Sean Gabb's Blog, page 5

Markets Not Capitalism: A Review

by Cory Massimino

http://c4ss.org/content/29932



Markets Not Capitalism: A Review

Markets not Capitalism is a wonderfully compiled set of readings spanning 150 years of the market anarchist tradition. We must first commend Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson on their work in bringing all this great literature together and bundling it in a fantastic book for those interested in what market anarchism truly has to offer, as stated by its most ardent supporters of both past and present.

It’s hard to believe the number of genius thinkers who have writings in Markets not Capitalism: Benjamin Tucker, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Voltarine de Cleyre, Karl Hess, Roy Childs, William Gillis, Kevin Carson, Roderick Long, and Sheldon Richman to name a few. The compilation truly blends together the 19th century individualist anarchist tradition with the modern left libertarian thinkers who are following in the former’s footsteps.

Since this book has so many great readings, I will only go over some of my favorite ones here.

First, the introduction itself, written by Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson, is a fantastic and concise overview of what market anarchism truly stands for. They write,

The social relationships that market anarchists explicitly defend, and I hope to free from all forms of government control, are relationships based on: ownership of property…contract and voluntary exchange…free competition…entrepreneurial discovery…spontaneous order.

That’s it. Those five things are fundamentally what market anarchism is about. It is about letting people be free to use their own property as they choose and cooperate with others in order to create the kind of society they want. Those five principles allow for a society free of control and domination. They birth a society of liberation and bottom-up organization with individuals in control of their own lives.

Following the introduction, the book is separated into eight sections. I’ve spontaneously decided to go over a reading from each.

Part 1: The Problem of Deformed Markets

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century” paints a picture of the kind of economy that is painfully obvious to recognize today. Except he identified the problems in 1851. Perhaps with an unnecessary amount of capitalization (in the grammar sense, not the economic sense), Proudhon was, nonetheless, the doctor who most aptly diagnosed the economy as one controlled and dominated by corporate capitalists, banksters, and statist legislators.

The trio conspired (conspires is more accurate) against the common man and extracted surplus value from workers, borrowers, and renters through the privilege of capital over labor granted by the state, the artificial concentration of credit by advantaged and usurious banks, the artificial restriction of land through state ownership and direction, and general state-enacted plunder. Sound familiar?

Proudhon believed the economy ought to be guided by the natural economic forces of competition and the division of labor, rather than the state and capitalists. “To suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself.”

But because of statist intervention, competition “is today a matter of exceptional privilege: only they whose capital permits them to become heads of business concerns may exercise their competitive rights.” As a result,

[competition]…instead of democratizing industry, aiding the workman, guaranteeing the honesty of trade, has ended in building up a mercantile and land aristocracy a thousand times more rapacious than the old aristocracy of the nobility.

I don’t want to think of how much more rapacious today’s aristocracy is.

Due to the state created capitalist ruling class, Proudhon came to reject capitalism in addition to government. He explains,

In the same way the wage-worker of the great industries, had been crushed into a condition worse than that of a slave, by the loss of the advantage of collective force.

There is hope according to Proudhon though,

But by the recognition of his right to the profit from his force, of which he is the producer, he resumes his dignity, he regains comfort; the great industries, terrible organs of aristocracy and pauperism become, in their turn, one of the principle organs of liberty and public prosperity…

Part 2: Identities and Isms

In “Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism” Gary Chartier makes a compelling case that goes against nearly 100 years of libertarian rhetoric: friends of freedom ought to also be anti-capitalists.

The kind of anti-capitalism that Charter supports is, he argues, a truer representation of libertarian and anarchist principles. He is not opposed to private property, voluntary exchange or markets. This kind of anti-capitalism harkens back to the arguments and rhetoric of the 19th century individualist anarchists, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker.

Chartier distinguishes between three senses of the word “capitalism”:

An economic system that features personal property rights and voluntary exchanges for goods and services.
An economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government.
Rule – of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state, by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production).

Capitalism, in the second sense is obviously against libertarian principles. Chartier also argues capitalism, in the third sense is also against libertarian principles because it 1) requires coercion and state interference to be maintained and 2) such a system is antithetical to the kinds of commitments to personal autonomy and sovereignty libertarian generally hold.

Obviously if capitalism is meant in the first sense, it is merely synonymous with a freed market, and therefore, it would make no sense for market anarchists to oppose it. But words and labels are a tricky business. He lists seven reasons to be anti-capitalist generally:

To emphasize the specific undesirability of capitalism in sense 3
To differentiate proponents of freed markets from vulgar market enthusiasts
To emphasize that the freed market really is an unknown ideal
To challenge the conception of the market economy that treats capital as more fundamental than labor
To reclaim “Socialism” for freed market radicals
To express solidarity with workers
To identify with the legitimate concerns of the global anticapitalist movement

In short,

Freed-market advocates should embrace “anti-capitalism” in order to encapsulate and highlight their full-blown commitments to freedom and their rejection of alternatives that use talk of liberty to conceal acquiescence in exclusion, subordination, and deprivation.

Part 3: Ownership

Roderick Long’s “A Plea for Public Property” is kind of like a slap in the face to many libertarians. Long uses three traditionally libertarian arguments to justify the existence of public (not state owned, but rather owned by the “unorganized” public) property in a libertarian society. Contrary to many libertarians’ claims that in a free society, all property will be private, Long contends it is both coherent and desirable for there to be public property as well.

In line with the Lockean defense of private property as an extension of an individual who homesteads previously un-owned things, Long writes,

Since collectives, like individuals can mix their labor with un-owned resources to make those resources more useful to their purposes, collectives, too, can claim property rights by homestead.

Long uses the example of people slowly clearing a way for a path over time through their combined efforts of walking through it.

Many libertarian use a line of argument that goes something like private property is needed for the realization of personal autonomy. Without a place to really call your own, your autonomy is very limited. This is true as far as it goes but the argument extends to public property as well. What about the autonomy of the property-less? Those without the means to have property certainly won’t have any sense of autonomy in the propertarian world. Having spaces that are publicly owned alongside private property allows people of small means to retain their autonomy somewhat.

Private property is also often defended on grounds that public property suffers from the tragedy of the commons. That is, a space that is publicly owned will be overused and depleted because no one using it has a stake in it and no incentive to leave anything for anyone else. But, as Long points out, this only applies to actually rivalrous goods and not things like ideas or the internet. There is also good reason to think in some cases there is a “more-the-merrier” effect. He points to arguments made by Carol Rose and David Schmidt that in addition to the tragedy of the commons, there is also a “comedy of the commons” that makes public space benefit from more people (like a free town fair).

Long continues through some common objections and concludes,

Ultimately, these problems will have to be resolved by a libertarian legal system, through evolving common-law precedents…An all private system can be oppressive, just as an all public one can be; but a system that allows networks of private spaces and public spaces to compete against each other offers the greatest scope for individual freedom.

