How to watch, and read, your news

"[T]the most studious and engaged man can neglect [newspapers and TV news] only at his cost. But have little to do with them. Learn how to get their best too, without their getting yours.... Like some insects, some [news] died the day it was born....

    "There is a great secret in knowing what to keep out of the mind as well as what to put in.... The genuine news is what you want, and practice quick searches for it. Give yourself only so many minutes for the paper [or TV news]. Then you will learn to avoid the premature reports and anticipations, and the stuff put in for people who have nothing to think.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his column 'Emerson Talks With a College Boy'

"We shouldn’t underestimate the power of great literature to resist the blandishments of Woke coercion."

"We shouldn’t underestimate the power of great literature and a great tradition to resist the blandishments of [so-called] Woke coercion. Identity politics don’t appeal so much to a youth who has imbibed ‘Self-Reliance’ and Walden, works that abhor group dynamics. Read Swift and Orwell and you immediately suspect an idealist who arrives with promises of radical change….Victimology won’t please a mind that admires Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery."

~ English professor Mark Bauerlein, quoted in the article 'A Key Lesson in Education Policy: You Don’t Make Peace with Termites'

Persecution?

 

 

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

          ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his Journals

"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind..."

"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion..."
          ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay 'History'

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"All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair." #QotD

"All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair."
          ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1860 essay 'The Conduct of Life'

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"Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about." #QotD

 

"Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about." 

          ~ attrib. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Quote of the Day: On nonconformity

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would
gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself,
and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Some quotable quotes for Budget Day

Another Budget Day, another advance auction of stolen goods. Here, specially for Budget Day, some thoughts and quotes on the nature of taxation:

"To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation." - Jeff Daiell

"I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum." - former Massachusetts Governor William Weld

"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs." - Dave Barry

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” - Jean Baptiste Colbert

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." – Alexis De Tocqueville

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. - Bertrand de Jouvenel

'We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.' - 'New Deal' luminary Harry Hopkins

"Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve 'tax breaks,' which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money." - Dave Barry

“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.” - Terry Pratchett

“For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It's sad to realise that most citizens do not even notice the irony of being bribed with their own money." - Anon.

"[There are dangers in] the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts." - Winston Churchill

"When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the state demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called "sales tax." - Jeff Daiell

"Taxation is far greater an evil than theft. It is a form of slavery. If you cannot choose the disposition of your property, you are a slave. If you must ask permission to work, and/or pay involuntary tribute to anyone from your wages, you are a slave. If you are not allowed to dispose of your life (another way of defining money, since it represents portions of your time and effort, which is what your life is composed of) in the time, manner and amount of your choosing, you are a slave." - Libertarian writer Rick Tompkins

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave." - Ayn Rand

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle” - Winston Churchill

"Taxation without representation is tyranny." - James Otis

"Taxation WITH representation ain't so hot either." - Gerald Barzan

"Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation." - Fletcher Knebel

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before." - HL Mencken

"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin." - Mark Twain

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan

"Death and taxes are inevitable; at least death doesn't get worse every year." - Unknown

"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government." - former US President Grover Cleveland

"Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down." - Charles Adams

"The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less." - Henry Hazlitt

"The poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape." - PJ O'Rourke

"A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul." - George Bernard Shaw

"Freedom is the quality of being free from the control of regulators and tax collectors. If I want to be free their control, I must not impose controls on others." - Hans F. Sennholz

"There's only one way to kill capitalism--by taxes, taxes, and more taxes." - Karl Marx

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." - Vladimir Lenin

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - PJ O'Rourke

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." - Bertrand de Jouvenel

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy." - former US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." - Robert Heinlein

"Taxes are the sinews of the state." - Cicero

"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors, and miss." - Robert Heinlein

TAGS: Budget_&_Taxation, Quotes

Cue Card Libertarianism - Need

A cannibalistic concept of need permeates the entire range of anti-freedom philosophies: the view of need as a claim. “I need food and sustenance,” this view states, “therefore you are obliged to be it, provide me with it, or give me the wherewithal to purchase it.” “I need resources,” says this view, “and this need gives me a claim over others that they must fulfil. Somehow.”

