We Need to Talk About Liberty

By Gary J. Hall

It might not seem like it, but human liberty is today in most peril where it was once most protected - the western world. This is potentially disastrous for humanity because liberty is the foundation of all human progress. Everything we value as human beings comes from it. If the most important scientific discovery in human history - that society manages itself better than any centralised Authority ever has or could - is buried alive under a tonne of statist thinking, then the astounding prosperity and progress achieved since the industrial revolution could be undone.

These selected writings by Gary J. Hall cover social, political, legal, cultural and educational issues from the perspective of individual liberty. They are radical in the original sense of ones that go to the root of the problem. Speaking not down to his fellow man but across to his brothers, Gary J. Hall invites you to swallow the red pill and see the ugly truth, but also the beautiful reality and potential. Hope lies only in liberty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781326108335

Book preview

More Government = Less You

Human beings are, by their nature, free to choose and act. More government = less freedom for peaceful people. Less freedom = less you. And there will never be another you.

The cause of the liberty movement is for you, the unique individual, to meaningfully exist and flourish; it is the struggle for every peaceful individual to retain all their innate freedom to be and do everything and anything they want to. That and nothing less.

A human life, on a cosmic scale, is the briefest of moments. What could be more tragic than a shooting star that isn’t allowed to burn as brightly as it possibly can before it fades away never to be seen again.

The degree to which you are not free to choose and act is the degree to which you are not you. It is the degree to which your choices merely reflect the choices of those who control you. The child who ‘chooses’ the quiet toy over the noisy toy only because his parents get angry or threaten to spank him is not choosing at all; he is obeying. Those who want to open schools and teach their own curricula, but don’t, aren’t choosing; they are obeying. Those who want to employ people who aren’t worth paying the minimum wage to, but don’t, aren’t choosing; they are obeying. A life of senseless obedience is suited to machines, not humans. Slavery is Man’s self-destruction.

In a world of obedience the individual is impossible. But without aberrations or deviations, without individuals who think and act alone and differently, but who spontaneously coordinate and cooperate, there would be no creativity, innovation or competition. And these are the forces that have enabled Man to rise out of dark caves of ignorance and into gleaming skyscrapers of enlightenment; out of pestilence and into prosperity; out of short, brutal existences into long, beautiful ones.

The absolute freedom for you to exist, to give as much as you wish and can to your fellow man, and to shine as brightly as possible before you fall back into the stars whence you came. This is the state of Man which the liberty movement believes should be, regardless of what is.

Less government = more you. No government = the boundless you.

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Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/more-government-less-you/

#2

I’m a Politician, Get Reality Out of Here!

From the BBC:

Ed Miliband has said there will be no return to the tax and spend policies of past Labour governments. [1]

There was no tax and spend policies. It was evidently borrow and spend since Blair’s Labour didn’t come knocking on our doors asking for twice as much in tax in order to fund the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost tens of billions (and which was in addition to the biggest spending ever on the public sector).

The days of needing to go to the people for funding for wars are long gone. It is much easier to just issue bonds backed by the future earnings of the unborn, and leave them with the bill. That way you don’t piss off voters and can give people more government freebies without first needing more money from them.

Reality TV is all the rage these days. Reality in politics, however, is being avoided at all costs. Why? Because political careers depend upon doing so. If you’re a politician, reality should be avoided like breaking wind should be avoided at a job interview.

From his perspective, it is essential for Miliband to avoid any reference to the previous Labour government’s relentless borrowing because borrowing is exactly what he intends to do should he get into power – and ‘debt’ is a dirty word at the moment. In fact, the only way miliband could possibly fund whatever hair-brained schemes he has planned is through debt, given that tax revenues from an ageing population are only ever going to decrease. All the more reason not to mention borrowing.