The importance in Long’s piece is that libertarian are often depicted, sometimes accurately, as propertarians. But this shouldn’t be true at all. Libertarian arguments provide a robust defense of real (that is, no state owned) public property.

Part 4: Corporate Power and Labor Solidarity

In “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth,” Kevin Carson applies Mises’ calculation problem and Hayek’s knowledge problem to private firms. While the two ideas have been historically used to criticize state planning, and Mises denied the calculation problem applied to businesses, Carson argues the two provide resounding arguments against the viability of large, hierarchical companies in a freed market.

The calculation problem, in short, states that “a market in factors of production is necessary for pricing production inputs so that a planner may allocate them rationally.” Mises showed this to be the fatal flaw of Socialism since the abolition of private property, and therefore prices, destroys any opportunity for the rational allocation of resources. Simply, Socialism is just not possible.

But firms are islands of central planning themselves. There are no prices within firms themselves. Carson writes,

The basic cause of calculational chaos, as Mises understood it, was the separation of entrepreneurial from technical knowledge and the attempt to make production decisions based on technical considerations alone, without regard to such entrepreneurial considerations as factor pricing.

But that isn’t the end of the story, Contra Mises, Carson explains,

But the principle also works the other way: production decisions based solely on input and product prices, without regard to the details of production also result in calculational chaos.

That is, Mises’ calculation argument actually does apply to private firms in addition to governments.

Then Hayek came along with another death blow for central planning: “Not generation or source of data, but the sheer volume of data to be processed.” Carson applies Hayek’s discovery to the firm,

The large corporation necessarily distributes the knowledge relevant to informed entrepreneurial decisions among many departments and sub-departments until the cost of aggregating that knowledge outweighs the benefits of doing so.

As the firm becomes larger and larger, it is more prone to knowledge problems and loses its ability to rationally allocate resources within the firm.

But this seems like a non-problem. After all, Carson explains firms will “distribute information until the cost of distributing knowledge outweighs the benefit of doing so.” He writes later,

The calculation problem may or not exist to some extent in the private corporation in a free market. But the boundary would be set by the point at which the benefits of size cease to outweigh the costs of such calculational problems. The inefficiencies of large size and hierarchy may be a matter of degree, but, as Ronald Coase said, the market would determine whether the inefficiencies are worth it.

The problem is there is no free market. This was the problem diagnosed in part one of Markets not Capitalism. Carson explains the myriad of ways in which state intervention makes calculation in the corporate commonwealth a real problem,

By state capitalism, I refer to the means by which, as Murray Rothbard said, ‘our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs,’ in addition to cartelizing markets through regulations, enforcing artificial property rights like ‘intellectual property,’ and otherwise protecting privilege against competition.

The kinds of policies that Proudhon identified in 1851, and are unfathomably more pertinent, widespread, and harmful today, prop up large, hierarchical corporations by socializing their losses. State intervention artificially raise the point where firms will stop distributing knowledge and creating hierarchy, making the kinds of firms we see in today’s corporate capitalism profitable. Whereas, in a freed market, they would be crushed by competition.

What makes “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” such a breath of fresh air is that libertarians have, for one reason or another, become apologists for corporations. In trying to defend free market principles, libertarians have often fallaciously become supporters for all things not directly run by the state, including corporations. But this is a mistake, as Carson notes, because the biggest corporations are also the biggest parasites. He takes modern libertarianism to task for misunderstanding the role of the state in propping up big business and vice versa. Big corporations rely on state power to retain influence and money, to deny alternative forms of business, and to oppress the common person. Rather than pinnacles of the free market, big corporations are spawns of leviathan.

Part 5: Neoliberalism, Privatization, and Redistribution

There’s a delicious irony in this book featuring an article by the founder of modern anarcho-capitalism. “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle” shows us a different side of Murray Rothbard. One that supports “[turning] over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants” at the time owned by General Dynamics.

In one of Rothbard’s most underappreciated and least well known pieces of writing, he takes issue with the fervent anti-communists of his day failing to ever provide an actual mechanism by which we could un-socialize. Noticing this failure, Rothbard offers a solution by which libertarians (synonymous with anarchists for him) can end the reign of state owned property and put that property in the hands of actual homesteaders.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to return state property back to its original owners since we can’t effectively determine which stolen tax dollars belonged to whom. Instead, Rothbard offers the next best solution and uses public universities as an example. Since the tax payers can’t be justly compensated, turning public property over to those who use it, and thereby homestead it, is the next best solution. In the case of universities, the facilities and buildings should be turned over to faculty and students who have effectively homesteaded the property.

But Rothbard doesn’t stop there. He recognizes the existence of state capitalism and understands how it blurs the line between “public” and “private” property. General Dynamics is a beneficiary of the military industrial complex and receives over half it’s funding from the state (stolen money). Clearly this company, and others that similarly receive most of their funding from the state lack a just claim of ownership.

They, too, need to be dismantled and the property transferred to the people homesteading it. In the case of General Dynamics, and most corporations, this is the workers. Since the owners of the corporation are merely an extension of the state, the actual workers have the best claim on the property.

Rothbard concludes,

What we libertarians object to, then, is not the government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles, what we are for is not “private” property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property. It is justice vs injustice, innocence vs criminality that must be our major libertarian focus.

Too often libertarians become apologists for so called “private” property and, in the process, become defenders of the statist quo. Rothbard is correctly pointing out libertarianism is a truly radical philosophy concerned with just property claims, not one that picks a side between the “public” vs “private” false dichotomy.

Part 6: Inequality and Social Safety Nets

One of the major tasks of this book, and the market anarchist project in general, is to demolish the false choice of freed markets or equality. Too often these two things are posed as conflicting ideals. That you must tolerate inequality to support freed markets or you must tolerate state control and intervention to support equality. Even libertarians fall into the trap of seeing the two as competing visions and not recognizing the levelling power of markets. In “Let the Free Market Eat the Rich: Economic Entropy as Revolutionary Redistribution” Jeremy Weiland takes this false worldview to task.

Now “eat the rich” might sound like dirty liberal or socialist rhetoric. But a proper understanding of state capitalism and the kinds of institutions that make up modern economic systems leads one to understand why eating the rich is both desirable and libertarian. As Rothbard explained in the last section, state capitalism blurs the line between “public” and “private” property. But why does it do this? Because the state is controlled by the rich. It is a tool the powerful, politically entrenched elite use to create large sums of wealth not through voluntary exchange and the free market, but through exploitation and state intervention. The common framing that it’s the state vs big business and the rich is completely wrong. On the contrary, the state and the rich are partners in crime, and often one in the same. To be anti-state is to be anti-rich (in the world as we know it, not anti-rich in a conceptual sense). In the words of Roderick Long, “Libertarianism is the true proletariat revolution.”

Jeremy Weiland explains, “The modern corporation is a legal entity chartered by the state.” It benefits from a huge variety of intervention including fiat entity status, personhood, and limited liability. All of which tilt the market in favor of well established, large corporations at the expense of smaller competitors and would be market participants. Simply put, “In a free market, corporations would not be able to rely on the state for their very existence.” Absent the state intervention, the true levelling forces of the market would come to fruition.

