So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. [Read more →]

Blackpool, Blackpool, everywhere, nor any drop to… This time, drinking over here, Hamish Howitt, pub landlord:

“I’m not pro-smoking just pro-freedom. “Having a pint and a cigarette in a pub is one of the last great enjoyments left for the working classes. “

You have to like the cut of his mainsail. It makes you wish he was right, but alas he’s 180 degrees wrong. Calls to liberty – working class or otherwise – are spurious on this one. As much as hard hats on a building site, or breathing apparatus down a mine, smoking legislation is about workplace safety. I suppose any staff who object to a pub pea souper could always work somewhere else. Your average Victorian mill owner would have agreed.

Tell that to the student working off his overdraft, or the single mum who needs employment that fits round school hours, or the 50-something asthmatic roadie who’s plain forgotten how to do anything else. Or any number of other constructs a hack-philosopher might invent. Can any of these make a meaningful choice, a free weighing of the alternatives, before selecting their place and conditions of work? That we don’t always have a real choice is a cornerstone of left thought; it’s all about the power, stupid. Asking: “Who has it; who doesn’t; how does that change things” is what separates liberals from the ‘I want, I want, it’s soooo unfair’ breed of prep-school ‘libertarians’. (That’s a misnomer, of course; these chaps are nowhere near as concerned about liberty as they are about property.)

In any case, there’s nothing special about private property that gets us off our obligations to each other. This is no more a case of liberty at threat than are the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002. You’re not allowed to poison your staff, not even minimum-wage workers. There’s an easy, costless way to internalize your externality: get off your backside, take three paces to the door and smoke outside. You could use the exercise.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

What’s most fascinating about this lament to socialism perdu is the central thesis:

It is axiomatic, since the death of socialism, that governments must everywhere retreat… Liberalisation, privatisation and global policies of “small government” (except in the areas of defence and law and order) have led to a withdrawal by governments from areas of concern, which, until recently, had been seen as their primary functions.

He’s 180 degrees wrong. In fact, the state is hungrier than it’s ever been. [Read more →]

Here’s a scenario for you: you have a time-machine, but it will only travel back to Christmas 1996. Labour are obviously about to win next year’s election, and you’re allowed one bet, on this question: who’s going to be the most influential political philosopher of the next decade? Granted, it’s a funny sort of time-machine, but where does your tenner go?

[Read more →]