Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The people say they'll keep calm and carry on... but for how long?

Mr Heffer has an interesting article in the Torygraph, this morning.

Here's the comment I left with the moderators:

Jack Maturin on February 25, 2009 at 03:30 PM (only three hours after posting! :-)

I agree with virtually everything you say, Simon, but have you considered who a large minority, or even a majority, of these middle class people are? They are the placemen and the placewomen of the client state itself.

They can afford large houses, private schools, and expensive foreign holidays because they have large salaries from Gordon, with gold-plated pensions coming later from the taxes of as-yet-unborn children.

(Or at least they think they do - repudiation of these 'debts' to these people, is an idea whose time will come.)

This then makes two divisions of middle class people, in this country. The tax payer class who are forced to pay all of these client state salaries and pensions, and the tax consumer class who benefit from this coercive largesse.

I suppose you could brand them as the 'Telegraph' class and the rival 'Guardian' class.

I agree with you that taxes and real public spending must be slashed, with warm bodies out of the door in every single state organisation, with perhaps an exception for people whom we all consider genuinely useful, such as doctors and nurses.

The mood of the tax payer class may get ugly if the tax consumers are not sacked. However, the tax consumers are going to get very angry indeed, when they are sacked, leading to strikes and all sorts of other related problems, unless we can change the way that they think, and persuade them that they too will be better off under a new system.

We need more of a solution than just saying that government spending should be cut, because the current democratic system will never allow this, when almost half of the electorate are members of Gordon Brown's client state.

This is where the BNP is getting its growing support from, via this disillusionment in the entire democratic process.

We need to tackle this too, because if we are to be subjected to a takeover by these national socialists, some of whom seem keen to post their thoughts on your articles, then we really will be in a terrible mess - perhaps a new dark age.

It is also no good blaming David Cameron for being a weak-willed lily-livered coward. Half of the people he is trying to appeal to read the Guardian. He is afraid of angering them. It is not his fault that he is unable to see beyond this problem, because he is a fish and the water he swims in is the fluid of democracy.

I am not suggesting that I have any answers. I look to men of your calibre to provide these. But there is more to this than just cutting government spending.

We need an entire change of moral, ethical, and political thinking.

Democracy is a God that has failed. What we need to do is find a person who is capable of re-generating a cataclysmic change in political thinking. Margaret Thatcher would have been up to this. David Cameron, clearly, is not.

We need to find the person who is actually capable of tackling this major failure of democracy. Otherwise we are either looking into the abyss of international socialism or the chasm of national socialism.

The solution could be that nobody who works for the state is allowed to vote or it could be that you get a vote proportional to the taxes you pay minus the salary and benefits you extract from the state?

As an anarchist myself, I don't think either of the above solutions would work, but that is the kind of change somebody needs to be able to come up with and make stick.

I am carrying on and I am keeping calm. But unless we can figure out how to unlock this Gordian knot of the failure of democracy, the time for carrying on and calmness will soon be coming to an end.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

"As an anarchist myself, I don't think either of the above solutions would work, but that is the kind of change somebody needs to be able to come up with and make stick."

My continuing experience is that statists, that vast majority out there, balk at stuff that I as an anarchist think moderate. There seems to be a Grand Canyon sized gulf between out mindsets and I cannot see how to bridge it. I fear that your description of tax consumers and subsequent suggestions, while perfectly normal to my thinking, will fall on equally deaf ears.

Jack Maturin said...

We can but try.

The first American revolutionaries must have thought that they would never be able to kick out the King.

But in the end.

They won.

Keep the faith, Gekko. One day we too shall win.

Might be a bloody long time off, I'll grant you! :-)

Time for a large glass of New Zealand Red wine.

Cheers! X-)

Anonymous said...

Jack, just maybe the frustrations of the present moronic politics are beginning to get to you.
Scrap this stupid exercise in paper money. Wasn’t it just the most stupid idea ever?

Print the stuff and then give our politicians the power over its supply? Madness.

Paper money and fractional bank reserves caused this nonsense. Without them Gordo would not have been able to expand the economy in the way he did; house prices would not have been able to go through the roof; the state would not have been able to grow so big without having to directly tax the population and suffer the consequences, in fact nearly all the real problems we have today, including having to suffer Keynesian economists and their mindless views would not exist.

We would still be plagued with the snouts in the trough, but this will be the case whatever model you choose to adopt. Even in an anarchist state you will be tempted to have the odd bit of legislation, and the legislators will find a way to the trough.