What about personal estates? The state created benefits don’t stop at just corporations. Weiland argues, “The biggest subsidy enjoyed by the wealthy lies in government regulation of finance.” After all, regular joes don’t “pay” for that service in proportion to their deposits. Low income people with less investments and deposits subsidize the rich through virtually all central bank regulation and FDIC policy. Barriers to entry in banking make it even worse by preventing workers from forming their own mutual banks and being forced to participate in the capitalist controlled banking sham.

Property protection itself is tilted in favor of the wealthy. Not only are the rich more likely to game the “justice” system (because the state monopoly answers to no one as long as there is no competition in arbitration), the rich are again subsidized by the poor through police protection. Wealthy people obviously have much more property than lower income people and need a much higher quantity of protective services (as well as a higher quality of protection since they are more likely to be targeted by thieves). But there is no market for property protection. Instead everyone pays through taxes and the rich use a higher proportion of police protect than anyone else…subsidized by the poor.

Weiland points out,

A truly free market without subsidized security, regulation, and arbitration imposes cost on large aggregations of assets that quickly deplete them.

He concludes,

Perhaps authentic libertarian means of genuinely free markets, taken to their logical conclusion, can effect far more egalitarian and redistributionist ends than we ever dreamed – not as a function of any central State, but rather as a result of its absence.

Part 7: Barriers to Entry and Fixed Cost of Living

A large part of the market anarchist project is showing ways in which the state harms the worst off among us and how freed markets truly help the poor, thereby melding our commitment to freedom and non-violent egalitarianism. As explained above, liberty and equality are not conflicting ideals. Rather, they are complementary. It is statism and equality that are simply incompatible. Charles Johnson’s “Scratching By” serves as a concise list of way in which statist interventions, often touted as egalitarian, actually make the poor worse off.

Welfare schemes tend to keep poor people dependent on the state, creating an endless cycle of poverty. But in addition to fostering a culture of subservience, they also prevent a different kind of culture from taking the place of statism and coercive, inefficient anti-poverty measures. Johnson explains,

But in a free market – a truly free market, where individual poor people are just as free as established formal-economy players to use their own property, their own labor, their own know-how, and the resources that are available to them – the informal, enterprising actions of poor people themselves would do far more to systematically undermine or completely eliminate, each of the stereotypical conditions that welfare statists deplore.

Of course the housing crisis of the 2000s not only led to a horrible crash crippling many poor peoples’ lives (and leaving the rich fine and dandy with bailouts and quantitative easing), it also created a system where renters and other low income people were subsidizing the housing of the better-off. Yes, housing subsidies did provide options for housing to people who otherwise wouldn’t have had it (of course, that, itself, is the fault of government land ownership, eminent domain, zoning laws, and credit policy). But those subsidies to homeowners was coming from non-homeowners, who tend to be poorer. This redistribution scheme was directly shifting money from the bottom of the economic ladder to the middle and top…and following the 2008 crash, the big banks were free to seize the homes, pushing the homeowners back to dire situations and leaving the original subsidizers still poor.

Johnsons also goes into depth about the scam of urban homesteading and how housing codes and regulations make it much more difficult for people to actually acquire property of their own, forcing them to remain dependent on landlords. Licensures, despite being promoted as consumer safety measures, actually impede competition and keep poor people out of the market. Costly (meaning both time and money) licenses lock poor people out of certain jobs and artificially restrict their employment options. He writes,

Government regimentation of land, housing, and labor creates and sustains the very structure of urban poverty.

Rather than the cure for poverty, the state is the cause. The war on poverty would be more aptly named as the war on the poor.

Part 8: Freed Market Regulation: Social Activism and Spontaneous Order

Roderick Long’s “Platonic Productivity” is a fascinating article that forces libertarians to rethink a lot of their arguments but also examine their commitments. Libertarians and defenders of the market often point out that employees will be paid according to their marginal revenue product (MRP). Therefore, the fact that women are paid on 75 cents for every dollar a man is paid is a sign of a real difference in productivity between the sexes. After all, if it wasn’t, the gap would be whittled away from competition. So, the libertarian concludes, the market is working fine! There is no need for government intervention here.

But, as Long, points out, there is merely a tendency for workers to be paid according to their MRP. For reasons Mises pointed out, the market never reaches equilibrium. Instead, it is always approaching equilibrium. The same goes for workers being paid according to their MRP.

Furthermore, since firms are, at their core, islands of central planning separated from the price mechanism internally, determining a worker’s MRP can be difficult. There is no easy way to figure out a worker’s MRP from within a firm so even “well-meaning,” profit driven employers not looking to discriminate can create a persistent wage gap. Long also points out discrimination can act as a consumer’s good for employers, allowing actual discrimination to persist. Instead of buying brand new carpeting for their office, an employer might spend those profits (or more accurately, never earn those profits) from discriminatory hiring practices.

Despite seemingly looking like an indictment of the market and begging for government intervention, Long points out why asking the state to solve this problem is misguided.

There’s no reason to think transferring decision-making authority from employers to the State would bring wages into any better alignment with productivity. People in government are crooked timber too, and (given economic democracy’s superior efficiency in comparison with political democracy) they’re even less constrained by any sort of accountability than private firms are.

Rather than a reason to give up our commitment to markets, Long’s argument is merely a reminder that the market is, itself, made up of fallible people with biases and imperfections. The market isn’t God. But of course, neither is the State.

Long finishes by pointing out,

Once we see why the productivity theory of wages, though correct as far as it goes, goes less far than its proponents often suppose, it does not seem implausible to suppose that this sexism plays some role in explaining the wage gap, and such sexism needs to be combated… But that’s no reason to gripe about “market failure.” Such failure is merely our failure. Instead, we need to fight the power – peacefully, but not quietly.

 

Filed under: Book Review, Liberty

A Word on Teachers

The below is from the comments section of this post by Swithun Dobson. Aside from the layout making it a challenge to read, I found it highly enjoyable. It’s an important article. It’s an important issue. And if articles like this are not written or read or shared then things like this will happen without our even noticing them. I then thought about my own schooling. Not private, but state schooling. I don’t know all that many people who went to private schools, but the general feeling I get from those who have experienced both is that a) private schooling is immeasurably better, but b) that it can succeed in being rather more subtle in its indoctrination or dumbing down than state schooling. The replacement of that subtlety itself may indeed be imminent. Anyhow, what I’ve just said may be rubbish and what I write below actually has very little to do with the article in question. However, Sean thought it warranted a separate blog post and so this is it. I have omitted some of it and expanded in parts. 

Those of a certain age who perhaps attended a grammar school and have done moderately well ought to be forgiven for believing that, while the state system is now grossly inefficient and obviously dumbed-down, the students have never had it so good. They, after all, didn’t get the leisure that children have today. And the computerisation of at least one lesson per week cuts down on the amount of writing they are obliged to do. Not only this, but those on the outside of a state school are under the frequently given impression that the lessons are “fun”, the teachers are “caring”, and that the continual research into the special and varying needs of some students has made all “equal in opportunity”.

