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In light of the horrific Grenfell Tower fire in London, leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn made an astonishing statement:

The ward where this fire took place is, I think, the poorest ward in the whole country and properties must be found requisitioned if necessary to make sure those residents do get re-housed locally.

In effect, Corbyns solution to the temporary re-homing problem was the requisition of properties of other citizens to house those made homeless by the fire. In a sense, this is of little surprise. Corbyn is a long-time opponent of economic freedom. He has praised Hugo Chavezs role in Venezuela, for example. Likewise, his closest ally, John McDonnell, is a self-identified Marxist who brought Maos Little Red Book into Parliament. An equally close ally, Diane Abbott, has argued in defense of Mao (in spite of the Chinese leader being responsible for more deaths than any other person in the history of the world). Given this, it is unsurprising that Corbyn would support such an authoritarian measure. However, what is astonishing is the willingness of the public to embrace such a measure.

When Corbyn announced this idea, I had expected it to be greeted with horror. Sure, scores of people backed his proposals to ban people from making certain consensual contracts (through a sharp minimum wage hike and the banning of zero-hour contracts), but surely they wouldnt go for this? The forcibly seizing of private property by government is evidently a step too far to the left to be palatable to the British public, is it not? Apparently not. Within minutes, social media was alight with people approvingly citing Pierre-Joseph Proudhons slogan later stolen by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of Property is theft, and endorsing Corbyns plan as a great act of justice. Apparently oblivious to the fact that if property cannot be legitimately owned, then the government ought not own property, which creates a real tension in their belief system since Corbyn advocates widespread government ownership.

I sympathize with the victims of the fire, but in my view authoritarian measures arent the solution. Especially since the Prime Minister, Theresa May, has made emergency funds available and countless charitable organizations are involved. We, as individuals, must help those affected by the fire, but I have to wonder if the support for Corbyns proposal highlights a more authoritarian socialist future for Britain. If requisition of private property is now a mainstream idea, what will Britain become like if Corbyn and his allies ever gain power? How far will Corbyns socialism go? Of course, worries of authoritarianism are dismissed by many on the left. For many of them, such intrusive and liberty-infringing measures are justice, and Corbyn is ushering in that justice. Yet, as a libertarian, the worries are real and history shows that socialism has a natural tendency to become totalitarian. Yesterday, it was a proposal to nationalize industries and curtail freedom in relation to employment contracts. Today, it is a proposal to requisition private property. Tomorrow, it could be something far worse and, given the widespread willingness to accept many of Corbyns radical and unaffordable policies, that is not an unthinkable scenario.

Socialism is on the rise in Britain. As libertarians, we need to make the case for less state power, for more personal charity (charity, of course, often treated with scorn in the UK), and more freedom. We need to make the moral, as well as the intellectual case, because the left fights with moral platitudes. I didnt want to take a political angle on this tragedy, but Corbyn has repeatedly made it a political issue, and it would be wrong not to voice opposition to that perpetual occurrence: statists using tragedy to justify infringement upon freedom and, if we are not careful, we might find ourselves in a situation wherein the government is increasingly invasive.

For those who wish to support the victims, here is a donation page.

* Matthew James Norris is a British libertarian with a degree in history and philosophy. He volunteers at several organizations, and will undertake a masters degree from October.

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Requisition? The Growing Danger of Corbyn's Socialism - Being Libertarian

As in other aspects of socio-political culture, Chiles experience of the late 1960s and early 1970s diverged significantly from other countries in Latin America.

On the one hand, hippismo (the hippies) and similar countercultural movements that captured the imagination of young people did so in a democratic, moderately plural society albeit one whose days were numbered as polarisation and the success of Marxism ushered in the 1973 coup.

On the other hand, the divided politics of the era and the strong grip of social conservatism on both right and left in Chile meant that countercultural experimentation was often caught in the crossfire of class warfare, while also coming under fire from both sides.

Readers will take away different message from Patrick Barr-Melejs excellent and finely researched Psychedelic Chile, timely in the 50th anniversary year of the Summer of Love, but by far the most interesting dimension of this book is the relationship between the Hippies and the Left.

Focusing on the period from 196873, which was characterised globally as one in which the rise of the counterculture and youthful activism was at its peak, this book explores two currents at the heart of this phenomenon in Chile: hippismo, the loosely defined culture of long-haired dropouts with headbands and bell-bottoms who smoked pot and disregarded sexual conventions; and Siloism, a more structured movement organised mainly in Santiago around the teaching of an Argentine guru known as Silo (Mario Luis Rodrguez Cobos) and its associated group called Poder Joven that combined various political and personal philosophies in the quest for a defined path to self-enlightenment.

