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The latest issue of GuildMag has just been published. Go to read the ultimate guide to the Shiverpeaks (couldn’t we have featured somewhere warm this time, Ollannach? I feel like I’m already living in the Shiverpeaks!)
James Delingpole on the remarkable community of interest between charitable organizations (partly funded by governments) and the government agencies they lobby:
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical”. Thomas Jefferson, 1779.
One of the curses of modern life is the plethora of “charitable” lobbying groups demanding that the government take more regulatory action in areas where most of us believe the state has no business interfering.
Almost every day you read in the papers that some apparently grassroots movement, supposedly speaking for all of us, thinks more should be done to stop us drinking, smoking, eating sugar or salt, make us less sexist, force us to spend more on foreign aid or environmental issues. But if that wasn’t annoying enough, here’s the worst thing of all: we’re paying for these unrepresentative, mostly left-leaning lobby groups with our taxes.
This is the message of Chris Snowdon’s report for the Institute of Economic Affairs, The Sock Doctrine [PDF] — the third in his trilogy of broadsides against the lavishly state-funded “fake charities” industry. By 2007, he noted, a quarter of the UK’s 170,000 charities were receiving money from the state and approximately 27,000 received at least 75 per cent of their income from the state. If you share these charities’ predominantly liberal-Left-leaning aims you probably won’t mind so much. But if you don’t, you might be inclined to believe, as Fraser Nelson argued in these pages last year, that “Britain’s charities are nurturing a colourful, talented and efficient anti-Tory alliance.”
But, of course, there are opposing charitable organizations equally dependent on government funding and spending disproportional time and effort lobbying for their pet causes?
Well the problem is that they’re almost non-existent. The reason for this was identified in 1985 by US researchers James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
“Virtually without exception, the recipients of government grants and contracts advocate greater governmental control over and intervention in the private sector, greater limitations on rights of private property, more planning by government, income redistribution, and political rather than private decision making. Most of the tax dollars used for political advocacy are obtained by groups that are on the left of the political spectrum.”
Perhaps I misunderstand the economic argument here, but I’d always had a pretty basic notion about buying season tickets or individual game tickets for most professional sports. You either bought a season ticket package for x number of games (up to the full season of home games) or you bought a single ticket for a particular game. Over the years, I’ve bought tickets to individual Viking games in Buffalo and Detroit where the purchase was simple and straightforward … I paid the fee and received a ticket. Nice and simple. Apparently that sort of stone-age arrangement is long in the past: at least in Minnesota, you need to buy a “seat license” in order to then buy season tickets. The Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover explains:
In an effort to raise $100 million of their portion of money for the new stadium, the Vikings released their ‘stadium builder’s plan’ for folks that want season tickets.
What’s a stadium builder’s plan? Well, it’s a one time fee that allows to you get season tickets … and you’ll also have to pay for those. Basically, the better the seat, the more cabbage you’re going to have to cough up. For example, if you want a season ticket in the ‘Valhalla Club’, your one time seat license fee will be $9,500, plus the cost of season tickets.
Damn, son.
The Vikings will have SBL’s for approximately 75% of the seats in the stadium, and the farther away you get from the field, the cheaper they are. The cheapest SBL is $500, and you have two payment options, 3 years with no interest, or 8 years with an as yet TBD interest charge.
On the one hand, I approve of the idea that the fans should pay more of the cost of building a new stadium rather than non-football fans among the state’s taxpayers. On the other hand, the prices seem incredibly steep for a mere “license”. You can get a virtual look at what you’ll be licensing a tiny bit of:
However, in an effort to relieve the sticker shock of said licenses, they released a virtual tour of what the new stadium will look like. And it’s pretty damn cool.
So, grab your checkbook. And your ankles.
The problem of the Ministry of Defence is that in peace time the three armed forces have no one on whom to vent their warlike instincts except the cabinet or each other.
Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com
Jonah Goldberg on the “ideal” lifestyle of students at elite universities:
There’s a certain kind of elite student who takes himself very, very seriously. Raised on a suite of educational TV shows and books that insist he is the most special person in the world — studies confirm that Generation Y is the most egocentric and self-regarding generation in our history — he is away from home for the first time, enjoying his first experience of freedom from his parents. Those same parents are paying for his education, which he considers his birthright. Shelter is provided for him. Janitors and maids clean up after him. Security guards protect him. Cooks shop for him and prepare his food. The health center provides him medical care and condoms aplenty. Administrators slave away at finding new ways for him to have fun in his free time. He drinks with abandon when he wants to, and the consequences of his bacchanalia are usually somewhere between mild and nonexistent. Sex is as abundant as it is varied. If he does not espouse any noticeably conservative or Christian attitudes, his every utterance in the classroom is celebrated as a “valuable perspective.” All that is demanded of him is that he pursue his interests and, perhaps, “find himself” along the way. His ethical training amounts to a prohibition on bruising the overripe self-esteem of another person, particularly a person in good standing with the Coalition of the Oppressed (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, et al.). Such offenses are dubbed hate crimes and are punished in a style perfected in Lenin’s utopia: through the politicized psychiatry known as “sensitivity training.”
But even as this sensitivity is being cultivated, the student is stuffed to the gills with cant about the corruption of “the system,” i.e., the real world just outside the gates of his educational Shangri-La. He is taught that it is brave to be “subversive” and cowardly to be “conformist.” Administrators encourage kitschy reenactments of 1960s radicalism by celebrating protest as part of a well-rounded education — so long as the students are protesting approved targets, those being the iniquities of “the system.” There is much Orwellian muchness to it all, since these play-acting protests and purportedly rebellious denunciations of the status quo are in fact the height of conformity.
But it is a comfortable conformity, and this student — who in all likelihood will go into a profession at the pinnacle of the commanding heights of our culture — looks at this Potemkin world and thinks it is the way things are supposed to be. He feels freer than he ever has or ever will again, but that freedom is illusory. He is, in fact, a dependent: All his fundamental needs are met and paid for by others. This is what the political theorists call positive liberty — when someone else gives you a whole pile of stuff so you can be “free” to do whatever you want.
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