Randomly Selected Article or Link

Everyone should read this. Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: Sir Ian Blair Says New Terror Attack Could Lead to Internment. What you make of it is up to you of course, but such a scenario has been in the "narrative" of many dismissed as conspiracy theorists since 9/11 and probably before.

Of course there's a world of difference between a more or less random act of terror by terrorists and the authorities cooking something up in order to be able to impose such restrictions (the most strident would even suggest, in the US at least, the aim is martial law and a suspension of the constitution). But if the establishment is even discussing the idea - and of course we must be open to the possibility that this is Iain Blair speculating on what people will clamour for rather than leading the charge himself - it is truly apalling.

Guardian Unlimited Money | News_ | Study reveals financial crisis of the 18-40s:

Patrick Collinson
Tuesday March 28, 2006
The Guardian

An official government study into Britain's personal finances reveals a lost generation of 18- to 40-year-olds unable to cope with debts and soaring house prices, with alarmingly low levels of savings and little hope of building a decent pension.

The study, by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Bristol University, published today, is the biggest of its kind undertaken in Britain. It paints a picture of a generational divide fuelled by higher education costs and the collapse of company pension schemes - with 42% of adults now with no pension and 70% with no meaningful savings.

The FSA will call today for a new national strategy to improve Britain's financial capability, including workplace-based financial seminars targeted at 4 million employees; making personal finance more prominent in the national curriculum from 2008; and "money doctor" packs which will be sent to 1.5 million new and prospective parents each year.

What a typical and completely ineffectual response. A few leaflets and seminars to tell people to do better. Whilst it is still important to ensure that those who have worked all their lives now have a decent quality of life in retirement, we need to radically rethink our economic and fiscal policies to address this looming generation of have-nots, including me!

All of this bullshit about us being better off than we ever have been and so on is worth nothing if that better off means that we slave longer and harder for it. The monetary system has created a similar problem to the feudal systems that preceded mass home ownership, only this time there is little way out because people just do not have the capability to build up that same asset backing as previous generations had.

Forbes reported recently that:

Making a billion just isn't what it used to be. In our inaugural ranking of the world’s richest people 20 years ago, we uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March. Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.

India's quota, 23 people worth between them $99bn compares with per capita GDP of just $3,400. Lakshmi Mittal's fortune increased in one year by the equivalent of SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND UK median incomes. Now don't get me wrong, I do not believe in a zero sum wealth game. I'm not some rabid trot that thinks they only get rich because others are poor. They get rich because money attracts money, because of the system that they are so good at playing. Because assets are transferred from poor to rich through landlordism (check out how many of Britain's rich list as rich because they own large tracts of our common wealth, the land of the UK itself that the rest of us need to pay them to occupy) and debt money.

This is not a call for some kind of punitive taxation - what's the point if, like Philip and Cynthia Green you can go through a year paying something of the order of five figures only in tax anyway, but for a new predistributive system that allows us all to share in our birthright, this planet, equitably and gives people a chance.

I read recently city councillors saying the planning process is not political. Indeed, it is not meant to be. But it is ever more apparent that it is highly political with a “small p”.

I strongly supported the move to planning decisions taken at area committees, and advocated even more public participation than happens now. I hoped this would enable people (and councillors) to understand why certain decisions are taken, ‘owning’ the resulting decision as a local community and, crucially, bearing the costs of appeals against adverse decisions.

But now councillors appear to make the decisions they think people in the room would like them to make, whether right or wrong, and leave the appeals process to sort it out afterwards. That way they get the voters’ credit for defending local opinion and let the Planning Inspectorate take the blame for decisions that run counter to local feeling.

As a result, more than two thirds of appeals against decisions by the city council are successful; and all appeals against decisions made by councillors at area committees.

Councillors – you are not helping people to understand and own planning issues, merely raising false hopes that you must know are likely to be dashed by Inspectors. You are costing taxpayers money and delaying much needed development (particularly housing) by over a year. With deep regret, it may be time for planning decisions to be handled centrally again.