Quite the contrary. State high schooling is a highly depressing and demotivating experience; nowhere else can you get the atmosphere of a police station, a hospital, and an asylum all in one. The teachers are conceited, overpaid dullards. (More often than not, it is the support staff who are more in tune with reality and with the students than the teachers.) The kids are usually already hopeless morons as a result of their prior state primary schooling, but willing to accept whatever the teachers say as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In this sense, teachers have never had it so good.

The similarities between state schools and the NHS are undeniable. (If the current adult population doesn’t go to school, they do many of them use the National Health Service. This, then, will suffice as a rough approximation of the quality of education the majority of British children receive.) They attract simpletons. They both ought to be pretty violently shut down.

Now, this may always have been the case – at least relatively so. Thus, state school teachers, while they were undoubtedly far superior fifty or sixty years ago to the trash we have the classroom now (again, I am judging this from the fact that most of my older relatives had a better state education than I could possibly hope for, yet did not go to Univeristy or College and left school at 14 or 15), even then the private school teachers would have been better. Ditto with doctors. Many libertarians have noted that when you nationalise something, it takes a generation for the rot to set in (on account of the fact that no public sector worker gets paid in proportion to the amount of satisfaction a client gets from their work in the way a private sector worker often does). For, while the market forces no longer work, there are still professionals who worked in the private sector running the state industry – people who have been conditioned to satisfy consumers and who have at least some dignity left. Alas! we are well and truly past this point now.

Not only this, but there seems to have developed a natural tendency for the morons running state education and state healthcare to become more and more self-obsessed – perhaps because of their constant success in demanding pay rises which of course the State won’t refuse because it needs its army of mental and physical poisoners. They have lost their dignity and replaced it with vanity. Nay, they are proud. They cannot understand how anyone would not listen to their every word with bated breath. Thus, teachers become increasingly authoritarian to students and other members of staff and doctors become increasingly political – and doctors increasingly authoritarian and teachers increasingly political.

So it seems rather obvious that things are going to get rather worse from the point of view of education, since teachers regard lessons not as a time to teach but as a time to play about with interactive whiteboards, drink coffee, and listen to the sound of their own voice – if the children are lucky enough to have been graced by their teacher’s presence (absenteeism is not uncommon among state school teachers, especially older ones, incidentally, who probably can’t stand their new, younger, even more arrogant colleagues).  And what strikes me as fascinating is the level of shamelessness among teachers. An anecdote I often tell – don’t get excited, I’m hardly Stephen Fry, Kenneth Williams, or Noel Coward, in more than one way – is when one of my English teachers was talking to the class (as opposed to teaching us English, which she couldn’t speak let alone write) about a strike she was going on with the other teachers. She said “It has been ages since our last strike,” to which a girl in my class with a deadpan facial expression and a voice of feigned enthusiasm loudly replied “Yes, miss, it’s time you had one.” Another anecdote is from my cousin who was teaching Maths in France when, one day, she turned up and there wasn’t a teacher in sight. Another strike, she was told. On the morrow, she went in, so did the teachers, all was back to normal for a day, surely? Not a child came to school. A representative of the students informed the school that if the teachers could strike, so could they. And it seems that this is the French way of dealing with Bolshy, lazy, overpaid, useless state school teachers. We, the students of Britain, must find our own way. Perhaps we could adopt the technique of the American ‘New Left’ and suddenly, in the middle of a lesson, shout “Jailbreak!” and run outside. That would help to illustrate at least one side of the issue: the prison-like nature of modern state schools. But what do we do to show the good sirs and misses that their services are no longer required and that, so far as work ethic is concerned, they are bottom of the class? I suggest a Dunce hat for every prison officer in your establishment. If not as sensible, the other methods may be more fun.

Filed under: Education, Liberty

Education: Another Step to the Total State

by Swithun Dobson

Independent Schools: Arms of the State

The Proposed New Independent Standards for Schools (PNISS) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/322296/Consultation_Document_23_6_-_independent_school_standards.pdf are a bigger threat to educational liberty than the National Curriculum and will effectively mean all independent schools will become arms of the state.

Here are the most egregious passages with some brief comments.

1.c)

“strengthening the spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) standard to require proprietors to actively promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs; and encourage students to respect other people, with particular regard to the protected characteristics [Ed. Age, disability, gender

reassignment,

marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race,

religion or

belief, sex and sexual orientation] set out in the Equality Act 2010 ”

Predictably nowhere in this document are key terms defined. Let’s take democracy: do they mean just the present-day UK parliamentary democracy? If so, would it be contrary to fundamental British values of democracy to advocate proportional representation or other procedural changes? So what do they actually mean by democracy? Athenian democracy, Swiss democracy, direct democracy, federal democracy, limited franchise, universal franchise? Obviously, democracy is used here purely as a positive adjective as opposed to anything concrete: its meaning will be changed when politically expedient.

The most laughable of the above values is individual liberty: by the terms of the proposed changes I will no longer by able to set up my own independent school to teach values which would have been the norm even thirty years ago. Further, I severely doubt the Educational Authorities would take kindly to any promotion of the works of Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard.

3.2.1

“The changes also include new requirements that the curriculum and teaching do not undermine the fundamental British values that are set out in section 1.1(c) above, and that the teaching does not discriminate against students contrary to the Equality Act 2010 (for example by girls being made to sit at the back of classes or teaching of intolerant attitudes). Although independent schools are subject to the Equality Act 2010, the only remedy directly provided by that Act is through the Courts; the new standards would allow the Department to take regulatory action against the school for failing to meet them.”

If parents wish to pay to send their daughters to a school where they sit at the back of the class that is the parents’ choice; note that the Trojan Horse related issues were at a state, not an independent school. If we accept large numbers of immigrants with a foreign culture, it is obvious that parents will wish to inculcate their children with their own cultural values. If the authorities dislike these values they ought to look at their immigration policy.

Notice again the lack of definition of intolerant. Am I intolerant for arguing that everywhere and always 2+2 = 4? How about that murder is always wrong? Moreover, what about propagating fundamental British values as the only fundamental values for Britons? Surely that makes me a fundamentalist and thus a danger to society!

3.2.2

“The proposed changes to Part 2 are aimed at making it clear to independent schools that the proprietor must actively promote the fundamental British values that are set out in section 1.1(c) above and that schools must actively promote the specified principles, including furthering tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions and encouraging respect for democracy.

A minimum approach, for example putting up posters on a notice board and organising an

occasional visit to places of worship would fall short of ‘actively promoting’.Schools will be expected to focus on, and be able to show how their work with pupils is effective in embedding fundamental British values. ‘Actively promote’ also means challenging pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values.

The new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristics (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) is intended to allow the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations: for example where girls are disadvantaged on the grounds of their gender; failure to address homophobia; or where prejudice

against those of other faiths is encouraged or not adequately challenged by the school. We intend to update and reissue the current guidance on this standard to reflect these changes.”

