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Continue reading →: Where are Reuters when corrupt officials cripple India?
This fawning piece lavishes praise on Indian bureaucrats – the country's 'best and brightest' – for their response to Cyclone Phailin. Perhaps they even deserve it. Yet India's potential is wilfully and systematically damaged every day by official corruption; corruption that is the key story in the world's greatest democracy.…
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Continue reading →: Of selfishness
The conventional view in Soviet Britain is that those who do business are heartless sorts driven by selfish pursuit of that dirtiest of all words in our foul-mouthed society; p**f*t. Yet my recollection of thirty happy years in business is of being under constant pressure to find ways to serve…
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Continue reading →: Lessons from the government shutdown in America
You can't look because the rangers aren't being paid We won't learn much from the current events in America. 'Paine's Law' applies; any fact may confirm any political view. This post may well be an example of that so put on spectacles tinted with your favoured shade and interpret accordingly.…
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Continue reading →: It is possible to be a good public servant
You may have noticed that the URL for my last post about press regulation was a bit odd. That's because, tired of the constant negativity of my own postings, I wanted to balance my criticisms of government's latest idiocies with an example of a good public servant at work. In…
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Continue reading →: Say it ain’t so
Britons more likely to support a party committed to public ownership | Liberal Conspiracy. Given that the poll was commissioned by a socialist campaign group for more state gangsterism, let's not get too gloomy too fast. It's amazing how consistently polls commissioned by people who believe X tend to find…
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Continue reading →: Faces of fear amuse the Guardianisti
Faces of fear at Canadian 'haunted house' – in pictures | World news | theguardian.com. What does it tell us that the no-state-too-big, no-tax-too-high totalitarians over at The Guardian find ordinary people looking terrified 'oddly hilarious?' There will clearly be no problem manning the gulags when their political dreams are…
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Continue reading →: I wish I had said that…
Spare Me – and Walter Williams – Your Self-Serving and Insulting Sermonizing …because I have often thought it. I respect ordinary thieves much more than I respect politicians. Ordinary thieves take my money without pretense. Unlike typical politicians, these thieves don’t bore me with silly explanations of why their thievery…
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Continue reading →: What libertarianism isn’t
H.L. Mencken said that "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." The human tendency to fall for such answers probably accounts for most religions and political ideologies. We can't accept that, while it's noble and fine to seek answers, they are almost certainly…
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Continue reading →: Snouts in the snout-shaped trough again
The new MPs’ Expenses Scandal | Trending Central. Both the law firms where I was a partner had anti-nepotism policies. We couldn't employ our own or each other's relatives. If we married someone from the firm, one of us had to leave. Why? I am sure it was often the…
THE LAST DITCH
Your blogger
Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.
Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.
He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that
“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
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There are many reasons they’re not passed down, Tom. The Triune code, laid out in scripture in all reputable versions…
I’ve always tried to live my life doing no wrong but life isn’t like that so you make compromised but…
Hate to tell you this, but it’s not going to end until you end it. You think people to whom…
[…] – Tom Paine […]
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First post (in case you want to read it from the beginning)
The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
A little bird tweeted in my ear that it was time to come over and see how things are.