But what will replace him? Oliver I Love Socialism Letwin, perhaps, or David Two Welfare States Willets? It could almost be better, in some
...continue Michael Howard: How to become a hero]]> It still remains unlikely, but I do feel that is at least possible that the Conservative Party may win the next General Election, here in the UK. With Blair increasingly going off the rails, behind in some polls, and trying to ramrod unpopular policies through Parliament, even against the wishes of his patrons and supporters in News International, there is some hope that we may yet be rid of him before he has his heart attack.

But what will replace him? Oliver I Love Socialism Letwin, perhaps, or David Two Welfare States Willets? It could almost be better, in some ways, if Blair stayed in power, as at least then we would still possess an enemy we could focus on properly.

So, this is a call to any Conservative politician out there, anyone who is active within the Conservative Party who stands any chance of a sniff of power should the Blessed Michael shock us and actually win electoral power. Now it may be too much to assume that the Blessed Michael, himself, is a regular Samizdata reader, but if you are with us, Mr H, I have the perfect plan of action for you to make England the wealthiest, the freest, and the happiest country in Europe, except for approximately one million Guardianistas who, basically, can just sod off.

Sean Gabb’s THE ENEMY CLASS AND HOW TO DESTROY IT: A MANIFESTO FOR THE RIGHT, which I read for the first time this morning, really is or should be the plan for your next government. Take time to read it. Then act upon it. Become a hero.

Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.

If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.

But, alas, this punk
...continue Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Defying Leviathan]]> I used to be a singer in a rock and roll band.

Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.

If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.

But, alas, this punk dream faded, as it did for a million others, and my brush with anarchy submerged itself for another twenty years. However, much to my surprise it resurfaced again last year, a little rusty but largely unscathed, when it experienced a depth charge blast from Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s mental mind bomb, Democracy: The God That Failed.

There are few in the world who dare promote the dissolution of all forms of government, especially in the hostile spitting face of a billion state-supporting rent seekers. And of those few brave men, only a tiny handful, mostly Austro-libertarians, possess the requisite economic theory, moral strength, and political knowledge to really frighten all of those state-loving horses. Foremost amongst them is Professor Hoppe, a man in the proper Austrian tradition of being a German speaker by birth, though also a man at odds with many inside proper libertarian circles, as opposed to those Christmas-voting leftist libertarian turkeys who believe the state is the ultimate guarantor of individual rights. Which makes about as much sense as taxman with genuine friends. Proper libertarians divide themselves into two broad camps; Minarchists and Anarchists; those who believe in a minimalist night-watchman state, on the grounds that even though the state is odious and should be limited in every way possible, it is still necessary to provide security; and those who believe that we need no odious government at all, because even security, that last bastion of the coercive apparatus of the state, can itself be provided on the open market.

However, when you educate yourself away from leftist-libertarian socialism, as some of us poor schlepps have had to do, this question of security, which divides the Minarchists and the Anarchists, is like the great family secret you can never find the answer to. It is the mad aunt in the closet, the uncle who should be kept away from his nephews, and the grandmother with the glass eye who does unspeakable things to goldfish. This question of security is simply never discussed. At least, never any place you can find it. You are either sensible, and a Minarchist, or a Barking moonbat, and an Anarchist.

Which is why I am glad that Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has broken the log-jam and tried to answer this divisive question of security, with his editorship of The Myth of National Defense. Fortunately, as well as buying the book, you can also read the whole of its text online, courtesy of a Mises.org PDF file.

Hoppe has assembled his wide-ranging collection of essayists, and their ideas, around the following pair of double-think concepts:

First: Every “monopoly” is “bad” from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly here is understood in its classical sense as an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service; i.e., as the absence of “free entry” into a particular line of production. In other words, only one agency, A, may produce a given good, x. Any such monopolist is “bad” for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into his area of production, the price of his product x will be higher and the quality of x lower than otherwise.

This is contrasted with:

Second, the production of security must be undertaken by and is the primary function of government. Here, security is understood in the wide sense adopted in the Declaration of Independence: as the protection of life, property (liberty), and the pursuit of happiness from domestic violence (crime) as well as external (foreign) aggression (war). In accordance with generally accepted terminology, government is defined as a territorial monopoly of law and order (the ultimate decision maker and enforcer).

