They've found a way to tax breathing!

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It could only be the ghastly dysfunctional socialist utopia of Venezuela:

We're used to a seemingly endless range of taxes and surcharges when we fly - passenger taxes, departure taxes, fuel levies. But Maiquetia International Airport in Caracas has taken this a step further - passengers flying out now have to pay 127 bolivars tax (£12; $20) for the air they breathe.

It seems the airport installed a new system to 'purify' the air-conditioning unit - the tax is to pay for it. Or so they say except, as one radio presenter observed:

 "Could you explain to me the ozone thing in Maiquetia? The toilets don't have water, the air-con is broken, there are stray dogs inside the airport, but there's ozone?"

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Quote of the day: on public health...

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From Chris Snowdon:

It cannot be said too many times that 'public health' is not about health. It is a political movement aimed at state control of individuals and markets. Look at the Lancet's manifesto for 'planetary health'. Look at the European Public Health Alliance's manifesto. Follow people like Richard Horton, Martin McKee and John Ashton on Twitter. If you can bear and afford it, read Gerard Hastings' book. It is not about health, it is about pushing an unelectable, economically illiterate political agenda through the backdoor. 

The rest of the article is excellent - do read it and share it.

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How the ragged troused philanthropists were right...

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'The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!'.

So proclaimed Frank Owen of the 'ragged trousered philanthropists' who had the audacity to vote Conservative. And thus was born the myth of the Tory working class - trained, almost dog-like, to nod to their betters and defer to their thoughts.

It always seemed that 'the left' are deeply concerned at the prospect that any 'worker' might vote for a political party other than one 'of the left' (whatever that means). After all, Tories "despise the working class", how can a member of that class vote for them?

All this explains why the Conservative politicians for whom 'the left' reserve the greatest vitriol - even hatred - are those who challenge their perspective. When Norman Tebbit, Eric Pickles, Patrick McLaughlin or even Nadine Dorries speak up the sound of left-wing hackles rising can be heard right across the nation. These people are the acme of class traitorhood, the very personification of false consciousness, the quislings of the working class.

The left is quite comfortable with David Cameron and George Osborne because they are what Tories should be: inherited wealth, top public school, Oxford, horse-riding - all the stereotypes of left-wing iconography. It makes for an easy campaign, roll out Dennis Skinner ranting about privilege, talk about 'out of touch Tory toffs' and add in images of top hats (or that over-used Bullingdon photograph - I wonder whose copyright it is, they should have made a fortune).

The problem is that it really isn't as simple as that, this class divide malarkey. For sure we can show people about the idea of surplus value with three slices of bread and a knife but that doesn't make it true nor does it put a roof over someone's head and a meal on the table. More to the point Norman, Eric and Nadine are proof that, not only does the Conservative Party not "despise the working class" but people from that class can get to powerful positions in the Party. This is not how it should be!

Today a man earning fifty or sixty thousand a year as a skilled operator working on shift is considered working class (and will most likely be a member of that working class institution Unite the Union) whereas a man earning half that amount from his fields is a rentier ("boo-hiss"). The argument to those ragged trousered ones a hundred years ago - that they should throw off those capitalist shackles - no longer stands since the ragged trousers have been replaced with designer clothes, two weeks in Tenerife and a new (-ish) Audi.

It seems the 'philanthropists' were right - invest in the free system and everyone gains. We don't know whether Owen was right (although there has been the occasional hint as to socialism's inadequacy as a system) but it doesn't matter because capitalism worked. The 'conditions of the working man' (the improvement of which Disraeli had set as the Conservative Party's mission) were raised and continue to rise.

We will continue to see the myth of the working-class Tory peddled - the idea that independence, self-reliance, hard work, decency and choice represent some sort of misplaced confidence in the capitalist system, a confidence that will fail the working man. And the belief that some syndicalist wonderland will come forth from the casting aside of capitalism.

Those values - working class Tory values - that the left rejects are in the soul of the Conservative Party. But we are, above everything, pragmatic and know that the consequence of Frank Owen's system is not Utopia but Venezuela.

