Property Right and Freedom

Private property is essential for a free nation. It gives meaning to the concept of freedom. It is a prerequisite for trading in a market economy. If the founders of a free nation are to have any chance of succeeding, they must have a moral theory of property rights.

Freedom and property rights are tightly related. Freedom means doing what you want to do rather than what someone else tells you to do. The right to do as you please with your own property makes up a large part of your freedom. On the other hand, other people's property rights limit your freedom. Each person's freedom ends where another person's freedom begins. A free nation would be a place where each person is free to acquire property and do whatever he wants with it without interference, as long as he does not trespass on the rights of others.

Freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech cannot be fully realized without private property. For example, there cannot be freedom of the press in a society where all printing presses are owned and controlled by the state. Even if the rulers do not want to practice censorship, unless they are willing to publish absolutely everything, which could require them to devote almost all resources to the publishing industry, they must decide, somehow, what to publish and what not to publish. They must also decide how many copies they will print of each publication, how to distribute them, what price to charge (if any) for each copy, and many other things that can affect the impact that the publication will have on society.

Even so-called free countries, whose governments do not directly interfere with religious practices and which permit private property, impose general regulations and taxes that limit religious activity more than a truly free nation would. Local governments restrict religious freedom indirectly through zoning laws and building codes. All levels of government that collect taxes thereby limit the resources that taxpayers can spend on religion. By demanding tax payments under penalty of the law, all states imply that what they want is more important than what any god or religious community or individual wants.
Freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you want on your own property and the right to stipulate the rules that others must obey when they speak on your property. It is not the right to speak at the same time as everyone else, to interrupt, to shout down, or to disregard the rights of others. You should always get permission from the owner before using his property as your stage. If the streets and parks and town halls and theaters and all other meeting places are owned by the state, the state must decide whether to permit assemblies, protest marches, and speeches. The state has the right to say how the public property may be used, including who may speak there and what they may say. Under communism there is likely to be less freedom of expression and freedom of religion than in a private property system. Any freedom allowed in these areas under communism is at the pleasure of the ruling class and they can end it whenever they choose.
The more private property you own, the more ability you have to exercise these freedoms. But what about the poor man who has no property? What difference does it make to him whether all property is in private hands or whether it is in the hands of the state? In either kind of society, he can't do anything or have any freedom unless someone who owns property allows him the use of it. In either case, someone other than he decides what actions he is allowed to perform, if any. This poor wretch is clearly in a bad situation under either system. Even so, he should prefer the private property system, because it offers him more hope of improving his situation. First, in the private property system there are many property owners ranging from struggling poor folks to small businessmen to big tycoons. Somewhere in this range there is bound to be someone looking to hire workers or someone with compassion looking to help people in need. The propertyless man has many different people he can plead with or try to negotiate with to get temporary use of property. If one property owner turns him down, he can try another, and another, and another. But when the state owns all the property, the state is the only one he can plead with or try to negotiate with. If the state turns him down, he is done. Second, if he understands economics or history, our vagrant will realize that a free-market economy produces more and more wealth and, consequently, more and more total freedom, whereas a centrally planned economy wastes resources and produces less and less wealth and less total freedom. In a free-market economy there is an increasing amount of wealth available for charity and there are more new business opportunities for people who are looking for work. In a centrally planned economy, the amount of wealth available for distribution constantly shrinks as the planners inevitably misallocate resources. Third, in the private property system, the propertyless wretch has a possibility of someday owning property and, thereby, gaining some freedom and independence. Under the state-ownership system, he has no chance of ever owning property and being free.

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Capitalism: the cure for poverty

I was encouraged to learn then that "the poor" really only means the Gentiles, as they are impoverished in not being a party to the Lord’s Covenant.

I usually find it prudent to avoid religious quotations. They invite correction and friction. Yet poverty, its causes and consequences, remains central to both politics and economics.

It seems to me those of the Left have co-opted it as "their" topic. The representatives of capitalism - the CBI or the Chambers of Commerce or even the Institute of Directors - avoid the theme, beyond suggesting that companies exist to be creamed for taxes so the state can help the poor.

I argue it is bold, liberalising projects that will invest those on the most modest incomes with dignity. Poverty, at its core, is about more than relative income streams. It is about extending choices that make life better and probably longer.

It is markets and capitalism that will lift everyone out of poverty - if it is opened up in ways that we seem too timid to touch.

I acknowledge the good intentions of many left-wing thinkers. I repudiate the results of their policies. One definition of poverty involves the proportion of income spent on food. A wealthy professional may eat very well, but his or her food budget is no more than 10 per cent of total budget.