Hoppe contends that both principles are incompatible. Either monopoly is good or monopoly is bad. It cannot be both. However, to counter this Minarchists argue that security is a special product, one which defies the first principle, because without statist coercion we would all be wolves at each others’ throats in a Hobbesian world of Homo homini lupus est, suffering from a continual under-production of security. Hoppe argues otherwise, basing much of his anarchistic case on the original ideas of Gustave de Molinari, who predicted in the Production of Security what would happen in a monopolized security system:

If…the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers.

The British police, in particular, seem to have taken Molinari to heart. In large swathes of the UK they see their job as being no more than handing out crime numbers, so that victims of theft can claim on their private insurance policies. From recent newspaper reports, the British police can sometimes hardly be bothered to do even that small task. The thought of coming out of their warm cosy police stations, or comfortable motorway police cars, and actually chasing down burglars and muggers is far too much like hard work. It is much better to stay behind a desk drinking tea and processing lucrative car speeding fines. British courts are also a superlative home for the overpaid and the underworked, with the price of justice set far too high for most ordinary people, and some innocent men and women spending years banged up on remand, at Her Majesty’s pleasure, while indolent government justice officers tea-break their tortuous way through endless triplicated paperwork.

Hoppe’s book is divided into four sections; State-making and war-making; Government forms, war, and strategy; Private alternatives to state defence and warfare; and Private security production and practical applications.

After an introductory chapter of his own, Hoppe hands over the baton to Luigi Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri, for a first section chapter on the relative modernity of the state, which they claim has only properly existed since the Florentine time of Niccolo Machiavelli, rather than the dawn of time, as the state’s denizens would prefer us to believe. Thus, having existed only briefly, the state is a concept which has a before. Therefore, it may also possess an after, which we can all happily work towards. They also describe how the state mainly arose as a vehicle for those who wished to become a new ruling class, after feudal times, and how, as free institutions and free markets threw off the ever-increasing strictures of the nation state, this ruling class saw its only hope for survival in the creation of supra-national bodies, such as the European Union, to use them explicitly as a means of controlling the free movements of goods, people, capital, and ideas, while still retaining full control over a coercive and parasitic stream of lovely jubbly taxation income, for themselves, their families, and their friends.

This essay is followed by The Master, the mighty Murray N. Rothbard. Hoppe reproduces one of Uncle Murray’s best ever pieces, which you may have read before, on War, Peace, and the State. This lucid morality tale tells us about how and why the state has killed millions since its Renaissance inception; how and why we can tackle all of the state’s arguments, which it uses to aggress against us in the form of taxation, regulation, and straightforward oppression, as it pursue its own agenda against other states; and how and why we should always try to work towards the maxim that no man should aggress against any other man at any other time, except in the case of self-defence. No anarchist, or aspiring anarchist, should ever leave home without reading this essay first.

The second section of the book then begins with what I feel is the best written essay in the book: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s piece entitled Monarchy and War, on the dangers of modern democracy. Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of this bitingly acidic tour-de-force, let me just regale you with a few quotes:

Democracy reappeared in a more civilised form in Athens, but when Socrates, in a truly political trial, praised monarchy, he was condemned to death. Remember also that Madriaga said rightly that our civilization rests on the death of two persons: a philosopher and the Son of God, both victims of the popular will.

Top quality.

It will be interesting to see if Mel Gibson makes his next film project ‘The Death of Socrates’. I would love to see it, but I do hope Mr Gibson avoids scripting the dialogue in classical Greek.

Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is particularly caustic about the terrible effects of the French Revolution, with its introduction of mass murder, conscription, and caretaker-king democracy:

It [The Revolution] wanted to bring liberty and equality under a common denominator, something Goethe considered only charlatans would promise. Equality, indeed, could merely be established in some form of slavery – just as a hedge can only be kept even by constantly trimming it.

Now that is an analogy to cut out and keep. If you ever see me using it again at some future date, please forget you ever saw me quote it here first. Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn also thinks one of the worst outcomes of the French Revolution was its export of democracy to the nascent United States, and the subsequent goal of the United States to then make the world a safe place for this same mob rule beauty pageant, otherwise known as democracy:

It was the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that made Germany the geopolitical winner of World War I. Bordering after 1919 on only one great power—France—it was now the direct or indirect neighbour in the East of partly artificial, partly militarily indefensible states. As His Magnificence, the rector of Breslau University, Ernst Kornemann, pointed out in 1926, the time to take advantage of this advantageous situation would come sooner or later. And it came. What Hitler actually inherited from these nincompoops who had dictated the Paris Suburban treaties was not only an internal situation characterized by the economic uprooting of important social layers and the imposition of an unworkable form of government, but also a uniquely profitable geopolitical position due to the division of Austria-Hungary. If Hitler had had any sense of humor, he would have erected a colossal monument to Woodrow Wilson.

