critical facultycrit-i-cal fac-ul-ty
A good working definition would be: The ability to mentally evaluate information, statements, or propositions, to determine if they are accurate, true, or likely.
dojodo-jo
A school for training in Japanese arts of self-defense, such as judo and karate.
On The Critical Faculty:“It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances.” William Graham Sumner

Thursday, 27 March 2008

“ A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.”

Harry Browne

“ The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”

The Sarkozys are on a state visit to the UK. President Sarkozy really seems to be looking to improve/upgrade the relationship between the UK and France. He looked smart, hansom and businesslike, his wife Carla, a former model, looked beautiful, cool and sophisticated when meeting the Royals.

As mentioned she is a former model and there is in existence a tasteful enough nude photo of her, taken before she ever imagined she might ever became the ‘first lady’ of France, that is going to be auctioned at Christies.

There is nothing she need be embarrassed about, she was honestly making her independent way in the world and that was a part of it. It owes something in style to the French artist Georges Seurat. If it were in oils no one could argue that it wasn’t tasteful art.

But the good old UK tabloids seldom fail to make us look like lowlifes. The visit proved and opportunity too tempting for them miss. They published the picture together with a leering two faced “Welcome to Great Britain, Madame Sarkozy”.

If it was not intended to be a calculated insult it could easily be taken as such. It could certainly be represented as such by anyone so inclined. Especially if they considered the politics of the tabloid and the government.

If a paper wished to publish the picture, maybe it would perhaps have been better to have done so before the visit, or wait until it was done. Or better still just printed an article to accompany it rather than trying to be ‘clever’.

The independent Asylum Commission haspublished a report critical of the way asylum seekers are treated in the UK.

The system does seem to be far from satisfactory. It takes far too long to make decisions and implement them, keeping people in limbo. It does not appear to consistently implement those decisions when they are made. The decisions do not always seem to make sense to a ‘layman’. It is actually illegal to employ ‘illegals’ and the punishments for doing so appear to be becoming increasingly draconian, so they cannon provide for themselves.

It must be said that many of the cases of asylum seekers that one hears about look far more like economic migration than actual genuine asylum seeking.

This impression is bolstered by the undeniable fact that the UK has many more‘asylum seekers’ than any other state in the EU. The natural question that arises is: If all these people are genuine asylum seekers, then given that many have to travel through large areas of Europe to get here, why do they not claim asylum at the first opportunity, as they are supposed to?

One can’t help but wonder if the welfare state is part of the attraction - and part of the problem. It is the nature of the system that actually makes it a problem. The chance of enjoying the ‘benefits’ of they system is an undeniable magnet. The drain on the system caused by large numbers of people who have never contributed to it is a problem, a serious one in certain areas.

If there were no welfare state, or broadly it could not apply to those who had not significantly contributed to it, this would remove the ‘drain’ and much of the problem. It might also make the UK less likely to be a preferred destination. In addition those who came in reality as economic migrants could be honest about it either working and contributing to society, or go elsewhere, possibly back home.

Surely those willing to work hard to honestly obtain a better life and who want to become British and adopt our values might be considered to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

It seems it is only under a social welfare system like ours, designed as if it operates in isolation, that this would be a problem at all, before the advent of the welfare state it would not have been. One wonders if this might be a main driver behind New Labour’s desperate desire for a compulsory national identity card system, that and their apparently compulsive desire to regulate the population, in as many aspects of their lives as possible.

Before the advent of the welfare state incomers who did not contribute to, or preyed on society, would have found it uncomfortable, even impossible to stay and left, or fallen foul of the law and been forced to leave. The Honest and hardworking would have settled and become British. In any even there would have been no ‘drain’.