The principle behind it all, freedom

I was asked recently what’s the ultimate basis behind my work, and the simple reply was freedom. It is something we can all relate to, humans and animals, and when it is removed or restricted it is either for a reason of safety or personal development, and if not then punishment.

So as removal of freedom is one of the most universal punishments known to man, along with assault and causing death, its existence is held to be the ultimate situation in life, next to life itself when compared with the death sentence. Knowing this, then why do governments throughout history do all they can to reduce and restrict our freedoms, using the Hegelian dialectic, that the alternative is worse. The alternative that rarely even exists but they knew they could create as the means to get the majority who sadly do not think for themselves to hand over their freedom. To quote Benjamin Franklin, those who give their freedom for security deserve neither.

I do find many people are so lost in this vision that I found I needed to list examples of the difference between imposed restrictions ‘in the name of work, health and safety’ and their removal. By applying everyday and ordinary examples then I hope everyone can relate to their own life situations and realise there simply aren’t many times any such restrictions are appropriate or beneficial.

Work and driving are my personal favourites. Driving is the ultimate freedom until humans learn to fly (literally or mechanically). It allows everyone, including the elderly and disabled, to have the opportunity to travel wherever and whenever they need or want with absolutely no need for other people to rely on, timetables, routes and the like. The late 20^th century saw growing restrictions on driving, from closed roads in Camden to the Tory Kenneth Clark introduction of road humps and the related road narrowings. As speed is not the primary cause of accidents (otherwise why do country lanes have a 60mph limit?) but lack of concentration, selfishness and alcohol (check the figures), then the false premise of 20mph zones whatever the restrictions added to create them, and the same restrictions on officially 30mph roads where you’ll wreck your car if you drive over 15mph are clearly for some other purpose. When I decided using logic maybe the councils wanted to do it to put people off driving altogether (forgetting all vehicles use these dreadful roads, including buses and emergency vehicles), soon afterwards the EU plan to ban urban driving by 2050 came out. No coincidence really.

Barnet council broke the mould, uniquely to my knowledge, when they decided to remove the humps and restrictions, much like Liverpool council just set the precedent to remove the bus lanes. A road a mile or so long I used to use to visit my grandma had been given mini roundabouts at every junction, slowing the traffic on a road with no buildings along it every few hundred yards for absolutely no reason. When overnight it seemed they disappeared it simply became a road again rather than an obstacle course. Accident figures are recorded by law when injuries are caused, and the most injuries come in the same borough from the deaths from emergency vehicles being slowed down by road humps, meaning the councils are actually causing more harm than benefit. Knowing this officially what does it tell you about the councils?

Work is the other example in my life, with the standard story of my family’s shop manager, who had a weekly timetable which basically meant when you weren’t serving a customer you’d be dealing with the stock, every single moment of the day. The work was exhausting and demoralising, but we assumed it was necessary for a busy international shop in the centre of London, till the week the manager went on holiday, we did the work when it was needed, and over the fortnight he was away everything he made us do got done in about a day instead of a week. We all then realised the reason the timetable was there is he believed no one should be paid to do nothing, so he simply created the work to make everyone earn their wages rather than relax and work better when they were needed to.

Animals without any speech express freedom the most graphically. The contrast of animals in cages, something to me which is one of the lowest levels of human behaviour, to when they are released, or when the cat or dog is returned from the kennels and bounds out of the car to run around the garden after being locked up for a week or two tells you pretty much all you need to know about the basic principle. If every government was based on this principle then every restriction would be a last resort, rather than their entire motivation.

Imagine the difference in your life if freedom was known as the prime motivation for all aspects of life. Rather than impose discipline as a default in schools onwards, people would have to work out through any required means to only apply it when nothing else would work. Respect of other people is one example- punctuality, carrying out your duties etc, using the other golden rule to treat others as you’d want to be treated yourself, could be started with outside discipline in school and home, but be replaced by self discipline as with early enough training such principles would become second nature. That would ideally be carried through to work and family life, where people would do their jobs properly not because they had to but because they knew they should. Freedom of speech would also be protected unless it actually encouraged people to hurt others, so David Cameron’s two attempts (succeeding the second time) to ban causing offence, a victimless and technically harmless act, and one so widely interpreted it could effectively close down any negative speech in public and possibly private if reported. We are all offended by other people’s words from school onwards, and that is our problem for caring what idiots think, as much as theirs for being idiots. But being an idiot is a personal problem and should not become illegal.