In a country such as Chile, both tendencies offer potent opportunities for research, but the author has confined his focus to explore three key propositions. First, entering Chilean history by way of the counterculture can tell us as much about the phenomenons foes as it can about these youths themselves. Second, as counterculture began to percolate through the youth scene, some of the values and attitudes it embodied began to seep into mainstream sectors of a younger generation that otherwise rejected what it embraced. Third, the media were critical in both influencing public opinion towards the counterculture mostly in an ill-informed and prejudicial sense but also reflecting it.

It is the first of these propositions that offers the most fleshy material for the political historian, mainly because of Chiles unique circumstances in this period and their tragic consequences.

This was a time of intense polarisation in which both left and right defended mainstream cultural assumptions that were instinctively critical of the counterculture, albeit for different reasons.

It went without saying that the conservative credentials of the right and its links to the Church made it hostile to hippies and everything they stood for. Even the more moderate and progressive Christian Democrats, who played an important role in Chilean politics at this time, saw in the counterculture threats to the nation, culture and family.

It was on the left however, that hostility to the counterculture is perhaps less easy to understand and explain. In this period, the Left itself was going through something of its own revolution, ideologically and organisationally speaking, with the intensification of the Cold War, Che Guevaras guerrilla (which undoubtedly resonated within the US and European counterculture), and the emergence in Chile of a new left subscribing to revolutionary vanguardism as opposed to an old left committed to traditional democratic incrementalism.

The tensions that these developments gave rise to resulted in Chiles old left coming to power under new left banners a democratic-revolutionary agenda that incorporated many young people with their own ideas about what this meant in terms of behaviour, liberation and cultural transformation.

In short, the Left confronted countercultures while riven by disagreements about the nature of the social order that would eventually replace capitalism.

While some on the left advocated pluralism, anti-counterculture discourses provided Marxists a position of relative unity about the characteristics of the new model citizen, even if there were still generational differences among them.

As Barr-Melej writes: governing Marxists and UP nevertheless preserved certain mainstream and bourgeois cultural outlooks and impressions that fell under the rubric of family values, existing in conjunction with an otherwise antibourgeois, antiimperialist, and anticapitalist revolutionary cultural-political project that saw public murals by young Communist artists, the massive publishing campaign of the state-owned publishing house (Editora Nacional Quimant), the songs of Nueva Cancin, expansive volunteer and revolutionary pro-literacy efforts on the part of young activists, and other pursuits. [p10]

By exploring this fascinating clash of cultures the political versus the socio-psychological Psychedelic Chile offers a novel and absorbing way in to this period of Chilean history. It is an important introduction to a phenomenon that is little considered by political scientists the social conservatism of the Left while also making up somewhat for an absence of literature that does not solely prioritise the participation of young people in class-based politics.

For many young people in that era, a culture of rejection of the old in which personal and socio-political liberation were largely indivisible themes anticipated by the guru of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse were at the heart of a vision of a new Chile.

In its own way, that was just as revolutionary as the failed experiment that Salvador Allende would embark upon.

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Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship by Patrick Barr-Melej - Pressenza International Press...

Where have all the Chavistas gone? Five years ago, every fashion-conscious Western radical was praising Venezuela to the skies. Sean Penn exulted in how Hugo Chvez "did incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor." Oliver Stone made an obsequious film about South American socialism, whose premiere in Venice was attended by the caudillo himself. Michael Moore hailed Chvez for eliminating 75 percent of extreme poverty. His Canadian equivalent, Naomi Klein, proudly declared her support for the beret-wearing strongman.

Suddenly, they have gone very quiet. In the UK, articles by prominent Leftists have started vanishing from the archive. The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was a passionate defender of Chvez, as were other senior figures in his party. "Venezuela is seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting neo-liberal policies," he wrote in a piece that has now disappeared from his website. "Conquering poverty?" Venezuela is in a state of unprecedented squalor: blackouts are frequent, food and medicines are running out and most state workers are on a two-day week.

Socialist selective amnesia is not new, of course: Rewriting the past was a characteristic of Soviet regimes, brilliantly dramatized in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." The reason Leftists make such frequent use of what Orwell called "the memory hole" is that their heroes keep failing them.

The pattern is always the same. Socialists take power somewhere. Comfortable, middle-class Western Leftists rhapsodize about their achievements. Then, the regime leads, as socialist regimes invariably lead, to poverty and tyranny. At which point, without a blush, Western Leftists say that it was never properly socialist, and move on to their next Third World pin-up.

First came the USSR. While Stalin was murdering millions in the 1930s through enforced collectivization, the New York Times's Walter Duranty was filing excited copy about the success of Soviet agrarian reforms. In Britain, the dotty socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, from their comfortable home in Hampshire, extolled the revolution in their 1935 book, "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?"

Nowadays, no one defends Stalin anymore. Western lefties will tell you that the USSR was never socialist, but practiced a form of "state capitalism." Yet, they went on to repeat the cycle with virtually every other new socialist regime: China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Albania, Cuba, Nicaragua.

