Okay so I’ll preface this video with the following, rather obvious, disclaimer: I can’t stand Jeremy Kyle! I find him ignorant, boorish, arrogant and exactly the kind of person who I know full well would absolutely love to get his hands on government power. In every way possible he comes across as a control freak dictator hypocrite cunt.

With that said, here is a video clip that shows the reality of welfare. Not what people imagine, or pretend welfare does, but what it really does: incentivise awful, cuntish behaviour. Welfare encourages the disintegration of the family, it discourages hard-work and virtue. Conversely it encourages abuse of drugs, anti-social behaviour and, worst of all, having children when you’re clearly not equipped for the task.

Watch the guy in this video clip, clearly an awful human being, but he’s holding a mirror back to society and saying the absolute truth, showing us the consequences of our system:

“I pay for my beer because of yous [the taxpayer]”

Jeremy: “People like you don’t deserve a penny”
Response: “But they get it don’t they?”

“If my money is stopped then I will get a job”

“There’s nothing you can do is there”

This isn’t an accident or an anomaly, this is pervasive across the country. If welfare was run privately, by charities, people like this would never get a penny because no charity in the land that gave out its donations to such people would continue to receive people’s goodwill. Private industry is accountable. Government welfare is not!

Before anybody feels the need to correct me, I know there are plenty of people on the dole who are not like this, in fact people in my own family have used welfare many times in my life and they are all nice people. That’s not the point though, nice people will be nice either way, but only the state rewards negative behaviour, only the state will take your money at the point of a gun and hand it out to people like this. State welfare is what is causing the downfall of society. All those programs the liberals want to protect, all those “safety nets” that the do-gooders want to continue, they are all the cause of the increase in violence in the inner cities and the single-parent households and the binge-drinking britain and the stabbings and the disintegration.

We need a new phrase to encapsulate the constant missing of this point by just about everybody in the country… Perhaps “It’s the government, stupid” would work.

Okay I’ve been seeing a lot about this on the social networking sites and even though I’m not especially knowledgeable about the inner workings so of the Internet I know for damn sure I do not want the government interfering one iota. For a start the Internet is AMAZING. It WORKS.  It is by far the greatest human invention of my generation. The idea that it needs regulating seems insane on the face of it, and yet, I am seeing more and more calls for “net neutrality”.

Firstly I’ll link to a mises.org article that is a good starting point for a Libertarian POV on this issue.

But it was the comments for that article that I think offered the most succinct libertarian defence. A dissenting voice spoke:

“The owner of the network is interested in obtaining as much revenues as possible. He can only do so if the service he provides is satisfactory to his customers. Otherwise, they will change to another network or discontinue the contract.”

Bollocks!! What if one provider allows me to read reddit and other allows me to read digg, while i want to read both — do i need to get two connections and keep switching between them?

This doesn’t even talk about unwillingness of providers to go to certain areas, all the while blocking “government intervention derp derp” in the form of municipal broadband connections.

To which lizard450 replied:

Clearly you don’t understand how the internet works. If a provider wants to actually “block” content that will be found out rather quickly. Then you can use a proxy and go around it. Mirror sites will pop up. The press for that company will be terrible and the stock will suffer. A few months go by and you’re good. Depending on how you do it you might even use a different DNS. Hell you could even contract with a company to encrypt your data and the ISPs would be entirely powerless to block you.

Now if the government decides that it wants to block access to say thepiratebay, 4chan, or wikileaks. It can do this and you can use a proxy and go around it, but then it is illegal and you can be arrested. Good luck using the avenues of government to reverse that shit.

Now as for ISPs providing better service to their products then competitors like comcast vs. verizon. Well that already happens of course because you’re on their network. The only thing we want is for them not to fuck with the competitor’s traffic.

Point is technically its really not possible to stop net neutrality. You can always get access. This is why people in China can still access porn and facebook. You just have to be smart enough to do it. When the demand gets high enough methods for the masses to do it will come out as well. Complaints.

So many sites are distributed from many different locations. Lots of money goes into providing good response and uptime. Large companies can contract with Akamai for example to really scale out their website.

Perfect!