So logic dictates the bare minimum of examples where it is necessary to restrict our freedom for a greater cause. Public health, protecting customers from poisoning by food products, restricting the spread of illnesses etc are pretty obvious and why anyone would want the freedom to sell bad food or sabotage it is anyone’s guess. But they all come under the golden rule and common sense. Working hours can be flexible where lives don’t depend on it, files don’t evaporate when not put away on time, and people can easily be employed to share jobs and arrange the hours between them to allow for children and other personal time when they would otherwise have to be working. Banning cars or making driving difficult affects everyone, like poisoning the air with geoengineering. Even the politicians are held up on the same roads as the plebs they legislate for, so why do they do it? Misanthropy is the root of most such rules, followed by exercise of power simply because they can. Two dangerous and primitive motivations, loved by politicians of all eras.

I believe once people learn the simple message they will quickly and easily wake up. Just imagining the difference between a journey before they narrowed the local roads and sent people on complex diversions is a good start. The extend that to your life. Wouldn’t you rather get to all your appointments easily rather than change buses (London split all their long routes presumably to collect two sets of fares for people going across the new boundary), be able to take time off work without official warnings, and not be taxed on both what you earn above a certain amount or what you spend beyond the bare minimum? Who earned the money? Most of the time you did. You probably studied for a few years, even if just for GCE exams, in order to work, and then the hours you work on top increase your earnings, or amount you sell that people buy because you provide things they need or want, and the government not only take the bare minimum they need to maintain the roads (which will soon be empty), health service, and support those unable to support themselves, they take more because they think it’s wrong for people to have ‘too much’.

Misanthropy returns, punishing those who succeed is another formula we need to consign to history, and wipe out simply through education that it is the exact opposite motivation people need in their short lives to strive to success. If you give up trying as your tenth painting will get you a tenth as much profit when you sell it as your first, then you may give up painting more than a few per year as why bother when you don’t get much back for the others which took you just as long to create? Or do another music tour bringing pleasure to thousands as you’ve reached the top tax threshold level. Like it or not the more money you have the more freedom it offers, so effectively by making it harder to have more than a certain amount under socialism then they are restricting the freedom of those who have done more to earn than their peers. This never means their peers can do and have more, just that they have almost as little as they do.

As a counsellor part of my work is getting people to take back their personal freedom. Who actually has the power to tell others what to do? Their parents, their employers, their governments and their teachers. But from that list one is different, the government. Those with the most power do not have it because they are royalty and aristocracy, at least not any more, but because we employ them (paid for directly from our taxes) to handle issues we can’t ourselves. Not to rule us. Using the minimal interference rule then parenting and employment should only make the fewest rules and allow people to use their own abilities to schedule the work, and if they can’t then the employer should have the freedom to sack them as they can’t do the job. It works both ways. Education is as much about self discipline, so only really needs to make sure students don’t disrupt classes, if they don’t turn up they are only hurting themselves. Hopefully by now I have created a picture of every aspect relating to the single root principle, and explained why in every case there is no need to use more than the bare minimum of restrictions, and this includes taxes and rules applying to work, laws and any other area of human activity. You hate having your freedom restricted, so why should other people have it when it doesn’t affect you? And when I hear the voices shouting from the viewers ‘What about global warming’, something which has caused the most restrictions on everyday lives worldwide since the fall of the Soviet Union, I’d say to watch my first interview on the UN and big society, and discover that was the biggest illusion created to cause the greatest loss of freedom ever encountered by humanity, as it is being applied equally in every UN member state worldwide whether you are aware of it or not, China has just come on board this week. If anyone seriously believes the aims of the Kyoto Protocol of 1992, to basically reduce demand for energy, by making it more expensive and less available, can be an improvement on the effects of a slightly warmer planet outside our lifetimes needs another session at school. This is no different to reducing demand for food, water and air itself. If they could they would, but food is becoming more expensive, meat is being made less attractive as cattle farming is alleged to contribute too much CO2 so is also being discouraged, and many farms in Africa have been cleared to grow biofuel, mainly corn and palm oil, to burn food in engines not designed to use them. Vans and lorries over a certain age are banned in London despite passing the MoT emission tests, and cars in Paris, as all major changes are now carried out in gradual stages so people don’t realise what’s happening till it’s too late. Making essentials such as energy, food and travel harder is making everyone’s life harder, and for what? Pretending they can control the earth’s temperature. As I said about the Incas, thousands of years may pass but humanity has not changed a jot.