Effectively, all recalcitrant views are to be challenged into silence and everyone must be convinced that the Egalitarian God is the one true God. Even expressing a heterodox belief by a parent in ear shot of staff members could easily lead to a letter informing them of their “troubling/prejudiced etc.” views. If a school fails to actively promote this then they will be faced with action, not via the courts as it would at present, but by the Secretary of State himself. I do wonder how the democratic free schools, such as Summerhill, will fare with these updated regulations since the whole point of the schools is that they don’t explicitly teach the children anything, allowing them to follow their own interests. If you were thinking that you could run an underground school, see this paragraph from the Letter from Lord Nash: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/318944/IS_reform_statement.pdf

“We have agreed with the police and Ofsted the arrangements for prosecuting individuals or groups that are conducting unregistered schools.”

What will come after these changes, which will more than likely pass, is renewed calls for a central registration of all home educators. For how otherwise can they determine whether parents are actively promoting fundamental British values? The next step will be for children to be removed from their parents for holding and teaching “unholy” views. If you think this is far fetched this is what the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said in March of this year:

“At present, there is a reluctance by the social services to intervene, even when they and the police have clear evidence of what is going on, because it is not clear that the ‘safeguarding law’ would support such action.

“How do we make sure the kids in London are not growing up with these kind of nightmarish ideas in their heads?”

“A child may be taken into care if he or she is being exposed to pornography, or is being abused – but not if the child is being habituated to this utterly bleak and nihilistic view of the world that could lead them to become murderers.”

“I have been told of at least one case where the younger siblings of a convicted terrorist are well on the road to radicalisation – and it is simply not clear that the law would support intervention.

“This is absurd. The law should obviously treat radicalisation as a form of child abuse.

“It is the strong view of many of those involved in counter-terrorism that there should be a clearer legal position, so that those children who are being turned into potential killers or suicide bombers can be removed into care – for their own safety and for the safety of the public.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26413024

Once the principle has been established that the state can remove children from their parents due their beliefs it can and will be extended to more and more “intolerant views”.

The consultation for most important sections finishes this Monday (4th August). I doubt they’ll listen but if we can get enough hostile responses in, they may delay the introduction. Further, if you know any Church, Mosque or Synagogue leaders please pass the links on.

To respond to the consultation follow https://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/

All the documents relating to the consultation below:

The Letter from Lord Nash

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/318944/IS_reform_statement.pdf

Showing Proposed Changes in Statute

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/322296/Consultation_Document_23_6_-_independent_school_standards.pdf

The Consultation

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/322296/Consultation_Document_23_6_-_independent_school_standards.pdf

 

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Scumbags

Tolerance vs. Relativism

by David D’Amato

http://c4ss.org/content/29644



Tolerance vs. Relativism

This week is remarkable in at least one rather important sense; it marks one of the most hideous and deeply frightening statements I’ve heard in all of my twenty-nine years, a viscerally unnerving remark made so casually and offhandedly that I nearly became ill on the spot. In the course of an otherwise pleasant conversation on the countless differences between cultures and the importance of patience and tolerance, I was told that female genital mutilation (from here on “FGM”) was not necessarily barbaric in and of itself — that its barbarism or lack thereof depended critically upon the cultural context within which it takes place. No act, I was told, is per se barbaric, but rather all cultures must be regarded as equal, and thus nothing is to be deprecated in itself. Here I offer, for the edification of the reader, a primer on the subject, which comes to us courtesy of a BBC article entitled “Anatomy of female genital mutilation” (the description that follows is explicit and extremely disturbing):

Female genital mutilation (FGM) includes any procedure that alters or injures the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

In its most severe form, after removing the sensitive clitoris, the genitals are cut and stitched closed so that the woman cannot have or enjoy sex.

A tiny piece of wood or reed is inserted to leave a small opening for the necessary flow of urine, and monthly blood when she comes of age (most FGM is carried out on infants or young girls before they reach puberty).

When she is ready to have sex and a baby, she is “unstitched” – and then sewn back up again after to keep her what is described by proponents as “hygienic, chaste and faithful”.

At this exoneration of FGM’s perpetrators, I was quite taken aback, practically thunderstruck by the enormity of the error, of its practical implications and an amazement that seemingly reasonable people could believe this. I had not imagined that my partners in conversation would cleave so closely to their cultural relativism as to embark on an apology for a practice so cruel and inhuman. But then this is among the fundamental philosophical problems with such extreme cultural relativism; it puts one in the uncomfortable position of having to accept any kind of brutal rights violation insofar as it is consistent with some arbitrary cultural value or tradition. My compeers at least were consistent in their barbarousness.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that the anarchist as such cannot also be a cultural relativist in any meaningful or principled way, for the opposition to authority simply will not brook even longstanding cultural practices such as FGM. Anarchists oppose authority not randomly or haphazardly, not in any piecemeal way that happens to make us feel comfortable in a given case. The opposition operates always, at all times.

It must not be overlooked, moreover, that all such barbarities — supposedly legitimate, “not barbaric” practices like FGM — are of course bound to be vaunted pieces of the cultural and customary inheritance. Were this not the case, were these vile practices simply aberrant and treated as such, they would hardly be worth opining on. It becomes necessary to vociferously condemn crimes like FGM precisely to extent that they are considered time-honored cultural traditions. Indeed, it must escape relativists such as my conversation partners that the lowest, most odious forms of bigotry — racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. — are all age-old cultural practices in their own right. We are apparently meant to defer to crimes like FGM just to the extent that they are at their most vicious, inhumane and ingrained. This is the juncture at which open-mindedness becomes mere mindless folly, an exercise in preposterous infinite regress.

Individuals are the social elements which actually exist. Culture, religion, politics — all of these we as individuals have invented, exalting them to such a degree that we now make of them much more than the human lives they are there to preside over. Cultural relativists give all manner of potential genocidal maniacs and human rights violators a carte blanche, a cultural pretext to which they can point while devastating human lives. Doubtless we ought to respect other cultures, even to actively look for the unique contributions they make to overall human flourishing. We must not, however, pretend that the imprimatur of culture is capable by itself of redeeming savage acts such as FGM. One needn’t be an anarchist or a proselyte of the nonaggression principle to understand that such acts are wrong wherever they are found, regardless of religion or culture.

 

Filed under: Liberty, Scumbags, War

Daniel Harding Reviews The Break

http://bluelibertyblog.wordpress.com/2014/07/29/review-the-break-by-sean-gabb/

‘The Break’ is the latest book by Sean Gabb, and another that explores another alternate timeline of the UK, as well as the amusing political outcomes of said universe. ‘The Break’ is set in the UK in 2018, in the aftermath of a disastrous event (the break) that has taken modern Britain and thrown her back near enough 1,000 years in time, or put her in an alternate universe in the more accurate sense. Most of the story is based around the quest of a young girl who needs to find her parents who have gone missing during her time abroad in Normandy. The other main character is the nephew of a Byzantine diplomat who have come to England to meet her rulers.