Net Neutrality is an issue that seems to be hot amongst young people; even though who normally take little interest in politics. This probably stems from a fact this generation relies on the Internet in so many ways they can’t imagine it not existing. Scare stories about ISPs blocking content tend to work very well on such people. But as we libertarians know, government always expands its power by scaring people and claiming to fix problems that either don’t exist, or it created in the first place. I think it’s important that we share articles like the one above with as many people as we can so they at least realise another side of this issue exists because at the moment I’m seeing a lot of ill-informed articles getting upvoted to the front pages of Digg and Reddit and, I’ll be honest now, it’s really freaking me out.

In the UK it is almost sacrilege to suggest that the 1997 Hand-Gun ban was anything less than a triumphant step towards a utopian peace. Over here comedians, pundits, papers and television routinely mock the USA for it’s gun culture; we are more enlightened, more “progressive” is the underlying sentiment.

But as anybody with any common sense could easily have concluded long in advance, prohibiting guns does not get rid of them, it only drives them underground. As the cliche goes: If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

On the 2nd of June Derrick Bird embarked on a killing spree that left 12 people dead in his wake. This is comparable to the 17 who died in the tragic Dunblane massacre which was the pretext for the hand-gun ban in the first place. Derrick Bird was not deterred from carrying a gun because Derrick Bird was batshit fucking insane. His victims, and the bystanders who saw what happened (fearing lengthy jail terms if caught with a weapon), were unarmed and unable to stop this madman.

In fact since the ban there has been absolutely no reduction in the number of homicides from firearms.

Now let’s forget the facts that the ban has not reduced murders, and let’s forget the obvious truth that you simply cannot legislate guns out of the hands of criminals and let’s talk about what really matters: the individual.

The government makes it impossible for individuals to protect their homes, and their families!

This might sound like hyperbole but that’s probably because you’ve never been targeted by a criminal.

If you are an average sized Male, living on your own, you cannot protect yourself against determined criminals.

Criminals are typically hard bastards, they’re used to fighting, they’re used to carrying weapons and using them, they’re often big and what’s more they’ll kick down your door and steal everything you have if they think they can get away with it. Here’s the crux: what are you going to do to stop them?

Phone the police? All the police can do is arrive after the scene of the robbery. Sure they can take a few details, but the vast majority of crimes are never solved. Maybe they’ll take a fingerprint or two, but if you’ve ever dealt with the boys in blue you’ll know that the chances of anything coming from that are about as remote as Mel Gibson teaching anger management classes.

When the individual property owner (a property owner is somebody who has agreed to live amongst society. He is playing the long game. Working. Producing. Accumulating wealth and becoming known in his community. He is the opposite of the criminal) cannot defend himself against the thug who wants to take by force what he has not earned through toil you have a recipe for a decaying civilisation.

It’s no coincidence that the worst places to live are the inner city ghettos, where the criminals are most likely to carry, and the victims are least able to invest in any kind of decent home security.

It’s also no coincidence that it is always the government who seeks to disarm the law-abiding and productive in favour of the psychopaths; the violent criminals…

They are the same people.

Where the criminal plays the short game, using violence to take what he wants in the moment, the government plays the long game; taking the fruits of your labour pay-cheque to pay-cheque, under the threat of its own guns, which it always finds a way to justify it needs.

Because remember citizen: ethics are not universal; there is one rule for us and another for them.

Why?

BECAUSE WE HAVE THE GUNS, THAT’S WHY!

So Hannan has finally admitted he was wrong to support Barack Obama.

This is better than nothing, I suppose, but then I’ve never been a big Hannan fan. He’s probably the best of a bad bunch, but he’s still a politician and he still speaks the language of politics. He essentially thinks desirable social outcomes can be achieved by some people forcing other people how to live. He constantly harps on about “democracy” as if that was some noble ideal and he parrots a lot of statist clichés. A few quotes from the article:

I was wrong. Not that Obama is without his good points, obviously. His commitment to school choice is unfeigned. His foreign policy has been a jolly sight cheaper than McCain’s would have been. The election of a mixed-race president who opposed the Iraq war has made the USA slightly more popular.

