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One of the most appealing aspects of a libertarian outlook is simplicity. It is often the case that when one examines, in greater depth, what initially appears to be a libertarian conundrum, it proves not to be. One such faux-dilemma, suggested to me by Alan K. Henderson’s comments to Andy’s post below, is the extent to which liberty can be threatened by non-state interests.
This can be the basis for populist political crusades against “Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, even “Big Food”. The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of “real competition”: to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced “tolerance” of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.
A similar dilemma is suggested by considering the plight of those in Northern Ireland who have fallen foul of paramilitaries. It matters little to a person tortured or exiled on threat of death whether his tormentors are acting for the state or a paramilitary group, Yet so-called human rights bodies such as Amnesty International, pay little attention to the human rights of such individuals, reserving their comments for infringements by state forces. Glenn Reynolds struck a chord when he cheered David Trimble for pointing this out. Needless to say this did not go down too well with some of the socialists and nationalists who comment at Slugger O’Toole. The conundrum is that surely a libertarian can agree with Amnesty’s justification: It is proper to be more concerned by state abuses than actions by private agents.
In examining this “conundrum” it also evaporates but leads to a surprising, counter-intuitive insight. In the segregated, working class urban ‘bantustans’ of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries are in a position to exert punishment and enforce exiles because they have been ceded a monopoly of violence. By the state. Local hostility to police forces means they are reluctant to carry out normal policing and individuals are prevented from defending themselves. This gives the paramilitaries a free run. Though they are nominal antagonists, the IRA effectively operates a monopoly of violence backed by the British state. The plight of its victims should be the proper concern of any agency which professes to uphold human rights.
French anti-terror police have arrested five people suspected of links with the Real IRA. This is the splinter group of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process (such as it may be) and has been blamed for a series of attacks since breaking away from the IRA. The most serious was the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence.
The suspects were all French nationals and they are suspected of involvement in a support network for the Irish group. They were held after police discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition outside the ferry port of Dieppe.
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening…
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.
Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever… that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.
You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as ‘hate speech’ by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships… and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.
And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.
I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that…The state is not your friend.
More and faster please.
As a libertarian I shall boycott Ryanair on political grounds while that state- backed parasite Michael O’Leary is in charge.
Before I explain, my apologies to Andy Duncan, for I intend to exercise the privilege of a Samizdatista and make my comment on his posting below a posting in itself. I want lots of people to read it and think as I do.
Why am I so against O’Leary? No, it is not his cheap flights (in themselves cheap flights are a good thing), nor his not paying dividends (I neither know nor care about dividends), nor his safety record (take the risk or don’t: up to you), nor his comments about wishing to be a dictator (unimportant bombast), nor the environment (a side issue: to protect it, privatise it), nor his intention to move his business elsewhere if the bureacrats mess him about (I actively like that bit).
It’s because he intends to make his airline strong by massive compulsory purchase of people’s homes, homes they love and desperately want to keep, so that airports can be expanded. Stansted Airport is the one I know about personally, but I stress that state compulsory purchase for any airport anywhere is as clear a violation of liberty as you will ever see. Like force-advocates everywhere O’Leary has a pep-talk about how it’s all necessary for the greater good, adding a positively Stakhanovite spiel about how Britain must compete with France and Germany. I stress that he doesn’t merely go along with this because he can’t imagine any other way; he is an enthusiast.
Also my neighbour saw him speak and said he was an arrogant git.
I don’t know if AynRand.org runs an annual awards ceremony, but if they do, I’d like to nominate Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, for the Hank Rearden Award for Top Quality Businessman of the Year. Check out this piece, in today’s Telegraph.
Just to tempt you, here’s some quotes:
We are never paying a dividend as long as I live and breathe and as long as I’m the largest individual shareholder.
It gets better:
Go to Waterside [BA headquarters] and tell Rod [BA’s chief executive] he’s going to grow profits by 12pc this year and he’d have an orgasm… God speed [Rod]. You’re doing an outstanding job. Keep it up.
