Film lives!

I recently dug out my old Nikon F80 and discovered that it contained a film that was 18 months old! Film still works, especially for wide-angle shots.

See here for the set:

Glasgow - West End
Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Libertarianism and immigration

It's obvious, is it not, that libertarians favour the free movement of people just as we favour the free movement of goods?

No, it's not.

As explained by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, there's a great difference between the free movement of goods and the free movement of people. Goods have a willing sender and a willing buyer. That's not the case with people. Libertarians do favour immigration controls: by the owner of each piece of property.

I see today that the Labour party is saying that under independence:

Passport controls would be introduced at Gretna and Berwick to restrict the movement of people into England if Scotland voted for independence, the Westminster government has warned.

Perhaps so, but this also implies that the movement of people from England into Scotland would be also restricted.

Once every piece of property is in the hands of its rightful owner we'll see just who is allowed to move where. But, in the meantime, I don't think that's it at all obvious that Scotland would necessarily be worse off than England in the event of border controls being introduced by governments.

The "Aspirational" Liberal Democrats

The cost of a day pass on Lothian Buses has gone up by 20%. Not to worry, the Lib Dems had an "aspirational" plan to stop this.

National Bankruptcy

On the Daily Mail's UK website last week I read this:

A quarter of all council tax is going to meet the soaring cost of the gold-plated pensions of town hall workers, it was revealed yesterday.

Taxpayer subsidies for the pensions of local authority staff topped £5billion last year, according to figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

But on the front page of the Scottish Daily Mail I read this:

The soaring cost of Scotland's town hall workers' gold-plated pension schemes now swallows a third of all council tax bills.

So in England it's a quarter and here in Scotland one third.

And we shouldn't just be looking at these high pension contributions. No, it's basic salaries too:

The pay gap between public- and private-sector workers in Scotland is five times bigger than for the UK as a whole, according to figures from National Statistics.

State earnings in Scotland are also considerably higher than across the UK as a whole. The average wage of a public-sector worker in Scotland has soared to £26,297 — £3,607 more than the typical salary of a private-sector employee.

This compares with average public-sector pay in the rest of the UK of £21,413, just £698 higher than the typical salary paid by a private firm.

And there's more.

The Lothian Pension Fund's contribution rate for employers is currently 18.9% on top of salary. From April this year the rate goes up to 20.8%. In 2010/11 it'll be 22.8% and in 2011/12, 24.9%. That's right, just about a quarter of basic salary will be added as a pension contribution in a couple of years time. So they're going to cost us around 2% extra each year even if they get no pay rises.

Interest rates...

...are now at minus 15.45%.

Granny mugging bastards.

Travellin' man

Lib Dem Andrew Reeves has been using public transport.

OK, quite an impressive schedule, and I confess that I too enjoy trips like that.

Early last year I went by train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and then got some kind of day pass that led me to Helensburgh, Hamilton and goodness knows where in between. I went into a fairly rough pub in Hamilton for my lunchtime pint. For some reason I was the only customer reading the Financial Times... The locals were looking at the Sun and Record. What I really remember about that pub is reading about the RBS rights issue and thinking that it might be worth a punt. Perhaps I had more than one pint and no investment followed. Thank God for Hamilton.

Of course in the old days I'd have thought travelling by train to be a bit wimpish. I recall attending an all-night party in Belsize Park and then going for a drive at eight the next morning. I ended up in Oban...

Brian Monteith on the Scottish pound

Is here:

Conservatives deserve better than the latest wheeze from the party leadership that is neither clever nor helpful.

At a time when the economic news in Britain has been going from bad to worse in very quick order one has to hope that the party that philosophically believes in the capitalist system, warts and all, might try to offer some explanation of why we are now entering the worst recession since the great depression of the 1930s and how free enterprise still offers the best hope for the future.

