Utopia, you are standing in it!

Labour’s manifesto reveals that they intend to re-nationalise water companies if they are elected.  How much would this ‘cost’? was many people’s response.  For example, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg noted that a ‘costing’ of this policy was omitted from the manifesto.

The nationalisation would happen by the government selling debt to the market, and using the money raised to buy shares [presumably at least a majority, perhaps all] in the company.   There are questions about which internationally acredited accounting conventions this borrowing would be included under, and which it would not.  But this issue is not very interesting [to me, anyway].

The interesting thing is to think through the economic consequences and ‘costs’ of the policy.

Supposing that the fair price for the assets were knowable, and that the cost of doing the transaction was small, in principle the company could be sold again at some point in the future…

The “narrative” of the Left, to use a newly favorite leftist word, contains a view of America as “an exceptionally guilty nation, the product of a poisonous mixture of territorial rapacity emboldened by racism, violence, and chauvinistic religious conviction, an exploiter of natural resources and despoiler of natural beauty and order such as the planet has never seen.” ( Thank you, Howard Zinn) So says Wilfrid M. McClay in a review of Fred Siegel’s new book: The Revolt Against the Masses.  There is as well a second view “in which all of history is seen as a struggle toward the greater and greater liberation of the individual, and the greater and greater integration of all governance in larger and larger units, administered; by cadres of experts actuated by the public interest and by a highly developed sense of justice.”

It’s an important book, “a critique of liberalism by someone…

Over at The Federalist John Daniel Davidson wrote a piece headlined “The American Left is Talking Itself Into Violence”

Something is wrong with the American Left. The recent spate of violent protests on college campuses has been well-documented, but the violence and intolerance championed by left-wing student activists is beginning to creep off campus and into mainstream public life.

The reason for this is straightforward enough: although progressives pride themselves on their putative tolerance and diversity, the imperatives of leftist politics are fundamentally illiberal. Justice imposed through power is the philosophical foundation of the political left, and when earnest progressives become convinced the only avenue to power is violence, their tolerance quickly falls by the wayside.

The reason for it all is not the campuses, that’s just more evidence of the derangement. The Left lost the election. They have been astounded to learn that the popular vote does…

UPDATE: This article appeared on the new HuffPo, and after writing this piece I realized I’d criticized the identical article a year ago, here. Well, so I’ve done it twice. My takes aren’t the same, so if you haven’t read the other one, read this one instead. Better yet, read both, as the earlier piece, which is shorter, has other information about the “feminism” of sharia law.  The piece shows that PuffHo is brain-dead, killed by Toxic Regressive Leftism.

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Well, I’m sorry folks, but, like a dog returning to its own vomit, I keep returning to the HuffPo, breaking my vow that I was done with them. The laws of physics dictated otherwise: I could not have done other than write this post. And my also-determined justification for returning to that odious site is that HuffPo may be the premier “clicky” source of news for Lefties, since it…