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Samizdata quote of the day This week, Alastair Campbell said that the current eruption of ‘Corbynmania’ was akin to ‘what happened when Diana died’. Worse still, popular delirium can foster a herd mentality that leads to the persecution of dissenters and opponents. This is especially the case when a movement’s mentality is half-detached from reality. Protecting benefits, ending austerity, raising taxes on the wealthiest, abolishing university tuition fees, reopening coal mines: Corbynomics is basically the equivalent of saying ‘wouldn’t it be great if all this Monopoly money was free?’.
– Patrick West
For extra FSM karma points, also read: The Corbyn audit: how Marxist Jezza would impoverish Britain by Zac Tate
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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.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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When one’s enemy is busy tearing himself apart – stand aside and send out for more popcorn.
The British continue to be drawn towards the ideals of nationalised organisations despite their dreadful record. This characteristic appears innate and supplies some of the reasoning as to why Mr Corbyn has such appeal. While this attraction appears unlikely to be tested in real life, I would not put it passed the electorate here to fudge the decision when asked, ambivalence might well see the experiences of the 1970/80’s repeated to a new generation.
Brits, more than most, tend to tie their economic thinking to some peculiar ideas about class, social structure and right-and-wrong.
For example, there tend to be very strong feelings among the great majority about the virtue of very rich people, the social value of the means by which they acquired their wealth, and whether or not they “deserve” to be that wealthy. People who have earned a lot of money are considered to be acting ‘above themselves’ and are frequently derided for their humble origins, the nature of the way they became wealthy, and for ‘forgetting where they came from’.
Right now, it is the season in the nicest parts of London where very wealthy foreigners bring their very-expensive motor cars into the country and flash themselves around town in them. And, regular as clockwork, all the red-top popular prints run stories about these idle layabouts, poncing around town in their fancy cars that they did nothing to ‘earn’, and creating a spectacle. Nothing creates a better story than the image of one of these things being hauled away by the rozzers for parking on a yellow line.
In the US, when people see a Ferrari drive by, most people go ‘Wow! Nice Car!’. In the UK, most people go ‘What a prat. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us. Wonder who he screwed over to afford that?’
There’s a streak of malice and vengeance towards the ‘undeserving rich’ that runs very deep in the UK, and this always makes very fertile ground for National Socialists like this Corbyn joker. You can tell them all you like about very straightforward things like the 3000 vs 9 million taxpayers statistic quoted in the article, and they will still believe that ‘the rich’ somehow possess limitless skipfulls of cash that can pay for anything and everything, and that they came by it in unvirtous ways anyway, and so they should have it taken off them.
llater,
llamas
who will be in a lawnchair outside the Ducati dealership on Woodward tomorrow watching an endless stream of the world’s fanciest cars going buy, and admiring Every Single One.
From Corbyn’s manifesto, pulled out in the CapX article:
Yay. Richard Murphy. I’m with Longrider. This could all start to get hilarious.
Of more interest in the current situation is when a movement’s mentality is completely detached from reality.
Someone should create a socialist slogan generator on the Web. “We want xxxxx for people instead of xxxxxxxx.” The possibilities are limitless, as is the appetite for such fatuities.
Should Mr Corbyn win hsi party’s leadership he will have plenty of time to make his intentions as leader clear. He won’t face hard questions from the media, just praise or scorn, but if he were to be asked ‘What will you do when you run out of other people’s money?‘, he has the simple answer ‘Print some more’.
Shhhh… There’s always the chance some leftoid nutcase might stray over here & be put off voting for him.
Gene, the formula’s even simpler than that: “X, not Y”. Bonus lefty points if it rhymes. (False dichotomies optional but preferred.)
My local council-run “community centre” has a poster advertising slimming classes, over which someone has scrawled – I swear I’m not making this up – “RIOTS, NOT DIETS”. W, I ask you, TF?
Actually “would it not be great if all this Monopoly money was free [and real]” is the basis of the economic policy of every major country on Earth.
And is taught in all the major universities – and supported by the media.
Mr Corbyn goes far beyond that.
That is only the Keynesian part of the Keynes-Marx fusion created by P. Straffa and co some decades ago.
One must not forget the Marx half.
So it is actually “would it not be good if all this Monopoly money was free-and-real – and we got to destroy the capitalist exploiters!”
The “and we got to destroy the capitalist exploiters” is the bit that should not be forgotten.
It is the key selling point of the campaign.
And the great thing about “Print some more” is you get to decide where that money goes first. Did anyone catch the news about Hugo Chavez’s daughter being the richest woman in Venezuela?
Excellent analysis by llamas of (one of) the British problem with regard to wealth. I have friends and colleagues who take exactly this attitude, while I stand amazed by people who have the drive and ingenuity to make sh*tloads of money.
The contrary problem in America is summarised in the line “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich” which presupposes that that’s all anyone should care about.
Back to Corbyn: he wants to kill the goose and print golden eggs. Good luck with that, Jez.