Unfortunately the best idea coming from the Scottish Conservatives has been for the party’s sole member at Westminster, David Mundell, to offer the hope that Scottish banknotes will be made legal tender across the whole of the UK. How that is expected to help pay someone’s mortgage in Biggar - or anywhere else in Scotland where no problem of using the notes exists - is a question the party leadership have obviously not thought to ask.

The Clydesdale MP hopes that his Private Member’s Bill will do the trick, although the irony of his timing is clearly lost on him. At the moment when the reputation of the Royal Bank and the Bank of Scotland could hardly be lower in Britain he announces a plan to force people to use their paper notes. The idea has clearly not been market tested – and would be unlikely to find favour with the many potential Tory voters in the rest of the UK that have seen their life savings and pensions based upon Scottish bank shares go down the toilet.

Had Scottish pound notes been real money then everyone would have rushed to hold Bank of England or Clydesdale banknotes - offloading those of the Royal Bank and Bank of Scotland that would have been considered to be near worthless. The result would have been a run on the two Scottish banks far worse than we have already seen forcing them both to be fully nationalised within a day.

I’m sure bringing home this economic reality was not what David Mundell intended.

The Conservative MP was happy to pose with Alex Salmond with a big Scottish bank note for the media. Again the irony was lost on this one man Conservative think tank. Alex Salmond not only supports the break-up of Great Britain he also supports the Euro becoming the Scottish currency and has recently been talking up that idea in Barcelona. Having a Euro would of course mean no Scottish banknotes, certainly none as we now know them saying the Scottish banks’ names on them. We would have Euros some of which might have thistles on them - but they would be Euros not Scottish pounds – authorised in Frankfurt to suit the German economy, not in Edinburgh and London to suit a British economy in which Scots play a disproportionately large role.

I’m sure giving aid and comfort to Alex Salmond’s goal of replacing the pound with the Euro was not what David Mundell intended.

But it gets worse, for when I consider what would happen if Scottish banknotes were made legal tender I find it hard to accept that the policy has been thought through beyond the initial photocalls and favourable headlines in the Scottish papers - for such a law is only likely to lead to the banknotes’ demise. Here’s why.

The three ‘Scottish’ banks - the Clydesdale (owned by the National Australia Bank), the Royal Bank of Scotland (now owned by the British Government) and the Bank of Scotland (now owned by the English Lloyds TSB Bank) - have the continuing ‘right’ to print their own banknotes so long as they are backed up by holding an equivalent amount in Bank of England notes.

The Scottish banks have to pay for this right, through the printing, transport and administration costs of the exercise, but for the moment are willing to swallow the overhead because it is worth it in marketing terms – and they are able to make money out of it.

Political and economic commentator Peter Jones explained it well in an intuitive article published in The Scotsman of 8 February last year. I only wish David Mundell had read it for Jones explained that: “Scottish bankers being clever types, they spotted that the value of their note issue was calculated on its value at the close of business on a Saturday. So they figured if they put the necessary deposits into the Bank of England on a Friday and took them out on Monday, the letter, if not the spirit of the law, would be complied with. Why do this? Because when their money is in the BoE, no interest can be earned on it, but for the other four days it can be deposited in an interest-bearing account, thus earning money for the note-issuing bank.”

The profit has been calculated to be £65 million for the Clydesdale alone – with far bigger sums for the two other Scottish banks.

If the Bank of England is forced to accept Scottish notes as legal tender surely we can expect it to demand that for the protection of everyone using them the notes are ALWAYS covered by the Scottish banks holding the equivalent value of the central bank’s own money.

With no profits to offset against them the production and administration costs would become a burden. So, while the Scottish notes would technically become legal tender they might be withdrawn from circulation when the Scottish banks find they can no longer afford them. True there is a marketing value to having the notes – but these are hard times and the pressure to find cost savings will be severe.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s what one senior Executive from a Scottish Bank told me when I asked about the policy: “If we force the issue on legal tender then the Treasury will simply demand that we lodge money with Bank of England at all times and it will then be cheaper to use bank of England notes rather than print our own. Scottish notes will simply disappear.”

