So Long as Government Exists, a Governing Class is Inevitable

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=10425

It was inevitable, argued English liberal Oliver Brett in his 1921 work A Defence of Liberty, that so-called “state socialism” would become simply another class society — this time with the state bureaucracy in the position of privilege. “So long as Government exists at all” — so went his brilliant quip on the principle — “a governing class is inevitable.” Just as everyone who attended Eton — regardless of their class of origin or what rustic access they originally spoke — “bore the stamp of Eton,” everyone who exercises state power bears the stamp of that power. Government molds everyone who wields its authority into a governing type.

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.

D.J. Webb on Anglo-Irish Relations

British-Irish Relations: “Not Entirely Benign”? David J. Webb

Historical Notes No. 53

ISBN 9781856376501 ISSN 0267-7105 (print) ISSN 2042-2571 (online)

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

© 2012: Libertarian Alliance; David Webb.

David Webb studied Chinese and Russian at Leeds University, where he was involved in Marxist politics.  He has since become a conservative writer, contributing to The Salisbury Review and Right Now!, and more recently contributing extensively to the Libertarian Allianceblog.  He lived for four years in China (Tianjin, Kunming and Chengdu) and now writes freelance on Chinese politics and economics.  He is also a student of the Cork dialect of Irish and runs the Cork Irish website at www.corkirish.com.

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

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY!

Compensating the British for slavery

David Davis

I have had occasion, this morning, to get very annoyed over at Facebook about what some jumped-up-politicoWoman has been saying over in Jamaica.

It appears that the old lie, told often enough and being a big enough lie, about how the British have been the prime-movers of slavery, persists. Frankly I’m not surprised. Two reasons come to mind:-

(1) We as a people are far, far too busy keeping on doing what we do, which is to keep buggering on and working and doing stuff and inventing things and selling other stuff, to be able to devote much time and energy to defending our reputation. We sort of take that as read. We _/Taught The World How To Live/_  , as I never tire of saying. It should be utterly obvious to all on the Planet that we were, are and will be for always, good people. We are So Unlike GramscoFabiaNazis***, most of whom are British sadly and shamefully, and who do harm out of all proportion to their numbers, and who are axiomatically not good.

(2) Socialism, in its various strategically-morphing-disguises, as is natural for Evil to want to adopt from time to time, is a specifically anti-English phenomenon. To be anti-liberal, as opposed to be anti-English-Civilization-culture-and-thought, is a mere triviality, a mere minor generality by contrast. It’s the various modern forms of socialism that have most orgasmically-jumped, salivating and ejaculating, onto the antislavery bandwaggon, carrying anti-Englishness with them while nobody noticed they’d got it in their swagbags and could take it off them first. We were, as I said, too busy to notice.

Continuing to tolerate this level of libel, slander and malicious defamation without riposte is strategic ideological madness. It does two things:

(a) it causes onlookers to think there may be something in the charges against us. Mud sticks: you can’t help it. Sticking is, after all, what mud is for.

(b) it lulls the attackers into thinking they have kicked and booted us on a weak spot and that they are actually right, even though they know full well that they aren’t.

Does anyone on here, all of you being super-intelligent, have anything to offer about a solution to this problem?

***They will have to go, but it will unfortunately take quite some time, and there may be an Endarkenment Stage in which they’d have to prevent their stray children being killed and eaten by starving mobs who have re-learned how to operate in the dark with rushlights, while their searchlights are out and their Argentinian-plastic-mined gateways are temprarily down.

Paul Gottfried on English Blame for the Great War

Note: Paul Gottfried is one of the few surviving German nationalists who happen to be Jewish, which gives him more freedom than your average guilt-denatured modern German to point out that we were hardly innocent third parties dragged into the horror of the Great War. The Germans did no more than anyone else to send the July Crisis out of control. They were no more unpleasant in the fighting than we were. Their war aims were no more unbalanced. The war guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty was monstrous, and I hope Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George are both in the next to innermost circle of Hell – the innermost being reserved for three really wicked people, whose names I won’t mention because one of them will send the usual suspects into a frenzy.

My own belief is that the order of things before 1914 was the best of all possible worlds. And it could so easily have been maintained throughout the twentieth century by a close and trusting Anglo-German friendship. Equal, though separate and complementary, in genius, in enterprise, and in all else that makes a civilisation great, both nations had so much to gain by friendship, and so much to offer in the way of friendly guidance to the lesser nations of the world.

This being said, Paul does overlook the effect on British opinion of building a German fleet. Its only possible use was against us. It sent us into a nervous frenzy. It scared us into allying with the ludicrous and declining French, and with the barbarous Russians. It allowed the devious and resentful Americans to slip the leash that kept them in the secondary status for which they have plainly always been fitted. Perhaps our response was excessive. But even a potential challenge by Germany to mastery of the seas had to be taken seriously. How would the Germans have reacted had we promised an army of three million men after 1898, and started joint military exercises along their border with the French? Because he overlooks the naval race, Paul fails to make his general case.

I think it’s best to regard the July Crisis itself as a catastrophic accident, for which no one actor can be uniquely blamed. It’s something for which whatever power you happen to be studying can be most credibly blamed. Almost every year in the two decades before 1914, there had been provocations from one great power or another. All were stupid. None wanted a general war.

Oh, and what makes it seem even more accidental is that, after 1912, Anglo-German relations were on the mend. The Germans had given up on the naval race, and would have been wholly out of it after 1916. The two countries worked amicably together to limit the scope of the Balkan War. If the crisis could have been delayed even another year, there might have been a war in Eastern Europe – but I see no reason why there would have been British involvement.

