How Mussolini invented Fascism



The account of Italian Fascism given below is generally well-informed. The note that Italian Fascism was NOT antisemitic is welcome. But the conclusion is far too florid. The author is clearly trying to avoid the historically obvious conclusion: That both socialism and patriotism have broad appeal. It was those ideas rather than any "love" of Mussolini personally that fueled Fascism's popularity.

Mussolini had the brilliant idea of offering both those dreams in the one party. Pure socialism -- Communism -- had such limited appeal that only violence abd brutality could bring it to power. But add patriotism to it and you have an enormous popular force on your side. Fascism is patriotic socialism -- a magic mix with huge popular appeal

Mussolini's appeal to Italian patriotism was strong. He said he would Make Italy Great Again. He said he would revive the Roman empire. And he set about conquests in Africa for that purpose. Add that to the "we will look after you" message of his socialist policies and he had a winning political combination

Donald Trump had only the patriotic half of Mussolini's policies. He was neither a socialist nor a Fascist. But that one half gave him the Presidency of the United States for a time despite his unattractive personality. Mussolini also had a rather unattractive personality so we have twice seen how politically masterful a strong appeal to patriotism can be

Benito Mussolini, the revolutionary socialist inventor of fascism who came to power 100 years ago this week, was one of the most talked about figures of his day. Most of that talk was positive. Pope Pius XI called him ‘a gift from Providence’ to save Italy; the US ambassador to Rome, Washburn Child, ‘the greatest figure of his sphere and time’; and Winston Churchill, ‘the Roman genius’. Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, wrote that he gave their epoque ‘its only flame of greatness’, and Cole Porter even wrote him into his 1934 hit song ‘You’re the Top!’ with a line that went: ‘You’re the Top! You’re the great Houdini! You’re the top! You’re Mussolini!’. The Spectator, no less, in an exclusive interview, called him ‘the great Prime Minister of Italy’ who ‘weathered the storm and took the mighty ship of state triumphantly into harbour’.

In the end, Mussolini caused catastrophic damage to Italy and Europe. But throughout the 1920s, and much of the 1930s, fascism was admired across the political divide, even by legendary icons of the modern left such as Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister after the March on Rome by his fascist blackshirts on 28 October 1922; it was a virtually bloodless coup at a time when Italy and Europe were in an even deeper crisis than they are today. The king called Mussolini to power because Italy’s democratic governments had been unable to maintain law and order on the streets, or in the workplace, unlike the future Duce’s private force of paramilitary blackshirts.

In 1922, devastated by the first world war and then the Spanish Flu, Italy appeared on the brink of socialist revolution. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia in 1917 and fear of communism stalked Europe. The tectonic tensions between peoples and elites, nations and empires, that had caused the first world war then caused the collapse of both ancient regimes and democracies, and the metamorphosis of socialism into communism and fascism. Mussolini founded fascism in 1919 as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement to socialism.

A rising star of the Italian Socialist party and a brilliant editor of its newspaper Avanti!, he had been expelled from the party in 1914 because he opposed its policy that Italy should remain neutral in the first world war. Instead, the future Duce believed that Italy must go to war against Austria and Germany which it eventually did in 1915. He insisted that socialists could not wait for history, as Marxist doctrine preached. They must make history, he argued, and such a war would help, not hinder, the revolution. As it did, in Italy, as elsewhere. The French and German socialist parties agreed with Mussolini and decided to fight for their respective countries against each other. This caused the collapse of the Second Socialist International and thus of international socialism.

The first world war had exposed a fatal weakness at the heart of international socialism whose mission was supposed to be world revolution and the abolition of the nation-state: people are more loyal to their country than their class. Mussolini made this cardinal rule the key to his version of socialism. It inspired him to replace international socialism with national socialism which he called fascism. Hitler, who would copy much from Mussolini, would call his version of fascism national socialism.