It is this view of need as a claim over others that underlies the whole Welfare State -- in a phrase: it is the ethic of the moocher, and the world-view of moral cannibalism. “Since I cannot be sure that you will meet my needs voluntarily,” says the moocher, “the state on my behalf, must force you to.” The moocher in cahoots with the looter – what could be more ingenious.

Uncomfortable with the crudity of it when so accurately formulated, the philosophical purveyors of this concept disguise it by repairing to a mysterious ‘social contract’ to which we are all supposedly unwitting signatories. Its political purveyors take for granted that voters regard need as a claim, just as they do themselves, and pitch policies to the satisfaction of the needs of one group at the expense of all others. The instrument by which such policies are implemented, now that literal cannibalism is no longer socially acceptable, is, of course, compulsory taxation.

“This is the history of governments – one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking at me from afar ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end - not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The most derisory example of this view of need, taken to its logical extreme, was probably voiced by Hitler when he promised that the Third Reich would provide husbands for all spinsters.

The wrongness of treating need as a claim is that it overlooks the fact that human beings are free agents. This view, which today is all-pervasive, succeeds in tying the non-needy to the needy, with the chains of enslavement hidden by government sleight of hand. It replaces the genuine right to satisfy one’s needs through one’s own efforts and by voluntary interaction with others, with the bogus ‘right’ to have one’s needs met by others with no effort of one’s own, and without those others having any choice in the matter.

In the field of ethics, this view -- which we may truly call altruism in action -- replaces consent with demands; in the field of politics it replaces right with need; in the field of human endeavour it punishes the productive, and rewards the unproductive. The result is that one begins to see others as a threat, rather than as the boon they should be in a free society in which none are parasitic on any other.

In a free society such a travesty would be laughed out of court. The needs of those genuinely unable to meet them through their own efforts would be met by voluntary charity, in ways much more innovative, effective and generous than coercively-funded state bureaucracies could begin to contemplate – not as a matter of grudging obligation, but as a matter of genuine benevolence.

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here. The series as it develops can be found here.

Cue Card Libertarianism -- Individualism

Individualism is the doctrine that that each human being is sovereign over his own life – that each individual is autonomous in themselves – and as such, no person can become a means to the ends of others. Nothing may be forced on an autonomous individual against his will; if something is desired of you it may only be obtained by your voluntary consent – which you are fully entitled to withhold.

Since individual autonomy is an extension of each person’s ability to think and to choose – that is, of an individual's rational faculty – the upholding of autonomy entails the upholding of reason, and its application in reality. It should go without saying that such an individual recognises this same principle in others.

In establishing what individualism is, it is important to understand very clearly what it is not.

Individualism is not is Subjectivism – doing or thinking what you feel like just because you feel like it. Subjectivism -- or its kissing cousin Hedonism -- is not the hallmark of an individualist, even if you believe as Nietzsche did that your feelings are of a superior strain and entitle you to ride roughshod over others. The individualist lives by his mind, and since he claims the right to do that for himself he respects that same right in others. (The individualist understands that we are not guaranteed success in all our freely-chosen actions: Each of us is free to make our own mistakes; the individualist respects that freedom, but will occasionally exercise the freedom to judge the freely-chosen actions of others.)

Neither is an individualist a Non-conformist simply for the sake of non-conformity (eg., Howard Stern, Madonna, Marilyn Manson et al). "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist" declared Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not so. Such a person’s behaviour is still driven by others: “Whatever they do, I’ll do the opposite” says the non-conformist. He wants to shock and outrage – others. He wants to be seen as an 'individual' -- as compared to others. Such a person, however well-tattooed and however weighed down with piercings, is still dependent on the judgement of others. A genuinely independent person conforms to the judgement of his own mind. (He does just occasionally however accept advice, and read maps. Being an individualist does not mean being an island.)

