Abandoning basic principles of economic liberalism will be a disaster for the NatCon movement, if it ever amounts to anything. The superiority of free trade and other liberal principles has been settled for a long time. Doesn’t mean one needs to embrace radical free markets, anarchism, or other such things. But embracing retrograde protectionist policies will just make us poorer. If national conservatism can’t integrate liberalism’s best ideas, then I think you can count on many smart people staying clear of the movement (and you’re likely to get a flood of economic ignoramuses).
Fifty years of putting an ever greater proportion of the middle (or future middle) class through the hyper-liberal, virtue-signalling sheep dip of Western academe has rendered politicians, political parties and their policy objectives largely irrelevant to what actually happens. The Long March through every single one of our civic institutions and machinery of government is too far advanced now for them to make much difference (however good, bad or indifferent those individual politicians may be).
> She endorses male-only socialisation and spaces, for example, without any awareness she’s just reinvented 19th century Gladstonian liberalism and its support for freedom of association.
Good for Mary! She's doing what Hayek wanted when he said that classic ideas, while still valid lose their lustre among intellectuals. So you need to find new words to inspire the demand for new-shinies. Who better to do it than someone maleducated enough to have never learned the old truths, but intelligent enough rederive them for herself?
I suspect the answer to the trade question is some kind of practical middle ground. Obviously there need to be imports. No country can make everything. On the other hand, it's also good to grow and make as much locally as possible. The consumer/service economy just isn't working out.
If I recall reading that the worker-owned Spanish anarcho-syndicalist corporation Mondragon was faced with this problem of competition from foreign goods. Offshoring wasn't an option for them - jobs were the whole point. But they also needed to be financially viable, or else: no jobs. The answer was automation, which raised their productivity enough to compete. Not sure if that worked out perfectly but it's something to think about. In any case Britain needs to figure out how to export something other than Instagram moments for tourists.
Let me suggest a different policy set: support worker dignity by ceasing to tax them to send ever more marginal students to college. That is, stop subsidizing colleges and let the labor market return to a point where if you don’t go to college there isn’t presumably something wrong with you.
One would have to do more, but that would be a good start I think. Maybe right before massively deregulating labor such that it isn’t so expensive to hire people. (Speaking from a US perspective of course, although I doubt the UK is better in that regard.)
Yes, I agree with this too. However, it would probably require a supreme court case to overturn disparate impact. One of the things that made college degrees necessary was that employers were prohibited from using IQ tests because certain ah, groups didn't do so well on them, meaning that they were "biased".
Possibly, but anymore a college degree looks a lot like a high school diploma: it shows you are functioning, but not much else. STEM degrees tend to be worth a bit of signal, but your average degree earner is getting business at best, or psychology/english/wankery most likely. Those don't tell you much, so much so that employers are starting to look for other things. If we got away from "everyone who doesn't go to college is apparently defective" it would be a big step in the right direction.
Letting employers just test whatever they want would be a step in the right direction too, I agree.
Abandoning basic principles of economic liberalism will be a disaster for the NatCon movement, if it ever amounts to anything. The superiority of free trade and other liberal principles has been settled for a long time. Doesn’t mean one needs to embrace radical free markets, anarchism, or other such things. But embracing retrograde protectionist policies will just make us poorer. If national conservatism can’t integrate liberalism’s best ideas, then I think you can count on many smart people staying clear of the movement (and you’re likely to get a flood of economic ignoramuses).
Fifty years of putting an ever greater proportion of the middle (or future middle) class through the hyper-liberal, virtue-signalling sheep dip of Western academe has rendered politicians, political parties and their policy objectives largely irrelevant to what actually happens. The Long March through every single one of our civic institutions and machinery of government is too far advanced now for them to make much difference (however good, bad or indifferent those individual politicians may be).
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
> She endorses male-only socialisation and spaces, for example, without any awareness she’s just reinvented 19th century Gladstonian liberalism and its support for freedom of association.
Good for Mary! She's doing what Hayek wanted when he said that classic ideas, while still valid lose their lustre among intellectuals. So you need to find new words to inspire the demand for new-shinies. Who better to do it than someone maleducated enough to have never learned the old truths, but intelligent enough rederive them for herself?
I LOVE HELEN DALE!
I suspect the answer to the trade question is some kind of practical middle ground. Obviously there need to be imports. No country can make everything. On the other hand, it's also good to grow and make as much locally as possible. The consumer/service economy just isn't working out.
If I recall reading that the worker-owned Spanish anarcho-syndicalist corporation Mondragon was faced with this problem of competition from foreign goods. Offshoring wasn't an option for them - jobs were the whole point. But they also needed to be financially viable, or else: no jobs. The answer was automation, which raised their productivity enough to compete. Not sure if that worked out perfectly but it's something to think about. In any case Britain needs to figure out how to export something other than Instagram moments for tourists.
Let me suggest a different policy set: support worker dignity by ceasing to tax them to send ever more marginal students to college. That is, stop subsidizing colleges and let the labor market return to a point where if you don’t go to college there isn’t presumably something wrong with you.
One would have to do more, but that would be a good start I think. Maybe right before massively deregulating labor such that it isn’t so expensive to hire people. (Speaking from a US perspective of course, although I doubt the UK is better in that regard.)
Yes, I agree with this too. However, it would probably require a supreme court case to overturn disparate impact. One of the things that made college degrees necessary was that employers were prohibited from using IQ tests because certain ah, groups didn't do so well on them, meaning that they were "biased".
Possibly, but anymore a college degree looks a lot like a high school diploma: it shows you are functioning, but not much else. STEM degrees tend to be worth a bit of signal, but your average degree earner is getting business at best, or psychology/english/wankery most likely. Those don't tell you much, so much so that employers are starting to look for other things. If we got away from "everyone who doesn't go to college is apparently defective" it would be a big step in the right direction.
Letting employers just test whatever they want would be a step in the right direction too, I agree.
Tell that to Natural Selection.
Over the long haul, worldviews that discourage their adherents from reproducing will lose out to those which encourage reproduction.