I’m sure being responsible for the death of Scottish banknotes was not what David Mundell intended.

It’s known as the law of unintended consequences and it happens when policies are not completely thought through. But Alex Salmond thought it through – he could see where it will lead – towards more nationalist votes as the Conservatives put another nail in the Union’s coffin.

Sean Gabb on Gollygate

Should the BBC have sacked Carol Thatcher because she said in a private conversation that someone looked like a golliwog? No, says Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance. Jo Brand was investigated by the police for allegedly inciting criminal acts on BBC 1 against her political opponents. Carol Thatcher used a word. One gets the sack, the other the BBC's unconditional support. But, then, Jo Brand is part of the New Labour Establishment. Carol Thatcher is the daughter of a Prime Minister who still makes the ruling class shudder.

Also worth mentioning: Jo Brand is alleged to have incided criminal acts against members of the British National Party, and she is a declared supporter of the Labour Party. The Libertarian Alliance has no time for any form of collectivism, racial or otherwise. Even so, we note that the British National Party is *not* led by unindicted war criminals who have enthusiastically joined in the murder of half a million civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have abolished ancient civil liberties and turned the police force into a governing party militia, and who have taxed and regulated and inflated this country to the verge of collapse.

We also note that, while Margaret Thatcher's name is continually blackened by the pro-Labour BBC, she did none of these things either.

The BBC is a leading part of the ideological state apparatus that sustains the present ruling class. What it has done to Carol Thatcher is wholly in keeping with its real purpose.

A government advised by the Libertarian Alliance would abolish the BBC on its first day in office, dismiss all its employees, disclaim all its copyrights, and end all state regulation whatever of the airwaves.

Sean Gabb can be heard making some of these points on BBC Radio:

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2009-02-04-sig-thatcher.mp

Why things are screwed - Part 2

But it's not just the public sector.

At a different client on Wednesday last week I received a letter from a supplier saying that we owed them £74. Wednesday is the day I'm in and the day cheques get written. But of course I'm not going to write out a cheque just because someone's asking for money. I sent the supplier an e-mail explaining that we hadn't received an invoice and please send us one. There was no reply on that day.

This Wednesday I'm back in and there is a reply. Please can I supply our account number? Now, I've been around finance for a long time and if someone sends me an e-mail that identifies the customer and asks for a copy invoice it'll be out the door instantly. I once sent someone from London to Bradford to pick up a million pound cheque and then rush back down and take it to Lloyds Bank head office in the City. It's a long story but business is all about getting paid.

Back to this week. I send a reply giving our account number. A couple of hours later I get another e-mail telling me that they couldn't send me the invoice because I'm not recognised as an "admin user" of their system. I passed this information on to one of the directors who will no doubt get the invoice, perhaps for payment next week.

Incidentally, another invoice was received from these people this Wednesday. It came by post and was opened by the receptionist along with the rest of the mail and put into my in-tray. The receptionist isn't an "admin user" either but that invoice will get paid on time.

Why things are screwed - Part 1

One of my clients is largely funded from the public sector. A few weeks ago I sent an invoice to one of the funding organisations. This invoice was for less than 1% of the typical monthly charge to these people.

A couple of weeks ago I had a call asking if they could pay us through the "government's credit card system". The mind boggles... I told them that I'd never heard of such a thing, that we certainly didn't have one of these cards, and why not just send us a cheque. They couldn't do that and it was agreed that settlement would be made by BACS as with all of their other regular payments to us.

On Tuesday I had another call from a different gentleman wanting to finalise payment "through the government credit card scheme". Again I explained why that wasn't possible and that they'd agreed to pay by BACS. "Oh, he must have given me the wrong message! And I see that you're a regular supplier and are already set up on our BACS system. We'll pay you that way."

Roll on to Thursday. This time I get a call from a lady wanting to know our bank details. I gently explained that they already had these and that they'd sent us a payment around 100 times larger than the one being discussed only the previous day. That didn't matter: I had to send a fax giving the same bank details that they've been using for years. I suppose that we'll now get the money.