Question every attempt to make your life harder. Do they really need to do it? Why are they making something you’ve always done impossible or much more difficult? Why have the new rules at work been brought in and do they really make the firm more productive? Do not accept a single attempt to interfere with your normal activities of life. Who has the right to stop you moving around freely or take more of your money than they need for their requirements? You have given every single one of these people your power except your parents, you can change schools or employers if they do not treat you the way you want to be, and certainly get rid of every politician as they are our servants, not our rulers.

Simple principles, easily understood, and resonate with every living being on the planet.

Breaking illusions

Here is the text used by my third interview with Mark Windows plus more detail.

3rd interview: Breaking illusions:

As a child growing up we start to discover many new ideas, mainly from politics. Fairness, redistribution of wealth, equality, all apparently good concepts designed to help people. The second stage, assuming we ever reach it, is to start applying these ideas and looking more closely into them, after which we may well discover they are not as clear as they seem, and quite often actually worse than the alternative. Redistribution of wealth means there is X amount of wealth, all owned in different amounts, and simply removed from those with the most, and not even given to the rest directly, but just goes to the government, just like the estate of a person without a will or family. No one wants that, so who would want better off people (who worked for it rather than stole it somehow) to simply hand over much of their capital for an unknown and unknowable fate, just to make the worse off people feel they may get something out of it.

For me the turning point was the black and white clearly wrong issue, when they planned bus lanes for my area in the 70s. As a teenager I hadn’t yet comprehended the lack of space in town, so imagined the buses getting their own new roads. When they arrived soon after I discovered all they did was take a lane from existing roads meaning there was less space for 95% of the traffic and a spare lane which was hardly ever used, causing jams from that day onwards wherever they are. Including buses, as most wait behind where they start while all the traffic comes to a halt moving over to the outside lane.

I have already dealt with low interest rates in my last interview, and will just remind people they help maybe a quarter of the population at best, as even the ones with mortgages pay more either when they buy their house as it will cost more, or when they sell it as the others will cost more, so they won’t save anything in the long run as everything they did will be lost through the directly connected price inflation. I will add as many as I can think of which use the single process of not accepting the wrapping on the surface but peeling it off to see the worms or worse underneath.

Credit cards are fairly definitive. The old saying, how many bankers own credit cards (answer, almost none) should speak for itself. If a retailer would not touch their own products with a bargepole (I’m guessing the same applies for the current trend of solar panels) then why would anyone else? There is no function for credit cards (the insurance they come with can be found on many other cards without borrowing money to get it), as if you have the money then you don’t need to borrow to buy things, and if you don’t then sooner or later you’ll almost certainly fall back and end up paying more interest or defaulting, and losing it all in costs. Before the first one people simply waited till they had the money before going shopping. There was and is hire purchase, which at least limits your impatience to a single item rather than an open door, and if it’s not a loan to make more money by selling a good deal on offer for a short period then you don’t need that either. That holiday or car can wait, and if you can’t afford it now then the added expenses of a car or holiday will roll up on top and you’ve already committed a hundred a month or something for three years out of the clearly little money you’ve got coming in. Why pay more for something today than save and buy it tomorrow anyway, is anything that vital for a one off, let alone a lifestyle?

Pyramid schemes, legal or not, are perfect examples of something even rich and famous actors lose thousands on, although there is only one version. The only difference is the size of the pyramid and amount put in, but a pyramid scheme of a typical 15 triangle (4,3,2,1) where four pay one and everyone else moves up means whenever the money runs out then 14 people lose for every winner. That’s the mathematical formula, so it’s the same as betting on two numbers in roulette, you’ve got a 1/18 or so chance of winning 18 times your stake, and put money in a pyramid scheme, and as all will run out of new people as each level multiplies the required number of new arrivals like rice grains on a chessboard, reaching trillions by the time you may get a payout, it’s a gamble not worth playing. Yet every new one still gets supposedly professional adults chucking their money away as they never wrote down the formula and worked out the chances of winning.