You may disagree with what Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn says about the horrors of democracy, but his writing really is wonderfully entertaining.

We then head into what I thought was the most disturbing and contradictory part of Professor Hoppe’s book: Bertrand Lemennicier’s chapter on nuclear weapons. After various mathematical proofs, based on Game theory, the author concludes that nuclear proliferation is a desirable thing to encourage, in terms of world peace. He also believes that the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and other members of the nuclear club, have no intrinsic right to prevent this spread of nuclear weapons.

I found this essay rather jarring, particularly after reading Murray Rothbard’s earlier piece, which states that we should try to remove nuclear weapons from the world as a priority action in every possible sphere, as they are immoral weapons of evil. And even if I could force myself to believe Lemennicier’s argument that various world governments should be the recipients of nuclear proliferation, one shudders at the thought of various non-governmental men, currently somewhere at large in the Hindu Kush, getting hold of such devices. Nuclear mushroom cloud over London, anyone?

I hope and pray that I and my children never live to see that day.

Gerard Radnitzky then puts a firm leather boot into the lie that democracy is more peaceful than any other form of government, decrypting virtually every war of the twentieth century, most of which involved democracies, often in the role as aggressors. This is a wide-ranging chapter which balances theory with reality, but which essentially comes at us with the premise that what democracy encourages is the creation of total war and the deliberate targeting, with lethal munitions, of other states’ civilians:

The democratic method tempts you to expand collective choice, because it appears to be so simple to use and almost costless (a facile mechanical process). It invites you to sin — galloping interventionism. The consequences: Because of the redistributive bias of democratic constitutional rule, it transforms the state into a vast redistributive machinery and the society into the “churning society”—interventionism, welfarism, collectivism—with consequences that go far beyond anything known under predemocratic social choice.

After this heavy, but necessary, opening half to the book, we get to the more interesting stuff. Joseph R. Stromberg talks about mercenaries, guerrillas, militias, and the ways in which they have been combined for successful defence, as in the American Revolution against the armed might of Great Britain. Larry J. Sechrest then writes a fascinating chapter on naval privateering and its warfare for profit, which helped keep the mighty British navy at bay when the early United States spent several decades consolidating its early freedom, mostly through a successful reliance on naval privateers.

So why did privateering die out then? Stromberg concludes his chapter with the riposting answer:

The fact is that privateering disappeared precisely because it was so effective. Career naval officers feared and resented the competition it represented, and those few nations with large public navies wanted to make sure that smaller nations could not challenge their domination via the less costly alternative of private armed ships. These were the primary motives behind the Declaration of Paris, signed by seven maritime nations in 1856, which prohibited privateering by the signatories and greatly hastened its ultimate end.

Whatever the case, the knowledge I gained from this essay certainly helped make the recent Russell Crowe film, Master and Commander, far more entertaining, especially when Captain ‘Lucky’ Jack Aubrey argued with ship’s doctor, Stephen Maturin, about the nature of warfare and anarchy, and how to fight a Boston-built privateer.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel answers another important question in the next highly instructive chapter. If governments are so bad, why do they so dominate the world? Hummel paints an optimistic picture portraying the state as a macro parasite which grew from the revolution in agriculture following hunter-gatherer times, where large bodies of people could produce enough food to carry free riders and wipe out remaining hunter-gatherers through slaughter and the diseases induced by people living in civilised proximity. The rulers of these early states could then introduce religious or secular ideologies to maintain the organic growth of statehood, leading us towards the present day cacophony of worldwide states. However, Hummel surmises that modern states which can lower their statist free-riding burden will become dominant through their consequential wealth-generation abilities and the superior weapons systems which this will also provide. Hence, the state may wither on the vine as such advantages become apparent, especially if just one truly anarcho-capitalist state could emerge with a large enough population to hold all the other states at bay.

No doubt Hummel has the United States in mind, for this torch-bearing role. But with those rapidly growing flat-tax economies in Eastern Europe, who knows where the wind of freedom will blow next?

We then come to the book’s important fourth section, where Walter Block, Professor Hoppe, and Jörg Guido Hülsmann, discuss how the private production of security could actually come to genuine fruition, in a future world based on reality rather than hope.

