~ It's time to pick the winning essay. Please vote!~
Here are the four essays we have to choose from...
Funny Money - by Mike Marshall
Money is a means of exchange or at least that is the theoretical justification for its existence according to economists. The rationale behind it is that money changes hands in return for a product or a service. For the majority of human history that was broadly true but as states became larger and their demands increased it ceased to be the case..
Christianity disapproved strongly of 'usury' - lending money at interest. For the first thousand years of its existence only Jews were permitted to lend money at interest which was one of the principal reasons for mediaeval anti-Semitism.
Alongside the 'money' economy there also existed a 'shadow' economic system where barter, exchange of services for goods and similarly non-monetary transactions co-existed with the money economy.
With the rise of banks and the Stock Exchange a wholly new approach to money began to dominate Europe. It is no coincidence that the British 'National Debt' was created at the same time as the foundation of the Bank of England. The result was that banks became rich by lending money at interest and nation states as well as individuals found themselves in debt to the banks.
If we briefly examine the mechanics of the financial system its utter irrationality becomes evident.
1 A customer deposits money with a bank.
2 The bank loans the customer's money - NOT its own money - to another customer
3 The bank charges interest on the loan
4 The bank does NOT pay the interest accrued on the loan to the customer whose money - without their consent or even knowledge - it has chosen to lend to the borrower.
5 Because the bank derives the bulk of its income from these nebulous transactions it depends on the deliberate creation and encouragement of a class of debtors
6 If every customer account within a bank was in surplus and no one borrowed from the institution or became overdrawn the bank would collapse
So much for the inherent absurdity of the banking system; let us now consider the equally ludicrous world of stocks and shares. They operate on the following basis:
1 An individual or, more commonly, group of individuals, form themselves into what is known as a 'limited company'
2 The company issues 'share certificates' that are purchased by other individuals or groups
3 In theory the possession of these certificates makes the shareholders part owners of the company
4 These shares are traded on stock exchanges and the 'value' of a company is determined by its current price on the stock market
5 Leaving aside the fact that deliberate manipulation of stock prices is an everyday reality, the entire system is NOT a rational method of managing money but simply a form of gambling, no different from betting on a roulette wheel in a casino or the turn of a card. Yet on the basis of this wholly irrational system companies rise and fall and thousands, even million of people, lose their jobs
Neither the banks nor the stock market create anything nor do they perform any kind of service. They are purely parasitic upon the activities of REAL people and are no different from loan sharks, Mafia enforcers and professional gamblers.
A real economy rests on the creation of a product or on the performance of some act of service. The financial economy creates nothing and performs no service beyond that of enriching professional criminals and pauperising the majority of the population.
Over the last four or five hundred years various attempts have been made or suggested to correct these obvious absurdities and injustices. They have taken two basic forms, an authoritarian response (generally along the lines of some form of socialist dogma) or a libertarian approach (sometimes along co-operative lines, sometimes along the lines of GENUINE free enterprise).
I'll briefly backtrack to consider what economists call Gresham's Law. This was first formulated in Elizabethan times by Thomas Gresham and states that 'bad money drives out good.' Gresham at least added the rider that 'if the king issues two moneys' but this qualification is rarely remembered by those who quote the law, perhaps precisely BECAUSE it is a crucial point.
Strangely enough the empirical evidence suggests that Gresham's Law is actually FALSE and that in reality the converse is true. During the Middle Ages a number of experiments with 'private' currencies were tried, further attempts being made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not until the 1930s were private currencies explicitly outlawed and the result was a huge growth in the banking sector and its overweening power.
Socialists have always been fixated on 'the ownership of the means of production' but history shows that control of currency and credit is where the REAL economic power lies. That is why even huge industrial corporations are at the mercy of the financial institutions.
Private money schemes have long been derided as 'funny money' but their detractors never explain how the worthless pieces of paper they champion are any less hilarious.
There are two ways to solve the problem. One is the authoritarian route of bank nationalisation and government control of currency and credit facilities.
