran and Britain(available until Thursday 15th).

Charles Darwin is one of my great heroes. I regard the author of The Origin of Species as a model of scientific probity, moral courage and intellectual clarity.

And I regard evolution by natural selection as the single most important idea in the history of human thought.

My fascination with Darwin’s life and work meant that I very much looked forward to seeing the movie Creation.

Maybe the film could not possibly live up to my expectations, but I was disappointed.

Darwin’s bio is competently summarized: the travels, life as a gentleman naturalist, the barnacles, the inner struggle as Darwin loses his religion, the procrastination in writing the masterwork – it’s all in the film.

The scientific militant friends Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker, and Alfred Russel Wallace, the young admirer who independently discovered natural selection, also get passing mentions.

But all this is overshadowed in the film by high family drama – notably darwin’s tender but tense relation with his wife, and above all his daughter’s death.

I’m sure the tragedy plunged Darwin into despair. But the portrait of the Victorian patriarch as a hallucinating wretch who shakes, screams and vomits with guilt until he and Emma manage a last-minute cathartic love-fest, just doesn’t ring true.

It would have been possible to make Darwin’s struggles interesting without turning them into standard 21st-century reality-TV fare.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the crash of an Air France plane at Habsheim in 1988. The newly delivered Airbus A320 was to overfly an airfield in eastern France during a show, but went down into the forest. Three passengers died.

Following this post a pilot friend of mine gave me the book written a few years later by the captain, Michel Asseline.

He rejects the official ruling that the crew was to blame for flying too low, and says the investigation was a farce designed to conceal the early faults of the plane and protect Air France’s investment.

The flight and voice data recorders – which civil aviation officials allowed Airbus to process – were apparently doctored.

I’m not competent to pronounce on technical issues. But Asseline’s conclusion about French institutions has the ring of truth – and addresses a leading theme of this blog.

In a country where the state controls the bodies that make a plane, fly it, and regulate the aviation industry, conflicts of interest abound.

The book makes an interesting parallel between the A320 and Britain’s Comet jet in the 1950s. Up to a point, the same scenario unfolded.

A state-backed European aircraft manufacturer sought to challenged American supremacy (De Havilland; Airbus); the new plane uses revolutionary technology (jet engines; fly-by-wire); the national carrier is drafted to showcase the new wonder (BOAC; Air France); politicians burst with nationalistic pride; early crashes are blamed on pilots and minor “teething problems”, sparing the manufacturer’s blushes.

But the parallels end here.

In the case of the Comet , when one plane too many fell out of the sky in 1954, an investigation was finally launched with a view to actually determining the cause of the crash – as opposed to reassuring the public and allowing flights to continue with minor adjustments.

All Comets were grounded, and a hard-hitting official report identified the real cause of the crash: metal fatigue.

The fixes came too late to save the Comet: by the time the plane was ready to fly again, in 1958, the Americans had cornered the commercial jet market.

But the two episodes illustrate the opposite conceptions of the state that prevail on either side of the Channel.

Britain is no less elitist than France – and probably even more – but its elites are divided; in a nation that invented separation of power, it is taken for granted that a non-monolithic state is in the interest of the public.

In France, the “general interest” is whatever the government says it is, and to be pitted against one state-supported entity – as Asseline discovered – is to be pitted against the whole state.

A year on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, everyone is giving their two cents’ worth on the crisis. I might as well too. (At a time when expertise needs as much deflating as financial assets, perhaps I should value my own opinion at just one cent.)

The analysis I found most convincing – and, strangely enough, the one that agrees most with my skepticism about state intervention – was Kenneth’s Rogoff’s.

Rogoff has been making the rounds of TV shows with a new book he co-authored: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

In this post he challenges the prevailing view that it was a big mistake to allow Lehman to fail, and that by doing so then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson turned a local storm into a global tsunami.

The problem, Rogoff says, was not just with one bank. Most of Wall Street had used borrowed money to make huge bets on assets whose value was shrinking.

America was going through the tail end of a classic cycle of financial folly and panic.

Whether or not Lehman was allowed to fail, Rogoff contends, many of the big institutions that were later bailed out would have needed to be sooner or later.

Lehman’s fall, it is true, did spread panic and pain. But in a deflating bubble, failures are not only unavoidable, but healthy. How else are you going to restore finance to health if don’t allow purges?

Rogoff believe that the eventual decision to rescue all and sundry was a terrible call. The government guarantee implicit in the decades-long policy of “too big to fail” had encouraged risk-taking in the first place.

As the time-horored saying goes, the greed that drives markets has to be tempered by fear. The state’s decision to underwrite the whole system while keeping it in private hands entrenches such a “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” culture.

Removing the possibility of failure, in the words of Gordon Gekko in the great movie Wall Street, leads to the “survival of the unfittest”.

What is to be done? In the absence of a market solution, banks should be forced to set more reserves aside, and told they are mortal. Provisions to wind them down should be made clear. The public guarantees they depend on should in due course be scrapped.

In the same spririt, I also recommend this Econtalk podcast with Allan Meltzer from February.