When I see poll results like this, and read articles like this, I wonder if libertarianism is ever going to be viable.
The poll results are:
Con : 45
Lab : 32
Lib : 14
which leaves 9% of the population elsewhere,
or:
Con : 41
Lab : 32
Lib : 15
which leaves 12% of the population elsewhere.
A couple of things strike me as interesting. First and foremost, 32% of the population actually still support the Labour Party, despite more than a decade of flapping around with corporatism, war-mongering, sucking up to the Great Satan, loads of talk but no actual help for the working man, etc. So, why are Labour's supporters still on board? My only guess is that they are fucking stupid and would, quite literally, vote for a dog turd that was carrying a red rose. If you also consider fucking mental tax rates, collapsing education, the NHS up the shitter, lies, corruption, sleaze, Mandelsnake, Bliar, the Prime Mentalist, Harridan Harmperson, etc., I can't see why anyone who was not a dyed-in-the-wool Labour supporter would still be on board. But at least one-third of the country's voters are terminally stupid.
Secondly, given the above, the fact that the Conservatives are not at 50%-plus shows that people are skeptical of the Tories, who really are struggling to differentiate themselves from Labour. "We aren't nasty old Tories, we'll tax and spend just like the Gorgon, we are a party of social justice, just like Labour, we're just better at managing the machine of state." Sure Dave, that's compelling. The fact that you can't come up with a better message than that, and the fact that you can't see that people are fucking tired of tax and spend shows just how much use you're going to be.
Thirdly, what is the point of the LibDems? Really?
Fourthly, if we look at the marginal / swing / whatever voters, it looks like 10-15% of the country's voters actually decide anything. That sucks donkey cock.
Fifthly, most of the 10% who aren't voting for the big three are presumably all voting for the BNP or the Greens, both of whom can be described as militant wings of Labour, so they're no fucking help at all.
In discussions that I've had with even reasonably intelligent and sensible people, they just can't see the problem of letting politicians get on with what politicians want to do. They just don't seem to see that giving politicians free rein is why they're paying so much tax, why the rubbish collections are shit, why they feel so oppressed, even why there is fuck all decent to watch on the telly.
So if you're offended by some faceless mong on the internet calling you a thick cunt because of your laissez-faire attitude to politics or your mindless tribal voting, all I can say is: "You deserve to be called a cunt, you deserve all the pain you get in your life as a consequence of British politics and you deserve both in fucking spades."
If you don't like it, fucking think before you make your cross next time or before you decide not to bother.
16 comments:
No, I'm afraid Libertarianism will never take off.
My own brand (well, most of it nicked from Milton Friedman, actually) of small government socially and economically liberal pragmatarianism (very similar to libertarianism in most respects) will never take off either.
Over time, governments get bigger and bigger and taxes get higher and higher. It's called 'public choice theory'. We are doomed and there's nowhere to run.
I'm willing to bet that a good wedge of the people still voting Labour work in the public sector and despite all the crap they see happening get distinctly nervous about anybody who talks about making government smaller or less overbearing.
You've got to think of it from the point of view of a local government health and safety officer in Lambeth, or a CCTV operator in Sheffield.
I have never voted.
I don't think I am "laissez-faire". Since I turned eighteen I've thought long and hard at every election. The only conclusion I could ever come to is that there is no one for me to vote for.
Show me a libertarian, with something sensible to say. Show me someone that seems to have any spark of intelligence and I'll be there with my cross. Until you can show me that box, you should keep your opinions of whether I'm a thick cunt or not to yourself.
Libertarianism might yet take off. Since I discovered the LPUK collective I have suddenly started taking an interest. People could be persuaded. They are behaving like morons because that is the only option they are given.
From conversations in pubs it is quite clear, at least amongst the pub going fraternity, some have an interest, and would welcome change, others really couldn't care less. But unless that change is offered to them in a tangible way, there will be no change.
And yes I agree there do exist a number of incredibly think cunts out there, however given better education and not the shite they dish up these days; multicultural PC bollox with Playschool as the educational template, this situation is unlikely to improve. Note adult education services have been cut in many areas of the country, thus ensuring many remain in ignorance.
I feel this is all part of the snot-gobbler's divide and rule policy.
