Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Oh Dear: David Hume, Again, And Giving Politicians Keys to Credit



After I wrote an entire book review, come essay, castigating the philosophy of the evil, though mild-mannered Scotsman, David Hume, Café Hayek quotes him this morning on economics with words I have to agree with. From his 1742 essay “Of Public Credit,”:


The practice, therefore, of contracting debt will almost infallibly be abused, in every government.  It would scarcely be more imprudent to give a prodigal son a credit in every banker’s shop in London, than to impower a statesman to draw bills, in this manner, upon posterity.


No truer words were written; Mr Hume got it right, once at least. The proof is the economies of Europe and the US, and not forgetting in New Zealand our current government with still a bigger dollar spend than Michael Cullen's, continues to borrow hundreds of millions every week. Across almost three centuries it appears our politicians have learned little: I wonder if we will, ever. 

Indeed, here's a question: haven't the only times the West has leaped ahead, been those times when revolutions, either philosophical, industrial or technological, pushed for some short glorious periods the influence of politicians back - and their racking up of debt to enslave the future to them - so free men were given the oxygen to do what markets allow them to do best: innovate and increase the living standards of all of us?
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1 comment:

  1. RichardNovember 23, 2012 at 7:49 PM

    Poor old David Hume - branded evil by the philosophically prudish simply for pointing out that the emperor wears no clothes.

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