Fascism began as a left-wing heresy against the Marxist creed and remained so at heart to the bitter end – regardless of the far-right tag attached to it after 1945 by a left desperate to avoid fascism and communism being treated as two sides of the same coin. In April 1945, when communist partisans shot Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci after their capture at Lake Como, those with him included his old friend Nicola Bombacci, a founder of the Italian communist party and member of the Soviet Comintern, who had been his closest adviser in the last two years of the war. Bombacci’s last words before a communist partisan firing squad shot him dead beside the lake were: ‘Viva Mussolini! Viva il Socialismo!’

The fascists did not believe, as the communists did, in the nationalisation of the means of production, or the abolition of private property, but that the state should run the economy in partnership with owners and workers via corporations – the so-called corporate state. Among early manifesto pledges was the abolition of the monarchy.

Fascism also had its own variant of the class war, this one between producers of whatever class, and parasites of whatever class. It introduced the welfare state. Mussolini – at the same time as Lenin – had realised that only a political party – not trade unions, still less a parliament – could enact the revolution. And he rejected Marxist dogma which gave a decisive role to the proletariat. The role of the party, the revolutionary vanguard – or priesthood – was to instill and maintain faith. The role of the proletariat was to believe, which it would do only if the revolution was national, not international.

Fascism quickly attracted nationalists who were both right and left-wing and whose roots went back to Giuseppe Mazzini and Italian reunification in the mid-19th century. Futurist artists who eulogised speed, the machine, and war as a cleansing force, played a significant early role, as did revolutionary syndicalists. The poet-warrior and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio provided inspiration with his March on Fiume (Rijeka) in 1919 and his electrifying speeches delivered from balconies – and known as dialogues with the crowd – which earned him the title the first Duce and which Mussolini would emulate so effectively.

Mussolini’s new newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia – partly financed in 1918 by British secret service money to keep Italy in the war – paid homage to all who had fought calling them the aristocracy of the trenches – La Trincerocrazia – many of whom would form the fascist revolutionary vanguard. The genius of Mussolini was to create fascism, not just as an armed political movement, but as a religious cult with him as a sacred leader who transformed politics into a daily act of collective faith. This is, of course, what the leaders of the French Revolution did as well.

In each town, the fascists built their party headquarters in the main piazza, complete with a belltower to summon the faithful, which often stood opposite a real church – always uneasily. Despite making temporal peace with the Vatican in 1929, fascism remained a rival of the Catholic Church in the battle for control of the minds, if not the souls, of Italians. It was not just its demolition of democracy, or its waging of war, that doomed fascism. The Duce was not Jesus, nor even Pope.

If you had to choose one book that Mussolini regarded as a Bible, it would not be Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but Gustave Le Bon’s huge best-seller, La Psychologie des Foules, published in 1895. Le Bon, an anthropologist, defined the epoque in which he lived as ‘the era of the crowd’ because the crowd was ‘the last surviving sovereign force’ but he predicted that the result would not be democracy. As others had noted, universal suffrage necessarily means the tyranny of minorities by the majority. For Le Bon, the ‘sub-conscious’ majority in the form of the crowd now wielded power, not ‘conscious’ individuals. But the subconscious crowd is tyrannical and driven by irrational impulses, untempered by reason. And yet, without a charismatic leader able to instill a religious sense of mission, such a crowd is impotent.

In 1932, the German journalist Emil Ludwig asked Mussolini: ‘You have written that the masses do not have to know but to believe. Do you really think that this Jesuit principle is practical?’ ‘Only faith moves mountains,’ replied Mussolini, ‘not reason.’ A month before his death in his last interview, he said: ‘I did not create fascism. I extracted it from the unconscious of the Italians. If it were not so, they would not have followed me for 20 years.’

The closest there is to a fascist manifesto is the Dottrina del Fascismo, an essay Mussolini co-authored with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, published in 1932, in which we read: ‘The fascist conception of life is a religious one’ that aims to create ‘a spiritual society’. Fascism ‘accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state.’ The state is ‘all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist… Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian’. That fascism regarded the state as the solution for everything, not as the problem, defines it as completely different from the Anglo-American, conservative and libertarian ‘bourgeois’ right for whom the opposite is the case. The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside.

