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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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

I’m Coming Over All Green


A great quotation from Steven Landsburg published on Café Hayek yesterday:

Even without any formal organization, markets tend to develop precisely because they are such powerful tools for improving everyone’s welfare.

Today we are everywhere enjoined to respect the delicate ecological balance of nature, in which each creature is so miraculously designed to fill its special niche, and in which each part interacts in glorious intricacy with the whole.  Let us save some respect too for the equally delicate structure of the marketplace, which routinely accomplishes feats that even nature dares not attempt.

A society is probably the most complex eco-system known. It is as complex as the needs and desires of every single individual in it, needs and desires that can only be worked out on the level of the individual, not in aggregate - meaning it is not accessible to a central planner - to achieve the voluntary, spontaneous order that free, laissez faire markets give us. Never perfect, how can it be, but it will always be the best system there is philosophically (first), economically, and thus politically. It is the only system that works toward both the freedom, and living standards, of each of us. The only system. And so to try and put this system, which nurtures human lives, into terms those chief architects of its destruction would understand; driving the bulldozer of government regulation, with the jack-hammer of taxation gouging out endeavour, into this delicate system of human welfare, is like doing this to a landscape:



It’s not surprising, therefore, that I have a dream, of seeing one of these:





Marching on parliament, not to close down mining, such as the mining in Australia, where 1,000 Kiwis a week are now fleeing to for jobs, but to save the markets that sustain us, and could grow us those jobs here. And that's as easy as asking the politicians to step out of markets: just sit up there in the hive, eat their lunch, and try to do as little as possible. Please.

2 comments:

  1. Mind you, Mark, gouging the landscape as per your picture is probably having a positive overall benefit on the average person's standard of living, whereas the gouging of our wallets by politicians hurts everyone and only benefits the troughers. Plus, chances of a Pike River type disaster are all but eliminated with open cast mining.

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  2. No disagreement :) It's not against open cast mining, just trying to make the point about how easy it is for governments to destroy free markets.

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