Clips from three political pieces

[sawyl]

My day has been greatly enlivened by John Holbo's wonderful post over on CT, which points some of the problems with associated with a thin, property based form of libertarianism:

To maximize freedom by locking everyone up, I suppose you would try to build the very most open-ish, least restrictive sort of jail you could devise. To maximize freedom by punching noses, I guess you would study the ways of the Batman, or something. What is far from obvious, obviously, is that doing either of these things equates to maximizing individual freedom. Period. And the same goes for maximizing individual freedom by accounting everyone their own property. You can set out to do this by attempting to devise the most smooth and efficient system for treating everyone as their own property. But it obviously doesn’t follow that this is the way to maximize individual freedom. Period. It’s more plausible that you will maximize freedom by treating everyone as their own, alienable property than by punching them in the nose, but it’s not self-evident that you can do it either way. Maybe people would be more free, on the whole, if you do something else entirely.

I also enjoyed Mili Popova's piece, reposted on Stross' blog, which examines the economonic problems associated with the idea of intellectual property and suggests that the situation might be improved by some sort of new model patronage:

We're going to see a wider variety of distribution models. My favourite example at the moment is the just-released Indelicates album which comes as a "pay-what-you-like" download, CD, iTunes type formats, CD plus various levels of extras such as art books, and the super special edition where Julia and Simon Indelicate rock up at your house, perform the album, record the performance and sign over the rights to the master. (I'm thinking that'd make a great 30th birthday present - hint-hint...) Amanda Palmer is also experimenting with different ways of making money, including pay-what-you-like releases and webcasts where she auctions off her finance's daughter. Ditto Zoe Keating. Kickstarter looks like a great way of funding art too.

Joanne Rowling, too, has risen in my esteem thanks to her opinion piece in The Times:

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

All of which, given the current moral acceptability of tax avoidance, seems most commendable.