Selected posts for Wednesday - no comments

Just a few excellent posts I picked out on Wednesday:

Fat Man on a Keyboard on attempts to resuscitate the radical Liberal Left:

[...] 19th Century anti-statist radical liberalism was against corporate capitalism; it was in favour of direct workers’ ownership and working class autonomy. It opposed exploitation and social control through the state. It spoke up for the liberty of the individual and allied it to a political economy based on extensive property rights. It advocated autonomous individuals and communities in control of their own lives. Often it was concerned with ensuring working class access to the expertise of professionals, such as doctors and teachers, rather than giving the inexpert the right to spend public money overruling them.

Is it relevant today? Certainly, but no one appears to be advocating it. Instead they are conjuring up a fictitious view of the Liberal Party of 1906 and amalgamating it with the worst of contemporary right libertarianism, thereby neatly relegating the successes of post-war social democracy, with those awkward egalitarian sentiments and universal welfare state, to a footnote of failure. This is not radical liberalism, it is not giving individuals and communities control over their lives, it is an incoherent mess guaranteed to lose an election.

Stumbling and Mumbling offers some statistics to counter the argument that Britain faces the toughest economic times for 60 years. See also Don Paskini's contribution. At the very least you have to wonder how short people's memories are when it comes to the rate of increase, let alone the level of unemployment:

The consensus among independent forecasters (pdf) is that the claimant count will rise by around a quarter million - to 1.1 million - by Q4 2009. In the 1981 and 1991 recessions, it rose three times as fast. It rose twice as fast in 1975.

Finally, PooterGeek on Ponzi schemes and populist attempts to prop up the housing market - for the benefit of some, at the expense of others.