The other is the libertarian approach, to make it possible for any individual or group to issue their own currency and provide their own credit facilities and to allow the people to decide whether or not to accept them.
As you will probably assume by now, I strongly favour the libertarian alternative.
So let's work towards the total collapse of the existing and utterly parasitic financial system and work towards its replacement by a libertarian option that enriches us all.
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Liberalism and Libertarianism - by Big Lin
I'd like to clarify my views on this subject because both of these ideas are often very much misunderstood. I'll begin by trying to show the similarities and then the differences between them as well as the various strands of both of these philosophies.
In the first place liberalism and libertarianism are related but not identical. Secondly there are subdivisions within each school and the nuances often get overlooked.
Where to begin? Well, let’s try and explain the similarities and differences. All liberals are libertarians but not all libertarians are liberals. In the same way all communists are socialists but not all socialists are communists, all Anglicans (Episcopalians) are Christians but not all Christians are Anglicans, all Mexicans speak Spanish but not all Spanish speakers are Mexican.
Let’s start by looking at the points of agreement and then at the areas of difference. The most fundamental values of liberalism are freedom, tolerance, fairness and compassion. Libertarians will agree with the primacy of freedom but give far less weight to tolerance and tend to regard fairness with suspicion or even hostility. Compassion is also a virtue they frequently take little account of.
I’ll briefly digress to talk about the various ‘schools’ of liberalism and libertarianism. The most radical, consistent and thorough-going form of libertarianism is of course anarchism. Even anarchistgs have different ‘schools’ from the ultra –individualist Stirnerite anarchists, the utilitarian anarchist school of Mackay, the communitarian-based anarchism of Kropotkin and Makhno, the socialist anarchism of Malatesta and Durutti, through to the anarcho-Marxism particularly advocated by some German and Italina anarchists.
A whisker away from anarchism are the individualistic libertarians whose political ancestors are Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand. Both are virtually anarchists though they do allow a tiny role for the state in terms of national defence against external aggression, some role in maintaining law and order within the country and concluding foreign treaties.
Closely related to individualist libertarianism is what is known as minarchist liberalism. This allows the state only slightly more of an interventionist role and assigns to it an additional function of acting as referee in disputes between citizens. Other than that its position is identical with individualistic libertarianism. Both minarchist liberals and individualist libertarians essentially regard the state as an enemy and something that should play as little part as possible in people’s lives.
Then there are classical liberals. They take a more positive view of the place of the state and essentially look on its principal role as being to DEFEND and EXTEND freedom as widely as possible. They also believe that the ‘refereeing’ role of the state often requires it to intervene directly to correct or prevent abuses of liberty by citizens.
My experience and an extensive study of history show that both minarchist liberals and individualistic libertarians tend to be resistant to change and extremely hostile towards state intervention in either economic or moral issues. That is much less true of classical liberals although they are always extremely reluctant to extend the power of the state without good reason.
Individualistic libertarians tend to consider themselves conservatives and often describe themselves as such. The same is also true of many monarchist liberals. Classical liberals tend simply to describe themselves as liberals and to be centrist in their general approach to things.
Left-wing libertarians are a rather different kettle of fish. In their ideology the community effectively plays the role of the state and uses varying degrees of coercion ranging from social disapproval to legislation in order to compel conformity. Although they DO place enormous emphasis on freedom it tends to be what John Arden called ‘left-handed liberty.’
Another strain of liberalism is radicalism. This tries to use the power of the state in a proactive way, seeking not simply to correct and prevent abuses but actively encouraging certain types of behaviour and discouraging others. The fruits of this strain are things like equal pay legislation, hate crime law and affirmative action programmes.
Then there are the social liberals who have imbibed a lot of socialist propaganda and IMO tend to overemphasise fairness in such a way that they correct one fault by creating an injustice in the opposite direction. Groups like the ACLU, NOW, the A4A and so on are trying to impose – in what I believe is a misguided attempt to correct genuine problems – an equally unfair and unbalanced tilt to the other extreme.
