Without the state

Tax and the super-rich - Adam Smith Institute

The ASI in predictable rant mode raised some reasonable questions about tax rates and the returns to the Treasury. However they don't address one question whcih has always intrigued me.

Why is is necessary to give more money to the already rich to encourage them to carry on working and so they don't avoid (and dodge) tax work while those on benefits supposedly need to have their money cut to achieve the same thing?

I know there is an argument too about keeping what you have earned but the argument I've set out is often made - although never in the same breath so far as I've seen.

Just for fun I'm trying a track back with this post - who knows what might happen?

Children massacred in Iraq bombs

Whatever your views on the original attack - and you can probably guess I wasn't enthusiastic to say the least - the bastards who do things like this have no standing and can make no claim to being revolutionaries or resistance fighters.

We have a duty to the people of Iraq. We failed them once - after the last Gulf War. If we pull out now, we would be failing them again - handing them over to thugs and murderers who would continue to use the deaths and suffering they create as propaganda against those who had the capacity to deliver them from it but walked away.

Torture may be legalised by new bill in US

No comments other than read this and if you live in the US do something about it!

[via Crooked Timber (several posts but this is the latest)]

Unparliamentary language

This made me reflect on the way in which supposedly intellectual and clever people seem so often to resort to abuse and ridicule to make their point. It can be funny of course but too often it is just tired and boring.

The Libertarian

I love this - believe it or not found via Samizdata.net (see the comments section).

You really can't make it up...

Midwest Airlines canceled a flight ready to take off for San Francisco after a passenger found Arabic-style handwriting in the company's in-flight magazine and alerted the crew.

[via Cheryl's Mewsings]

Mutualist.Org

Mutualist.Org is a fabulous site with hundreds of links, articles and more on Mutualism.

Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

[via Early Days of a Better Nation (Ken McLeod)

Happy Birthday John Coltrane

John Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926. Also in 1930 Ray Charles and in 1946 a certain minor blogger.

Equality and justice for all...

“I am a convinced advocate of economic and social equality because I know that, without it, liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of nations, will never amount to more than a pack of lies.”

— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871.

[via a comment on Crooked Timber]

I can't work this out...

It appears from this article that the Republican Party was running its own detention centre during the National Convention. Googling comes up with variations on the same story but no 'mainstream' links. There seems little doubt about the existence of the detention centre and the physical conditions biut the rest is obscure. It smacks of Chicago '68.

Can anyone cast some light on this?