Mark Steyn turns out the best piece I’ve seen yet on the steel thing. Okay so I’m a week late. (Another link from Sean Kirby.)

There’s a story that someone from England was invited to talk about free markets in some other country, and after his speech was approached by several members of the audience who said, “I cannot agree with your ideas because I do not like to go barefoot.” The visitor was bewildered until his host whispered that most shoes in that country were made in state-owned factories. (Does anyone know where I read this story? I thought it was in An End to Allegiance, but the author, Geoffrey Sampson, said no.)

As Frédéric Bastiat put it in 1850:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

In this context, let me plug the Separation of School and State. The analogy with “church and state” is intentional: the established schools have much the same role now as the established churches once had: their goal is to ensure mental monoculture.

Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to ‘educate the people’ so that they will have but one common mind to delude.

(Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1980)

Peter Hollo cites an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes:

. . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest (which would equate to the extreme laissez-faire capitalist position).

Apples and oranges. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (or, as Ayn Rand would have it, ‘of the fit’) applies in any system; what varies is the meaning of fit. In a world dominated by the ethic of trade, fit means uniquely or efficiently satisfying the desires of others. In a world dominated by so-called Social Darwinism or bureaucratic egalitarianism, fit means playing the rulers’ game.

(‘Social Darwinism’ is a misnomer because its eugenist adherents fancy themselves wiser than slow clumsy Nature in identifying the unfit. Dawkins and Gould are both humbler than that – as is a good libertarian.)

About 1985 I read an essay entitled ‘The Danger of Equality’ by somebody named Gorer. To summarize his dimly-remembered thesis: In a complex society with many kinds of institutions, there are many modes of status-seeking – owning the biggest boat, having one’s daughter presented at the royal court – which are generally harmless; whereas under regimes which seek to abolish all that in the name of equality, like France the USSR, the only road for social-climbers is the quest for power over others, which is corrosive all around.

Compared with how I as a student imagined it, my life has been an abject failure (but don’t get me started on depression); and yet, most of the time, I have been quite comfortable doing low-level work for small firms. (Family kept the wolf of Reality from my door during a couple of years.) In a less chaotic, less dog-eat-dog world, my allergy to conformist authority might well have killed me by now.

The soft leftist I once was might retort: “In a truly egalitarian world you wouldn’t be forced to conform.” See Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or the ‘hate speech’ codes. Would-be social engineers too often mistake the normative for the predictive, or, as linguists would say, the prescriptive for the descriptive.

Steve White scores a good one:

Can someone explain to us why we expect the military budget to scale linearly with the GDP? Isn’t it the whole idea of a federal government that it will scale sub-linearly?

Are we just being mathematical and picky here, or do we detect an area in which it would be sensible for Big Brother to give us back some of our stolen lunch money? Hmm?

A scatter-chart of budgets around the world might be worth making. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find that the relation is super-linear at the high end, and sub-linear at the low end.

on Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait writes In praise of renting and to hell with owning:

In general, the relationship between owning-or-renting and freedom is surely the opposite of what it is so often said to be by British Conservatives. Renting equals freedom, not owning. Most home “owners” in Britain are about as free as a bird locked in a cage . . . .

One of the appeals of nanotechnology, for me, is the possibility of comfortable homelessness: if I can wear a self-fitting smartsuit that contains my library and computer, and automatically scrubs my skin as appropriate, what do I want a house for?

Am I the last to see it? A t-shirt bearing the familiar iconic portrait of Che Guevara – you know, beret with a star – except that the face is from Planet of the Apes.