Slow and painful death

David Davis

I did warn people about the Euro in the late 1990s, when it was all new and what a previous boss of mine called “so shiny”. Rashly, I even took on a £25 bet with a young YEM fellow whose name now escapes me, and which I lost: what was that the Euro would fall irreversibly below 50p within a year of issue. I lost, and paid him.

I think he was called Nick something or other. If you’re reading this, Nick, then you’ll know who you are, and I’d like to talk to you again about the Euro although you might not want to as it seems to have hit on some inconveniences and embarrassments. And no, I don’t want the money back, it’s quite all right: anyway, I expect you and your bureaucrats have probably spent it long ago.

Perhaps the EUSSR founding fathers made an error in their strategic plan, when, due to the time when they set us all off on our journey to their Promised Land, the overt use of terror-police was, er, sort of slightly out-of-favour for the present, as there

Feeding Medieval European Cities, 600-1500

Note: This has nothing to do with libertarianism, but it is a subject I sometimes find of compelling interest. SIG

http://www.history.ac.uk/resources/e-seminars/keene-paper

Derek Keene (Centre for Metropolitan History, UK)
1998

1. The medieval city: a problematic concept

I’m taking it as axiomatic, first that the large city cannot exist without a fertile and productive hinterland (which is itself a characteristic commonly praised in medieval descriptions of cities); and second, that whatever the natural endowment of the hinterland, its productivity will to a large extent be shaped by the growth of the city. A third axiom overrides the first: namely, that at a certain level of a city’s power or wealth, and given the appropriate transport and institutional infrastructure, its demand for supplies transcends the pedological limitations of its immediate hinterland, so that that the interplay between city and country can take place at a great distance from the point of consumption. Thus we enter the world of the Kenyan mange tout, an image not entirely inappropriate for understanding at least some aspects of the feeding of medieval cities.

Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations

ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2010) — New research led by economists at the University of Warwick reveals that medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world’s poorest nations today.

Freemen of the Land: A Barrister Writes Again

by F. Gibbons

I’ve just noticed the comment some way above by suedenimon, which strikes me as extremely bizarre indeed.

‘…I find it very difficult to square the logic that ANY barrister can actually lay claim to being a libertarian unless it is done in the same way as wearing a fashion item like a Prada handbag to proclaim ones credentials to be in ‘the’ set!, for barristers are almost to a person inclined heavily towards the conservative, though I do allow that singularly unsuccessful ones who are unable to put forward cogent arguments and thus fail miserably to impress ‘chambers’ into giving them work may pretend to be libertarian to impress others who do not take the time or trouble to think for themselves.’

This is a completely outdated and cartoonish view of the Bar that is undoubtedly shaped by nothing more than fantasy and watching far too many period dramas. I, for one, know many members of the Bar (and of my own Chambers) who range from everything from conservatives, to liberals, to socialists, to communists and beyond. There are some sets that are completely dedicated to left-wing law and politics: take a look at leading chambers Garden Court (http://www.gardencourtchambers.co.uk/) and Doughty Street (http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/) and their members’ profiles if you don’t believe me. Loads of chambers have dedicated asylum, immigration and human rights teams that are far from conservative, and some chambers are almost entirely dedicated to the practise of such law (for appellants as opposed to the state). Yes, many sets are conservative too, but the strength of your statement above is an extreme exaggeration to the point of absurdity.

‘If Mr Gibbons were to hand such rubbish in at court he would be disbarred and thrown out of the Law Society pretty damn sharpish I would think, if not slung into the cells for contempt (disturbing the proceedings of the court).’

Please. This doesn’t even make sense. Barristers aren’t even regulated by the Law Society.

In my initial comments, where I sought to warn laymen off copying Mr Barry’s behaviour in the video, I expressed a genuine view that such behaviour was likely to see people convicted of contempt of court. I can see that some supporters of the FoL movement have taken this as some sort of insult as opposed to the genuine, practical experience of someone who practises in these courts regularly and knows how judges apply the law there. As such, on both threads, I’ve been met with quite some venom as well as personal insults, which I hasten to add I have not made against anyone else on either of these threads.

That said, if some people are simply approaching this debate from the childish viewpoint that all barristers are ultra-conservative monsters incapable of independent thought, purely by virtue of their profession, I suppose there is little chance of any actual discussion, sans name calling and insults.