George Orwell, a revolutionary socialist who was also a patriot – as opposed to a nationalist ­– was one of the few on the left to understand and admit why fascism had mass appeal. In a 1940 review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he wrote:

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain… they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

Elsewhere, Orwell wrote that ‘the overwhelming strength of patriotism’ was the key to understanding the modern world and Mussolini, like Hitler, got and kept power ‘very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not’. Compared to this patriotism, he wrote: ‘Christianity and international socialism are as weak as straw’.

Fascism, unlike the Nazi version of it, was not explicitly anti-Semitic until Mussolini’s fatal alliance with Hitler in the late 1930s. Many Jews were fascists, as was Mussolini’s penultimate mistress Margherita Sarfatti. His anti-Semitic laws, introduced in 1938, were despicable, but no Jews were deported from Italy to the Nazi death camps until after his overthrow in July 1943 and his restoration as a Nazi puppet in the north. In the southeast of France, occupied by Italy between November 1942 and August 1943, Italian officers and officials saved the lives of thousands of Jews, primarily from the Vichy French, who were Hitler’s willing collaborators.

To dismiss the Duce as a grotesque buffoon, as Anglo-American historians normally do, or a puppet of the bourgeoisie, as Marxist ones always do, cannot be right. Such definitions fail to explain why he was able to get power and keep it for more than two decades with relatively little use of the mass murder that characterises most dictatorships – especially communist ones. Nor why there was so little resistance to him until he began to lose battles in the second world war – or why he was so popular abroad.

The explanation is obvious: true, there were no opinion polls and no fair elections, but the only feasible answer must be that a critical mass of Italians was in favour of fascism, and a majority in favour of Mussolini. That fascism was wanted by so many Italians, not imposed, is something that the mainstream left still refuses to accept because it means accepting an uncomfortable truth: the Italians, not just the Duce, were to blame for fascism.

As his estranged daughter Edda – whose husband his regime had executed for treason in January 1944 – said when she heard on the radio that he had been shot at Como with Petacci, Bombacci and other fascists, and their corpses brought to Milan where they were strung upside down from the forecourt roof of a petrol station: ‘I believe you can really hate only a person you have loved… It was the final act of love of the Italians for him.’

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/how-mussolini-invented-fascism/

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The Gender-Obsessed Left Will Have to Pry My Children From My Cold, Dead Hands

As a father, it is my responsibility to watch out for my children and to protect them from demonic lies and from medical interventions that would leave them scarred, stunted, and infertile.

Yet a growing chorus of activists and legislators seem intent on taking children away from parents like me, not because we would harm our children but because we would protect them from harm.

Naturally, these activists don’t admit the truth of what they plan to do. They couch the language in Orwellian terms like “gender-affirming care,” in order to make it seem like they, not parents, have the children’s best interests at heart.

These activists insist that if a child—barely old enough to grasp basic concepts of grammar, mathematics, or geography—claims that he or she identifies with the gender opposite his or her biological sex, that self-identity must override all other concerns. Woe to any parent who dares to disagree with the declarations of an 8-year-old.

In my home state of Virginia, Del. Elizabeth Guzman—a Democrat who represents portions of Prince William and Fauquier counties—supports a bill to expand the definition of “child abuse.”

Guzman’s bill (HB 580 in the 2020 session) would define as “abused” any child “whose parent or other person responsible for his care creates or inflicts, threatens to create or inflict, or allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.”

The bill doesn’t spell out exactly what a “physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity” means, but “mental injury” can be rather broadly construed to include a parent’s disagreement with a child’s self-declared “gender identity.”

Nick Minock, a reporter for WJLA-TV (Channel 7), asked Guzman: “What could the penalties be if the investigation concludes that a parent is not affirming of their LGBTQ child? What could the consequences be?”