George Orwell once wrote that the further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

The accuracy of this profound observation is evidenced by the widespread abuse (barely disguised as intellectual criticism) aimed at Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, by the media and the public at large. The man may well be a zenophobe, but the fact remains that he is the only remotely mainstream politician in the UK who has openly spoken about the disastrous effects to the economy that government borrowing and resultant growth over the last few decades has had. The fact that a single politician, who is considered marginal and an ‘extremist’, is the only one to point out the UK’s economic reality reveals just how far the UK really has drifted from truth.

One day, presumably when all the shit hits the fan and the welfare cheques stop going out, the public will get reacquainted with the truth, but for now the truth is about as welcome as a grizzly bear at a salmon convention.

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References

^Ed Miliband has said there will be no return to the tax and spend policies of past Labour governments.(www.bbc.co.uk)

Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/im-a-politician-get-reality-out-of-here/

#3

Smokers Are Not Victims, Tobacco Companies Are Not Killers

From the BBC:

"A US court has ordered the country’s second largest cigarette company to pay $23.6 billion (£13.8bn) to the wife of a smoker who died of lung cancer.[1]"

This could only happen in a society with a justice system that has drifted so far from rationality and so far into the logic black hole of socialism that its judges decree that individuals who smoke are not responsible for their own deaths, and have essentially been ‘murdered’ by the people who produce cigarettes. That this argument is completely contradicted by simple facts of reality (i.e. cause and effect) is practically irrelevant when you can simply force others to act according to it – i.e. make a tobacco company hand over $23bn to the widow of someone who chose to smoke himself to death with the cigarettes they produce.

The truth is that tobacco companies violate no one’s person or property by producing cigarettes and therefore are innocent. Society may deem them irresponsible or exploitative, but they are not criminal organisations. Smoking is an unwise choice, from a health perspective, but it is a voluntary act and can be refrained from at any moment, which is why smokers are not victims of crime.

There is in fact no ‘case’ here at all. No injustice has occurred, there’s no wrong to write. And so all the U.S. ‘justice’ system has done is spend a great deal of time and money in order to ultimately declare innocent people who make cigarettes as ‘killers’ (or at least guilty of manslaughter), and a man who made an unwise choice as a ‘victim’.

Ayn Rand once wrote: We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

The consequence of court rulings like this, which ignore reality, is that it gives smokers the further handicap (to quitting smoking) of a sense of victim hood. If smokers in general believe they are victims of the evil tobacco companies, and why wouldn’t they when the highest authority in the land says so, then they are less likely to quit smoking. This is because they are being led to believe that the root cause of their addiction is external to them and therefore beyond their control. I can stop smoking because smoking is a choice I am making, becomes I can’t quit smoking because I can’t stop tobacco companies producing cigarettes.

The tragic irony here is that judges who hand out punishments like this to tobacco companies almost certainly do so in the belief that they are helping the cause of smokers. Aside from achieving the very opposite of that, they also send out the message to smokers that some ‘good’ can come of their addiction in the form of massive payouts to them or their widows. The prospect of your wife and your children being ‘set for life’ as a result of receiving an enormous payout from a tobacco company can only increase the incentive to keep smoking.

In a stateless society, no insurance agency would take on a claim for compensation against a tobacco company on behalf of a smoker (or a smoker’s widow). As the claimant could have no reason or evidence to support their claim, to do so could only result in profit loss for the agency, and also reputation loss as a result of wasting people’s time. In this environment smokers (and their partners) would not find themselves being deluded into thinking they (or their partners) are victims and have any sort of claim for compensation against tobacco companies. That their smoking addiction is a result of their choices would be strongly reinforced by a society that behaved this way. Smokers would be left in no doubt as to whose responsibility their well-being is and therefore who has the power to help them quit.

