One

From time to time in these jottings I mention the output of the Institute of Economic Affairs, almost always praising it.  But now I mention An End To Welfare Rights - The Rediscovery of Independence (Choice in Welfare No. 49), by David G. Green, the blurb on the cover of which made me laugh out loud:

David Green recommends that all entitlements to benefit should be abolished and replaced with an obligation on government to prevent hardship without undermining the spirit of independence.

David G. Green recommends that all government plans to make pigs fly by attaching wings to them be replaced by a government obligation to make pigs take to the air by other means.

 ... should do more to protect the consumer against the capture of the regulatory agency by self-interested producers.

 ... and replaced by a new agency whose members would have the status of trustees, forbidden to gain financially from the performance of their duties and be liable in law for failure to discharge them properly.

He thus lacks the intellectual attitude needed to speculate intelligently about the future, because in the future there are no accomplished facts, only what are now fancies.  Fair enough.  Nothing wrong with that.  Unless you insist on pretending that it isn't so, and on attaching at the end of your fact-ridden writings some ill considered phrases to the effect that virtue and wisdom must in the future be made to triumph over vice and folly.

Two

I had a conversation at my last Friday evening soirée with Tony Vander Elst, who is Philip Vander Elst's better dressed brother, and a Libertarian Alliance Gold Subscriber.  Tony tells me that my opinions about phonetics (as spelled out in my The Harm Done by Look and Say: A Reaction to Bonnie Macmillan's Why Schoolchildren Can't Read, Educational Notes No. 29, Libertarian Alliance, London, 1998) are all wrong, and that you can teach babies to read by waving flash cards at them, for just one second at a time.  The cards say "CAT" and "DOG" and "CUP" and "MICROWAVE OVEN", and so forth, in large red letters (red because of something to do with neural pathways) and as you flash them you say "cat" and "dog" and "cup" and "microwave oven".  Ten years later your offspring collects its Nobel Prize for Literature.  Tony did this to his daughter, he says.  Look-and-say works, he says, with infants. Phonetics is merely a remedial teaching method for those feral children who have not had flash cards flashed them in their babyhood.

I told you all about this ten years ago, said Tony to me indignantly. Weren't you listening?  Of course I was listening.  I just forgot about it.  Why, I said, didn't you write this stuff down?  For someone so gung-ho for literacy, Tony does indeed seem to have a circuit missing when it comes to putting things in writing. I repeated what I remembered of what Tony said to me to another friend, who insisted that look-and-say for babies is really phonetics, because the baby spontaneously deduces the way that the individual letters on the signs each refer to individual sounds, and that's why babies exposed to flash cards go on to be better at reading.  It's my understanding of Tony's opinion about what he did to his daughter that he vehemently disagrees with my other friend's interpretation of what was happening.

Which just goes to show how important it is to get these kinds of confrontations written down and published, so that each of us can react
to exactly what the other person really thinks, instead of merely to what we think he thinks.  Verbal chit-chat that isn't even tape recorded is useless.  It sinks into the sands of oblivion in the space of a few days.  I forgot what Tony told me ten  years ago, and would have forgotten it again, if I hadn't at least written down my immediate recollections of it here.

It occurs to me that Tony is a film producer, a man for whom a script isn't finished until it has been turned into a picture. He may accordingly be blessed with a superb memory for what is merely acted out and spoken in front of him, because that's what he thinks really matters, and accordingly doesn't feel the need for arguments to be written down.  They need only be had.  Because we all have photographic memories and perfect sound recording systems inside our heads, don't we? And maybe his enthusiasm for the process of recognising complex patterns as opposed to deducing noises from mere strings of abstract symbols (seeing CAT as one pattern rather than as three separate symbols), explains his attitude in the look-and-say versus phonetics debate.

I hope Tony Vander Elst rises to this speculative bating.  He's probably not up to writing a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet, but he is surely capable of stringing together a letter to Free Life, at whatever length he can manage.  The Free Life correspondence column has recently, I think you'll agree, acquired an air of genuineness.  A reply to this from Tony would reinforce that atmosphere.  Well maybe not, what with his odd surname, but I would nevertheless love to have his harangue to me immortalised in writing, so that we can still be ruminating on his educational opinions in ten years time, however wrong-headed these may prove to be.

Three

This one will probably be cut, because I no longer put Free Life together and cannot therefore be sure of elbowing sufficient space for all my jottings.  Here's a thought, prompted by Manchester United's amazing injury time triumph over Bayern Munich, and subsequent celebrations.  Suppose you had gone back a hundred years and whispered in the ear of some political enthusiast that in a hundred years time the streets of Manchester would be filled with a million cheering people, most of the socially unelevated sort, and asked said enthusiast what he thought the cheering was going to be about.  Would he have guessed: football?  Would he not have surmised that it was some kind of socialistic political demonstration of the sort later filmed by Sergei Eisenstein?  A celebration of the Fall of Capitalism, perhaps?  Yet now, political demonstrations seldom muster more than a few thousand.  The last big demonstration in Western Europe similar to the Manchester jamboree was when France won the World Cup.  Football is where socialism has gone to die.  No doubt when our Editor first read this he muttered about Old Rome, in the declining days of which political affiliations derived from which team of charioteers you backed.  Presumably the next step is for football managers to go into politics.  But if they're wise, they'll stick to real life.