Guzman did not question the reporter’s framing of the question, but responded that if Child Protective Services runs an investigation and finds the parent guilty, “it could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that a CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”

Make no mistake, this bill involves criminalizing a parent’s dissent from a child’s stated “gender identity,” and activists are pushing gender identity on younger and younger ages.

Guzman’s bill doesn’t just represent the goal of one Virginia Democrat, however.

Major medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Children’s Hospital Association not only support transgender medical interventions for children, but sent the Justice Department a letter urging law enforcement to crack down on “disinformation.” This appeared to amount to reporters who run direct quotes from doctors who offer experimental “treatments.”

Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law SB 107, a bill to turn California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care.” The measure, which will take effect in January, defines “gender-affirming care” as an absolute right. It will give California courts the ability to award custody over a child if someone removes the child from his or her parents in another state to obtain such “care” for that child over the parents’ disagreement.

Gender activists and their allies who have infiltrated health care organizations often insist that experimental transgender medical interventions—which often amount to chemical castration—are essential for gender-confused children, to prevent them from committing suicide.

This twisted logic enables activists to claim that a parent’s disagreement on gender identity constitutes a form of “mental harm” to a child.

The idea that a father’s refusing to sign his daughter up for the removal of healthy breasts and a healthy womb constitutes child abuse is so absurd, it requires multiple levels of doublespeak to justify. False terms such as “gender-affirming care” are necessary to cloak the truth of what is going on.

In fact, this craze reminds me of the horrific history of eugenics and lobotomies, which were celebrated as the height of “progressive” science and medicine at the time. The inventor of the lobotomy received a Nobel Prize, and many Nobel laureates supported eugenics.

America may look back on transgender surgeries the way horrified students of history look back on these “progressive” phenomena.

Yet even less invasive interventions also bring terrifying side effects. Cross-sex hormones can weaken kids’ bones and make them more prone to heart disease. So-called puberty blockers, often billed as fully reversible, involve introducing a disease into a child’s body and make puberty harder to start again, should the child change his or her mind.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo put it perfectly in comments he sent me back in July.

“Medicalization of minors with gender dysphoria might advance the political views of physicians involved in their care, but the data showing any benefits for the actual children is extraordinarily thin,” Ladapo said. “The affirmation model runs an unacceptably high risk of harm.”

As a father, it is my job to protect my children from harm, and this gender ideology threatens multiple harms. It threatens to confuse my young children about what men and women are. It threatens to mutilate their bodies and deprive them of the long-term fulfillment of having children of their own one day.

It threatens to deprive them of their father, based on how I answer when my 3-year-old daughter asks, “Daddy, are you a man? Am I a girl?”

Not on my watch. If Guzman or Newsom want my children, they can tear them from my cold, dead hands. And I expect I’m far from alone.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/19/gender-obsessed-left-will-pry-my-children-my-cold-dead-hands

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Is parody now illegal?

The Weekend Update sketch on "Saturday Night Live" is a classic example of social and political criticism that comes in the guise of something else — in SNL's case, a TV news broadcast.

RONALD REAGAN enjoyed recounting the cynical jokes that citizens of the Soviet Union often told about life under communism. One of his favorites involved an American and a Russian who were arguing about the merits of their respective countries. As Reagan told it, the American said, "In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say, 'Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country.'" The Russian replied that he could do the same thing. The American was surprised: "You can?"

"Oh, yes," said the Russian. "I can go to the Kremlin, enter the general secretary's office, pound his desk, and say, 'Mr. General Secretary, I don't like the way President Reagan's running his country!"

If anything is a defining feature of a free society, it is the right of ordinary citizens to openly criticize, ridicule, or joke about government officials, however lofty or powerful. So when Anthony Novak of Parma, Ohio, decided to create a mocking parody of his local police department's Facebook page, he was engaging in activity that goes to the core of American civil liberties — liberties that officers of the law are sworn to uphold.