Wrong! Obama IS without his good points. The man is a sociopathic, lying, war-warmongering, bought-and-sold fascist. Specifically he has NO commitment to school choice, and has done nothing to improve children’s education. He has, however, spewed the same pro-school-union BS that various presidents have for the last 50 years or so. The same school unions that are fucking kids up in their millions.

His foreign policy has not been any cheaper than Bush’s, in fact it’s been the same, bomb, kill & bullshit afterwards to justify it. It’s sick. Whether it’s cheaper than McCain’s is irrelevant because it’s a proposition that cannot be proved. Hannan could easily have stated clearly on American talk shows “I would never vote for either of these hacks” instead he sung Obama’s praises.

Using Obama’s Mixed-Race as a factor in his favour is blatantly racist. I realise Hannan is saying that this is what other people like, but it’s clearly a stupid point to cite in his favour.  The fact that they think he’s anti-Iraq war is more fool them, the man is pro-war, he just said a few good things when it was politically popular for him to do so; once it comes to the actions he’s actually taken we see that he’s actually in favour of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq and he loves war in general.

These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.

This stuff is true on a surface level but it ignores the nature of government: even if Europe didn’t exist, Obama (or any president) would be trying to do these things. It’s not “Europeanisation” it’s simply the inevitable increase of state power over time. That’s what the state always tries to do, and Obama is just continuing the general pattern. Perhaps Europe has inspired America, but I think a more accurate way to look at it is that all states are trying to increase their power at all times and Europe is just home to some of the more successful efforts.

No one denies that Obama was dealt a rotten economic hand; but he has played it ineptly. His policies are serving to make his country poorer, less free and less respected. And that is a problem for all of us .

As somebody who claims to subscribe to Austrian Economics and be a big fan of Hayek stuff like this just sounds retarded to me. “Dealt a bad hand” WTF?  The “Economy” is independent from Government, they simply interfere with it, it’s not a “hand” for politicians to argue about, it’s people’s real lives, and whenever government meddles in it they are HURTING PEOPLE. All Obama needed to do was NOT PLAY THE GAME, remove regulations, reduce taxes, stop printing counterfeit currency, but, as anybody with any sense could have predicted, he’s done the opposite every chance he’s had.

He was actually dealt a great hand: he was elected into a tidal wave of goodwill and promise and been given ample leeway to make mistakes by his, mostly retarded, supporters. The fact that many of them are actually beginning to lose faith in him is a testament to just how much he doesn’t give a shit about helping anybody except his political buddies. I know it might seem OTT to get angry about this sentence but why is Daniel mincing words? Why is he beginning his sentence with “No One denies…”

Either take a fucking stand or jump off the libertarian bandwagon, sir.

Until I see Hannan call Obama out PROPERLY as an authoritarian, a fascist and an accessory to tens of thousands of murders then I’ll have little time for him. I appreciate the speech he made to Gordon Brown (by far his best moment),  but he’s clearly libertarian-super-lite and a far cry from the kind of principled people I want to give exposure to.

The Devil’s Knife/Kitchen has an excellent write up on why the “coalition government” is just more lies and bullshit.

It also highlighted a quote from Tesco regarding the minimum pricing regulation that I hadn’t seen before:

Supermarket chain Tesco says it wants to see curbs on the sale of cheap alcohol during this Parliament.

Tesco has welcomed a promise by the coalition government to ban below-cost sales of alcohol in England and Wales.

The UK’s biggest retailer goes further, saying it would back the more radical step of introducing a minimum price.

I wrote about this before here, but I made the mistake of not including politically connected superstores. The point is rather easy to copy  & paste over to any business or industry though. So I will do that now:

If Tesco are in favour of X regulation, it will always be because it is IN THEIR BEST INTERESTS. Why would alcohol minimum pricing be in Tesco’s best interests you might ask? Well there are several reasons but here’s my best guess:

Because Tesco are already one of the largest sellers of booze in Europe they already gain massive advantages from economies of scale. They can buy in huge quantities and therefore compete well with competitors. They’d like to sell at a higher price, of course, but due to the magic of competition they find themselves forced to keep prices low, or risk losing business to the ASDA’s the LiDLs or the thousands of smaller businesses that try to compete on lower markups.

