Benedict Brogan wrote a Telegraph article called “Election 2010: a bracing reminder of the price we pay for political freedom“, in which he notes the cost to Britain’s young soldiers in Afghanistan in juxtaposition with the scenes of election tumult.
Well I can think of several arguably good reasons for western troops to be fighting in Afghanistan but I sure hate to think of anyone dying for political freedom… freedom, sure… but that qualifying word in front does rather change things. Politics is what we call the struggle to control the means of collective coercion. It may be a process we cannot avoid but it is, at best, a necessary evil… and most of the time it is just evil without the necessary.
Freedom is essential and worth fighting for… but anyone who died to defend political anything died for all the wrong reasons. What does ‘political freedom’ even mean in Britain? The right to vote who gets to rape you?
Britain’s political system is not something to get all misty eyed about because most politics has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” but rather forcing people to do things they would rather not do. It is for the most part about people using the proxy violence of the state to take things they want and punish people they do not like far more often than it is about dealing with the genuine collective threats of plague, disorder and war.
And as for this being an ‘extraordinary’ election, as the linked article claims, I cannot recall one where it mattered less which of the largely interchangeable plonkers on offer gets into Number 10. All that will change is which of set of rapacious thugs says who gets snout space at Westminster’s trough filled with other people’s money. But of course many will vote Tory on the ‘lesser evil’ principle and no doubt act surprised when Cameron more or less does all the things he has said he will do to prop up the intrusive regulatory welfare state. People voting for an ever so slightly lesser evil (and quite possibly not even that) will get exactly what they vote for… another evil government. Nice one, guys.
Today is the day that nothing important really changes.
I’ve half a mind to print that out and hand it to whatever political lowlifes are hanging around the door of my local polling station when I drop in to make my futile gesture. It says everything I’d want to. But they wouldn’t take any notice anyway.
Good Point Perry
Last week I heard George Gilder talking about his new book “The Israel Test” and he made pretty much the same point. Free Capitalism is more important than democracy.
Politics may be a necessary evil, but its does nothing to increase the sum total of human happiness, except in a purely negative sense of forbidding governments to do harmful things. Capitalism does great stuff like build the Iphone and provide for good food and nifty cars and the chance for beautiful girls to strut their stuff in the spring.
I think I’ll drink some tea.
A strange moment to share with you on this election day… On my way into my local polling station a gentleman of Asian origin arrived and asked one of the helpers there if he could hand his postal ballot in at the station.
I’m not sure why this man was entitled to a postal vote, but I did see he had time to go down to the local polling station with it.
New Labour, Newer Labour or Newest Labour. Or some combination thereof.
Too bloody true.
The issue is not slavery for a “good” cause versus slavery for a “bad” cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a “good” gang versus dictatorship by a “bad” gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship.
Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “Conservatism: An Obituary.”
Perhaps the soldiers can come home from Afghanistan and shoot the leaderships of the major political parties.
Accept, on no, that would upset Benedict Brogan and his “political freedom”.
There was a time when “political freedom” meant, in Britain, freedom from politics – a nation where the government left people to get on with life.
However, now everything is political – especially for David Cameron with his “big” (government financed “society” (which is nothing to do with civil society).