Our friends, the EU, are also thinking of prosecuting Ryanair on some spurious grounds of whether Ryanair received state aid at Charleroi airport, its Brussels’ base. O’Leary describes this as:
Regulatory bullsh*t.
Excellent! Michael O’Leary has also said that if the EU rule against him, he will shut Charleroi down, and sack its 3,000 workforce. He rounded off this promise, in typically uncompromising fashion, with the following statement:
I’ve no intention of making life easy for bureaucrats.
Bravo, sir! Unfortunately for Dagny Taggart-style ladies everywhere, multi-millionaire Michael O’Leary is getting hitched soon, though he’s not letting it put him off his financial stride:
The reception is going to be cheap. The honeymoon is going to kill me.
Though recently, his thoughts have also strayed to politics and sport:
I think a right-wing dictatorship led by me would not only improve the Irish economy but the Irish football team too.
What a dude. I’ve got some Irish blood in me. If Michael O’Leary ever becomes Prime Minister of Ireland, I wonder if they’ll let me swap passports? I quite fancy Dundalk, which remarkably, is also the home town of The Corrs.
Brendan O’Neill has been lamenting the postponement of elections in Northern Ireland, pointing out this is profoundly anti-democratic. He is of course entirely correct.
However as long as the state is allowed to have more or less unlimited potential power over civil society, it cannot be unexpected that in a tribal place like Ulster, folks in a given community are going to be terrified of The Others having their hands on the levers of power. I suspect trying to share so much power is at worst a futile hope leading to more violence and at best, a Mexican stand-off.
Surely at least part of the solution is to simply bind ALL political power in Northern Ireland hand and foot with a written constitution that places pretty much every aspect of life that really matters off-limits to the vagaries of democratic politics. Worried about those ‘dirty Fenian Tagues poisoning our schools’? So abolish state educational conscription completely and leave it to churches, community groups, socialist-group-hug-collectives, business guilds, whoever, that way the ‘Tagues’ do not have to worry about the ‘stinking Orangemen’ doing the same to their children. Just apply this to all the centralised power functions (such as planning and land use) for full juicy goodness. Once you have done that, it would seem to me that much of the reason to try and bomb people into/out of power becomes… well… pointless.
Democracy is fine, just as long as the people being voted for cannot actually do anything. Think outside the (ballot) box. Be a radical.
There will be no ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes of Gulf War II and, given the current political and cultural climate, I suppose that is understandable. However, one would have thought that Mr.Blair might at least see the benefit of a suitably discreet pause before publicly shafting them:
Tony Blair is prepared to radically scale down the Royal Irish Regiment as part of his proposals to persuade the IRA to destroy all its weapons and halt all paramilitary operations, army and political sources claimed yesterday.
So it appears as if the Royal Irish Regiment, whose members fought with such gallantry and tenacity in the Battle for Basra as far back as…ooh, let’s see…a few days ago, are to be issued with a whole new set of marching orders. Thanks very much, chaps, now fuck off!
The irony can surely only be desribed as breath-taking. Whilst neither Saddam’s Ba’athist thugs nor his Republican Guards could put so much as a dent in them, their very existance as a fighting unit is about to be sacrificed by a government that will stop at nothing in a (vain) attempt to appease the brooding war-dogs of Sinn Fein/IRA.
Members of Sinn Fein/IRA have been protesting against the war in Iraq, both yesterday and today, as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair meet in Belfast to discuss the shape of post-war Iraq and the Northern Irish peace process.
For some strange reason,
Ba’athist Socialism’s crimes do not get any mention…
I wonder why?
That the Marxists of Sinn Fein/IRA should be making common cause with Iraqi Ba’athist Socialism should be no surprise, but that they should be publicly supporting them at a time when the torture chambers and corpse filled warehouses of the regime’s victims are now coming to light is very revealing not just of the true character of these people but is a measure of just how out of touch they are. To be honest I can hardly contain my delight at their public display of sheer unalloyed stupidity.
