Scottish independence? Yes, but only on these terms

by Robert Henderson
http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/?p=499

The Scots Numpty Party (SNP) has managed to defeat the attempts of the unionists who deliberately devised the electoral system to thwart single party government (and hence leave independence off the practical political agenda) and get a majority in Scotland. The SNP leader Alex Salmond can now call a referendum on independence . However, to have a referendum which is binding, the SNP needs the sanction of the UK Parliament. From his public comments David Cameron appears to accept that such a referendum would be binding because he has stated since this SNP victory that if a referendum was held he would campaign for a NO.

L. Neil Smith: An Application for Employment

by L. Neil Smith
from The Libertarian Enterprise, July 9, 2001

Mr. Charles Moore, Editor
The London Daily Telegraph

Dear Mr. Moore:

A thoughtful individual recently sent me a couple of columns from your publication that I found interesting for several reasons. One of these, “A Free Country”, written by you, asserts bravely, “It is time to take a stand against” [an itch that possesses both Right and Left] “to make new laws that curtail our liberties”.

Vanessa Redgrave: slow-motion-tragedy in the raw

David Davis

I find, from reading the bloodshedding-papers, that this poor old demented “Mummer’s Moll” (and we all in our hearts, can guess what one of those is) is up in arms about the eviction of some “travellers” from a large site in Essex.

It seems the buggers are being evicted for flouting “planning regulations”. Aside from what most libertarians think about “planning regulations” in modern England (that is to say: they affront and abate people’s individual property-rights) there is more to say about why “Travellers” in particular arouse ire and indignation in specifically English hearts and minds. “Travellers” is a GramscoStaliNazi euphemism for “a self-chosen group of people that are allowed to go about doing what they want to whom they want, with the backing of the local Council Soviet and the Police.”

It should be suggested that “Travellers” have been set up as a favoured political subgroup, in proper Nazi (that is always and in particular to say: leftist) fashion, to be directed and used as a weapon to further weaken liberal English society and its traditional terms of discourse. But therein lies the mortal threat to them as a group. When their usefulness has passed, they will be removed. I have been phones and have to go collect my wife, so here is what I said on Facebook a little time ago:-

The problem with “travellers” is not that they “travel”, or increasingly these days “settle”, and actively and deliberately behave in ways that don’t endear them to the other local “settled folk”. Their problem is like that of the poor Muslims, who will also wake up only when it’s too late and the British Political-Enemy-Class’s death-camp-guards are breaking down the doors.

The “Travellers” are being used as door-forcers by the EnemyClass. They are being allowed to behave like utter scumbags with the connivance of “councils” and the “Police”, because they are being used as a favoured minority, and also all the while showered with looted “State benefits”.

They are like the 1950s schoolboy that does as he likes to weaker individuals in the playground, because he’s a friend of the bullies. He stamps on their dinky-toys, destroying the suspension and beidng the axles, because “ner-ner-na-ner-ner! You can’t TOUCH meeeeee!” He stuffs their football gear into the toilet during break. He goads the bullies to “scrag” a thoughtful boy in his own desk, during a “wet-break”.

If you don’t know what scragging is, just ask.

So, “Councils” and “Agencies” go out of their way to assist “Travellers” to upset as many people as possivle with impunity. This has the benefit of encouraging ethnic English emigration, specially in rural constituencies which tend to be conservative, thus diluting political opposition to GramscoStaliNazism. Now then, when the “Travellers” will have finally served their purpose, they will get a rude awakening: it will likely be by armed police of the GramscoStaliNazi EnemyClass, who will whisk them away into “night and fog”. They will be “resettled”.

They ought to wake up before it’s too late, and see that an English Revolutionary Liberal Party (capitalist minimal-statist) will allow them to have camps, provided that they BUY THEM, and then do not spend their time robbing, burgling, horse-rustling and taunting their neighbours. If they do, the Secretariat-For-War (of which I will be Principal Secretary of State) will “take care of them”.

Cutting Through “Free Trade” Rhetoric

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8188

In a recent Guardian commentary, Timothy Snyder opines that “those who benefit from the Tea Party are more like British lords than American rebels.” Snyder argues that Tea Partiers are “rightwing anarchist[s]” whose “mantras of low taxation and small government have become the way to avoid discussing the challenges of globalisation.”

Anthony Gregory — Contra Kevin Carson on the Humanity of Corporations and Government Teach ers

A debate on C4SS
http://c4ss.org/?p=8145

MUTUAL EXCHANGE

Mutual exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses—we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue.