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On the stupidity of socialism...and price fixing

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I gather Ed Miliband wishes to fix energy prices "while the oligopoly is sort out" or some such. And reintroduce socialism. Here's why this is stupid:

Flights out of Venezuela to anywhere are 100% sold out, months in advance. Yet many planes are flying half-empty. Why? The official exchange rate is 6.3 bolivars per dollar but the black market rate is more like 42 bolivars to the dollar. Few people are allowed to convert bolivars to dollars at the official rate but there is an exception for people with a valid airline ticket. As a result people with an airline ticket can convert bolivars to dollars at the official rate and then sell the dollars at the much higher black market rate.

Socialism was stupid when the Russians did it. Stupid when the Cubans did it. Stupid when Labour tried in in the 1970s. Oh, and always corrupt - the elite do fine (look at that Venezuelan story - the latest from the country where toilet paper is impounded, its production nationalised because the boss can't wipe his arse). It's the poor that suffer - they get the queues, the black outs, the rationing.

That is socialism. It is evil. And stupid.

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In which I get a little Marxist in the cause of minimum government

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This is quite a difficult thing for me to write - partly because I'm stepping out from the areas where I'm comfortable with my knowledge but also because it challenges a more or less universal misunderstanding. And it begins with this quote from Engels:

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.

Setting to one side the vast (and largely incomprehensible) corpus of Marxist thinking, it strikes me that there is nothing to disagree with in the idea that the state will become superfluous. And those of the right (or at least the freedom-loving bit of the right) should share the objective - or is it the consequence - of Marxism.

Now I take the view that Marx's historical determinism - that the process from the hypothetical cave to a free socialist life is inevitable - is a load of nonsense. But this doesn't negate the ambition to which Engels alludes - that a perfectly just society would not need government. It is an admirable liberal aim.

The problem - and all the disagreement - comes from the route that Marxists (or rather 'communists', which I understand is a slightly different thing) choose to reach the shared objective of a free society, by which I mean one that does not require governing. Here's another Engels quote:

At the same time we have always held that in order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the state and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the capitalist class and re-organise society.

The contradiction - an acknowledged contradiction - here is that in order to create a world free of the oppression of government it is necessary to seize control of government and through those means 'oppress' any people or organisations ('the capitalist class' is a conveniently broad concept) that stand between today's society and that perfectly just society we desire.

The problem here isn't that Marx's ideas were wrong but that the programme developed with Engels and operationalised by Lenin, Mao and others was wrong. This was a failure of strategy not a mistaken ambition - if we agree that, in part, this ambition is a just society free from the inevitable oppression that comes with government.

What is most bizarre however isn't that some people still adhere to the failed prescription of Engels (although this is somewhat odd) but that Marxists make common cause with Fabian Socialists, who had - and have - a very different view of the state. Here's Mark Bevir:

Fabian economic theories, unlike those of the Marxists, almost required their adherents to call for an interventionist state. The Fabians believed that rents could not be eliminated since they arose from the variable productivity of different pieces of land and capital.  The only solution was for the state to collect rent and use it for the collective good.

We have -on "the left" as we like to call it - an alliance between people whose end game is a free society without government and those who, in a manner reminiscent of Plato's 'guardians', believe that a (courageous) state is necessary for the just society to operate. It seems to me that Marxists are making common cause with people whose ideology is not simply different but diametrically opposed to what they believe. Those who want Marx's end game (and who could argue with that - other than Fascists and Fabians) need to make common cause with people who share the same broad objective but embrace a different strategy, who think making government smaller now makes more sense than trusting to those controlling government rejecting power.

Clinging to a failed strategy is daft. Yet that is what many on the Marxist left are doing - clutching to a belief that controlling the state is what matters rather than joining with those who wish to see a smaller state now. The principles of cooperation, collaboration and coproduction that Marxists applaud are shared but the means to the end are not.

