How very ironic that the very next institution Clarkie bashes is Starbucks for the business genius behind that wonderful place is Howard Schultz who is naturally a Jew!

I guess it's the difference between France and Belgium, two nations which with great delight rounded up their Jews and shipped them out to death camps, and the United States, with all its love for freedom, which saved Europe from itself at least three times in a century.

Does this admirer of mass-murderers honestly believe that people are forced at gunpoint into Tesco (surprise, surprise, also founded by a Jew) and Starbucks? Has he no idea why so many people prefer coffee in Starbucks to one of those glorious establishments much beloved in Paris and Brussels (think, for example, hygiene, price, quality of coffee, service, convenience)? Does he not understand the reason why the U.S. has Intel, MSFT, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Boeing and Dell and France has tourists and wine? Does he not comprehend that the City of London is currently the undisputed centre of international finance with all the concomitant advantages for the UK and Paris is little more than a tourist trap precisely because Britain has embraced the free market?

Who really can really be surprised that this vile man, this fan of authoritarian regimes past and present, would worship an ideology - socialism - which has been responsible for more death and poverty than anything else in the modern history of mankind?

Besides, Howard Schultz is a great supporter of Israel. Yet one more excellent reason to buy your coffee at Starbucks!

Freedom to the pike is death to the minnow

Please feel free to pour on the insults. There is nothing Joshie loves more than gentiles with their knickers in a twist over an upstart Jew.

"Freedom to the pike is death to the minnow"

You have to remember that this is the same sad individual who defended Clarkie's support for a mass-murderer by citing Clarkie's own "research." Ha ha.

My comment was a response to Stephen's argument about a 'free market', and was nothing to do with your insane witterings, Joshua.

I object to being called a neo-liberal extremist!

What's wrong with calling me what I am, a classically liberal extremist?

I see that all comments to Mr Clark's site have to be moderated - oh, well its his property, so he can do what he likes with it. But I'll not be bothering thanks.

There's nothing to stop anyone opening up a coffe shop that only employs people called Derek, sells nothing but 'fairtrade' coffee from a remote area of Patagonia, every bean of which is individually picked by a woman called Betty- that's what a 'free market' is all about (don't expect it to be cheap though). But hang on, what's this - just in the last year the Government has produced 3,621 pieces of legislation, much of it regulatory legislation forced on us by Brussels, and all those pieces of legislation need to be followed don't they.

Now I ask you, who is going to be able to manage that onslaught of regulatory vomit better - a firm with its own legal department who can use economies of scale to handle the load (all costs of which are passed onto the customer - as they have to be) or a guy and a girl called Derek?

Get rid of the regulation, and watch a thousand coffee shops open their doors...

Bonus!! - these coffee shops will be paying tax, as will the people that work in them (even the Dereks).

This isn't rocket science - it's simple stuff. Why people think the bloody government can do things better than motivated individuals is utterly beyond me.

You don't really belive this do you"

"Has he no idea why so many people prefer coffee in Starbucks to one of those glorious establishments much beloved in Paris and Brussels (think, for example, hygiene, price, quality of coffee, service, convenience)?"

Starbucks is successful because its products are inferior, bland and uniform. Its brand has become a 'fashion' statement.

British consumers have low tastes and are, on the whole, uninterested in quality in food and drink. Cheapness is all.

I am a frequent visitor to Vienna where a couple of Starbucks always seem full. But not with Austruans. Rather British and American customers who crave the familiar and are fearful of asking for a "Grosse Brauner" or "Melange" in Cafe Central, Kleine Cafe or any of the other wonderful Viennese coffee houses.

Steven, why do you bother with the idiot?

Stephen bothers with 'the idiot' (as you call Neil Clark), because much to his consternation, Clark has been proved right on:
(a) Iraq ( unlike Stephen, Clark predicted the non-existence of Iraqi WMDs and that the war would be a disaster and would fuel Islamic terrorism);
(b) Yugoslavia; (unlike Stephen, Clark did not swallow the lies about genocide in Kosovo.)
The reason Stephen posts so much about Clark derives from utter furstration. But rather than do the gentlemanly thing and concede that Clark has been proved right, he prefers to indulge in fourth form pie throwing.

"But rather than do the gentlemanly thing and concede that Clark has been proved right, he prefers to indulge in fourth form pie throwing. "

Whereas Clark's comments on the subject of Stephen Pollard are distinguished by the breadth of their learning, their magnanimity and of course their incisive wit.

"Freedom to the pike is death to the minnow".

A lot of silly anti-trust law and other regulations are justified by recourse to this sort of reasoning. If Starbucks or some other big chain manages to undercut high-price, small-size coffee shops in say, Manchester or Ipswich, then presumably they do so because customers prefer the low prices to the high ones. Their preferences are revealed in the market share of the big chains. The smae sort of stuff is now being written about Walmart, Borders and the like.

Of course, some big business conglomerates do get an unfair advantage through the government-created power of eminent domain, but that is hardly the fault of laissez faire, but its opposite.

Diversity on a shopping centre is nice, but if consumers want to buy coffee from a big chain, use its Wi-fi access and the rest, then their preferences rule. What Neil Clark and other protectionists want is to impose their vision of what an ideal High Street should look like on us. In reality, though, we would get the sort of indifferent, turgid customer service and lack of choice we had in the decades immediately after WW2.

In any event, if Neil Clark and his fellow socialists really were genuinely concerned about the welfare of small entrepreneurs, they would lobby for deregulation, tax cuts and so forth. Like that is sooooo going to happen.

Johnathan is right. So many lefties confuse capitalism with big business. A real libertarian capitalist like me would very much like to see an end to all corporate tax-breaks and feather bedding. If you want a truly 'level playing field' then for God's sake implement one. The really big difference one could make would be to abolish the pettifogging regulations that emanate from Brussels via the special gold-plating service that only British bureaucrats know how to do, and disproportionately impinge on smaller businesses. Larger companies don't mind complex regulatory environments. They act as a barrier to entry and are thus intrinsically anti-competitive.