Bait-and-switch “charity” in progress…

Christopher Houseman

As the snow piles up outside my front door (among many others), The World Wildlife Fund is currently broadcasting a weepie, Warmist TV ad appealing for money to save the polar bear from extinction.

I fail to understand:

1. How the WWF can even think about broadcasting AGW agitprop to a population that’s having trouble dealing with yet another snowy day. Even if AGW were true, has nobody at the WWF heard of Marketing 101?
2. Why sending money to the WWF will cool the climate for polar bears in any case.

Wikileaks: Feeling Rather Anti-American Today

Mario Huet

Regarding Mrs Clinton’s absurd claim that the Wikileaks Scandal is an “attack on the international community”:

 Whenever Americans speak of attacks on freedom or on the world, what they usually mean is that they would very much like to constrain or kill someone. What they invariably mean is that something has upset them by revealing that they are evil and stupid. As they can’t easily say, “We are getting sick of people revealing to the world the extent our wickedness, incompetence and dishonesty”, they must fall back on tired old nonsense about global irresponsibility and its shocking consequences.

Well, if there are shocking consequences to the US, and to other nations who collude with them in leading their own people on a very large scale then that is just too bad. Let us not forget that it was the United States that chose to make a certain country “respect” the UN by themselves ignoring the UN’s wishes and starting a war. Yes, we all saw and heard the nonsense about how Saddam Hussein wouldn’t bend over far enough so the weapons inspectors could properly look into his bottom, but that was hardly a most excellent justification for the subsequent deaths of thousands of people. When not blaming Saddam Hussein for blowing up the twin towers (and for all I know, the assassination of JFK), America went to the most ridiculous lengths to suggest that he he had top men working on the sort of things that would have Indiana Jones crying, “Help! I want my mommy!”

And when not that, it was a moral imperative that they “liberate” the ordinary folk in poor little Eye-rack. Which they did by doing their best to blow them all to smithereens, and removing a strong leader and stable government, and replacing them with a piss-poor excuse for a leader and a bunch of resentful nutters who seem to spend most of their time plotting to kill each other. Peace, stability, human rights: all of the greatest importance to the Great Satan, (and his minions) and all served in the same usual blundering fashion.

When I hear terms like “rogue nation” and “dangerous lunatics”, I am afraid I think first and foremost of the United States. I imagine a frothing mad, but stupid cartoon character who, seeing signs of smoke, cries, “That’s a fire, that is, and I’m just the guy to put it out, I am!” He then runs round for a bit, getting redder in the face and becoming breathless, while shouting things such as, “Bring ‘em on!” and “We’ll see about that buddy!”, and then empties a great big bucket of GASOLINE on what is smouldering. And what happens next is that he begins shouting, “Oh, my, this is not good! This is even worse than I thought! Hey folks, you-all gotta take a look over here, ’cause this ain’t just my problem, and I shouldn’t have to deal with it all on my lonesome!”

Perhaps I am just feeling rather anti-American today.

FLC200, The Passive Smoking Scare: When Ruling Class Propaganda Masquerades as Science, Sean Gabb, 26th November 2010

FLC200, The Passive Smoking Scare: When Ruling Class Propaganda Masquerades as Science, Sean Gabb, 26th November 2010.

Carry a Samurai Sword and become invisible to police

Michael Winning

You can see it here.

NOW…that’s what I call an idea

Bioluminescent trees.

David Davis

Bet you 50p you’ll see this at David Thompson soon, on Friday Ephemera….

Introduction to \

Early in 1991, I was persuaded to do some editing work for The Social Affairs Unit. This book was by biggest project, and it involved more work than I expected. Some of the essays were fully written out and needed only moderate editing. Many were corrupt transcripts of what were often rambling conference speeches, and these needed to be rewritten. This was in the days before the Internet, and I had to spend days in various libraries, checking facts and pulling out quotations.

via Introduction to \.

UN Global-Warm-Mongerators…always wrong, all the time

David Davis

We’ve come to expect it, since they do it on purpose.

BUT..

The pretence, of course, of appearing manfully to try to shore up a wrong position (although based on falsified data – a fact still not widely known or believed, despite the Climate-Gate scandal) is a good position for them to take. It makes them look like heroic, altruistic martyrs in the service of “The People”.

These droids are very, very clever, far-seeing, and have planned their strategic and fundamental assault on civilisation for a very, very long time.

WE must never, ever underestimate their resourceful and ferociously-focussed pursuit, in the face of all opprobrium, of their objective of irreversible enslavement of all people: this will be in a living hell encompassing the Whole Earth, where all except the bastards themselves will endure the torments specially reserved for the damned.

What the EU-governmint thinks of elections…

…especially in places like Ireland.

David Davis

Fun airports

David Davis

View some here.

FLC186, Democratic Art: The Non-Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Gabb, 10th September 2009

What makes Carol Ann Duffy so popular is the knowledge that anyone else might have written her works. Writing in her style needs nothing more than a word processor with the spelling checker turned on. Her nationality, sex and possible sexuality aside, she is the ideal poet for an age that calls itself democratic – and, in a debased sense, probably is.

via FLC186, Democratic Art: The Non-Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Gabb, 10th September 2009.

Nigel Meek on Maurice Glasman (a New Labour “Peer”)

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/econn/econn095.htm

The Nature of Christian Democracy: A Review and Critique of Maurice Glasman’s Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia
Nigel Meek

Economic Notes No. 95

ISSN 0267-7164                   ISBN 1 85637 560 9 

An occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance,
Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, Mayfair, London W1J 6HL.