I may misunderstand Marx here, in which case tear what I say to shreds, but if a free, just society is the end - and surely it is - then Marxists, rather than sneering at libertarians, Randians and anarcho-capitalists, should spot the shared ground and see that a society where the state directs or controls over half of human activity is not the sunlit uplands that Marx imagined.

Or maybe not...

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A reminder that socialism doesn't work...

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We should all have worked this out by now but, it seems, some places still have to learn that socialism really doesn't work, not even a little bit:

The new programme, launched last week, uses crowdsourcing technology to enable users to let each other know which supermarkets still have stocks of the tissue.

Called Abasteceme – "Supply Me" in English – the free Android app has already been downloaded more than 12,000 times.

Creator Jose Augusto Montiel said most downloads have been made by residents from the capital Caracas.

He said: "Lots of things are in short supply, but what people are most worried about is finding toilet paper. People never knew how much they needed it until it started running out." 

According to the government it is wicked anti-government forces that are buying up the loo paper so as to "destabilize" the country.  Yes folks, socialism is both useless and stupid!

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Tell me Sir David who are you going to kill first?

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It seems that (at least according to George Monbiot*) the sainted David Attenborough has been peddling his eugenicist message again:

On the Today programme on Wednesday, Sir David Attenborough named the rising human population as the first of the factors causing the loss of the UK's wildlife. 

We know that Sir David believes in a mythical thing called 'optimum population':

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. 

What interests me (leaving aside that the current population projections for the world suggest stabilisation by the middle of this century and decline thereafter) is who Sir David wants to kill off.

Is he proposing to sterilise less productive members of society - cripples, people without university degrees, members of parliament? Or are we to expect a sort of Logan's Run:

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage..."

Perhaps 21 is too young to pop us off, maybe thirty as in the film or perhaps a more modest 45!  Or will we have be some dystopic variant on the National Lottery - with the prize being sterilisation or even death.

The truth is that Attenborough is perhaps the last of a dinosaur generation - the inheritor of the authoritarian state direction (I hesitate to give it its real name) that so appealed to Keynes, to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and to that self-indulgent English elite: Shaw, Wells, Tawney, Foot. These people, for all their supposed socialism, saw a load of little peons to be herded about, organised, hectored, lectured and patronised. And if needs be, neutered.

So given it isn't gorillas Sir David plans on killing, who is it?

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*Can I point out that Monbiot's article is (as usual) a pile of factually incorrect dribble

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Socialism died in 1989 - now we must destroy its shadow

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Socialism died at the end of the 1980s. For sure, its corpse twitched and jerked for a few years but there's no doubt that it died. And that it won't be missed. Here's Dan Hodges reminding us:

She won. Hers was not a superficial victory, but a final settlement. In the 1980s the Left framed the battle with Thatcherism as a final reckoning. And they were right, it was. And it was Thatcher who emerged victorious.

In truth it wasn't just Margaret Thatcher or even her and Ronald Reagan. It was a catalogue of great men and women - Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Helmut Kohl, even Gorbachev from the evil empire.

Socialism died. The trouble is so many didn't get the news. They didn't see how free enterprise, free trade, privatisation and free capital movement - that lovely neoliberalism - was making the world a better place. Wealthier, happier, more equal - all the things those socialists claimed for their failed creed. Except for the actually working bit.

It beggars belief that intelligent people continue to delude themselves that we can plan, organise and direct all the economy. That clever men can make better choices for you and me than we can make for ourselves. Eastern Europe - all those Poles, Slovaks, Romanians and Bulgars we fear will flock to England - is poor because of socialism. It really is that simple.

The next generation has to destroy the shadow of this dead creed. Or else we will watch as other places - places we once pitied as starving basket cases - start to catch us up. Watch as we squander the inheritance of our past success on a make believe economy - one where public spending, the modern equivalent of taking in each others washing, creeps ever higher and where the chimera of borrowing-driven consumption eats away at wealth and prosperity.

If we don't slay socialism's shadow, we will all be poorer. And for some that may mean the relative poverty socialists bleat about becoming real poverty. A poverty created by the vainglory and hubris of the socialist.

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Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State...

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Fascism is being reborn.