The characters in ‘The Break’ are very believable, and are very fitting for the way that the storyline unfolds; particularly so when the two main story-lines intertwine towards the end of the book. The events that the book revolves around are also very believable, and present a fairly satirical, yet scarily accurate view of the modern world, which shows that our long dead ancestors were probably much more decent and socially advanced than our own world is.

The UK in the world of ‘The Break’ is a police-state where the government controls what people can say or do. People are required to carry identification cards at all times, and there is a clear distinction between the lives of the political elite and the lives of everyone else who live under the boot of their government. It is clear that much of the political satire that is explored in ‘The Break’ shows us a mirror image of our own world, if exaggerated to show where it could potentially head under current conditions.

Sean does an excellent job throughout of gradually raising the suspense and intrigue of the plot, allowing it to simmer to the point where the hidden aspects of the plot come together, revealing the reason for everything that has happened during and before the events of the book. The way that Sean blurs the line between the fictional world in his books and reality brings up many moments that will make you both grin and cringe at the same time as you see the relevance to your own life. In short, this is an excellent book which, although slow at the start, will make you not want to put it down once you get further along the storyline.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this book, much as I did with Gabb’s ‘The Churchill Memorandum’. I’m already looking forward to getting my next book of Sean’s once I have finished with my current libertarian book (‘The Market for Liberty). This book is very relevant and enjoyable for both libertarians and non-libertarians alike, and I highly recommend getting it.

If you are interested in reading ‘The Break’, it can be found HERE.

 

Filed under: Book Review, Libertarian Fiction, Liberty

Graphic of the Day

Filed under: Liberty

Blacking up on the Road to Auschwitz

 

Blacking up on the Road to Auschwitz

By Sean Gabb

On Friday, the 25th July, I was called by a female researcher at BBC Radio Ulster for a comment on a story in Northern Ireland. Several members of the Rugby Team there had been photographed at a fancy dress party, with their faces blacked up and wearing chains round their necks. All hell had broken loose on publications of the photographs, and grovelling apologies from all concerned hadn’t been enough to settle things. The local anti-racism bureaucracies were calling for resignations from the Team. Would I, as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, care to make a comment on this?

I could have come out with the boilerplate libertarian reply – that it’s not our business if someone paints his face black or green at a party, or puts on an SS uniform, or hangs himself, or consumes recreational drugs. I could also have said what I do believe about this incident, or what I know about it: that, if the politically correct hegemony makes it almost irresistible not to make jokes, it is uncharitable to laugh at black people in this way. However, I was in a bad mood that day, and so began the following conversation with the researcher:

SIG Can you explain to me why anyone should take offence if a white man chooses to paint his face black?

BBC Because t shows contempt for black people.

SIG I see. Yet there is a black comedian called Lenny Henry who often whites up and mocks white people – and on the BBC. Talking of comedians, the female duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders used to have a sketch where they dressed as fat, working class white men and mocked them. I’m not aware in either case of any outrage and calls for them to be taken off air. Why is it so terrible, then, if a couple of white men paint their faces black? Before I can make a comment on your show, I do need to have it explained what the problem is.

BBC [Long pause] Because they were wearing chains as well. They were mocking slavery.

SIG I think we can both agree that slavery is a terrible thing – and we can celebrate the role of the United Kingdom in putting down both slavery and the slave trade. But is there any reason to suppose that the sportsmen were somehow calling for black people to be made slaves and forced to work on sugar or cotton plantations?

BBC [Another long pause] Making fun of white men is an act of defiance. It’s an attack on patriarchy by the oppressed.

SIG Really? So a couple of women whose comedy has made millionaires of them are oppressed? As for men as a dominant group, is it your ambition to follow French and Saunders into comedy? Men are at a structural disadvantage in divorce and custody proceedings. Men are more often sent to prison than women for the same offences. Men accused of rape are generally treated as guilty until proven innocent. Women who make malicious accusations of rape are seldom punished, and hardly ever harshly. Men die earlier than women. NHS resources committed to male illnesses, such as prostate cancer, are trifling set against the obsession with breast and cervical cancer. Men commit suicide in disproportionate numbers. School teaching and examinations are biased to improving the grades of girls rather than boys. The BBC itself discriminates against men in its hiring and promotion policies. Speaking as a man, I don’t see much evidence of a discourse of patriarchy that consigns women to second place in this country. [Facts here]

BBC [Now impatient] So you think there’s nothing wrong if ethnic minorities are insulted?

SIG I haven’t said that. However, I will elaborate on my earlier comments. We live in a soft totalitarian police state, and the BBC is one of its instruments. Hardly anyone gets locked away for disagreeing with the justifying ideology of multi-culturalism. But dissidents go get stuck in the pillory. They are especially pilloried if there are white men popular with the working classes, and if their disagreement is expressed as mockery. Whatever can be seen as dissident humour – and I really have no idea why those sportsmen blacked up – is portrayed as the start of a continuum than ends in Auschwitz. This has to be done, because nothing is more subversive of a police state than mockery. Also going after these sportsmen in as integral part of manufacturing the appearance of consent. When people can be destroyed for upsetting the inquisitors, the rest of us become vary careful about what we say or do. For most of us, the surest way to be careful is to say or do nothing that is likely to upset. The resulting absence of dissent keeps the unstable equilibrium from falling over….

The debate on air that resulted from this was more Punch and Judy than cultural analysis. To do it justice, the BBC is sometimes a good place for the latter. But a five minute slot, with a nervous presenter to shut me up every few seconds, wasn’t the right place. I sneered at the complainants, pointing out that they were all somewhere on the State’s payroll. At one point, I had to tell the enraged anti-racism campaigner I was up against to shut up and let me have my turn. Before the microphone was turned off on me, I managed to say that this was a story only given prominence because the BBC was a culturally Marxist institution, and that it said more about the obsessions of our ruling class than the wickedness of a few rugby players.

Given another minute without interruptions, I’d have added that apologies never work in these cases. Step on someone’s foot in a railway carriage, or get his name mixed up, and an apology usually works – and may even start an interesting friendship. But do not suppose you can buy off the anti-racist inquisition with an apology. It helps not to get these people sniffing round in the first place. Those sportsmen must have been stupid to think they could get away with what they did – especially in a world where everyone has a mobile telephone packed with recording hardware. After the event, though, the only response should be a shrug and a curt “No comment.” Once you start apologising, these people smell blood and start circling in earnest. Stonewalling works more often than you might suppose. Even when it doesn’t you’ll go down with more dignity on your feet than one your knees.

I sometimes wonder why the BBC lets me so often on air. I’m on the radio once a week on average, and sometimes get an audience of several million. Could it be that the British state broadcaster has a genuine commitment to diversity of opinion, and that, when I make the effort, I can be crisp and entertaining? I doubt this. More likely, the BBC has a legal obligation to go through the motions of allowing a diversity of views, and I have a reputation for not actually swearing at the fools and villains I’m put against. Otherwise, the BBC may be homogenous in its ideology, but is decentralised in its structure. The researchers hardly ever compare notes with each other. Once they have you in their databases, you stay there until you die or the researchers move to other jobs.