Whilst the government attempts to forcefully eradicate smoking by robbing tobacco companies of large sums of money and handing it to smokers or the widows of dead smokers, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that the free market continues to peacefully provide numerous ways to help smokers quit, the most recent of which is the electronic cigarette or e-cigarette. At least one study[2] suggests those who use them are twice as likely to quit as those who use nicotine patches and gum, which is impressive considering there seems to be good evidence[3] that the latter have proven effective for some time now. Perhaps in time the higher value being placed on e-cigarettes will shrink the markets for nicotine patches, and perhaps even eliminate smoking itself. One thing is for sure, the only chance of that ever happening is through markets. Government action to help people quit smoking is doomed to fail because, unlike markets which naturally reduce the value of something by virtue of supplying something else that society values more,  it can only ever attempt to force people to value smoking less by making it more expensive or cigarettes more scare. Trying to change what people value by force is to fundamentally fail to understand human nature.

To quote Ayn Rand again: To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

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References

^A US court has ordered the country’s second largest cigarette company to pay $23.6 billion (£13.8bn) to the wife of a smoker who died of lung cancer.(www.bbc.co.uk)

^study(reason.com)

^evidence(www.npr.org)

Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/smokers-are-not-victims-tobacco-companies-are-not-killers/

#4

Anarchy is Anarchy

One of the many useful features of Google search is that you can quickly look up the etymology of words. I searched for anarchy etymology and Google returned a neat graphic (below), which shows the definition (in this case two definitions) of the word, its origins and a chart showing the usage of the word over time in literature. The latter data comes from Google’s Ngram tool, which allows you to chart the usage frequency of any given word or set of words across 5 million books and over 500 years.

AnarchyEtymology_Graphic

One of the first things that struck me about these results is that anarchy has the most profound identity crisis. We don’t seem to know what it is. It’s either the political ideal for Man (number two). Or it’s completely undesirable chaos (number one). We just can’t seem to decide, so we define it as both (in true Orwellian double-think fashion) and just hope no one notices – or cares. But it can’t possibly be both the most desirable and least desirable state of society because that’s illogical, and so something’s not quite right here.

Perhaps we can uncover the true definition of anarchy by probing deeper. Let’s look at the etymology of the word to see if that gives us any clues. The original and literal meaning of the word anarchy is simple, it is: without ruler. Note that the first definition of anarchy supplied above adds a prefix to this: "the state of disorder due to…being ‘without ruler’. This definition refers to a supposed effect of the state of anarchy and not the actual state of anarchy itself. At some unknown point in the past, then, it appears we started to primarily define anarchy by its supposed effects, and not by the actual state itself. At some point this error crept in and has remained ever since. The second definition, however, is equal to the original (and accurate) meaning, but seemingly only exists in order to point out the fact that anarchy is regarded as a political ideal by some; as if to say "anarchy in reality is this undesirable state, but some people believe the opposite". Like defining God as a fictional entity, but then explaining that some people believe the opposite. Surely this is quite revealing of the prevalent view of anarchy.

Let’s now look at what is implied if both definitions are true. To recap, the first definition is: A state of disorder due to absence of non-recognition of authority. The second definition is: Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual.

If both definitions are true, then absolute freedom for the individual (regarded as a political ideal) leads to disorder, chaos, turmoil, rioting etc. In short, that which would prevent the existence of peaceful societies. Before we assess whether this conclusion is true we need to define what is meant by absolute freedom.

If absolute freedom means individuals with the legal and ethical freedom or right to perform any action they want to (e.g. murder and theft) without anyone having the right to use force to resist, then peaceful societies would, of course, be impossible. But an ethical system that does not allow for the forceful prevention of any actions at all is the equivalent of having no ethics at all. And so what absolute freedom can only mean, then, in this case, is the total absence of any concept of morality in the human mind; it means a reality where all human beings are incapable of empathy. In other words the proposition is: if hurting and killing others was not strongly undesirable to human beings and therefore we didn’t desire to establish the ethical right for everyone to resist such actions, then this would lead to social chaos. But this is merely stating the obvious. Peaceful societies would be impossible if humans didn’t pass down their universal aversion to violence and theft from generation to generation and there was no ethical right to resist it, but, evidently, we do and there is. Today’s societies are possible because only a very small minority of human beings regularly engage in violence - and because the ethics upon which they are founded (i.e. the law) permits the use of force (by the State) to prevent and punish such acts. (Leaving aside the murder and theft committed by the State itself, which the State’s laws prohibit the resistance of).

