Samizdata

…that project-a-keyboard one you just mentioned, Brian, is the daftest. You’d have to clear your desk before using it.

If full moons make people go bonkers or turn into wolves, maybe the lack of a full moon makes people po-faced and excessively serious.

Jason Soon*, who like the fragrant Natalie Solent is a high quality blogger who is on the side of the angels, also does not seem to have figured out that Tony Millard was actually joking. The fact Tony’s article appeared on Libertarian Samizdata was a significant clue that the wine tasting apparatus might be lodged in the cheek.

*[Ed. Jason’s archive links do not seem to be working at the moment (a frequent problem with blogger alas), so in the meantime just go to Jason Soon and scroll down to the article Un-libertarian samizdata to see why we are spanking him]

Now to the serious part of my blog post:

Tony Blair and David Blunkett have promised to scrap all British restrictions on firearms ownership, affirm the state’s commitment to individual civil liberties, repeal the Town and Country Planning and Land Act and replace the statue of proto-fascist Oliver Cromwell in front of Parliament with a statue of Margaret Thatcher wielding a sword and standing astride the prostrate body of the fallen Arthur Scargill…

Tony Millard has a unique Chianti fuelled view of how to revitalise rural economies

Whilst I agree with the general premise that our welfare/benefit system is responsible for many of society’s ills, I am more concerned at the undermining effect of fossil fuels on the “working classes” (for want of a better word – meant in its historical sense, i.e. those with more forearm than forehead).

The artificially low cost per watt of diesel, particularly the untaxed, “farm” or “red” sort, has a hidden crippling effect on those parts of society whose principal selling point to employers is “grunt”. By providing an artificially low alternative to the working classes’ human energy, we radically reduce their earning power and status, with all the miserable consequences that that entails. Taxing fuel at a level to raise pump prices to say six times their current level, with a commensurate (i.e. total tax-take) reduction in income tax would have a number of benefits

1. augmentation in the status of the musclebound

2. re-focusing of local economies on local production

3. reinforcement of the rural economy by increased teleworking, local spending, and farm jobs

Basic manufacturing is already in terminal decline – the West can never again realistically be expected to compete with the likes of the Chinese in this area – and the service industry is less fuel price sensitive, and as such I am not yet convinced of the arguments that suggest a huge rise in imported products.

Pride and sense of purpose is an excellent societal glue – let’s re-value honest toil.

Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)

I think the muitbats have mated with the froonbats and had baby smelibels in your brain, because I have only the vaguest idea of what your post to me was about. Most of your readers will have even less idea, because at least half of them are so benighted as not to make their daily pilgrimage to my blog. I slipped that one in rather nicely, don’t you think? Were you saying that I could keep the proceeds of my now-uneccessary keyboard fund because I have said some nice things about the Queen sometimes and the British Empire wasn’t so bad? If so, I quite agree with both propositions (a decision helped along by explicit permission from the donors) while not quite giving my full intellectual assent to the chain of reasoning between them.

(What with all these jolly little interjections and in-jokes, this blog is sounding more and more like The Corner all the time. This is no bad thing. It is a cause dear to Perry’s heart that Jonah Goldberg should one day come weeping and penitent to our door, saying brokenly between sobs, “I’m so sorry that I foolishly said that I was so mighty that I needed no hits from an outfit calling itself “Libertarian Samizdata”. Not only do I concede that I copied your format in forming The Corner, I also humbly beg you to take us over, now that the Libertarian Revolution has arrived and President Sullivan is in charge of the Committee for Public Safety and Rending Conservatives In Their Gobberwarts, In A Totally Non-Coercive Manner Of Course.)

Back to the British Empire. I agree with you. Empires are wrong, but as Empires go the British wasn’t so bad. And part of the reason for that not-so-badness was indeed the fair trials for the “fuzzie-wuzzies”. I seem to recall that a very similar remark to that made by Corporal Jones was made by one of the characters in Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast when the party land in the alternative universe where Britain rules Mars as a penal colony. “We may be shot,” said one of the good guys, “but we’ll be shot after a fair trial with a wigged judge and a defence counsel.” Maybe not those exact words, but that was the sense of it.

Hello Natalie. I didn’t send any money for your keybo8rd because I too am a cheapskate. But keep it all, I say. We’re British. We have our reputation in the USA to live down to. Over there, us Brits are a bunch of sciving scrounging parasitical sciver scrounger parasites, or so it said in The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the film they changed the Brit sciver etc. journo to an American. No wonder it bombed.

We’re scroungers, that is to say, when we’re not tormenting the world’s ethnic minorities in their countries of origin. In connection with David Carr’s spat with the warblogwatchers, concerning another trans-Atlantic stereotype, one of my favourite lines in a TV sitcom was in Dad’s Army (which, for the benefit of uncultured, can’t finish a sentence without a script to read it from, ignorant of everything outside America, cameras on enormous beerguts, Macdonald building, gas guzzling, napalming, friendly fire killing, plastically surgicated and let’s face it just plain crazy Americans) is about the British WW2 Home Guard. Ex-member of the Thin Red Line Corporal Jones the Butcher, during a discussion of the merits of the British legal system, said:

“We always gave the fuzzy wuzzies a fair trial before we shot ’em.”

The British Empire in one line.

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