Whatever the case, I had a good time last Friday – in retrospect at least. Not, I’ll confess, that it did any measurable good.

 

Filed under: Culture War

Jane Cobden: Carrying on Her Father’s Work

by Sheldon Richman

http://c4ss.org/content/29751



Jane Cobden: Carrying on Her Father’s Work

Among libertarians and classical liberals, the name Richard Cobden (1804–1865) evokes admiration and applause. His activities — and successes — on behalf of freedom, free markets, and government retrenchment are legendary. Most famously, he cofounded — with John Bright — the Anti–Corn Law League, which successfully campaigned for repeal of the import tariffs on grain. Those trade restrictions had made food expensive for England’s working class while enriching the landed aristocracy.

But Cobden did not see free trade in a vacuum. He and Bright linked that cause with their campaign against war and empire, arguing that trade among the people of the world was not just beneficial economically but also conducive to world peace. Unlike other liberals of his time (and since), Cobden understood that free trade means trade free of government even when it pursues allegedly pro-trade policies. As he said (in one of my favorite Cobden quotations),

They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.

Unfortunately, this brilliant insight has eluded most advocates of international trade, especially in the United States going back to its founding, who looked to government to open foreign markets — by force if necessary.

Cobden’s legacy is much appreciated by libertarians, but one aspect of it is largely unknown. (I only just learned of it, thanks to my alert friend Gary Chartier.) Cobden’s third daughter and fourth child, Emma Jane Catherine Cobden (later Unwin after she married publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin), carried on his work. Born in 1851, she was a liberal activist worthy of her distinguished father.

The Wikipedia article on Jane Cobden, which I draw on here, relies heavily on two sources: Anthony Howe’s entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Sarah Richardson’s “‘You Know Your Father’s Heart’: The Cobden Sisterhood and the Legacy of Richard Cobden” in Re-thinking Nineteenth-century Liberalism, edited by Howe and Simon Morgan (2006).

“From her youth Jane Cobden, together with her sisters, sought to protect and develop the legacy of her father,” according to Wikipedia. “She remained committed throughout her life to the ‘Cobdenite’ issues of land reform, peace, and social justice, and was a consistent advocate for Irish independence from Britain.”

The triplet land reform, peace, and social justice has a left-wing sound today, but that’s because the modern classical liberal/libertarian movement from the 1930s onward got sidetracked by an alliance of convenience with the conservative and nationalist American Right, which, like the liberals, also opposed the New Deal and (in those days, but alas no more) militarism. That alliance, which was fortified in the 1950s due to the common opposition to Soviet communism, had the unfortunate effect of cutting libertarians off from their true heritage.

That heritage included a focus on the class conflict and rights violations inherent in mercantilism (protectionism, corporatism), government control of land distribution, and many other state activities. The libertarian abandonment of some of those concerns in the second half of the 20th century in effect bequeathed them to the antimarket Left. Today a growing number of libertarians have reclaimed them.

Jane Cobden was also a prominent voice for extending the vote to women. Wikipedia says: “The battle for women’s suffrage on equal terms with men, to which she made her first commitment in 1875, was her most enduring cause.” Cobden was a member of the Liberal Party” (which was hardly a libertarian party) and she “stayed in the Liberal Party, despite her profound disagreement with its stance on the suffrage issue.” (The Liberals tended to favor the vote for women but had higher priorities.) The libertarians of her day, both in England and the United States, also made women’s legal and social equality a major part of their agenda. (Some, like the American Lysander Spooner, thought no one should have the vote because they opposed government solutions to problems.)

In 1888 Jane Cobden and other Liberal women ran for seats on the new London County Council. This was a controversial move because up till then women could not hold office and not everyone interpreted the Local Government Act of 1888 as permitting it. She and Margaret Sandhurst won seats in 1899. Sandhurst was disqualified under the act after a challenge from her defeated rival, but Cobden was not challenged.

Even so, her position on the council remained precarious, particularly after an attempt in parliament to legalise women’s rights to serve as county councillors gained little support. A provision of the prevailing election law provided that anyone elected, even improperly, could not be challenged after twelve months, so on legal advice Cobden refrained from attending council or committee meetings until February 1890. When the statutory twelve months elapsed without challenge, she resumed her full range of duties.

But her problems were not over. A Conservative member took her to court, arguing she had been illegally elected, that her council votes were therefore illegal, and thus that she should be severely fined. The court agreed, but an appeal cut the fine to a nominal amount. Her allies hoped she would go to jail instead of paying the fine, but she did not take their advice.

After a further parliamentary attempt to resolve the situation failed, she sat out the remaining months of her term as a councillor in silence, neither speaking nor voting, and did not seek re-election in the 1892 county elections.

In 1892 Cobden married Unwin (whose company published Ibsen, Nietzsche, H.G. Wells, and Somerset Maugham), at which point, Wikipedia says,

Jane Cobden extended her range of interests into the international field, in particular advancing the rights of the indigenous populations within colonial territories. As a convinced anti-imperialist she opposed the Boer War of 1899–1902, and after the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 she attacked its introduction of segregationist policies. In the years prior to the First World War she opposed Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform crusade on the grounds of her father’s free trade principles, and was prominent in the Liberal Party’s revival of the land reform issue.

Again, she was carrying on her father’s antiwar, anti-imperialist, and free-trade campaign and his concern with social-legal equality. Wikipedia quotes Richard Cobden from 1848:

Almost every crime and outrage in Ireland is connected with the occupation or ownership of land.… If I had the power, I would always make the proprietors of the soil resident, by breaking up the large properties. In other words, I would give Ireland to the Irish.

He also wrote:

Hitherto in Ireland the sole reliance has been on bayonets and patching. The feudal system presses upon that country in a way which, as a rule, only foreigners can understand, for we have an ingrained feudal spirit in our English character. I never spoke to a French or Italian economist who did not at once put his finger on the fact that great masses of landed property were held by the descendants of a conquering race, who were living abroad, and thus in a double manner perpetuating the remembrance of conquest and oppression, while the natives were at the same time precluded from possessing themselves of landed property, and thus becoming interested in the peace of the country.

Here Cobden asserted an idea from John Locke: that the criterion for ownership of a parcel of land is not conquest but labor.

Jane Cobden thus “embraced the cause of Irish home rule — on which she lectured regularly.” She also “was a strong supporter of the Land League,” which strove to “enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on.”

“After visiting Ireland with the Women’s Mission to Ireland in 1887,” the Wikipedia article continues, “she subsequently used the pages of the English press to expose the mistreatment of evicted tenants.”

Reflecting her interest in land reform, Jane Cobden published The Land Hunger: Life under Monopoly in 1913.

Along with these causes she maintained a keen interest in her father’s passion, free trade.