For those at the bottom of the spectrum, 40 per cent goes on food. Yet the cost of our groceries is grossly too high because of the autarchic policies of the European Commission. The European Union protects the agricultural sector so tightly that the cost of food in our supermarkets is acknowledged to be at least 25 per cent higher than it need be.

That agreed sum may understate matters. If the commission lowered its tariff barriers, vast acres of land on other continents would come back under husbandry and prices would fall further. It seems plain to me that prices would fall immediately by 40 per cent and in many foodstuffs it would be 50 per cent. In the case of some commodities, such as sugar and bananas, falls would exceed 50 per cent.

This is a tangible and vivid way to dilute poverty yet who speaks out clearly against the inequity of the common agricultural policy? All the candidates in the Euro-elections in June are mute on CAP reform. Above all, why does Labour not scream from the rooftops? The Left, alert to the truth, ought to be tireless in abusing the malignant CAP.

The prospect of GM foods is treated as a threat of some nature. In fact, GM techniques will be a great blessing to the poor of the planet. The Green Revolution has enhanced the harvests more than the incremental improvements of the past 2,000 years. It is agronomists whose names we never know who have done more to mitigate poverty than high-minded European socialists.

The other dominant expenditure for those at the lower end of the income spectrum is housing - usually expressed as rent because ownership is usually not an option. Every community in Scotland is seeing the price of homes surge, whether it be in urban Edinburgh or remote rural communities.

The poor are marginalised even further. Often they are locked into the worst municipal housing schemes where life is grim and bleak. Scotland has no shortage of land. Prices are high only because of the constrictions we preserve.

If you want to make life easier - or cheaper - then land use has to be liberalised. Supply and demand is an equation we all know works in every other market, but in housing the principles of economics have to be suspended to preserve the ritual or ceremonial roles of councillors and planning officials.


Agronomists have done more to mitigate poverty than high-minded European socialists



Scotland’s Labour establishment seems blind to the notion of permitting many more new homes. Some would be on new sites, but much of it would be adaptation of present structures. It is simply ludicrous rural Scotland pretends it has no space.

Another cause of sustained poverty seems to me to be dreadful schooling. A poor education makes for a poor life. At its most simple if, after ten years of state schooling, you emerge unable to read or write or count your life chances are stunted.

Chancellor Gordon Brown can pour billions into "education", but success eludes him as the system crushes any element of choice. I believe that a legal test-case brought by an 18-year-old graduating from an Edinburgh school without elementary skills might transform the opportunities.

We need a mechanism that allows pupils to select strands of education and also one that rewards teachers that show real merit. I think our more dreadful schools stunt the lives of millions of kids. They are as bright as the rest of us, but are repelled by grottier schools.

There are some strands to the phenomenon of poverty that may be more intractable. Many people may seem slothful or incapacitated from normal work routines not because they are lazy or inept but because they have psychological or psychiatric problems - mostly undiagnosed.

Nonetheless, it would be feeble not to agree that the social-security system is nourishing a class of professional welfare beneficiaries who are adept at avoiding work. I was arrested by the Newsnight Scotland disclosure that one-third of Glaswegians now live off benefits. I am not contesting legitimate claimants, but I do think a high proportion of "the poor" are choosing not to work. This may be entirely rational behaviour. Why work if you are no better off after income tax and national insurance?

So, I offer three policies to liberate the poor: free trade in foodstuffs to halve the price of groceries; relaxing land-use impediments to dissolve the cost of housing and radical reform of schooling to break the cycle of stunted learning.

I can understand why politicians prefer to preserve the present systems, but the more imaginative must see that capitalism will lift the poor. It is socialism that keeps people crushed.

By JOHN Blundell

(• John Blundell is the director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs )

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Read to Lead

By Morton C. Blackwell

(Morton Blackwell is the Founder and President of the Leadership Institute.
Widely experienced in and out of government, Mr. Blackwell served three years in the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. In 1984, Mr. Blackwell left the White House Staff to work full-time as the president of the Leadership Institute, his educational foundation which identifies, recruits, trains, and places conservatives in politics, government, and the media)

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Some people bluntly say they don't read. They say they would read if only they had the time.
I will also be blunt: You have time to do what you choose to do. The more you read, the better you read -- and the more you enjoy it.

People who don't read cheat themselves. By not reading, you limit what you can achieve, make mistakes you could avoid, and miss opportunities that could improve your life. Soon, as the gaps in your knowledge become apparent to others, you must reconcile yourself to not being taken seriously.
Before going any further, I must make clear that I do not urge you to spend the rest of your days nestled in a cozy spot at the local library. Far from it.

