Technical question about Drupal

by Sean Gabb

I have two questions for anyone inclined to answer them. I like the CTI-Flex sub-Theme of Zen, and want to create some specific effects.

1. I want to create a page template – to go in the “Create Content” menu – called Essays. Every time I click on this, I want to open into a page that already has a grey box in the top right corner saying “click here to view/print pdf”. I want this so set up that I simply need to enter the name of the pdf file, not the full location.

2. I want to create a Primary Menu, to sit on a horizontal top bar. This will consist of links such as Home, Essays, Recipes, All, etc. When It hit on Home, I want both sidebars to disappear. When I hit on Essays, I want a Taxonomy View index of articles to appear. When I hit on Recipes, I want the same for recipes. When I it on All, I want a Taxonomy View index of everything.

Is there anyone listening who is able to help?

Taxing corporate profits

dj

I am increasingly of the view that corporation tax, as long as it exists (of course libertarians would aim to delete all such taxes, but that could well take some time), plays a wholly negative role in penalising corporate success. Companies that are inefficiently run pay little, but those that are well run and could create wealth and jobs pay more. Moreover, we read in the UK that some large banks manage to pay little on their large earnings, owing to losses brought forward and an array of offshore vehicles, and even that some large newspaper corporations pay almost no tax in the UK.

A profit tax is a ridiculous concept in an economy that wants to grow. I would replace these by a business turnover tax. Quite simply, no losses would be brought forward, no profits would be calculated. The tax would simply be a percentage of turnover. So all banks would pay it at the set rate; so would all newspaper corporations. Inefficient companies would have to pay it, and some could be forced into receivership by having to pay more than now; but the profitable would find they paid less. By keeping their costs down, and given that no calculation of profit or earnings would be made, they would find they paid less by simply paying a percentage of turnover.

Finally, all companies would pay on their UK turnover, so offshore financial vehicles and the like would not reduce their liabilities, thus lowering the burden on the companies that currently pay corporation tax. Accountancy costs would be lowered by the elimination of profit/loss as a basis for payment.

Gay-only Bed & Breakfast Establishments Probed by Equality Commission

http://www.christian.org.uk/news/gay-only-bbs-probed-by-equality-commission/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+christianinstitute+(The+Christian+Institute)

Comment by Iain Ross-MacLeod LMPA

Where on earth are these people going with this silly investigations?

There are homosexual bed-and-breakfast houses purely and simply to save the heterosexual people from becoming vexed by the behaviour that they might find offensive taking place.

One cannot go around in a heterosexual establishment entering the bedrooms of others who have left their doors open seeking fulfilment, and only for that purpose, with any degree of safety or comfort for it is not the convention to do so in this country as yet.

People do not go to exclusively heterosexual bed and breakfasts establishments seeking sexual activity as these nocturnal indulgences are inclined almost exclusively to homosexual establishments a number of which are there for that purpose.

It has always been the case from my earliest days in Portsmouth circa 1960 and in the London naval clubs near Waterloo station that service personnel would leave their doors open at night if they wish to be entertained and if they did they would lock them.

When there is a gay bed and breakfast in an area the people who are running it usually apply common sense and don’t allow people who may be offended by gay behaviour to stroll around casually in their corridors. Not all gay bed-and-breakfast establishments allow this sort of freedom in any case. Some are very conventional and they don’t encourage promiscuity on their premises at all.

The same applies to gay bars where sex takes place. There are many gay bars in London, and there may be in the provincial cities as well for all I know all I know. Sex will often take place in the back-room or in a ‘dark room’ and it is no place for heterosexual people to be lounging around behaving like voyeurs. The door policy should certainly be to keep out heterosexuals and all those people who have no interest in gay sex as much as possible. That is the way to keep the place trouble-free and safe for those that wish to come in and, perceive, partake or perform.

Surely equal opportunities does not mean forcing people to be exposed to those who do not wish to join in with or tolerate their behaviour but for purely there for other purposes

Perhaps we are going the same way as the Eastern countries. I have just returned from the Philippines where previously in gay bars where sex took place the audience mainly consisted of men who came in to watch rather than to participate. Certainly there was the odd woman who might have been the friend of some gay people or the like. However recently a gay bar in the Philippines allows Korean girls in to suck the cocks of the of the gay boys as they are wandering around on the stage.

Conspiracies of Rome – Richard Blake « Thouroughly thought through

 

Conspiracies of Rome – Richard Blake

Regularly I find myself reading a book of undoubted literary genius. The characters are fascinating, the plot is so juicy you could make a fruit salad from it and it has all the makings of a classic that will survive the transitory nature of time. However, there is a rather large issue weighing on my mind. A hippo, if you will, has plonked itself unceremoniously in the back of my waking thoughts. This problem is as follows; it has taken three sodding weeks to read ten pages of this lexical masterpiece.

You know exactly what I mean, we’ve all experienced it. The dreaded “heavy read”. What is most annoying is that because we know what a rip roaring, snort wangling read it is, we feel guilty (or just plain moronic) for not being able to plough on through and then add it to the list of books we can boast about having read to our lesser read acquaintances.

This is more irritating than a mosquito that has a distinct smell of vinegar. Very unpalatable i’m sure you will agree. But I am here to assure that you no longer have to feel that sense of gnawing guilt as you slam the book down unceremoniously and get out the FHM magazine. There is another way!
Reading is, after all, about enjoying yourself whilst not having the distractions of people making life excessively complicated for you.

Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake and the sequel in the series entitled The Terror of Constantinople represent this alternative. Historical fiction can sometimes be sniffed upon the same as when your pet dog plants his most intimate business in the middle of your Persian rug. They are truly enjoyable to read, and if you’ve had this beaten out of you by some vague sense of responsibility to read Nietzsche and Thucydides every week then this is the perfect cure.

Set in the period following the decimation of the Roman Empire and the ascension of the Roman Church a young Briton named Aelric stumbles rather haphazardly into a series of events that see him traveling to Rome. The plot uncovers, as the title suggests, various conspiracies coming from several different directions. Through a combination of luck, naivety and the fact that he looks “gorgeous” (according to himself) he navigates his way through the machinations of the Roman Church and a secret organization called the Column of Phocas.

It has whit in abundance, along with a good amount of action, some intriguingly gory details and is sprinkled quite pleasantly with some legitimate wisdom, if you keep your eyes open for it.

The second book is full of the same qualities but the storyline is much more available for the whit that has brief showings in the first volume. Character wise The Terror of Constantinople (which is set in the middle of a civil war in the Eastern Roman Empire) is infinitely superior. It also contains the phrase “necrophiliac fist job” which, frankly, should have you all sold on it.

Admittedly there is a problem with books of this particular genre. They tend to be written by the academic types, professors of Classics and various posts along those lines. Sometimes it is glaringly obvious that they have slipped back into academic mode and the story can stagnate somewhat. For instance when Blake describes the hippodrome in Constantinople he gives a description which is down to the inch, which seems slightly show offy and unnecessary in my book. But these deviations from storyteller to student borer are extremely rare and the chances are you may not even notice it.

Both books have a nostalgic atmosphere to them, in that they describe with harrowing detail the decimation and decline of the Roman Empire. What was once the beacon of the civilized world is by now a slum with all the majesty of the past ripped away by an overly powerful and corrupt church. Whether this is an intentional colouring by the author or a representation of history and how Europe slipped into the dark ages during the domination of the church, I will leave for you to ponder upon.

Nevertheless, if you find yourselves wanting to read a book in a couple of days without giving you a stomach ulcer from the stress of reading it, then I strongly recommend these two thoroughly enjoyable books. Incidentally the third book in the series is also available, and is set in Alexandria.
But for now, content yourself with the first two. Stop being boring and reading obscure South American Literature. Branch out, read a book that does not a take a doctorate to read and actually remind yourself what a thoroughly entertaining read is all about.

Conspiracies of Rome – Richard Blake « Thouroughly thought through

Beware of electric hummingbirds, in a town near you

David Davis

I just spotted this:-

http://www.avinc.com/nano

They might be owned and run by the government. In fact it’s the most probable conclusion.

Apologies to David Thompson – I forgot to say it was seen here….