Therefore, the argument if absolute freedom for the individual existed, then peaceful society would be impossible, is true, but it is merely hypothetical. It actually only says something useful about reality when the argument’s premise is false; it says that morality must exist in the minds of a people for the existence of ordered communities where it is permitted to use force in order to prevent or punish acts of violence.

Today’s widely accepted dictionary definition of anarchy goes beyond simply defining what the word anarchy means and asserts or assumes that the state of being without ruler leads to a state of disorder. This seems to reflect the fact that the vast majority still believe in the necessity and virtue of the coercive entity known as the State. Indeed, it represents one of the many assumptions that form the foundation of people’s moral acceptance of and intellectual support for the State – e.g. without the State there could be no social order, no affordable education or healthcare, no infrastructure, no help for the poor etc.

The graph for the use over time for the word ‘anarchy’ is interesting. It seems the word is occurring in literature approximately half as frequently as it was two centuries ago. More specifically, immediately following a slight rise, the word’s frequency took a sharp dive from around the 1970′s onwards. What might this be a reflection of? This roughly correlates with the relatively sudden and exponential growth in the size and scope of  governments in many of the major democracies. It could mean that, now that the western world’s governments are bigger than ever, the masses fear anarchy far less than they have for a long time. In the 19th century, it seems, anarchy was being mentioned much more often, which perhaps reveals that many more people than today feared it could happen. Under today’s very big and pervasive governments the masses feel almost totally safe and secure, perhaps, and far fewer of them fear a state of anarchy could ever materialise.

Liberty advocates would, I’m sure, interpret this as a bad sign. Trust and belief in the virtue of the State has never been higher, it seems. I would suggest that this is because the government is more active in people’s lives than it has ever been; it’s doing (and spending) more than any governments in history ever have. It’s giving people an income, it’s paying their rent, it’s paying for the raising of their children, it’s helping them buy a home, its raising their wages, it’s imprisoning people for doing non-violent things like possessing and smoking drugs because other people prefer that they didn’t; and much more besides. A great deal more people are more reliant or totally reliant on government than ever. Aside from the significant material need for the State’s handouts, the masses have a greater psychological need than ever to trust government and believe in its virtue; for if the government is not virtuous, then the way they are living their lives and raising their children is also not. As creatures who desire to be good that represents the possibility of realising our worst fear: that we aren’t. Continued blind faith in government is how we hope to avoid ever confronting that horror. If the government can’t be completely trusted, then we are not shielded from all harm in the comfy creases of the duvet of democracy as was believed, but are in fact sitting defenceless in the skeletal hand of the State.

Anarchy means without ruler. It means an ordered community free from a coercive authority. It means a world where all human interactions are voluntary or contracted, and therefore peaceful. Anarchy is the preferred state in which billions of people continuously choose to maintain their private relationships with friends, family and co-workers, which is what makes our struggle and failure to define it correctly so curious.

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Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/anarchy-is-anarchy/

#5

Blackadder Goes Forth, Lessons In Liberty & the Evils of Power

The final scene in the last episode of the quite excellent TV comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, which is set in the first world war, never fails to move me. You can watch it here[1].

As Captain Blackadder and his men, against their every instinct to live, charge over the top towards German machine guns and their certain deaths, the motion slows and the scene slowly fades to a sea of poppy’s gently swaying in the breeze that sweeps across a sun-drenched field somewhere in the English countryside. Millions of red flowers, each one seemingly representing a soul lost in that monstrous human tragedy that was the first world war.

