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As well as surging into the Total Politics Top 200 UK Political Blogs this blog has made it into the Top 20 UK Libertarian Blogs.

I achieved a more than respectable 11th place, amidst distinguished company.

Since the libertarian trend in all its many varieties is the shape of the future, this is a great result.

Many thanks to all readers who kindly took the trouble to vote for this blog in this category. If you have not yet done so, have a read of my Well-Armed Red Riding Hood story. 

Its (and, on a good day, my) philosophy: Strong, Thoughtful and Generous.

Here is one eloquent US feminist's analysis of the Palin phenomenon:

Make no mistake - the Democratic Party and its nominee have created the powerhouse that is Sarah Palin, and the party's increased attacks on her (and even on her daughter) reflect that panic.

The party has moved from taking the female vote for granted to outright contempt for women. That's why Palin represents the most serious conservative threat ever to the modern liberal claim on issues of cultural and social superiority. Why? Because men and women who never before would have considered voting for a Republican have either decided, or are seriously considering, doing so.

They are deciding women's rights must be more than a slogan and actually belong to every woman, not just the sort approved of by left-wing special interest groups.

Palin's candidacy brings both figurative and literal feminist change. The simple act of thinking outside the liberal box, which has insisted for generations that only liberals and Democrats can be trusted on issues of import to women, is the political equivalent of a nuclear explosion.

MSNBC's openly biased presenters are reeling.

Not everyone is happy.

Fascinating for the planet as all this is, behind the massive new noise McCain/Palin need to win key states.

And that will not be easy.

If you want to read online the FT's distinguished Lex column, you have to pay for it.

But at least Lex shares with us for free a nifty graph on the rouble's fortunes up to and following the Kremlin's Georgia intervention:

Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, after which one foreign banker observed he would rather “eat nuclear waste” than invest in Russian securities, is still alive in the market’s collective consciousness. Billions of dollars flowing out of Russia and the central bank being forced to intervene last week to prop up the rouble inevitably put traders in a cold sweat.

This piece at the excellent Knowledge Problem neatly looks at differences between Chinese and Russian oil reserve management styles:

There are few assets more specific than an oil well. If you invest wisely today to maximize the present value of the well's future output, that does you no good if you're not around to claim those future flows (because, for instance, you're rotting in a jail in Chita.) So, to hell with the future-maximize what you can produce today, even though that impairs the well's long run value....

Katherine Whitehorn's ramblings against competition as somehow juxtaposed against 'action for the common good' miss one other vital effect of competition, namely its tendency to incentivise frugal use of resources.

We hear all the time sundry collectivists urging the idea that capitalism and competition are uniquely wasteful of resources and environmentally destructive.

They tend not to mention the most ambitious attempt in human history to run a society via state-imposed socialistic 'cooperation' for the common good, and the remarkable environmental impact that had.

Because it is not easy regularly to bring about major cost-reduction strategies, businesses (and governments, and consumers) focus on making 'marginal' efficiency and other cost savings wherever they can be identified.

And the brilliance of competition is that it endlessly encourages this process through innovation.

Take shops.

You want to buy a new lawn-mower. In your town there are four shops selling them.

Once upon a time you would have had to telephone round to check the rival costs and availability of the model you wanted.

Now you can do much of that via the Internet.

But what if you could just type the make/model into your car computer which then guided you directly to the shop offering the best deal?

What if your car was transactive?

Come on, Katherine, tell us.

Would not smart kit like that created by competition itself give rise to wonderful new forms of cooperation - for the common good? 

This morning on the radio I stumbled upon veteran UK broadcaster Katherine Whitehorn's impossibly grand voice condescendingly calling into question the value of markets.

Here, if you can face it, is the full text of her Point of View.

Off she goes:

Political correctness has long been condemned, often unfairly, for the absurdity of always saying person rather than man or woman, for trying to be polite to minorities, or for refusing to call anyone top of the class for fear someone else weeps for being bottom.

But this isn't the real political correctness - what's really been the only politically correct thing to say under Mrs Thatcher, and under Tony Blair, is to assume that competition is better than co-operation, that it's the only useful spur to action.