Serious Fraud

I see that Lib Dem leader Tavish Scott is calling for:

the Serious Fraud Office to launch an inquiry into a £12bn rights issue at RBS last April, which critics claimed misled investors into believing the bank was a good investment.

I fully agree with this proposal. But there's surely something else to consider.

The various foolish bankers who've lent so imprudently couldn't have done so if the extra money - around 14% last year - hadn't been created in the first place. Any investigation should consider the entire process of monetary creation. And that's something directly under the control of politicians and their lackeys.

Happy Birthday

Scotland, my old, respected mither!

Tho' whiles ye moistify your leather,

Till whare ye sit on craps o' heather,

Ye tine your dram,

Freedom and whisky gang thegither,

Tak aff your dram!

Not the Oscars

It's time for the Plook Award again:

Three towns are in the running to be declared the most dismal in Scotland in this year's Carbuncle Awards.

Motherwell, Glenrothes and New Cumnock have all been shortlisted for the award, dubbed the Plook on the Plinth

Previous "winners" and nominees have been suitably grim, as are this year's finalists. I don't suppose that these places being dominated by public sector development has anything to do with it...

Don't have a wooden Tsar?

Oh yes we do:

People in the Highlands can look forward to more opportunities to enjoy a healthier 2009 following Forestry Commission Scotland’s appointment of its first dedicated health champion.

Angus McWilliam has been appointed as the Highland Conservancy’s Highland Health Advisor, and started work in the Commission’s Dingwall office on January 6. He will work closely with local communities and organisations including NHS Highland, The Highland Council and Scottish Natural Heritage to promote the physical and mental health benefits of access to woods and forests

You what?

I must admit that I've always wondered what all of our wonderful Scottish scenery was actually for. Obviously not for people to take photographs. Oh no, that would never do. It seems that we are meant to walk in the countryside! I'd never have thought of that, would you? Thank God our taxes are being used to reveal this news to us.

All together now:

left, right;
left, right...

The English Empire

According to today's Scotsman, in tonight's John Adams programme on Channel 4 :

Congress votes to declare independence from England.

"England".

In 1776.

Oh dear...

Happy New Year

New Year 2009
Originally uploaded by David Farrer

New Year 2009
Originally uploaded by David Farrer

More here.

Has the Telegraph been dumbed down?

I guess it has:

Video: New Year's Eve celebrations begin in Aukland

Revellers in the New Zealand capital have watched a colourful display coming from the top of the Sky Tower.

"Aukland"?

"capital"?

Oh dear...

Do the Scotsman's journalists pay income tax?Do unions mislead?

Now here's an interesting story:

SALARIES in Scotland are lagging £3,000 behind the average British wage and are more than £18,000 less than pay packets in London, a survey reveals today.

The research found only workers in Aberdeen and Edinburgh earned more than the £31,323 average taken home by full-time workers across the UK.

No that's not what's "taken home", it's pre-tax. There is a difference.

At least the Scotsman picks up on this bit:

However the GMB's UK national average of £31,323 is far higher than the ONS average of £24,908 as it refers to the "mean" average – a basic division of all salaries by the number of full-time workers – rather than the "median" preferred by the ONS, which effectively ignores extremely low and high salaries.

But let's look at the GMB Union's figures a bit more closely, in particular that £46,462 "average" for London. That seemed extraordinarily high to me, even accepting that the Union doesn't use the normal "median" wage but instead quotes the very misleading "mean".

Here's what the GMB says:

These figures are from a new analysis by GMB, Britain’s general union, of the recently published Table 7.7a of the 2008 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings by the Office of National Statistics. These are the most recent figures from the survey in April 2008. GMB’s analysis ranks the average gross annual pay for full time men and women workers from the highest to the lowest for each region and area of the UK and expresses the pay in each area as a percentage of the average annual pay of full time men and women in UK. The figures are for jobs in the area. What is shown is an average of the gross pay of the higher and lower paid jobs.

