Unbelievable.
After a very nice day out, some evil lurker tricked me into clicking a link to a Madeline Bunting blog post.
It’s year 10’s English class in a London comprehensive. Forty kids are debating the purpose of a school. “Teaching social skills,” they suggest. Why do you need them? I ask, playing devil’s advocate. “To get a job.” Is that the only point of having social skills? “Yes, what else is there?” One demurs, hesitant and not entirely sure how to express herself. “No, there’s more to life than a job. There’s happiness. Social skills are needed to make you happy.”
Yet another example of why state run schools are some of the most poisonous places on the planet. Of course, this shameless, brainless apologist for the state and all its systems of control cannot question the very idea that children are sitting in a class segregated by age, brainwashed and almost incapable of speaking English.
Talking about ethics to these prisoners is completely absurd; first of all they are all in a classroom in a state of involuntary servitude. This is like discussing ethics with slaves. Secondly, the school that they are in has been paid for through by the coerced extortion of monies by the violent state; the notion of discussing ethics in this extremely unethical environment is a profoundly schizophrenic act. On an instinctive level, any child can feel that being in school by force, and in that form is completely wrong, an injury to them, and unethical.
If this demonstrates anything at all, its that Madeline Bunting has no idea of what is or is not ethical. If she understands what she is doing, then she is a state propagandist of the first order, who gains directly from the unethical nature of the state and its predations.
Amazingly in the comments to this drivel, someone actually (partially) gets it:
Any ethical/moral debate needs to embrace issues of ownership and control – a debate thet has been effectively abandoned in the 21st century. In particular we desperately need an intelligent dialogue about the ownership and control of our money system.
We need ask if there has ever been a more dysfunctional, immoral and unethical form of money creation than our current system, which allows the private creation of money in parallel with debt (i.e. credit) for the profits of financiers and at the expense of the people: Abraham Lincoln said that “the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government?s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles? the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.” Until we understand this we are morally bankrupt and economically enslaved to the financiers.
Ethical money means gold coins in the hands of the public. It means the complete removal of the business of money production from the clutches of government.
‘People’ like Madeline Bunting cannot understand this; they belong to the school of thought that holds money to be a sort of magic thing that ONLY governments can make. They are not interested in piercing the veil on this subject, and if they do, they hate where it leads, because to be ethical at that place means LESS government and not MORE and they are ALWAYS for more government.
It was a fascinating illustration of how deeply the instrumentalist values of the market have penetrated our everyday thinking when kids talk in this way.
Actually, what it demonstrates is that school is not a place to go if you want to learn how to think. It demonstrates that those children are nearly brain dead, like a drowned man brought up from the bottom of a lake and revived only to exist as a vegetable on a respirator. Thats what these children really are, and for the record, ‘kids’ are the offspring of goats, human beings have CHILDREN.
“Social skills” is the type of phrase management experts dreamed up to put a market value on a set of human characteristics.
Its called ‘socialization‘ when people like Madeline Bunting are talking about Home Education, and why that natural, beneficial and wonderful practice is not a good thing.
Cheerful, punctual, able to co-operate, take instructions: these are all marketable skills. But to many of these kids, equipping them for the labour market was the primary purpose of education. Any idea of it as enriching and deepening their understanding of what it is to be human and lead meaningful, contented adult lives, had been entirely lost to view. The one girl who offered an alternative was just as instrumentalist, only her goal was different: social skills were needed for not a job but for her personal happiness.
Oh dear.
Firstly, the marketable skills listed above (obedient to the state being the glaring omission) are exactly why schools were designed. They are factories that produce workers and nothing more.
Education that enriches and deepens the understanding of anything can be had outside of school, and in fact, many argue that it is only out of school that such things can be acquired organically. By using the phrase ‘lost to view’ she implies that none of the bad things schools do is deliberate, that somehow everything has evolved into this state by the accumulation of many innocently made bad choices over decades. No, that is not the case Madeline.
Now to the one girl who offered an alternative. On the one hand, Madeline decries the lack of schools providing enrichment, meaning and understanding so that students can be contented (happy), but when someone wants to get to the goal of happiness in a way other than she approves, this is ‘instrumentalist’.
