The Political Thread

[Modern Panther]

It is only a small step from "the people" holding more rights than one person to holding more rights than two people, or a hundred, or a minority.

The key point is reasonable.  When the government uses overwhelming force or unfair methods, they no longer deserve our support.  The great thing about representative democracy is that the arbiters of what is "reasonable" is us. 

A willingness to sacrifice the whole crew to save his mate might have felt noble to Kirk, but I doubt the guy with the wife and three kids whose job it is clean the gunk out of the transporter filter felt the same way.

[The Legendary Shark]

Who decides what's reasonable? You say it's "us," but is that us as individuals or us as a whole? Again, if we all had the same rights there'd be no problem deciding what is and is not reasonable. Leaving the right to decide to a nebulous "us," or worse still to a handful of elected people, muddies the issue. If it is wrong for me to push you around and take your stuff and force you to live how I think you should live, then it's wrong for two people to do that to you, or a hundred, or a minority of leaders.

The government uses overwhelming force and unfair methods as a matter of course, for example by sending in riot police to break up peaceful demonstrations or by passing legislation and disguising it as law. Or by issuing dodgy dossiers. Or by telling lies and avoiding questions.

To me, the arbiter of what is reasonable for you is you - not me and my friends or the people I vote for. So long as you live within the simple and straightforward strictures of the Common Law, what right have I to stop you?

The point about Kirk taking his crew to rescue Spock is that they all volunteered, none of them were ordered to go or forced to comply. They willingly followed his lead and, if the guy with the wife and three kids whose job it is clean the gunk out of the transporter didn't want to go, he didn't have to.

[Modern Panther]

"Common Law" is a mixture of decisions of court which further define legislation, or matters which have never been legislated for, or there is limited legislation for, because there's never been a need. 

The first requires the authority of a court, the second requires a shared responsibility - a collective "us". 

The collection of taxation and its use for the public good is one of the simple and straightforward strictures of common law.

[sheridan]

As James T. Kirk said, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." The many is simply a collection of individuals, each with the same rights and responsibilities. The many, therefore, have only the same rights and responsibilities as the one.

You must have seen a different edit of that film - the one I saw had "Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."

[Leigh S]

Hi there - I am a serial killer - my idea of reasonable is to kill you and wear your hands as antlers!

You have to have a set of agreed rules of reasnableness about anything - if you leave tax to "reasonableness", then people will reason to their own benefit - they do at the moment even within the constraints of a supposedly rigid system.  I know it would be nice to think a sea change in attitudes would happen and everyone would be competing to be the most generous - that is certainly a blue sky version of humanity.... Wasnt there a reality type programme on recently where people were "ship wrecked" and immediately broke into self serving tribalism?

[The Legendary Shark]

Panth - By Common Law, I mean the basic fundamentals of all law, which is basically very simple - cause loss, harm or damage to no-one, honour your lawful contracts, pay your lawful bills and be honest in your dealings. These are the foundations on which all case law is built.

Legisalative law is distinct from common law and subservient to it. For example, if a government passes legislation declaring that all blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies born in July must be euthenised that legislation would be instantly rendered null and void by the common law, which forbids causing harm to others. Technically, legislation enforcing taxes is also null and void because it violates the common law need for contracts and also endorses the forcible extraction of money, goods and property - which is theft.

Common law does not require imposition by a court as the overwhelming majority of people understand it. Courts become involved only after transgression in order to examine what law, if any, has been violated and how harmony between the parties in dispute can be achieved.

Legislative law is an evolution of maritime law or business law. Initially, a sailor would "sign up" for a voyage, waiving his common law rights and instead agreeing to place himself under the specific rules of the particular ship or shipping company he wished to work on or for. This practice expanded massively under the British Empire, propogated by such bodies as the East India Company and survives today in the form of contracts of employment. Governments have appropriated the idea for themselves, conflating legislative law with common law (the "law of the land"), thereby pretending that legislative law and common law carry the same weight, which they do not.

It is important to remember that most genocides have been perfectly legal as they were enacted through legislation of one type or another. However, that which is legal is not necessarily that which is lawful. The Nazi trials at Nuremberg definitively proved this with the succinct verdict that "I was just following orders" is no excuse.

Taxation law is not common law, it is legislative law.

Sheridan - it's a while since I watched the film but you are correct. Law is not always black and white. For example, in extreme cases (what is sometimes referred to as a "lifeboat situation") Spock's "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one" may be perfectly valid. But hard cases make bad law, and that which applies in a lifeboat does not necessarily apply in everyday life.