The script never varies. We are supposedly witnessing a new dawn until the moment of collapse at which point, overnight, we are told that it "wasn't real socialism". Here, for example, is Noam Chomsky in 2009:

"What's so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created."

And here he is today: "I never described Chavez's state capitalist government as socialist' or even hinted at such an absurdity. It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained."

But Venezuela isn't remote from socialism. It's a textbook example. Chvez and his successor, Nicols Maduro, set out to replace the market with a system of state production and distribution. Result? Shops are empty, inflation is running at 720 percent and hunger has returned. A few state-run distribution centers offer cheaper food, with rationing by queue rather than by price. Queues, of course, are a feature of every socialist regime.

So is corruption. The bigger the government, the more people's success depends on sucking up to officials rather than on offering a service to consumers. Expanding state bureaucracies offer new opportunities for nepotism. First, Venezuelan jobs were allocated on the basis of political allegiance; now food supplies are.

And so is penury. When I was growing up in South America in the 1970s, Venezuela was a place that people emigrated to. Now, Venezuelans are stampeding to get out. And I still find this almost unbelievable there are recorded cases of death from malnutrition.

It's true that pure undiluted socialism, like pure undiluted capitalism, exists in theory rather than in our complicated world. Still, we can make some rough comparisons. In 1973, when Chile abandoned Marxism and embraced markets, income per head there was 36 percent of what it was in Venezuela; now, it is 151 percent. Or compare West Germany to East Germany, or South Korea to North Korea, or Cuba to Bermuda.

"That's not fair!" say Leftists, "You're citing all the examples of dictatorships!" That's right, comrades. And maybe that's telling you something about the way socialism ends up relying on coercive force.

It is not fair to judge socialism as a textbook theory while judging capitalism by its necessarily imperfect real-world examples. Judge like with like, and every socialist state is poorer and less free than its market-based neighbors. If you know of a counter-example out there somewhere, compaeros, let's hear it.

Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.

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In Venezuela, the destructive force of socialism is at work - Washington Examiner

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Greg Jayne, Opinion page editor

It is one of the most pointed and most flexible pejoratives in the conservative lexicon, a word that can be twisted to fit nearly any situation.

So, when the Washington Legislature last week approved a family leave bill with bipartisan support in both chambers, Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, pulled out an old standby and said, Its one step toward a socialist state government.

And why wouldnt she? Socialist and its linguistic corollary, socialism, resonate as four-letter words in the American ear, making them useful for driving home a point without having to employ nuance. Not that anybody employs nuance these days. We live in an era, after all, in which the leader of the free world believes meaningful communication can be had 140 characters at a time.

Anyway, the point is not to focus on Pike. She did not create the current political climate and, to her credit, she is nothing if not consistent. Pike was re-elected last year with 56 percent of the vote, her constituents know what they are getting when she represents them in Olympia, and she works hard on their behalf. That is to be respected even when you disagree with her.

Instead, the intent is to focus on this notion of socialist and its use as a pejorative suitable for nearly any occasion regardless of accuracy. Websters tells us that socialism means any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

That would seem to make cries of socialism squishy at best and empty at worst. Socialism is about government ownership of the means of production, which would cause a collective aneurysm in the American public. Until the government begins taking over Starbucks, Boeing and Apple, we are far from becoming the United Socialists of America.

No, the United States remains deeply beholden to capitalism, as well it should. We have a gross domestic product of more than $19 trillion 25 percent of the worlds production and about 60 percent bigger than the next-largest country, China. American capitalism has created an endless string of innovations that have benefitted the global quality of life and have generated an extraordinarily high standard of living.

And yet, there is reason for concern. A poll conducted last year by Harvard University found that 51 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 do not support capitalism. Only 42 percent approve of the system that helped create their iPhones and their lattes and their economic freedom.

This is understandable, considering that millennials experience with capitalism consists largely of the Great Recession and the calamity that ensued. But it should be noted that the recession was much worse in many of the worlds other nations. And it should be noted that capitalism is the worst economic system except for every other one ever conceived.

Yet as America wrestles with the future of capitalism and as conservatives throw around words such as socialist to try and instill fear, it seems that efforts would be better spent on trying to make capitalism work for the masses.

Take the family leave bill. Washington became the fifth state to approve of one, and when the law takes effect in 2020, it will allow employees to be paid while taking time off for a birth, adoption or a serious family illness. The alternative is for workers, even many with full-time jobs, to be unable to afford time off for life-changing events. If this counts as socialism, well, were all better for it.

Because if conservatives are intent upon opposing anything that falls under their definition of socialism, they should start dismantling police and fire departments. They should disassemble the U.S. military. They should leave roads and schools and social safety nets solely to the private sector.

That might help rid America of what some view as the evils of socialism, but it might also call to mind another pointed and flexible word: Dystopia.