They also have some formulas which are so blatant it’s incredible most people still swallow them partly as they are too busy to look closely enough to see what’s being done. Affirmative action, otherwise known as positive discrimination, is one current policy forcing its way into the BBC and EU, making people employ 20% ethnic minorities as it represents British society, and a minimum number of female large company directors. This means they are not employing the best people for the job but forcing one out to make way for a token ethnic or female candidate, who ought to be as offended being taken on purely as they ticked a box, rather than because they would have got the job anyway. Police candidates are turned away as they’re only employing ethnic candidates till they reach their quota. How insulting is it to be ‘part of a quota’- “I got my job because I was part of a quote, but my qualifications weren’t really good enough”. That’s a real crowd pleaser isn’t it. And discrimination is pretty universal, you can’t discriminate who you discriminate against, or shouldn’t if you’ve accepted it as a principle, so as some wonk has decided Britain is 20% ethnic minorities and the BBC at least will have to reflect it, regardless of even the number of applicants, as with women directors the studies prove they simply don’t want to do it that much. But that means football and other sports ought to represent it as well. What’s that, they already do? Really? So if you were to take the entire football league and apply the BBC rule then you’d have to presumably hold back from taking on ethnic applicants till it represented society, surely if the formula is correct it must be applied equally to all? Or have I missed something?

I think the principle here is the most important thing to learn, and the examples can easily be extended to things like rationing and market manipulation, where instead of relying on a legally enforced free market, governments hold back commodities to keep prices up (since when were good prices a good idea, houses or otherwise?), or not let third world people eat or profit from their natural resources as their rulers keep it all for themselves or sell it abroad for profit, or don’t provide a system to import and distribute it? Therefore when the west ration and fiddle commodity prices as they look to the third world to imagine there can’t be enough of the basics we all need, the figures prove there was always more than enough but no one will either allow the average citizens to earn enough to buy it or even bother to sell it locally there as there’s more profit in the developed world. That is an insidious political policy which looks like they are conserving valuable resources by limiting their availability worldwide, but all they are really doing is imposing the same policies which cause third world famines and power cuts on their own people by restricting access to food, power and whatever else they say is running out at the moment, and people think they’re doing them a favour.

Equality is a related illusion. As I’ve said before, each life is equal, but every person is different and unique. So treat everyone equally but don’t expect them to run the same race without winners and losers, and as each career and life is different then few people are even in the same race, so each can win their own simply by fulfilling their potential and being persistent. Positive discrimination is one example of enforced equality, while comprehensive schools and high taxation are others, all solid socialist principles and all failing to improve the natural situation minus government interference. Try it for yourself. How many socialist politicians are millionaires, send their children to private schools and use accountants to save paying tax Tony Blair and family? Just like the credit cards, how many socialist rulers live the way they try to make you? Look some up if you don’t believe me, or read Toby Young’s story of his left wing millionaire father Lord Young spending many evenings with his millionaire socialist academic friends discussing ways to reduce the money of the wealthy while drinking expensive wine and driving home in their Rolls Royces. That’s how it works, the people promoting all these illusory policies would never apply them to themselves, who in sound mind would?

You can see this principle operate quite easily in sales pitches. Again, a good business sells things people need at a fair price, and if they do then they will thrive, as many like it do. But the many who don’t are using the same shortage mentality, as they believe there aren’t enough genuine customers for them so must create extra ones by cheating. Of course this is blatant fraud, but they do it and unless you learn the tricks they will work. Do we all need to go to what was apparently a long term legal mock auction in Oxford Street to learn how they work, or just learn from a single customer? The other scam businesses vary little, they all make claims they can’t fulfil, offer more than they can provide for less money, and inevitably you end up disappointed and down financially. Shell games are the same, all variations on the theme, if the dealer has two chances of winning and you have one mathematically then you must lose, even when they aren’t cheating as well by hiding the ball under a different shell when they lift it up.