The Germans would probably have seen off the Russians in this war. But, let’s face it, so long as they aren’t wearing really sexy uniforms, when was German domination of Central and Eastern Europe ever such a bad thing?

I suppose I might also mention that this case is made at greater length in my novel, The Churchill Memorandum, which is currently on special offer via Amazon. SIG

Nazi Exceptionalism; or, How Godwin’s Law Gets It Backward

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=9757

Most participants in online debates are familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” The implicit corollary, of course, is that the first person to descend to such a comparison automatically forfeits the debate. Oddly enough, though, I don’t remember electing anyone named Godwin to legislate for me. And more importantly, that corollary is — or can be — quite stupid.

Mr Blake Does It Again!

Sword of Damascus
by Richard Blake
Published by Hodder & Stoughton
Paperback Edition: 16th February 2012
432pp, £7.99
Kindle Version £6.99
ISBN: 978-1444709681

Richard Blake’s novel The Sword of Damascus, has now been published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton. His earlier novels have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Slovak and Complex Chinese. This is the fourth in his series of critically-acclaimed and internationally best-selling historical thrillers.

Thomas Jefferson: Libertarian Wordsmith

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826):  Libertarian Wordsmith
Peter Richards

Libertarian Heritage No. 28

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/?q=node/688

Introduction

A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind.  It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow-laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.¹

Walter E. Kaegi: Emperor of Byzantium

Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium
Walter E. Kaegi
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 380pp
ISBN 0 521 81459 6
Reviewed by Richard Blake

This is the first biography of Heraclius in over a century, and the first ever in English. That a biography was worth writing should be clear from the book’s cover note:

The rot sets in, but be of good cheer, for it usually takes quite some time.

David Davis

The Last Ditch is worth visiting from time to time. Sadly, since Tom Paine’s (that’s his screen name, as it were) wife died, he’s been writing less. I hope he recovers his former zeal for intellectually-flogging the guts out of our enemies, the GramscoStaliNazis.

A recent one is good reading, about the awful slow-motion-descent of the USA into modern British-style post-socialist horror and unredemption.

When Fascism Was On the Left

by Keith Preston
http://attackthesystem.com/?p=12717

The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

The Whole World is Watching – the Diggers, the Occupiers, Some Chinese Protesters

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=9284

In 1649 at St. George’s Hill in England, as recounted in the revolutionary anthem “,” a band of landless peasants who called themselves the Diggers tore down enclosures, built themselves cottages, and began spading up land to grow food. Their goal was to set an example for the people of England, to throw off their chains and reclaim their ancient birthright. They were eventually driven off by the local Lord of the Manor, but they survive in memory as heroes in the bloody five thousand year war between those who claim to own the Earth and those who live and work in it.

General Idea of the Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=9258

Humanity has had to live, and civilization to develop, for six thousand years, under this inexorable system, of which the first term is Despair and the last Death. What secret power has sustained it? What force has enabled it to survive? What principles, what ideas, renewed the blood that flowed forth under the poniard of authority, ecclesiastic and secular?

Newt Gingrich and the Invention of Politics

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=9173

“Remember there was no Palestine as a state,” says Newt Gingrich, current frontrunner for the Republican Party’s US presidential nomination (“Gingrich Describes Palestinian People as ‘Invented,’” Fox News, December 10). “It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people …”

FLC204, Brief Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt, Sean Gabb, 12th February 2011

Yawn…. Egypt very foreign…. Not like us at all…. Moslem Brotherhood waiting its chance…. Men in beards…. Settling down at last…. No real change out there…. Business as usual in oil market…. proper light bulbs on sale in Alexandria…. All a good advert for Richard Blake’s Blood of Alexandria…. Yawn – when will there be something else to watch on the telly?

via FLC204, Brief Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt, Sean Gabb, 12th February 2011.

Libertarianism: Left or right?

by Sean Gabb
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/?q=node/676
2011-12-02-manc.mp3

Sean Gabb, speaking to the Manchester Liberty League on the 2nd December 2011.

Ayn Rand, Objectivism and Anarchism

The Facts Of Reality: Logic And History In Objectivist Debates About Government
Nicholas Dykes
Philosophical Notes No. 79
ISSN 0267-7091 1 85637 609 5

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

© 2007: Libertarian Alliance; Nicholas Dykes.

Nicholas Dykes is a British-Canadian writer currently living in England. He is married, with two grown-up children. Besides numerous pieces for the Libertarian Alliance and journals such as Reason Papers, he is the author of Fed Up With Government? (Hereford, UK, Four Nations, 1991), the 300-page manifesto for a putative British ‘Libertarian Party’. This current essay was previously published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2005): pp. 79-140.

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

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

Redeeming the Industrial Revolution

by Wendy McElroy
http://mises.org/daily/5814/Redeeming-the-Industrial-Revolution

[Wendy McElroy will be teaching Capitalism
and the Advance of Women, an online Mises Academy course,
starting January 26.]

A destructive myth has wrapped itself around laissez-faire capitalism. It is the erroneous notion that the free market harms the “vulnerable” within society; specifically, it is said to harm women and children by cruelly exploiting their labor. The opposite is true. Laissez-faire capitalism offers the one element that the vulnerable need most to survive and to advance: choice. The most liberating choice individuals can have is the ability to support themselves and not be dependent upon anyone else for the food going into their mouths.

A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer

Article by Matt Zwolinski.

If you’re like most people, then the one thing you probably think you know about Herbert Spencer is that he was a “Social Darwinist.” And that one thing is wrong.