This can be translated to, “be happy, but only in the way that I say happiness should be achieved”. Pure paternalist drivel of the most loathsome kind.
These were bright and interested 14-year-olds, but if you ran this argument in any other school, you’d probably get pretty similar responses.
This is why so many people are fleeing schools for Home Education.
The gap that intrigued me was the absence of any notion of being a good person, or of the many values that might not be able to command a market price such as being challenging, courageous, truthful, honest, spontaneous, joyful or even kind, compassionate.
This is absolutely astonishing.
These insane people, people like Madeline Bunting, are completely irrational, brainwashed anti-freedom monsters. They are the same sort of folk who associate the word ‘democracy’ with ‘fair’ and ‘just’, and in this particular instance, ‘free market’ with evil, greed, destruction, inhumanity and badness.
This paragraph is as wrong as a paragraph can be. A person who is ‘a good person’, who is challenging, courageous, truthful, honest, spontaneous (creative) and joyful has traits that are ALL highly marketable and desirable; employers desperately want people who have even a subset of these qualities, let alone all of them, and if you are a person who has them all, especially the essential trust quality, you will be LITERALLY worth your weight in gold.
How is it that this monster cannot understand that being trustworthy has a high market value? What sort of evil mind set produces a person that thinks being trustworthy is worthless to others?
It beggars belief.
I started with this classroom anecdote because it seems a good way to make concrete an absence. The central premise of the Citizen Ethics supplement published in this paper at the weekend (the full pamphlet can be downloaded on Comment is free) is that we have lost a way of thinking and talking about some very important things.
It is only the intellectual slave class of the state and their drooling followers that have lost the ability to think and talk about ethics in a coherent and rational way. From Matthew Parris and his nauseating and fawning noises of total allegiance to the state, to Henry Porter’s similar sickening concessions and total submission to the all powerful state as the final, natural, indispensable legitimate monopolist of violence, who thinks:
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us
[…]
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499
These people, Bunting, Parris and Porter, none of them can explain how it is that the power to ‘act’ (murder, steal etc etc) can be given to them by people who do not themselves have that power or right.
This is the way of thinking and talking about very important issues that has been ‘lost’. Of course, many of us do not think that it has been lost at all; these aparatchicks deliberately tow the line that the state is legitimate, while they in fact know that it is not.
The preoccupation with market efficiency and economic growth has loomed so large that other activities, and other values, have been subordinated to its disciplines.
When Madeline talks about ‘economic growth’, she means the increase in pollution and consumption of resources. Economic growth does not need to mean an increase in destruction; it can come about by an increase in efficiency. The very internet that her shabby article was accessed through, the computer that I am writing this on, and the server that hosts these words are just the smallest example of what increased market efficiency really means.
Not a matchstick of wood was needed to make this transaction; this is what happens when people are free to invent what they like and use and share what they have invented in the way that they like; we get the internet. People without imagination, like Madeline Bunting, even though these miraculous cost free increases in efficiency are literally staring them in the face, still insist that economic growth is an entirely undesirable and negative thing. Its a lie of course, and there are many examples of people similar to her who made all sorts of dire predictions and miscalculations that made them look silly in hindsight, thanks to the relentless innovation of man, who continues to inspire and free us from useless toil and waste, in spite of the state and its brain dead boosters.
“You can’t buck the market,” said Margaret Thatcher
As evil as Margaret Thatcher may or may not have been, this statement by her is absolutely correct. You can no more buck the market than than you can cause light to be dark, water to be dry or change the nature of the universe on the most fundamental levels.
The market, market forces, the nature of man and of money are things that are a natural, spontaneously emerging consequence of reality. These consequences are governed by laws:
- F=ma
- Pe=mgh
- Ke=1/2mv2
- E=mc2
All of those are examples of laws that describe how nature works. They are reliable, inviolable, unchangeable and absolute.
Money is another thing that obeys strict laws, in the same way that energy is governed by laws. You cannot create something out of nothing; this is the truth in both physics and economics, the science of money.
