Here's the bread, now where's the circus?

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

It's one of the questions we ask, you know, is the government pulling the wool across our eyes? Or worse feeding us bread and circuses so as to take us away from our slavery, our lives tied to the grind of the workplace where we earn money to pay taxes. Taxes that mean the government can give us "services".


And the scaring us - waving the "terrorist threat" before us, speaking of the "fear of crime" at every opportunity and feeding the news media with endless tales of death, disease and illness.


Behind these words lies a central message - the core message of social democracy:

"Everything in the state, nothing outside the state."

From our earliest childhood we are taught of government's benign mission - the lawyers and lawmakers are held up to us as shining beacons of goodness. And to do this as Jane Addams said:

"We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many."

This fascism of the spirit - this denial of independence is the dull curse of the fabian. The belief that a clever elite, sitting over us, can direct towards a better society and more that the route to that better society is through the perfection of people and the denial of individual rights.


This is the corrupted world of nudge - where we hand out the soma to those good enough to comply but punish, cast out, those refuseniks who reject the state's promised betterment. This is the ghastly world where our governors sell us freedom within the collective but punish us should we step beyond that and declare ourselves independent - in the words of Thomas Paine:

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren and to do good is my religion."

This idea of liberty - that rights are innate, not something granted by a benevolent ruler or else passed to us on tablets of gold - is crushed by the social democratic groupthink and the evils of 'progressivism'. There is no liberty in government. As someone once said:

"I am not a number, I am a free man."

So tell me, where are the circuses?

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Why you should vote...

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Why we should all vote.

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As well as my own meanderings round the matter of voting and not voting, I have been struck by two recent musings from a couple of more thoughtful – and probably wiser than I – bloggers on the matter of the election.

Firstly, we have Billy Gotta Job on the insignificance of voting (and why this is as it should be):

“Except that we’ve been deluded into thinking that democracy is an individual pastime, no different in essence from voting in the X-Factor. That by voting we can somehow take forward our own individual interests. That politics is like a pick’n'mix sweet counter in which we can select our favourite orange creme, but ignore our unloved nut cluster. That identifying interests that we have in common with others is a sort of ego annihilation, and a defeat for our personal independence. But in truth democracy is not about us as individuals. It is the right to be insignificant, to make no personal difference. The true threat to our democratic health is not spin-doctors, or the media, or expenses scandals, or sound-bites, or the distractions of celebrity culture. It is the myth that we should form our political judgments by totting up whether we’ll be 50 quid better off under this party or that, and that collective interest is no more than a quaint hangover from the past.”

Now I don’t really believe (and I guess that this won’t be a surprise to my small band of loyal readers) in the supremacy of collective interest – indeed I see collective interest as merely the mediated agglomeration of individual interests. However, Billy has a point – as an individual act, voting is of vanishingly small significance. You vote, my vote, Gordon Brown’s vote are not going to make the difference.

Whether or not we vote is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election.
The second piece – from the doyenne of Libertarian bloggers, Charlotte Gore – who says she does not care about the result of the election:

“So the most important lesson I learnt was that I really, really, really don’t care any more. In the choice between the Conservatives or Labour, the only real loser is everyone else. A different bunch of vested interests calling the shots, different types of interference with people’s normal day to day lives and I’ve no doubt that the State will be bigger and more expensive by the time they’re through, no matter what. Taxes are going to go up, the Private Sector will continue to shrink and there’s only one direction that Civil Liberties are going in.”

Except Charlotte does care – she cares enough to have spotted what Billy spotted – that her vote is insignificant. That only as part of a perceived collective interest can our votes count (which is why libertarians should oppose proportional systems of voting based on votes for parties). And Charlotte’s problem with voting is not resolved by there being a party somewhere for which she can vote positively – let’s call it the Laser Cat Party. Even with that party, Charlotte’s vote – insofar as it can really effect change – remains insignificant. The large parties (and attached vested interests) continue to control the process and – as membership declines – the use of public funding will act to exclude the Laser Cat Party since it would not receive funding.

So why vote? The answer is simple and it’s the answer your granny used to give. You vote because it’s the right thing to do and because, however insignificant it might be, voting is often the only chance you’ve got of getting something changed. People really did chuck themselves under horses, people really did get killed, people really did strike, march and protest so as to get that right to pick up a stubby pencil and mark a cross in a box once in a while. Don’t get me wrong, if you choose not to bother it doesn’t make you a bad person – you’re not really letting down your suffragette great grandma or the great uncle killed on D-day.

So go and vote it’s your chance to do something. And do it loudly, proudly and knowing that it’s the most significantly insignificant act you can undertake.