If you want a laugh, have a read of this BBC article entitled “Where now for capitalism”? Great to read the thoughts of such renowned free marketeers as….Noam Chomsky, Tony Benn, Brendan Barber. Along with other elements within the left-wing media, the BBC takes delight at the current chaos in the money markets/housing market and it is fantasising at the moment that capitalism is dying and it’s time for socialism uber alles.
THE WAR ON CAPITALISM.
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“But you all appear united in the absolute conviction that the media is against you (the BBC in particular).”
Well, whatever we ‘appear’ to be united in, that’s just your distorted reading of the situation. I for one don’t think the media are (it’s a plural noun, mate) ‘united against me’. They are not united for or against anything.
The BBC is biased. That’s what we are saying. The hint is in the name of this blog. Perhaps you should read it before going off on a tangent.
archduke and will,
You guys must remember that to Leftoids – especially those not employed by the BBC yet come here to defend the indefensible – anyone not to the left of Gramsci is a right-wing extremist nutter. Almost every single one of them has called this blog a far-right echo chamber or something along those lines at least once during their various tenures here, never mind the drive-by trolls.
Their glasses aren’t just rose-tinted, they create a negative parallax: they make things look much farther away than they really are. It’s all a matter of perspective, and their comments reveal their vantage points.
George | 21.09.08 – 4:33 pm | #
No, YOU think (using the term loosely) that its only job ‘should’ be etc. Plenty of rational people disagree.
I put it to you, that those people are not rational. People who think that the purpose of the state is to control how people live their lives and to restrict free trade are not rational.
And you can’t read, mate. Nobody said that these protections are the ingredients for barbarity: it’s the absence of the other protections that is the recipe for barbarity: absence of protection against the tyranny of the majority, to name one example.
And you cannot comprehend what is meant by the “protection of the rights of the individual”. That would also include the protection of the individual from any “tyranny of the majority” – including, you would have to agree with me, the right of the individual to be protected against any majority that wanted to commandeer his earnings for the purposes of “redistribution”.
Whichever way you look at it, my idea of the proper role of the state includes – and in fact CENTERS AROUND – the protection of the individual from either other individuals or mobs of individuals.
Absence of protection against hunger and against emotional torture of minors is another.
It is not the job of the state to “protect against hunger”, it is the job of the individual to protect against his own hunger and of those who depend on him (offspring). It is the job of the state to sustain and protect the conditions under which the individual can act in his own interests to protect himself against hunger (just so long as he doesn’t interfere with the rights of others to do the same).
As soon as you say it is the job of the state to protect us against hunger, you’re getting onto the kind of territory in which it is deemed OK to enslave one man to pay for the welfare of another. You’re getting into the realm of “wealth redistribution”. It is not up to the state to redistribute wealth, to commandeer the property of one man in order to feed another.
There are plenty more. It’s these that make for civilised society.
No, it is “these” that make for a society which largely consists of producers and parasites. A welfare society in which the poor are paid to stay poor, and the successful are punished for their success. A society in which the most vulnerable minority – the individual – is persecuted and oppressed. A society in which the individual hopes, dreams, aspirations and personal priorities of the individual are sacrificed for the sake of some mystical notion of “common purpose”, decided upon by the mob and enforced by faceless bureaucrats.
George | 21.09.08 – 4:37 pm
Yes, how rude. Without even reading the blog he just got aboard his tangent and went off.
(Probably like a sedgway, but goes sideways.)
Jason, are you unable to read? You yourself said:
The state’s only job should be to protect the individual from physical coercion and fraud
You said nothing at that point about “protection of the rights of the individual”. This is something you invented later because you could not sustain your original argument.
As soon as you say it is the job of the state to protect us against hunger, you’re getting onto the kind of territory in which it is deemed OK to enslave one man to pay for the welfare of another
Nonsense. Taxes are not ‘enslavement’. Unless you are a juvenile anarchist, of course.
George | 22.09.08 – 7:29 pm | #
George | 22.09.08 – 7:31 pm | #
1) Protecting the individual from physical coercion and fraud IS protecting the rights of the individual.
2) Are you unable to read? I did not say that taxes are enslavement. In fact, taxes are highly appropriate in order to fund a state in its endeavors to uphold the rule of law and protect the rights of the individual. In other words – the state’s only moral role. So, taxes should be used for national defense, law and order and a criminal justice system.
What I said was that to force one man to pay for the welfare of another, i.e. to pay for the upkeep of another, to feed him etc – is enslavement. Which it most certainly is.
You seem to think that one man has the “right” to expect another man to “protect him from hunger”. I maintain that no such right exists.