Well, who wouldn’t want to trade the capitalist exploiters for government exploiters with the legal use of violence backing them up?
Llamas gets it spot on. Brits tend to be inverted-snobs. It is pathetic. It is sort of the hang-over from Empire. It leads to a bizarre sense of entitlement. And am I the only one who thinks Corbyinite sounds like something I’d mine in Namibia because it is needed for mobile phone batteries.
He looks like the sort of sociology teacher that gets Yewtreed. I guess at least he isn’t Burnhamite which is the new form of bland. Or the other two who make white A4 look like a rainbow.
Paul, I have to say this again… If you study social sciences at uni you will get twatted but… This doesn’t happen in the hard sciences. F=ma whatever. There was no political content (other than peeps saying they needed more funding which is natch) in any uni maths or physics dept I have known. It just isn’t there. Of course thre are inane and insane subjects (Eng Lit springs to mind – though it has foxy chicks who don’t believe it either). So does math, mind. Less so physics. And Chemistry, God help us! Pigs in knickers the lot of them but then as someone scrawled on a lecture theatre folding table at Newcastle University’s Armstrong college in what I suspect was a last act of desperation, “chem is wank”.
No, we underestimate folks. It is harder to indoctrinate than you think. And there is no way you can do it via QMech or GR. Apart from anything the arts lot wouldn’t know Schrödinger’s equation equation from their own arsehole. And to go back to the inverted snobbery they positively revel in their pignorance. It is a badge of power amongst the farts and shitterature mob not to have the slightest idea how to solve a quadratic. They of course wank higher than any in Wome.
Because if you can’y handle the truth you can always just make it up.
Just curious. What are Corbyn’s ironclad constituencies (voting blocs):
Muslims
Government workers
Education employees
Union workers
New immigrants of any kind
What or who else? Are they the same as the US?
Biggest group of new immigrants in UK are eastern and central Europeans. I very much doubt many are going to vote for Corbyn
Is it really possible in the UK for new immigrants to vote without acquiring citizenship, like in the US?
(NB: i am asking if it is possible de facto, not de jure.)
If they are from the EU, yes.
John Galt III
Not sure how many dead vote in the UK, but electoral fraud has been facilitated by postal voting reforms enabling postal votes on demand.
There is no obvious check on your citizenship when you register to vote in the UK, you get a form and are invited to fill in as many names as you can, the system has relied on trust and perhaps the possibility of being called for jury service as reasons to ensure truthful declaration. Hence the unpopularity with the Left of the Poll Tax, if someone registers to vote and is liable for a tax, the local council will come looking for their money.
Only in local elections I believe, possibly also the Euro ones, but not in General Elections. However, electoral fraud is now widespread due to cultural enrichment, so the only honest answer is: who knows?
I followed the link to Zac Tate’s article and am now wondering why I have not yet woken up screaming. What? You’re telling me this is real and I’m not having a bad dream about being back in the 1970s? May as well go with the flow, then. First thing is to find my polyester disco suit.
Nick M, your experiences – and mine – closely match those those of British-born and now American conservative John Derbyshire. It was he (I think) who said that there are right-wing academics, but they tend to be confined to those subjects where, at some point, it is required to take a square root.
And your comment about chemistry brought back a long-forgotten memory from my final year in high school. All over the place were posters, advertising the school play for that year, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. On one of these, someone had written the rather plaintive question: is alchemy as boring as modern chemistry?
The essential problem is that the monopoly money *is* free. Just not to us plebs.
I hope you are right Nick.
Llamas, what does Average Briton think of people like James Dyson and Richard Branson? I wonder if the British attitude to wealthy people is because so many wealthy people inherited their wealth, so you could believe that their ancestors must have been aristocrats?
raising taxes on the wealthiest
Corbyn has already showed his colours by declaring a 7% hike on £50k. If he considers that to be “wealthy”, it wont be long before £40k becomes a “well off” income and subject to more taxes. It is a great pity many do not see how Bennite socialism never actually targets the rich, just the people who have studied and worked hard to better themselves and have finally moved up a rung on the ladder, in fact they are the ones coincidently are just below those doing the phoney leftist maths, and they happen to not be the one per-centers like Jeremy, who don’t like giving up stuff without anyone else doing the same, the same old politics of envy.
But money has, and is, being printed. Corbyn is merely asking why, if printing is good for some things, it isn’t for others.
It’s a damn good question.
Not really, because it isn’t good for anything.
Is it really much different in the UK than the USA? I do not think ‘so many’ people inherited great wealth in the UK vis a vis other places.
No, in Australia, and America, people are more likely to have worked for their money, but I just wondered if Britain still had some lingering class resentments, which translate into attitudes about money. Australia does have the tall poppy syndrome, where equality is enshrined as an envious ideal- nobody should rise higher than his ‘mates’; equal status, not equal opportunities, is the undercurrent here.
No, Perry, it’s a good question because nobody has an answer.