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May 29, 2005

We're not dealing with Billy Idol

Some things are heart-breaking beyond understanding. As little sympathy as I have with a workers or labour movement, the treatment of individuals is not strained.

I think I experience a deep sense of frustration that democratic principles can so easily and apparently so naturally or necessarily become conflated with a dismissal of economic motive - how economic freedom could so easily be de-coupled from personal freedoms. "Materialism" and the desire for wealth and personal prosperity only in the most skewed of imaginations, would not be the natural coincident to the desire for personal liberty. To me there is no argument that perestroika should come before glasnost - it appears that for whatever reason, that is the natural desire of movement.

There is no doubt that there is a kind rabid intensity at work, and that it is engendered by the mirror it faces, but it seems at times a dishonesty of self - on both sides.

But the representative thing itself seems to be to be an effective thing - and for all its manipulation and the pose of its gestures, there's nothing that suggests to me that it is not worthy in some way.

A policy of personal openness needs to be accompanied by a belief in economic openness, in economic freedom - to cede that, and not to criticise others for not being more free than they already are, betrays conscience. If anything, economic freedoms need to be extended rather than curtailed by the engagement of public sentiment. You would hope that public sentiment as much understands the will towards economic freedom, and not to address that is to cling to a nothing of a thing. The rights and prosperity of those who toil depend on things that spite will infect. If they are looking only at a thing, that that thing has to be where you are. It is in their economic interests to be more free.

There are many reasons for avoidance. Other than this, there is often not the grand thing of shame, but the shrunk of embarassment.

Posted by subtitles at May 29, 2005 11:21 AM | Personal