The power of free association: Libertarian unionism | The Economist

 

The power of free association: Libertarian unionism | The Economist

Kevin Carson quoted in The Economist:

I’VE repeatedly argued that private- and public-sector unions operate in different institutional settings, raise fundamentally different moral and political questions, and that it is altogether reasonable to support private-sector unions while rejecting public-sector unions on account of the nature of their differences. A common response I’ve heard from the left is that I’m slyly seeking to sow discord by disingenuously arguing that the larger union movement is not in fact one, but is instead a coalition of fundamentally distinct organisations of unequal moral standing. A common response I’ve heard from the right is basically the same: "you don’t really support private-sector unionism, do you"?

Well, I do. Sort of. It’s complicated because American labour law is complicated.

The right of workers to band together to improve their bargaining position relative to employers is a straightforward implication of freedom of association, and the sort of voluntary association that results is the beating heart of the classical liberal vision of civil society. I unreservedly endorse what I’ll call the "unionism of free association". My difficulty in coming out wholeheartedly for private-sector unions as they now exist is that they are, by and large, creatures of objectionable statutes which have badly warped the labour-capital power dynamic that would exist under the unionism of free association.

Progressives and libertarians generally part ways on the justifiability of legislation that boosts the bargaining power of unions. Progressives generally think, not implausibly, that government has already put a thumb on the scale in favour of employers through the legal definition of the character and powers of the corporation, such that it is manifestly unjust for government to fail to put an equalising thumb on the scale in favour of unions. For now I only want to say that I think there is indeed a plausible case for government stepping in to help strengthen workers’ bargaining power when inequalities in such power (often created by law and legislation) lead to a systemically unfair division of the gains from productive cooperation. I don’t think the same plausible case applies to public-sector unions for reasons I’ve recited ad nauseam. 

So, do circumstances merit a further statutory boost for private-sector unions? I don’t know. Rather than become mired in largely intractable metaphysical disputes over fairness of the division of the cooperative surplus, which we would need to do in order to determine whether government should do more to augment union power, I believe it would be much more productive to focus on the ways in which the prevailing legal regime clearly handicaps labour relative to the power unions would have under conditions of free association. I heartily agree with Kevin Carson, a left-libertarian theorist and activist, when he argues that:

[T]he room for change lies mainly, not with adding further economic intervention to aid labor at the expense of capital, but rather with eliminating those policies which currently benefit capital at the expense of labor. The question is not what new laws would strengthen the bargaining power of labor, but which existing ones weaken it. …

The most obvious forms of state intervention that hobble labor are legislation like:

1) The provisions of Taft-Hartley which criminalize sympathy and boycott strikes;

2) The Railway Labor Relations Act and the “cooling off” provisions of Taft-Hartley, which enable the government to prevent a strike from spreading to common carriers and thus becoming a general strike; and

3) “Right-to-Work” (sic) laws, which restrict the freedom of contract by forbidding employers to enter into union shop contracts with a bargaining agent.

Further, we should examine the extent to which even ostensibly pro-labor laws, like the Wagner Act, have served in practice to weaken the bargaining power of labor. Before Wagner, what is today regarded as the conventional strike—an announced walkout associated with a formal ultimatum—was only one tactic among many used by unions.

Mr Carson then goes on to enumerate some of those now-rare tactics, which, taken together, add up to a compelling case that a return to the unionism of free association would improve the bargaining position of labour relative to the status quo. 

It is in this light that I wish to join the Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney in congratulating Mitch Daniels for his opposition to the "right-to-work" legislation proposed by Indiana Republicans. Presidential, indeed.

London Zoo and the global warming religion

by Robert Henderson
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=693

London Zoo has the precious piece of warmist propaganda cited below plastered all over the zoo. (I reproduce as it appears in the Zoo, the illiteracies and capitalisation being their own).

“ 350 – THE MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER IN THE WORLD

350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is the safe upper limit for almost all life

We are currently at 387 ppm and rising by 2ppm per year, higher than at any time in human history

SO WHAT?

The wild relatives of the amazing animals you see in the zoo today are already at risk from:

Melting poles and glaciers

Rising sea levels

Spread of disease carrying mosquitoes to move, warmer places

Increased drought

Warming and acidifying oceans carbonising coral reefs and other species to extinction

In fact, all life, including life is at peril

The World Association of Zoos and Aquaria supports the urgent call to stabilise atmospheric CO2 as far below 350 ppm as is possible

JOIN US

Visit www.waza.org and 350.0rg “

CO2 is currently “higher than at any time in human history, eh? Well, maybe, but even that fact is far from certain. Take this article in Nature in 2000:

‘Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years

Paul N. Pearson1 & Martin R. Palmer2

1.Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK

2.T. H. Huxley School, Imperial College, RSM Building, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BP, UK

“Knowledge of the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations throughout the Earth’s history is important for a reconstruction of the links between climate and radiative forcing of the Earth’s surface temperatures. Although atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the early Cenozoic era (about 60 Myr ago) are widely believed to have been higher than at present, there is disagreement regarding the exact carbon dioxide levels, the timing of the decline and the mechanisms that are most important for the control of CO2 concentrations over geological timescales. Here we use the boron-isotope ratios of ancient planktonic foraminifer shells to estimate the pH of surface-layer sea water throughout the past 60 million years, which can be used to reconstruct atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We estimate CO2 concentrations of more than 2,000 p.p.m. for the late Palaeocene and earliest Eocene periods (from about 60 to 52 Myr ago), and find an erratic decline between 55 and 40 Myr ago that may have been caused by reduced CO2 outgassing from ocean ridges, volcanoes and metamorphic belts and increased carbon burial. Since the early Miocene (about 24 Myr ago), atmospheric CO2 concentrations appear to have remained below 500 p.p.m. and were more stable than before, although transient intervals of CO2 reduction may have occurred during periods of rapid cooling approximately 15 and 3 Myr ago.”’ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6797/abs/406695a0.html

That is saying that CO2 levels are thought to have remained below 500 ppm for 24 million years or so. That means fully fledged mammals have survived happily enough at higher concentrations than 350 ppm and in the not too distant geological past before that date, proto mammals and of course organic life in general managed to get along with a massive 2,000 ppm of CO2.

The other thing to note is the failure to make any mention of the other main greenhouse gases water vapour (the most prevalent greenhouse gas) and methane. This is a common turning of a blind eye by the warmist religionists. In the case of water vapour they do this because little can be done about reducing it, and in as much as man is responsible for producing water vapour, a great deal results from the creation of paddyfields , something which is done overwhelmingly by developing nations so political correctness kicks in to produce silence amongst Western elites. It is also very inconvenient for the man-made warming argument to have to admit that the most prevalent greenhouse gas is effectively beyond human control. As for methane, that also has a politically direct dimension because paddyfields produce a large amount of the gas.

I particularly enjoyed the plea to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere “as far below 350 ppm as is possible. “ Reduce it very substantially and, others things being equal, we would be heading for an ice age or even an earth which became a permanent snowball. The plea also ignores the fact that CO2 is plant food. Lower CO2 levels means less vegetation which means fewer animals. Atmospheric greenhouse gases including CO2 are necessary to maintain the planet in a state in which humans can live.

What this crass piece of warmist propaganda shows is how closed are the minds of the warmists and how determined they are to proselytise their creed without any regard for logic or scientific research which undermines their case .

In Libya and Elsewhere, the State Depends on Submission

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=6239

Citing “the law of equal freedom” that binds all human institutions, Herbert Spencer wrote in 1851 of “the right to ignore the state” — of “the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry.” For Spencer, the goal was to stimulate “voluntary co-operation” and promote the enlargement of “the area within which each citizen may act unchecked.”

Today in Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, free individuals, having awoken to the proposition that state power depends on their submission, are disobeying the despotic orders of the political class. In the face of savage violence and the stark disregard of their pleas for freedom, people in these countries continue to gather together in audacious defiance of those who call themselves rulers.

As reported by The New York Times, Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who came to power in 1969, has responded to protests with “a vague package of reforms, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure.” Unfortunately for Qaddafi and his ilk of degenerate tyrants, though, desultory references to empty “reforms” will not fulfill the aspirations of people who have, for generations, endured the oppression of a tiny elite.

