Why not read a nice book instead?

Posted at 12/14/2003 03:22:21 PM GMT by Steven Chapman :


Sunday, October 05, 2003  

See Gun, Go Ape Crazy

It's that time again. Three high-profile shootings in a week and already the hyperbole is flying thicker and faster than 9mm rounds in a Tarantino movie. Britain's gun laws, to anyone with sense, are clearly as much a failure as our drug laws. So why are they not being publicly challenged?

The Guardian, not normally associated with tabloid-esque exaggeration, thinks Britain is "gun crazy." Senior police officers describe gun crime as a "'cancer' spreading across Britain." "These guns are in the hands of the whole community. Guns are everywhere and they are being used by everyone," according to the Urban Nation Youth Project. Really?

Such sentiments illustrate a stark truth: Britain's gun laws - widely acknowledged to be by far the toughest in the world - are failing, and debate surrounding this issue has become so hysterical it is seemingly impossible for anyone to openly confront this fact. For those of us who favour legal private firearm ownership as a means of defending oneself and one's property, not to mention for sporting pursuits, these times are most definitely a low-water mark. A whole raft of issues attached to gun ownership cannot, it seems, be publicly debated without provoking the kind of shrill responses illustrated above, and no one can put their head above the media parapet without being cut down by a hail of hot invective.

The most obvious issue is, of course, self-defence. The right of self-defence - arguably the most important of all our rights, since upon it they all ultimately depend - has been progressively eroded over the years, tipping the balance of power ever more toward would-be muggers, rapists and burglars. To set aside any object for forceful self-defence, whether it be a knife by your bed or a baseball bat next to your front door, is now classed as 'premeditation' and hence constitutes an offence in its own right. Burglary today is more likely to be dealt with by your insurance company than by your local police, with the result that everyone pays twice over for nonexistent protection through high premiums and even higher taxes. Gun controls have simply been one aspect of what is a much wider assault on our right to protect what is ours, and at no point has there ever been a rational justification for them. From the 1920 Firearms Act (publicly defended as a response to a (nonexistent) crime wave, but in fact passed more in fear of Bolshevism in the Home Counties) to the two 1997 Acts banning handguns (a irrational and doomed-to-fail response to the actions of a lone nutcase), restrictions on private firearms ownership have been driven by groundless fear and an almost inbuilt distrust of common people among the governing elite, and the consequences in respect of our present vulnerability to violent criminals are there for all to see.

There are some glimmerings of hope, however. Recent polls on crime have revealed a surprisingly large minority in Britain who would, were it legal to do so, own (and even carry) a gun to defend themselves. This, and the degree of public support for Tony Martin, would seem to suggest that the anti-gun lobby aren't having it all their own way. Yet even this slender silver lining has its own cloud, since the widespread disillusionment with politics - normally a healthy sign, in my view - has meant that this minority is not getting heard, nor are its views represented in the public debates in the print media or on TV.

It seems that gun control will have to go on, as drug bans have done, until the absurdity and futility of both are seen to be inescapable and inevitable. Those of us who think against the grain on this issue can do our modest little bit to push the debate in the right direction, but I suspect that in the end it will be patience, rather than convincing argument (we have those already, for what good it does), will be the virtue best worth cultivating. Or, if you like, you could write to your MP - but given the willful blindness and fear gripping our political elites on this and so many other issues, I wouldn't expect anything more than platitudes in return.

Posted at 10/5/2003 04:03:44 PM GMT by Steven Chapman :


Saturday, October 04, 2003  

A Taxing Proposal

Talking heads in parliament and the media line up on a regular basis to tell us all how much we love our public services, how we cherish the NHS and are deeply attached to our publicly-funded education system, and some even inform us that we are - apparently - ready and willing to pay even more to make a success of these institutions. But if this is true, why is taxation compulsory?

The underlying premise of every debate on tax I have ever tuned into is always the same: that the rate at which we are taxed - whether it be more, less or none - should be decided centrally, by government. Socialists, social democrats, conservatives, liberals, minarchists, utopian anarcho-capitalists - all imagine the tax issue being settled by grand legislative fiat, a single rate - or set of stepped rates - set for all. But who says deciding how much tax we pay should be the province of government? Why shouldn't taxation be voluntary?

