This piece at the Library of Law and Liberty is brief but a nevertheless thorough summary of Dalrymple’s views on Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister. I can’t help but quote extensively, but please do read the entire piece:

Her long-term effect on her own country was far more equivocal than is commonly thought. She undoubtedly succeeded in reviving a commercial spirit among a large sector of the population, which until her had been almost dead, but in fact changed very little where the public sector was concerned – except for the worse. She found the latter inefficient and left it inefficient and corrupt…

The stridency of her rhetoric against the state disguised the fact that under her rule the role of the state remained as preponderant in millions of people’s lives as ever it had been before; government expenditure may have decreased (temporarily) as a proportion of GDP but it increased absolutely…

Her error in part was to have failed to recognize the change in the character of the British people…

Strident in rhetoric but timid in practice where it mattered most, Mrs Thatcher managed to discredit in the minds of many the very necessary reforms that never took place. Her memory, hated by many, thus stands in the way of real change…

For a time she restored faith that decline was not inevitable. But one of the lessons of her life is that one person in a democracy, however remarkable, cannot singlehandedly change a nation. We in Britain are firmly back to square one, with a public sector proportionately larger than when she came to power 34 years ago.

In the first of many pieces Dalrymple has written in recent days on Margaret Thatcher (hat tip: William O.), he withholds his previous criticisms of her policies and celebrates her admirable personal qualities — as exemplified by her behavior on the two occasions when (previously unknown to me) he met her:

The second time I met Margaret Thatcher, she remembered who I was from the first time. She even remembered what I had said on that occasion, which is more than I can say myself.

Not being a world-historical figure, I naturally found this all very flattering. And, in fact, she had flattered me the first time round as well, by telling me that the talk I had given at a meeting which she was chairing had been a great success. She leaned across to me and said confidentially, “I can tell that you have spoken before.” Naturally, I took her to be sincere.

He goes on to celebrate “the sheer force of her personality, of her will” and concludes: “In an era of political clones, she was singular.”

Read the full piece here

To this question posed in a New England Journal of Medicine article…

Is it fair to penalize smokers even though the highly addictive nature of nicotine makes their behavior less than entirely voluntary?

…Dalrymple quotes another article:

…a randomized, controlled trial involving employees of General Electric showed that a combination of incentives amounting to $750 led to cessation rates three times those achieved through information-only approaches (14.7% vs. 5.0%).

In New English Review Dalrymple examines the instinctive inclination to good manners exhibited by Peter Bauer and Immanuel Kant:

My late friend, the development economist Peter Bauer, had the most beautiful manners: so beautiful that I took them for my model. Alas, I could never equal them for, though not particularly ill-mannered, I have always to remember to behave well. Just as style in prose should be imperceptible, as the uniquely perfect vehicle for what is said and indissoluble therefrom, so manners should be unconscious, not added to conduct but intrinsic to it. They should not arise from reflection but from a habit so deeply ingrained that, however much they might once have been instilled or learned, they are now entirely natural and normal to the person who has them. And since their purpose is to ease social intercourse and make it agreeable, they should not be carried to the point of making anyone uncomfortable, turning them into mere etiquette in order to distinguish those who know how to behave from those who do not.

Here is something one never hears:

Every time an adolescent or young adult is murdered in Britain these days (as one was yesterday), my internet server or my newspaper tells me that tributes have been paid to him or her, as though being the victim of a murder were some kind of achievement. The young person murdered is almost always ‘brilliant,’ ‘bubbly’ or ‘beautiful,’ or, if male, a talented footballer. No really bad person, or even one of doubtful character, it seems, is ever murdered: which certainly does not accord with my experience of murder victims, that I think I may fairly claim to be above average.

This will sound harsh at first to some ears, but keep reading.

In the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple points to an editorial in the British Medical Journal suggesting that wariness of the mentally ill is based on unjust prejudice:

The central error that in my opinion leads the authors to insinuate this untruth is a very common and damaging one: the elision of what happens to you with what you do. No doubt there is a continuum between these two poles, which is what makes the ascription of personal responsibility often difficult and full of ambiguity (thank goodness, for otherwise life would be dull and uninteresting, and literature redundant); but this is not, or ought not to be, to deny the difference between what happens to you and what you do, unless all judgement of what lies on continua, which is to say practically all judgement, is to be abandoned. Schizophrenia is at the ‘what happens to you’ end of the continuum, while so-called substance misuse disorder is much nearer the ‘what you do’ end.

I’m not sure whether the title of this essay in New English Review was written by Dalrymple, the magazine’s editor Rebecca Bynum, or by some great sage centuries ago, but I find it very profound! It certainly captures the sense of the piece, in which Dalrymple discusses a murder of pigeons that he recently witnessed and pokes a little fun at his own sense of moral indignation:

Rational as it is to view their behaviour as devoid of all moral significance whatsoever, and absurd as it would be to consider those birds as morally reprehensible, I find it almost impossible entirely to clear my mind of the irrational notion that the scene had a moral significance or meaning. If, for example, I had been able by some means or other to protect the pigeons from the unprovoked attack of the sparrowhawks upon them, I should have done so, even though saving the pigeons meant harming the sparrowhawks…

At the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple addresses the case of Mohamed Aziz, a Spaniard who defaulted on his mortgage yet won a case in the European Court of Justice against his lender:

Mr Aziz signed a contract without duress, and now wants to go back on its terms. And he will feel no dishonor in doing so, as hundreds of thousands or millions of other repossessed Spaniards will feel no dishonor in so doing. Why will Mr Aziz, and they, feel no dishonor?

The reason is, of course, that [his lender] the Catalunyacaixa has itself been bailed out by the government: that is to say, the taxpayers, of whom Mr Aziz is presumably one. So while he is expected to pay for the bad decisions of others, he has hitherto been expected to assume the consequences of his own bad decisions. And this is patently unfair and unjust. If the Catalunyacaixa can be bailed out because failing to bail it out would have terrible consequences, why should Mr Aziz not be bailed out because failure to bail him out would have terrible consequences?

No chain of reasoning ever comes to an end, and so we may ask ourselves why the Catalunyacaixa needed bailing out? It needed bailing out because of its habit of conjuring money out of nothing, which is possible only under a fiat money regime.