We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?
– Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book entitled Unjust Rewards
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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Unelected leftist are just so bright, are just so able to see past reality, that they can not only speak for people they never met, but they can order and use state force to ‘help’ them, and of course punish others.
They’re annointed. The elite.
People should be more thankful.
/sarc
A good reply.
As for “unjust rewards”:
Justice is to be given money (or goods) voluntarily, injustice is to steal, or to take by threat of violence.
The amount of income or wealth someone has got nothing to do with justice. It is whether the money was taken by violating others (whether they be rich or poor or neither) that is a matter of justice.
People who talk of justice as a matter of how much income or wealth that is “distributed” to someone (as in “social justice”) simply do not understand what “justice” is.
I certainly would not like them in a court – as either judge or jury.
“So you say you were robbed – what is your income in relation to the income of the person who smashed you on the head and took your wallet?”
The incomes of the person robbed and of the robber are not relevant to the case.
Of course if relative income is relevant – I (who is very poor) should attack Polly and take some of her money.
That would seem to be her position.
She’s been eloquently demolished in today’s Times by Giles Coren. Do read the whole thing, it’s excellent.
So rich traders are often neither nice nor well read – Plato observed this rather a long time ago.
However, collectivists are often not nice either – such as Plato with his death penality for trying to leave one of his pet scheme city-states (the one in “The Laws”).
And as for being well read – well collectivists are often not very well read in anti collectivist literature, and they often want such works banned.
Such a statement from someone with a name like Raj Chande nicely gives the lie to Toynbees’ resentful, self deluded little world. She’ll never notice, of course. Twit.
Good on Mr Chande. He is a free man.
So rich traders are often neither nice nor well read
I have a few that were nice, and I have met a few who were well read. And I have met many who were neither of these things. Rather like people in most other fields of human endeavour. Do I think that they are worse in either respect than (say) your average newspaper journalist? No. And they are a good deal more numerate than your average newspaper journalist.