© 2003: Libertarian Alliance; Nigel Meek.

Nigel Meek is the Editorial Director and Membership Director of both the Libertarian Alliance and the Society for Individual Freedom. He graduated as a mature student with a BSc in Psychology in 1996 followed by an MA in Applied Social & Market Research. He has most recently worked in market research and the support side of further education and is currently conducting further postgraduate research in political science.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and
not necessarily those of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee,
Advisory Council or subscribers.

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

Preface

This essay, presented here with only minor revisions, was originally written in 2001 as an academic review of Dr Maurice Glasman’s (1996) Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia. Its most important feature for Anglo-American readers is its description and analysis of that school of thought known as ‘Christian Democracy’, a largely continental European and Roman Catholic phenomenon little understood in the mainly Protestant, English-speaking world.

Although this issue is not specifically explored in the following, it is demonstrably true that most of the founding fathers of what has become the European Union were devout Roman Catholics; that the Vatican, the Catholic church generally, and senior lay Catholics in EU member states have been and continue to be amongst the EU’s main proponents; and that throughout the EU Catholics are both more supportive of European integration than Protestants and do so for cultural rather than economic reasons. (See, for example, Nelson et al (2001).) This, of course, is not in itself an argument against the UK’s engagement in the EU. However, it is another reason for more open and considered thought of the UK’s membership of, and, no doubt, eventual dissolution in, something that is alien and ill-understood.

More specifically, looking at the European Parliament, it may also serve to illustrate the inherently highly ambiguous and often controversial membership of the British Conservative Party of the Christian Democrat-influenced European People’s Party and European Democrats group of MEPs.

Those interested in the historical mirror image of this phenomenon may care to consult the earlier chapters of DeLeon’s (1978) The American as Anarchist for a brief and clear description of the profound influence of Anglophone Protestantism on aspects of modern libertarian radicalism.

All references found below are from Unnecessary Suffering.

The Quest

Glasman’s starting point is the belief that there are two ways that society actively distinguishes between necessary and unnecessary suffering: establishing a justice-based common status for all, and people’s treatment at work. However, whereas in the former case – i.e. political liberalism – he optimistically contends that the idea of individual rights has substantially succeeded via the establishment of durable legal institutions, in the case of the economy this is not so (pxi). Glasman sets out to remedy this defect.

Unnecessary Suffering is Glasman’s attempt to identify and describe a – if not the – particular concept of the ‘third way’, that oft-sought road that combines the best of the two allegedly dominant ideologies since the 19^th century: capitalism and socialism. Its purpose, however, is not to concur with much of modern politics that claims to abhor all ideology, but to describe the historical antecedents, theoretical arguments, and post-war operationalisation (or not) of something very specific: the siting of democracy within the workplace rather than the collectivist State or the individualist market (p5).

Specifically, Glasman sets out a thesis, based in particular on Roman Catholic doctrine, that, whilst accepting the institution of private property and market competition (and hence is apparently anti-socialist), nonetheless rejects unlimited managerial prerogative (which Glasman finds in both capitalist (p20-21) and communist (p133) forms), the commodification of labour, and profit maximisation as the driving force of economic decision-making, demanding instead worker participation and workplace democracy (and hence is apparently anti-capitalist).

In a number of chapters, Glasman looks in some detail at the post-war history of (West) Germany and Poland, examining in particular the changing fortunes of Christian Democracy, communism, and the New Right, and both the external and internal pressures brought to bear on these countries. This aspect of the book is not fully explored here, but in any case much of it is an analysis of the implementation or not of the theories set out in the earlier part of the book.

The Theoretical Core

Glasman freely draws on the work of a number of 19^th and 20^th century thinkers, the first of these chronologically, and who Glasman cites as of key importance in the development of Christian Democracy in Germany, being the 19^th century Roman Catholic bishop, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler.

One assertion of Ketteler’s that goes to the heart of Glasman’s view of the relation between the individual and the collective was that, in Glasman’s words, “The dilemma of Christian Democracy was that the principle of private property had led to the removal of people’s status as members of organisations” (p37). However, the implications of this are obvious and alarming: that one can only have true status as a member of an organisation and that individuals have little or no inherent worth.

Glasman goes on to note Ketteler’s claim that contracts between an employee and an employer who holds that latter’s means of subsistence are not voluntary but really a form of compulsion (p37). Aside from perhaps an Aristotelian objection to this definition of ‘compulsion’, there are a number of arguments against this. First, they are voluntary: the employee can always starve. This may well sound a shocking assertion to those schooled in modern positive-rights welfare liberalism, but the freedom of voluntary exit is ultimately the most basic freedom of all.

Secondly, in practice, people do manage to find alternative employment after having reached the seeming bottom. In any case, it is a matter of empirical fact that the immiseration hypothesis was and is wrong and that this picture of the destitute individual prostrate before ‘the boss’ is a marginal and decreasing one and certainly not an image on which to base and operationalise any social theory.

Thirdly, the fate of the dismissed or otherwise unemployed worker under economic liberalism seems better than the same individual who for some reason is excommunicated from his organisation or guild when, as is quite clear from Glasman’s overall thesis, the guild – ultimately through its relationship with, and use of, State coercion – really can make sure that he never works again. In the Ketteler/Glasman thesis, then, there seems little real place for the individual as an autonomous economic agent.

Ketteler also claimed that society was by then so complex that welfare needs could not be met by charity alone (p37). However, it can be strongly argued that the reason that the whole raft of possible non-State welfare provision available through commercial, not-for-profit, or charitable organisations can no longer cope, certainly now at the beginning of the 21^st century, is because of their ‘crowding out’ by the State from the 19^th century onwards with the latter’s power to fund through coercively expropriated taxation.

