11/11

Since lots of other people appear to be doing something similar, I thought I'd take a look at my top eleven postings from twenty eleven.  It's been an on and off year with some months having little blogging at all.  I've been hovering around the 200 mark in the Wikio UK Politics blog rankings most of the year.  It's my usual eclectic mix of stories:

In at 11 we have a post from October 2011, International relations: the problem's in the name, I did while feeling frustrated about an essay on one of my modules.  I was frustrated that, as an anarchist, we focus on inter-NATIONAL relations and not so much inter-INDIVIDUAL relations.

At 10, from September, we had Planning Promotes Poverty, a rant at all the groups lining up to try and kill the government's National Planning Policy Framework, a subject I shall return to very soon.  The NPPF goes nowhere near far enough to free up the system such that it will bring down land costs and ensure everyone gets appropriately housed without much or even perhaps any state support, but the so called amenity groups opposing the NPPF are entrenching poverty for millions with their objections.

At 9, from June, I was watching a "natural history" series about supposedly "pristine wildernesses" protected by things like national park status around the world, and blogged in Unnatural Histories: the failings of the state in microcosm that it showed how government policies' unintended consequences actually produce a sanitised, manufactured version of "pristine wildernesses" that would rarely be what would have happened naturally whilst often causing much hardship by displacing people and fencing off open country.

At 8, again from October, and again in response to issues in a politics module I wrote And what society is not… defending that hackneyed old saying from Margaret Thatcher that there is "no such thing as society".  Society cannot exist without the individuals within it being free to associate and make their own decisions voluntarily.

In at number 7 comes Rigorous Liberalism and the Minimum Wage, yet another October post, which was prompted by a discussion I was having about whether the Minimum Wage was a "liberal" idea, and concluded that it was not - that the focus of my "Rigorous Liberalism" ought to be not artificially inflating peoples' incomes by taking resources from someone or something else (tax or minimum wage, say) but ensuring that all privilege and rent that artificially increases the cost of living and artificially decreases employment opportunity ought to be removed first, before we see whether we still need to make some form of subsidised cash support for the least well off.

At number 6, a fourth top spot for October, I read Paul Collier's "Bottom Billion" in response to a lecture on global development on my course and came up with a jolly scheme in The bottom billion: time for a take-over? that the plight of the bottom billion is so desperate and so intractable that we should put aside all the arguments about "democracy" and "self-determination" and allow entrepreneurs literally to mount take-over bids for countries they thought they could find economic potential in.

Onto the top five then...

At 5, October's fifth post, I wrote about how groups like 38 degrees and the Occupy movement with their claims to represent the "99%" show up Participatory problems for syndicalists? - that the fact that only the "usual suspects" can be bothered to participate in most political activity shows that it would likely be very difficult to achieve "consensus decision making" in an anarcho-syndicalist world.

At 4, this time from November, and in response to a questionnaire about attitudes to political institutions, trust and participation in one of our politics seminar groups, Don't Vote: It just encourages the bastards! wonders why, if people trust the politicians and institutions so little, do they continue to participate by voting and thereby legitimising the very system they say they do not trust.

The 3rd most read post of the year (according to my Drupal access logs at least and a little bit of nifty SQL querying), from way back last January, I picked up on a piece in the Economist in which I suggest that The Economist pushes "Rigorous Liberalism" for World Economic Forum.

In the runner's up spot, with the top two way out ahead of these others, comes "Economic Liberals" and the Social Liberal Forum's Straw-man, a response to a post at Matthew Gibson's "Solution Focussed Politics" blog and...

The most read post on this blog from 2011 was a suggestion I made back in April, about different ways of financing Higher Education, in Mutual funding for Higher Education.

So that's that then!  I hope to do better, in both quantity and quality, in 2012 and as the ideas given me in my degree flow more freely!