But because Tesco have already positioned themselves into thousands of prime locations nationwide (often due to being able to secure planning permission that other’s can’t from councils they can easily buy off) a minimum price on alochol would help them more than it would smaller more competitive businesses. Whilst they already have mass distribution and convenience in their favour it would be hard for them to lose business to anybody if this regulation came into effect.

Imagine a working class family that makes their weekly shop at their local Tesco superstore. What possible reason could that family have to shop around for their alochol purchases if they know for a fact that the alcohol products that compete on price (the unique selling property they most look for, as a low income household) now cost the same everywhere? As companies like Bargain Booze (recommended) immediately find themselves going out of business, much of those lost pounds will inevitably find themselves instead going to the established convenience stores. Tesco is making a hefty bet that enough of it will come their way to make the regulation profitable.

When a business is in favour of regulation of this sort never fool yourself into thinking they care about whatever issue the politicians are grandstanding on (the politicians don’t care either by the way). Tesco are not interested in cutting down on binge drinking, they are only interested in their bottom line. There is nothing wrong with caring about your bottom line, of course, when it leads you to compete on price and quality in the free marketplace. However, when you openly advocate the iron fist of the state to regulate in your favour to improve your margins, then we are talking about something quite different… something quite nasty and violent.

As a libertarian I am going to, whenever possible, stop shopping at Tesco when there is a nearby alternative. I don’t know what Asda’s official position is on the minimum pricing bollocks, if anybody knows please post in the comments. Until I hear that they are saying the same things Tesco are saying I will be going there for my weekly shop instead. I urge anybody else who cares about this to do the same.

Fuck you Tesco.

Government regulations are never necessary. Not only do they not work as well as natural market regulations, they always have ugly unintended (or secretly intended if you’re of a cynical bent) consequences. If you take a simple example like food hygiene in restaurants, the market could easily take care of this and eliminate all environment safety officer’s jobs tomorrow. It works like this: if there is a concern amongst people that the food they eat is clean, there will be a gap in the market for an auditing company to certify restaurants as such. Those establishments that refuse to submit themselves to testing will attract only those customers that don’t give a shit about kitchen cleanliness.

The advantages of this over government regulation are numerous. Firstly, if one auditing company gets known for taking bribes they will lose their reputation and restaurants will no longer want their certification and will go elsewhere. What do you do if the government is corrupt, overpriced or inefficient? Oh yeah, you can’t do jack-shit! Let’s say I open my own cafe, and the local Environmental Health Officer reads this very blog entry and decides to fail me out of spite? In the current situation I am absolutely shit-out-of-luck. On the market I can just go to a different trusted certification board if one has a personal vendetta.

Secondly, on the market, the entire costs of auditing go to the business owner, and then that cost is factored into the price of food. In this way those enjoying the benefits of eating out pay for the costs involved. In the current situation all tax-payers currently subsidise (to some extent) those who enjoy eating out a lot (usually the middle-class and the wealthy on the average).

None of this even takes into account the natural market mechanism of reputation; even if you ignore third party private health inspectors, established restaurants still have an incentive to keep their kitchens clean to a reasonable extent. People getting sick from food poisoning is bad for business, and if a disgruntled kitchen employee decides to blow the whistle on their nasty food hygiene practices it could spell the end of their entire  enterprise. Much easier then to just not run your company like a pig-sty in the first place.

Some people doubt the market can adequately regulate itself, but if you just open your eyes you can see it happening all the time. It works so well that people don’t even notice it. Look at the computer or mobile phone industries. Watch how the standards are constantly improving at an incredible rate. Look how new features are constantly being introduced, processing power is growing faster every day, mobile phones now come with ever more features. Was any of this decreed by government? Absolutely not. Competition and free people making their own choices always leads to better quality and lower price, all the state can do is get in the way and fuck shit up.