Block lays open the public goods theorists who insist that only states can provide defence, by taking all of their arguments apart and leaving them wanting. Hoppe then follows up with a demonstration of how reliance on the state for defence has left us in a state of perpetual war, with a continual and a permanently insecure destruction of private property, and how a system of insurance could provide us with a reliable system of both internal and external defence. He also argues why this system would lead to a far more peaceful world than the one we currently have, where airlines are stopped by the state from having $50 dollar guns on their flight decks, so a $400 billion dollar US state defence system can then fail to prevent terrorist outrages involving airliners. If you are going to read just one chapter from this book, read this one.

Hülsmann then concludes this book with how secession, down to the level of the individual, may be the method by which we can reach Hummel’s anarcho-capitalist wonderland.

All in all, The Myth of National Defense is a fabulous book, and one which I can highly recommend even to confirmed Minarchists, so they can refute it at their leisure. Its one drawback is that it does lack the organic unity of the Professor’s earlier book on democracy, mainly because he failed to write the whole thing himself. But just the chapter by Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, alone, makes up for this.

Is it really possible for the state to be removed from our lives and for us to survive to tell the tale afterwards? You will have to make up your own mind, but after reading it myself I can only say one thing:

Ich bin ein Barking moonbat.

Auf wieder hören…

But being a former law student he has fallen into the trap of believing that if a law is passed by a legislature then this automatically makes it a good thing. Because he has just
...continue No more heroes anymore]]> If there were ever an annual Ayn Rand award, here in the UK, for Britain’s most outstanding business leader, then a recent contender could easily have been Tim Martin, the founder and chairman of the JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs. He created this chain from virtually nothing, in 1979, and built it into one of the largest leisure businesses in the country. Which is remarkable.

But being a former law student he has fallen into the trap of believing that if a law is passed by a legislature then this automatically makes it a good thing. Because he has just called for a smoking ban to be imposed upon all the privately owned pubs and bars in Britain, following Ireland’s recent heavy-handed example.

Now I have no problem with Mr Martin banning smoking in all of his own pubs. But like all the best hypocrites Mr Martin has no intention of doing this, because he realises he will lose too much business to his competition. But this hypocrisy has failed to prevent him from wishing to inflict his own intolerant views upon every other private bar owner and pub smoker in the country.

Which does beg the following question: Are there any truly successful business people here in Britain who we libertarians could actually hold up and respect as role models for the future? Or is it simply impossible in Nanny State Britain for any big business leader to be successful without being mentally flexible enough to accommodate the sinuous and relentless needs of our slave controllers in government?

I need a hero to worship. Does anybody have one?

Mr Milburn used to be the Secretary of State for Health, here in the UK, until his shock resignation in 2003. We may never know the real reason why he resigned. But when Alan visited me in a nightmare recently, in the
...continue Return of the undead]]> But for the grace of God, are there any loathsome politicians out there who you sometimes feel you may have ended up like? I have one. His name is Alan Milburn, a man who I sometimes look like and sound like, which for those of you who know the difference really is quite a cross to bear.

Mr Milburn used to be the Secretary of State for Health, here in the UK, until his shock resignation in 2003. We may never know the real reason why he resigned. But when Alan visited me in a nightmare recently, in the guise of my former Marxist Dark Half, he told me he flounced out of government because Tony Blair had become incapable of protecting him from Gordon Brown’s prime ministerial ambition.

But it seems Alan is regretting his flounce and is trying to worm his way back into Tony’s ministerial cash box. This morning, on Radio4′s Today programme, he spent a lengthy chat with James Naughtie banging on about the glorious work-life balance achievements of Scandinavian-style socialism. You can imagine my joy listening to this nauseous bilge, as I circulated around the M25 on my way to earning yet more tax to pay for this Geordie parasite’s Chardonnay lifestyle. But one of his supposed claims really ate into me, as I mentally rehearsed the business presentation I had to deliver this afternoon.

This is the assertion that companies should lower working hours and improve child-friendly work policies, not because this is a nice socialist thing to do, but because this makes companies more productive and more efficient, if only the fools would realise it.

I suspect if this really were true, then all wildly successful business people would spontaneously adopt such measures without any need for Mr Milburn’s expensive regulatory touch, but then I had a wild spontaneous thought of my own.

If Mr Milburn’s work-life balance assertion were true, and British company bosses were being so stupid in failing to adopt its measures, this would mean that there are whole swathes of British industry laying wide open to entrepreneurs willing to adopt Mr Milburn’s ideas. If such entrepreneurs were as clever as Mr Milburn in realising how efficient they could become by following his ideas, they would quickly become far more successful than their stupid competitors and clean them out by providing better and cheaper services to consumers in every possible line of business.