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Jayne: Accusations of socialism bandied about too frequently - The Columbian

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum I considered publishing a special issue of the magazine in which, in a series of specially commissioned signed essays, we would indict the guilty men of Brexit. As Ive said before, I am no ardent Brussels-phile but the referendum campaign had appalled us. David Camerons carelessness and insouciance in calling and leading such a wretched campaign and then walking away from the consequences of his actions disgusted us.

We despised the narcissism and game-playing of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, newspaper columnists masquerading as statesmen. The xenophobia of the right-wing press and Nigel Farage had been loathsome. The Remain campaign had been little better, from the fear-mongering of the Treasury to the lacklustre performance of Jeremy Corbyn.

***

The inspiration for the issue would be Guilty Men, the celebrated polemic written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard and published in July 1940 under the pseudonym Cato, named after the Roman senator and historian. The three authors were all employed by Lord Beaverbrook, a Conservative and appeaser, hence the desire for anonymity. Catos 15 guilty men included Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Lord Halifax. Their appeasement of Hitler had led to the Dunkirk catastrophe. Our guilty men would have been Cameron, Johnson, Gove, Farage, Duncan Smith, Corbyn, and so on.

In the end, we published an issue featuring a brilliant Andr Carrilho cover illustration of Boris Johnson with an elongated nose, the chosen line for which was The Brexit lies. But the idea of writing something more ambitious about the Brexit debacle the viciousness of the campaign, the lies and distortions, the divisions it exacerbated and revealed nagged at me.

I even discussed with my agent, Andrew Gordon, writing a short book, a contemporary reworking of Guilty Men for the age of Brexit. Youll have to write it quickly, by the end of the summer, he said. I didnt have the stamina for such an undertaking but I hoped another writer might and said so in a column. Someone must have been listening because last week a book about Brexit called Guilty Men by Cato the Younger, published by Iain Dales enterprising and nimble Biteback operation, landed on my desk.

***

The original Guilty Men opens with an impassioned account of the retreat from Dunkirk: How was it . . . that the bravest sons of Britain ever came to be placed in such jeopardy? Cato the Youngers version begins more prosaically with a short summary of the original book with which it shares a title before it moves on to the beaches of Kos in Greece and the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War. From there, it recounts how Britain came to join the European Economic Community and how the conditions for Brexit were created.

It is not written with the swagger and literary flair of the Michael Foot original: after all, Foot was a belletrist as well as a politician and newspaper editor, a passionate student of the Romantics, especially of Byron and Hazlitt. But it makes its case forcefully as it indicts for the five sins of deceit, distortion, personal gain, failures of leadership and hubris 13 men and two women, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, who is damned because of her inflexibility on freedom of movement. (I suppose the title Guilty Men and Women would not have been so euphonious.)

In the concluding chapter, or envoi as the author prefers, there is an expression of defiance: We will come through and we will thrive. But the final note is long and plangent, a lament for what is described as a diminished sense of European fellowship, perhaps for ever. For ever is a long time, of course, but you get the point.

Guilty Men sold more than 50,000 copies in a few weeks and 200,000 by the end of 1940. No tract on foreign policy since Keyness Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919 . . . had so decisively seared itself into the public consciousness, wrote John Stevenson in his introduction to the Penguin edition. Cato the Youngers Brexit Edition is unlikely to be a bestseller Britain is not existentially threatened by fascism, after all but its central idea is a good one (I had it myself!) and one wishes the pseudonymous author or authors well.

***

While we are on the theme of Brexit, here are some more variations. David Davis, who used to say that striking a free trade deal with the EU27 would be straightforward because the Germans would be so desperate to sell us their cars and the French their cheese and wine, has now said that the Brexit negotiations are as complicated as the moon landings. Andrew Adonis, speaking in the Lords, has called Brexit a hard-right nationalist policy. The diarist and theatre critic Tim Walker uses the neologism Brexshit. Nick Clegg has asked, rhetorically, if any of us remember the time when we were promised an easy Brexit. And the Labour MP Mike Gapes has suggested we are heading for a Wrexit crash.

***

Dunkirk and the failure of the Norwegian campaign opened the way for Winston Churchill to become prime minister and for the creation of the wartime coalition in which Clement Attlee served with such distinction. Today, in our age of illusion, there is no Churchill waiting on the Tory benches to replace the humiliated Theresa May. Compared to Churchill, Boris Johnson (for all his glorified Churchillian self-image) is a huckster and a popinjay, whose character flaws render him unfit to be foreign secretary, least of all prime minister. Churchill said that Chamberlain and the appeasers had led Britain to the bullseye of disaster. Something similar could be said of Johnson and of our present predicament. Guilty men, indeed.

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The election sealed the deal Jeremy Corbyn's new socialism won the argument - New Statesman