As US and British soldiers fight and die together in Iraq to overthrow a mass murdering tyranny, I wonder how this scene in Ulster will look on television screens in Boston? I look forward seeing what happens the next time someone tries a little fund raising for the Irish Republican ‘Army’ across the water.
Hello America! We love you!
As stories of the Irish Guards operating skillfully in Basra with tactics honed in Northern Ireland are recounted, I hope a few more noisy protests from the Sinn Fein supporters also make their way across the world’s computer and TV screens as they make an interesting contrast.
Irish Guards snipers in Iraq demonstrate the true meaning of Anglosphere solidarity
Irish Guards in Basra
And British eyes are crying.
The Irish have voted ‘yes’ in the second referendum on endorsing the Nice Treaty.
Depressing, but predictable given the weight of the government support and the quantity of EU bribe money behind the ‘yes’ campaign.
I don’t suppose a ‘no’ vote would have scuppered the EU or even slowed it down in any material sense, but it would have dented their own sense of inevitability. Seems now that resistance is, indeed, futile.
The bad guys are winning.
Bugger.
It had to come out eventually. This week “soldier 027” gave testimony on the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry. He is under careful protection for now so his buddies won’t get a chance to silence him.
Those events of long ago were target practice. The Para’s were told by an officer before they went out “they might get kills”. And they did. They opened fire on unarmed civilian demonstrators and killed thirteen people. Intentionally. With careful aim. Soldier 027 said he believes one soldier was responsible for up to ten of the body count. While his buddies were dropping demonstrators, he was scanning the line of them with his scope, unable to find any threat.
His buddies agreed to a story. His own statements after the event were modified without his knowledge. This shows his superiors were involved and culpable.
It is as if the US National Guard sent to Selma, Alabama did so in hopes of either getting their first kill1 or adding to their tally, shot a bunch of civil rights workers… and then Johnson claimed the unarmed NAACP demonstrators fired on them… and then by the time an inquiry of “appropriate persons” was convened, the US Army had forged the written record to back up the claim of innocence.
One must note the Paratroop Regiment simply did not belong in Derry. They are an elite war-fighting group intended for serious kill or be killed combat, not police work. I should like to see the persons responsible for that deployment tried and hung for the cold blooded murder of 13 people and the responsibility for all of what came after.
It is not hard to understand why a community would rally around those who would fight back, and I know from discussions over beers in West Belfast that back in those early days of the insurrection the Para’s were particular targets.
And they brought it on themselves.
1 = Unfortunately the Ohio National Guard corrected this oversight. The State is not your friend.
In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or ‘The Naive Idiot’ as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise.
As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making ‘landmark speeches’ about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, “Sinn Fein’s” political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:
Pat Doherty, the Sinn Fein vice-president, said: “The IRA is not Sinn Fein’s private army. Sinn Fein is in government because of its electoral mandate and its absolute commitment to the peace process.”
And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party’s private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody ‘domestic’ demographic solution (i.e. the way it was ‘solved’ in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware.
So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain’s incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to.
I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years… but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do.
In what can only be the yet another indication the the EU intends to ignore even the semblance of democratic norms when it does not suit them, whilst at the same time wrapping themselves in the cloak of legitimacy that the European ‘Parliament’ allegedly brings:
Günter Verheugen, enlargement Commissioner, said on Wednesday, that it would be difficult to interpret a second No by the Irish: “If a treaty is rejected twice in a country and that country knows exactly that this treaty is a precondition for the conclusions of enlargement negotiations, the outside world cannot make the judge whether the rejections means enlargement or something else.”
So if Ireland votes NO to EU enlargement, Günter Verheugen feels it might in fact mean something other than NO to enlargement. I suspect I understand the source of the misunderstanding: When translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Greek and then into Danish and then back into English, the result was:
A pint of Guinness please
However when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into German and then into Swedish and then back into English, the result was:
Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Murphy
Yet when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Portuguese and then into Italian and then back into English, the result was:
We are just a bunch of Paddy jokers, pay no attention to us
No wonder poor Günter Verheugen is confused as to the meaning of the word NO.
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