So just what is it that is stopping Mr Milburn, and all the union leaders who also support his assertion, from taking over the whole of British industry with fully work-life balanced companies? Is it, perhaps, that Mr Milburn is talking out his derriere again, as he did for several years as Health Secretary, and would be incapable of managing his way out of a colostomy bag without a big fat government subsidy?

Or is this just a feeble plea, to Tony, to come and rescue Alan from backbench obscurity and a mere hundred and sixty grand a year in salary and expenses?

As Tony has now run out of useful idiots, as his New Labour lies have come home, expect Mr Milburn to be given a big fat job spouting defensive hot air for Tony sometime in the next few months, where Alan can spend five days a week at home achieving a big fat taxpayer-funded work-life balance. Nice work, if you are morally bankrupt enough to get it.

It seems the Individualist Revolution really is creeping up on us, unawares,
...continue The private police state]]> For those who missed it, this morning, there was a fascinating article in the Daily Telegraph about the increasing failure of the British state to perform its most basic activity, that of providing personal security to its tax-paying citizens. It seems more and more people are simply withdrawing any hope they may have once held in the British police and are taking their own personal security matters directly into their own hands, with impressive crime reduction results to boot, through the creation and adoption of private police forces.

It seems the Individualist Revolution really is creeping up on us, unawares, as street by street, in Britain, the enfeebled state withers away and people take an ever-increasing amount of private control over their own private lives.

This is not what the state intended. But it is what is happening. Long may this withering process continue.

This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother’s milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.

When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley
...continue What are your kids watching?]]> In my usual stupor, this morning, before all the drugs in my constitutional cup of tea kick-started my ageing brain cells, I watched a snippet of the popular BBC children’s programme, Blue Peter.

This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother’s milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.

When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley Judd. Ah, the things Lesley could do with a hot wet bucket of clay which would warm the confused cockles of a 12 year old boy.

So I watched this morning’s programme with interest. A fresh-faced pretty female presenter wandered around a cocoa plantation in Africa explaining the cocoa pod origins of chocolate production. ‘Fascinating,’ I thought. There was plenty of factual information and so far a distinct lack of anti-capitalist agitation. ‘What is wrong with the BBC, this morning?’ I wondered. Alas, I think the presenter could feel my disappointment at her failure to take a regressively tax-funded opportunity to try to brainwash British children into becoming politically correct. So just to make me happy she moved up into the BBC’s more usual anti-capitalistic gear. This is the essence of what she said next, in front of a group of happy smiling African children:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools [including a machete and a pole-handled knife] to collect her cocoa pods, which I do find puzzling, but she is happy because she belongs to a co-operative. All the workers here share the co-operative’s profits and are funded by the ‘Fair Trade’ organisation. This means that they have enough money to pay for a water pump and a school for their children. So please make sure that when you buy chocolate it is covered by the ‘Fair Trade’ logo, to help people like Mary, her family, and all the children you can see here.

Absolutely shameless. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud of her. The subtext message is, of course, very clear:

Collectivism is good. Free markets are bad. Feel guilty if you buy free market chocolate.

At the end of this bright young thing’s piece to camera there was a big smile and then a ‘Fair Trade’ photo plug for their supported brands of chocolate. This was followed by words of hearty support from an even prettier himbo back in the studio. In fact it seems the Blue Peter report is part of a concerted BBC effort to help the ‘Fair Trade’ cocoa campaign. That I am coerced into funding this anti-capitalist rubbish is one thing, as hopefully being over 18 years of age I can make up my own mind about such matters, but broadcasting this anti-free market poison to five year olds is morally outrageous.