I’ll leave you with a couple of videos I watched recently that inspired this post. In the first Ryan Faulk explains “Regulations” to TheAmazingAtheist. In the second Timothy Carney argues convincingly that regulations frequently favour big businesses at the expense of start-ups and consumers, and are often lobbied for aggressively by those very corporations:

It seems there are several levels to the immigration debate, each seemingly slightly more rational and libertarian than the last:

Level 1: Hi, I’m an authoritarian racist and I believe that Immigrants are destroying the country! We fought a war so we wouldn’t have to speak German, and now these foreigners are coming over here, stealing our jobs, diluting our Saxon DNA and generally just going around being different. The solution? Forced deportation and an immediate halt to all new immigration!

Level 2: Hi, I’m a middle-of-the-road newspaper reader. I last managed for form an opinion of my own in 1983. I’m definitely not racist. I recognise that a lot of Black people born in the UK actually fought in the war, and many immigrants do important jobs, like fix our railways, and do our heart surgery. That said, Britain is nearly “full” and we simply cannot allow unrestricted flow of migrants into our fair island. It’s not that I’m racist, it’s just that unemployment is rising, and there aren’t enough jobs to go around. I’m not against all immigration, but they should have to prove that they are skilled workers. The solution? A cap on legal immigration, the deportation of all illegal immigrants (the rule of law must be obeyed!) and a general understanding that while we’re not racist, British people must come first!!!

Level 3: Hi, I’m a libertarian apologist. Although in an ideal world I believe in free immigration and no borders, we don’t live in that ideal world. What we have in this country isn’t an “immigration problem” it’s a “welfare problem” and because of that I’m going to advocate limits on immigration. I know the pure libertarian argument would be to get rid of the welfare system, but I like to dilute political positions, so I’ll jump on the popular, political band-wagon and just claim that we can’t have free immigration because they’ll come over here for the free benefits.

Level 4: Hi, I’m the logical end-point of a pro-freedom philosophy. Just as I wouldn’t punish a cocaine user with prison, just because somebody, somewhere used the drug irresponsibly, I won’t advocate punishing somebody looking for a better life, just because somebody, somewhere, took advantage of a Mafia hand-out scheme. Furthermore, the premise that immigrants are more likely, on a per-capita basis, to claim welfare than indigenous whites is unconvincing on its face. If 1000 immigrants can’t come here because 20 will claim benefits and the country will collapse, then how come the country can survive 1000 new babies? Why exactly are people born in this country less of a drain on the system? People who come to this country to make a better life for themselves have already shown a natural self-motivation to improve their lot. They are much, much more likely to work hard than somebody born over here, never knowing genuine hardship.

Even if you accept the squabbling over the blood money that the state hands out in various forms of welfare as legitimate, I would argue you should still be in favour of free unrestricted immigration. If there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant, and these foreigners were paying tax like anybody else, then I’m sure what you’d find is that the immigrants were, on net, subsidising the native’s welfare cheques. Anecdotal evidence follows: I have known plenty of foreign people who have come over here, from Polish, to Pakistani to Indian and I have yet to see one claiming benefits. On the other hand, I know so, so many British born people who are the exact opposite: no work ethic, and fully comfortable in the mind-set of “I deserve free stuff”.

So when I hear the argument that “we cannot have free immigration while we have a welfare state” I call bullshit on two fronts: firstly it’s BS because if it’s true then you should be attacking the welfare state, not those people who are trying to better their lives. Secondly, it’s BS, because immigrants aren’t the people who are draining the welfare pool; it’s the generation of indigenous parasites who were born in this country not knowing anything except welfare. The women who have never worked a day in their lives, but have 5 children to different fathers; or it’s the men who have gamed the welfare system for 5 years straight, they couldn’t get a D- in GCSE Maths but they’re smart enough to realise that free money for 0 hours work is a sweet deal. They drink cider near park benches, their grandfather fought in the war, and, if they’re not passed out in a ditch on the day, they’re probably voting BNP.

I keep getting stupid campaign leaflets through my door. I pick them up and am consistently amazed at how they manage to one up each other in the retard stakes. Seeing as none of these leaflets are remotely libertarian, and yet people all across my city (Cardiff) are getting them spammed through their letterbox, I figure it’s somewhat worthwhile to point out just how stupid these politicians are… you know… for the record.

