The Bewilderness

£53 a week on taxes that pick the pockets of the poor

Iain Duncan Smith has stated that he could live on £53 a week: a media stunt that will attract the raucous cries of the Left on heat; attracted lovingly to the pheromonal stink of Tory contempt for "scroungers" and the "undeserving idle". It is not my goal to join the crapsourcing of mediocrity; where a thousand voices join in error. But I do not wish to give this Minister the benefit of the doubt. He is wrong.

He is wrong because government policies and the monetary debasement they sponsor prevent anyone from living off this sum. Let us take the staples. There is no free market in food so the poor are forced to fork over far more than is affordable so that they can subsidise the agricultural sector. Petrol is needlessly expensive forcing many to pay more for public transport, for the goods that they buy and for the car that they would have been able to afford, except for the fuel escalator. And you need a car to get to a job. And in a lunatic dash for decarbonisation: consumers are forced to pay ever higher amounts forgas and electricity in order to subsidise renewable energies and destroy British industry. The choice between eating or heating is not a myth for many. This is all undertaken by the government.

So, remove the subsidies and the taxes on even sinful activities; prevent all monetary debasement and the inflation that erodes living standards: you could live on £53 per week. Destroy planning laws that afflict the housing sector and you could include rent too. 

But don't say that you can live on £x a week when you know that your own taxes penalise the poor in their pocket. 

A branch is hacked off our tree of liberty tonight

The Independent, in its leader, tries to maintain a moral high ground in welcoming political intrusion (defined as external influence and regulation) by distinguishing between itself and the popular press. The distinction lies between those who provide information at a profit and those who don't. Such organs, who believe free speech is best curbed by rules and regulations, welcomed the Hacked Off campaign and want the right people to be able to gag the Sun.

Our politicians have gagged the press at the behest of celebrities; when the victims of NHS maltreatment or medical cover-ups warned that the new rules could destroy investigative journalism.

Freddie Astbury, president of Thalidomide UK and a victim of the side-effects of the morning sickness drug, said: “With thalidomide we learned the lesson that it’s very important to have a free press.

“If the Lib Dems and Labour introduce a law making it harder to investigate things like this they will be protecting the likes of pharmaceutical companies and not protecting the victims"

The voices of victims will find it much harder to reach the public from tonight just so left-wing politicians can spare their own blushes and that of their pet celebrities. Scum is a useful collective for those who have destroyed Britain's freedom of speech.  

The success of the state

Not discounting the potential for dogmatism amongst all ideologues; the state becomes the source of immorality in libertarianism (due to its coercive power) and an adoption of philosophical underpinnings that theoretically dictate historical origination and development. Perhaps useful in a debating exercise but has the potential to reduce complex questions on where do states come from, how do they form and why do they persist. They do not come into existence in the same way and in some geographical regions the state has never come into existence at all. 

Bit if one were to pinpoint the most successful institution that humanity has brought about, then the state has a strong claim to be number one. It is universal, adopted in most civilisations (though underpinned by the city and/or the court) and adaptable enough to survive even the most severe of crises. The Byzantine state survived the Dark Age, changed and reduced, but still in existence.

Is coercion the key test for the success of the state? Other institutions are also coercive. Is the state successful because it acquires a monopoly on violence. State structures continue to exist and tend to emerge from polities with overlapping power centres, lacking a monopoly in violence. These tests are incomplete if viewed through a historical prism.

This short piece does not explain why states exist and why they contine to be successful; the ability to seize assets for collective purposes is a key part of that story; its immorality clear.

Libertarianism provides a key perspective on the morality of state power and action. This does not tell us why states emerge, exist and adapt.

Open 'wi-fi' abolished

Another great technology ruined by a government using a sledgehammer to crack non-conformity. Since file-sharing could result in piracy, the Digital Economy Bill attempts to avoid this eventuality by outlawing free wi-fi. How this helps prevent piracy is beyond me, but what do small businesses and legal clarity matter?

