A quiet muse...

...as one socialist suffocates another, ever so delicately, with a pillow...

...it would be nice if Klein’s alternative were generally viable. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of forty acres and a mule would be vindicated, albeit in a more socially organized manner. But it is not. Worker’s control is a great dream (I dreamed it myself for many years), but it founders on the reality of capital diversification, which the worker-owned firm cannot handle. Cooperative land holding is just a myth, pure and simple, and always has been, throughout human history...Herb Gintis on Naomi Klein here...

May you live in interesting times...

...environmentalism is a political idea; it aims to reorganise society around its values and ethics. Yet this ideology has never been tested democratically. It hasn’t won any seats in the UK parliament, yet almost the entire house of commons has embraced environmentalism. It's as though, one morning, the House of Commons turned up for a debate, not as the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the independents, but as members of the Green Party. (More here...)

Why is this? Is it that the science is truly settled or that the precautionary principle has won converts? Or simply that most elected MP's in the U.K. are entirely comfortable with drastic wealth reduction ?

Next month's elections, the global financial crisis and the acknowledged forecast global cooling - for possibly the next 30 years - will see the beginnings of a reappraisal of climate change as an environmental and economic priority. At least one likely future cabinet minister in NZ, Rodney Hide; is a firmly declared climate change sceptic.

The gloves are coming off, and battle is about to begin...in NZ we can only hope for determined, principled leadership and an enlarged debate over climate change...



This too, re financial anguish internationally from the UK blog An Englishman's Castle. Challenging and interesting times indeed...

The intervention, or rather interference, of the state in financial and economic matters can only lead to sclerosis, the suppression of enterprise, the raising of taxes, starvation of investment, lack of innovation, technological retardation and the rise of the power of organised labour. Judging from yesterday's interest cut, the much-vaunted independence of the Bank of England has already gone out of the window and state control of the central bank is back with a vengeance.
If you doubt this analysis, recall what happened in this country between 1945 and 1979, when such an ethos as we are now returning to existed unchallenged, even by Tory governments. The more the state intervened, the more it had to intervene: the appetite grew with eating...more here...

We therefore hold these truths to be self-evident...

1. You spend your own money buying something for yourself—you therefore try to get the best possible product for the best possible price.


2. You spend someone else's money buying something for yourself—you still try to get the best possible product, but you are not so concerned about the price.


3. You spend your own money buying something for someone else—you are deeply concerned about the price, but you are not nearly so worried about the quality of the product.


4. You spend someone else's money buying something for someone else—in which case, who gives a shit?

with thanks to P.J.O'Rourke and Milton Friedman.