In that final episode we learn how Blackadder, a professional soldier all his life, thought ‘war’ was a breeze when his enemies were only ever two-foot tall natives armed with spears or sharpened fruit. He never dreamed of such horrors as faced him now. We hear lieutenant George, a Cambridge educated dim-wit, reflecting on how he and his fresh-faced pals eagerly signed up to serve King and Country, and how he is the only one of the bunch still alive. Private Baldrick reveals how people lined the streets the day he left home to fight the war and how that made him feel like a hero.

Unlike the hopelessly indoctrinated George, Blackadder is under no delusions. He realises that they are all being marched to their death by a ruling elite of sociopathic madmen who see him and the rest of the troops as cannon fodder. He understands the reality of the situation perfectly well. Throughout the series, Blackadder’s only goal is to find a way out of the madness without getting shot for desertion, but all his attempts fail. In the final episode, as he stands poised at his trench ladder waiting for the signal to charge to his death, he muses on the futility of his last-ditch attempt to escape, which was to pretend he had gone insane, and asks rhetorically …who would have noticed another madman around here.

Although George lacks any kind of common sense or critical thinking skills, he is educated enough to be able to rationalise the war narrative created by the ruling elite and mainstream intellectuals of Edwardian Britain and to repeat it in ways that sound plausible to the privates - and to himself. Baldrick is barely literate, which means he lacks the mental tools to identify the falsehoods enveloping him, and yet his child-like mind sometimes leads him to ask simple but profound questions like why can’t we just stop all the killing? To which lieutenant George, wading desperately through the war propaganda in his mind, cannot find an answer.

In the Goes Forth series, Blackadder is our lens of truth, and represents reason and sanity. George represents the narrative, the lie, the delusions and the madness. Madness of such degree that he cheerfully rejects a last-minute offer from general Melchett to sit out the big push and watch the results come in amidst the leathery comfort of British army head quarters thirty five miles away. Baldrick represents the enslaved and ignorant masses, dragged to their deaths in their millions like sardines in a fishing net.

What this comedy series captures so brilliantly is the nature of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, and what gives the powerful their power and therefore what keeps the powerless without it. The belief in the concept of ‘king and country’ is what creates the moral legitimacy for men (generals) to shoot other men (soldiers) for not doing as they say. The men giving the orders have been tasked with doing so by the King, and the King’s position cannot be questioned for he has been chosen by God; and no man may question God’s actions because he is the Supreme Being and knows and sees all. It’s a straight-jacket of illogic, from which the common man of the Edwardian era had little hope of escaping – not just because he was forced to wear it, but also because he had no moral objection to it as a result of indoctrination.

Fast-forward 97 years and the world looks like it has progressed a great deal, but has it? Superficially things look different, but fundamentally they are the same. Violent authority still exists, as does a very similar dynamic between the powerful and the powerless. The Kings and Queens, chosen by God, have become politicians, chosen by the God of democracy. Their ‘grand plans’ (the welfare state, minimum wage et al), which the masses believe to merely represent the ‘will of the people’, are implemented by an army of (highly-paid and privileged) bureaucrats in the form of laws and regulations; and the police are the ‘firing squads’ imprisoning those who disobey. The same straight-jacket, then, but with different patterns on it. There’s no more mass slaughters, of course, just mass theft in the form of taxation. The common man is no longer morally obliged to sacrifice his life for King and Country, just a great deal of his property and liberty to the modern God of democracy. The common man’s standard of living has improved a great deal, of course, but there still exists a violent authority with the supposed moral right to imprison him or kill him. He’s still not free, but he has got a much more spacious cage.

Until taxation and the State is abolished as a result of the common man’s moral objection, then the possibility of war and more mass slaughters will remain. War is a ludicrously expensive endeavour, which destroys wealth. The only thing it ‘creates’ is human suffering, and that’s of no value to humanity. Only governments with the institutionalised ‘right’ to steal from the living and the unborn have the means to engage in large scale wars that last years. Thus the realisation of a world without war is inseparable from the realisation of a world where individuals are free from violent authority. War will only end when Man is free of men.