Whilst it is true that Somalia is making excellent progress as an anarchy, with its newest industry already bringing in two hundred million dollars a year; not bad for a population of 6.5 million, I would think that it might be a step too far, too quickly, for the UK.

Maybe keep it simple: bring back the gold standard, insist on one hundred percent banking reserves and privatise the supply of money. Most people will be able to understand this.

Jack Maturin said...

There is no way this country could tolerate an overnight conversion to anarchism. There are just too many people who have too much of their lives invested in the current system.

But we can work back to it gradually. The key is privatisation.

Everything that moves must be privatised. Everything that doesn't move should be privatised.

We start with this 'Art of the Possible' plan, here:

=> http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/2009/02/britain-at-risk-of-10-year-recession.html

And then we move backwards, privatising one thing at a time.

Once the above plan is in place and we have competing gold and silve coinages, with all natural law banking privileges removed, we can start work on privatising all Universities, then all schools, then all hospitals, etc, with matching tax cuts as we go, to pay for private provision and much greater amounts of private charity.

Once we've completed that, we then start privatising welfare, and all other possible functions of government until we get down to security.

We then offload as much business law into the private sector, that we can, then personal law. We remove public policemen and gradually replace them with private "gated estate" type policemen, until eventualy we are down to just the armed services.

These will be the last things to be privatized, but even they can be privatised. Was not Sir Francis Drake himself, one of England's greatest ever heroes, a privateer?

Yes, we're talking a long way off into the future, but once the process is begun it will quickly accelerate.

The key to it, as you suggest, is to privatize the money supply, because once governments lose their control over money, many of their other controls will fall away naturally.

Eventually, if we must have a government for a few more decades, we can fall upon the much more natural government of monarchy, at least to tie the remaining armed services (and courts and police) until we can think of a way of privatising those, too.

Then finally, once all of these agencies are also privatised, we can then abolish monarchy and finally arrive at the totally voluntary society.

Yes, all of the above may seem nonsensical to the typical statist. This is because we in this country have entirely subjected ourselves to state education, in which the state and its agents have continually pushed the magnificence and the absolute essential nature of the state.

This is why Britain will not be the heart of the anarchist revolution over the next two centuries.

It will either be the United States, which has a strong tradition of libertarian revolution, which was successful 200 years ago in throwing off the British King, until the Hamiltonians wrecked the whole thing.

Or it will be the tiny countries of the world which put up such a good successful model, that we finally emulate them. (Eg. Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Lictenstein, Andorra, Monaco, etc.)

The key in this country will be moving to the privatisation of education as soon as possible. With attendant privatisations of the state's propaganda machine in the Universities and at the BBC.

Once people have their minds freed, they will eventually become more responsive to a totally voluntary society.

Proper money will help, as will the privatisation of the Universities. Because once all of the philosophy and economics departments are cut from the succour of the state, they will be forced to teach things people actually want/need to learn. Austrian economics will then become dominant, and wipe away the mistakes of neo-classicalism, monetarism, and the dreadful monster of Keynesianism.

We'll get there eventually, because eventually the truth must out.

The modern state has only really been going for a few hundred years, and is heavily tied in with the concepts of fractional reserve banking (as propagated in Florence) and central banking (as propagated here in England). Remove these props to the expansionist state, and all else should follow. States will collapse quite quickly after this.

Another key could be the breakup of United States into at least 50 different countries, and the end of the US Empire (with its bases still throughout western Europe).

That is why it is not ALL despair, doom and gloom, at Maturin Towers. Because that Kenyan Cock currently in the Oval Office seems hell bent on destroying the United States. Good luck to him. Because from the rubble may emerge my 50+ different countries, many of which have a strong history of radical libertarianism (e.g. Virginia - though having eaten many meals at Tyson's Cross VA, surrounded by US government staffers, that tradition may take some time to revive! :-)

There is still enormous hope. It's just all going to be a bit 'difficult' to re-adjust to an onward trajectory for humanity, one based upon peace, life, liberty, property, and prosperity.

In the short-term things look terrible. In the long-term, things still look great.

Socialism cannot work. The more you have of it, the worse it fails. This is why Gordon's proposed One World government (at first for the financial system, and then later for everything else), will fail far quicker than the Soviet Union ever did.

Keep the faith, Anonymous. The future belongs to us.