Saturday 3 December 2011

Link Tank 03/12

Enjoying that hangover?

McDonald's outwits San Francisco's ban on Happy Meal toys

"Never trust a charity to tell the unvarnished truth"

After Strauss-Kahn, France discovers sex addiction

Jeremy Clarkson: a public-sector worker speaks his mind

MMMhop: Hanson go into the beer business

Seasteading is "not a completely crazy idea"

A strike by the affluent and protected

It was never about health: Workplace e-cig ban introduced in Boston

Men don't think about sex all day long, after all

Beak gesturing Ravens


1 comment:

Sam Duncan said...

Good piece about Clarkson. Who'd have thunk it: a public employee with a bit of sense?

Actually, that's not fair. I think there's something we libertarians need to understand a bit better, and that's the fact that in an economy organised the way ours is there are bound to be thoughtful, small-government, free-market types who find themselves, against their better judgement, working for the state or claiming benefits purely to make ends meet. They're not necessarily all thinking, “Heheheh, let's milk these taxpaying suckers for all they've got because we are righteous and they are evil”. If you're medically inclined, for example, and want to stay in this country, you have little option but to work for the state. Does every NHS employee believe it's the Envy of the World™ and utterly unreformable? I bet they don't.

And it was, after all, obvious that Gordon Brown decided to force people who had hitherto avoided it onto the government teat in the belief that it would make them vote against a smaller state in future. There's no reason to think that this would actually work for everybody. On the contrary: unlike Brown and UNISON (whose press release on Clarkson's remarks out-dumbed them by several orders of magnitude), we understand that people have minds of their own.