It was in about 1938 that Harold Walsby began to explain to the (anarcho-) Socialist Party of Great Britain the reasons for their eighty years of unbroken failure; there have been periods since then when they were left more or less alone, but pressure has never been completely removed from them, and sometimes a little… read more »
Although the party does not credit us with this (or with anything else, for that matter) we do not hold that their activities are wholly harmful or even pointless, only that their function is not what they believe it to be. So far as their efforts produce any result at all, it is not the… read more »
In order to see what is wrong with what the “Socialist” Party likes to call the case for socialism, all one has to do is to take it seriously. We recently attended a meeting of one branch of the party at which it was proposed that a collection be taken and the proceeds given to… read more »
For years the (Anarcho-) Socialist Party have been telling us the way to end starvation is to abolish capitalism. Now their own journal shows how wrong they have been. An article entitled “How Many Die of Famine?” by “ALB,” in the March 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard, speaks of claims that 50 million or… read more »
There is a proposal that the barristers should be deprived of their monopoly of appearing before the higher courts. Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, has been quoted as opposing this. He is reported to have said that as a barrister and the father of barristers he would not agree to anything that might harm the… read more »
One proposed cure for our economic difficulties is that all restrictions on competition be removed. Here is one example of the way this tends to work out in practice. In 1981 Hereford was chosen as the site of an experiment in removing all official controls from competition between bus services. For a time competition flourished,… read more »
Reforms have an unfortunate tendency to produce unintended consequences; Katharine Whitehorn recently noted some more instances of this: Clear away slums and you destroy family relationships; give children school meals and mothers stop thinking it their job to feed them; introduce the potato to Ireland and produce the famines of the 1840s, and Irish Americans… read more »
Language is one of the marks of humanity. There is no known human society without it, and although languages are constantly changing linguistic studies do not show them to have evolved in the same sense as societies may be said to have done. Societies of simple economic or political structure do not have correspondingly simple… read more »
We are increasingly coming to suspect that when reading adverts for goods of which you have experience, it is well to bear in mind a strong probability that what is promised is precisely what you won’t get. This is how it seems to work: The features you particularly want are those you’ve not been getting…. read more »
In IC15 (December 1984) there appeared an article under the above title suggesting that the orthodox view, that people generally need work if they are to lead satisfactory lives, was mistaken. The article put forward reasons for believing that there is a large group (it may even be a majority) that would be happier without… read more »