In places like Bahrain and Libya, the state and its attendants have secluded themselves in the lap of luxury, cordoning off valuable natural resources like oil for the personal benefit of those in the close orbit of the central state. Conditions in Libya are an especially descriptive example of the ways that statist restrictions monopolize resources for slothful corporate and political officials; in that country, though it has — due to its oil sector — one of the highest per capita GDPs in Africa, most of the population withstands a crushing poverty that relegates them to the margins of survival.

Similarly, in Bahrain, which enjoys the first ever “free trade” agreement between the United States and a Persian Gulf nation, a garish corporate elite closely entwined with the monarchic state loots the wealth of society. State-owned companies like Bahrain’s Gulf Air devour huge “loans” covered by the Bahraini worker, the firm hemorrhaging money while its CEOs put their feet up. When the Yemeni state began to fret that the oil was drying up, it was time to escalate its partnership with the U.S. in the “war on terror,” a prime source of U.S. taxpayer millions.

Political elites are eager to latch onto the empire, relinquishing the “sovereignty” they supposedly cherish, when the role of American outpost brings a $300 million payday for politicians and their friends. Unemployment and destitution, long ignored by a state-corporate aristocracy in the Middle East and Northern Africa, have taken their toll.

These countries’ productive majorities are no longer content to prop up and underwrite the dissolute culture of their “leaders,” to work their fingers to the bone while palace parties rage in their capital cities. The truth that statism tries so desperately to muffle is that we are all Yemenis, Bahrainis, Libyans and Algerians. Lines drawn along largely artificial cultural and national lines estrange us if we accept that the state’s arbitrary violence is necessary for us to be able to deal with and relate to one another.

Free market anarchism turns on Spencer’s “law of equal freedom,” the simple idea that everyone ought be left alone to do whatever they would like provided they observe everyone else’s identical right. The people of the Middle East and Northern Africa understand the power of civil disobedience and peaceful interaction, a power that — when carried to its end — means a world without the injustices of states.

When Will George W. Bush Be Tried for His War Crimes?

When Will George W. Bush Be Tried for His War Crimes?
by Sheldon Richman, February 21, 2011

We should take a small measure of satisfaction in former President George W. Bush’s cancellation of his trip to Switzerland after human-rights groups threatened to bring legal action against him for authorizing torture. Persons detained by the U.S. government after 9/11 were subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” including waterboarding. In reality those methods constituted torture, violating U.S. law and international agreements.

Under those agreements charges can be filed against members of the Bush administration in jurisdictions outside the United States. The Center for Constitutional Rights along with European groups said they will ask Swiss authorities to initiate a criminal case against Bush. They also planned to file their own complaint.

If all that Bush and members of his administration suffer for their crimes are travel restrictions, it will be a mild penalty indeed. (Alas, the U.S. government can and probably will obtain immunity for him.) They deserve far more, starting with a public criminal investigation in the United States, followed by trials. But President Obama says there will be no investigation of top officials. Wishing to “look ahead,” he has decided to treat Bush & Co. as above the law, embracing Richard Nixon’s maxim, When the president does it, it’s not illegal. In Germany that used to be known as the Führer Principle. Many of us naively thought it was repudiated at the Nuremberg trials after World War II. How wrong we were. The stain that Bush and Obama have left on America won’t fade anytime soon.

It would have been bad enough to torture people actually suspected of wrongdoing, but the Bush administration went well beyond that. Many people subjected to hideous treatment were picked up on the flimsiest of “evidence.” People were offered bounties to turn others in; naturally, some saw that as a chance to settle old scores having nothing to do with terrorism. Absence of evidence (as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say) was not considered evidence of absence. In at least one case, a man was tortured — by the U.S. government’s helper in Egypt, Omar Suleiman — to get the prisoner to say that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda agents. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney badly wanted to justify their preexisting wish to effect regime change in Iraq by tying Saddam to 9/11. But there was never any evidence of Iraqi complicity.

That reminds us that torture was not the only crime committed by the Bush administration. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were also (and still are) outrages because, among other reasons, they were based on lies. Bush officials, such as Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, now acknowledge “misstatements,” but that can hardly be taken seriously. We know that back then grave doubts were expressed over the quality of the so-called intelligence about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld’s excuses are pathetic. When he beat the drums for war, he said he knew where Saddam’s WMDs were. Now he says he meant he knew the location of “suspected sites.” Did he step out of Orwell’s 1984?

As many people long have believed, the Bush administration’s defector/informants were lying, but their American handlers didn’t care. The one known as Curvevball, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, admits he lied about Iraq’s biological weapons. “I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that….” Janabi said, according to the Guardian.

Is he proud of the million Iraqis who died, directly and indirectly, because of the war he helped bring about? How about all the maimed children? Are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Condoleezza Rice satisfied that they relied on Janabi? Did they really have no reason for skepticism about his claims and motives?

Americans are forced to spend billions of dollars on intelligence-gathering every year. Yet many insiders doubted what the administration was told about Iraqi WMDs in 2002. So what? Bush & Co., hell bent on killing Arabs after 9/11, weren’t interested in evidence or the lack thereof. They needed a way to scare the American people into war, and nothing was going to stop them.

Let us hope the retribution against this evil bunch is only just beginning.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association” at www.sheldonrichman.com. Send him email.

Can’t see the wood for the trees

by The Devil

Can’t see the wood for the trees It seems that—as they did over the piss-poor Book Trust—the Coalition are about to show just how easily a collection of ball-less, dickless government ministers can be brow-beaten by a bunch of pious, holier-than-thou, rent-seeking lunatics.

Ministers are preparing to ditch controversial plans to sell thousands of acres of state-owned woodland in England, the BBC understands.

Which just goes to show how the flexible the Coalition’s convictions are. Let us contrast their lack of action over the forests with the decisive measures taken by the New Zealand Labour government of 1984 (and you are going to hear a lot about this because the parallels are excellent)—as recounted by ex-NZ-minister Maurice P McTigue in his 2004 lecture to Hillsdale College. [Emphasis mine, on the grounds of
relevance.]

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

I do recommend reading the entire speech—several times. I wish Cameron would.

But the paragraphs immediately following the one above are very much worth highlighting, especially in view of the fact that the Tories are aiming, in five years, only to reduce the deficit to zero—not actually to pay off any debt.

Some of the things that government was doing simply didn’t belong in the government. So we sold off telecommunications, airlines, irrigation schemes, computing services, government printing offices, insurance companies, banks, securities, mortgages, railways, bus services, hotels, shipping lines, agricultural advisory services, etc. In the main, when we sold those things off, their productivity went up and the cost of their services went down, translating into major gains for the economy. Furthermore, we decided that other agencies should be run as profit-making and tax-paying enterprises by government. For instance, the air traffic control system was made into a stand-alone company, given instructions that it had to make an acceptable rate of return and pay taxes, and told that it couldn’t get any investment capital from its owner (the government). We did that with about 35 agencies. Together, these used to cost us about one billion dollars per year; now they produced about one billion dollars per year in revenues and taxes.

We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees. The government’s share of GDP dropped from 44 to 27 percent. We were now running surpluses, and we established a policy never to leave dollars on the table: We knew that if we didn’t get rid of this money, some clown would spend it. So we used most of the surplus to pay off debt, and debt went from 63 percent down to 17 percent of GDP. We used the remainder of the surplus each year for tax relief. We reduced income tax rates by half and eliminated incidental taxes. As a result of these policies, revenue increased by 20 percent. Yes, Ronald Reagan was right: lower tax rates do produce more revenue.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—this is the way that you produce better services and reduce both taxes and debt.

Stuff you and your Big Society, Dave: try showing us that you can take some responsibility for what needs to be done, and maybe we’ll have a go at it too.

_The Churchill Memorandum_, by Sean Gabb, by Reviewed by L. Neil Smith

_The Churchill Memorandum_, by Sean Gabb, by Reviewed by L. Neil Smith.

The first review of a book that, even unread, has driven several people to the edge of madness, and one or two somewhat beyond. I am particularly flattered that the review is by the greatest living libertarian novelist – even Mr Blake gives way to L. Neil Smith!