This country sadly in some ways, thankfully in others, is not prone to radical political activity, with the exception of some of the ethnic immigrant communities.
I am no expert in setting up a new political party and getting recognition for it, other than knowing it will take considerable amounts of money
Education is the key.
Very few people change their basic opinions after the age of eighteen, which is why the state seeks so eagerly to capture education.
Hence, if you control the teachers, the professors, the BBC journalists, the Guardian newspaper through its advertising revenue, and all of the other main-stream media through state licensing, you control the minds of the British population, or at least you can more easily persuade them to accept the status quo.
The trick will then be to get the state out of education. They won't go without a fight, I'll grant you, but that is the battleground, not that of mass persuasion of an already-adult population.
How do we get the state out of education? Tricky. But although being a short-term pessimist on this issue, as in the Mark Wadsworth line of thought, I am a long-term optimist.
The state, as it stands, cannot go on forever down its current track, which it has been on since about the time of Hegel, in Prussia (or possibly Machiavelli in Florence). The state will eventually consume itself through inflation, taxation, and regulation, and destroy all of its sources of income, the same way the Roman Empire did.
If we are lucky, we will then be in place to offer an alternative ethical framework based upon individual liberty and a totally voluntary society, propagated through private home schools and private Internet universities, once the state has broken down into nothing more than a series of mafia gangs.
Hopefully the United States will also implode into 50 different countries, and so be forced to stop terrorising the world, the EU will implode in a similar manner, and everywhere else in the world there will be secession and the dimunition of democratic/socialist (it's the same thing) government.
As Mao once said, people will still go on living without big government, once it implodes, and then libertarianism could grow from the roots up, with no single territory bigger than about Scotland, and hopefully much smaller than that.
We may be closer to this situation than we think. Although governments around the world are trying to push off the latest recession with another palliative bid of inflation, we could finally be in the Keynesian long-run game where such "stimuli" completely fail to work.
If/when the bond bubble bursts, assuming we really are in the final fiat currency bubble, the British government is going to run out of money virtually overnight, with nothing but a printing press to turn to.
Even those 33% of idiots who work for the government, who are presumably the ones voting for them, may finally turn against the hand that used to feed them, once the subsequent hyperinflation sets in, and we could get to where we want to be quite quickly, albeit with a likely interim risk of a military dictatorship.
After that collapses too, however, people may be willing to try the alternative of a society based on freedom, much as the original Americans tried in 1776, before the advent of the federalists and Alexander Hamilton, and the federal crushing of the whisky rebellion.
Alas, there's a lot of "ifs" and "maybes" along the way, before we reach a world where libertarianism has taken off, but wouldn't life be a bit boring if there wasn't?
Maybe it is about education, in which vouchers would help enormously. If set at about £4,000 per child, that'd shave £30 billion off the education budget to boot.
And people DO change their opinions after 18. Up to 30 you're a lefty, then you're moderate and over 40 you are hardcore - hardcore socialist, libertarian, Tory, totally disillusioned, whatever, but hardcore nonetheless.
'The state will eventually consume itself through inflation, taxation, and regulation, and destroy all of its sources of income, the same way the Roman Empire did'.
Spot on. We've been here before. We've always been here before. We've been at the bread and circuses stage for some time now, which seems to be the end-point of a cycle which begins with industry, initiative and innovation, which are themselves born of neccessity. Those virtues make the state possible. In its turn it strangles them.
We've been able to coast along, first on our forbears' legacy and then on bluff after that. Now those options are used up we'll have to start over or go under.
What we as libertarians (of whatever stripe) need to do is somehow make it into a mass popular movement. Or even make it fashionable. We need it to be the reflexive position on every issue for a significant chunk of the population. Then we can talk political parties.
There are several problems with this:
0) I have no idea how to do it.
1) Thinking is harder than emoting. Explaining why and how markets work and why and how interventions usually fail is hard to reduce to appealing slogans. Unlike the irrationalist left wing ideas "People before Profit!" and what not.
2) Libertarianism is a broad church - there isn't a single cohesive world view or pat ideological explanation, unlike Marxism. (this a good thing, btw)
3) State schools and state telly churning out pro-state ideas and minds. Tough.
4) Some people who describe themselves as libertarians aren't in any sense. They're just people who hate. Politicians, Chavs, Scroungers, Muslims whatever - just haters.