What to Make of “Capitalism”

Note: This posting has generated nearly a hundred comments, and has been viewed by pushing towards 10,000 people. We are not surprised, as the issues discussed are central to the future direction of the libertarian movement. For this reason, we are pinning it to the top of the blog until the comments and views fall away. SIG

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8156

For the United Kingdom’s The Guardian, Pankaj Mishra says the world is “looking at a fresh political awakening,” citing examples from Egypt and Greece to Israel and China. “[E]xtreme and seemingly insurmountable inequality,” Mishra argues, are the source of the new “public anger,” and that inequality is itself the result of “the west’s model of consumer capitalism.”

Margaret Thatcher: the most useful of idiots

by Robert Henderson
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=1067

With his mixture of vaulting intellectual ambition and howling mediocrity of mind, Lenin is the MaGonagal of philosophers. (Connoisseurs of intellectual incompetence and pretension should browse through Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empririo-Criticism’ for an especial treat). Nonetheless, like Hitler, the man possessed a certain low animal cunning and a complete absence of moral restraint, which qualities permitted him to make a few acute psychological and sociological observations. Amongst these is the concept of the useful idiot.

Sean Gabb and Enoch Powell

by Roderick Long
http://aaeblog.com/?p=8058

A successfully iconic satire destroys the viability of its target. After Tina Fey’s celebrated skit on SNL, for example, Russia’s visibility from Alaska could never again be invoked without derision as an argument for Sarah Palin’s expertise in international affairs. This is a lesson that Sean Gabb really should have taken to heart before offering this particular defense of race-baiting anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell ….

We therefore say this with regard to Enoch Powell. He was a classical scholar of great brilliance and distinction. His Lexicon to Herodotus (1938) is one of the most valuable works ever produced on the ancient historian. As well as in Latin and Greek, he was fluent in every main European language, and in Welsh. He was also at least competent in several ancient and modern oriental languages.
— Sean Gabb, 2011

And then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
—

The Freeman, New Issue

by Roderick Long

The latest issue of the Freeman features articles by Charles Johnson on monopoly capitalism, Kevin Carson on managerial progressivism, Gary Chartier on class analysis, Carl Watner on Lysander Spooner, Sheldon Richman on Lawrence O’Donnell and the IMF, and lots of other good stuff – including a piece by Ludwig von Mises titled “Ludwig von Mises: Economist, Philosopher, Prophet” (though I gather that Mises didn’t choose the title).

If Google thinks it, it must be true…

But I’ve been saying it to whoever will listen, for some time.

David Davis

Eric Schmidt thinks the British “school system” (by which I take it me means primarily the State part) undervalues science, engineering and computing versus what he calls “the humanities”. Humanities apart – the study of which, if they are proper ones like joined-up-history, proper geography with facts, and languages such as Latin and classical Greek – if we simply got rid of vacuous rubbish like “Citizenship”, “personal, social and health education” (abbreviated to PSHE to simultaneously impress, frighten and exclude parents from objecting), and the pretentious self-regarding twaddle of forcibly-applied topics in “literature” (and poetry) from the English “syllabus”, replacing that with an own-time-reading library of proper English literature by dead white male authors, the time saved could be turned over to more proper science, engineering and computing.

Visits to steel-foundries, blast-furnaces, silicon-ship-fabs, wire-drawing factories, shipyards and textile mills would also immediately be re-instated.

AND, I do so wish that WordPress would refrain from this faux-matey stuff…“This is your 3,714th post. Slick!”

Democracy, Libya and the SAS

by David Webb

I don’t have time to write on this subject, but I want to get my view out there that this is no revolution in Libya. It is not the “Libyan people”, but rather an SAS- and NATO-led operation to get rid of Gadaffi. Do we care who runs Libya? Do we know for sure the new Libya will be a democracy? The whole thing is repugnant. Do we even stop to ask what the human toll is when we are bombing whole cities assumed to be inhabited by tribes that support Gadaffi? Respect for national sovereignty has been at a zero throughout this.

Statement on Enoch Powell

by Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance

Statement by Sean Gabb,
Director of the Libertarian Alliance,
on the Vilification of Enoch
Powell,
26th August 2011

A couple of weeks ago, the historian David Starkey made a comment on the riots. He has been widely denounced for what he said, not least because he referred approvingly to Enoch Powell.

Professor Starkey is able to defend himself. What concerns the Libertarian Alliance is how our increasingly totalitarian ruling class regards Enoch Powell as some kind of Emanuel Goldstein. Even if nothing controversial in itself is said, to speak of him without visible and ritualistic loathing will bring you under suspicion of thought crime.

We therefore say this with regard to Enoch Powell. He was a classical scholar of great brilliance and distinction. His Lexicon to Herodotus (1938) is one of the most valuable works ever produced on the ancient historian. As well as in Latin and Greek, he was fluent in every main European language, and in Welsh. He was also at least competent in several ancient and modern oriental languages. In addition, he wrote a fine biography of Joseph Chamberlain, and was an expert on the mediaeval House of Lords.