Referring to BIS's comments about the low bandwidth of coffee-shop connections, Lilian Edwards suggested it was "not correct to draft laws hoping they are difficult to break".

Edwards also pointed out that BIS's guidance for universities shows the government admitting "they don't know themselves how universities fit into the Digital Economy Bill".

"[Universities] don't know if they're subscribers, ISPs or neither," Edwards said. "If the government is not clear, how on earth are the universities supposed to respond? This seems almost unprecedented to me, for a government document."

To protect the George Michaels and Hollywoods of this world (as lobbied), the network effects of open-to-air wi-fi must be destroyed in universities, libraries, coffee-shops, pubs and anywhere else that people could congregate to share information online. Just because one aspect of sharing online could be illegal, all sharing online must be rendered difficult or impossible.

This 'rotten' Parliament ends in gerrymandering

The government and the palace are preparing for a hung Parliament: just in case. For this rotten Parliament and this 'rotten election' is defined by three gerrymandering parties, two of whose policies have some residual merit.

The Liberal Democrats favour a proportional system that would provide them with more seats and perhaps a 'kingmaker' role. The Tories aim for a reduction of seats within a first past the post system, redressing the imbalance that favours the Labour Party.

The prize for rotten behaviour is handed to Brown and the Labour Party. Masquerading as reformer, they adopt the only electoral system that will extend their predominance in Parliament by accentuating their voting strength.

A hung Parliament may be the worse outcome, offering the opportunity to perpetuate this political class, all of whom deserve to be turfed out. The scum wish to alter the keys in favour of incumbency.

The new enemy is salt

The new enemy is salt. Here is an interesting example at an early stage of how calls for legislation leap from study to implementation. A survey has looked at salt.

In the paper, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and colleagues, from the University of California, San Francisco, USA, undertook a computer simulation showing the effects of population wide reductions of dietary salt intakes in all adults aged 35 to 85 years in the USA. Reducing dietary salt intake by 3 g per day (1200mg less sodium per day) could result in 60,000 to 120,000 fewer cases of heart disease , 32,000 to 66,000 fewer strokes and 54,000 to 100,000 fewer heart attacks.

Just one study and even then, dietary recommendations are notorious for lack of reliability. But the recommendation follows like day after night:

A reduction in dietary salt of 3g per day, the authors went on to say, would have approximately the same effect on reducing cardiac events as a 50 % reduction in tobacco use, a 5% reduction in body mass index among obese adults or the use of statins to treat people at low or intermediate risk for CHD events. Furthermore, reducing dietary salt intakes by 3g per day would save $10 billion to $ 24 billion in annual health care costs.

Precise, costed benefits that bear little resemblance to reality, but a comparison with the other devils of public health is utilised to define a 'collective benefit'. Thus the call for legislation by the European Society of Cardiology:

While individuals may use salt sparingly at home, around 75 % of the salt we eat is already in the food we buy. This, says the ESC, underlines the need for legislation to lay down guidelines. "The reality of international food production in Europe means that such public health initiatives need to be tackled on a European wide basis, rather than an individual country basis," said [Professor Frank] Ruschitzka.

Throw in a publicity week and the NGO for good measure:

Salt will again be on the agenda with World Salt Awareness Week 2010 , which runs from February 1- 7 (3). The week is being run by World Action on Salt and Health (WASH), a global group that works with governments to highlight the need for widespread introduction of population based salt reduction strategies.

Add salt!

Clegg's progressivism heralds an aggressive secularism

Nick Clegg gave an interview, highlighted in the Independent, about Liberal Democrat policies on gays. Policies that in contemporary vernacular are labelled progressive, and yet are deeply illiberal in their consequences.

Force all schools – including faith schools – to implement anti-homophobia bullying policies and teach that homosexuality is "normal and harmless".

This unwillingness to respect the values of different communities was justified by Clegg in one of the most disturbing quotations from a political leader:

But last night Mr Clegg asked: “If we don’t want to discriminate, why do we make differences in language? Language is a hugely important signifier of how we segment society and how you seek to create differences between people. Since we don’t want to make differences on this and the law has moved a great deal to do that, we should be linguistically the same too.”