Madeline Bunting and all of her Grauniad cohorts do not understand these facts. That is why they can print that ‘Quantitative Easing’ (printing money) is the solution to the problem of the current crisis. They believe, as a child does, that Santa Claus brings presents to all the good children in a single night. They believe that government creates jobs. They believe that government creates money. Of course, government does create money; what it cannot do is create value by printing words on paper that they pass off as money. Money does not have value, “because people believe in it”. This is the sort of fantastic thinking that these people soak themselves in, and they shun the warm dry towel of logic so they always stay wet.
Until Madeline Bunting and the other fools at the Graunaid and everywhere else in the media either decide to stop lying for the state or come to their senses, i.e. wake up from their delusions and magical thinking, you will never read a factual article in their papers that deals with ethics and money. Period.
, and no government has disagreed since.
That is a lie. The crash would not have happened if that were really true.
It was the adage that was used to justify soaring pay for the highest earners and stagnant earnings for the low-paid.
Jealousy politics raises its revolting head yet again. Rates of pay are always justified. People are never paid more than what they are worth. There is no such thing as ‘too much money’. These are the ideas of the fantasist where the world is an unjust place every second that men everywhere are not absolutely equal. There is no such thing as a ‘fair’ wage. Minimum wage laws hurt people, not help them. Minimum wage laws make jobs scarce. It is all the fault of the state and its insane supporters, the Madeline Buntings of this world, and everything I just wrote is true.
The market ruled, and questions of injustice, honour or integrity were all secondary or irrelevant.
The market always rules, just as gravity always pulls down, wether you like it or not. The crash is the market asserting itself against the delusionists who think that you can eat yourself fitter.
Injustice is the state stealing money while Madeline Bunting and Henry Porter cheer them on. These people are not honourable by any definition; they are for violence, theft, murder and enslavement of their fellow man. They have no integrity, as on the one hand they call for conditional rights and ‘civil liberties’ and then on the other, profess their undying loyalty and support for the state (Porter and Parris). Yes indeed, honour and integrity are secondary to these people, secondary to their love of the evil state.
A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values.
And that tells you all you need to know about the depth of understanding of economics at the World Economic Forum and of Madeline Bunting. They know nothing whatsoever about economics.
The crash / credit crunch had nothing to do with a ‘crisis of ethics’ not even when you turn that phrase onto the murderous state and its insane lust for the printing press, because the state is fundamentally unethical, and so there is no possibility of crisis in ethics there, since there are no ethics to begin with.
Sir Thomas Legg declared in his final report on MPs’ expenses that there had been a failure of ethics.
Here we have a scandal over a thimble full of water dipped into the ocean of stolen money. The trillions stolen by these MPs to murder and enslave is not the scandal, but instead, Madeline Bunting wants you to believe that a few pennies here and there to repair the houses of, and to service and entertain the thieves, is the great crisis of ethics. Never mind that these people want to force all children into the very schools that even a monster like her finds disturbing, making illegal any better, natural human alternative that produces the people that she claims she wants to see coming out of the education system. Never mind that they mass murder, colonise and destroy at will, unquestioned by these Grauniad ‘journalists’; none of that is important; only the duck house of an MP is a crisis in ethics.
This is a classic case of the media diverting attention away from the true crimes to focus on the sensational, the irrelevant and the petty, while crimes of mass murder and unprecedented theft go unreported, and when they are reported they are justified with false reasoning. Appalling, unforgivable behaviour.
There’s a widespread perception that social norms have subtly and gradually shifted towards the centrality of personal self-interest. As long as it’s legal, it’s legitimate; no further individual judgment is necessary.
And here we have the call for all actions to be illegal, whatever they are. A permission based society where everything is illegal to replace the free society, where everything that is not illegal is legal. Madeline Bunting wants a world where you have to have permission to do everything, no matter what it is. That is the only way she will feel safe from the chaotic free system, where people are able to peruse their own ideas of what is or is not good. This is anathema to Porter, Bunting and Parris, who would have everyone under control of the monolithic state ‘for their own good’.
It is only the unfettered personal self-interest that has brought mankind the great achievements. Men working to fulfil their destinies as they see fit, working voluntarily for profit or not; this force of nature – man unleashed – is the only way we can have peace and prosperity in abundance. Madeline Bunting and her imagination-less monster companions would have us live without, for example The Google, because they want to enrich themselves by printing books. They would keep us in horses and carts to save the buggy whip manufacturers. They are the luddites, the fear soaked nanny statists, the health and safety fanatics; they are everything that is wrong with the west.