But on the upside:
1) The actions of our rulers are widely seen as illegitimate. People in authority have never been so widely despised at least in modern Britain as they are now.
2) There is an anti-authoritarian streak in the English - there is, its just submerged, but we are not Germans.
3) This gives me hope: Speed cameras destroyed
Mark, I'd be more nervous of "vouchers" than you. Although incredibly heavily regulated, the private education sector in this country is still "relatively" free from direct government control, because it takes no money directly from the government.
Should vouchers come in, very few private schools would turn them down. But once you take stolen money off the mob, you must allow the mob into your business to "make sure" that this money is being spent "wisely", i.e. in providing "The Mob is Good" indoctrination lessons.
Vouchers must be rejected. The solution is simply to privatize all current state schools or give them away to educational charities, or even to all of the teachers who work in a particular school. We must not grow government control of education (as through vouchers). We must remove government involvement entirely.
What the hell business is it of theirs, anyway, to be educating our children and robbing us for the privilege? If we did have an entirely anarcho-capitalist society and described another remote society where the government ran all of the schools, we would rightly assume that this remote society was suffering from a severe case of totalitarianism. Let's try this out:
"And in the Inca civilisation, the King was hailed as a Sun God, and it was compulsory for all children to attend schools run by the Sun God's ministers, in which every morning the children said prayers to the Sun God" - Does that sound like a totalitarian society? Absolutely. It also sounds exactly like the British state education system, though you can probably replace worship of the Sun God with worship of the Eco God.
That we have grown up thinking it is normal for the state to run the education system, which is full of statist lessons and statist teachers saying how necessary the state is, is a mental conditioning process we must overcome if we are ever to be free of these Guardianista bastards.
Vouchers make it worse. Complete privatisation is the only answer, plus the removal of all "compulsory attendance" laws or any other paper law forcing compliance with what any central body wants.
The price of liberty is that you don't get to tell other people what to do or to take their property from them against their will, even if to provide them with services you think they should have.
None of us are Gods, not even, may God strike me down, President-Elect Barack Obama. Therefore none of us have the right to tell other people how to run their lives so long as they keep their noses out of our lives.
For more on school vouchers, and the subtle unintended consequences which accompany them, try this:
Vouchers: Another Central Plan
@Jack: very, very thought-provoking stuff.
I'm off to have a think.
Oh, my, great minds think alike. I've just been discussing something very similar - the reasons behind political nihilism...
Actual Jack, I agree with you completely.
Vouchers just give rise to administrators and (much worse) government inspectors poking their nose into every thing and making sure that it's "a proper school".
What you want is huge diversity in education. Ideally, a lot of it wont involve schools at all, in any traditional sense of the word.
Google John Taylor Gatto for more on why compulsory state schooling is evil.
I'd quite like to see a huge expansion home schooling, networks of parents working together, private tutors and little schools. Oh yeah, this means people have to get involved with their kids - maybe only have one partner working full time.
It's about as useful here in the States as a dead cat...but I may defaming all good dead cats and thus apologize. That doesn't stop me from voting Libertarian. The alternative parties invite...well...suicidal thoughts.
No.
It can't thrive in a mass society. It requires stubborn independent minded people, who can be economically self reliant, and both able and willing to stand up for themselves. Maybe people like the Vikings - wealthy yeomen, warriors and traders in a polity without strong central rulers. Perhaps the legendary American pioneers and ranchers, able to fight the locals and thrive in the absence of strong central government.
These are not politically correct people. The mass of people are, by nature, bluntly, slaves, wanting someone else to look after them and tell them what to do, afraid to leave the herd, hating anyone who shows any sign of independence or superior ability.
If the current society and civilisation collapses, it won't be replaced by anything nice and liberal in any sense. Certainly tough independent minded gang leaders may emerge from the chaos, but they will be brutal savages, more likely to adhere to fundamentalist Islam or Voodoo than to be, or to tolerate, adherents of any western intellectual and political tradition.
"You've got to think of it from the point of view of a local government health and safety officer in Lambeth, or a CCTV operator in Sheffield."
And the millions who depend on state (sorry MY taxes) handouts...
Maybe you guys should consider allowing the invisible hand to decide the scope of government...political tolerance.
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