Piping up
While I support Harold Furchtgott-Roth and Arielle Roth’s argument in Why ISIS celebrates the FCC’s network neutrality rules – 4th December, in one sense, the right over editorial content, there is one large omission in your argument. ISP’s in the United States are mostly monopolies. Merely classifying them as dumb pipes is the appropriate decision in the current market environment. That is not to say consumers today cannot purchase content filtering services on their own. While a “dumb pipe” is merely transmitting bits, virtual private networks, firewalls, and the like can offer all sorts of content filtering services for customers seeking that.
Chris Cachor, Chicago, USA | @ccachor2
Inside job
As long as parties can impose ‘list’ candidates on unwitting electors, or central office can impose candidates on local parties, then there is no future in the party system if you want to see any government as representative of the voters’ opinions.
All parties are hijacked by ambitious insiders, and they always insert their own people. The disgraceful connivance of all parties in setting up the ‘list’ method of selection meant government could never be trusted with setting up the voting system.
Ban all parties, 200 senators to cover the whole country, a rolling programme of 40 for re-election every year; max. 3 terms for any senator, a pool of civil servants to support them, they can choose 4 each, and the unwanted ones go into HMRC or somewhere. Salary £150k, £10k pension at 65 index-linked, no external employment, no stationery, duck-house, mortgage budgets, give them a monthly accommodation allowance equal to rental of moderate flat to use as they see fit.
Colin MacKenzie, UK
Do the shuffle
A great article by Tim Montgomerie summarising what’s changed and what hasn’t in the two years since he suggested a 4-way realignment of British politics. It staggers me to see how supine most of our people are: the Labour Party moves far to the left of most if it’s MP’s but they stay. 4 million people vote for UKIP, receive almost no representation, but carry on as usual. The Conservative Party (as Cameron rules) does not reflect the views of huge swathes of the party, but both MP’s and supporters quietly carry on. Deeply unpopular governing policies on immigration, the EU etc. carry on but the electorate does nothing. Why does Mr Montgomerie’s realignment not take place?
Christopher Horne, Malvern, UK
Housing Benefits for the market
Housing Benefit is Broken? Yes, but scrapping it would wreck the private rented sector, crash the social housing sector, depress house prices and in doing so throw the economy in to recession.
£13bn. Not much is it to take off those who own the 4m homes currently privately rented in the UK. It’s barely £3,000 per property and those rich, evil landlords can afford it, can’t they? No. They cannot.
About half of privately rented homes are rented to those in receipt of Housing Benefit. Most are working as well making some contribution, but that still £7,000 per property. That’s more than the rent on a 3 bedroom house in Wakefield – £113.92 per week. (Those who quote the highest rates of Local Housing Allowance often forget that people rent property in places other than London) .
Many of those homes are in the parts of the country where rents and house prices are low. Take Housing Benefit away from the tenants and you will see an flood of evictions as tenants can’t pay the rent (they are on 6 month tenancies). Then landlords will try to sell into the vacant home market which will depress prices, so they won’t be able to pay off their mortgages, so then there will be mortgage defaults and the banks will stop lending. Then the whole housing market will grind to a halt with millions in negative equity hoarding cash rather than spending, crashing the wider economy to boot!
Then of course, there’s the other £13bn paid to social tenants – many of these are retired. Raising NI thresholds won’t help them and their Landlords won’t cut their rents because the price of cleaning, painting, repairs and maintenance won’t fall. Nor will the interest payments the Government demands from Councils and banks demand from Housing Associations.
We do have a housing market which needs house prices and rents to stabilise in real terms, probably for ten to twenty years while earnings rise and the Government is doing everything it can to help acheive that. It did cut the LHA rate from the 50th percentile rent to the 30th, then cap its increase, then fix it. Now it is cutitng affordable rents and it has tried to release land to build. We are now seeing a big rise in the number of home completions, especially “affordable homes”.
In response to all this, house price growth in hot spots has ameliorated recently. But there are many places where prices are still below where they were in 2008. Crashing the market isn’t going to help maintain the recovery we have got, and it would take a hell of a lot more than £13bn to rescue it if it did.
John Moss, London, UK | @John_J_C_Moss
Keeping the faith
Nile Gardner argued that Barack Obama is weak and delusional in the face of radical Islamic jihad. That critique is true enough, but fails to note the “why” behind the “what.”
Obama’s inability to discern the power and danger of ISIS goes back to a soundbite from his first campaign, when he said some people “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Obama wasn’t trying to insult blue-collar, Bible Belt America when he said that. He really does not “get” religion.
Some insist that Obama is a Christian, while others call him Muslim. Both labels miss the point. Obama is a “humanist. ” Modern humanists read Scripture as a series of comments about people, not a series of commands of God. The 20th century German theologian Karl Barth quipped that his liberal Protestant contemporaries were not talking about God in their theology. They were just “talking about Man in a loud voice.”
It doesn’t matter much which text a humanist begins with–Bible, Qur’an, or Book of the Dead–because the modern mind will eventually make it fit our modern sensibilities. Old Testament texts about genocide are spiritualized, New Testament texts about slavery are rationalized, disturbing passages about “killing the infidel” are allegorized into combatting our doubts about ourselves. That kind of Islam is not the enemy of America, and Obama knows it. To that degree, he is correct. The majority of Muslims in America are adapting their faith to fit their culture, just as Catholics and Protestants and countless other religious groups have done before.
The majority of Muslims are not the problem, however, and that is where Obama’s modern thinking is so dangerous. Obama really does know far more about Islam than his right-wing critics do, but he knows far less about old-fashioned, God-centered religion. He seems to think that every believer will grow up into his own sophisticated faith if they just get good jobs and have adequate education. Obama’s “weak and delusional” thinking comes from assuming the rest of the world thinks just like him. He has criticized the “colonialism” that imposed Western culture on the rest of the world, even as he imposes his own modern sensibilities on the billions who believe that a real God still rewards and punishes.
A 20th century Christian named Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Jim Elliot died in South America, killed by Auca tribesmen. Jim Elliott was radically rational. So were Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who died in a hail of bullets last week. Elliott and Farook and Malik all believed in a real God who really rewards–and punishes.
Most Christians aren’t Jim Elliott, and most Muslims aren’t Syed Farook. The vast majority of us, believers or not, say one thing and do another. Every once in a while, however, some exceptional individual takes their Scriptures seriously. And when that happens, it changes everything. Until Obama understands that, his response to radical Islamic jihad must always be misguided
Scott Somerville, West Virginia, US
On Trump’s a menace who would ruin America – 8th December
What you see in Trump is a person who cannot be bought off with donations from special interests. He is the catalyst. His candidacy has spurred on the discussion of vital issues such as the survival of western civilization. Everyone is now focusing upon it’s laws and freedoms rather than apologetic hand wringing of political correctness.
Have faith, something good will come of it.
John North, Acworth Georgia, US