But Parma's police officers didn't uphold Novak's rights — they shredded them. They announced that the spoof Facebook page was being "investigated." They claimed that "public safety" was at stake and got Facebook to identify the creator of the parody. They arrested Novak on charges of having broken a law that makes it a crime to "disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any police . . . or governmental operations." They jailed him for four days and got a warrant to search his apartment, where they seized his laptop, cellphone, hard drives — even his gaming consoles.

"When I woke up in jail . . . I thought, wow, I really screwed up here," Novak said in an interview recorded by the Institute for Justice, the nonprofit public-interest law firm that represents him. "And then I remembered, wait, I didn't actually do anything wrong."

No, he actually didn't.

When the case went to trial, the jury unanimously acquitted him. But when Novak subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against Parma police detectives for the abuse of his constitutional rights, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the police were protected by "qualified immunity." Under that doctrine, police (and other government officials) are not accountable for violating a citizen's rights — even if they do so in bad faith — unless their misconduct was plainly contrary to "clearly established" law. The appellate court held that since Novak didn't include a disclaimer making clear that his page was a spoof, the police might have sincerely believed that what he posted on Facebook was illegal.

Now Novak and the Institute for Justice have appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that if anything is clearly established in American law, it is the right to caricature, laugh at, or parody public officials.

Enter The Onion.

In an amicus brief that is simultaneously brilliant, hilarious, and serious, the noted humor website — which specializes in parodying traditional news stories — urged the high court to hear Novak's case. In keeping with Supreme Court rules for friend-of-the-court briefs, it first identified itself and explained its own interest in the case. It did so, of course, in its signature deadpan style:

"The Onion is the world's leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events," the brief began, mentioning its "daily readership of 4.3 trillion" and its ownership of "the majority of the world's transoceanic shipping lanes." Its interest in the case, it said, is straightforward: "The Onion's writers . . . have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists."

But there was nothing humorous about what Parma's police did to Novak, and it's alarming that an appellate court would give the cops a pass because someone satirized them with a straight face.

"The Sixth Circuit's ruling imperils an ancient form of discourse," the brief notes. "The court's decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true." But parody depends on its ability to "plausibly mimic the original." If the court of appeals ruling is allowed to stand, it would mean that parody is entitled to First Amendment protection only if it is stripped of the very element that makes parody work in the first place.

The Onion, a leading online humor site, submitted a friend of the court brief in support of Anthony Novak that is is simultaneously brilliant, hilarious, and urgent.

Novak and his lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to hear their case for reasons of constitutional clarity. The Sixth Circuit's understanding of the law is contradicted by that of the Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, and only the high court can resolve the split. More ambitiously, the petitioners want the justices to reconsider the whole concept of qualified immunity, a doctrine with no basis in the Constitution or statutory law, and one that all too easily lets malicious officials off the hook.

At a minimum, however, the Supreme Court can use this opportunity to confirm that parody is wholly protected by the First Amendment — period. In all candor, Novak's pretend Facebook page wasn't all that funny and a few Parma residents apparently didn't get the joke. But under the Constitution, that doesn't matter. It isn't only Onion-caliber parodists who are entitled to crack wise at the expense of their local police department. And cops who wage spiteful vendettas against would-be comedians shouldn't be allowed to claim that the parodist had it coming for failing to spoil the punchline.

Parody is an essential form of social and political criticism. It is as old as Aristophanes and as contemporary as the most recent Weekend Update on "Saturday Night Live." It is a powerful tool for exposing folly, tweaking the high and mighty, calling attention to injustice, and broaching unpopular truths. It can be a vivid means of weighing in on controversies of the day. In April 2016, the Boston Globe Opinion section published a parody version of the newspaper's front page, dated one year in the future, to convey with eye-catching immediacy what it thought a Donald Trump presidency would look like.

At its best, parody enriches public debate by illuminating the status quo from an unfamiliar angle. Jonathan Swift's "modest proposal" in 1729 for preventing Irish children from becoming a financial burden on their parents (he recommended selling them to be eaten) was both a grisly piece of satire and a brutal comment on English attitudes toward Ireland's poor. Nearly three centuries later, that essay is still discussed and has lost none of its shock value — a striking demonstration of the power of great parody.

