We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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No, the British state is not financially bankrupt, at least not quite yet, but thus quoth Dave Cameron…
“Because the legacy we have been left is so bad, the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough. But people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now […] instead of your taxes going to pay for things we want, like schools, hospitals and policing your money, the money you work so hard for, is going on paying the interest on our national debt.” ”
These remarks by David Cameron might look like something that would get a thumbs up from the Samizdata mob yes?
Well no. “Unavoidably tough”… I have no doubt whatsoever that these cuts are something Cameron would indeed prefer to avoid, and therein lies the reason I despise him just as much as I have ever done. The cuts to government spending, which should be an order of magnitude greater just as starters, are not being done because allowing the appropriative state to grow so vast is morally wrong or intellectually foolish, no, it is being done but because it cannot currently be avoided.
If it could be, what Cameron really wanted to do was increase the size of the state’s appropriation by £ 25 billion.
That is what he intended to do before he realised it was simply impossible: never ever allow that key fact vanish down the memory hole. He is not making the moral case for a smaller state, because he does not want a smaller state, he is just discussing dealing with the current economic crisis, nothing more. In this respect he is the ‘anti-Thatcher’, who at least made the intellectual case for a less pervasive state (even if she then allowed Norman Tebbit to destroy the very political cadre that sprung up to support that view).
Could it not be that what “we” want, and certainly what “we” need, is not for more skoolzanhopitalz funded by the state? What “we” need is for more wealth to be created, not more stuff to be funded by money diminished by being filtered through the wealth destroying tax system and then mis-allocated by politics.
A superb video from the TaxPayers’ Alliance asks…
… how long do you work for the tax man?
Mr Congdon said the dominant voices in US policy-making – Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, as well as Mr Summers and Fed chair Ben Bernanke – are all Keynesians of different stripes who “despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money”
– This is the, er, money quote, so to speak, from an article by the erratic Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, quoting Tim Congdon
So when Hilary Clinton states that maintaining stability on the peninsula was “critical”, surely a solution seems to be staring everyone in the face.
- Keeping tens of thousand of US troops in South Korea is expensive for the hapless US taxpayer
- China would rather not have US forces stationed anywhere in Korea
- North Korea will soon be capable of actually delivering nuclear weapons
- North Korea has an antiquated military and a busted economy and therefore no ability to fight a long war
- North Korea is clearly lead by deranged madmen prone to attack South Korea (i.e. torpedo their ships) for no good reason
- South Korea has a formidable and modern military
So…
Bite the bullet, so to speak. Give South Korea a nudge and whatever backing it needs to blow the living shit out of the North and reunify the country. They have the wherewithal to do most of the heavy lifting themselves and the casus belli is a legal slam dunk.
Result? Short term death and misery, for sure… but long term geopolitical stability for the region because:
- The most repressive regime on the entire planet will be history
- No longer any justification for stationing significant US forces on China’s doorstep
The backroom deal is obvious: China throws North Korea to the wolves and US promises to get out of the post-unification Korean peninsula.
This has the making of a win-win-win-win for China, the hapless occupants of that open air prison called North Korea, nuclear threatened South Korea and the ever burdened US taxpayer. Extra added ‘win’ can also be added to the scenario if the leadership in Pyongyang end up on meat hooks (but eating a laser guided 500 kg bomb also works).
A ‘muslim’ babe called Rimah Fakih wins a beauty pageant in the USA and apparently this is a Hezbollah conspiracy.
Rimah Fakih strikes a nice Islamic pose much favoured in Hezbollah circles whilst onlookers chant “Allahu Akbar!”
Rimah Fakih contemplates sharia in Michigan
Rimah Fakih models the latest in approved burqa fashions Yup, clearly a sign of how deep radical muslim infiltration of key American institutions go. Moreover as we all know that beauty pageant winners are known for their original thinking and deep political insights, and moreover some radical in Lebanon (this one, not this one) shares her family name apparently, the Islamisation of the good ol’ USA is clearly at hand.
I have posted these images as a wake up call to American to act before they are overrun with bikini wearing pole dancers intent on destroying the home of the free and land of the brave.
No need to thank me… just another high minded public service from samizdata.net 
Can it be? Do my eyes deceive me? An MP… a Tory MP… who seems to have a grasp of economics!