In 1904, Richard Cobden’s centenary year, she published [and wrote an introduction to] The Hungry Forties [subtitle: Life under the Bread Tax,

Descriptive Letters and Other Testimonies from Contemporary

Witnesses], described by Anthony Howe in a biographical article as “an evocative and brilliantly successful tract.” It was one of several free trade books and pamphlets issued by the Fisher Unwin press which, together with celebratory centenary events, helped to define free trade as a major progressive cause of the Edwardian era.

With the coming of World War I in 1914,

Cobden became increasingly involved in South African affairs. She supported Solomon Plaatje’s campaign against the segregationist Natives’ Land Act of 1913, a stance that led, in 1917, to her removal from the committee of the Anti-Slavery Society. The Society’s line was to support the Botha government’s land reform policy.… Cobden maintained her commitment to the cause of Irish freedom, and offered personal help to victims of the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21.

She spent the late 1920s and ’30s organizing her father’s papers and otherwise carrying on his work.

One final — and telling — story:

In 1920 Cobden gave Dunford House [the Cobden family home in Sussex] to the London School of Economics (LSE), of which she had become a governor. According to Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the School, she soon regretted the gift; Webb wrote in her diary on 2 May 1923: “The poor lady … makes fretful complaints if a single bush is cut down or a stone shifted, whilst she vehemently resents the high spirits of the students … not to mention the opinions of some of the lecturers.” Later in 1923 LSE returned the house to Cobden; in 1928 she donated it to the Cobden Memorial Association. With the help of the writer and journalist Francis Wrigley Hirst and others, the house became a conference and education centre for pursuing the traditional Cobdenite causes of free trade, peace and goodwill. [Emphasis added.]

Beatrice Webb co-founded the LSE with her husband Sidney. Both were leading advocates of state socialism and the reformist welfare-state strategy known as Fabianism. (They were also among the many prominent welfare statists who favored eugenics.) We can imagine which opinions Cobden resented.

Jane Cobden, who died at age 96 in 1947, still has a place in modern culture. She was made a character in the BBC television series Ripper Street, and her portrait hangs in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.

 

Filed under: history, Liberty

Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

by the Rev. Dr Alan Clifford

Note: When Dr Clifford turned up last year with some of his congregation, to hand out leaflets at the Gay Pride March in Norwich, he nearly got prosecuted for Hate Crime. If he gets done this year for handing out the leaflet reproduced below, we shall know that the country really has become a lunatic police state. SIG

JESUS CHRIST

SAVIOUR OF SINNERS

Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

(John 1: 29)

In a world of sin, shame, hatred and evil, the wonderful message of Jesus is our only hope.

WHAT IS SIN?

We have to be clear about this. It is humanity’s basic guilty state. Just as crime is a violation of the law of the land, sin is a violation of the Law of God, the Ten Commandments. It is an affront to His holy majesty. It incurs His just wrath. Being rebels, without God’s pardon, hell is our ultimate destiny.

SIN’S UGLY SYMPTOMS

These are many. None of us are clean. We all need help. First we must honestly admit our guilt.

SEE THE CHECKLIST

Unbelief

Pride

Idolatry

Blasphemy

Fornication

Debauchery

Pornography

Adultery

Homosexuality

Sodomy

Envy

Stealing

Greed

Drunkenness

Scoffing

Extortion

Sorcery (occult)

Hatred

Quarrelling

Jealousy

Anger/rage

Selfishness

Discord

Disruption

Murder

Lawlessness

Lying

Perjury

These examples are based on lists in the Bible (see Mark 7: 20, Romans 1: 18-32, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11 and Galatians 5: 19-21).

How did you do?

If your boxes are empty, you are perfect. Congratulations!

But if you dismiss others for being imperfect, you are guilty of pride!

If you’ve never murdered anyone but have committed adultery, you are still guilty of breaking God’s Law (see James 2: 10-11).

If you’ve never laid a finger on anyone yet still hate them, you are also guilty of ‘heart-murder’ (see Matthew 5: 21-22).

So let’s stop pretending. We are all sinners. The Bible is right after all.

There is no one righteous, no, not one … For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

(Romans 3: 10, 23)

If your conscience is troubling you, as it should, you are ready for the Good News. Here it is:

Because God loves us (John 3: 16) and is unwilling that we should perish (2 Peter 3: 9), the Son of God, Jesus Christ came to save us. He brought resources we do not possess. Through violating God’s holy law we are guilty rebel sinners. We are helpless to repay the debt we owe to God. Christ became man to pay in our name and nature all that we owe. Sin deserves death and damnation. On the cross, Christ suffered the wrath of God in our place. As the God-man, His death as man satisfied the righteous demands of God the Father.

When we repent and trust in Christ we are justified—acquitted, pardoned and accepted—as children of God. Conquering sin by His death, Christ conquered death by His resurrection. Believers are saved eternally from sin, death and hell (see Romans 3-5).

Note also that

JESUS

is the only Saviour of the world

As the Father’s love-gift to the human race, no one else can do what only Christ has done. All other religious leaders – like Muhammad and Buddha – were only human. They too were sinners. They are also dead. Christ lives to seek and save the lost. We all need Him.

HERE IS THE MESSAGE OF CHALLENGE AND COMFORT FOR US ALL

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor [passive] homosexuals, nor [active] sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified [purified], but you were justified [or

pardoned and accepted] in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

(1 Cor. 6: 9-11)

Are you still in sin’s terrible grip?

Then pray for mercy and pardon. God who loves you—but not your sin—will hear and bless you!

A PRAYER FOR LIBERATION

O God, I confess that all sin is hateful to You. I now turn from my sins to receive Your pardon through Jesus Christ who died for me on the cross. Forgive me, I pray, and, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, set me free from all evil thoughts, desires and deeds. Give me strength, and guide me by Your Word, the Bible. Help me to live the Christian life in truth, love, honesty, purity and self-control, through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

Dr Alan C. Clifford

Norwich Reformed Church

www.nrchurch.co.nr

 

Filed under: Culture War, Liberty

Know A Decent Pub Garden? Shhh, Don’t Tell

by Dick Puddlecote

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/PtdutLRJ3jE/know-decent-pub-garden-shhh-don-tell.html



Know A Decent Pub Garden? Shhh, Don’t Tell Via ASH Scotland, this written question exchange between a Green MSP and Scotland’s anti-smoker in chief is highly amusing (I think even he was probably struggling not to laugh when he read it).

So, apparently, telling smokers where they can smoke comfortably is now considered to be tobacco advertising by the Green Party. In fact, I think I might have transgressed this imaginary law myself by promoting a pub in Bognor last year.

Fancy being an outlaw? Well all you apparently have to do now is post something online saying that some pub or other has a decent garden and you’re advertising tobacco. Voila!

We’re still discovering how very intellectually bankrupt and absurd anti-smoking lunatics can be, I wonder when we’ll reach rock bottom.

Good grief.

Filed under: anti-smoking nazis, Liberty