Standing foursquare in the postmodern forum, Clegg identifies language as the key to meaning, power and discrimination. To avoid discrimination, law, language and education should all seamlessly reinforce each other. The unspoken inference is that multicultural Britain is gradually being replaced by a set of values, labelled 'progressive'. Relativism was a respectable position in the last century but an aggressive, secular ideology has gradually been coming to the fore, with overtly anti-clerical consequences. Clegg is the latest unwitting representative of this trend.

The new progressivism is an illiberal doctrine. It does not respect the space required for freedom of conscience and promotes a system of values that must be indoctrinated through education, relying upon the state to inculcate these in the country's youth. The intolerance of self-styled progressives has been mounting in recent years: and it is unclear if they can maintain an incoherent programme incorporating identity politics and progress. It works for gays but not for religion.

We have already seen a parting of the ways in other countries: such aggressive secularism has rapidly moved towards populist stances, as the Pim Fortuyn phenomenon in the Netherland demonstrated. Eyebrows are raised that Clegg's statement implicitly heralds such a realignment in British politics. Do we hear echoes in Labour?

Liberty and road safety

New Zealand, like many activist governments, wants to do something about road safety. For the Kiwis, this appeared to be easy. Make motor insurance compulsory. That would have a beneficial effect on road deaths. Or perhaps not:

A government decision on compulsory third party vehicle insurance is in doubt after research showing the majority of kiwis already have vehicle insurance.

Part of a Ministry of Transport review of the compulsory insurance issue, the survey of 4,000 New Zealanders found 92.4% had motor vehicle insurance.....

The level of uninsured motor vehicles was similar to countries overseas where vehicle insurance was compulsory, including the UK, where an estimated 6% of motorists were uninsured.

If people buy motor insurance without legal coercion, why do we need the sanction of the law? No doubt New Zealand differs from the United Kingdom in a number of cultural aspects, but their experience is invaluable in arguments against coercion.

Soak the rich, save the state, help the planet.

The one word that we should despise when applied to politics is libertarian. For, Peter Riddell describes the Liberal Democrats thus, when they are anything but.

Let us look at their policies: taxes based on economic illiteracy and populist gain, designed to tap into the current theme of 'hang the rich' and damn the poor. And they describe this stance as courage. If only they had written a book on this virtue to clarify their hypocrisy.

Even Riddell, centre-left, recognises that the LDs are radiating the zeitgeist but have no coherent voice, conflicted between liberty and equality.

Soak the rich, save the state, help the planet. Sums up all three parties actually.

Repeal RIPA

A feature of this complex state is its view of the law as a tool. Individuals are expected to comply with the laws, no matter how bad, rushed, complex and incoherent they are. But civil servants have a higher purpose as they view the laws that they draft as rules for the governed, not the governors. It is this stark dichotomy between rulers and ruled that acts as a drip, drip slide to privilege and inequality before the law.

Today, the Office of Surveillance Commissioners has reported that the tactics employed by the Environment Agency are designed to circumvent the law. Moreover, they are extraordinary, using a network of spies to try and detect environmental crimes. They have trespassed on private property, carried out illegal surveillance and abused their powers to track private citizens. This is blandly described as “fundamental flaws” in their operation and a lack of proportionality.

This abuse is based upon the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), a bill rushed through to expand the powers of government to combat terrorism. However, the powers have been used to achieve other goals, such as widening the influence of local government and abusing the original objective of countering potential threats.

The ensuing eight years has led to a change of attitudes and practices in municipalities and quangos. Laws are no longer obeyed, due process is ignored and individual rights are there to be countered, not upheld. Those who undertake these tasks see nothing wrong in breaking the law since they are imbued with a higher purpose: privileging their petty rules at the expense of all our liberties.

No need to see the solution: repeal RIPA.