I couldn't work out where the GMB got its figure from but according to table 7.7a the mean gross salary for London is £40,354, not £46,462, and the median, that's to say the typical salary with as many people earning above and below this figure, is £29,260 PA.

So why would a union present London salaries in this misleading way? Could it be because they want to discredit capitalism? Surely not...

Route 66

I was having a look at Propliner Magazine at lunchtime today when I came across an article by Gordon Reid.

Gordon, or Nodrog as he was known in the good old days, was one of those aviation enthusiasts who came down from Glasgow to Prestwick at the weekends. Another frequent weekend visitor was the late Wilf White. I'm sure that you'll all be buying a copy of Wilf's photographic book, not least because yours truly makes an appearance on pages 16 and 17, although the year quoted on page 17 seems to be a bit out...

Nod, who is on page 17 of Wilf's book, later worked at Heathrow and then emigrated to Australia. His Propliner article describes a recent trip to the US:

After a 14.5 hour direct flight from Melbourne I arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of July 17th. I was en-route to EAA Air Venture 2008 at Oshkosh, Wisconsin and on arrival at Los Angeles my usual means of transport to Oshkosh is a connecting flight to Chicago. This year, however, I had decided that I was going to drive across the USA from Los Angeles to Oshkosh and back to see how many Propliners I could find.

Fair enough, I thought.

Nod's concluding paragraph goes like this:

The return journey from Oshkosh to Los Angeles took me 10 days and added a further 4,400 miles to my car hire thus taking it to 9,541 miles. In total 150 airfields were visited with 157 Propliners being noted. The main types being 81 DC-3s and 44 Convairliners, supported by 13 DC-4s, one Carvair, two DC-6s, two DC-7s, three C-46s, three Martin 4-0-4s, two L-749/1049s, two Viscounts and four YS11s

There are two lessons to be learnt from this:

(1) The younger generation couldn't cope with this kind of workload.

(2) Sell your shares in car rental firms that hire by the week.

Don't Tread on Me

I see that the SNP's been having a go at Westminster's inability to protect data:

THE SNP today hit out at the UK Government's "appalling" data loss record, claiming more than 13 million records were lost this year, equivalent to 25 every minute.

And Pete Wishart's certainly got this right:

Mr Wishart said Labour's record on data security was reason enough to abandon ID cards.

But as one of the commenters puts it:

I really do think the Scottish Nationalist Party are tempting fate - it's not as if those elements of the public sector for which they have responsibility don't handle personal data!

That's exactly what I thought when I first read this piece. Abandoning ID cards is certainly a start but that doesn't deal with the fundamental issue here. What really needs to be addressed is why governments (including Scottish ones) need to collect so much information on us in the first place. And the answer of course is that they've strayed far beyond what could be said to be the only legitimate function of government: protecting us against those who initiate force or fraud.

Full stop.

For those politicians who don't understand this and who might wonder what's in store for them I recommend watching Channel 4's excellent new production.

On my recent silence

There's been no blogging here for a couple of weeks. And there are two reasons for this.

First, I've been unwell. My chest infection returned on the 8th of the month and has still not completely gone. I've had no energy to do very much of anything at all, including blogging.

But there's something else.

Readers may well have noticed a distinct reduction of the number of posts over the past year or so. I guess I've become somewhat "blogged out".

This whole thing started way back April 2002 with these words:

Welcome to this new blog. The title Freedom and Whisky links the two themes of this blog: libertarianism and Scotland. The libertarianism will, however, sometimes extend beyond events in Scotland and I shall also be covering non-political news of interest to me north of the border. I have therefore included links to a variety of Scottish sites which I often use.

The plan was to introduce libertarian ideas to readers in Scotland but also to help libertarian-leaning folk elsewhere learn a bit more about this rather strange land.

Most posts have had something to do with politics but I've always believed that it was a good idea to throw in some other pieces that dealt with whatever simply struck me as interesting.