For Ketteler, the role of unions and artisans’ organisations was a positive one and to quote Glasman was “to ensure high quality craftsmanship, honesty in relation to other workers and the preservation of values within the economy” (p38). Some of this is no doubt often true, but when we examine, say, the medical profession, by maintaining unnecessarily high standards it limits supply thus raising prices and denying appropriate medical treatment in particular to the poor who cannot afford to pay twice for it (i.e. once through taxation and then again to the commercial medic). In any case, the supplier is here apparently sovereign. Also, in practice, it can be interpreted to mean that individual workers are not allowed if they wish to negotiate their own terms except via the union or similar organisation.

Ketteler also believed that the State should take steps to rectify the fact that “the market violated the capacity of the person to live an autonomous life” (p38). This is an odd assertion. If one is not ‘dependent’ upon the market – a polite fiction, of course, since it is not the impersonal market one is dependent upon but other real, people – then one must be either dependent upon others simply giving one money, surely a condition even less conducive to an autonomous life, or, excluding those acts traditionally considered criminal, dependent upon others being coerced into giving it by and via the State, no less unconducive to an autonomous life one would have thought, and certainly rather less moral.

Another key influence on Glasman is Karl Polanyi, and especially his book The Great Transformation. For Glasman, Polanyi’s two key propositions were that individuals are “… constitutively dependent upon a physical environment and other people for the satisfaction of needs” (p5), and that “the economy requires social institutions which disseminate skills, distribute knowledge and preserve the status of human beings and nature as something other than commodities” (p5-6). From this follows what Polanyi calls the ‘three commodity fictions’: labour, land, and money. These are not commodities at all since they are not produced for sale. Labour, for example, is “inseparable from the body and the life of a person and cannot, therefore, be stored up or reinvested.” Land is not a commodity since it is a “gift of geography and history” (p6).

However, it would be a serious blow to Glasman’s thesis if Polanyi’s commodity fictions were themselves fictitious: and I would argue that they are, and indeed self-evidentially so. First, one might argue that a commodity is anything upon which a subjective value can be put. Then Polanyi makes the attributive mistake of confusing labour with the person: when we sell our labour we do not sell ourselves. Next, if we wish to live as anything than the most primitive hunter-gatherers, productive land needs to be wrested from nature and by a ‘Lockeian’ mixing in with it of our labour – to use a well-known concept – becomes property and hence a commodity.

Regarding the third of these, money, Glasman also discusses further on in his book subsequent Christian Democrat demands for the ‘constraint’ of capital (p35). Polanyi, the Christian Democrats, and Glasman all seem to suffer from a straightforward misunderstanding of the nature of money in all its forms. Money is a good like any other, subject to subjective evaluation and the laws of supply and demand. To ‘constrain capital’ is nothing less than to constrain the most important form of non-constituted – i.e. not of the person’s body – private property of all, that which facilitates the voluntary transfer of goods and services, and hence an autonomous private sphere of activity, and therefore ultimately advanced liberal civilisation itself.

Anticipating his later discussion of Hayek, he sets out Polanyi’s argument that atomism – i.e. in practice market capitalism, I assume – and nationalism are linked in their mutual contempt for the range of intermediary institutions and traditions such as unions, churches, guilds, etc. which serve to sustain society (p7). However, whilst there is real truth in this in the latter case, and Glasman’s theoretical rejection of the leviathan State does him credit, in the former case we begin to see Polanyi’s, and hence Glasman’s, primary error in their misunderstanding of the market, again seen more clearly when he turns to Hayek.

Whilst accepting both the State and the market, Polanyi claims that “a substantive economy … requires a society based upon non-market institutions which plays a role in the provision of needs, the distribution of knowledge and the allocation of status” (p17). (A cynic might say that this emphasis on status is to protect those that have ‘paid their dues’ from free-market parvenus.) As a result, rather like Ketteler, he goes on to say that “Unmediated dependency on either the State for welfare or the market for wages leads logically to an unmediated dependency on the State as the protector of community” (8). This is certainly true in the case of the State, but again, unfortunately for Polanyi, there really are only two ways of getting money: through theft, fraud, or coercion, whether ‘privately and illegitimately’ through crime or ‘publicly and legitimately’ through State-expropriated taxation; or voluntaristically through wages, interest and rent received, inheritance, gift, or charity. To a true liberal, only the latter voluntary transfers are morally acceptable. Any other distinction or attempt to create a fictitious ‘third way’ in title transfer is illusory.

Glasman examines – and surprisingly, perhaps, for those expecting a thoroughgoing assault on the New Right, not entirely unfavourably – some of the work of Friedrich Hayek, and indeed this is possibly the most important section of Unnecessary Suffering (p24-27). He notes Hayek’s critique – e.g. in The Fatal Conceit – of constructivist rationalism his support for a spontaneous order, and thus his opposition to socialism on the grounds of its adherence to “hyper-rationalism in its administration and atavistic communitarianism in those matters concerning ethics and moral argument” (p25). Glasman shares Hayek’s views about the role of tradition in the preservation of knowledge and his critique of the centrally planned state. However, whilst he agrees with Hayek’s identification of an intermediary between instinct and reason, he says that Hayek failed to understand that the same was true of the economy, i.e. that there is an intermediary between the market and the collectivist State, these being represented by institutions such as “vocational organisations, public libraries, universities, artisan institutions and municipal government” (p26).