The Churchill Memorandum, by Sean Gabb
by Reviewed by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attiribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Let me begin this with a disclaimer: Sean Gabb, the author of The Churchill Memorandum is a friend of mine. Author, lecturer, TV and radio personality, Sean is what used to be called a “man of parts”, intelligent, principled, and tough. Through perspicacity and dogged determination, he has become the face and voice of libertarianism in Britain.

He is also more than a fair hand at fiction, having created the most interestingly offbeat hero I’ve seen in a novel in a long time, groping his way through a highly-textured and devilishly complicated world of spies versus counterspies in a 1959 shaped mostly by the fact that Adolf Hitler expired before he had a chance to set the world on fire, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

World War II never happens. Britain reverts to a metallic monetary standard, minimal government, and low taxes (followed by Germany) and she grows wealthy and healthy both as a nation and as a people in the process. Pearl Harbor is attacked, and the United States loses Hawaii and the Philippines to Japan, although Britain defends America’s west coast.

What follows is a positively Hitchcockian story that will remind the reader, by turns, of The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Winston Churchill, in this branch of history is a drunk who died in relative obscurity, leaving his private papers to Harvard University. Anthony Markham is an historian working on the second volume of the old boy’s biography at the behest of his family.

The opening chapters are thrilling, as the biographer is trying to get through security and out of a thoroughly fascistic United States, ruthlessly controlled by the dictator, President Harry Anslinger (with the enthusiastic help of subcreatures like Richard Nixon). Look him up: in our corner of probability, it’s arguable that, of all political figures in the 20th century, Anslinger may be more responsible than any other for transforming America into the police state it has become today.

What Markham doesn’t know—yet—is that, among Churchill’s many papers is a document that may have an explosive effect on the balance of power in 1959, and the relations between Britain, Germany, and America, and that there is no safety for him back at home in England. He becomes the pawn and target for differing groups who want to use him and the Churchill papers for all sorts of different purposes.

The novel is so tightly-knit that it’s hard to say anything about it without giving too much away. Sean writes in a manner that has you smelling the surroundings (not always a pleasant experience) and feeling the grit of asphalt and concrete under your feet. “Noirer than noir” might be an accurate description, but somehow, it’s never depressing.

The novel as a whole is agreeably full of sound and fury, but there is a particularly splendid action scene on a train. Thanks to Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and Harry Potter, Americans are familiar with British trains, and that familiarity comes through even when the train in question happens to be bulleting along at 300 miles per hour, levitating above magnetic rails. It made me realize that a struggle on the railways is the British equivalent of an American car chase.

A couple of words to American readers. Sean has chosen to present the details of 1959 to us the way it really was—or would have been, and that includes the language. Words and phrases that are politically incorrect were a part of common conversation sixty years ago, and even today, in my own experience, are uttered more often in Britain than America.

In addition to Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon (also Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, and Nathaniel Branden), Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayeck also figure—a bit shockingly—in the action. I absolutely love stories like this, which is why I write them, myself. And there are many other characters who will mean more to Sean’s countrymen, people like Enoch Powell, Harold MacMillan, Michael Foot, and Lord Halifax. It can’t hurt, as you accompany Markham on his adventures, to keep Wikipedia open at your side. Sean is a great teacher, and this book has a lot to teach us in his painless and often extremely funny way.

Buy it, read it, tell your friends. I guess it’s my privilege to welcome Sean into the ranks of sideways time travel writers the way that Robert Heinlein once welcomed me. The genre is richer for his presence.
The Churchill Memorandum by Sean Gabb is available in both paperback and Kindle format at Amazon.com. Buy it by clicking on [this link]

Another one bites the gold-dust of rich exile

Michael Winning

I see that the fascist bloke Gaddaffi, he of the faux desertrobes and warlord gear, has got a little local difficulty. Literally. Methinks his son wanted to succeed hium like that fellow in Cuba and the other one in Morth Korea.

One just hopes for these poor downtrodden masses that their trying to get out from under “The Fathers of Their People” will get them what they want. I has me-doubts somehow. They stiull suffer under a thing that calls iteself a religion but really needs to be dissected and proper-lylly de-bunkum-ised, so its fit for human consumption. Perhaps they need to read some Roger Scruton stuff about how law and secular custom can’t be separated from religion in Muslim lands. Read some of that myself after 9/11 I did. It seems to make them accept the most improbable temporal warlords with such meekness, it’s scary.

Romans 13: Ordained by Sin, Ordered by Love

By Ricardo Rodriguez and Brennan Lester
http://c4ss.org/?p=6165

By Ricardo Rodriguez and Brennan Lester

There it began – the Roman Emperor Theodosius I signed the decree, and all of Rome was coerced into Christianity. Ever since then, as economist Ludwig von Mises notes very well, Christianity has never been able to put down the sword on a large scale.[1] For politics eats away at a man – the politicization of something profoundly changes a man and his ideologies. Politics has changed Christendom as well – deeply and profoundly – and the end result is contradictions, as well as complete alienation. Romans 13, history shows, has been a central tenet of this politicization much like the tribute episode that was treated last time. Romans 13, however, by being interpreted with the intent of supporting the State, or seeing Christianity as supporting the State, lends itself as such to contradictions, alienation, misinterpretation, and most definitely mistranslation.

One should keep in mind how crucial this text is for the Christian anarchist – one cannot escape discussion of its contents when talking about anything involving Christian anarchism. Further, the anarchist movement is not very fond of it, and for very good reasons – it has been used for the Divine Right of Kings,[2] as well as the Christian Right for justifying government.[3] Monarch King James I called on its authority when he wrote in Chapter 20 of his Works (1609) that “[t]he state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called ‘gods.’” Similarly, and more recently, US evangelical John MacArthur wrote that the principle of subjugation to governing authorities is “unqualified, unlimited, and unconditional… [t]he text makes no distinction between good rulers and bad rulers, or fair laws and unfair laws”: all the same “[e]very one of us should get in line to submit to those who are commanding us”[4]. It is not a pretty sight – the anarchist movement is very well justified in being naturally alienated away from really existing Christianity as a result. However, this alienation is not at all substantiated by the actual facts, and much to the movement’s detriment, as will be explained in detail before the end of our analysis.

This interpretation created great hostility for Christianity in most anarchist circles throughout history, regarding the State and religion as one beast— that one cannot have church without state, that both are part of the same enslaving principle— perhaps most famously expressed by Mikhail Bakunin when he wrote, “[t]here is not, there cannot be, a State without a religion”[5], that under Christianity, “all men owe [the
"legislators inspired by God himself"] passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason… Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church” (emphasis Bakunin’s) — “his existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him,” [6] and as such offered the now infamous inversion, “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”[7] This opinion has been widely adopted by anarchists of most stripes, such as Benjamin Tucker, who translated Bakunin’s God and the State for English audiences and the criticism of religion by egoist Max Stirner. [8]

Not only has it enraged atheists, but it has also caused scorn among Christian anarchists; most notably Leo Tolstoy, in his 1882 work “Church and State,” who asserts that Christianity “excludes the external worship of God [rulers and
statesmanship]” and “positively repudiates mastership” but says that the link between the State and Christianity is a deviation and that “[t]his deviation begins from the times of the Apostles and especially from that hankerer after mastership Paul.”[9] This criticism is also echoed by figure of great significance to anarchist and modernist thought, though not an anarchist himself, Friedrich Nietzsche in The Antichrist who criticized the Apostles, and namely Paul, for falsifying the history of Christianity, Israel, and mankind for his purposes.[10] But this is all due to a lack of proper understanding, both the rejection of Christianity itself and the rejection of Paul’s message in the book of Romans by the anarchists is of detriment to a fuller understanding of Scripture, an understanding that this paper will assert comes to the aid of anarcho-pacifism, and rejects the notion of allegiance to a State ostensibly ordained by God.