Actively involved in politics since the early 1960s at the local, state, and national levels, I understand the importance of action. Nothing moves unless it is pushed. Political activists elect candidates, pass or repeal laws, and determine public policy. But while boundless energy and enthusiasm are essential in activists, something else is necessary. To be successful leaders, activists must also be well-informed.

How To Learn
You can learn in three different ways:
1. By personal experience.
You can learn by trial and error. Known also as the school of hard knocks, trial and error is the most painful way to learn anything. I can't deny that this school teaches its lessons well. Its drawback, however, is that by the time you graduate -- if, indeed, you ever graduate -- you're too old to go to work. Students who study only at this school learn things only the hard way. No matter how diligent a
student you are of the school of hard knocks, you cannot learn by first-hand experience everything you should know.
2. By observation.
By paying attention to what goes on around you, you can learn from the experience of others. Careful observation is invaluable to anyone in any field, from sports to science to politics. But again, you cannot be everywhere. Everyone's individual power of observation is necessarily limited.
3. By studying the experience of others.
You can't experience or observe everything, but you can, by reading, learn from the experiences of your contemporaries, the previous generation, and those who lived ages ago.
You can learn from them all by reading their works and books about them.
After you have accumulated a lot of knowledge about how the world really works, you can become highly effective and achieve many things important to you.
In politics, it is not enough to know what's right. To succeed, your command of a subject must be so secure that you can persuade people you are right. And then you must activate them.
You should have such a mastery of the issues that you can frame your arguments to anticipate and render ineffective your opponent's arguments. You should know all you can learn about what works and what doesn't work. How do you accomplish this? Schooling alone will not suffice. All knowledgeable people are largely self-taught.

How To Read
The surest way to acquire a wide range of useful knowledge is to read every day.
My introduction to books came early, before I started school. We had a lot of books in our house. First, my parents regularly read aloud to me. After I learned to read, they did what Samuel Johnson advised other parents to do more than 200 years ago:
I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study.

In time, I moved on from my family's books to my grammar school library and then to the well-stocked children's section of the East Baton Rouge Parish public library. From there I went to the well-stocked library of my junior high school, where I read, if not all, at least a large percentage of its books. After this, at my small rural high school, I read every book in that school's library at least once.

Sometimes my reading is systematic. I took a decade, ending a few years ago, to read at my cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains everything I could about the Roman Republic and the Greek city-state era. I believed the experience of people in those semi-democratic periods might be applied helpfully to modern-day America.
Well-written history books have all the drama of novels and the added merit of being (generally) true. And I systematically read many political biographies. Anyone interested in the public policy process should read biographies and autobiographies of political leaders. Histories and biographies, even if the authors are unsympathetic to conservatives, unfailingly contain a trove of information about how to succeed in the public policy process.

The art of politics cannot be as exact as, say, mathematics or chemistry, because it is so much more complicated. A number doesn't care if it's added or
subtracted; a chemical doesn't care about its history or its future. Understanding people requires wisdom, not just knowledge.

You have time to read, if you want to, every day. Read in bed, before you go to sleep. Read when you wake up in the morning. Read while your car is being serviced. Read on airplanes. Read during the dull parts of meetings you have to attend. Read while you're waiting in those long lines to get your driver's license renewed. Almost every day you can reclaim, by reading, some of your time which otherwise would be wasted.
You don't have to finish a book before starting another. Most well-educated readers read two or more books at the same time. Read some in one book. If you temporarily tire of it, read some in another for a change. There is no shortage of good books available.

Over the years, I have often been asked to recommend books I consider of particular value for conservatives. What follows is a core library of 26 books, all of which can be purchased from online services. Most of them can be found in libraries or in good used-book stores. I introduce the authors in alphabetical order. Every conservative leader should read (and re-read) these books. You can get all of these from sources at the end of this booklet.

No one could agree with every view expressed in these books. In some matters the authors have opposing views. But any conservative will find merit in each one.

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Google Buzz 'breaks privacy laws'

A leading privacy group has urged US regulators to investigate Google's new social networking service Buzz, one week after its launch.
The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has made its complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
It says that Buzz - which is part of Google's Gmail service - is "deceptive" and breaks consumer protection law.
The search giant has twice made changes to the service to placate an outcry from users about privacy concerns.

Canadian officials are also looking at whether Buzz violates privacy laws.
"Google still hasn't gone far enough," Epic's consumer privacy counsel Kim Nguyen told BBC News.
"Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an e-mail service not a social networking service," said Ms Nguyen.
"Despite all the changes, they still do not give users a meaningful way to opt into it."
Buzz was automatically rolled out to Gmail's 176 million users.
The FTC has been asked to "require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service".
The complaint has also asked the FTC to "require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief".
'Rightfully upset'
Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail last week, the search giant has faced a torrent of criticism regarding privacy.
The feature that attracted the biggest outcry was one which automatically gave users a ready-made circle of friends to follow based on the people they emailed the most.

