Thursday, May 17, 2007
Overly Strong Statement of the Day 3
Ok, so this probably isn't enough of a regular feature to warrant it having a name which, well, suggests so strongly that it's a regular (in fact, daily) feature. But nevermind.
Tony Blair is stepping down at the end of June, and the issue of his successor naturally enough came to the fore. Labour MPs were to nominate candidates for the leadership race, and in the event of such a race, the party as a whole would vote on who should be leader. As it happened, it didn't get that far; none of the other candidates got the requisite 45 nominations to run in a party-wide election against the favourite, Gordon Brown (who got 313 nominations). So Gordon Brown will take over 10 Downing Street, without there being an election.
John McDonnell, who fancied himself as the most serious challenger to Brown, got only 29 nominations, nowhere near enough to trigger an election. McDonnell described the result as 'a blow to democracy'.
Tony Blair is stepping down at the end of June, and the issue of his successor naturally enough came to the fore. Labour MPs were to nominate candidates for the leadership race, and in the event of such a race, the party as a whole would vote on who should be leader. As it happened, it didn't get that far; none of the other candidates got the requisite 45 nominations to run in a party-wide election against the favourite, Gordon Brown (who got 313 nominations). So Gordon Brown will take over 10 Downing Street, without there being an election.
John McDonnell, who fancied himself as the most serious challenger to Brown, got only 29 nominations, nowhere near enough to trigger an election. McDonnell described the result as 'a blow to democracy'.
Labels: Overly Strong Statements
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Overly strong statement of the day 2
Well, this isn't really a sequel, since the original installment was Shawn's not mine. But anyways, I found this pretty hard to stomach:
'There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what type of market there is depends on laws and policy decisions that government must make. In the absence of a legal system supported by taxes, there couldn’t be money, banks, corporations, stock exchanges, patents, or a modern market economy – none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.
It is therefore logically impossible that people should have any kind of entitlement to all of their pretax income.'
(Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, The Myth of Ownership: 32. My italics.)
Call me old-fashioned.....
'There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what type of market there is depends on laws and policy decisions that government must make. In the absence of a legal system supported by taxes, there couldn’t be money, banks, corporations, stock exchanges, patents, or a modern market economy – none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.
It is therefore logically impossible that people should have any kind of entitlement to all of their pretax income.'
(Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, The Myth of Ownership: 32. My italics.)
Call me old-fashioned.....
Labels: Overly Strong Statements