So just to preserve a smidgin of balance I thought I would try to improve on what the Blue Peter presenter said this morning, particularly as she seemed so genuinely puzzled as to why Mary had nothing more than iron age tools to cut down her cocoa pods:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools, such as her machete and a pole-handled knife, which at first I found puzzling until I thought about it. I then realised that Mary and her family are kept deliberately poor at a bare subsistence level by two different sets of collectivists. The first corrupt set of thieves are the tyrannical political classes in Africa who routinely steal from their governmentally-controlled populations, via taxation, import tariffs, and export license corruption, to help finance their personal purchases of Swiss gold and to fund their governmental purchases of arms, which they need to keep their own people down. This deprivation by taxation, inflation, and regulation, means that African farmers are never able to save enough re-investment capital to improve their farm production methods beyond subsistence or to increase their revenue to create better lives for themselves and their families. The second group of corrupt collectivists are the politicians in the protectionist blocs, like NAFTA and the EU, who do everything they can through taxation, subsidisation, and import controls, to increase food costs for their own populations and to protect their rent-seeking farmer clients. The resulting western tax revenue is used to give large numbers of these western parasites comfortable secured incomes and to help African tyrants buy even more western weapons systems to further suppress African people through the arms supply mechanism known in these parts as ‘international government aid’. So all you five year olds out there, if you really want to decrease poverty in Africa, always try to see beyond the immediately obvious problem and try to discover the underlying causative factors, which will almost always be some kind of government intervention. Free markets feed. Collectivism starves. And now back to the studio.

Now if the BBC were to broadcast that kind of propaganda, though only to adults of course, then even I would be willing to pay the BBC television license fee.

I am currently working my way through the Discworld canon, having started with The Colour of Magic a few months ago. At first, as I came across the odd libertarian-leaning comment, I thought it might be interesting to record them, as I found them, and publish them all on Samizdata once I had reached the last page of the last book. But there are
...continue Just another brick in the tax retention barrier?]]> There is little in life as popular as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book series, about the adventures of Rincewind the Wizzard and all the other assorted folk of Discworld, including of course The Librarian, and The Luggage.

I am currently working my way through the Discworld canon, having started with The Colour of Magic a few months ago. At first, as I came across the odd libertarian-leaning comment, I thought it might be interesting to record them, as I found them, and publish them all on Samizdata once I had reached the last page of the last book. But there are just far too many for that. Once you have your eyes peeled, these covert anarchistic swipes pop up all over the place like magic mushrooms in a damp autumn wood.

But some still stand out as giant white-spotted red caps, just begging for hallucinogenic consumption. I am compelled, for instance, to broadcast this following comment from Cohen the Barbarian, which I discovered this morning in the book Interesting Times. Cohen is speaking about the subject of slaughtering in the Agatean Empire, a Discworld continent bearing an astonishing resemblance to both modern China and its bureaucratic dynastic past:

‘Oh, yeah. Slaughtering,’ said Cohen. ‘Like, supposing the population is being a bit behind with its taxes. You pick some city where people are being troublesome and kill everyone and set fire to it and pull down the walls and plough up the ashes. That way you get rid of the trouble and all the other cities are suddenly really well behaved and polite and all your back taxes turn up in a big rush, which is handy for governments, I understand.’

Very handy.

Cohen also has little time for the tax-paying population of the Agatean Empire:

‘People think that’s how a country is supposed to run. They do what they’re told. The people here are treated like slaves.’
Cohen scowled. ‘Now, I’ve got nothing against slaves, you know, as slaves. Owned a few in my time. Been a slave once or twice. But where there’s slaves, what’ll you expect to find?’
Rincewind thought about this. ‘Whips?’ he said at last.
‘Yeah. Got it in one. Whips. There’s something honest about slaves and whips. Well…they ain’t got whips here. They got something worse than whips.’
‘What?’ said Rincewind, looking slightly panicky.
‘You’ll find out.’

One presumes Cohen is talking about a culture of governmental acceptance, perhaps driven by a successful government-worshipping ideology. No doubt Mr Pratchett will let me know, once I push on further into the book. However, just as a clue, Cohen fills in Rincewind with a little more detail:

‘Strange bloody country,’ he said. ‘Did you know there’s a wall all round the Empire?’
‘That’s to keep…barbarian invaders…out…’ [said Rincewind]
‘Oh, yes, very defensive,’ said Cohen sarcastically. ‘Like, oh my goodness, there’s a twenty foot wall , dear me, I suppose we’d better just ride off back over a thousand miles of steppe and not, e.g., take a look at the ladder possibilities inherent in that pine wood over there. Nah. It’s to keep people in. And rules? They’ve got rules for everything. No-one even goes to the privy without a piece of paper.’

Sounds like a day in your average modern NHS canteen, then.

Alas, that is as far as I have reached. But just like all his other books, so far, Mr Pratchett has got me hooked. Now we could discuss whether Mr Pratchett is a closet libertarian. But unless the man himself is reading this, and would like to put me right, I think there is very little doubt about that, especially if we draw a veil over the co-written Science of Discworld books. I am personally far more struck by Cohen’s observation about the Great Wall of Agatea.