During his long political career, he was notable for his defence of the British Constitution and of the traditional liberties that it embodied. He was an anti-socialist and an anti-corporatist. He resigned from one Conservative Government that was soft on spending and inflation. He helped bring down another that was a national disaster. He played an important part in stopping further “reforms” to the House of Lords until the year of his death.

He opposed British membership of what became the European Union, and he regarded the American alliance as barely less undesirable. He opposed the Cold War and the First Gulf War. He believed in a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He was easily the best political speaker of his age.

The public reason for why he is so hated by our modern ruling class is that he opposed mass-immigration and multiculturalism. Since the legitimising ideology of this ruling class is based on the claim that “diversity” is strength, and the threat of utter destruction for anyone who disagrees, his opposition might be sufficient reason for his being hated. Even so, much of the hatred rests on the envy of men and women who are themselves uneducated and illiterate and dishonourable and sordid and incompetent. Enoch Powell is hated in part because he dissented from the established view on immigration, but also because he was a shining example of what a statesman ought to be – and of what a statesman often approached to in this country before the present clique took over.

I am proud to say that the Libertarian Alliance frequently invited him to speak at its meetings in the 1980s and 1990s, and that we published several articles by him. Of particular importance among these articles is the attack that he made in 1984 on the Drug Trafficking Offences Bill and the principle that it brought into English law of asset forfeiture without conviction. (See Hon. J. Enoch Powell, The Drug Trafficking Act versus Natural Justice (Introduction by Dr. Chris R. Tame), The Libertarian Alliance, 1987, ISBN: 0948317 97 3).

When Enoch Powell died in 1998, our Director, Chris R. Tame, paid his respects by standing outside the crowded memorial service. I was not able to join him on this occasion. But I did recently make Enoch Powell the directing genius of my Churchill Memorandum, which is an alternative history novel set in a world of 1959 where the Second World War had not happened.

I feel honoured to have met him and heard him speak, and to possess signed copies of his books. And I rejoice in directing an organisation with which, however slightly, he was connected. A hundred years from now, no one will remember the corrupt nonentities who are now using Enoch Powell as a stick for beating David Starkey. Equally, a hundred years from now, men will still be reading Enoch Powell for pleasure and instruction.

End of Statement

Junk food

Michael Winning

Look guys, I make food for people. I farm pigs, than I have them killed and butchered and sent to you in your blasted shops, for you to eat in all ikinds of extraordinary ways that bloody huntergatherers would not hav conceived.

Now here is a guy that knows what’s going on in the strategic (there’s a word the Boss uses nnow! Im clever me!) battle against what Prince Charles called “cheAP FOOD”.

Look, there is a seriously dangerous “green” assault on the notion that people ought to have what food they want and as cheaply as possible. I think it’s bloody terrible,m and nobody has noticed.

New Book by Chris R. Tame

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Question-Classical-Contribution-Liberalism-ebook/dp/B005IZWNDO/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316026166&sr=1-6

The Land Question in Classical Liberal Thought And the “Georgist” Contribution to Classical Liberalism: A Bibliography by Chris R. Tame, Edited with an Introduction by Sean Gabb

The purpose of this Bibliography is manifold. It aims to provide a wide ranging guide to Henry George’s work, to that of Georgist writers in the English language (i.e., primarily American and British), to the “precursors” of Georgism, and to its principal critics. It also offers a selective listing of the competing Land Nationalisation school. In addition it provides an extensive listing of the broader literature on the land question, emanating from liberal, radical, conservative and socialist writers. The relatively small body of secondary scholarship regarding land issues is also featured.

Semi-complete Listing of Books

By Sean Gabb and his close friend Richard Blake

Real Welfare Reform

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8110

Yesterday (August 22), NPR’s Tell Me More inquired about the current state of America’s welfare system, taking President Clinton’s “historical overhaul” in 1996 as its starting point. A guest on the program, activist Barbara Ehrenreich contended that the overhaul “began an era of the government washing its hands” of “the poorest of the poor.”

Whatever you think about welfare as such, it would be hard to dispute the claim that the poor are getting a raw deal in the United States.

Within the context of the American political dialogue, wherever it surfaces, the word “welfare” itself is incendiary. All by itself, it seems to have the ability to divide people into at least a couple of camps, to unnerve Americans into a kind of reflexive defensiveness centered on their ideas about politics, class, even morality.

For the American “right,” roughly designated, welfare represents a special kind of injustice, redistribution that allows a shiftless, undisciplined class the right to something for nothing. The left, again speaking generally, regards welfare as essentially a charitable endeavor, a helping hand for the less fortunate, for the victims of injustices in society, ranging from enduring racial prejudices to exploitation of the working class; to this latter group, it is the rich — the privileged, educated, suburbanite corporate elite — who come away from the Washington card table with their chips stacked high.

