Hildegarde

It’s one of those days, so this isn’t likely to be extensive.

For those of you who didn’t see, Mique posted the following link

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/11/introduction-to-kenneth-minogue

That goes to an Australian magazine which has excerpted a bit from the book I was talking about yesterday.

It’s a good book, and I’m sort of sorry that the excerpt is of one of what I think is its weakest sections.

It’s weak not because the argument is weak, but because Minogue uses what I think of as the European definition of “rights” rather than the one developed in the Anglophone sphere–that is, “rights” as entitlements to things (education, housing, not to be offended) rather than rights (no scare quotes) as negative only, as restrictions on government power.

Rights properly understood–rights as originally defined by Locke and the eighteenth century–have none of the bad effects Minogue complains of, because (as he puts it) they “confer no benefit.”  They simply forbid the government from interfering on our lives in certain specified areas.

Beyond that, this book is written by an Australian living in Britain, and it takes Europe as its focus.  The few times it mentions the US it does so in passing–and in some ways that’s too bad.

Minogue’s critic of the fundamentally anti-democratic project of the European Union would apply equally well to the system of regulatory agencies in the US–unelected, unaccountable institutions empowered to issue legally binding regulations that no one has ever voted for and that the people cannot control since the people who issue them are not subject to election.

Okay.  That was one of those sentences.

At any rate–it’s a good book and I recommend it.

And since he starts off telling us he wants to understand things, not to change them–well, we can’t fault him for not having a solution.

I do, however, have a few suggestions.