Our Editor wants something to be said about the Libertarian Alliance. Does it still exist? Yes it does, and it just did a mailing. We ran out of excuses for the lateness of this mailing several months ago, so I'll spare you these until matters improve. Which they are doing, because we now have a clutch of new stuff to publish and send out in another mailing, Real Soon Now.

The clutch in question comes from a certain Christian Michel. Christian writes in French, in that oracular abstract-ridden French manner which consists of going from a paragraph of lofty conceptual obscurities to announcing that therefore income tax is an abomination, or whatever. Usually French intellectuals go from lofty abstraction to the claim that therefore income tax should be doubled, so it's nice to have one of these people on our side. Better yet, Christian has also translated his stuff into English, and very good English it is too, despite his worries about this. His subjects include: "Should Criminals be Punished?", "How Should We Think About Economics?", The Information Revolution, Pornography, Business Ethics, Marx and Engels, and Drugs. If you can't wait for the LA to put this stuff out on paper, try e-mailing Christian on cmichel@cmichel.com, and he can steer you to his website.

Does it make sense to publish stuff that's already been published in the Great Filing Cabinet in the sky already, and is already available to anyone with a PC and a modem? Chris Tame and I both think it does. The Internet is such an infinite swirl of stuff that it surely counts for something if an organisation consisting not of one man and one dog but of several men and a small-to-medium pack of dogs reckons some particular clutch of writing to be worth attending to, and puts its paw marks on it. The Internet doesn't "cut out the middle man". It doesn't do away with editors. It demands more editors.

It will help greatly that the Libertarian Alliance will be attaching much more informative titles to Christian's pieces. "Should Drugs Be Prohibited?"? Well should they? If you are off the fence, say so up front. The more pieces there are clamouring to be read, the less time we all have for silly guessing games about what each particular piece says.
 

I'm watching the news and they're on about the Concorde crash, which they now say was caused by the runway not having been swept. My theory is that the crash was caused by wind-surfing. I have blamed wind-surfing ever since I read, on the day after the crash, that the pilot liked to do it. No one who wind-surfs should be allowed anywhere near the flight deck of an aeroplane containing passengers. Passenger airline pilots should have slow, sedentary and risk averse hobbies like growing prize geraniums or collecting nineteenth century teapots, not mad Pepsi-Max advert enthusiasms like wind-surfing. Why wasn't the runway swept? That's the question. The news said: because they'd just had a fire drill. Wrong. The runway wasn't swept because the mad, extreme-sports, Pepsi-Max swilling pilot said: to hell with sweeping the runway, I want to go to New York, now!!! And because he was so charismatic and so handsome and so dashing and so extremely French, nobody dared to contradict him, certainly not the Charles de Gaulle airport runway sweepers, who probably (this should also be investigated) do grow geraniums and collect teapots.
 

Getting back to the Libertarian Alliance, another game we have recently started playing is the giving of awards. Last year we gave an award to Arthur Seldon, and he seemed genuinely glad of the appreciation. You want a great twentieth century Editor? Look no further. God knows Dr Seldon deserves all the appreciation going, if only for putting up with Ralph Harris for all those years. Don't get me wrong, Lord Harris was and remains a super-talented free market propagandist. (See Antoine Clarke's latest LA piece - Personal Perspectives No 11, Liberty in France: A Personal Account of the "XXIIème Université D'Été de la Nouvelle Économie, Aix-en-Provence, September 6th-11th 1999: Hayek and the Road to Freedom, about a conference at which Lord Harris spoke, to great effect.) But for reasons (as Chris Tame would say) that I won't go into now, Lord Harris is a hard man to live with and to share decisions with.

This year, there's talk of the Libertarian Alliance giving a similar framed eulogy to James Tooley. Dr Tooley definitely gets my vote. He is still at the early stages of his career, but has already made and is busily publicising a great free market discovery, namely: Free Market Education In The Third World. In the First World, governments are rich enough and stupid enough to have nationalised and ruined mass education, and have done so. In the Second World, governments didn't do all that badly. They did nationalise everything, but had less money to spend being stupid. Sadly, however, they are now applying First World worst practice to their school systems. In the Third World, governments are not rich enough to have nationalised and ruined mass education and, although stupid, have tended to have other worries, like remaining the government. Neglect has allowed free market mass education to flourish. In the next few decades one of the great world business success stories is going to be Third World education businesses expanding into the First World and sorting out our educational messes for us.

Dr Tooley travels. He finds things out. He visits schools in China, India, South Africa, South America, Surrey. He combines glad-handing and baby-kissing in First World educational academia with lack of compromise where it most counts. He makes friends of our enemies and tells them they're wrong, charmingly and patiently, and is now helping them to do better. Could there be a more important free market, from the libertarian point of view, than the free market in education?