The greatest illusion of the 21^st century, despite the true performance figures being available, are wind and solar power. The industry manufacture them so know what they produce (eg most years the British farms produce 80% of their full capacity for a week a year, at 6-12 times the cost). Solar can’t convert enough watts for more than 10-15% of domestic use even in the Sahara and if anyone thinks they can store the paltry amounts they may build up on summer days when no one’s home for more than the odd night then sit down and do some sums. Not forgetting the short dark winter days when you need it the most. As for the random amounts produced by wind which can never change, combined with the maximum conversion power per turbine, is obvious they are a waste of space, money and resources. They can never improve or change as they can’t convert much more than double the current few watts, and become slightly cheaper but not compared to fossil fuel, ever. If in doubt then convert your local hospital to wind and solar and come back and tell me.

Quantitative easing, ‘putting money’ into the economy (so they tell you), is clearly an illusion, as how can the treatment for an ailing economy be providing more money which you clearly don’t have. Where exactly does this money come from, and if they’re rich enough to provide it then why is the economy in trouble? It doesn’t make sense now, does it? They call it ‘quantitative easing’ as it sounds far better than ‘currency inflation’, which is a lot closer, and simply forces up commodity prices making life more expensive for everyone except the sellers of the commodities. Who are far from the majority of course. If you even think about it for a moment, how can a government put so much real money into the economy when it needs it, because it hasn’t got it? It’s the same money of course, all they are doing is redividing the numbers to look better until it all blows up in the inevitable inflation as no more capital has ever appeared, exactly like shifting the money around in a pyramid scheme. All variations on the theme. If the government actually had the billions the papers tell you they put in the economy every year why don’t they just divide it equally and give it to each person directly? Unless and until they do then you know it’s not real money as it’s only the people who need it, not the banks and investment companies it actually goes to, and it doesn’t increase the economy as it makes everyone else poorer from low interest rates and high prices, so simply shifts the same money away from the people.

Hopefully you will get the idea from a few examples, and apply the bus lane formula to any other cheat you find in life, and spread the word. People ripping you off won’t advertise it, my last interview showed the government are actually as bad as any of the crooks, so they are at least as likely to do it and need watching for every policy. They have to make it look good, and massive corporations and governments alike have all the resources they need to provide a massive façade for the hell they’ve provided behind it. The entire illusion of equality, wealth redistribution, renewables, low interest rates giving people more money (they don’t, it’s proved), are all either robbing Peter to pay Paul, putting people in positions they didn’t work for or deserve, telling you it’s raining when they’re peeing on your head, are all variations on a single theme. Taking a ripoff and making it look like it’s helping and you have to have it. Once your pocket’s been picked it’s an expensive lesson and too late to get it back, so learn the principle first and don’t let them near it.

PC translations into English

The 21st century has produced a slew of worthless neologisms, this is what they actually mean:

I was assigned male/female at birth - I am a boy/girl
Carbon footprint- How much can we tax you
Transition- Have your vital organs excised to collude with a mental disorder rather than treat it
Carbon trading/credits- How much can we tax you without you noticing?
Wind turbine- ugly looking machine to extract money and taxes
Islamophobia- You must tolerate diabolical behaviour from Muslims at all costs
Homophobia- You must support every act ever carried out by a homosexual at all costs
Misogyny- You must be positive about women at all costs
Sexism- You must accept women are not just as good as men but better
Equal rights- equal misery
Equality of wealth- poverty
Genderfluid- batshit crazy
Safe space- exclusion zone
Diversity- everyone not like you
Multiculturalism- everyone's welcome except your people
Challenged- disabled
Liberal- fascist
Anti-fascist- fascist
Tolerant- fascist
Sustainable- shortage
Clean energy- no energy
Solar panels- virtue signalling on your roof
Pro-Palestinian- Nazi sympathiser
Boycott- Nazi sympathiser
Zionist cabal- Jewish people
Palestinians- Arabs in Israel and around its borders
Casual racism- making a joke
Causing offence- speaking the truth in public
White privilege- Black failure
Check your privilege- Give us your money
Progressive- Luddite
Equal opportunities policy- Ethnic minorities, gays, women and the disabled come first
Nuclear free zone- Local virtue signalling
Low Emission Zone- You must pay us even more
Bus lane- half a road
Cycle lane- quarter of a road
Mini-Holland scheme- gulag
Diversity training- brainwashing
People of color (sic)- coloured people (no, I can't see the difference either)
Racial diversity- every race but white
Renewables- nothing
Green jobs- unpaid voluntary work
Green economy- third world economy
Diversity officer- thought policeman
Microaggression- I just made that one up (I wish...)