What we intend in doing, then, is to take the Greek text of the verses, and begin translating and giving analysis of the passage.[11] We do not intend to critique other interpretations per se, as literature exists or will exist that does this better than we can. (see the “Further Reading” section) Rather, our intent is to show a historical-grammatical interpretation of the text – that in which necessarily ends at a position of Christian anarcho-pacifism – and attempts to to a conclusion immense both in its strength as well as its general cohesion. A theological analysis of a text is never perfect, but we do intend it to be strong enough to persuade another to get rid of their views that to be Christian must necessarily mean to support a State ordained by God.

One must start by making clear a few things. Romans 13 – as far as one can tell – was not written with any type of Stoic use in mind.[12] There is no exact metaphorical or allegorical way of looking about this text. In fact, some scholars consider Romans chapters 12-15 to be the “imperative” part of the book, as one can see by historical-grammatical analysis what Paul writes to the Christians.[13] Not only that, but this entire section of the book of Romans is written in such a manner that it is cohesive,[14] with each verse bound inextricably with the other; as a letter to Roman Christians, no fragment should be overlooked in analysis.[15]

It is therefore first important for us to notice Paul’s reiteration of Christ’s teachings of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt, 5:38-9, NIV) at the end of chapter 12: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21) To review the contents of Romans 13 without understanding Romans 12 is to strip away the context of the lessons preached— for at the heart of Romans 12 is the divine idea that the Christian must love one’s neighbor as one’s self, and to not resist evil with evil. It is not to love those you prefer to love but to even “[b]less those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.” (Romans 12:14) Those principles are the very foundation of Christ’s teachings, Christian pacifism, and Paul’s philosophy.

And that leads us to Romans 13:1 (NIV), a line that seals the deal for most in favor of statism: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” It appears to be a dead end for the Christian— thus we must bow to the State. But this is not what it seems, as shown by John Howard Yoder’s treatment of the passage in his stellar The Politics of Jesus. To start, it is wise to view the text in its Greek form and work from there:

Πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω. οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν:

One of the words one must concentrate on, even if one can’t read it, is τεταγμέναι, which is normally translated as “ordained” or “established” in the King James and New International Version. In actuality, the word is a perfect passive participle of the word τάσσω, which one can conclude means to “order”, to “arrange”, or to “put into place” more so than it is translated as “establish”, or “ordained”. This changes the underlying implication, for as we go back to Chapter 12, one reads:

“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.” ~ Romans 12:19

One can begin to see a point to what Paul is exemplifying – submit because God arranges and fixes all, because for a Christian, God is ultimately in control. One reads in Yoder:

“God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignty to tell them where they belong, what is their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed. Nor is it that by ordering this realm God specifically, morally approves of what a government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills; the librarian does not create nor approve of the book she or he catalogs and shelves. Likewise God does not take responsibility for the existence of the rebellious ‘powers that be’ or for their shape or identity; they already are. What the text says is that God orders them, brings them into line, providentially and permissively lines them up with divine purposes.” [16]

One can see Yoder’s point verified in 1 Samuel 8, which is the first time a government is truly mentioned in the Bible, as well as Hosea 8:4.

However, let us go back to the Greek analysis of Romans 13:1 – we are not quite finished examining the vocabulary, as there are some more crucial things we must keep in mind: ὑποτασσέσθω in particular also comes from τάσσω, but combined also with the word ὑπο, which means “under”, which then leads itself to mean to be “ordered under”, in a sense of voluntary submission – rather than the common dogma of being told to do it because it is a commandment. This harks back a few sentences in the text to the text of Romans 12. This does not give any implication of an absolute obedience – rather a very conditional, voluntary obedience.

This obedience is fleshed out in the word ἐξουσίαι, which is translated as “authorities”. N.T. Wright and Clinton Morrison both point out profoundly that the authorities in which Paul mentions is not a clear distinction between earthly and heavenly.[17] This does not simply account for Paul, but one can see the pervasive nature in even Roman currency, where the denarius stated, “Tiberius Caesar, Worshipful Son of the God, Augustus.”[18] This incredible mix makes it a confounding word to translate. Further, more specific words like ἀρχαὶ and δυνάμεις – “rulers” and “powers” respectively – can indicate one half behind the meaning of the word ἐξουσίαι, and should be examined carefully.

One sees these rulers and powers in Romans 8:38-39, showing profound contempt for them. In this vein, Paul writes that Christ has “disarmed the rulers and authorities (ἀρχὰς and ἐξουσίας) and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.”(Colossians 2:15) Paul never stops to show that nothing stands between the Christian and God [19] – the authorities are disarmed and rendered useless. This voluntary submission proves itself to be a profound expansion of what Paul wrote after – with the submission of authorities occurring due to the fact that God puts them in their place, that Jesus has disarmed and rendered the authorities ineffectual, that one should save revenge for God, and resist evil not with evil: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)

This line of thought does not lose its strength as one goes along, but rather continues to develop in Romans 13:2, which reads in the NIV:

“Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”

And in the Greek:

ὥστε ὁ ἀντιτασσόμενος τῇ ἐξουσίᾳ τῇ τοῦ θεοῦ διαταγῇ ἀνθέστηκεν, οἱ δὲ ἀνθεστηκότες ἑαυτοῖς κρίμα λήμψονται.

The word mentioned earlier which means “order”, “put into place”, “arrange”, etc. – τάσσω – is in this verse as well. The word τάσσω is a very crucial part of this entire passage, as one can tell – further, it is used here in the word ἀντιτασσόμενος, which combines both τάσσω and the participle ἀντι, which is connotative to “anti” thus leading to a combination which means literally to be “against order”, or to be against the order established by God.

One should be able to see the obvious at this point – this too harks back to what Paul was saying just before hand. Everything is falling into place – a Christian is in fact a person who should believe that revenge is God’s alone, and to not put anything into one’s own hands. A Christian must be pacifistic towards authorities. The question begs, however, if this voluntary submission is contingent to also allowing them to reign and submitting to whoever comes by with a big gun.

It is simple: Resist evil not with evil means exactly what Jesus meant for it to say. It does not mean that one should not resist evil at all, as Adin Ballou points out wonderfully,[20] but to resist evil with good – with Christian love. Paul explains this heavily in Romans 12 – but what does this entail per se? It entails turning away from evil, and to love one’s enemies and pray for them. Early Christianity is known for martyrs that never fought back, but certainly many were running, fleeing, while preaching, praying, and loving.[21] This is what it means to resist evil not with evil – very much so must a Christian turn away from what the Bible teaches as evil,[22] and to pursue one’s faith in God. One must not forget that last part, for as Acts 5:29 states: “Peter and the other apostles replied: ‘We must obey God rather than human beings!’ (NIV)

One need not harken back to the Greek to see that again and again is the topic of resistance to evil through evil means addressed by Paul. This point of resisting evil with evil is further exemplified in the translation, for the NIV reads in verses 3-5:

“3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.

4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.”

So it is here that the contents of the first two verses become intertwined: Resist evil not with evil, but instead let God have revenge, for it is His to take; and He will take it “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52) . It also connects itself to many things, especially the idea that a soft answer turns away wrath (Proverbs 15:1), along with many other verses showing that love stops evil. There is a profound idea here that Paul is showing, and it is to resist evil not with evil, which will set one free.

Additionally, verse four says essentially to do right and not transgress Jesus’ teaching, for they do not wear their swords without a cause ( εἰκῇ is the word that is translated to “no reason”, though one could have a stronger wording with “without a cause”). Another mistranslation is in verse 4 – “They are God’s servants”, in which the word servant (διάκονος), is actually singular. It is more or less translated to “He is God’s servant”, with the word “rulers” not even being in the Greek text for verse four. Further, the fourth verse does not mention rulers, but rather making it clear that whoever does have a sword is under God’s control and arrangement (vengeance and all), and that transgressing resist evil not with evil will carry consequences.

The fifth verse then seals the lid on this interpretation, showing why we should voluntarily submit to authorities – possible punishment, but also conscience for not letting God handle the situation. One should turn away from evil, but do so in love, for it is God’s commandment.

One is not left with clean air after this, however, for one has one more obstacle to overcome before having a completely clear understanding of the text – that is, Romans 13:6. However, this obstruction shows itself to be illusory when subjected to closer analysis, where a massive mistranslation befuddles what is the true expression of the text.

