Blog of the day

I've just discovered a rather splendid blog. Here are some tasters:

Excerpt 1 (especially for the current generation of "Honey I Shrunk The State" libertarians, to be filed under "I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than you imagine"):

Money and property rights are both creations of the state. If the state were abolished, neither would exist. The ‘money’ point is obvious, but the same applies to property: the fact that you happened to own a nice house would be irrelevant, because someone bigger than you would come along and tell you to get out of it or he’d kill you

In other words, when people complain about the money that the state takes off them in taxes, comparing it to their pre-tax paycheque, they’re talking complete and utter nonsense. The correct figure for comparison is the amount of money that they’d have in Hobbes-world. Which, apart from musclebound psychotic thugs, would be vastly less than they’d have under any plausible liberal-ish-democratic-ish society.

Excerpt 2 (a precis of a Reuters article, to be filed under "interesting fact I didn't previously know"):

During the Korean War, Congress enacted an excess profits tax meant to keep military contractors from, well, profiteering. In its infinite wisdom, Congress defined excess profits as anything above what a company had been making during the peacetime years 1946-1949.

 Boeing was mostly a military contractor in those days (Lockheed and Douglas dominated the passenger-plane business), and had made hardly any money at all from 1946 to 1949. So pretty much any profits it earned during the Korean conflict were by definition excess, and its effective tax rate in 1951 was going to be 82%…

It being 1951, Boeing instead sucked it up and let the tax incentives inadvertently devised by Congress steer it toward a bold and fateful decision. CEO Bill Allen decided, and was able to persuade Boeing’s board, to plow all those profits and more into developing what became the 707, a company-defining and world-changing innovation.

And finally, I'm regretfully filing this under "something I've thought for a long time, but never got round to blogging about myself":

Since I’ve already tweeted that it annoys me, as a left-wing kind of person, that some people in the 1980s hated Mrs Thatcher so much that they opposed the most reasonable and fair war that the UK has ever fought, I thought I’d make clear on my blog that anyone who opposes it is pretty much evil.

Back in 1986, I remember watching England being beaten by Argentina in the World Cup quarter finals and listening to left-wing friends cheering Maradonna's infamous "hand of God" goal. It was a reflexive gesture against Thatcher's war and the bellicose jingoism that it inspired. But the thing about reflexes is that they are mindless. As a bit of a Billy Bragg-listening lefty myself, I was sick of hearing about the war and sicker still about the way it had rescued the hated Thatcher government from electoral oblivion, but I also realised that it was about as just as war ever can be.

Nobody lived on the islands before the Brits decided to plant a flag on them back in the 19th Century, so it wasn't a question of colonising downtrodden locals who had a right of self determination. Unless somebody can prove that the native penguins have a strong opinion about which piece of coloured cloth on a stick flies over their islands, it's up to the islanders whether they want to be British, Argentine or whatever else they damn well want. The settlers overwhelmingly wanted to be British, yet they were invaded by the troops of a brutal, undemocratic military junta that wanted to annexe their homeland by force.

You can bewail the loss of life, but it's still not unjust to eject a repressive, near-fascist junta from islands they've invaded against the clearly expressed will of the islands' population.  The Thatcher government can be criticized for the Falklands war, but only in the narrower sense of not preventing it in the first place. By seeming way too relaxed about South America's more unpleasant right-wing juntas before the war and by withdrawing HMS Endurance, the only British naval asset in the South Atlantic, you could argue that the Conservatives gave the Galtieri regime the impression that Britain would be unwilling or unable to defend the islands against the attack it was considering.

This is what I should have said to my fellow lefties back in the eighties but, to my shame, didn't.Well done to Banditry for putting the record straight.