Suppose instead of being told how much tax you will pay, you were instead free to decide for yourself how much - if any - you would pay. Suppose a tax return consisted of an itemised list of all the various areas of current public expenditure, with suggested contributions beside each item (dependent on your income) together with a field where you could write in how much you were actually prepared to pay for each item.

This system would have numerous advantages over the compulsory system. Firstly and most obviously, it would remove the coercive element from taxation, and recognition would be given to the fact that it is, after all, your money earned through your labour, and that extracting it from you by force is no more than legalised theft. It would then be up to the interest groups who currently benefit from the compulsory arrangement to resort to persuasion, argument and advocacy in order to maintain their funding, a state of affairs which may introduce some much-needed discipline into their modus operandi.

Secondly, whatever the intellectual heirs of A.V. Dicey may like to believe, in a democracy it is the people who are sovereign, and not parliament. We are accountable to no one. We choose who governs us, so why should we not also choose how much of our money they have to play with? With falling voting figures, it is clear that a vast number of people have become disillusioned with the ballot box as a way of exerting influence on government, and no matter how many people stay away on election days, the elected - in particular the current Labour government - still delude themselves with the notion that they have a resounding mandate for their policy decisions. Yet, while voter apathy may not make a difference to the way government operates, the decisions of millions of taxpayers will. Government cannot do a thing without our money, and if our money is the currency of our consent, then our consent - or the refusal of it - has sharp teeth indeed.

Thirdly, those who are attached to public services - the majority, we are regularly led to believe - would be free to continue funding them, and more to the point, would be free to refuse funding for certain expenditures they were unhappy with in favour of others more congenial. (Of course, those who are not remotely attached to those services could simply opt out.) Ineffectual anti-war marches would be replaced by straightforward tax withholding - a rather more potent weapon than slogans about oil or American imperialism. (Or, for that matter, placing one's trust in feeble French 'diplomacy.')

But what if no one bothers to pay tax voluntarily? What if everyone figures: hey, probably no one else will pay, so why should I? And how can anyone who supports the idea of public provision be guaranteed that sufficient funds will available for it? All obvious questions, all with obvious answers. Charities in the UK net billions of pounds every year - £15.6bn in 2001 alone, for example, of which £6.76bn came from the public - by persuasion, not coercion. The private sector earns this amount many times over in return for the provision of goods and services - by persuasion, not coercion. These facts alone indicate that people will pay for the things they consider worthy or worthwhile without having to be forced to do so - and don't forget that the recipients of this money have a positive interest in not wasting a penny of it, unlike government. So why wouldn't anyone pay tax if it were voluntary? And as for the lack of a guarantee: this can only be obtained through force, as at present, and this element of legally-sanctioned force is precisely what is at issue. Why, when the rest of us have no guarantees as to our income, should government be a special case? Why should it be that we must work in order to earn, while government merely has to exist to do the same?

Of course, it'll never happen. Rarely do the powerful ever give away their powers willingly, and there is no sign that anyone remotely close to government has even considered voluntary taxation as a possibility. Then again, the world is full of things no one considered possible once upon a time, not least of which is the machine on which I am typing this (and the means by which you are reading it) and the fact that I can freely do so without being charged with sedition. For the time being, at least.

Posted at 10/4/2003 12:25:42 AM GMT by Steven Chapman :


Wednesday, October 01, 2003  

Brent Rude

The recent Liberal Democrat by-election victory in Brent East was more about putting up two fingers to the Labour government and dismissing the Conservative opposition (again) than about endorsing the Lib Dem political agenda. But what else should we expect when so many people's imaginations are limited by politics itself?

A "political earthquake." The "biggest hammer blow of Tony Blair's political career." The "best chance since the Thatcherite early 1980s to break the mould of British politics ." Just three of the more florid appraisals of the significance of the Brent East result. It was of course none of these things, but as far as Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy is concerned right now, any publicity is good publicity so long as they spell your name right.