The headline I've chosen would be welcomed by the Owen Jones' of this world - it describes and defines what they believe. It is the very essence of Richard Murphy's 'courageous state' - a definitively fascist concept.

And the headline is a quotation - a translated quotation - from the man who created Fascism, Benito Mussolini. There was no subtlety at all to Mussolini's hatred of the Italian elite or to his belief that the institutions of society - industrial might, the strength of labour and the passion of leadership - must be directed by the state in the interests of the state.

Fascism is being reborn - here is Lyndsey Hanley writing in the Guardian:

Yet isn't the idea of 3 million people working hard and not being required to pay tax a recipe for their disenfranchisement? The Liberal Democrat segment of the coalition is most likely to see a high tax-free allowance, which goes up to £9,440 on 6 April, as a step towards the goal of a "citizen's income" – a no-strings basic payment from state to individual over and above any earned (and therefore taxable) income. A fundamental component of citizenship, however, is paying towards the ongoing work of building and maintaining resources for everyone to use. 

Everything in the state, nothing without the state.

Every day I see the dark shadows of this authoritarian creed - in the denormalising of personal choices, in the arrays of cameras pointed at everything we do, in the selection of chosen "hatreds" to condemn and in the braying offence of calling for more regulation, more control and more taxation.

As Benito said:

The Government has been compelled to levy taxes which unavoidably hit large sections of the population. The...people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the...people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.

Or perhaps this fascism sums it up:

His narrative depicts the State in a current crisis of confidence, neutered by the self-doubt of elected politicians who are taught to believe that the market knows best. This results in a weak government unable to perform its duties and uncertain of the State’s ability to work for the benefit of the citizens it represents. Yet...vision the State is not just the best but the only solution to the current financial turmoil, uniquely positioned to deliver a prosperous, sustainable, and equitable future for the greatest number.

Mussolini would have cheered Richard Murphy - and his courageous state - to the rafters. Here again is that rallying call for action against the corruption of the markets and the evil of capitalism. Here - cheered on by  the likes of Ms Hanley - is a new authoritarianism of the left, a new fascism.

And it scares me.

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Quote of the day....modern government defined

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From Peter Saunders:

You see, I am your government, which means I care about you and I know best what is good for you. It's my job to nag you and boss you around. That's what living in a free and democratic country means: I force you to vote, then I take your money, then I use it to tell you how to live your lives. You'll thank me for it one day.

This truth is what we must fight, just as we must fight the misguided belief that all the money exists only because of government - we must try to reclaim what is ours: independence, personal responsibility and command of our own affairs.

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Ah that BBC impartiality...

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Via the honourable Mr Fawkes this from a BBC news editor:

Who or what do you hate and why?
Tories. As Aneurin Bevan said: ‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.’ 

Now what were you trying to tell me about the BBC being balanced and impartial?

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Predistribution: In which The Eds dress up in flares, put on kipper ties and groove at the disco

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It's that deja vu all over again. Labour wants to return to a snappily rebranded version of wage and price control. The Eds present this as new an radical but I think we've been there before:

In order to safeguard the real value of wages, the Labour Government launched the first serious attack on the rising cost of living. The weapon specially fashioned for this attack is the policy for productivity, prices and incomes, which forms an essential part of the National Plan. Without such a policy it is impossible either to keep exports competitive or to check rising prices at home. The alternative, in fact, is a return to the dreary cycle of inflation followed by deflation and unemployment.

Substantial progress has been made in working out, with management and the unions, the objectives and criteria of such a policy. An essential part of the machinery, the Prices and Incomes Board, is now operating. But the policy needs further development. 

Yes folks, that was the 1966 Labour Manifesto. A manifesto that ushered in the age of tripartite meetings over beer and sarnies in Downing Street - the new age of the "National Plan". A manifesto that (coupled with the sheer incompetence of Heath's 1970-74 Conservative Government) paved the way for the collapse of manufacturing industry, inflation rates of over 25%, an endless parade of strikes and levels of unemployment not seen since the 1930s.

And Labour is returning to this?