How long before this guy gets a visit from the party whip advising him that insightful talk about real world economics might be harmful to his career, capice?
It is amusing to be honest. The Tory party faces a PM with no actual mandate, who is as charismatic as a bowl of cold Scottish porridge and who has presided over economically calamitous times… and the best the Tory Party can do is… 36.1 percent.
I now look forward to some bracing political paralysis and hopefully the unedifying mess of a hanged… I mean hung parliament… hanged would be most edifying indeed. With a little luck the inevitable steaming pile of discordant political prima donnas will further discredit the whole establishment with their antics.
I can only hope that in the coming months this period will do lasting damage to the Tory party in order to provide a wedge of daylight for the likes of Libertarians and UKIP to exploit.
The ‘Middle of the Road’ is where you generally find road kill.
Benedict Brogan wrote a Telegraph article called “Election 2010: a bracing reminder of the price we pay for political freedom“, in which he notes the cost to Britain’s young soldiers in Afghanistan in juxtaposition with the scenes of election tumult.
Well I can think of several arguably good reasons for western troops to be fighting in Afghanistan but I sure hate to think of anyone dying for political freedom… freedom, sure… but that qualifying word in front does rather change things. Politics is what we call the struggle to control the means of collective coercion. It may be a process we cannot avoid but it is, at best, a necessary evil… and most of the time it is just evil without the necessary.
Freedom is essential and worth fighting for… but anyone who died to defend political anything died for all the wrong reasons. What does ‘political freedom’ even mean in Britain? The right to vote who gets to rape you?
Britain’s political system is not something to get all misty eyed about because most politics has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” but rather forcing people to do things they would rather not do. It is for the most part about people using the proxy violence of the state to take things they want and punish people they do not like far more often than it is about dealing with the genuine collective threats of plague, disorder and war.
And as for this being an ‘extraordinary’ election, as the linked article claims, I cannot recall one where it mattered less which of the largely interchangeable plonkers on offer gets into Number 10. All that will change is which of set of rapacious thugs says who gets snout space at Westminster’s trough filled with other people’s money. But of course many will vote Tory on the ‘lesser evil’ principle and no doubt act surprised when Cameron more or less does all the things he has said he will do to prop up the intrusive regulatory welfare state. People voting for an ever so slightly lesser evil (and quite possibly not even that) will get exactly what they vote for… another evil government. Nice one, guys.
Today is the day that nothing important really changes.
The notion that it is the state’s business how fat people are is grotesque but we can thank athlete James Cracknell for giving us a superb example of why it does not matter a tinker’s damn which of the three clowns actually ends up in Downing Street:
Tories have what it takes to tackle obesity. The Conservatives have a sporting solution to Britain’s ticking health time bomb, says James Cracknell
The same relentless statist chipping away at civil society will happen regardless, egged on by countless busy bodies like James Cracknell.
Mind.your.own.business.
The country needs a Conservative government with a strong majority in order to tackle the enormous challenges it faces, says The Sunday Telegraph
Well then what a pity that none of the main parties are actually offering a ‘conservative’ option to vote for.
Despite the parties’ attempts to capture the all-important middle ground, the differences between them are clear. Labour believes that only the state can solve the country’s economic and social problems. The Conservatives, by contrast, believe that the growth of the central state is the cause of the problem, not its solution, and want to call upon the invigorating power of citizens and communities.
And this, gentle reader, is why the current editorial of the Sunday Telegraph is fit for nothing more than lining the bottom of a bird cage.
Cameron has made it abundantly clear over the last few years that he, just like Labour and the Lib Dems, sees the state as the centre around which civil society must rotate, regardless of selective rhetoric to the contrary. Ignore the dissembling phraseology and just stay focused on the numbers.
And what do the numbers say? They say that risible balderdash like “the invigorating power of citizens and communities” is just code for Tory directed statism, which differs in verbiage and style, but not substance, from Labour directed statism. The litmus test to see if there is truly any difference is very simple to administer:
Will the state’s net take of the nation’s wealth be smaller or larger at the end of David Cameron’s first (and hopefully last) term in office? Will it be less by even so much as a single penny?
