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It seems according to Sunday's Independent that his Priory clinics have been treating 800 British troops who served in Iraq and are suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think our treatment of British "vets" is scandalous compared with the value some other nations put on looking after those who have put their lives on the line for their country and I am sure that many more probably deserve Priory type standards of assistance. But if this was Haliburton and America we'd be screaming blue murder about contracts for favoured insiders.

Of course the alternative, properly funding public sector mental health services, is just unthinkable these days, isn't it. And a far cry from W H R Rivers at Craiglockhart.

...but bats in your bra? The rest of the office has just realized my tears are of laughter...

Is this what people mean by "NFN" I wonder?

Over at The 1909 Group, I've got an essay up on the new National Housing and Planning Advisory Unit, and its rather poor prospects for success if it doesn't get to grips with land and monetary reform, rather than just pushing new additional housing on often unwilling communities.

Now, I understand the arguments in favour of a smoking ban on public and employee health ground but over at Freedom and Whisky in Only following orders David Farrar highlights that the smoking ban is also an erosion of private property rights.

You know by now that I can get Land Value Tax into almost any discussion! And here is an apt one for those that tell me that real estate is absolute property and therefore not something the state should tax. Yet in the smoking ban the government of Scotland (and the rest of us soon enough) is removing a property right - the right to decide who you allow onto your property and what they can do there.

So far as I am aware, smoking is not, yet anyway, illegal. Yet the powers that be are able to prevent you doing perfectly legal things in your own property. Real property is not absolute property, but a bundle of rights that can be altered, in modern times at least through democratic processes, which is at least better than for most of human history where they have most often changed by force or diktat.

In fact the only absolute property one has is, as John Locke pointed out, property in oneself. Assuming you are not a slave, the only thing you ultimately have which is absolutely yours is yourself. Indeed this is why slavery is itself such an horrific practice. This is one of the philosophical bases behind the argument that land tax is better than income tax. Income is the fruits of your labour, the efforts of the only thing you absolutely own, yourself. Land rights are utterly contingent on the society and jurisdiction of which it is a part, so the profits on land ownership are, as Adam Smith said, a better specie on which to base tax.