This leads us to the Friedman Question: if everything is reduced to markets and money, how can society survive when its values, obligations and collective purposes are all stripped away?
Well, if government fucked off then society would do more collectively. As, for example, food banks fill in that gap in the efficiency of the state. As the lifeboats save people at sea. And so on.
Sure, sure, let’s define society as what we do collectively, not individually. But there’s no reason at all that all of society needs tpo be mediated through the State.
This was exactly my experience living in Texas. The people do the things that Europeans expect the state to do on a voluntary, and charitable, basis. They demand the state keeps the fuck out of it, and it all works very well.
So I’d never have managed to become a government bureaucrat in Texas, BIP???
When I lived near Dallas a tornado came through a local town, probably Stephenville which was a magnet for weather troubles. The locals sent FEMA away and refused the government help. ‘People here help each other, we don’t need help from outside..’
“But there’s no reason at all that all of society needs tpo be mediated through the State.”
Except who’s going to employ all those useless arts and media students, the children of the progressives, if not the State?
One of the problems of the modern age is that we’ve created this idea of women working, and then absolutely stuffed up the state with useless women, instead of automating that shit and having women stay home and be wives.
How things used to be: men earned money. gov took a bit in tax. Gave the rest to wife. Wife did housework and cooking.
How things are: men earn money. gov take a load in tax. Government gives a lot of that money to wife who is doing a pointless government job. Wife takes money and pays for car, cleaner, childcare and lots of takeaways.
Now, not all women, I should add. There’s a certain section of skilled, productive women. But a huge chunk aren’t. We’ve expanded the state, created wanky jobs, that are filled with women, doing nothing to improve society. So no-one is better off. If we didn’t do this, women would actually have far more leisure time. Husband goes to work, do some cooking and cleaning, and a whole load of time for gossip, or to do some painting.
Wives do ‘wanky jobs’? Some do ‘sucky’ ones as well !
Isn’t the standard joke there that that’s “girlfriend” mode which becomes deactivated upon marriage?
I thought the only purpose of the RNLI at the moment was to act as a water taxi for Islamic invaders?
I think that the taxi service dealt with more people in 2025 than the RNLI in its whole history – but that it just a guess, because I’m too lazy to look up the figures.
A very strange question, it borders on satire, “how will we survive if people just take care of things without the gov’t being involved?”
Everything the state touches it screws up. So we need a lot less state interference in our lives. I blame technology and women. The technology that allows us all to be controlled and monitored and women for all the touchy feely stuff that our politicians use to make laws that oppress us.
Women used to do all that “touchy feely stuff”. And better than government. Women used to cook and clean, pick up the kids from school, sure, but they also had some time for various sorts of civil behaviour. Like maybe they helped with feeding the poor, or helped out old ladies, or ran the Brownies.
Once you declare that all women shalt work in paid careers, you lost that. You then replace what was a nice concerned lady popping into see an old neighbour with a government bureaucracy that is supposed to do it, which that working woman and the rest of us have to pay for.
This isn’t a nostalgic perspective. It’s that most mothers are now doing work that is less efficient than what they used to do. The government work isn’t very productive, but then you take off childcare, 2nd car, etc not a lot left. But we also lose the value of the “little platoon” stuff. Women running the Brownies or feeding more people at the Sikh temple. Stuff you can’t do if you have a full-time phony baloney job. So you then need a government feeding service, that requires an army of bureaucrats and run it shittily compared to a load of gossipy Sikh women who rather like doing it for a few hours a week.
From the state’s perspective, and as you’ve pointed out, the numbers work. Ie, increased tax take (less spend) being net positive. Not giving a shit about the wider effects, as their strategy for migration currently proves.
Gamecock blames Wickard v. Filburn
Well, if government fucked off then society would do more collectively.
This only works in a homogenous, first-world country. Importing millions of hostile third-world people destroys lives, destroys institutions, destroys social capital, destroys communities and the ‘social cohesion’ that the left are always banging on about.
If the government fucked off out of the way, third world moochers would find the environment in Britain rather less attractive. No benefits, no preferential legal treatment and communities who would organise to protect themselves.
Yes the homogeneity allows for fellow feeling.
But the socialists don’t want fellow feeling. They want atomized individuals, naked against the power of the state. How else will they control them?
So they propagandize against the people, attempting to divide them.
Additionally they import strangers, who don’t have fellow feeling. Those strangers largely have habits repellant to the natives. The state produces media glorifying the immigrants’ habits and denigrating the natives’. More division, and the immigrants feel less pressured to adopt native habits as a result.
This is the plan, not an unintended consequence.
And the forces of law, order and justice are repurposed to generate disorder which justifies more robust ‘policing’.
Nothing (except a trading algorithm) is ever reduced just to markets and money.
I’m trying to think of how often my father interacted with The State. He paid lots of tax. He was sent to kill Germans. He’d go in front of the beak occasionally to be a character witness if an employee did something damn silly.
On the other hand, he didn’t use the NHS (though my mother and us nippers did), he never drew any sort of dole, and he didn’t live long enough to draw his state retirement pension.
As he used to say, he was obliged to hand The State lots of money and about all he got back for it was the cost of our schooling. Yipp-bloody-ee.
He was a public-minded sort of chap: Sea Scouts, Board of the Savings Bank, Secretary of the Harbour Trust, funded a prize at the Academy … but wouldn’t touch politics with the proverbial.
But there we are: the civilisation of which he was part is being thrown away in these islands and on much of the Continent too. The bastard State!
Friedman insisted that markets are the only reliable mechanism for coordinating human activity.
No he didn’t. He pointed out that free and voluntary exchange helps people get along better than the alternatives do.
Ritchie isn’t intelligent enough to criticique Milton F, but that’s never stopped him before.
Is there a Friedman Question? Not a far as I am aware. And, AIUI, Friedman was not a reductionist. Rather, free(er) markets encouraged individuals and groups to sustain their values, obligations and collective purposes…