Shadow People: Attacks On Humans Increasing

Reblogged from The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG:

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Note: Will it bring men in white coats knocking on my door if I say that I "saw" such creatures when I was a very young child? That doesn't mean I believe in their existence. Seeing things that aren't there and can't be there may be a part of tuning the human mind. But it's interesting to read that others have seen them.

Read more… 915 more words

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism — Newly Revised!

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=10175

People raise the question of whether the network revolution, in one area of our common life or another, will be coopted by the old forces of hierarchy. Will the old institutions manage to hang onto life by incorporating network elements, and thus survive the transition to the new society — with themselves in charge of it?

The Churchill Memorandum, Reviewed in The Quarterly

I get off luckier than poor Keats did!

The Churchill Memorandum – gift of the Gabb

EDWARD DUTTON visits a noted libertarian’s alternative universe

(Quarterly Review – Autumn 2011)

The premise of Sean Gabb’s novel is certainly imaginative. The year is 1959 but it is an alternative 1959. Hitler died in a car crash 20 years ago, there was no World War II, Churchill is dead and never became Prime Minister andEnglandis the land of the free while theUSA has become a totalitarian state.

In Praise of Lazy Surfers, Stoners, Junkies & Freaks

by DL
http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/in-praise-of-lazy-surfers-stoners-junkies-freaks/

Seems so sick to the hypocrite norm
Running their boring drills
But we are an elite race of our own
The stoners, junkies, and freaks

Are you happy? I am, man.
Junkhead Alice in Chains

Recently, while persusing Rational Review, I noticed this essay,Then and Now: The Thatcherite Legacy of Totalitarian Plutocracy, by Sean Gabb. I thought the piece quite interesting since it sort of echoed my last post(libertarianism vs libertarianism). We simply replace Reagan with Thatcher and there you have it. But Gabb’s piece was a little more practical and a bit more specific. Gabb defends the british working class against charges of laziness by excoriating the highly artificial political economy wrought by the Thatcherite policy regime. Gabb more or less rhetorically asks why the working class should be obligated(or demonstrate an allegiance) to the competitive terms of this highly artificial, plutocratic political economy?

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by George Orwell

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by Emmanuel Goldstein

Chapter 1 – Ignorance is Strength
Chapter 2 – Freedom is Slavery
Chapter 3 – War is Peace

Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The Normalization of Dystopia

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=10170

Lily Tomlin used to say “I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up.” Writers of dystopian sci-fi have the same trouble keeping ahead of actual reality.

Forty years ago, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, in the Illuminatus! trilogy, portrayed a near future in which the ruling elite used a wave of assassinations a la JFK, RFK and MLK to terrorize the American public into accepting a full-scale police state. “The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind.” A few years of such orchestrated terror, and the state would have Americans “under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans.”

The Real Summit of the Americas Scandal

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=10160

To call the Summit of the Americas “prostitution scandal,” in which at least 23 US Secret Service and military personnel are now “implicated,” a tempest in a teapot is to vastly over-estimate its impact and importance.

Comment Moderation

by Sean Gabb

Search me what’s happening, but comments on postings are going into a moderation queue. We don’t moderate comments. We simply take them down if they look as if they’ll get us into trouble with the authorities. Apologies for any delay while this problem sorts itself out.

Accountable Government

by D.J. Webb

Accountable Government

Accountable government is not the same as democratic government. We have seen in recent years how we are still able to vote for governing parties, and yet still see the business of government largely conducted behind closed doors in Brussels and in Whitehall. The democratic electoral mechanism is still in place, but it doesn’t appear to make any difference any more. The reverse could also be true: a government could be accountable, while not being fully democratic. Before the advent of full democracy in the late 19th century, for example, the British government was accountable, in law and to Parliament, a consideration aided by the fact that government was still relatively small in scope and objectives.

We might need these one day

David Davis

The fellows over at Samizdata have noticed that someone has found 20 carefully-packed and wrapped “NOS” Spitfires in Burma. (For those of a less engineering/technical bent, “NOS” means “new old stock”.) I did think of writing about this here a few days ago but I got distracted by a fly, or something.

It’ll be nice if they can be reassembled, tested and flown. Trouble is, we may be “short of pilots”, in exactly the same way that old Chris Tame used to remark that the end-times for liberty may be coming in Britain, as there are now “too few people left who could make a difference”.