So David Cameron is apparently going to explain that we need to learn to understand the "hoodie culture" better - that for many it is a way not of hiding aggression and criminal intent but of "keeping your head down" retreating into anonymity in an hostile world. That instead of opprobrium youngsters need nurturing to make the correct life-choices in a fast moving bewildering (and I'd add very unequal) society.

It reminds me of Germaine Greer's "The Boy" of 2003, a book extolling the real beauty of teenage males that got her some bad press with some decrying her as a middle aged pederast. I recall not buying it myself because I felt it might feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. I heard her explain the rationale behind the book at the time though. What she was trying to do was rekindle a sense of self-confidence; that boys in particular were, through their fashion statements - baggy trousers, hoodies and the like - reacting to being constantly put down, as inherently criminal, as "thickos", as failures in a feminist world that said we can do without men.

For years we have been showered with statistics about how boys are in fact doing worse than girls, at school, at university, at life. Now sure, we've had generations, perhaps millennia, where girls and women were second class citizens, chattels, not worth the same as men, and that had to be addressed. But maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Of course I'm prepared to accept that in fact women are simply just the superior being and that levelling the playing field has begun to allow that inherent superiority to shine through. But even if that is the case, it means we need to pay more attention now to boys and men, to give them the step up to realise their potentials and so on.

When I was a councillor it was a very common complaint that there were "gangs of youths" just hanging around, intimidatingly, frightening old ladies going about their ordinary business at the local shop, the chippie or whatever. Cameron is right certainly in one respect - Labour's, and society as a whole's it seems, response to this has been to criminalise them, with ASBOs, curfews, banning their attire from public places in the name of a surveillance society that wants to record our every move, Big Brother like. It seems sometimes that it's not a case of if you offend, but when you offend, we will be able to spot you (and, by extension, punishment will be swift).

The axiom that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide is Labour's mantra for centralising control of our lives and is making people feel that their privacy is under attack. And if you're young and perhaps just a little bit naughty (weren't we all? As DC should know!) and you don't quite have a full understanding of your rights you are going to be tempted to retreat into anonymity.

A friend of mine took a bunch of kids from his council estate on a couple of overseas trips to Oxford's twin cities of Bonn and Leiden last year. Some of them had ASBOs. Whatever he allowed his name put to in his Labour election leaflets this May (he lost anyway) it made him realise that ASBOs were not really the answer to many of these problems - that a little bit of TLC was what they needed to settle down and make the right kind of choices when faces with them. To have some self-confidence.

And then there was Tom Conti's contribution to "This Week" a couple of years back where he speculated that if we throw huge investment at education, that if we make schools, especially in the early years, places of respite from a hostile world, and, in some cases, hostile home lives, with class sizes of just half a dozen in the most formative years so that the environment is more family than cattle-market, that we will foster a sense of personal responsibility that will eventually feed through into massive savings in currently state provided services (especially health and social services related).

Can we afford not to address these issues? And do it better than criminal sanctions? Respect does indeed begin at home, and when prominent, and one presumes well brought up for want of nothing, young political campaigners have so little respect for the "little people" in the council estates that, when caught short, they feel no compunction about pissing in the alleyways of someone else's neighbourhood, maybe the example from the very top could be a bit better!

Whatever the answer, the youngsters of today are our future. They are ours (well not mine personally you understand - no chance of that!), a part of our communities. If our communities are outlawing them in the formative years, what resentment are we storing up for our future? And boy, do we need more people like this to change things.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, education, young

Over on the Ludwig von Mises Economics blog last week, Ben O'Neill, an Australian libertarian and academic, wrote a piece against the welfare state in Is the Starving Man Free? and the full article is here:

'Modern "liberals" who advocate the view that government should provide us with the necessities or alleged necessities of life rarely appreciate that this assistance rests on a system of mass robbery and enslavement that is highly inimical to their professed belief in liberty. In fact, the advocates of such policies present them in quite the opposite light, as enhancing our liberty.'

Now, much as I hesitate to go up against an article at the great Mises Institute, this issue goes to the heart of differences between some liberals and some libertarians, though not this liberal libertarian. Indeed it is one of the core messages of the "Liberal Alternative" book we are compiling under the auspices of ALTER, and, to give it a plug, what I will be talking about in the ALTER fringe next Saturday evening in Liverpool, alongside James Graham, Tony Vickers and Vince Cable.