A more dispassionate observer might have found the voter turnout - 36% - rather more revealing than the election result itself. Voter turnouts in Britain are down generally (for instance, Labour's 164-seat majority in the Commons derives from the support of a mere 25% of the electorate), but this is low even by the standard of the 2001 general election turnout (57%) - at the time the subject of much hand-wringing and angst, along with the predictable re-animation of the undead compulsory voting meme.

But not this time. Today the pundits are too distracted by the political soap drama to think about such fundamental questions as: if this is an opportunity to "break the mould of British politics," why did 64% of the voters choose to stay at home? Why are political events, such as this by-election or the Hutton enquiry, of ever-diminishing importance to almost everyone outside Britain's political and media elites? Are swings like that in Brent East a consequence of a rational appraisal of party policies by voters or simply a convenient channel for a disillusionment with government in general that has no other, more creative, outlet?

Polly Toynbee once noted, in a rare moment of clarity, that "anarcho-individualism is a very British mindset" - possibly the only sentence she has ever written that cheered me up. Occasionally, our media elites peer over their walls and notice to their chagrin that a great number of the British people are not as they would wish them to be, that (the horror! the horror!) they stubbornly refuse to be politicised in the name of government's grand ideological projects. It is one thing for one's cherished political beliefs to be despised and opposed, but another thing entirely to encounter a vast swathe of complete indifference. And nothing provokes the urge to bully, punish and coerce like indifference. How dare the people be unmoved by the ideas that keep us awake at night? How dare they ignore us, and go about their lives as though we don't even exist? They must be poked and prodded, and made to care! (Toynbee continues: "and [anarcho-individualism] is not compatible with social democracy." You can almost hear the petulant stamp of her foot.)

Speaking as someone who doesn't give a damn about social democracy, I don't see this trend of political disengagement as inevitably negative at all. Where it is nihilistic, it is so because there is a tension between people's expectations of government and their experience of being governed. Too many people demand that government (that is to say, politics) be the solution to their problems, yet at the same time they are aware that government itself often has an entirely different agenda, unrelated to their demands and expectations. As a consequence, popular responses to government these days can be located somewhere on the scale between sullen resentment and outright hostility.

Outright hostility is fine. In fact, we could use some more rebellion and active disobedience, especially when it comes to the inexorable expansion of our tax burden and the gradual contraction of our civil liberties. But only if people rebel and disobey because they believe in something positive, a way of doing things apart from the 'political process', and because they remember that this country belongs to them and not to the State. This is precisely what did not happen in Brent East, and if Charles Kennedy is cheered by what was nothing more than the manifestation of a cynicism bred of hopelessness then he no more "connects" with the British people than anyone else in politics today.

Then again, we knew that anyway, didn't we?

Posted at 10/1/2003 08:26:22 PM GMT by Steven Chapman :


Thursday, September 18, 2003  

Sorry about the hiatus, but I'm thinking about re-launching this blog. All this quickfire stuff is starting to bore the pants off me. Even other people's fisking is getting tedious. I have some ideas, which may - or may not - come to fruition in the fullness of time, and ideas for pieces on such diverse topics as: why democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be, why some libertarians keep the state at bay at the front door, while letting it in via the back door, why Hutton is an exercise in hysteria that will tell us nothing of real interest, why the war in Iraq was wrong (yes, I have changed my mind about this) and why America and Europe are not diverging but in fact going in the same direction on parallel tracks. Phew!

Just as soon as I have the energy to set pen to pixels (i.e. when my contract with a certain university comes to an end next month).

Posted at 9/18/2003 03:42:02 PM GMT by Steven Chapman :


Thursday, September 04, 2003  

Quote for the day:

As for the moral panickers, if they want to avoid future generations of scary youth, they should urge higher taxes to pay the state to become the best possible nanny to all babies.

- Polly Toynbee, making the most of her hour in the sun with Tony.

What do you do when you can't afford to bring up a child? (Answers on a postcard please. Hint: it doesn't involve sticking your hand in my pocket.)

Posted at 9/4/2003 05:45:00 PM GMT by Steven Chapman :