The great strength of predistribution is that it does not cost the state a penny to pursue. Rather than relying on taxation to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, Miliband will harness the instruments of legislation and regulation. Rail companies, for instance, would be barred from raising fares by more than 1% above inflation

The central element in this is that first sentence - there is no cost to the state. Instead, the use of regulation means that costs (in the form, it seems, of wage and price controls) are placed on businesses. And this, of course, means that you and I pay a de facto tax when we purchase goods and services.

Even the fans of socialist economic policies have their doubts:

Let's take the original(ish) and bad part of this first - the idea of capping rail and utility prices. This runs into several problems:

- It redistributes most to heavy users, who are not necessarily the poor. Commuters and people living in big houses gain more than poor people in small flats.

- Lower prices encourage the use of scarce resources. High prices, remember, are signals to use the product sparingly.

- Price caps tend to reduce profits. To offset this, companies will try to cut costs - for example by reducing maintenance spending. The upshot will be a worse service and job cuts.

For reasons such as these, economists have traditionally hated the idea of using the price mechanism to redistribute incomes - a dislike embodied in the second theorem of welfare economics.

Not a ringing endorsement of 'predistribution' there from the left!

In truth this entire policy is simply to revisit the idea of a partially planned economy. A system where prices and wages aren't determined in an efficient market place but through inefficient negotiations between government ministers, business leaders and trade unions. Or worse where this tripartite arrangement is replaced by a bureaucracy of price and wage control.

With each iteration of its economic policy, Labour inches closer to that 1970s model of regulated wages and prices, protectionism, credit control and implicit bureaucratic direction of business and industry. Decisions about prices for essential goods - food, fuel, housing - will be effectively within the purview of the government with the resulting relentless downwards pressure on prices. The same interference that, from the mid 1960s (along with the indulgence of trade union militancy) played such a part in destroying British manufacturing industry.

It is good politics to promise price cuts - The Eds know this. But, as an economic strategy - especially linked to running the printing presses a full whack - it is a recipe for collapse, for unemployment and a sclerotic, corrupt private sector that focuses on lobbying government rather than delighting customers. Labour's leaders, in a fit of depressing nostalgia, have donned their flares, attached the kipper ties and headed off down the disco. They'll be sporting mullets next!

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Musings from a thick Tory...

A Thick Tory Ponders Life's Deep Truths

It is quite remarkable that I, as a Conservative, am able to make use of this laptop in order to write coherent sentences. Perhaps this is a credit to the education I received and to the glorious simplicity of the English Language plus of course the forgiving nature of you the reader.

It seems that the great minds of Canadian academe have cast the runes (or whatever it is that psychologists do in order to garner “data” for their published work) and have discovered what my left-wing friends have known for years – Conservatives are thick. Or rather that – as I understand the work in question (bearing in mind that I am a Conservative) – a shadowy cabal of clever people manipulate us thickos through ideology:

Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo".

Now, dear reader, Mr Monbiot who wrote that is left-wing so able to use multi-syllable words without getting severe headaches. We must therefore see clearly that he is right even though those long words hurt our eyes.

Now there’s nothing new in the left explaining to us right-wingers – often in the most patronising tone – that our problem is that we’re stupid. Ergo, we should let them run everything since they’re so much better qualified in the brain department. Here’s grumpy old Liberal John Stuart Mill:

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

Not of course that J S Mill with his belief in free markets, liberty and self-determination would qualify these days as a left-winger. But, hey, it’s a good quote! And since that time Conservatives (with and without the big ‘C’) have lived with the designation of stupidity. And it’s the worst form of stupidity – a sinful, corrupting, evil stupidity that divides not the stupidity of Homer Simpson as idiot savant.

So George Monbiot cries the oldest insult levelled at Tories, one that meant little when J S Mill said it and means little today – “you’re thick you are, what do you know?” And George’s ‘oh-so-superior’ left-wing pals echo him (and some second rate jokester called Brooker) in giggling about how they always knew Tories were stupid and right-wingers were thick. I mean look at what they read! Surely anyone intelligent would read the Guardian?