However much we may have laughed at the Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” line, we can now see how it seeped into powerful institutional cultures such as the City and parliament.
Greed is good. Greed is the manifestation of the desires of men to make things and to act in the world. Greed is self interest; the lust for knowledge, for a better toaster, for commercial space flight, for faster computers. Greed is what makes the world good. Greed IS good.
The City is a collection of private firms; it is not a ‘powerful institutional culture’ any more than a packet of yeast is. Yeast does what it does and people in business do what they do.
Parliament on the other hand is a criminal organization that is precisely like a mafia gang. It extorts money, murders (actually the mafia NEVER murdered as much as any state ever did) and uses violence to get what it wants solely to prop up its own existence. It is a parasite, a drain on the resources of the good, the innocent and the productive. Once again a Grauniad hack fails to make the distinction between private business and the state; but this should come as no surprise to anyone; these are the same people who think money comes out of a printing press.
Citizen Ethics was a project to ask nearly four dozen prominent thinkers what this was all about. Did ethics really have a role to play, and had it failed? First, despite plenty of disagreements, on one thing there was a clear consensus: ethics are crucial.
Whose ethics?
There are people who believe (correctly) that the Madeline Buntings of this world are fundamentally unethical, and they can prove it. Without stating the source of your ethics, its foundation, its basis, its formulation, this word is just another meaningless posture.
Ethics are not something that you can make up as you go along. It is not something that you can design by the pick and mix method, like some of the very confused people who want to be free in their lives, but who insist that others should be violently restrained, licensed, inspected and controlled.
Like economics and physics, there is only one set of ethics that is correct for man, within which he is able to act morally and when he acts in groups of people, all achieve their full potential in harmony.
This one set of ethics is not self contradictory, does not make exceptions that allow for unprovoked violence or theft or other immorality. It is complete, logical, and unassailable, just like the basic laws of motion, that produce predictable results every time ad infinitum. You know its name because you read BLOGDIAL: Libertarianism, as described by Murray N. Rothbard.
They are the underpinning to all political debate; they frame the questions we ask of ourselves and of our political economy and therefore do much to shape the answers we end up with.
And that is why if you start without the facts and the laws that govern reality, you will never be able to predict where the cannon ball will fall when it is shot, or put a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Without Newton’s laws you cannot do these things, and without Murray Rothbard and Libertarianism and Austrian Economics, you have no starting point based in the world as it actually is to be able to get to the correct answers.
They are vital to the civic culture in which both politics and economics are ultimately rooted.
Economics is rooted in immutable laws. The way men deal with each other ethically is rooted in what their true nature is. From those two things flows the shape of how the world should be.
So, as Will Hutton will do in his book, Them and Us, out in the autumn, if we really want to understand how some of the incredible myths perpetrated over the last couple of decades have gone unchallenged, we have to go back to some basic arguments of philosophy. What is justice? Who deserves what? What constitutes human flourishing?
What is justice? First we need to know what man is. Who deserves what? Once again, what is man, where do goods come from, what is property, who owns property, what is theft, what are rights, what are not rights; these are the questions that are answered by Murray Rothbard. What constitutes human flourishing? That is not for anyone to define except by those who want to impose their will on other people, I can tell you that for free.
Too many of these questions have simply been shelved for too long.
They have never been ‘shelved’ unless you are writing for the Grauniad, where they hold that they are the protectors of the revealed truth of how the world works. People all over the world are turning to Libertarianism because it is demonstrably true and because it tells us what is wrong with how the world is currently organized.
Austrian Economics can predict the crashes, why they happen and how money really works. On the contrary, rather than being shelved, these questions are being asked and answered more now than ever, and the Madeleine Buntings and Henry Porters of the world are running scared, because their false world view is crumbling before their very eyes, just like the Soviet Union disintegrated before the eyes of the people who believed in that immoral, unethical, unworkable system.
Questions of justice and reward were left to the market to resolve; questions of human flourishing were privatised.