American conservatives, on the other hand, oppose “taking from Peter to pay Paul” in principle, maintaining that people ought to work for what they get and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. As with nearly all divides as evaluated under the American political lexicon and categories, both sides are grievously unenlightened about the attitudes underlying their opponent’s worldview.

Although their accounts are incomplete, both the conventional left and right have important insights to offer. Rearranging stolen wealth according to the impulses of a coercive political process — rather than those of a voluntary, market process — does seem to contravene basic ideas about self-ownership and the philosophical concept of just deserts.

At the same time, concerns for the helpless and indigent certainly ought to motivate our ideas about what “the good society” should look like. What the working dichotomy in the U.S. doesn’t seem to tolerate, though, is the fact that the foregoing ethical contentions — one fundamentally opposed to redistribution and the other prescribing economic justice for the downtrodden — are by no means mutually exclusive.

In fact, the two narratives are naturally aligned. While favoring voluntary exchange and objecting to taxation and coercive redistribution, market anarchists hold that the foremost beneficiaries of redistribution are indeed the rich. The American economy is riddled with examples of state-granted economic privilege, legal strictures and rules creating the bargaining power imbalances that cheat the common worker.

And special privileges for the exploiter class come in all shapes and sizes. One pervasive example (among many) is the existence of barriers to market entry, which limit competition by increasing overhead, enabling the corporate aristocracy to monopolize wealth and resources.

Timothy P. Carney, in The Big Ripoff, handily dismantles the myth that Big Business loathes government regulations: “If something does not hurt you, or hurts you a little while seriously hindering your competition, it is a boon, on balance.” The overall regulatory framework thus favors the continued expansion and dominance of corporate power within the millions of transactions we described as “the economy.”

From party to party and administration to administration, ever more regulations are added by federal rule-making agencies. The reasons become clear, the goal being to centralize power in state-backed cartels. It should come as no surprise that General Electric alone, to take a prominent example, spent $40 million dollars lobbying the federal government in 2010, more often than not asking to be regulated.

Political stunts like President Obama’s “revolving door ban” executive orders, which ostensibly blocked corporate lobbyists from certain posts in the government, show that people are catching on — that Americans are beginning to understand the connection between state and commercial power. But that connection (and the political realities that accompany it) is also the reason why such theatrics are destined to fall by the wayside.

“Welfare,” then, — at least at the present moment — turns out to be something of a scare word for both sides, a red herring that, on its own, doesn’t address the more important, foundational question: Who really, primarily benefits from the state’s violent interventions into economic relationships?

When we begin to acknowledge the indisputable answer to that question, we can accordingly start to see the state as one sweeping welfare program for the rich and well-connected. We can see genuine free markets not as advantaging big business, but as offering their own kind of welfare reform, this kind targeting the unearned profits of the United States’ corporate powerhouses.

Warren Buffett’s Financial Incentive to Push for Higher Taxes

http://amerpundit.com/2011/08/17/warren-buffetts-financial-incentive-to-push-for-higher-taxes/

by Stephan Tawney on August 17, 2011

Did I say “financial incentive”? Why yes, yes I did. It turns out that Mr. Buffett — new liberal hero thanks to his push for higher taxes on the “rich” — isn’t really a disinterested party:

Libertarian Alliance in The Seoul Times

by Sean Gabb

Our reach is truly global. I suspect we’ve had dozens of hits this year in the local and foreign media. Sadly, I lack the time and search tools to find the details.

http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=10899

Half a League, Half a League, Half a League Onward

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=8074

It takes a lot to shut me up. I tend to be first past the post with an opinion, right or wrong, and not much brings me up short in that area.

I must confess, however to falling speechless and slack-jawed for a moment at the sheer gall of a CBS News Internet poll accompanying the story of two men sentenced Tuesday in the United Kingdom (“Brits get 4 years prison for Facebook riot posts,” August 17): “Is four years prison too harsh for a Facebook post?”

Sean Gabb in The Malawi Nation

Reforming Criminal Justice:
Three Steps to a Safer Country
Sean Gabb
Published on the 19th August 2011
in The Malawi Nation

A good criminal justice system does two things. First, it catches thieves and violent criminals, and punishes them so hard they’ll think twice about reoffending. Second, it leaves the rest of us alone. The system we have doesn’t do that. It goes after too many people whose “crimes” have no identifiable victim. At the same time, too many real criminals get away – sometimes literally – with murder. They’ve a good chance of not being caught, or not being prosecuted, or not being convicted. If they are convicted, the penalties are often absurdly lenient. The system soaks up oceans of the taxpayers’ money. It employs armies of lawyers and probation officers and social workers. And, looking at reoffending rates, it doesn’t punish. It doesn’t deter. It doesn’t reform bad character. Everyone knows the system has failed. We used to make jokes about the shifty lawyers and soft judges and the courtroom antics of hardened criminals. But that was a long time ago. No one is laughing now.