The horror, brutality and sadness of World War I, or indeed any war,  is so great that we instinctively avoid contemplating it, which is why culture like Blackadder Goes Forth is important. Comedy serves as a cushion to our senses and allows us to contemplate things otherwise too ghastly, but which we really ought to in order to remind ourselves of the ever-present threat to human life and social progress that is the violent authority of the State.

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References

^watch it here(www.youtube.com)

Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/blackadder-goes-forth-lessons-in-liberty-the-evils-of-power/

#6

Good Without God – And Government

I’ve got to hand it to the Humanists of the Palouse, their billboard[1] is clever. It’s smart because Good works in non-mysterious ways is a play on the common religious retort God works in mysterious ways, of course, but it’s useful because it reminds us that religion is not a requirement for morality and good behaviour. But what do we mean by good? We all know, but it’s always wise to start with definitions. Here’s the common definition of good in the moral sense:

possessing or displaying moral virtue

Virtue is defined as the quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. Good, then, is the quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. Evidently the vast majority of people avoid violence and theft and instead cooperate with each other in order to get what they want, and so most of us are generally good. The number of us that choose force over cooperation is remarkably small, and represents a remarkably small percentage of the world’s population. A clear and simple ethical principle resides in the vast majority of  human minds: violence and theft are wrong. How this came to be is a fascinating area of study, but is beyond the scope of this piece. In a nutshell, it’s either best explained by the biological process of humanity’s evolution as social animals, or by the invention of religion.

When it comes to what we should and shouldn’t do in our private, everyday interactions with friends and colleagues, then, the vast majority of us are of the strong conviction that violence is wrong. But, curiously, when it comes to what the government should do and should avoid doing the vast majority of people are very much in favour of using force against others; because, by definition, government is the use of force.  This widespread advocacy of the use of government force against certain groups of people or the whole of society is evidenced by the fact that the number of laws and regulations being imposed upon society just keeps growing. If people were averse to using government force, then the number of laws and regulations would be diminishing.

In today’s world lobbying for government action is often resorted to by organisations like Humanist groups in an attempt to do public good, but this reveals the curiously contradictory ethical conviction that: private violence is bad, but public violence is good. It’s contradictory because there’s no meaningful distinction between public and private. The latter means individuals and the former just means many individuals. If aggregation changes the truth of the ethical principle that violence is wrong, then that means it is wrong to kill one person but good to kill many. This is not a principle because it is not universal (i.e. its truth depends on the number of people), and therefore it is not of any use as a guide to good behaviour. As a result of this schism between private and public morality, most people and organisations today find themselves pursuing unethical courses of action in the mistaken belief that they are ethical. Which is surely the greatest fear of anyone who desires to be and believes themselves to be good.

Ethics has one main goal: determining in what circumstances it is appropriate to use force, or in other words to establish that violence and theft is wrong and that therefore it is justified to use force to resist them.

The non-aggression principle, the underlying ethical principle of libertarianism/voluntarism/anarchism, establishes that the only just use of force is when one’s person or property is being or has been violated. In short, in defence of person or property. The non-aggression principle is a negative right, which means it doesn’t require any positive action in order to not violate it. At any given time and place, anyone who is not assaulting, stealing or defrauding (implicit theft) – in short not initiating force – is abiding by the non-aggression principle. You are abiding by it right now, in fact. Did you have to do anything? No, and neither did anyone else, which is also what makes it universal. Everyone can be not violating it at the same time. The same cannot be said of positive rights, which require someone (i.e. people who represent government) to do something in order to not violate them. Thus for positive rights to exist the initiation of force (coercion) is required, which is the opposite of the intended goal of ethics.