The State is an Epidemic

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=10147

Of all the standard counter-arguments to the anarchist idea that I run into, perhaps the most frustrating is “well, yes, I concede that there are a lot of problems with political government, but how do I know that whatever you propose as a replacement won’t be even worse?”

Then and Now: The Thatcherite Legacy of Totalitarian Plutocracy

Note: Since Mrs Thatcher came in with her lying promise of a national revival, British “prosperity” has been achieved as follows:

The banks, enabled by the political wing of the ruling class, create huge amounts of money. Some of this is lent to politicians to secure their client base, some of it to the well-connected to spend on themselves or their business ventures. Those who have first spending of the money are able to appropriate resources from everyone else in ways that look like ordinary purchase, and not the theft that they really are.

This process enables and requires a bloated financial services sector. This is further enlarged when inflation and heavy taxes push the rest of us to hope for any return at all on our savings by putting it in the hands of coke-fuelled gamblers.

Productive activity is taxed and regulated into decline. This has the effect of destroying economically secure and politically engaged middle and working classes that would otherwise protest at the looting. Because, at however basic a level, industrial workers have daily experience of applied science and of the underlying rationality of things, the decline of industry turns people back into superstitious sheep, addicted to astrology and in awe of lying statistics. The working classes are further immiserised by state-sponsored mass immigration. This reduces wage levels, and promotes further deskilling, and makes the kind of solidarity of dissent last seen in the miners strike impossible, and justifies a police state to deal with any remaining dissent.

The result is an overclass of very rich people, who splash money round places like London, and who legitimise their wealth by hiring intellectuals to argue that it has been acquired through the “free enterprise system.” Go outside these enclaves, and you see growing impoverishment, disguised for the moment by debt.

I can just remember the 1960s, when most ordinary people had secure employment and could look forward to real increases in their standard of living. Dave Barnby is luckier, in that he benefitted from the old order of things.

Saying this doesn’t mean that I approve of nationalised industries and overmighty trade unions. However, when I compare the liberal social democracy that ended c1980 with the increasingly totalitarian plutocracy that is the real legacy of Margaret Thatcher, I know which I prefer. SIG

The Libertarian Party UK and the Politics of Courage

Hello Sean,

Although I understand your argument, I believe freedom and liberty are not an excuse for truancy. I like you am against state imposed education, I was both state and privately educated, and truancy was not accepted in either system. Indeed my view and that of the Libertarian Party UK is that there should be a voucher system, so parents and children can choose between progressive and effective state schools, free schools and private education. If this were the case, many would opt for private education, state education is very wasteful and generates negative income to the exchequer. Private schools are efficient, achieve results and have a positive impact on the exchequer.

Truancy and the Total State

Libertarian Alliance News Release
Release Date: Monday 16th April 2012
Release Time: Immediate
Contact Details:
Dr Sean Gabb, 07956 472 199, sean

Truancy and the Total State

The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties institute, today condemns proposals by the British Government to deter truancy by cutting the child benefit of parents whose children absent themselves from school.

A Scandal in the Media

Republished on invitation from http://ex-army.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/scandal-in-media.html

It was in the late April of ’12, and Holmes and I were sitting, as it were, in the sitting room. I was relaxing after a long day of making my rounds, while Holmes continued his perusal and study of the “Internet” on his “laptop,” a device that he was positively obsessed with at the time, puffing dreamily away at a pipeful of his egregious shag tobacco, seemingly indifferent to my very presence. As he was clearly in no mood for idle banter, I picked up my copy of the Times, and proceeded to lose myself in its shocking accounts of crime, political scandal, and the interminable war in Afghanistan in which I myself had participated several decades ago.

The English élite’s cultural style

by D.J. Webb

Are Unflappable Englishmen Actually Just Complacent?

England, and especially the political élite, has long cultivated a rather admirable cultural style. I call it unflappability. It is a kind of sang froid that dates back to the days when England ruled the waves. Our current prime minister, David Cameron, exudes unflappability partly because of his upper-class, Eton and Oxford roots. His class were born to rule—to rule one-quarter of the earth, and not just England—and many members of his class retain a serene cultural style, which means that he performs well in a crisis, debates well in Parliament and gives a good account of himself in front of a television camera.