Now for the whole of my life, up to precisely seven point four seconds ago, I had accepted the usual notion that both Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England, and the Great Wall of China, in …err… China, were about keeping out my ancestors, the barbarian Picts, and my more distant ancestors from my Ukrainian links, the barbarian Mongols.

But were both, instead, about keeping in the tax-paying populations of Imperial Rome and Imperial China? It has nagged my unconscious mind for years that the Great Wall of China just peters out, admittedly in a barren desert up against a deep ravine, rather than going down south to the Himalayas. As Cohen implies, would a horde of real barbarians really be unable to ride around its western edge or find a lightly-manned spot in the centre and simply climb over it? And the same goes for the Picts in ancient Scotland. For anyone who has been up on Hadrian’s Wall, on a cold winter’s night, it cannot be beaten for bleakness. And while those Roman legionaries from Aswan, in Egypt, kept themselves warm in the watchtowers, perhaps quite a contingent of hairy-armed Picts could have swarmed over a remote part of the wall, in the dark, and then made their way south to rape and pillage, just as they do in modern-day Carlisle, today.

But for ancient farmers and peasants, in both northern England and northern China, perhaps the thought of breaking past these stone barriers to find a non-taxed Mel Gibson-like anarchistic freedom north of the walls, or trying to encourage this freedom to come south, was a tad more challenging and the real reason behind the construction of these large and expensive border defences?

Was the imperial bureaucratic thinking, in both empires, along the lines of No Wall, No Taxes? We have the more modern creation of the Berlin wall to show us how the mind of the bureaucratic parasite can work when it is stressed by its slaves escaping. Were ancient parasitical minds any different?

In the meantime, while some of us may cogitate on that before rejecting the idea and re-accepting the orthodox position on walls keeping out barbarians, my advice is, get yourself a copy of The Colour of Magic and see how you get on. You will never see foot lockers in the same light again. Or librarians. Especially librarians.

However, I have just watched a hilarious piece on Channel4′s News programme where the Royal College of General Practitioners challenged how these good news figures had actually been arrived at? I felt like phoning the programme up and telling its producer about a civil service game called Hard Target,
...continue Monkey nuts]]> Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street web site is claiming that some spurious target or other, for the National Health Service to recruit an extra 2,000 General Practitioners, has almost been reached. That is, according to some figures produced, and I use the word advisedly, by the UK government’s Department of Health.

However, I have just watched a hilarious piece on Channel4′s News programme where the Royal College of General Practitioners challenged how these good news figures had actually been arrived at? I felt like phoning the programme up and telling its producer about a civil service game called Hard Target, which involves a pack of marked cards, a set of rusty darts, and a small bag of pistachio nuts. But I relented and listened on.

With an increasing number of GP surgeries refusing new patients and an increasing shortage of GPs around the country, for instance in Barnsley, as mentioned by Channel4 tonight, and even in relatively well-funded towns in Scotland, the Royal College puts the alleged increase in GPs at something more like 200, rather than 2,000, and if you take into account the increasing number of GP retirements and the increase in part-time GP working, the full-time figure actually shrinks, in real world terms, to something more like 26.

So, well worth increasing the spend on the NHS then, to nearly one hundred billion pounds, from about sixty billion. I know that’s almost £1.54 billion pounds per extra GP, but hey, is it really possible for us heartless libertarians to put a monetary price on the sanctity of human life and its guardians in the general practitioner service? Shame on us.

Which leaves me in a dilemma? Do I believe the UK government figures or do I believe the ones from the Royal College of General Practitioners set at about 1% of the government’s own claims? It is a toughie, I will admit, but you know me. I always believe everything the government says on principle. For where would civilisation be if we ever lost trust in the government?

I am an Aardvark.

A National Health Service surgeon, from the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, has been suspended on full pay, for a week now, in a row over whether he took too many croutons to go with his lunchtime soup.

No, I am really not making this up.

I particularly like the comment from some idiot going under the name of Lord Warner:

There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and
...continue The cleverest man in the world]]> It would appear from yesterday’s UK budget, before my accountant gets through the smallprint, that Gordon Brown has decided one million small UK businesses hold just too many awkward voters to browbeat in one go. So he has only smacked us with a light tap rather than the full hammer of state retribution he was muttering about earlier in the month.