I find the religious right in America appalling and a total travesty of Our Lord’s teaching. In the same way I look on the social liberals as people who have utterly betrayed the most fundamental principle of liberalism, its overriding love of freedom. Just as the rantings of Glen Beck disgust me, so too does the venom of Michael Moore.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m a classical liberal. To me it remains the best and fairest political philosophy ever developed.
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The Benefits of Multiculturalism - by Donna
OK, I suppose I'd better start off by saying I've got foreign blood in me so some people could try and make out I'm biased but I don't think so.
You only have to look at history to see how much contact with other cultures has brought to most countries. The Greeks and Persians benefited from their contacts; the Roman Empire became more and more influenced by its subject peoples; the British Empire brought its culture to lots of places and was also influenced by the culture of the countries within the Empire.
Look at the English language - a mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Latin, Greek, Norman French and a few more exotic languages. There's a surprisingly large number of Hebrew, Yiddish, Romani, Urdu and even Aztec words in the English language. 'Chocolate' comes from an Aztec root.
Take food - isn't it great that in Britain we can eat French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Indian and Chinese food?
Isn't t great that music has always been an international language so we can listen to reggae, RAvi Shankar, Julio Iglesias, cajun music or whatever?
Van Gogh's painting was decisively influenced by Japanese art.
Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach and got him recognised as one of the greatest ever composers.
English poet was largely dragged into the twentieth century by two Americans, T S Eliot and Ezra Pound.
The Jews gave Britain one of its best leaders, Disraeli.
In science, art, literature, music and philosophy you can point to the likes of Holst, Epstein, Wittgenstein, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Einstein, Oppenheimer and a whole bunch of other people who have enriched and benefited the countries they or their parents made their home in.
So let's give three cheers for multiculturalism!
Let's hear it for the immigrants who've given us so much and have also learned from us!
Monocultures die; multicultures grow, develop and flourish.
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The Right Choice? - by Skylark
Some 40 years ago a two line advert in the personal columns of The Times caught my eye. It began “Decisions, decisions! Researchers would like to hear from people who have difficulty making up their minds…..”.
That seemed to be me to a ‘T”, so I cut it out, fully intending to phone - then began to have doubts. Was I really that indecisive? Surely there are others worse? I never did discover whether the researchers got any responses to the advert, but there is every chance they missed out on the greatest prevaricator of all time - me.
The thought of living in a world where jobs, friends, even holiday destinations are all determined is depressing, but there may be merit in the argument that too many choices cause stress.
Is anyone immune from the agonies of choice? Take a simple thing like clearing out one’s junk. Ruthless pruning produces a satisfying sackful of objects from the past, but a moment’s hesitation produces doubt. Might I want to read this again? Wasn’t this what Auntie Norma gave me for my 16th birthday? Will these old heated hair rollers ever come in handy? So the sack stays as clutter and you begin to wish some passing burglar would just pop in and lift it, thus saving you the bother.
The NHS is beginning to focus on choice. We can decide which hospital to travel to for our operations, which sounds like a jolly good thing so long as we have access the facts and figures – and often we don’t. Nowadays we are also asked to make choices between forms of treatment and that poses altogether more serious problems. We have to decide between the interventions that offers a potentially better cure but can cause nasty side effects, or the operation that raises the spectre of permanent disability – or live with the problem. A friend faced with similar choices told the surgeon in no uncertain terms that it was his job, not hers, to offer the best solution – she’s a retired army nursing officer and former matron, so not above putting a doctor in his place.
So this is where I am now. Hunny invites us to write an essay on a topic of our choice, and I sit here racked with indecision. Had we been given a title, I’d have been a happy bunny, knuckling down to “my hobby” , “favourite walks” or “is education failing our children?” I might even have risen to the challenge of “progress in nuclear physics”, for as they say: “Google is your friend”.
But no, we have to pluck something out of the air, and the last thing I caught from there was a bad cold.