Leigh S - I think you're confusing personal rights and responsibility with chaos. Killing people is against the common law (but not against legislative law, as all the dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., sadly and mutely demonstrate). Respecting and honouring the rights and responsibilities of the individual does not imply that courts and police will cease to exist, nor that everyone will automatically devolve into savagery. Human beings have evolved as a social species, cooperation is hard-wired into us. For example, I don't need the government to tell me to drive on the left hand side of the road, I do it because that's the custom and because I don't want to kill myself or anyone else.

If there was a revolution tomorrow and the new Glorious Leader decided to impose anarchical policies such as voluntary taxation, then there would indeed be chaos and greed. This is because most people have been brought up with the idea that we all need somebody else to tell us what to do. The very first thing we learn in school is not that 1+1=2 or the alphabet, but that if we want anything we must first ask permission and that we must do as we are told. It's very hard to shake that off. What is needed, in my view, is a long period of public discussion on these issues so that people can see for themselves the potential benefits and pitfalls of living in a truly free society. Storming Parliament and hanging politicians from lampposts is definitely not the answer. Never has been, never will be.

I don't own a television and so did not see the program you refer to. However, I'd be willing to bet that the situation was engineered to be good entertainment, from the selection of contestants to the geography of the arena and the availability of resources. If the contestants had all just got along and cooperated, it would have been a very boring show.

[GordonR]

I don't think anyone - even Owen Smith himself - seriously expected him to win.  I think he was essentially a stalking horse, standing and taking  a bullet for the party (as he would see it) in order to see how much support there was out there for a Not Corbyn candidate.  And now he and the people behind him have their answer - 38%.

As I've said elsewhere, I suspect cold, hard eyes are looking at the numbers and figuring how much of the anti-Corbyn section of the party - most of the MPs and more than a third of the membership - might follow them the pastures new.

Peace is not about to break out in the Labour Party, now that the leadership contest is over.

[Modern Panther]

Spock's "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one" may be perfectly valid. But hard cases make bad law, and that which applies in a lifeboat does not necessarily apply in everyday life.

You just argued that "putting the individual before the many" is valid.  Now "putting the many before the individual" is a bad law because it's too extreme? 

Rather that worry about hypothetical of the government murdering babies (or Nazism, which is founded on the supremacy of the individual) lets talk only in realities. 

The reality is that if the government didn't compellingly people to pay taxes, hospital and schools would close.  Once the bodies had been cleared away private companies would take over .

If the government follows policies the people don't like, the people can remove them.  Private companies can only be removed by investing huge sums of money. 

In removing authority of government (which is answerable to the people) power is handed to the wealthy (who are answerable to their investors).

[IndigoPrime]

As I've said elsewhere, I suspect cold, hard eyes are looking at the numbers and figuring how much of the anti-Corbyn section of the party - most of the MPs and more than a third of the membership - might follow them the pastures new.

And yet under FPTP, any split would be electoral suicide for both bits of Labour. Which is kind of poetic justice in the sense Labour reneged on promises to the LDs when Blair got in and has ever since that point gone against any idea of electoral reform in the Commons (Corbyn and Smith included), although I note they're more than happy to suggest we should have PR elections for the second chamber.

[sheridan]

"The level and rate of UK unemployment measured by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) using a definition of unemployment specified by the International Labour Organisation. Unemployed people as those without a job who have been actively seeking work in the past 4 weeks and are available to start work in the next 2 weeks. It also includes those who are out of work but have found a job and are waiting to start it in the next 2 weeks."

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment

Interesting, so all those times I thought I was unemployed between jobs that my temp agency had passed my way, I wasn't (even if I only had one day's work followed by a few weeks not-work)...

[The Legendary Shark]

You just argued that "putting the individual before the many" is valid.  Now "putting the many before the individual" is a bad law because it's too extreme? 

Rather that worry about hypothetical of the government murdering babies (or Nazism, which is founded on the supremacy of the individual) lets talk only in realities. 

The reality is that if the government didn't compellingly people to pay taxes, hospital and schools would close.  Once the bodies had been cleared away private companies would take over .

If the government follows policies the people don't like, the people can remove them.  Private companies can only be removed by investing huge sums of money. 

In removing authority of government (which is answerable to the people) power is handed to the wealthy (who are answerable to their investors).

Putting the rights of the individual before the rights of the many is valid. I said that "hard cases make bad law." This means that general law should not be based on extreme situations, "lifeboat situations." For example, if there are ten people in a lifeboat and one of them has a deadly infectious disease, the nine might throw the one overboard to save the majority. Moral discussions of this decision aside, a sound legal argument of self-preservation could be put forward to defend this act. However, if a group of people in a village did the same thing, say casting an infected person off a cliff, the same defence could not be employed as there are other options - isolation, hospitalisation, etc. This is what is meant by "hard cases make bad law."

