Brendan O’Neill writes:
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.
Read the whole column. O’Neill writes with the sharpness of a latter-day Mencken.
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The LRC blog also has some great posts on time preferences and incentives in the London welfare state:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/92789.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/92833.html
Justin Raimondo noticed how many of the disadvantaged folk have Blackberries: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/08/09/barbarians-with-blackberrys/
Holy! Leftists not siding with the “downtrodden” who just want their chance to have their iPhone? Hell yeah!
Brendan O’Neill has been peddling his own brand of Libertarian Marxism for many years now. He’s an interesting read, but quite kooky at times.
That sounded like he was writing about Philadelphia.
You’d think all of the Keynesians in Britain would be cheering the tremendous economic opportunity of all those broken windows!
Heard one MP say yesterday – something like, ‘strength and unity through rebuilding’!
The Libertarian argument against this line of reasoning is simple. Although breaking windows forces people to spend money demanding repair services, the money they spent is no longer there to be spent or invested on other things.
Breaking windows just destroys capital and does not increase the total amount of real wealth.
The UK is just upset that someone else is competing with the government in smashing windows and taking property to distribute to the poor.
Breaking news: Libya and Syria recognise UK rioters as the official government of the UK.
In case you haven’t heard that one yet.
More seriously: Phone hacking scandal. Proposed budget cuts for the Metropolitan Police. Bobbies work-to-rule. Hmm…
You hangover-theorists must admit however, this is a tremendously good thing for British glaziers. Therefore it will lift the entire economy.
Signed,
Krugman
Provided there is still a building or a house to replace windows. Some buildings have been completely destroyed or burned to a cinder, I don’t think that glaziers will benefit off those.
And bricklayers.
Love,
PK
Theodore Dalrymple’s writing on the subject is also perceptive and reminiscent of Mencken: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/british-rioters-the-spawn-of-a-bankrupt-ruling-elite/story-e6frg6zo-1226112640970
channeling mencken:
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/the-rioting-act/
Brendan O’Neill is oversimplifying. In this case, racism, class distinctions and economic barriers to entry play huge roles. It is appropriate to assign some blame to state-intervention although it is a maze of history to sift through to be sure. However, I prefer his attacking the state to the blatant moralizing O’Neill engages in; that somehow these human beings are less than he is. Elitism at its finest. Exacerbation, not solutions, typically come from such an elitist perspective.
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