Today, we live in a world of numerous positive ‘rights’, formalised by laws and regulations, that all require coercive action on the part of government in order to not violate. For example, according to socialist democracies, poor people have a ‘right’ to financial support from government. Thus in order to provide to people that which they are morally and legally ‘entitled’ to government must take money from everyone under threat of force in order to fund the welfare system.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the epitome of the western world’s attempts to realise a better world through positive rights. All but two of the ‘rights’ declared within it require the government to do something, which means use force against people. For example, article 25 declares that:

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…" 

In order to not violate this collection of ‘rights’, governments have to do a heck of a lot. That of course means they need lots of money and we all know where the government gets its money from – our wage packets and the future wage packets of unborn tax payers. From this it is easy to see how positive rights are a disaster for ethics and society because they make committing coercive acts (I.e. taxation) a moral necessity. In other words, for the government not to steal from people would be immoral. Quite incredibly, morality is flipped on its head. But worst of all, this happens without society at large even so much as batting an eyelid.

In any human relationship where this ‘flipping’ of morality happens, that is, where the use of force/aggression is defined as good, that relationship is dysfunctional and self-destructive for all parties because violence that isn’t resisted or avoided is free to damage the minds and wither the souls of everyone it touches. This is why every civilised society’s relationship with government in human history has led to the former’s decay, debasement and eventual destruction, and the latter’s increasing tyranny (which is the opposite of the expected/desired outcome). Conversely, it is also why peaceful, voluntary exchanges of an economic and social nature lead to the fulfilment and betterment of all parties. The way we all choose to behave reveals that we know this to be true of human interactions, but we abandon this truth when ‘acting’ through government in pursuit of public good. There are more people than ever acting by proxy through government and governments are doing more than ever, largely because they are committed to not violating numerous positive ‘rights’ that generations of intellectuals of a socialist bent fantasised that everyone should have.

The major democracies are still growing, but for all of them a sudden contraction is coming. Of that there can be no doubt. The catastrophic debts of governments make this inevitable. The dysfunctional relationship between society and government is going to break down. The question is: will society realise that it is better-off without government and walk away? Or will it once again persuade itself that next time will be different and return to government only to be abused again?

Humanists rightly believe that good doesn’t need God. But it doesn’t need government action either. In fact, it requires its absence.

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References

^their billboard(richarddawkins.net)

Permalink: http://garyullah.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/good-without-god-and-government/

#7

Technology Has Changed the Way We Value Music

As a music podcast producer of five years I have quite a few DJ and musician friends on Facebook. Recently, an article on Digital Music News has been doing the rounds and provoking much comment amongst my music community. The piece was written by a Grammy-nominated composor, keyboardist and recording artist by the name of Armen Chakmakian and features a screen capture of his quarterly royalties statement for public viewing. He points out that "14,227 performances of music (almost every track 100% owned by me) generated $4.20″ and then remarks someone’s making money, and in true fashion with the music industry, it’s not the artists. Business practices like this are one of the reasons I jumped ship and only write for television now.[1]

What Armen Chakmakian’s royalties dividend tells us is that people have come to value services that allow them to easily access and navigate all the music out there on the web more than they value the music itself. They don’t value music less in the sense that it brings less pleasure or comfort to them than it did before, but less by virtue of the fact there is no longer any need to pay much or anything to acquire music now - given that a great deal of it is now floating around the web in the same abundance as oxygen floats around in our atmosphere. It is no longer scarce. Nowadays, the monetary cost traditionally associated with the acquisition of music can be easily avoided by those who so desire to. The only cost is the time and effort it takes to find the stuff. It’s not always easy to find and there is often no guarantees on the quality of the audio. Napster, the first p2p digital music sharing service made it much easier to find music, but couldn’t solve the problem that you might not get what you thought you were getting (because of erroneous metadata on the part of sharers). This is where Spotify and other commercial music streaming services create value for music lovers. They not only provide a quick and easy way to access and navigate a wealth of music, but they can also guarantee the audio quality of their content because it is streaming from their own purpose-built music databases. Further value is provided by the fact that you don’t need to store the music on your own device and therefore take up precious storage space, which wasn’t the case back in the day of Napster and isn’t the case for people who still acquire their music directly from others sharing it.

The reason why, then, that recording artists like Chakmakian only make a few bucks out of royalties from