Sean Gabb
According to The Independent, Britain seeks to expand its empire with 77,000 square miles of Atlantic seabed.
Splendid news. I propose Tony Blair as Governor General. We could give him a nice plumed helmet – and a pair of lead-soled boots to help his descent to this latest territory to be painted red on the map.
THE BLOGMASTER ADDS:-
This is actually a very important point raised here by Sean. If Libertarians care about property rights and what they are and what they are for, (and many of us do,) then there ought to be an agreed legal method, which everybody respects (that’s the point of Law after all, no?) to define what entitiy or “corporate person” or individual, owns what parts of the seabed.
We ought to care about who’s administering such “Law” – in case it is a bunch of “authoritarian-nationalists” (a great term, which I picked up on a newsgroup just this morning, as a description of the government of the USSR Russia today in 2008.)
MUCH MUCH better, than the crass, sad term “nazi” which gets liberals into so much trouble when used by them to describe ordinary socialists accurately.
We here do not care whether there is stuff on or under the seabed round Ascenscion Island or not. Naturally, the inhabitants, of which there are several thousand, will. It’s their life, not ours. But we think that the general point that’s being made in the article is a vital issue for the next 100-200 years, while the Earth is still the primary source of New Property Rights.
Comments please, pronto! (There will be a short written test on 31st August, to see who’s paying attention.)
They’re at it again – The liberal paternalists are proposing to ban the display of tobacco in shops and are currently soliciting the opinion of their electorate.
Banishing cigarettes will cost ordinary taxpayers more money, inconvenience thousands of consumers, and threaten the livelihoods of shopkeepers all over the UK.
I’m sick and tired of more of the same from Nanny – obsessed with dictating how people live their lives but brushing the big issues, like knife crime and recession, under the carpet. They’re planning to hide tobacco, and they are already policing alcohol, red meat, fatty foods, and salt to name a few.
I’m sick of seeing pubs closing down where I live. I’m sick of being made to feel guilty because I eat and drink as I please.
I’m sick of Nanny. How about you? Register your support – Say NO to the Nanny State
Ceej
Ceej is quite correct. The systemic trouble is to do with the character of the British however. We are innately nice people, such that we have spent the best part of 15 centuries tryiing to eradicate violent individual conflict from our society and latterly from our politics. (This is unlike some countries – and religions – I could mention.)
Egging the omelet even more deeply, we have benignly tried to export this model to the world.
So, we are probably uniquely vulnerable to Utopia-driven idealists, such as socialists of all kinds. Woords, like “fairness”, “social justice” (a tautology,) “sharing”, “public health” and the like, when bandied about by ne’er-do-wells and stalinist thugs impersonating politicians and council “officers”, tend to strike a chord.
It is a tragedy that British people do not immediately beat to death in the street any bureaucrats who dare even to suggest that smoking might be circumscribed and proscribed owing to the possibility of self-harm being caused.
There are probably no remedies at this stage of things, for the condition we have allowed our freeoms to fall into. All we can do is preserve, as if in aspic, the memory of how things were in better times.
Write your prescriptions for renewal, save cultural objects of use in renewal (books, music, pictures, archived information and data of all kinds especially) and keep them safely hidden, their locations unpublicised.
There is a Dark Age coming soon. It may not be long – perhaps 200-300 years only.
A related (ish) article that might be of interest:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10024047-76.html
Thanks to Patrick for flagging up the problem of “Space”.