Justice is the business of courts. Remuneration is an absolutely private affair. Human flourishing takes care of itself, just like weeds do. This is a perfect example of wrong thinking, where there is no distinction between the sphere of the state and the world of the private, where words have lost their meaning, where an ethical foundation is missing.
It was left to everyone to decide their own sequence of pleasurable experiences in life with little acknowledgement of how many of those depend entirely on mutual co-operation.
It is only through everyone deciding and taking their own path that all man can reap the maximum rewards. Men voluntarily exchanging causes mutual co-operation to spontaneously emerge; we need each other to achieve our pleasure, whatever that may be. Madeleine Bunting does not understand how the world really works. She does not understand where prosperity comes from, what prosperity is, how innovation works, how capital flows, and what man is.
The classic paradigm is sitting in a traffic jam in your 4×4 with its astonishing powers of acceleration rendered useless.
If all the roads were privately owned, and there were no speed limits, traffic would flow better.
One explanation for this abandonment of the debate is that we lost a language in which to think and argue about ethics.
There is no ME in your WE.
Perhaps this is partly attributable to the vexed legacy of institutional religion and the long shadow it still casts. The promotion of ethical behaviour has been bound up with particular institutions, and as they decline, it leaves a vacuum of authority.
I agree with the second sentence.
Who dares talk on this subject with confidence?
The Libertarians especially Lew Rockwell.
It prompts fear that any such discussions are really a Trojan horse for promoting a religious belief. There’s a suspicion that words such as “morality” tip us quickly into the kind of instinctive conviction made infamous by Tony Blair in which sincerity is regarded as an adequate substitute for careful reasoning.
Whatever the basis of your morality, as long as you do not bother anyone, what you choose to believe and how you choose to act is entirely your own business.
Even the language itself is mired in a history of social control; morality and virtue are words that are reluctantly used, since both still convey overtones of intrusive monitoring of (particularly female) sexual behaviour.
Unbelievable; this person talks about brainwashed children in schools and “intrusive monitoring of behaviour” in the same breath!
But since most of the contributors to this pamphlet express their commitment to ethics without any reference to religious practice, perhaps it is finally possible to move beyond these familiar anxieties and resume a task of ethical reasoning regarded through most of history as essential to being human. This is philosophy as the Greeks understood it – love of the wisdom to lead lives of meaning and fulfilment, not some kind of abstract game with words.
Ethical reasoning starting from where? And with whom? Whose definition of meaning and fulfilment? Violence is not an abstract or a game with words; what these people want is total violence against everyone who does not believe what they believe. They want children imprisoned in their brainwashing schools, so they they can indoctrinate them in THEIR ideas of what is and is not ethical, that they have muddled together from scratch.
Ethics is a word that derives from two Greek words, ethos for habit and ethikos for character, and it better fits what Citizen Ethics proposes rather than “morality”, which comes from the Latin word “mores” for social institutions and customs. This is not about reasserting conventions, a preconceived code, but about reinvigorating a habit, a process of reasoning to the perennial question: what is the right thing to do?
This is not the perennial question, and that a group of people should want to force their version of what the questions should and should not be is a gross form of violence. As far as I am concerned (and you can do and think whatever you like, I could care less as long as you do not interfere with me in any way whatsoever) the questions are, “what should I NOT do?”, “how can I DO NO HARM?” and all the other questions the answers to which will ensure that I never harm anyone else with violence either by my own hand or by proxy through the state or its agents. With this as the basis, a moral existence is a natural consequence; what you do with it, on top of it, voluntarily, is all bonus.
People who are interested in ‘doing right’ are the most dangerous humans in the world. They are the sort of people who come up with political correctness, affirmative action, miscegenation laws, minimum wage laws, censorship and ever other evil that decent people hate. All of those are a direct consequence of not having a properly operating ethical code that prevents the doing of evil, that does not define what man is and what his true relationship is with the world and with other men.
We wouldn’t claim there is a consensus waiting to be found – on the contrary, our aim is to provoke a noisy debate on what kinds of habits and characters we need to run the good society.
Is it now?