If there is an antonymic personification to the idiot savant then George Monbiot is that person – so well educated, well read, filled with eclectic ideas, a veritable fountain of knowledge. Yet, at the same time, so comprehensively, categorically and consistently wrong.

Let’s grant left-wingers their superiority, let’s embrace our Tory thickness – for all their knowledge these socialists, progressives and the like have brought us oppression, state control, obscene taxes, political correctness and the nanny state. Anyone who takes more than a moment to look at socialism’s record would conclude that these awfully clever (and mostly wealthy and privileged too) people visited disaster upon the ordinary people for whom they claimed to care.

It’s no use having great brain power if you use it to make the simple complicated, the obvious obscure and the common-sensical illegal. Yet that is the legacy of the progressive left.

If that is “intelligence” then I’m staying right here being “thick”.

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Labour's still wedded to the license state

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The bizarre polity that is modern India was - under its then perennial Congress Party rule - described as the 'license raj":

This is when India got its License Raj, the bureaucratic control over the economy. Not only did the Indian Government require businesses get bureaucratic approval for expanding productive capacity, businesses had to have bureaucratic approval for laying off workers and for shutting down. When a business was losing money the Government would prevent them from shutting down and to keep the business going would provide assistance and subsidies. When a business was hopeless an owner might take away, illegally, all the equipment that could be moved and disappear themselves. In such cases the Government would try to keep the business functioning by means of subsidies to the employees. One can imagine how chaotic and unproductive a business would be under such conditions. 

Every economic act, every profession, every industry acts solely on the basis of licenses granted by government. Not only was this corrupt but it crippled the Indian economy for a generation.

This lesson in failure - with India falling ever further behind places like South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and, latterly, China - is still ignored by social democrats. Ignored by those who see the purpose of the state as the direction of individual actions to a greater good - or rather to the preferences and interests of the political class.

Such a man is Ivan Lewis MP, the Labour culture shadow - Mr Lewis wishes to license journalists:

Lewis will suggest that newspapers should introduce a system whereby journalists could be struck off a register for malpractice.

Not only is this illiberal - but then we expect that from Labour politicians - it is stupid and enforceable only by arbitrary power. It would represent the first step towards the social democrat establishment controlling the output of the press, a big stride towards the hounding of journalists for the grave sin of criticising Labour politicians. And it is wrong.

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I like choice - and so should you

Vivienne's masterpiece salmon

We hear often of the sin that is "consumption". Not the 18th and 19th century killer of literary genius but the preference that many of us have for spending a fair old chunk of the limited time we get on stuff we actually like doing. If you want to call that decadent, uncaring or planet-threatening that's fine by me. But I intend to carry on consuming.

And I am not swayed by the righteousness of some folk who, having failed to persuade us - the consumers - that consuming is a bad thing - have shifted the attack. The problem, they tell us, is choice - there's too much of it, it is making us anxious, stressed and meaning that we are no longer "organising ourselves and making a critique of society".

This little animation from RSA (entitled "Choice") peddled all this stuff - including the quote in the above paragraph. We have here all the regular left-wing anti-choice arguments including jolly little stories about how some bearded professor was uptight about which wine to buy in a restaurant or how some self-indulgent journalist wrote that sex life wasn't like the sex lives described in the pages of Cosmopolitan. Plus the usual rubbish about the stress we get from being over faced by the range on offer in the supermarket.

I feel so sorry for all these sensitive folk living in their convenient little anecdotes. But the argument - so typical of pop psychology - is founded in story and prejudice rather than in the reality of consumer behaviour. Yes, consumers will tell you they don't like choice. But consumers also use heuristics to mange and moderate choices - mostly they're called brands although they may also be choices about shopping location or, today, the use of comparison web-sites. There is an entire academic discipline - consumer behaviour - that studies such stuff.

More substantially, however, the argument against choice presented here tiptoes towards anti-capitalism - not just through an ignorance of what, precisely, we might mean by capitalism (it is presented as the creator of our consumer society) but through the contention that choice is used by "capitalism" to prevent us from achieving "social change". I have to smile at the manner in which "capitalism" is anthropomorphised - made to have an existence as master of an "ideology of choice".