It reads in the NIV:

“This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.”

However, one reads in the Greek:

διὰ τοῦτο γὰρ καὶ φόρους τελεῖτε, λειτουργοὶ γὰρ θεοῦ εἰσιν εἰς αὐτὸ τοῦτο προσκαρτεροῦντες.

One should see two things missing here: “authorities”, and “governing”. The former is translated from λειτουργοὶ, however this has nothing to do with authorities. Rather, this has everything to do with a minister, a priest, or a servant – nothing of authoritative power. “Governing”, on the other hand, seems to come from εἰς αὐτὸ τοῦτο, which translates to “with this very thing”, while “προσκαρτεροῦντες” translates to “adhere to”.

The icing on the cake is that this passage turns into, “For this is why you pay taxes, because God’s priests (or ministers or servants) adhere to this very thing.” For supplementary proof of this translation of “εἰς αὐτὸ τοῦτο” without any Greek grammatical explanations, one can cross-reference with 2 Corinthians 2:3, Philippians 1:6, and 2 Corinthians 5:5 – all of which uses “τοῦτο αὐτὸ”, “εἰς αὐτὸ τοῦτο”, or plain “αὐτὸ τοῦτο”, but it also translates to “this very thing”.

It is clear that this passage cannot be a pro-taxation statement. Even if one were to take the translation as it is, one would find major historical inaccuracy considering the amount of resources showing that taxes did not go to governing in the Roman Empire. Rather, it should be a known fact that the taxes went to military expansion before concentration on governing [23]— to recall the advice Emperor Septimius Severus gave to his heirs, “live in harmony; enrich the troops; ignore everyone else.”[24] As early as Nero did emperors debase the currency in order to fund the increasing costs of military and bureaucracy.[25] This indirect tax on cash balances became worse and worse under succeeding emperors Aurelius, with prices higher than ever before in the Empire’s history when Severus’s heir, Carcacalla took over.[26] The Roman Empire would periodically confiscate property, and towns would be forced to feed, lodge, and provide transport for the troops— the soldiers were even allowed to loot as they pleased.[27]

To give solidify the interpretation of 13:1-6, one should look at the concluding verse right after the passages – “Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor”. This drives the point home– to voluntarily submit and to resist evil not with evil. Give to everyone their due – which is in the end is summed up in the Golden Rule of loving one’s neighbor as yourself. It is clear that in the book of Romans, Paul is outlining how the pious Christian is to deal with those who it is hardest to love: the corrupt, violent, and degenerate “authorities” who make up the State, they are a test of the Christian’s obedience to God’s command of universal love.

If anarchism alienates itself away from religion – never accepting its existence, but always wanting it to push it away, then there is no reason to be an anarchist. A political ideology that pushes away over 3 billion people in the world should not be a political ideology worth having. The ideas that anarchism must be absolutely contingent with any type of personal conviction – whether irreligious or religious – is one in vain. Anarchism is about the factual order of human beings and understanding how human beings order naturally. For as David Hume said, “… the stability of possession, its translation by consent, and the performance of promises. These are, therefore, antecedent to government.”[28] One must not forget that anarchism is about the natural order of human society – to say religion is not a part of human society would be horribly ignorant of thousands of years of civilization. To say religion naturally does harm to a society is equally ignorant – for history shows profoundly that it was never religion that has caused the problems, as much as it was the political power absorbing religion. Theodisius I is just one example of many, along with well thought out arguments for as to how Christianity’s desperate need to seek political power hurts the church more than anything. [29]

Christianity necessarily goes in line with anarchism; Christianity necessarily is anarchism. It is a form of anarcho-pacifism – it submits to pacify, but resists in love, compassion, and with deep religious introspection. It shows that there is no genuine authority but God, and everything is under God’s control – wrath and revenge is His, not the Christian’s. Anarchists should welcome the chance to connect Christianity with anarchism, or any religion for that matter, as it pushes forward the importance of peace and the fundamental understanding of the benefits felt from cooperation, as opposed to the parasitism of the State. To ignorantly toss away an entire group of people is to defeat the purpose of spreading information. With love, respect, and keen understanding can anarchists truly spread the basis of anarchism. Fear of confronting religion only leads to fear in accepting anarchist ideology, and a bitter rejection of what is held dear to many of “the people” is to insulate the movement of the people with intellectual dogmatism.

In desperation to conform to society’s ways of thinking, many Christians – whose main objective should be to obtain salvation – desperately cling onto the State. With amazing leaps of apologetics, many Christians will attempt to justify the State through the use of Scripture, no matter what the costs of doing so may be. The deaths of millions upon millions of innocent people in history matters not – one will still assume the State does not directly attempt to hinder their relationship with God. The desperate attempt to use the sword to express Christianity is in vain – in the end, it will push people out of faith completely. If one must love Christ, one must abandon the sword, and by abandoning the sword, they must abandon their allegiance with any State, whose origins start by forcing others into fear and submission to a singular human will; the State elevates its law above all else, its supremacy over the land it possesses lays claim to a totality over the spirit that could only be rightfully claimed by God— and no Christian can preach fidelity to a force such as that. By breaking down Romans 13 into a passage of resisting evil with Christian love, the Christian should reflect on who their allegiance truly belongs to. The question then remains: Does the Christian tacitly give more allegiance to the temporal State, or allegiance to their faith in an eternal God? The former asks for allegiance until death, and the latter asks for all your heart, mind, and body, and condemns the idea of being lukewarm. The choice is for the Christian – choose wisely.

Further Reading:
Stark, Thom. Peace and Security: Two Rival Gospels in Romans 13 (A History of Interpretation and Critical Appropriation). Pickwick Publications, forthcoming.

Citations:

[1] Mises, Ludwig Von. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007. 43. Print.
[2] One can see some defense in this in Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.
[3] An interesting sermon indicating that “Christians have a holy obligation to be the best citizens we can possibly be”: “God and Country Sermon, God and Country Sermon by Brian La Croix, Romans 13:1-13:5 – SermonCentral.com.” SermonCentral.com – Free Sermons, Illustrations, Videos, and PowerPoints for Preaching. Web. 06 Feb. 2011.
[4] MacArthur, John. “The Christian’s Responsibility to Government—Part 1 — John MacArthur.” Bible Bulletin Board. Web. 09 Feb. 2011.
[5] Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. God and the State. [S.l.]: Cosimo, 2008. 84. Print.
[6] Ibid., pg. 24.
[7] Ibid., pg 27-8.
[8] Tucker, Benjamin R. “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ.” Instead of a Book by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism. Adamant Media Corporation, 2005. 14. Print.
See also Stirner, Max. The Ego and its Own.
[9] Tolstoy, Leo. “Church and State.” Wikisource, the Free Library. Web. 31 Jan. 2011.
[10] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. Tr. R.J. Hollingdale. pg. 165-169 for a brief overlook, though Paul is mentioned many more times.
[11] One can join in and follow: http://www.greekbible.com/ offers a very well done Greek Bible, at the same http://biblelexicon.org/ is a strong lexicon. However, as Ricardo did when writing the Scriptural analysis, it is best to buy an authoritative lexicon, along with Google searching continually and cross-referencing. Immense scrutiny and thought should be applied at all times.
[12] There is a lot of back and forth thoughts on how much (or if at all) Stoicism is used in Paul’s writings, but there is hardly anything at all giving evidence that Paul used it for Romans 13. One can see this in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, where authors Steven K. Strange and Jack Zupko try to use Stoicism in the core of Paul’s teaching, but give no reference to Romans 13 using Stoic terms. Further, there is a strong rebuttal on the notion that Paul used Stoic language at all by Joseph Spencer called “Stoic Influence in the Writings of Saint Paul”. In James Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, he writes that “[Paul's] views of the divine birth of Jesus, and of His resurrection…are unintelligible except in terms of Stoicism”, bur give no reference to the notion that Paul’s political views should be viewed in such a way.
[13] Thorsteinsson, Runar M. Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: a Comparative Study of Ancient Morality. Oxford [u.a.: Oxford UP, 2010. 92. Print.
[14] One should not forget that verses and chapters were not in the original manuscripts of the Bible, and was developed after. There are many different ministries that offer an overlook of this development, for example Rowland Croucher’s “Chapters and Verses in the Bible”.
[15] Bear in mind our scrutiny of the verses stops at 13:7, however, and that one can give analysis later in the chapter. Thom Stark wonderfully points out in The Human Faces of God, pg. 201-202, that Romans 13 also had much to do with the eschatological viewpoints Paul had, which is shown later in the chapter.
[16] Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus; Vicit Agnus Noster. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972. 203. Print.
[17] See N.T. Wright’s “Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans”, along with Clinton Morrison’s The Powers That Be.
[18] Tolstoy, Leo, and Constance Garnett. The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006. 11-14. Print.
[19] Smith, Mahlon H. “Tiberius.” Virtual Religion Network. Web. 31 Jan. 2011.
[20] Romans 8:38-39
[21] Balasundaram, Franklyn J. Martyrs in the History of Christianity. New Delhi: Publ. for The United Theological College, Bangalore by ISPCK, 1997. Print.
[22] 1 Peter 3:11, Psalm 34:14, Psalm 37:27-29, Proverbs 3:7, Zechariah 1:4 to name a few passages.
[23] Bartlett, Bruce. “How Excessive Government Killed Rome”. The Cato Journal, Volume 14 Number 2, Fall 1994.
[24] Peden, Joseph R. “Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire.” Ludwig Von Mises Institute. 7 Sept. 2009. Web. 31 Jan. 2011.
[25] Bailey, M.J. “The Welfare Cost of Inflationary Finance.” Journal of Political Economy 64(2): 93-110.
[26] Schuettinger, Robert Lindsay, and Eamonn Butler. “The Roman Republic and Empire.” Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1979. 19-20. Print.
[27] Haskell, H.J. The New Deal in Old Rome: How Government in the Ancient World Tried to Deal with Modern Problems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939. 216. Print.
[28] Hume, David. “Book III.” A Treatise of Human Nature. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2005. Print.
[29] Boyd, Gregory A. The Myth of a Christian Nation How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church. Grand Rapids (Michigan): Zondervan, 2005. Print.