Privacy advocates said that meant the list of contacts was open for all to see and could have had serious implications for journalists, businesses or even those conducting illicit affairs.
Engineers have now replaced the auto-follow feature with one that suggests who to follow but EPIC said that still leaves the "user with the burden to block those unwanted followers".
The organisation also wants the company barred from using Gmail address book contacts to make up social networking lists.
Google has apologised and said it acted quickly to address concerns including introducing a new option to disable the service.
"If it becomes clear that people don't think we've done enough, we'll make more changes," Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz told BBC News.
He acknowledged that many of Gmail's "tens of millions" of users were "rightfully upset" and that the firm was "very, very sorry".
'Seek forgiveness'
The botched launch of Buzz has led many to ponder how and why it happened.
In an interview with BBC News, Mr Jackson admitted that testing of the service had been inadequate and that it was not opened up to a big enough group of people to try out.
"We've been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn't quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild."
The Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group, said it was not surprised by this stumble.
"This case illustrates a lot about Google's corporate culture where a company is run by computer scientists whose operating method is don't ask for permission when you can always ask for forgiveness," said the organisation's John Simpson.
The move by EPIC to ask the FTC to investigate Buzz mirrors one it made in December against the world's biggest social networking platform Facebook.
Then, the privacy watchdog was not happy about changes the company made to its privacy settings.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8519314.stm

Published: 2010/02/17 08:47:02 GMT

© BBC MMX

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Dolphins have diabetes off switch

A study in dolphins has revealed genetic clues that could help medical researchers to treat type 2 diabetes.

Scientists from the US National Marine Mammal Foundation said that bottlenose dolphins are resistant to insulin - just like people with diabetes.
But in dolphins, they say, this resistance is switched on and off.
The researchers presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.

They hope to collaborate with diabetes researchers to see if they can find and possibly even control an equivalent human "off switch".
The team, based in San Diego, took blood samples from trained dolphins that "snack" continuously during the day and fast overnight.
"The overnight changes in their blood chemistry match the changes in diabetic humans," explained Stephanie Venn-Watson, director of veterinary medicine at the foundation.
This means that insulin - the hormone that reduces the level of glucose in the blood - has no effect on the dolphins when they fast.
Big brains
In the morning, when they have their breakfast, they simply switch back into a non-fasting state, said Dr Venn-Watson. In diabetic people, chronic insulin resistance means having to carefully control blood glucose, usually with a diet low in sugar, to avoid a variety of medical complications.
But in dolphins, the resistance appears to be advantageous. Dr Venn-Watson explained that the mammals may have evolved this fasting-feeding switch to cope with a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet of fish.
"Bottlenose dolphins have large brains that need sugar," Dr Venn-Watson explained. Since their diet is very low in sugar, "it works to their advantage to have a condition that keeps blood sugar in the body… to keep the brain well fed".
But other marine mammals, such as seals, do not have this switch, and Dr Venn-Watson thinks that the "big brain factor" could be what connects human and dolphin blood chemistry.

“ There are several interesting diseases that you only see in humans and dolphins ”
Lori Schwacke NOAA

"We're really looking at two species that have big brains with high demands for blood glucose," she said.
"And we have found changes in dolphins that suggest that [this insulin resistance] could get pushed into a disease state. "If we started feeding dolphins Twinkies, they would have diabetes."
Genetic link
Since both the human genome and the dolphin genome have been sequenced, Dr Venn-Watson hopes to work with medical researchers to turn the discovery in dolphins into an eventual treatment for humans.
"There is no desire to make a dolphin a lab animal," she said. "But the genome has been mapped - so we can compare those genes with human genes."
Scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego have already discovered a "fasting gene" that is abnormally turned on in people with diabetes, "so maybe this is a smoking gun for a key point to control human diabetes", Dr Venn-Watson said.
If scientists can find out what switches the fasting gene on and off in dolphins, they may be able to do the same thing in people.
Lori Schwacke, a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Charleston, South Carolina, said that the work demonstrated that there are interesting similarities between dolphins and humans.
Dr Schwacke, who is studying the effect of pollution on dolphins along the coast of the US state of Georgia, is also interested in the links between dolphin and human health.
"There are several interesting diseases that you only see in humans and dolphins," she told BBC News. In this case, Dr Venn-Watson said, "the fundamental difference is that dolphins can switch it off and humans can't".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8523412.stm

Published: 2010/02/19 09:18:39 GMT

© BBC MMX

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