But what is the alternative to this "ideology of choice"?  Logic tells us that the only alternative must be an "ideology of choice denial". Our choices - whether of wine with dinner, of places to live or of clothes to wear would be constrained, limited and even stopped entirely (bit like healthcare really). And one presumes - although this isn't stated - the limitation of choice would require mandation. Somebody will have to set out the choices we can have - assuming that "somebody" actually thinks we should have any choice at all.

So the argument presented - for all its wit and literacy - is profoundly illiberal, requires a mechanism for limiting choice (so we are not stressed or otherwise pained by our choices) and represents the continuation of the Nancy Klein attack on that choice. Or rather on the "wrong sort of choice" (as we can characterise Ms Klein's argument) - the idea that the brand "McDonalds" is essentially different from "Liberal " or indeed from "Chateau Lafitte Rothschild". All are those pesky heuristics - short-cuts to decision-making - that enable a complex consumer society to work.

Although the RSA do not present any alternative - "organising to achieve social change" is as far as it goes - the vision, characterised by the use of bees as a metaphor, owes more to Aldous Huxley than to a happy vision of the future. Indeed it could be this:

"Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

Please let it not be so. Let us be free. Stop speaking of some idea of social change as if "social change" is absolutely desirable. And stop offering excuses that permit governments to control our lives, to remove our choices. And stop already with this angst, this post-millennial ennui, this pseudo-guilt trip - choice is good, it makes us happier, healthier, wealthier and, each day, the chance to do it differently means that innovation, change - even social change - takes place.

However, the sad little assault on choice will continue, partly because some folk makes choices that people who do cute animations for the RSA disapprove of (you know getting drunk, smoking and eating the wrong food) but mostly because the social change that is driven by choice isn't the "social change" such people want. Rather than the controlling hand of the benevolent masters directing the ignorant towards enlightenment, we get a messy, exciting, chaotic mish-mash of changes - some fantastic, some problematic but all of them driven by the individual actions, initiatives and, yes, choices of men and women doing stuff they like doing.

Choice is good. And don't ever forget it!

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A loud celebration of being right wing...

Disraeli - a great right winger!

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few. (Benjamin Disraeli)

A while back I penned a little joyful celebration of being “Tory Scum”:

For me, yelling “Tory Scum, Here We Come” is an admission once again of socialism’s defeat. There is no rational, intelligent argument in this dystopic, dehumanising creed’s favour so its advocates must resort to insult – to hurling abuse, to fear, aggression and destruction as a substitute for debate and discussion.

Socialism died in 1989 – us “Tory Scum” were proved right. And when I hear it now, I smile.

I forgot, in writing this, that there is a wider problem for the failure that is Labour – the need to condemn its enemy, anyone who disagrees with the numbing, controlling, interfering, mistrusting and uncaring “democratic socialism”. And the way this is done is – along with thinking it cool to attack people personally for believing in free markets and independence – to use the dread term “right wing”. Especially when that term can link free marketer libertarians with state-loving fascists.

The problems with this position are two-fold – firstly, it represents an act of desperation by social democrats. The term “right wing” represents (in the mind of the social democrat) all that is bad an evil – Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, these are the incarnate representatives of what it means to right wing. And it is but a short journey from not actually supporting social democracy to building gas chambers or machine gunning children.

Secondly – and most importantly – Fascism, in whatever incarnation we chose, is not right-wing but is the bastard child of Fabian social democracy. Yes the social democracy was corrupted, forced into a marriage with militarism (rather as we see with Castro, with Ortega and with Chavez) and made to serve aggressive nationalism. But, in the end, it is socialism – the idea that the state could perfect man – that sits in the middle of fascism. No observer free from the left’s prejudice could describe National Socialism as ‘right wing’.