I also believe it gives some libertarians a "bad rap"; seeming to leave the "safety net" to the possible vicissitudes of private charity gives them a "beggar thy neighbour" reputation. Yet Liberals, and before the Ayn Rand/Ludwig von Mises school of libertarianism the mutualists and individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, had a neat response. For the record, I tend to agree that if we take from people what they earn with their own labour and resourcefulness it is coercion and even theft, but there is a source of value that properly belongs to us all, and not, as in the current predominant model, to the occupier - rent.

Benjamin Franklin wrote:

But notwithstanding this increase (of population), so vast is the territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully; and, till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long a laborer for others, but gets a plantation of his own; no man continues long a journeyman to a trade, but goes among these new settlers, and sets up for himself.

[From: Observations Concerning for Increase of Mankind (1751), Sec. 8, Works, Vol. II, p. 225]

If we had free land, nobody would starve, unless that is they could not physically lift a spade to grow their own sustenance. The poor could up-sticks, spread out to the next available plot of unoccupied land and cultivate it. It would be a basic existence to be sure, but one that would not depend on another to provide, by state coercion or by reliance on private charity. And in time, one which could provide the most basic means of providing not just sustenance but opportunities to create wealth.

Now the fact is, we are not in that happy situation Franklin described. We do not have "free land". It is all enclosed. And indeed it would not suit modern, sophisticated, "civilized" (in the sense of "urbanized") humanity well if we did have lots of unused land lying around being unproductive. But the corollary of that is that there is no way the landless poor can sustain themselves without recourse to selling their labour to another. And in that state of desperation where one is about to "starve" one is surely more than most liable to coercion by that other. "Will work for food" maybe a simple slogan, but it hides a desperation likely to be seized upon by the unscrupulous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Then he says: "If I am born into the earth, where is my part? Have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin." ..."Touch any wood or field or house-lot on your peril," cry all the gentlemen of this world; "but you may come and work in ours for us, and we will give you a peice of bread."

[From: The Conservative, A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841]

Now what of the other side of O'Neill and the Mises style libertarians' claim that for the state to take anything from everyone to support the "starving man", to give him his basic needs, is "mass robbery and enslavement"? Well, as I said, I tend to agree that taking anything of what someone has made with his own labour or resourcefulness is theft. It is justified by the "liberals" that O'Neill castigates (that's most of us!) on the several grounds that it prevents a greater evil - the starving man, that it pays for the inputs that enable us to make money from our labour - our education and that of others to work for us, and the somewhat vague assertion that those who have much should give more to support those who have less. But it is still an offense against self-ownership; that which John Locke describes as being able to retain the fruits of our own labour.

But there is value in land that the owner does not create for him or herself. It is two hundred years since David Ricardo showed that rent increases to absorb the extra productivity that can be gained from a good piece of land compared with an inferior piece with no effort from the land owner, as owner. There is a perfectly reasonable strand of libertarianism, known as geolibertarianism, that asserts that since this rent is not earned by the landowner, but created by the expenditure of others, in labour and capital, that gives a particular location more social and commercial attractiveness, it is legitimate to collect this value from owners to compensate those who suffer from lack of land. And in a modern, urbanized economy, this would mean cash with which to satisfy their most basic needs, a "Citizen's Income" allowing them then to sell their labour, their bellies full and their body rested, without having to accept a potentially exploitative bargain.

Unlike taking part of what a person earns from his labour, impinging on his or her self-ownership, this can be justified because it is value that the owner does not earn for themselves, that it does not affect their ability to earn from their labour in future, and as a user fee in return for the state's or community's protection of their right to occupy such a location, a user fee in proportion to the potential natural productivity of that location, whether they make use of that potential productivity or not. Location is a monopoly, protected by the state; libertarians are against monopoly and state protection. It forms a neat, virtuous circle, from which those left without access to free land can be supported without the "mass robbery and enslavement" O'Neill rightly denounces.