This is the core of Glasman’s theoretical argument, but I suggest that Glasman has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the market: that rather than being the discrete entity that he assumes, it is but one species of a much larger type of social interaction characterised by voluntaristic relationships. In other words, that there are only two forms of societal relationships: coercive and voluntary, with the market being the directly wealth-creating element of the latter. Also, for all his acknowledgement of Hayekian criticisms of the limits of statism, it cannot but be noticed that many of the intermediary institutions that he so favours rely on the coercive half of societal relationships – i.e. the State – for either their funding and/or their special protection.

Glasman’s theory, then, is both flawed in its misunderstanding of the societal location of the market and also its conception of many of his favoured intermediary institutions which turn out to be deeply statist albeit of a second-hand, parasitic, and dishonest nature. His announcement of Hayek’s epistemological failure to account for the “institutional means through which substantive practices of practical knowledge have been protected from the rationality of the market as well as the rationalism of the state” (p27) is anyway doubtful given the inherently subjective nature of the market, but more importantly suffers from his failure to acknowledge that such practical knowledge – that is knowledge of subjective value to either the worker, entrepreneur, consumer, or hobbyist – can be and is protected and transmitted via the various elements – market and non-market – of the voluntary aspect of social relationships.

The New Right

Towards the end of the book, Glasman discusses the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s (p98-120). He offers an interesting view into the nature of ‘crisis’, a period during which the existing arrangements come to be perceived as unstable, and either collapse due to this instability or survive thus proving there was no crisis in the first place. Crises thus resolve themselves either way: there can be no permanent crisis (p98). However, there seems to be at least a third option missing from Glasman’s analysis: that crises can be detected and changes made towards a (sufficiently) new system before the old system actually collapses. Therefore, one analysis might argue that Britain was in crisis during the 1970s but did not actually collapse due to the Conservative Party’s victory in 1979 and the implementation of the necessary ‘Thatcherite’ policies.

He claims that the major crisis during this period was that the Keynesian paradigm – qua system of historical interpretation rather than moral philosophy – was discredited by its failure to any more accurately predict and explain events (p111-113). This caused a breakdown in trust for the paradigm and the answer to ‘what is to be done?’ could no longer be given since the ‘logically and conceptually prior’ consideration of ‘what’s going on?’ was no longer held to be reliably answered. The New Right, however, in a process which Glasman likens to a Kuhnian paradigm shift (p99), appeared to offer a new and better explanation.

Looking at it from the inside to some degree, one might question Glasman’s apparent view that the New Right came out of nowhere in the 1970s (p115). There had always been a classical liberal ‘underground opposition’ to the post-war settlement, but it had been ignored by the establishment and often actively suppressed – as it still is – by the universities and much of the intelligencia. Equally, however, Glasman is, for some at least, over-optimistic about the collapse in support for the post-war settlement (p119): it is difficult to recall it being true either at the time or, providing one allows for rhetorical and tactical changes, now.

A Miscellany of Interest

Glasman highlights some interesting and illuminating aspects of post-war and post-Cold War history. It is certainly an eye-opener to learn of the massive foreign debt accumulated in the 1970s by the supposedly communist Poland and owed to Western governments and banks (p89).

Staying with Poland, Glasman describes at some length the ideological roots of free union Solidarity and plausibly describes them as a mixture of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and the Roman Catholic socio-economic thought that forms the core of Unnecessary Suffering (86-97). If so, it shows that the democratic Left in this country during the 1980s were, after all, more correct in saying that it was their model that Solidarity was pursuing, not the contemporary Thatcherite/Reaganite one. Some of us must stand corrected.

Glasman is given to making dubious – and sometimes distasteful – historical comparisons. To take just one example amongst many, discussing the inter-war years, he writes that “Each country, whether it was New Deal America or the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or welfarist Britain, responded to the threat that market economies posed to the existence of society by releasing labour, land and money from the subordination to the price system alone.” (p15). To talk within a ‘liberal’ thesis about labour – i.e. human beings – being in any sense ‘released’ by Stalin or Hitler, other than millions of them being ‘released’ from the burden of breathing, is unnerving.

Dr Glasman’s Internal Struggle

Throughout the book, one is aware of the tension within Glasman’s thinking, and implicitly within Christian Democracy. On the one hand he frequently rejects socialism and the centralised State, and indeed specifically says that his intermediary institutions facilitate life in a capitalist economy (p78).

On the other hand, he is also critical of capitalism in terms that would make any socialist feel proud. For example, he argues against a straw man version of ‘market utopianism’ by describing a society in which self-interest is the only acceptable form of rationality (9). It certainly calls into question Glasman’s familiarity with the world of ‘actually existing commerce’ and the way that many of those engaged in business in fact spend a surprisingly large amount of their time not acting as economic profit-maximisers.

He also openly calls for a “society [which] could democratically organise the satisfaction of needs” (p142), but ‘happiness’, for example, is not an objectively verifiable ‘need’ and Glasman is, no doubt unconsciously, promoting despotic austerity. He also seems predisposed towards a rationalist interpretation of history, particularly when discussing the New Right (and especially paradoxically when considering his support for some of Hayek’s thinking), as though the key actors consciously envisaged all real-world political events and their outcomes.

If a crude judgement about Glasman’s ideological homeland is to be made, it is that he is a liberal-minded man of the Left who recognises that socialism is no longer an intellectually respectable cause. Instead, he has cast around for something which seems to offer the political liberalism that he seeks, whilst still allowing him an emotionally pleasing denunciation of ‘capital’.

