Quotulatiousness

April 6, 2013

The old class system and the modern welfare state

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

A majority of Britons who are on state assistance now believe that the system is too generous and discourages recipients from seeking jobs:

In 2003, 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed that ‘unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work’; in 2011, 59 per cent agreed. So a majority of actual benefits recipients now think the welfare state is too generous and fosters worklessness. Surely those well-off welfare cheerleaders, when shown these figures, would accept that perhaps they don’t know what they’re talking about. But no, they have simply come up with a theory for why the poor are anti-welfare: because they’re stupid.

Even more resented than those who abuse the system are those who run it:

Working-class mothers hated the way that signing up for welfare meant having to throw one’s home and life open to inspection by snooty officials, community health workers and even family budget advisers.

They didn’t want ‘middle-class strangers’, as they called welfare providers, ‘questioning them about their children’. They felt such intrusions ‘broke a cultural taboo’.

And the use of welfare as a way of allowing society’s ‘betters’ to govern the lives of the poor continues now. Indeed, today’s welfare state is even more annoyingly nannyish than it was 80 years ago.

As the writer Ferdinand Mount says, the post-war welfare state is like a form of ‘domestic imperialism’, through which the state treats the poor as ‘natives’ who must be fed and kept on the moral straight-and-narrow by their superiors.

Mount describes modern welfarism as ‘benign managerialism’, which ‘pacifies’ the lower orders.

Working-class communities feel this patronising welfarist control very acutely. They recognise that signing up for a lifetime of state charity means sacrificing your pride and your independence; it means being unproductive and also unfree.

The madness of Kim Jong Un

Filed under: Asia, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

In his weekly “Goldberg File” email, Jonah Goldberg explains why he is much more concerned about North Korean provocations and expostulations:

The problem — I fear — is that Kim Jong Un has himself been duped. I could very well be wrong, but my concern is that unlike his father and grandfather, he’s come to believe the propaganda. Like Hitler in the bunker ordering that non-existent armies be moved into position, I fear he doesn’t realize that his country is, militarily speaking, like a giant bee. It can deliver a horrible sting, but once it does, it will die.

I also think he’s more than a few fries shy of a Happy Meal. People used to say he spent time in the West and so he can’t be all bad or too crazy. I love this kind of horsehockey. You know who else spent time in the West? Lenin, Marx, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Sayyid Qutb, and Michael Jackson just to name a few. Now Michael Jackson may not have been a mass-murderer or advocate of murder, but he was Coo-Coo for Cocoa-puffs. Why? Because from childhood on he lived in a bubble. My guess is that Kim Jong Un’s bubble has always been a good deal thicker than Michael Jackson’s — at least Jackson went on tour. I fear the only difference between King Joffrey in Game of Thrones and Kim Jong Un, is that Joffrey is better looking, albeit with more ridiculous clothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Un has told his aides that if Obama attacks, “I’ll give him a red smile.”

I’m only partly kidding, but it wouldn’t surprise me all that much if a contributing factor to Un’s belligerence was the recent release of the Red Dawn remake on DVD. If you’re a crazy dude who spends his days in pajamas drinking Long Island ice teas in your bunker as Romanian prostitutes let you win at Call of Duty and Dennis Rodman texts you compliments, that movie might just be all the proof you need that the Americans understand what a threat North Korea is. The message of the film, in Nork-Crazy-Talk at least, is that Americans should keep fighting even after the North Koreans crush our military.

Never Again, Again and Again.

Even if we end up appeasing North Korea yet again, and we kick the can down the road yet again, something needs to be said that isn’t said — or at least appreciated — enough. North Korea is really, really, really, evil. And one day, after the regime is finally gone, historians will look back on the Hieronymus Bosch hell that North Korea has been for decades and condemn us all for letting it endure as long as we did. Forced abortions, mass starvation of whole generations of children, torture, oppression and institutionalized cruelty of every imaginable kind is what distinguishes Juche as an ideology.