On and on:

We are heading, it seems, for bad times such as we had in the 1970s. Then the main trouble was that the unions could disrupt anything and everything at will, and flabby management seemed unable to do anything about it.

But we still had the best broadcasting in the world, a health service which had only suffered two exasperating reforms, an education system widely respected and an efficient civil service not subject either to the stodginess or the questionable integrity of civil services elsewhere.

I have always thought history will find it odd that, in those circumstances, Britain decided to copy the practices of commerce, and model all its institutions on the thing it did worst.

Apart from the unremitting tedium of this Viewpoint, it is strange that KW pits 'competition' against 'cooperation', and that she appears to assume that 'cooperation' = state-owned/run organisations and them alone.

Competition is no enemy of cooperation. It usually expresses cooperation. It compels phenomenal examples of cooperation round the planet.

I have just been to Tesco. Every product of the myriad items sold there (including a lively Polish food section) has arrived there via sophisticated minute-by-minute cooperation between myriad firms and their myriad employees.

Or take YouTube and all the other 'community' sites now flourishing. What is that other than spontaneous cooperation arising from countless spontaneous competitions of designs and ideas between clever people and networks?

KW's trite mistake is to confuse hopelessly pricing mechanisms, public ownership and public control, private incentives and private ownership. The examples she gives are a mess.

Listen carefully, Katherine.

Any system incorporates incentives, positive and negative as well as implicit and explicit. Every activity has an opportunity cost - you can do only one thing at a time and therefore the 'cost' of doing that is the benefit foregone of not doing something else.

The main problem with state-run systems is that their incentive structures necessarily tend to be stagnant, limited and clumsy - hence the manic proliferation of 'targets' we now see, as an attempt to pep things up a bit.

Plus we see what we see, and measure what we can measure.

The NHS saves the lives of thousands of people every year, but who counts the opportunity cost of lives lost because the NHS does not offer certain treatments or pay for certain drugs?

As state-determined education - largely free from competition - steadily dumbs down exam and learning standards, who counts the opportunity cost of future jobs and opportunities lost because our children are too poorly educated to be fully effective as grown-ups?

So if you are saying that our beloved BBC, health service, civil service and education system are all now notably worse than in the 1970s, you might like to ponder the thought that maybe this is because the inefficiencies inherent in running massive systems in this way have compounded up alarmingly.

You can't seriously be saying that the trivial 'competition' elements battened on to these inefficient structures over the years (eg outsourcing cleaning in hospitals) have caused the problems you identify.

Can you?

Which is not to say that outsourcing cleaning is necessarily a good idea. It is good to promote loyalty within organisations from top to bottom.

But maybe again the proliferation of UK/EU officially-inspired regulations on 'health and safety' and other things themselves have created a context in which cost-incentives encourage managers to go for it?

Large-scale emergencies put everyone to the test. Does state-run 'cooperation' out-perform privately incentivised cooperation? Not necessarily.

And so on.

Ho hum.

No surprise I suppose that Ms Whitehorn is given such a prominent platform to ramble on in this feeble way against competition by the BBC, an organisation which raises its funding via a poll-tax on all TV viewers rather than by competing normally in the market-place.

This posting on Russia/Kosovo/Georgia prompted a pointed comment from reader Will:

Fascinating philosophy question: if X responds badly to your action and cites your action as a reason for that bad behaviour, how far are you responsible for what X does?

Seems to me that the answer depends on what you think of X - what you think X actually is.

Three scenarios:

Mineral:   you can take the long road round the base of the mountain, or attempt a short-cut across a steep slope covered in loose stones. You know that the stones may slip and cause damage to houses in the valley. You go for the short-cut. The stones slide and cause such damage.

You suspect that your footsteps prompted the mini-landslide. If they did, the stones simply made a Newtonian response to some or other physical force you exerted. They had no choice but to slide. You had no real options to calibrate the stones' response to your steps, other than not to attempt the slope at all.

Vegetable:   you decide not to weed the whole of the garden. Nasty weeds/brambles grow strongly in the most neglected areas, less strongly in the places where you keep nature at bay.