(I should note here at the last that I know the immensely likeable Maurice Glasman personally. He once told me that, because of his support for the anti-socialist elements of Christian Democracy and (in part) thinkers such as Hayek, some of his students regard him as being definitely ‘of the Right’.)

The Wrong Tools for the Job

However, this ‘psycho-political’ analysis is likely to do him a disservice, for if nothing else it is to try to interpret and make some sense of Christian Democracy using inappropriate and inadequate conceptual tools. Yet this same error is very widely made in Britain when analysing the EU, particularly by its opponents. Critics from the ‘Left’ regard the EU as a ‘capitalist club’, and can point to elements such as the free movement of goods and capital and the acceptance of material inequality to justify their belief. Critics from the ‘Right’ liken it to the old Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, and can point to elements such as the Common Fisheries and Agricultural Policies and worker participation in management decisions to justify their belief.

However, they are both wrong. The crucial point is that, as noted in the Preface above, the EU is substantially founded on and driven by a Christian Democrat ideology of the sort described by Dr Glasman. Something that is not merely philosophically mistaken, but fundamentally alien to the liberal, Protestant, Anglophone political tradition.

References

DeLeon, David (1978) The American as Anarchist, Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press.

Glasman, Maurice (1996) Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia, London: Verso.

Nelson, Brent, James Guth, and Fraser Cleveland (2001) ‘Does Religion Matter?’, in European Union Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp191-217.

This is a slightly revised version of an essay that first appeared in the May 2002 issue of The Individual, the journal of the Society for Individual Freedom (www.individualist.org.uk), pp6-10.

---

 

Libertarian Alliance home

Dr Robert McIndoe

Tim Evans

Robert McIndoe R.I.P

On behalf of everyone involved with the Libertarian Alliance, I would like to express my sadness on learning that Robert McIndoe has died.

A graduate of St. Andrew’s University who had a life long passion for learning, in recent years he went on to gain an MBA from the Open University and then an MA in Theatre & Performance Studies.

An engaging, thoughtful and genuine ‘renaissance man’, his early career saw him train as a mental health nurse before he went on to excel at communications and management consultancy – not to mention a wide range of other commercial and professional activities.

A wonderful and creative artist with a passion for everything from painting to theatre, he will be greatly missed by everyone who had the exhilaration and pleasure of knowing him. A treasured and special friend over many years, I for one will miss him hugely.

He leaves his beloved wife Shirley, and lovely daughters – of whom he was so proud – Madeline and Isobel.

Dr Tim Evans

This fellow’s right too

David Davis

The population of the libertarian blogosphere is, if not actually falling, well then, er, possibly sagging a bit.

The LMF (libertarian motor-mouth fund) is not likely to be created yet or indeed any reasonable time soon, to “come in and audit the “posting rate versus asset-bankable-ideas”. It’s not terminal, and many chaps have other stuff to do, unlike the LeftoStaliNazis.  CountingCats has an interesting discussion going on: the hard-men will probably stick around.

Oh, and Gold’s still $1,355 , so we are not out of the (Bretton) woods yet.

Lord Young is right that things could be worse than they are

David Davis

The socialist PM, David Cameron, has slapped down Lord Young (who has now grown up and therefore is old, and so he can see further than some) for saying that things in general, considering that our government is bust and our State’s debt is unsustainable unless we all work harder for a few decades, could be worse than they are.

Ireland faces torment, meltdown and sovereign extinction.

Greece got out of the same punishment for permanently allowing a government of lazy aggressive socialist scumbags, by threatening to kill all the Germans in the world, dead. Whether it’s in the nature of the Greeks, an otherwise good and sound people, to allow their governments to pretend that all Greeks are socialist lazy scumbags and will of course go along with defrauding the peoples of other nations linked to them forcibly at gunpoint by Brussels, is another matter.

The French got out of it by their murdering fascist government getting their students and “public sector workers” (which is to say: most people there) to threaten to burn all their politicians and mayors and state-bribe-receivers and police to death. How far it would have gone, rests on to what extent we think the French pretend to go along with the pretence of their “government” being a pretend government or a real one.

The Irish, being English, don’t behave quite in the same way.

Quote of the day

David Davis

Ed West writes again about Ireland, and whay could happen despite the best efforts of the Eurocrats.

His sign-off is brilliant:-

“And political union cannot just happen; it entails becoming what Roger Scruton calls “a society of strangers”, and “democracy involves the ability to grant a share in government to people with whom you profoundly disagree, including people of another faith. This is possible only where government is secular, and where nevertheless people revere the process of government as the expression of a shared national identity.”

Ireland went along with this delusion because they believed it would bring them wealth and because they were sick of being a backward country left out of Europe’s mainstream. All of Europe’s nations had their reasons for being part of the plan to end nationalism and with it conflict in Europe.

They were led by their political elite, but in all these countries the population followed; only in Britain was there widespread hostility to the idea, not because of our attachment to some “glorious imperial past”, as the federasts believe, but because in Britain the idea of the nation-state was not discredited by war.

If Peter Hitchens got a penny for every time someone repeated this line, he could probably single-handedly bail out Ireland, but it’s worth repeating: “Britain is the only virgin in a continent of rape victims.”

Yet all along the elite of Ireland and elsewhere were wrong, and the little people of Middle England were right.”

Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize 2010

Why a Libertarian Society would not Deprive Individuals
of Cultural Roots and Collective Identity
David Robert Gibson

Cultural Notes No. 55

ISBN: 9781856376211
ISSN: 0267-677X (print)
ISSN: 2042-2539 (online)

An occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance,
Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, Mayfair, London W1J 6HL.