Nor is it sufficient to say that each person is an end to himself, while preaching that he must purge his behaviour of every last vestige of personal inclination and do his 'Duty' (we might at this point hear the heels-clicked-together of Immanuel Kant and his Categorical Imperative, or the carved-in-stone moralising of the religious). An individualist pursues those actions he has voluntarily chosen as being in his rational self-interest (about which he may of course be quite wrong), not those imposed upon him as his 'duty'. As PJ O'Rourke put it so well, "There is only one basic right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." (He is also of course quite entitled to reap all benefits should he be proved correct.)

Nor will it do to say, “We should permit the individual to act on his own judgement, since that way, he delivers the best results for society” (see for example John Stuart Mill, et al). Individualists are not Utilitarians. Such a maxim rests on the assumption that society owns the individual, not that he owns himself, and that the degree of latitude he is 'permitted' may be varied at society’s discretion (witness Mill’s many compromises with statism). Individuals acting together voluntarily in their own self-interest are in fact the only way to deliver "the best results for society" -- but this is a consequence, not a primary justification. As Adam Smith said, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

In summary then, libertarians -- and certainly this libertarian -- would agree with the summary given of the doctrine by Ayn Rand: “Individualism holds that a civilised society, or any form of association, co-operation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights – and that a group as such has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.”

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.

Bloodless scholasticism ahoy!

Camille Paglia is pissed off that women were absent in what Will Wilkinson calls the "BBC's ridiculous philosopher popularity contest" that some of you may have noticed a few weeks ago. I was fairly pissed off myself to see Karl Marx top the poll, but the selection from which to choose wasn't too great.

"I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves," argues Paglia, before taking wing:

Today's lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundamentally altering young people's brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry. Today's philosophers are now antiquarians.

Wilkinson contends contra Paglia that, far from collapsing, "philosophy as traditionally practiced is at its high water mark." However, he says,

I agree that academic philosophy is insufficiently engaged with the public, and could hold a more privileged place in the fragmented popular consciousness. And I think this is due to straightforward institutional reasons. Academia as it is presently constituted does reward a kind of bloodless scholasticism. One reason I decided to drop out of academia was that I thought direct engagement with current policy debates and cultural concerns would make me a better philosopher. Greats like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx were not academics, but men involved in thinking through the practical political matters of their day.

Quite true. In the words of poll winner Karl Marx, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (a great pity however that he himself had so misinterpreted the world before he attempted to have it changed.) Ralph Waldo Emerson made a related point many decades ago in an address which got him banned from Harvard in which he castigated the chattering classes of the day, those second-handed ivory tower-dwellers

who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm ... who values[s] books as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul.

What meek young men will find in their libraries today is rather different to the great men to which Emerson referred however. What they will find instead is moral and intellectual pygmies of the likes of "radical pragmatist" and ethical relativist Richard Rorty. Tibor Machan takes Rorty and his ilk to task over at SOLO:

The greatest minds in the Western philosophical tradition, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza all held that, while it is difficult, human beings can learn of some basic truths. At the very least they held out hope that this could be done, especially in the realms of ethics and politics. The American Founders shared a similar perspective, which is why they declared themselves in support of the inalienable individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But today, probably more so than ever before, the dominant idea in most universities is that no basic truths about ethics and politics can be identified...

The practical implication of the view that Richard Rorty (and other relativists) expound is that the positions of the terrorists and of the victims of terrorism are basically indistinguishable as to their merit or worth. In the grand scheme of things, as best as we can tell, the two are on the same footing—or, to put it another way, neither has any better footing.

Machan suggests that in these troubled times it is little wonder philosophers such as Rorty spend so little time writing op-eds and engaging with the world, and so much time talking nonsense to each other. "They ought to remain silent in less troubling times as well," contends Tibor.

Amen to that.