Whenever a politician starts talking about “the children”, keep one eye on your wallet and the other on your liberty.
– Anonymous
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The humbling of the WTO not only worsens economic prospects for the developing countries (as well as for the rest of the world) but also shifts the balance of global political power from poor to rich – perhaps decisively, and who knows for how many years. That is what the developing countries’ champions are so busy celebrating.
— Former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler, via Glenn, to whom Samizdata remains loyal.
— Salam Pax, summarising how quite a lot of us actually feel, writing in the Guardian. Actually, go read the whole thing. The descriptions of how the Ba’athists attempted to censor the internet and how people got around it that follow are quite interesting. This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future. The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. I don’t think philosophically there’s a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
You might think that being your brother’s keeper is fine. But when Tony Blair says that he is his brother’s keeper, what he actually means is that he wants to force everyone else to be this. The statement isn’t about him at all. If he really subscribed to the moral code he advocates, surely he would donate most of his income to the poor. Then again, when you hear middle-class socialists demanding higher taxes, and you ask them how much extra they personally should pay, they often reply back that only “the rich” – people richer than they are – should pay more. Judging cultures is not the same as judging races. One’s race is unchosen; no-one can be condemned for membership of a racial group. However, culture is chosen, so a person can be condemned for their acceptance of an immoral culture. The equivocation of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it is based on the racist view that one’s race determines one’s ideas and outlook.
— Mark Steyn’s advice to people who would send him e-mail. Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did. This constant intervention by government in tasks that belong to the (with thanks to David Goldstone) When I leave university and get a job, I want to live and die by my own efforts, but if they are especially productive, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour without being penalised by the state for my success. I don’t want to see people starve, or to go without basic needs, but rather than having the state steal my money and use it to pay them to stay poor, I want them to have the opportunity to work, earn and live for themselves. I also want, through free charity, to be able to decide for myself in whose aid the money I donate will be spent: perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription; perhaps I won’t think that the fact that one has been born in closer geographical proximity to me gives them a greater claim to the money I worked for. I don’t want these choices to be taken from me and decided centrally, by those whose very jobs require them to please as many local people as they can. – David Bean, part of the St Andrews Liberty Club’s new committee, writing on The Liberty Log |
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