© 2010: Libertarian Alliance; David Robert Gibson.

David Robert Gibson was born in London in 1953, and lives in semi-rural Essex. He left school at 16, and has worked in many occupations including the civil service, as a community worker and as a courier. Since 1988, he has worked in information technology and he has been a freelance computer consultant/technician since 2000. His interests include individual freedom, spiritual development, libertarian politics, history, the countryside, aesthetics and motoring. This essay is a slightly revised version of the winning entry to the Libertarian Alliance’s 2010 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize, ‘Would a Libertarian Society Deprive Individuals of Cultural Roots and Collective Identity?’.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and not necessarily those of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee,
Advisory Council or subscribers.

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

PREFACE

I take it as a privilege to present my essay for a prize established in the name of the late Dr Chris R. Tame.  I have tried to write this from the heart, to further and do honour to the cause of libertarianism, and also as a modest effort to help continue the work that Chris championed for almost 40 years.

INTRODUCTION

The answer to the question is No—well, that’s certainly my answer.  If and when we achieve a libertarian society, two things are certain—that its people will have individual freedom at their core principle, and those people will have histories—cultural roots and many of them collective identities.  Being libertarians, those people will surely reflect upon whether or not those cultural roots and collective identities are compatible with individual freedom, and so keep or discard them accordingly.  In a libertarian society, there will not be, as there are now, central authorities to impose or deny those associations, or to make a ‘Year Zero’ break from their past.  They will not be ignorant, passive ‘sheeple’ to be cajoled and coerced into obedience by rulers.  Rather, free people will, having complete freedom of conscience, action and association, decide themselves.  So we had best answer the question by reflecting upon what sort of adherence to cultural roots and collective identities will be compatible with living the libertarian life.  There is the additional possibility that these freed people will set down new cultural roots and even collective identities, freely entered into and freely left.  Any collective association will be subservient to the prime principle of freedom—that the individual person is free to think and act as they choose, provided that that does not infringe other people’s freedom to do the very same.

Libertarianism is a political and social philosophy, and most completely, a way of life.  The vast majority of political ‘philosophies’—I use inverted commas because most of them are not wise—boil down to one group of people imposing their will upon those who do not agree with them, i.e. everyone else.  In 21^st Century Britain, we live in a society that most political commentators would call ‘free and democratic’.  To be sure, this is neither an absolute monarchy nor a communist or fascist state, according to the purist meanings of those words.  However, and despite regular elections, local, national and European, like all three political models ‘ representative democracy’ exists by ‘elected’ groups of people, almost invariably supported by a minority of the electorate, enacting laws that the rest of us are required to obey.  If we disobey, even if that disobedience hurts no one and may help many, the Regime can and will send their agents, and not even always as a last resort, to imprison or murder us.  That is not freedom, it is not libertarian, and it will not do!

THE SURVIVAL OF CULTURAL ROOTS AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES

Families are the most universal and enduring cultural roots and collective identities, and they must endure for any society to survive.  A libertarian society will not subsidise families, either by money or propaganda, and so I foresee a resurgence in the traditional heterosexual marriage/partnership between a man and woman, usually with children, simply because it is the most self-sustaining kind.  Without children a society becomes extinct!  Parents would nurture children when they are young, and children no doubt would return that kindness when they are old.  That is the traditional way.  Sadly, because the state provides copious welfare payments and big business issues propaganda in the form of advertising telling people they should work for status, possessions and shallow entertainment, this traditional way is dying-out.  Instead, parents are often ‘semi-detached’ towards their children, leaving them to be ‘brought-up’ by role models on television, the media and in computer games.  They then increasingly often, send them off to ‘uni’(versity).  These children as adults then ‘return the compliment’ by having increasingly little to do with their parents, and when the latter are old, pack them off to a nursing home.  This does not make for a caring and cohesive society.

Work would continue, and as workers spend much of their lives at work they would naturally build and sustain a collective identity with their colleagues, during work and afterwards.  As government would not exist, or if it did it would be vastly smaller than now, there would be far fewer people working in central locations.  The state would be gone or minimal in size, and large companies would no longer have the state protection given them via limited liability.  Nor would large companies have state patronage.  I work in Information Technology, and I have noticed that in state colleges, most of the computers there are supplied by huge multi-national corporations including Hewlett Packard and Dell.  Their turnover would wither considerably.  Consequently, most people would work locally and so their identities would be far more with people in their locality.  This was, of course, true of the vast bulk of people throughout almost all of recorded history.

Clubs and informal groups attract many people to spend time, with and identify with, others who share their interest in practicing games, arts, intellectual pursuits, various forms of ‘self-improvement’, myriad hobbies, and historical societies and re-enactment groups like the Ermine Street Guard and the Sealed Knot.  These are voluntary, and so I foresee they will continue.

Political parties, I expect, would cease to exist, since they serve to gain freedom or advantage for themselves and or their ‘clients’.  A libertarian society will give people freedom and those people will not take advantage, since to do so would not be libertarian!  I suspect that some readers will be surprised by my summary dismissal of political parties.  To them I pose the question: In a society where people are free, what would be the raison d’être of political parties?  The same must be asked of international organisations, and probably even the nation state—and answered, in my view, in the negative.

Religion in libertarian society deserves a more complex answer.  Religion, or the modernist term for it, ‘Faith’, includes a vast array of doctrines and, much more important, practices.  It is not the business of libertarians, rather like Elizabeth I, to enquire into men’s souls, but we must consider whether what they do allows people to be free.  Religious practices are of two very different types – those that focus on meditation, contemplation and or prayer—what I shall call mystical, and those that act to change the world socially (and culturally and politically)—what I shall call militant.