Habits are how animals behave; men do not act out of habit, they act from reason. Once again, who is this mythical ‘we’ that she speaks of, and why is the running of the ‘good society’ (whatever that is) the goal? Who decided this, and why should anyone be forced to go along with it all? The answer is they should not, and anyone who wants it forced upon everyone is violent.
To go back to the lovely kids in the classroom, what is the good society we want to inspire them with – beyond their future roles in the economy as workers and consumers? What habits and character can we offer them as conducive to deeply rewarding lives? If we don’t know plenty of possible answers to that question, it’s no surprise they don’t.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/21/ethics-failure-market-moral-code
- What is ‘the good society’?
- Who is the ‘we’ that wants to inspire other people’s children with it?
- Who is the group that decides what animalistic habits the children of today are going to be brainwashed to reflexively exhibit?
- Who decides what is or is not a man of good character?
- Who decides what is or is not a ‘rewarding life’?
And what an insulting condescending monster to assume that just because SHE does not have these answers, children cannot find them out for themselves by whatever means, without HER HELP.
The ever insightful Mimi Majick puts it plainly, “This woman knows exactly what she is doing; she is utterly wicked”.
I agree.
Now on to the document ‘Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis‘ which is hosted on Scribd… wait a minute, I thought Scribd was EVIL?!
No surprises here; an intolerable, appalling mishmash of violence, pronoun abuse, lies and vile collectivism.
Here is a nasty taste:
The financial and political events of the past year have given rise to a crisis of ethics. Bankers and MPs acted legally but without integrity, and we lacked a language to respond. How are we to articulate our misgivings? How can we regain our ability to reason ethically?
Bunting. What a joke!
‘The times call for new ethical understandings as much as remembering old ones’
Anyone who wants to redefine what a human being is or is not is your mortal enemy. That is EXACTLY what Bunting is saying here; ‘we’ (whoever that is, and we know she means the authors of this bad document and their sick followers) have to construct a new ethics; in the same breath she admits that ‘we’ (meaning actually THEY) do not have the language to create such an ethics. Very very DUMB!
WE NEED A PUBLIC LIFE WITH PURPOSE
Michael Sandel
NO ‘WE’ DO NOT!
So, as frustration with politics builds on both sides of the Atlantic, it is worth asking what a new politics of the common good might look like. Here are four possible themes.
A first concerns citizenship, sacrifice and service.
Slavery, theft and violence. Pure evil.
To achieve a just society, we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life
‘Reason together’; this translates to “we have to enslave everyone to obey the majority rule”. No thanks, and no sale!
HOW TO LIVE AS IF WE WERE HUMAN
In a world that has laid bare the pitfalls of individualism, we must learn once more to live in the real world, says the Archbishop of Canterbury
Apostate Christian calls for enslavement:
‘We have looked into the abyss where individualism is concerned and we know it won’t do’
There we go with the ‘we’ business again. Individualism (which is the true face of what it means to be a human being) is the only way that man can reach his full potential. Real Christians understand this through the idea that man has been given free will, and that this is the only way that he can actually choose good over evil.
These apostates want man to be FORCED to do what THEY think is good. That diminishes man entirely to a creature. But then, this is exactly what they want, and the very language they use to describe their brainwashed followers reveals this; this man has s FLOCK. Nuff said.
Self-interest and calculation have derailed our values. To get back on track we must remember the affective bonds that link us to one another
Mark Vernon
Heavens above, they are all INSANE.
Self-interest and calculation are the ultimate tools for enlightenment, prosperity and freedom. Without them, man is reduced to property.
our current moral discourse lacks a compelling vision of what it is to be human
It doesn’t have to be compelling, it only has to be true.
Ethics is a form of practical intelligence. Like friendship, we nurture virtues best by our engagement with others and the world. Such skills must be learnt afresh in every generation – another reason why a fixed, codified system never inspires: it contains little conception that life is to be lived.
This is completely false.
What man is is FIXED, just as the laws of nature are fixed. The result of setting the ideas and beliefs of what man is to zero every generation is so absurd that I can barely believe that someone would be stupid enough to print it.