Back in 2002 I was probably the only libertarian blogger in Scotland and indeed one of the very few Scottish bloggers of any sort. I think it's fair to say that we now have quite a few Scottish blogs written by people with distinct libertarian leanings, even if they can't necessarily quote their Mises and Rothbard chapter and verse. The same is so down south. Almost every day I discover a new libertarianish blog written by someone who gets it but whose name is quite unknown to me. How different from the old days.

I joined the Libertarian Alliance way back in 1972 and have looked after its money (such as it is!) ever since. Back then meetings took place in someone's flat and half a dozen was a good crowd. I well remember sitting on someone's floor listening to Harry Schultz going on about gold and money. Was he mad? No, it turned out. Later on we graduated to draughty meeting halls and the numbers rose - perhaps by seven or eight in a good year. I recall being inordinately proud when I met Andrew Alexander of the Daily Mail at some gathering of suit-wearing Young Conservatives and Alexander telling me that I must be the token "real libertarian" because I was wearing blue jeans, a black polo-neck sweater and a Taxation is Theft badge!

Eventually the Alternative Bookshop opened in Covent Garden, managed by LA founder Chris Tame who was later assisted by Brian Micklethwait. Brian was usually to be seen crouched over his highly advanced Osborne computer, churning out an endless stream of LA publications. On paper of course: there was as yet no Internet. The shop saw regular visits by Hayek, Friedman and other prominent writers. Back then we probably knew all British libertarians in person. But now, as I said above, they seem to keep popping up all over the place. There's a veritable anarchy of new libertarians out there and I like to think that this justifies Chris Tame's firm belief that the intellectual battle is what matters, not day-to-day political skirmishes.

So why so few posts here recently?

Partly it's just being "blogged out". How many times can one rant on about the idiocies of politicians? How often do we need to tell the Bank of England to just stop printing the money?

Another reason is connected to the vast expansion of Internet output from libertarians and from others writing about just about everything else that interests me. Take a look this. Click on the folders to expand if necessary. It's a full time job just trying to keep up with other sites!

So what now for Freedom and Whisky? I'm not sure really but I'm not going to go away. Maybe there will be less day-to-day party political stuff and more to do with the more important long-term ideas. Perhaps that takes me a bit more away from Scotland, but not necessarily. I voted SNP back in May last year but they've turned out to be big-statists just like the rest of them. There's plenty of material there. And how will Scotland recover from the near disintegration of its financial services industry? Will part nationalisation make us more afraid of independence or will the inevitable loss of control to London have the opposite effect? It could go either way. But what's certain is this: like everywhere else on the planet Scotland needs the ideas that were pioneered here during the Enlightenment. Libertarian ideas.

A Happy New Year to all my readers.

Saviour of the World

I can't see why there's all this fuss about bridges over the Forth so that folk can get back home to North Queensferry.

Can't they just walk on the water?

That German Market again

I wasn't going to write about it again but then this has cropped up:

A RETIRED lawyer has claimed he was stopped from taking pictures of Edinburgh's Winter Wonderland by an event steward who told him it would "breach data protection laws".

There are plenty of comments and almost all are sensible.

The restriction seems to be on what the organisers call "long lens cameras". But as this chap points out, modern compact cameras often have zoom lenses that are considerably more powerful than the lenses used by the typical DSLR user. It also occurred to me that the more recent "full frame" DSLRs that have larger sensors than is usual are clearly bulkier than the "cropped sensor" DSLRs that most people use. Presumably the security operatives will find these large cameras to be especially threatening. But the larger sensors reduce the telephoto effect of any particular lens. Indeed, that's why the tiny sensors on compact cameras can produce such powerful telephoto effects.

As Mr Elder said:

There should be a clear notice displayed, explaining the rules.

And the rules would seem to be: powerful telephoto zoom lenses are fine unless the camera is large.

New Site

Welcome to Scottish Libertarians.