If you want to talk only in realities, I refer you again to the "dodgy dossier" - a pack of lies put forward as truth in order to justify a war of aggression*; a direct contravention of the common law requirement to be honest in one's dealings. (Nazism is based on the superiority of race, not the individual. If it was based on the superiority of the individual, it would include all individuals but it demonstrably did not.)

The reality of your claim that " if the government didn't compellingly (sic) people to pay taxes, hospital and schools would close," is conjecture (as is my claim that voluntary taxation would have the opposite effect). There are other ways to fund, or partially fund, such things. If you want to keep government involvement, how about the process of seigniorage? When the government, under the treasury, issues paper money, it costs between three to five pence to print each note, which it then sells to the banks at face value. That means that for every fiver the Treasury prints it gets around £4.95, for every tenner £9.95, for every twenty £19.95 and for every fifty £49.95. However, over 97% of the money in circulation today is digital, created by private banks at the grand cost of fuck all. Allow the Treasury to take back that 97% and charge seigniorage on it and that's a big chunk of money that could go into hospitals and schools. It probably wouldn't cover everything but it would be a significant start. The rest could be made up in other ways, one of which could be voluntary contributions.

Further, having private companies involved (not governmentally protected monopoly corporations) would reduce costs by introducing free market competition into the mix.

Once a government has been removed due to policies "we don't like," the policies generally stay in effect under the new government, such as the War in Iraq, Council Charges and Tuition Fees. Private companies can be removed by public sanctions - you don't like Coca-Cola, buy something else.

Government is only answerable to the people in theory, in practice it answers to the wealthy. Take away the authority of the government and you take away one of the biggest advantages the wealthy have. The wealthy then become answerable to, and dependent upon, the goodwill of their customers and natural market forces.

*Incidentally, this war was also a contravention of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which the United Kingdom signed August 27th 1928. This pact, which remains in force today, has over sixty signatories which  promised not to use war to resolve "disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them." This is another breach of the common law requirement to honour one's lawful contracts and further demonstration of the moral bankruptcy of governments and their legislations.

[Professor Bear]

I don't think anyone - even Owen Smith himself - seriously expected him to win.  I think he was essentially a stalking horse, standing and taking  a bullet for the party (as he would see it) in order to see how much support there was out there for a Not Corbyn candidate.  And now he and the people behind him have their answer - 38%.

A minimum of 200k Corbyn supporters (though the NEC's own numbers say 100k more than that is more likely) were prevented from voting and the true percentage of support for the Labour right is likely lower than 38%.
Smith also sniped the original candidate against Corbyn, Angela Eagle, and made it clear via homophobic comments that he was willing to go on the attack against rival candidates, while staunch Corbyn critics like John Mann openly attacked Smith for putting his name forward.  Smith wasn't a stalking horse candidate - he genuinely thought he could win, though admittedly this was likely because the initial plan was to exclude Corbyn from the ballot and make the actual contest a formality. 

[Modern Panther]

The wealthy then become answerable to, and dependent upon, the goodwill of their customers and natural market forces.

If this is a fair and equitable way for a society to function, can you explain to me why the companies which are the most profitable and popular are frequently the ones which are responsible for human rights abuses?  Why is it that Apple continue to run at a massive profit despite their mistreatment of factory workers?  Why are there Starbucks on every corner despite their unwillingness to pay towards the well-being of society?  Why are Wal-Mart the most profitable company in the world despite their willingness to mistreat employees?

[GordonR]

Smith wasn't a stalking horse candidate - he genuinely thought he could win, though admittedly this was likely because the initial plan was to exclude Corbyn from the ballot and make the actual contest a formality.

If that were truly the case, then a much stronger and more identifiable - i.e. someone people had actually heard of - candidate  than Smth would have come forward to take theur shot at it*.  As it is, Dan Jarvis, Chuka Umunna and (even, god help us) Tristram Hunt are all still there, watching and waiting.


* unless Smith was always supposed to be an interim leader, there to ride out the storm of Corbyn's removal until someone more capable and electable thought the omens were right for them.

[Professor Bear]

I think Eagle was supposed to be an interim leader, that the more recognizable names knew that being the one who deposed Corbyn after the party's shift to the left would do them more harm than it would favors.  They were more than likely waiting for the next leadership contest - in their minds, they had four years to line up their ducks.