The entire reason why man is able to do what he does is precisely because he can transfer information across generations. Each generation can do what it likes, but what they cannot do is redefine what man is or what right and wrong are. What is ethical and what is unethical is fixed. The result of not knowing what these set rules are is tyranny accepted as normal and ethical, as the people who write in the Guardian do. It would be like people having to learn mathematics from scratch every generation. I can tell you exactly what those people are; they are Gorillas and the other primates who never change, who act by habit and instinct only, who do not write anything down and who do not have any awareness of what they are.
By the nature of what knowledge is, there will always be a first person who correctly identifies and then codifies the one true ethics that emerges from the nature of man; that philosopher was Murray Rothbard.
He discovered and wrote down the ethical equivalent of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica where the laws that describe what man is and is not and how he is governed by this immutable nature and the immutable nature of reality have been laid out clearly and completely.
Murray Rothbard’s triumph was to expose the absolute base of what man is as he exists. He did this without any reference to religion; it is purely logical and derived from reason only.
From this basis, everything else that you want to believe and any action that you want to take can be tested to see wether or not it is ethical. Libertarianism is unambiguous, clean, without contradictions and easy to understand. In the same way that Newton’s laws of motion can get you to the other planets with pinpoint accuracy, Murray Rothbard’s Libertarianism can get you to a complete understanding of the way the world should work, with absolute clarity and precision, with an infinite amount of space for any personal belief you wish to hold, an infinite amount of leeway for you to help others in any way you choose, to collaborate, exchange, build, grow, live, worship and be a total human being.
This is what the writers of this pamphlet DESPISE.
often on the fringes of critical debate, Islam has much to offer when it comes to the development of an ethics based on our common citizenship,
Tariq Ramadan
Uh oh…
‘Our’ Common citizenship? Of WHAT exactly? I am not a citizen of ANYTHING in common with you Mr. Ramadan. The same goes for you Rowan.
Ethics based on anything other than the true nature of man is worthless. Libertarianism, with its infinite space for any sort of belief, accepts every type of religion. What you believe is your own business. You are even free to offer it to others, ad infinitum. The only thing you are forbidden from doing is harming others or their property. You cannot steal, coerce or initiate the use of force against others, for any reason whatsoever.
And now, we have the very disturbing, suspiciously ineffective Shame (yes SHAME) Chakrabarti, who answers a questionnaire:
What’s the fundamental code we all should live by?
The simple code for living is equal treatment. There are all sorts of rights and freedoms we have and hold dear – freedom of speech, privacy, conscience and so on. And they can’t necessarily be absolute, but what we can say is that any changes to them have to be universal. So for example, take the issue of body scanners at airports. You can argue that it’s an invasion of privacy to have them, you can argue that it’s necessary to prevent terrorism, but what you can’t argue is that it’s ok to compromise someone’s privacy and not others. So it’s not going to be ok to isolate certain sorts of passengers, who look different maybe, and only use body scanners on them. It’s about equal treatment: if you make compromises on liberties, you make them for everyone, not just for some people. That’s paramount.
Equal treatment? Equally good or equally bad?. I think the answer is BAD, since this monster believes that rights are not absolute, but conditional on the word and by the leave of the ever present ‘we’, who will decide what ‘beneficial changes’ are to be made… universally of course… by the power of the omnipotent state, for which this witch is a shill.
Look at her treatment of body scanners; they are justified as long as ALL people go through them equally. These are the words of MONSTERS, and collaborators and TRAITORS, traitors to all souls everywhere… These words should make you BRISTLE with anger.
Clearly not one of the people who were invited to write for this document or answer the questionnaire have any idea of ethics, where they come from, or anything else about them. They are without a moral compass, evil, violent, control addicted, statist MONSTERS, ‘the enemy’ if you will.
Capitalism has been undermined by an abuse of the very principle that is its cornerstone: fairness. It is essential that we reclaim the idea of just rewards
Will Hutton
Profit is ethical to the extent it is proportionate to effort and not due to good luck or brute power
I’m not making these up, they are directly copied and pasted!
And finally, before I vomit all over my keyboard:
What would the economist John Maynard Keynes make of the state we’re in? We asked philosopher Edward Skidelsky to press Keynes’ biographer, his father Robert, on what the great man might say
‘The great man’
oh… no… I’mgoingto p-huuuuuurllllargh!!!!!!!!