There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and the IT contractor sector several years ago, with his IR35 measure, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

What really puzzles me, however, is why whenever he deliberately introduces tax loopholes, to apparently encourage small businesses, instead of financial journalists just praising him in newspapers the damned small businesses actually take advantage of his faux largesse. Which means he has to get all moody and pompous before closing his own damned loopholes down again. And of course, if it is so wonderful to sack 40,000 civil servants, or should I say re-badge 40,000 rent-seeking deadbeats as outside agency staff, just why was it so wonderful to take them all on in the first place, at the rate of 500 anti-smoking awareness counsellors a week, for a full seven years?

And just to round off this triplet of Keynesian fact-changing stupidity, if everything is going so well with the British economy, just why is it the Red King of Scotland is borrowing so much? I know I could live off caviar and Krug champagne if I possessed the ability to make the British taxpayer pay off my credit card bills, but I would certainly avoid bragging about it if I was morally bankrupt enough to try it. Somebody, somewhere, is going to have to pay the piper at some point, even if some in the private sector are currently working overtime to supply the government with goods and services paid for with money borrowed off future taxpayers. This gives Gordon apparent economic growth without the tax revenues you would normally associate with such growth, which is why he is reaching for the overdraft facility like Craggy Island’s Father Jack would reach for the Black Bush whiskey after the end of Lent.

The difference between these two sons of the cloth is that Father Jack just gets drunk, whereas Gordon Brown gets drunk on the power of spending and wasting other people’s money.

In conclusion, there are two answers to my general doublethink questions above. Gordon Brown is either the cleverest man in the world. Or, as Eric Morecambe might have once put it, the man’s a fool.

I’ll spare you the trouble of asking you to guess the direction in which my own opinion lies.

BTW, for any wavering Gordon Brown worshippers reading this, who are beginning to suspect it might just be the Eric Morecambe option, if you want to know why it is all going so horribly wrong for New Labour, read the Murray Rothbard article entitled The Myth of Efficient Government Service, where the whole shooting match is revealed with Uncle Murray’s usual sure-footed conciseness and shattering clarity.

Spanking.

Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the
...continue Entering Gordon’s black hole]]> It is a very nervous time for those of us in Britain stupid enough to be self-employed, in this age of grasping government. Because Gordon Brown is desperately short of cash and he is also desperately scared of raising any more income tax from voters employed by large organisations. So where does that leave him? It leaves him staring at me and a few other hardy self-employed souls standing out here in living-on-our-own-wits land, ready to take the hit to fill his £10 billion black hole of unfunded borrowing.

Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the devil and I hate him with every twisted fibre of my being. But I think I am going to hate him even more on Thursday morning, after his UK government budget statement on Wednesday, because the small print is almost certainly going to show me owing Her Majesty’s Government up to 70% of my direct ill-gotten income, which I currently exploit out of the oppressed banks and City corporations of England.

If he does do this, by making me pay all sorts of national insurances on dividend income, for benefits I am ineligible to claim, to try to effectively turn me into an employee of the state, he may be clever enough to remove all of the wheezes we use out here in self-employed land, to get ourselves off the hook.

And if I have no choice but to become a government employee, why become a productive one? My escape route to the US is currently blocked by forces too powerful to mention; there is no John Galt style gulch I am aware of, hidden in Wales; and I’ll be damned if I hand over 70% of my hard-earned cash to that great grasping fat Scottish whore in 11 Downing Street.

So what is a man to do? How can I best contribute to the fall of the state, retain my sanity, and get out of this financial hole? I have the perfect plan. Instead of helping to create a gulch in some unknown Welsh valley I could swallow an even more bitter pill. I could help bring on the ultimate collapse of the British government by doing something so evil, so heinous, I’ll have to destroy all the mirrors in my house to avoid catching my own reflection.

I think it may be time to consider becoming a Tax Inspector.

I will contribute nothing to the government coffers; I will waste unbelievable amounts of revenue on photocopying; and everyone I inspect will find themselves on the end of unbelievable tax rebates, backdated with incredibly generous interest payments.

Obviously I’ll have to beat myself with a nail-studded lash every evening, in strict penance, but maybe we libertarians should stop trying to avoid the state, and infect it instead, to bring the beast down? But maybe they have just got me beaten? Is this what they want me to do, to become another mindlessly destructive deadbeat drone?

Or is there another way out of this hole, to stop me entering this realm of madness? All help and bona fide US passports, stamped ‘Portsmouth, New Hampshire’, gratefully received.

BTW, if there is a man in Britain who thinks he hates Gordon Brown more than me, I am afraid you are mistaken. For it is impossible to hate Gordon Brown more than me without your head blowing off. I am the daddy.