Here the response of the weeds/brambles is 'inanimate, but dynamic. Your actions do calibrate to a generally predictable extent what happens in which part of the garden. Your 'responsibility' is more subtle.

Animal:    you live in a nature reserve where some fierce bears roam. How far to avoid the bears? When you can not avoid them, act kindly towards them or beat them back?

You start to feed one bear in a kindly but wary fashion. One day he eats one of your pets. You whack him with a stick. He responds angrily by eating a neighbour's infant. Did you cause that tragedy to happen, not just by hitting the bear but by deluding yourself that a friendly relationship with the creature was possible and altering its consciousness..? 

* * * * *

All this is a convoluted way of pointing to the contradictions in much of the analysis about Russia and whether/why Western actions are 'provocative' to Moscow.

Do we treat Russia's 'fear of encirclement', 'insecurities' and 'anxieties' as, so to speak, inanimate facts of life over which we (and they) have no control other than to top-toe widely round them?

Or are they simple genetically coded facts of life which do respond in a predictable but insensate way to what we do?

Or are they animate/sensate facts of life, where we need keener judgement to get the response we want?  

Or are they human, even reasonable fears?

What if they are human but basically unreasonable paranoid fears?

The gushing Western punditry on Russia contains confusing contradictory elements of all these ideas.

Some people appear to suggest that Russia for reasons of obvious history/geography/Tsars/Communism/vodka has no choice but to behave the way it does. Safest is to adopt a Finlandish stance to avoid risking trouble.

Others argue that Russia of course does have choices, hence all the more reason to behave in a subtle respectful way: keep that bear calm and happy, even if he eats some of your rabbits now and again.

And then there are those who say that Russia of course makes its own decisions, but we have to strive to set a robust context in which they know that bad decisions have bad consequences for them. Eventually they will come to see that they have no more reason to fear 'encirclement' by democratic NATO states than eg Switzerland does.

To answer Will's question.  

I expected Russia to play tough in the CIS if key Western countries went ahead and recognised Kosovo as independent without having secured first a reasonable global consensus and in the face of explicit Russian objections.

NB this was separate from my view on whether and when Kosovo 'should' be independent, or whether Serbia 'deserved' to keep Kosovo.

The vital point was and is that the Kosovo independence issue is partly about Kosovo, but also about a bigger vision of global order. Acts of state recognition are at the very heart of diplomacy - it is a high risk strategy to mishandle them when a UN Security Council member is closely engaged and has Views.

I expected a tough Russian response not so much because Russia cares tuppence about Serbia or Kosovo - rather because Russia does care a lot about some other issues, whose handling turns on a sort of informal shifting balance of power as between differing accepted principles. This balance is not easily defined or articulated at any one moment, but top politicians and diplomats are paid to sense it and manage it. 

To conclude. It may look worthwhile to take a calculated risk. You know that your move can lead to a bad outcome, because you know that someone prone to lashing out may well lash out in response.

You move, and the lashing-out occurs.

You are not in any moral causation sense 'responsible' for that lashing-out when it occurs. Yet you can not complain much when people say you miscalculated somewhere. And you end up having to deal with the damage.

Some actions may be well motivated. Perhaps even Right.

But not, all things considered, Wise. 

Far from accepting the defeatist idea of different and inevitably rival 'spheres of influence' in Europe, the EU should use its one true serious advantage vis-a-vis Russia, namely far greater wealth and a far better example.

Andrew Wilson captures it well:

The most effective way of dealing with a newly-assertive Russia will be for Europe to issue a collective refusal to accept a bipolar Europe of distinct Russian and EU spheres of influence. The place to start is Ukraine.

His various solid ideas on how to do this look quite right to me. But above all the EU needs a Policy backed by some evident determination.

Which means the EU being serious about Europe, and not just about itself.

Russia's intervention in Georgia compels EU leaders to realise that the time has come for assuming grown-up responsibilities. Poland should have a lead role to play here by being steely, convincing - and creatively realistic.