The right to bare arms

Michael Winning

That got you! My cracked arm is improving so I’ll find something caustic to say about David Cameron, probably tomaorrowwhen I have gone out and about the land, not done for a few days.

Sean Gabb on LBC re Ticket Touts

Are ticket touts immoral? asked Iain Dale on LBC Radio on the 17th February 2011.

No, said Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. He said a man’s right to resell at one price what he has bought at another should not be banned or regulated. Even when a ticket carries a stipulation against resale, that is a matter for the civil courts, not the police. He added that the main difference between a ticket tout and City bankers is that when the former buys tickets he can’t resell, he doesn’t go sobbing to the Government and get the national debt tripled to cover his losses!

Listen here: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2011-02-17-sig-tout.mp3

“Shared Value” and State Capitalism

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=6158

On Tuesday, NPR’s On Point assembled former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness to discuss Porter’s new article, “Creating Shared Value.” The article (Harvard Business Review’s January-February feature), recommends that we “reinvent capitalism,” elegiacally explaining that “[t]he capitalist system is under siege,” and that “diminished trust in business” is a thing to be feared.

The central thesis of Porter and his co-author Mark R. Kramer is that business and society ought to be brought together, toppling the outmoded dichotomy between the bottom line and social responsibility. That project, with its gloss of “shared value,” seems a lot like something market anarchists could get on board with. Underneath its appeals to “meeting human needs,” however, Porter and Kramer are concerned much more with recapturing the values of some apparently not-so-distant past where Big Business was looked on as a neighborly paragon of virtue.

That such a past never existed anywhere but the Madison Ave. reveries of Big Business is of no real concern. Anyway, all of the talk about the “intersection between” society and business is promptly drowned out by the authors’ concessions to violent statism and their conflation (perhaps the most common of all) of the state and civil society. Focusing on “the right kind” of government interference with the market, the article supposes that such interference should address itself to apparently “precompetitive issues,” convinced that a lack of an appropriate regulatory substructure leads to crisis.

Though the substance of the article acknowledges that the state’s regulations impose arbitrary costs, invariably fail to achieve their putative goals, and actually obstruct “measurable social improvement,” the authors nevertheless fall into the doctrinaire reassurance: “Oh, don’t get us wrong! We still recognize the need for state involvement!”

The notion that some areas of business practice are supposedly outside of the realm of competition — and that the state is capable of neutrally defining those areas — is fanciful enough, but Porter and Kramer don’t stop there. No, on On Point, Porter supplicated government, seen of course as benign but bumbling, to “learn” how to tailor its regulations; he maintained that Big Business, which he sees as rallying for competition, just wants to be left alone to create shared value.

In response to the latter claim, Robert Reich stepped in to bring Porter back to earth, noting that “we have a regulatory state that is largely the product of Big Business lobbying.” In spite of that observation, the implications of which are obviously lost on him, Reich blamed too much competition for capital — a condition apparently brought about by globalization — for the present standard of corporate malfeasance.

When Porter agreed with that tenuous inference, he and Reich patted each other on the back for “getting it,” and seeing that naturally there must be a — you guessed it — new law to keep shareholders from jumping around from company to company (i.e., to keep them invested in the established economy).

For all of its predictable paeans to the state’s prying into our lives and our exchanges, Porter and Kramer offer something of a spotty account of how “re-localization” and internalization of corporate costs could transform our ideas about business. Without genuflecting to the myth that the state and Big Business are mortal enemies, they might have been onto something.

The nugget of truth is that “[b]usiness and society have been pitted against each other for too long,” but business wants it that way; entrenched corporations undeniably won’t be willing “to take the lead” to bring the two together. The state-corporate system is designed to make sure that true freedom and voluntary association are never the governing norm for society, but that is exactly the goal of the free market left.

“[T]he idea of anarchy,” taught Proudhon, “is quite as rational and concrete as any other. What it means is that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that the social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges.” If we’re worried, as Porter says he is, about “capitalism in a bubble,” then we might tear away at the insulation the state’s has put up around capitalism. That way we might begin to see what kind of social order true free exchange is capable of creating.

In Egypt, as Everywhere, Anarchy is Order

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=6147

In press commentary on the recent events in Egypt, there were frequent expressions of concern that Egypt might be falling into “anarchy.” “Anarchy,” in conventional journalistic usage, means chaos, disorder, and bloodshed — a Hobbesian war of all against all — that occurs when the stabilizing hand of government is removed. “Anarchy” is the agenda of mobs of kids in black circle-A t-shirts, smashing windows and setting stuff on fire.

But “anarchy,” as the term is understood by anarchists, is a form of society in which the state is replaced by the management of all human affairs through voluntary associations. Paul Goodman argued that it was impossible, through violence, to impose an anarchistic order on society, or to achieve a free society by replacing an old order with a new one. Rather, a free society results from “the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.” Or to quote Gustav Landauer: “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.”

And we saw a great deal of anarchy in Egypt in recent days, in that sense. The people of Egypt have made a great start towards extending the spheres of free action, contracting new kinds of relationships between human beings, and creating the institutional basis of a real community.

Despite the poice state’s attempts to promote religious dissension and divide the opposition, Coptic Christians have stood watch over Muslims during their daily times of prayer. Muslims, likewise, guarded the perimeter of Liberation Square during a Coptic mass.

The resistance organized patrols to safeguard shops and museums from looting, and to watch over neighborhoods from which the security forces had been withdrawn. Meanwhile, as it turned out, most of the actions of violence and looting were false flag operations, carried out by security forces posing as protestors. So the functionaries of the state were the actual sources of violence and disorder; law and order emerged from anarchy — that is, from voluntary association.

The interim leader, Vice President Omar Suleiman — the object of so much hope on the part of neoconservative partisans of “stability” and “order” — is a torturer and a collaborator with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. Never forget: For every dubious example of an alleged “bomb-throwing anarchist,” like those at Haymarket, there are a million bombs thrown by governments. For every innocent person harmed by an alleged anarchist in a rioting mob, there are a thousand people tortured or murdered in some police dungeon, or ten thousand slaughtered by death squads in the countryside. For every store window broken by demonstrators, there are untold thousands of peasants robbed of their land in evictions and enclosures by feudal elites.