So with that in mind I’m going to analyse at least one flyer from the three main parties, and perhaps more as it comes through my door. Click on the image below for the full size flyer + my comments. Don’t worry if you’re nowhere near Cardiff, all of this stuff will no doubt relate almost exactly to the crap you’ll be getting through your doors wherever you are.

Hilarious interview with “Lord” Adnois on his handling of the Icelandic volcano fiasco.

To paraphrase his position: “Government may have messed everything up, but we were doing the best we could… after all, it’s important that planes are safe. Act of god… Act of god… safety of passengers. Blah blah blah.”

There is absolutely no need for government to have any involvement with aeroplane safety ever, under any circumstances.

The private airline owners have all the incentives already to take care of their passengers. If one of their planes were to crash it would not only cost them millions in terms of the lost plane and the lost staff, it would also permanently destroy their reputation. Killing their passengers and staff is not in their best interests. However, unlike the government, they also have to weigh these small risks against actual real-life factors like: inconvenience to passengers & staff and the loss of millions of pounds every single day the planes are grounded (which affects thousands of shareholders and families) to name a few.

By rational risk/reward analysis like this the free market will come to the right conclusion. Furthermore, those people who desperately want to get home could likely take the first risks, with those more hesitant waiting a while. By giving airlines a choice, stranded consumers are also given more freedom.

The truth is, the airlines and the aeroplane manufacturers are the industry experts. They are the people best able to make the assessment on how risky the volcanic ash really is. And yet it’s the government bureaucrats who get to make the ultimate decisions. The incentives are, as with everything government does, entirely perverted, and here’s why: for every day that the planes are grounded, the airlines lose millions and people get more and more frustrated, but the government loses nothing. However if the bureaucrats say that it’s fine to fly and something goes wrong, they get massive blame. They have every incentive to air on the side of take-no-risks-nanny-state-style-molly-coddling and absolutely none to weigh things up in a rational way that takes all factors into account.

I know this post is hardly current events any more, but watching this idiot squirm in his seat and rationalise his nonsense is ugly to watch. The fact that people like Paxman never question the root problem, that government was involved in this decision at all, is a real shame, though I give him props for calling the guy out as well as he did.

Speaking to the problem of evil existing in the world despite the many claims of an all powerful and loving god Epicurus famously wrote:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

There is a similar problem with democracy.

1) If people are mostly good, then they don’t need to be coerced to do good things (provide welfare, charity, look after the sick, be peaceful etc.) by government. They will be in the majority and able to defend themselves against a minority that might wish to do bad things. If they can’t defend themselves against “evil” without a government. Why would they be able to defend themselves against evil by creating an institution with a monopoly on violence? Logically it is weak.

2) If people are mostly bad then it makes absolutely no sense to institute a government that is elected by a majority. Nobody elected in such a system can be good, because the majority of voters will have bad intentions. For those who believe people are inherently selfish and amoral, and won’t help people of their own accord, how can democracy solve that problem?

FIRST: The bad people must elect an array of politicians who self describe themselves as “representatives”…

SECOND: These representatives will now enact laws (rules that force the population to behave in certain ways).

THIRD: Bad people, elected by mostly bad people, will now use their power to force people to do good?!?

Does this really make any sense to people? Surely the more likely (if not certain) outcome is that the bad people will use their power to benefit themselves, and their bad friends.

The logical leap that democracy can create desirable social outcomes amongst a population that would otherwise be selfish and leave people to die on the street is akin to jumping to “God is loving. Don’t worry about it.” when a tsunami kills 100,000 people. IT MAKES NO SENSE.

“Democracy” is a meme, just like “God”, and like God, it exists only in the minds of those who continue to believe in it. Children raised in a family that doesn’t teach them about religion grow up unaffected by the meme, but still happy. Unfortunately, across the world, most children are forced to attend compulsory education in state-run-education-camps sometimes called “schools”… It is little wonder then that they graduate with a strong belief in the virtues of Democracy despite the entire idea being illogical at its core. Otherwise intelligent people will get rabidly angry when you point out to them that mob-rule is tyranny, not freedom. In the same way, otherwise rational and intelligent Muslims, with degrees in physics from prestigious universities, can blow themselves up in the name of “God”…

If anybody would like to defend the “Democracy” meme in the comments I’d love to hear it.