The religions that are largely mystical include Buddhism, Taoism, the more quietist forms of Hinduism, contemplative Christianity and Sufism.  In the modern world Islam is by far the most militant—both in the laws it imposes in Muslim countries, and the violence it carries out there and in other lands in the name of Islamic jihad, although in the Indian sub-continent some Hindus and even a few Buddhists take up arms to impose their religion upon ‘non-believers’.  I include under the title militant, less formal but widespread practices including female genital mutilation and ‘honour killings’.  Some ‘Christian fundamentalists’ would like to impose their religion upon others, that is a desire rather than a practice.  In short, a libertarian society can co-exist with mystics (indeed it may be enhanced by them as I will mention in my Conclusion).  It cannot co-exist with militants, but rather the overwhelming majority of individual people asserting their own freedom of action, without denying other people theirs, will make its successful establishment possible and so people will have no reason to be militant.  Some readers may find this a bland assertion; of them I ask: How can we have a libertarian society when many members of it are not willing libertarians?  People must become libertarian in their hearts and souls before a libertarian society can be created.  They will not be obeying orders!

There are people here, and in growing numbers, from abroad, who follow cultural traditions from their homelands, or the homelands of their descendants, including Ramadan, Eid and Diwali.  Jews and Muslims traditionally do not eat pork, nor do Hindus eat beef.  Most of these practices do not conflict with the libertarian life, but I feel that my Essay would be incomplete if I failed to mention, at least in passing, that many immigrants are establishing the cultures of their homelands here.  Insofar as those cultural roots and collective identity are anti-libertarian, as many manifestly are, they will delay or render increasingly impossible a libertarian society here.

I have long argued¹ against mass immigration, that is immigration without the prior invitation of a native citizen here, is illegitimate.  I have also argued against imposed multi-culturalism, that is the state imposition of enforced association upon people with members of other races, religions, cultures and orientations.  I think both are morally wrong, not least because they are achieved via coercion, and that both are destroying the peace within society and may well bring it to a bloody end.  I consider that both are disruptions of the traditional relatively homogeneous culture and neither deserves to stand.  What is to be done to cure these problems?  I do not have a watertight answer, but I do feel that libertarians should spend time in thought and reflection to find one.

Libertarianism is not a nationalist movement, but rather an individualist one.  However is it a non-coercive philosophy, and both mass immigration and multi-culturalism have been imposed.  Words including racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic (not to mention homophobic, sexist, etc. in other conflicts) have been used by the new-Left establishment, with a mounting intensity that crosses the line into fanaticism, to vilify people who prefer the company of others who are like themselves.  They should not stand, and I feel that in a libertarian society people will be free to resume traditional associations, if they wish to, freely.  We will not be made to fit into cultural straightjackets tailored by any regime.

I do not know whether a libertarian society will establish itself throughout the nation, or even the world.  In view of the way society is fracturing, I think it rather more likely that it will start locally, perhaps within a ‘patchwork’ of differing cultures.  If that comes to pass, the militia that I mention elsewhere probably will be essential to its survival.

There are many periodical traditions that people follow, including Remembrance Day, Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes Night, (largely Christian) Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Saints Days and Harvest Festival and Pancake Day/Shrove Tuesday, and wearing crosses, (largely Pagan and Druid) Summer and Winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge and elsewhere, May Poles and Morris Dancing, (largely in Scotland) Hogmanay, and sundry other religious and secular celebrations.  None of these involve people suffering or imposing oppression upon other people, so I see no conflict between their practice and the libertarian life.  Many of these constitute part of what many people see as ‘being English’, and again for the same innocuous reason, I do not see anything un-libertarian in that.  Some may even have ‘Charles and Di’ mugs on their mantle-pieces, but not, alas, me.

Charity is a long-established tradition here and throughout most of the world, operated by church and secular groups.  One major criticism that the political Left level at the dismantling of the ‘welfare state’—a natural consequence of a libertarian society—is that the poor will ‘go to the wall’.  Whether or not that became true it should not be maintained at the expense of coercive theft from taxpayers.  I also think that that is unjustified.  In a libertarian society, people will be free to do as they wish with their money and their time.  I have talked with many libertarians, and my strong impression of them is that they are decent-hearted folk.  I deduce that in the absence of state poor relief, charitable giving would continue and probably increase, at least until such time that the libertarian morality of self-support replaced that of financial dependency (upon taxpayers via a coercive state machine), for all but people who were too ill or disabled to support themselves.  Those people were once known as ‘the deserving poor’, before political correctness brought obloquy upon those who uttered it.

REVIVED AND NEW TRADITIONS

Some English ways are in decline or have all but died.  Libertarian culture will give people the freedom to sell their apples in pounds and ounces, to hunt foxes, and to own guns, including handguns (I was interested to see a pair of Wordworth’s pistols in the William Wordsworth Exhibition at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Cumbria—clearly there was a time when even such as a poet would own handguns!).  Successive United Kingdom governments and the European Union have legislated to make these traditional practices extinct, and their health and safety laws threaten playing conkers and such local traditions as Cheese Rolling at Coopers Hill in Gloucestershire—no more in a libertarian society.  There may also arise new traditions celebrating men who have furthered the cause of liberty here, including John Pym, John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell.