The people of Egypt have managed to throw out one tyrant. Now they find themselves under a military dictatorship which may or may not wind up reducing the level of tyranny. But if the Egyptian people find the new boss as oppressive as the old one, says Molinari Institute President Roderick Long, they know how to get rid of him.

If there is any real hope for the future, in the long run, it is in the anarchy that the people have built for themselves on the streets. There’s an old phrase that’s popular among the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World: “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” The Egyptian people have made a fair start toward doing just that. May the seeds of anarchy which were planted in the recent uprising continue to germinate and grow.

The Equitable Life shakedown

djw

This is a short message on the subject of the Equitable Life compensation affair.

I think there probably is such a thing as misselling of investments, for example, where grossly misleading claims are made. But such claims would need to be barefaced and wholly out of kilter with any sense of reality. Were an investment adviser to advise you a fund was likely to rise in value by a factor of ten in a year, that would certainly constitute misselling. If he were to advise you it would rise by 30%, and it in fact fell by 20%, that would be within the normal range of risk of investments.

However, even in cases where outrageous claims about investments are made by advisers, the priniciple of caveat emptor comes into play. Would a reasonable person believe that a fund might rise in value by a factor of ten in one year? Unless it could be shown a reasonable person would believe outrageous claims, even blatant “misselling” of this kind ought not to give rise to a legal action.

I am fed up of hearing Equitable Life investors claim they believed their investment could only go up. No reasonable person could think an investment could ever be “a dead cert”.

I would like all compensation claims with respect to Equitable Life to be cancelled. In future, such attempted shakedowns (whether of a company or the state) should be considered as attempted fraud and the investors prosecuted. People have to take responsibility for themselves. Their investments fell in value, but such is life–they have no reasonable claim against the company or the state. To read that HM Treasury is to pay £1.5bn out of general taxation to the investors is intolerable–don’t they realise the country is already indebted?

More Concerning Lord Monson

by Nigel Meek

It was only first thing this morning that I found out from our chairman, Michael Plumbe, that the Society for Individual Freedom’s (http://www.individualist.org.uk) president, Lord Monson, died a few days ago after a fall at his home (http://tinyurl.com/6dn5txc).

I’m not part of the SIF’s old guard who can still trace their membership back to the 1970s or even the 1960s, so there was a marked background and generation gap between us.  In all my years as a senior officer of the SIF, I can only recall one direct conversation with him.  We’d finished an SIF management meeting at the Westminster Arms in London when he approached me and started talking.  He was so quiet and diffident that it took me a while to realise that he was actually talking to me!  Bizarrely, it was about the postcode system in London.

Nevertheless, in my brief acquaintanceship I found him engaging.  Despite being a product of the suburban bourgeoisie, I found it a little endearing that the SIF contained a lingering measure of feudal deference.  Whereas for everyone else it was “Nigel this” or “Mike that”, it was always “Lord Monson”!

As the editor of the SIF’s journal, The Individual, I’ll try to collect for the next issue a few reminiscences from senior members who knew him better that I did.  Any recipients of this email who have something that they’d like to contribute, please get in touch with me.

In the meantime, my sympathies are with his family.

Dr Nigel Meek (SIF editor & membership secretary)

Jock Coats: Two Cheers for Mr Dave

http://jockcoats.me/node/4357 

I like to think I understood [1] the basic idea and the potential [2] of “Big Society” early on; in fact before the brand name even reached the airwaves, when we heard mutterings about free schools, I wondered if that idea was going to be cast wider to encompass other policy areas.

I have an advantage in this: I am an admirer of Albert Jay Nock, and in particular of his short book, “Our Enemy the State (pdf) [3]” (of which there is also an audio book recording, by me, here [4] and here [5]). Nock was one of the first libertarian thinkers I ever read, mainly because apart from considering himself a thoroughgoing anarchist, and an admirer of Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer and Franz Oppenheimer, he was also a fan of the Henry George’s Single Tax and I was at the time also convinced of his arguments.

In “Our Enemy the State” he posits that the “state” and “society” are diametrically opposed constructs and that any increase in state power or functions necessitates a lessening of the effectiveness of and appetite for social power to produce solutions to social problems:

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

…and with the example of the great relief effort that was mobilised in the infamous Johnstown flood disaster, he illustrates that not only is social power itself diminshed by the state’s encroaching on it, but that we would tend to roll over and let it:

When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them.

All this was written in 1935, against the background of the rise of totalitarian states in Europe, and in the US, the Great Depression, which was prompting the government to ever more state intervention which Nock and others at the time thought might lead them in the same direction as Russia, Germany or Italy. In fact, he considers the New Deal as a sort of a coup d’etat, but conducted by purchase not by violence: by purchasing the votes of millions through the creation of a client state; a vast increase in the number of bureaucrats; and a similar increase in the number of people dependent on state welfare or indirectly through state regulation (for example, if you think the state’s looking after you by mandating a minimum wage or some kind of safety regulation).

So, many people will just say “well so what? If we vote for more state intervention, if we think that creates a fairer world, where’s the problem?” And may will simply not agree when I say that it simply doesn’t create a fairer world, and more often than not creates a less fair world. A world in which some people get to live off the productivity of others for a start. And throughout the history of states, as Nock and Oppenheimer say, that has meant the wealthy and connected living off the production of the poorer and less well connected. Indeed it is the origin of states – a more powerful group expropriating the production of a less powerful group. And so insidious is it that they would have us believe that the only thing standing between civil society and “might makes right” is in fact the state, whose origins are in exactly that, “might makes right”.

And so, to Big Society. There are some of us who passionately believe then that “social power” can deliver all the social goods some people think only “state power” can provide: security, equity, a safety net for when we cannot cope, and most importantly greater freedom and respect for individual preferences. But can we believe that Cameron, Clegg and so on believe this also? After all, they are part of a group of people who have sought, and gained, control of all that “state power”. Nock does not believe that states ever hand back power: that only by its ultiamte collapse having consumed all the production of society and still not sated itself to the extent that people begin to have to serve the state for nothing – slavery in effect – can we hope to reclaim that lost “social power”.

He feels that even when you vote for a different party, you’ll tend to find that that different party simply accepts the current status quo of the balance between state power and social power and may reduce the pace at which the state seizes further power, but in general will not begin to hand it back. It may occasionally appear to be handing back power, by, for example, switching from direct subsidy, to imposing regulations that have a similar effect. One might suggest that the Thatcher era privatisations were such an illusory transfer of state power back to social power. But ultimately it still keeps its friends in privilege at the expense of the least well connected.

But Big Society appears to be different. I noticed in Any Questions on Friday Tristram (“I’m not a Jeremy”) Hunt criticised Cameron and Clegg in the context of a question on Big Society, for believing ideologically that the state should get out of people’s lives and that a “thousand flowers would bloom” to replace its functions. Then we hear Clegg on Sunday [6] telling us that “You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.” These are unequivocally good signs it seems to me.

I still have many qualms over the way this great hand back of power, if that is what it really is, will be implemented – after all, even as Prime Minster and Deputy Cameron and Clegg are but two people within a vast bureaucracy that has huge vested interests in holding onto power, and I’d rather people power stole it back from the state rather than the state controlling that hand back. But if we, those who are affected by overbearing state power, and those who would benefit from increasing social power, can grasp this opportunity, then perhaps, just maybe, we can make it happen.

But people have got to be persuaded that the state is bad at doing many of these things and that “we the people” could do them better, more efficiently and with a greater respect for the needs and preferences of individuals. That in itself is an enormous task, so conditioned are we to believing the state does so many things better than local or private provision could. That is the challenge of Big Society. And its inauspicious start makes it all the more difficult.

[1] <http://jockcoats.me/big_society_bottom_or_arse_down>
[2] <http://jockcoats.me/universities_and_big_society>
[3] <http://mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf>
[4] <http://mises.org/media/category/220Our-Enemy-The-State>
[5] <http://jockcoats.me/our_enemy_state>
[6] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/13/nick-clegg-protection-freedoms-bill>