Well lets see what Dave has to say on that subject…
Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year – rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers
Oh I just never tire of linking to that article, filled as it is with radiant doublespeak but oh so revealing numbers, the empty Tory verbiage of classical liberalism varnished over the numbers of Keynesian statism: that truly epic insincerity that has become Cameron’s trade mark and which the mainstream media simply accept uncritically.
Strange how much “the invigorating power of citizens and communities” of “Big Society” looks like costing even more that the “Big State” we have today, eh?
“After trying to watch the first debate Maggie said, ‘they irritate me’. She is particularly angered by the way all three do their utmost not to answer questions.”
– Margaret Thatcher’s apparent view of the recent election debate. Attributed to her by Katie Hind
The economy in Britain and much of the world is in dire straits and it would not be an exaggeration to say we have entered a period of history that far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’, historians looking back may well call it the ‘crisis of regulatory statism’.
And that is what makes the current UK elections… and indeed the recent US election… so utterly uninteresting.
Political parties on both sides of the imaginary left/right divide are in near total agreement that question at hand is not “how do we change the state of affairs that got us into our current predicament” but rather “how do we manage this crisis best in order to preserve the status quo”. The one thing that everyone in politics agrees on is Britain’s vast regulatory welfare state is an immovable given. This is literally beyond debate and exists at the meta-contextual level …all that is actually up for discussion is how best to preserve it.
Commentary in the mainstream media accepts as axiomatic that the parties represent the struggle between laissez faire and regulation, between capital and labour, between right (whatever that means) and left (whatever that means).
Indeed the parties themselves employ the same rhetorical markers to differentiate their products as they have always done: the so-called ‘conservatives’ speak of “prudence” and “responsibility” and “living within our means”… Labour and the LibDems speak in terms of “fairness” and “equality”… and these terms are simply accepted at face value and repeated by most of the media as if the choices on offer were between chalk and cheese, and as all the parties benefit from this differentiation, this linguistic legerdemain is unchallenged and uncontroversial.
Yet the choices on offer are in truth more akin to that between Coke or Pepsi… the ‘sacred rite of democratic empowerment’ actually comes down to being given the option of selecting rapist A, B or C and then being told not to complain when you get raped because, after all, you got to vote.
And so we see the media portraying David Cameron as Thatcher the Milk Snatcher reborn… a dangerous welfare wrecker when he states that he intends to, and I quote from a Daily Telegraph article last year:
Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year – rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: “That’s not what they should be thinking. They should be thinking this would be a responsible government that would make government live within its means, that would relieve some of the debt burden being piled up on our children.”
So the Tory party, those slash-and-burn laissez faire wildmen, wanted to take £25 billion more out of the productive economy in taxes so that the state can spend it… at a time when the economy is actually contracting… and somehow that will relieve rather than increase the burden on “our children”. Yup, clearly an ardent capitalist is our Old Dave… it must be so because the media reports him saying he is all for markets largely without comment.
But the core truth here is that if by some dark miracle Brown’s Labour wins, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. If the even more spendthrift LibDems win, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. However if Cameron’s Tories win, we will have… a vast regulatory welfare state… oh, and fox hunting will be permitted again.
And yet the idea that there are meaningful differences between any of these gits is a given even though all they are really discussing is how their different approaches to rearranging the same elements can preserve the very state that got us where we are now. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.
Nigel Farage of UKIP at least talks of sacking two million public sector workers and having a bonfire of the QUANGOs… making him the only half way visible politician making any truly radical statements at all. Sadly Farage also seems to think “quantitative easing”… i.e. just running the printing presses in order to re-inflate the very credit bubble that has been the trigger for much of the current woes, is just fine and dandy, so I do question his grasp of economics, not to mention causality… but by the standards of current discourse he is Ludwig Von Mises reborn and perhaps in time Pearson can smack some sense into him on that score.
But UKIP will not be running the next parliament and so it does not matter which of the three plonkers you vote for because in effect the same person will still be in 10 Downing Street: and that would be the ring-wraith-like presence of Tony Blair of course… or Tory Blair if you like… the name and party hardly matters because that grin remains like some demonic Cheshire Cat in the sky over Westminster.
What did you say your name was again?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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