Back in late 2005 Guardian prima columnista Polly Toynbee was urging the case for Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair:

From now on, the economy will turn upwards and there is no need for Labour to panic - yet, of course, they will. Faced with bad polls, there will be growing pressure for Blair to announce his departure by next autumn's party conference.

... Labour's man needs to arrive as fresh, surprising and progressive as Cameron now seems. People worry how this puritanical and somewhat dour chancellor can stand up against the ebullient, debonair young prince. But age and style have nothing to do with it. It is the brightness and the content of their policies that matters.

And, lo, in 2007 it came to pass that Gordon Brown was poised to become Prime Minister:

A 10-year chancellor must leap out of the starting gate like a fresh contender. He must electrify the stale air with new ideas and new directions strong enough to reach right down to these jaded roots. That takes high voltage jolts of surprise and optimism.

Then, it happened!

There was something stunned about Gordon Brown's expression as he stood on the threshold of No 10. He looked genuinely awestruck, as if the hugeness of the weight that had just fallen on his shoulders had taken him by surprise.

Mere weeks later it was all going wrong:

There is a stunned disorientation among Labour MPs, alarmed by both Brown's vision void and his sudden incompetence ... The backbenches sat through Darling's politics-free performance on Tuesday like the Animal Farm beasts gazing through the farmer's window in the final scene. Far too late they realised something awful was happening before their eyes: you could have cut their silence with a knife.

Then it was all down:

Maybe he hasn't the character, the toughness, the fibre, the daring. He was always the Macbeth who failed to wield the knife. In those waiting, plotting years of half-cocked conspiracies, a Lady Macbeth would often have shouted: "Infirm of purpose!"

And down:

A year ago, this week's cornucopia of good policies would have signalled the truth of Gordon Brown's words as he stood outside Downing Street and said: "Let the change begin." If these had been his opening salvos, if these had signalled his clear direction of travel, he might not now be sinking fast ... Now it is late, a whole year too late. Is anyone still listening?

Which brings us to today:

The smell of death around this government is so overpowering it seems to have anaesthetised them all. One bungle follows another and yet those about to die sit silently by...

Unseating a prime minister is very high risk - but a dying party should be ready to take dangerous medicine if that's the last chance left.

On 29 June 2007: as they stepped into No 10 yesterday, here was as decent and clever a team of ministers as ever graced the cabinet table.

Now they are ... a cabinet of minnows.

It's tough being a cheer-leader, waving those glittery pom-poms and smiling brightly as your team collapses and the crowd laughs both at the players - and at you.

Jon Worth has a couple of thoughtful observations on the farcical European Parliament report which broods on the disruptive role of bloggers.

I think that he has a point, of sorts. But the best way to deal with vampires when they pop out is not to assume they are unmenacing just because they are pallid and sickly. Rather nail them briskly to the floor with a wooden stake.

Above all, he ignores the fact that reports such as this - paid for by us victims - tend to help define the European psychological and political-moral debate over media issues, ensuring that it plays out in a context which starts from an instinct for EU/state-sponsored official 'balance', rather than an instinct for freedom.

Look at the hapless socialist Estonian MEP who launched this dire exercise, trying to explain herself:

Speaking to the EUobserver, Ms Mikko clarified her intentions: "We (sic) do not need to know the exact identity of bloggers. We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source."

"The Economist is a valuable brand, its articles are trusted by readers without contributors having to reveal their names," she said. "If there is a way to validate the best bloggers the same way that publishing in the Economist validates its writers, it should be done."

"It is clear that a Harvard professor of international relations is likely to treat, for instance, the Middle East peace process or European integration in an educated and balanced manner," she added. "The same trust cannot be put in a radical high school student from Gaza or a Eurosceptic who has never been out of his village"

"The reader should know why this or that blogger should be trusted on a particular issue."

Almost every word she says here is profoundly, unfathomably stupid.

Above all there is a way to 'validate' the best bloggers.

It's called the marketplace, millions of judgements by millions of people, evolving over time, exploring what makes sense and what does not.

This tragic woman needs a strong coffee in Cafe Hayek - where orders emerge.