So let us rescue being right wing from this corrupted view of the left wing commentariat, let us set out what is really means to be right wing:

·         For the right “caring” doesn’t mean raising taxes from the relatively poor, paying them to middle class professionals who then ‘care’ for the poor. Caring is something we do personally – it is an individual act, done without looking to a nice salary and an index-linked public pension. Right wingers do not view charity as a sin

·         Right wing people seek out independence and self-reliance – our aspiration is to provide for ourselves, to care (that word again) for our families, to look out for our friends and to pay our way in the world without recourse to the support of the state

·         As right wingers we do not see the words ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ as problematic or slippery  terms only salvageable through the appending of the word ‘social’ – these words are central of belief that, left to their own devices, people will take advantage of the market’s natural laws to better themselves and, in doing so, better society

·         Right wing people recognise the importance of place – not as something to be managed, let alone created, by the agents of government but as the mud on our boots, the soil in which we have settled and grown strong. And the right to own that place – to be able to use our property as we see fit – is essential to that understanding. Place without private property is serfdom

·         And lastly those of us on the right doubt and question the role and purpose of government. It is not simply to echo Ronald Reagan’s joke – the most frightening words in the English Language, “I from the government and I’m here to help”- but to believe that independence, enterprise and the busy-ness of hard work are driving betterment and that the state is, most of the time, a barrier to a better place, a better society and happier people

This is what is means to be right wing. It is to be celebrated not muttered secretly behind our hands in case some BBC executive or Guardian columnist hears and points the finger crying; "look they admit to being right wing, they must be stopped before terrible things happen".

And those terrible things? Ah yes – peace, freedom, democracy, self-reliance, independence and the ownership of place.

Whatever the Guardian and the BBC may say, whatever lies they made spread, never forget....

...being right wing is good, you’re helping save the world from the controlling state, you’re making it better, cleaner, wealthier and safer for everyone.

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Joining the Liberal Democrats doesn't make you a liberal!

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A while ago I wrote a little comment explaining why “Jack of Kent” – the estimable David Allen Green, lawyer, blogger, skeptic and sometimes journalist – isn’t a liberal. It is a mark of David’s popularity (and his assiduous self-promotion) that this little blog post remains one of the most visited at The View from Cullingworth.

It seems now that “Jack of Kent” has gone the whole hog and joined the Liberal Democrat Party:

The Labour opposition is impotent. In government they were illiberal and often brutal. There is only one political force which is having an actual liberal effect in our polity as it is presently constituted, and it is the Liberal Democrats.

Yet – as I pointed out – David isn’t a liberal but a social democrat. No genuine liberal could believe this:

The liberal endorses an individual's autonomy unless there is a greater public interest in interfering with that autonomy.

Such a position is indistinguishable from the essential social democrat position – it places society’s interests above those of the individual. The problem – or confusion – may lie in a differing understanding of what the term ‘liberal’ actually means. I fear that David’s view owes less to Gladstone and more to Herbert Croly, the godfather of Roosevelt’s politics and founding editor of New Republic:

Government, according to Croly, could no longer be content with protecting negative rights; it needed to actively promote the welfare of its citizens.

This position, the championing of positive rights and the embracing of regulation to correct “market failure” are the essence of “progressive” politics. Indeed, Britain’s Liberal Democrats remain overwhelmingly a party of social democracy – a marriage between the Fabianism of people such as Shirley Williams and the grass roots activism that typified the old Liberal Party.

My argument before was that, in rejecting ‘market orthodoxy’, David was rejecting the basis of liberalism – that free exchange between individuals represents the best way to order things.  Instead we get American “liberalism” – a mish-mash of social democracy, ‘progressivism’ and above all the promotion of group rights above personal rights. Indeed, the preamble to the Liberal Democrat’s Constitution makes explicit that the party is not a liberal party:

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. We champion the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, we acknowledge and respect their right to freedom of conscience and their right to develop their talents to the full. We aim to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity. We believe that the role of the state is to enable all citizens to attain these ideals, to contribute fully to their communities and to take part in the decisions which affect their lives.

So “Jack of Kent”, who isn’t a liberal, will feel quite at home in what isn’t a liberal part.

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