Libertarians will not initiate violence, but those who are not pacifists will surely want to be able to protect themselves.  Even if our society becomes libertarian, most of the world will be slower in becoming so—judging by the state of the world over hundreds of years of history.  Consequently, I suspect we will see the return of militias, local paramilitary forces—strictly voluntary equivalents of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, and of those here in the early modern period.  They will serve to expel foreign invaders, and be held together not by conscription or formal contract with the state, but rather by the security of mutual protection and a sense of honour in not leaving their comrades in the lurch.

Readers may have noticed my mention, with approval, of mystical pursuits.  I suspect that many libertarians are so because they find libertarianism intellectually satisfying or compelling (and so it is).  I find more inspiration in how well it reconciles with the quest for spiritual liberation, and I would be far from surprised if the triumph of libertarianism saw many more people following the path to spiritual enlightenment.  I think we will see the establishment of meditation centres – modern echoes of the abbeys that were widespread in the mediaeval period.  In my view we need to seek inner liberation from fear, guilt and anxiety in order to be in the right state of mind to be alert fully to our political serfdom, and to assert our freedom from it.  Conventional religion is largely focused upon collective identity—services in churches and more recently in some areas in mosques and temples, but the religion to which I refer focuses more within—upon individual identity, arguably enlightened by a greater Self, or to some God.

Why do I write of mystical religion in an essay that is considerably about politics?  Was not one of the achievements of the ‘Enlightenment’ the separation of Church and State?  To those questions I reply that personal spiritual elevation is not obedience to an institution or a creed, it is the search for inner freedom, and how can we become free without, politically, when we are not free within, spiritually?  We live in an immensely complex, fast-moving, ambitious and materialist society, in which publicly no value is placed upon the inner man—the soul or spirit.  Jesus is recorded as saying, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?  Or what shall a man give in exchange for his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26 and Mark 8:36-37).  Buddhist and Taoist sages said similar, indeed Taoism has as its central principle Wu Wei—non-interference (with the natural rhythm of life).  Is not non-interference also central to the libertarian life?  I feel that it is in harmony with the thoughts of great libertarians like Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, Rockwell, Hoppe, etc.  I hope that this non-interference will become an established culture.

I will digress briefly from the central point of my essay because I think I would be unfair for me, having mentioned spiritual endeavour to readers, to leave them without giving them any direction towards it.  Do try to practice meditation (or prayer), for example two techniques ‘Sitting quietly doing nothing’—and watching the passage of thoughts without becoming attached to them, and the similar ‘Mindfulness of Breathing’—observing your natural rhythm of breaths, without interfering with that rhythm.  You may well find that you become less urgent, less ambitious and more at peace with yourself.  You may find that you understand yourself better, and as I consider that we all have the same mixture of feelings and motives, albeit in different proportions, we will understand other people better.  You may also find that you become less tolerant of coercion, being coerced and coercing other people, and so deepened in libertarian convictions.

We venture into the unknown in predicting what new traditions will arise, but judging from our pre-libertarian past, they will continue to be very varied, and probably often local.

CONCLUSION

So, to conclude: the cultural attachments that people hold dear to themselves are numerous and varied in character.  We can deduce that some of them will survive in a new libertarian society, and that others will not.  The question that the essay title poses begs another: How will we achieve a libertarian society?  Answering it lies beyond this discussion, but it should occupy at least some of the time of all who call themselves ‘Libertarian’.  Answering it successfully in ways that satisfy both our minds, and more importantly, our souls, and consequently satisfy the vast majority of people who are not libertarians, will lead inexorably to libertarian lives for all.  We do well to reflect, day-to-day and hour-to-hour, how we need to change our outlook, and to make those changes.  I commend this essay to its readers, and I hope that reflection upon it will help them to illuminate their libertarian life.

NOTE

(1) Such as on the Libertarian Alliance’s Yahoo! Group, where you can read more of my reflections from time to time on a variety of subjects.  The Group can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertarian-alliance-forum/.

Libertarian Alliance home

FLC188, Are the Russians Coming? Brief Thoughts on the Climate Change Scandal, Sean Gabb, 3rd December 2009

What I predict will happen is that the propaganda will continue for the next few years. But it will be gradually be replaced by a new set of justificatory lies. Global warming itself was the replacement for acid rain pollution, ozone holes, and even global cooling. In the absence of some new environmental claims, I suggest that we shall hear much more for now on about “peak oil” – the notion that fossil fuels exist in limited supplies and that they will run out within the next few generations.

via FLC188, Are the Russians Coming? Brief Thoughts on the Climate Change Scandal, Sean Gabb, 3rd December 2009.

FLC185, The National Health Service: A Libertarian Perspective, Sean Gabb, 18th August 2009

The idea that only profit-seeking organisations are consistent with libertarianism is to take a shockingly arid view of the ideology. What libertarians should like about commerce is not its taste for profit but its distaste for compulsion. What legitimises markets, in libertarian terms, is that they are structures of voluntary association. This is what brings the friendly societies and much trade union activity, and so much of what in Victorian times was called \

via FLC185, The National Health Service: A Libertarian Perspective, Sean Gabb, 18th August 2009.

Breaking News…(royal wedding imminent)

Michael Winning

DD wrote about this in one of the first posts on this blog I find.

How soon will the Euro implode?

UPDATE:- I said this the other day, too.

David Davis

About 12 years ago, or it may be 13, I bet a YEM* person £25 that the Euro, recently issued, would sink to UD$1.00 by that Christmas. It did fall, a bit: my prediction was only wrong in degree -  but I lost my bet and ponied up.

Now Peter Oborne thinks the project is at last about to come undone.

* “YEM” was the “Young European Movement”. God knows what’s happened to that.