Giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and car keys to teenaged boys.
The Man Versus The State
So for the latest of my forays into reading audiobooks I have decided to embark on a reading of Herbert Spencer's "The Man Versus The State" which is cited several times in the previous book, "Our Enemy The State" by Albert Jay Nock, who also provides an introduction in the Online Library of Liberty edition I have used for this recording.
Each of the essays probably deserve a post of their own, because they all have a tremendous resonance with some of today's pressing issues, especially as we go into a general election. So for this post I will just link to the audio files. Once again, there are individual MP3s for each section, an M4B file more suitable for iTunes and iPod/iPhone playing which are recognised as audiobook format and contain chapter information, and a Zip file of all the MP3s for downloading.
The Online Library of Liberty edition I have used contains much more than the four essays originally included in "The Man Versus The State" when first published. But since I wanted to read his critique of the Liberal Party around the time of Gladstone before going to the Liberal History Group event next week, I've decided to release this section now, which is the original work, and record the other essays over the next few days/weeks and add them as and when.
NB - I have not gone through all of these chapters with the proverbial fine-toothed comb for errors and slips, but I think they're all pretty well intelligible and that any errors will be relatively trivial (and so more difficult for me to find and correct!).
Related reading
Here are some stories that may be on related subjects, based on the tags used in this post:
- Our Enemy, The State
- Millburn report: a glimpse into the fuckwitted futility of government.
- From here to Liberty
- Democracy itself, rather than the BNP, is the problem
- Education: chacun a son gout?
- Empire, state and anarchy
- Sharia and Anarchist Private Law
- Media Laws and the Fourth Estate
- Are you willing to pay more to prevent me using drugs? Let markets decide the law!
- The de-Labourfication of Britain?
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About Jock
Name: Jock Coats
Age: 40s
Lives: Oxford, UK
Works: IT Support, Oxford Brookes University, where I am also a Governor of the University and a Warden in a hall of residence.
I am a card carrying Lib Dem, but am a confirmed market-anarchist, of the US Individualist Anarchists or Mutualist tradition. Other passions are social enterprise, monetary reform and housing. See full profile and contact form and at the following web-haunts:
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[...] Albert Jay Nock, in "Our Enemy The State" predicted this inability to think "outside the state" and compared it with the European Christian Reformation: so disaffected were people with the hegemonic Roman Church that they went as far as rebelling and seceding from its rule, yet they did not liberate themselves, but rather set up another church with similarly repressive rules and hierarchies. And for an analysis of how even the most popularly elected "democracy" does not have the power it always seems to think it has, have a read of Herbert Spencer's essay "The Great Political Superstition" from his collection "The Man Versus The State" (or listen to me reading it!) [...]
[...] to read Herbert Spencer's essay "The Great Political Superstition" (or listen to my audio rendition of it) in which he quite comprehensively for me demolishes all the arguments for the legitimacy of [...]
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