I am not arguing for invading North Korea — not because it would be wrong to do so but because the price of doing so is just too high. If we could overthrow the regime with a snap of the finger, I would spend my days snapping my fingers until King Jong Un and his whole pajama-clad clan were hanging from their feet in the streets of Pyongyang. But costs and benefits must be considered in foreign policy, and the costs of deposing the band of murderers is just too high. That said, the costs of not doing anything are high too. But since we don’t feel them, we don’t pay them. Doing nothing probably means consigning at least another generation of children to grow up physically stunted and deformed from hunger and mentally stunted and deformed by institutionalized barbarism. That is, if they are granted the privilege of growing up at all.

An unusual hero for a modern TV show

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Virginia Postrel briefly reviews a British show that just made its way across to North America:

When the British drama Mr. Selfridge debuted on PBS this week, American viewers saw two things rarely on display in contemporary popular culture: a businessman hero and, more remarkably, a version of commercial history that includes not just manufacturing but shopping.

The show, which is also streamed on PBS.org, stars Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born founder of the London department store. In the first episode, he arrives in 1909, determined to shake up U.K. retailing with the techniques that made him a success as a partner at Chicago’s Marshall Field’s: showmanship, tons of advertising, and displays that let customers easily handle the merchandise. In the second, he puts perfumes and powder on display right by the store’s front door and introduces an affordable house fragrance concocted with new chemical processes.

Ambitions that an American drama might treat as self- centered greed become, in a British context, a bold strike against class privilege. “You show great potential,” Selfridge tells the talented shop girl Agnes Towler (played by Aisling Loftus), the show’s working-class heroine. “You remind me of myself when I started out — grasping for every chance, keen as mustard to learn. You love it, don’t you? The customers, the selling, the feeling of the merchandise under your hands …”

[. . .]

Yet like railroads and telegraphs, the department stores of the late 19th and early 20th century were socially and economically transformative institutions. They pioneered innovations ranging from inventory control and installment credit to ventilation systems, electric lighting and steel construction, along with new merchandising and advertising techniques. They brought together goods from all over the world and lit up city streets with their window displays. They significantly changed the role of women, giving them new career opportunities and respectable places to meet in public. They popularized bicycles, cosmetics, ready-to-wear clothing and electrical appliances. They even invented the ladies’ room.

Emile Simpson hailed as “one of the greatest military historians of his generation”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Howard is so impressed with Simpson’s book that he goes out on a limb to recommend it:

Some four decades ago, the TLS sent me a book to review by a young lecturer at Sandhurst entitled The Face of Battle. It impressed me so much that I described it as “one of the best half-dozen books on warfare to have appeared since the Second World War”. I wondered at the time if I had made a total fool of myself, but I need not have worried. The author, the late Sir John Keegan, proved to be one of the greatest military historians of his generation. It would be rash to put my money on such a dark horse again, but I shall. Emile Simpson’s War From the Ground Up is a work of such importance that it should be compulsory reading at every level in the military; from the most recently enlisted cadet to the Chief of the Defence Staff and, even more important, the members of the National Security Council who guide him.

Emile Simpson does not presume to show us how to conduct war, but he tells us how to think about it. He saw service in Afghanistan as a young officer in the Gurkhas, and his thinking is solidly rooted in that experience. Like Clausewitz 200 years earlier, Simpson found himself caught up in a campaign for whose conduct nothing in his training had prepared him; and like Clausewitz he realized that to understand why this was so he had to analyse the whole nature of war, from the top down as well as from the ground up. Afghanistan, he concluded, was only an extreme example of the transformation that war has undergone during his lifetime; and that itself is due to the transformation of the societies that fight it.

[. . .]

It is impossible to summarize Emile Simpson’s ideas without distorting them. His own style is so muscular and aphoristic that he can concentrate complex arguments into memorable sentences that will have a life of their own. His familiarity with the work of Aristotle and the history of the English Reformation enables him to explain the requirements of a strategic narrative as effectively as his experiences in Afghanistan illuminate his understanding of the relationship between operational requirements and political objectives. In short (and here I shall really go overboard) War From the Ground Up deserves to be seen as a coda to Clausewitz’s On War. But it has the advantage of being considerably shorter.

Powered by WordPress