Oddbean

I'm English but live in the US. My family are in England & I often think I should move back at some point but apart from family & friends (which obvs are very important) there's little reason to live there. It does seem like a depressed run down place. I was a Remainer but came around to supporting Brexit after the fact. I think in the long run it will be positive that we left the EU. It won't be for a while yet though & I see myself staying in the US for now.

Nice blog. You’re right, the system is broken and the ones who want to ‘fix it’ just want to take away freedoms that are not in their favour. Not sure how to fix it, but I know it’s partly about keeping the power balance tilted in favour of the individual, especially for all of those digital services. Thanks!

Yep, I am working on some ideas on how to fix it but it certainly isn't easy. I keep coming back to Libertarian ideas and balancing the budget. These are non popular ideas though as it means removing public services, but the only other option is continuing with the mess we are in.

Good to see you writing! I guess we may have bit of the same problem, the post lengths getting out of hand 😄 While you correctly recognize the problem as "politics", I think the real problem is just caused by the current form of democracy: People who don't have a stake in things can vote on how the resources get used! Ultimately that's what's causing these problems. You focus on UK politics, but of course these issues are not UK specific. These exact same problems can be seen all around the Western world (and beyond, but mostly in "the west").

Excellent, well-reasoned article. I read it and couldn’t help but draw parallels with the feckless political class here in NZ. The problem persists in most modern liberal democracies, it seems - team red vs team blue mentality, voter apathy combined with (often blind) trust in our leaders / institutions etc. It needed to be said, so thanks for using your platform to address the many elephants in the room. Hope to see you in Sydney.

Libertarian? You might need to nail that term down a bit. NZ in the 80s was a leader in the nuclear nonproliferation movt, leading to being bombed by the French and frozen out of ANZUS. The people-lead nature of this lends itself to an anarchist, or even Social Democratic label. https://pmcarchive.aut.ac.nz/articles/flashback-nzs-nuclear-free-law-1987-challenging-goliath-4359.html

Remember to connect with me through SimpleX Chat using the following link: https://simplex.chat/contact#/?v=2-7&smp=smp%3A%2F%2FZKe4uxF4Z_aLJJOEsC-Y6hSkXgQS5-oc442JQGkyP8M%3D%40smp17.simplex.im%2FGURI7tP4afExB-87ZpAQViqh3dnT87ia%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-3%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAT8NmXPElFRftWJE-Y9p4joK98e-kk6dV0tJNN0frDjM%253D%26srv%3Dogtwfxyi3h2h5weftjjpjmxclhb5ugufa5rcyrmg7j4xlch7qsr5nuqd.onion

Sorry didn’t mean to hijack this thread to be a conversation about NZ. But there were a bunch of liberal economic reforms that took place in the mid-eighties, the so called “Rogernomics” after the then Labour Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas. Devaluation of the NZ$, deregulation of state-owned enterprises, tax cuts, removals of tariffs and subsidies, etc. It worked really well for a while, but much of the populace want to keep their snouts in the trough and for the rich to pay for it all. The last (Labour) government bumped up the top income tax rate to 39% (GST, the sales tax equivalent, sits at 15%) and now the (liberal) media is full of articles about how we need wealth taxes and capital gains taxes. They see it as a revenue problem, not a spending problem. When I asked Adrian Orr (current Governor of the Reserve Bank) if they had plans to hold bitcoin as a treasury asset, his answer was a derisive “no”. Disappointing.

I run 2 small businesses in the UK. So much of my time and labour go toward funding government through the taxes I pay. I can’t help feeling those career civil servants and politicians have never had to make the money - they just spend it. Making something to sell or providing a service for money is hard, putting up taxes or printing money is easy. We have a government apparatus that knows it can rely on using the ultimate threat of violence to enforce ever increasing tax collection from a working populous that is too scared, miss-informed and too obsessed with their own personal travails to find a better way. I do feel things will need to get a whole lot worse before the public wake up to it. I wish I could see a path to a better future, but the country feels a little like a ship lost in the doldrums and the captain has been at the ship’s bottle! Pete - it would be so good if you could interview some ex senior civil servants from Bank of England or HM treasury. I don’t know if they would answer candid questions or not, but I’d love to hear from inside the belly of the beast and hear what they have to say about how the system operates and how it needs to change. Do they even see the problems the same way you do?

Your email announcing the release got identified as spam on Gmail, then once is clicked "report as not spam" and tried to click the link I got a "suspicious link" warning as well! Need to look at your DKIM / SPF in your DNS settings for your new domain. 😊 I thought you were being impersonated.... Especially with all the sausage images..... My mind went to a Matt and Tray Parker McCormack takeover! 😂 I will now read the article safe in the knowledge that the link I'll click won't steal all the BTC I don't have in my mobile wallet 😋 https://image.nostr.build/e1b99534b56bc64e2919f602a3fea1967b8e60b8db9605b60b5287776baae6ba.jpg

tl;dr for my pleebs "Britain is still viewed as a desirable place to live, even if we worry about its decline. Restoring that greatness is what we should focus on." "We’ve been pitted against each other as a distraction. But at the core, we all want the same things: less crime, lower taxes, and functioning public services. These are achievable goals, but only if we stop letting politicians divide us." "The path forward must be one based on liberty and freedom. Every political decision should be evaluated by a simple question: 'Does this make people more free or less free?'"

Yes. As a Brit, I tend to agree. The governing intricacies are complex but it must start with asking why there is crime, why there is high tax, why are our public services so screwed stretched. Over time why has this come to be? Simple answer is the average salary no longer covers the average existence. Why? Inflation and greed. How can a job in 1999 still command the same salary as the same job in 2024? Why has that come about?