Swift's reputation is in no danger of being eclipsed by Novak's parody. But that makes no difference to the First Amendment and should have made none to the police. What happened in Parma was no joke, and the Supreme Court ought to take up this case to say so.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26515/the-supreme-court-can-remind-officials-how-to

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We live in a Nanny State

It doesn’t matter whether you are discussing the UK, Australia, some European country, or any other country. Whenever the state has started to dictate social, economic, and commercial behaviour – serious problems have followed. These usually include loss of freedom, loss of living standards, higher costs, and dislocation of social cohesion.

The nanny state certainly does initiate many changes, often by regulation rather than legislation. It is the bureaucrats who introduce changes, changes which are often not welcome by society in general and frequently by those who are unjustly penalised by regulations that favour some, usually big business, to the detriment of a larger number, usually small business and consumers.

The politicians do, of course, try to implement their nanny state controls. The overreach seen in the Covid pandemic is a perfect example. Politicians of all persuasions introduced draconian laws and regulations, supposedly to keep us safe, but actually to control what we – the general populace – could do, when we could do it, and for how long. They even went so far as to dictate what we should inject into our bodies on pain of being excluded from our freedoms in society and our ability to work.

We see it still in the energy problems which we are now experiencing. The world has plenty of recent examples of government decisions that are adversely impacting on energy supply and cost. There is no shortage of energy and there could be a way to transition to a lower carbon dioxide emitting power generation system, but our nanny state knows best and despite all the evidence to the contrary they are pushing ahead, full bore, to have coal-fired power stations shut down and renewables built. There is no coherent plan for the transition, mainly because the federal government doesn’t actually own any power generation or distribution assets and doesn’t understand the economics of the energy system. In fact, they don’t seem to understand the basics of economics. When you make something essential scarce – the price will rise and those who are least able to afford the cost will bear the brunt of the disruptions.

The nanny state is pushing the unproven climate warming due to the burning of carbon fuels, and destroying not only our low-cost energy but our competitiveness in the world. It doesn’t, and probably cannot, state what the targets are in measurable numbers, how these targets were determined, how they are measured, and where we are in achieving those targets. Even worse, they do not consider what is happening in the world, the large uncontrolled emitters, the piddling effect on either increasing or decreasing our carbon dioxide emissions on the world’s atmospheric carbon dioxide.

If you wish to consider other areas just think of safety. Many safety procedures actually do little to improve safety, they just add cost. Safety is best managed by explaining the issues to the people doing the work, providing them with the necessary tools and equipment, and then getting out of the way. Not all situations are identical and the experienced person directly involved can often make the best decision. Consider our disruptive method of roadside working with our peers overseas.

We can also look at housing standards. These are often designed to suit a worst-case situation, increasing costs with no benefit to most. They rarely constitute best building practice for heating, cooling, site conditions, suitable materials, latest technology etc. Or the restriction of certain work to licensed practitioners, practitioners who frequently ignore the regulations, who may not have maintained their knowledge of the latest technologies, and who are given carte blanche to charge high prices for simple work which can be performed by any number of other people with the necessary knowledge and skills. Trade skills and regulations can be learned by anyone.

There are some areas in which the state could and should be involved because private enterprise may have difficulty in providing the service at a price that is affordable to all. These include major infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, transportation systems, sewage collection and treatment, water supply, energy supply, and communications. That doesn’t mean that the state has to own or operate the service, they just have to make sure, in some way, that it is available to everyone at a standard price.

No, the nanny state has not shown that it knows best. It hasn’t even shown that it properly understands. The state should set the basic standards and then the enterprise of people will deliver, at both the best price and a suitable quality. The people will adjust their society to suit the prevailing conditions and the nanny state should just follow suit with the appropriate legislation. That is the correct order of things.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/the-nanny-state/ ?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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