Two Small Island Nations
With a population of a few million people have had a seriously outsized impact on world culture. Here is a good profile of one of them.
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Okay, I'll bite: what's the other one?
ReplyDeleteIreland, of course.
DeleteThe 20th largest island in the world—larger than Sri Lanka, 7.5 times the size of Jamaica, and, if you prefer a non-island comparison, almost exactly the same size as Austria—is a "small island"? Okay, if you say so.
DeleteShonk, Shonk, Shonk... Yes, I should have written the new title in the first place. But it ought to have been pretty obvious that I meant small relative to their cultural impact, and not small relative to all the world's islands! I mean, Jamaica itself is huge compared to Governor's Island or Jura, so why didn't you complain about me calling it small?
DeleteA famous story from around here tells of a sage who visits an extremely kind and hospitable town, and then wishes that the town would burn down to the ground. "This way, they can leave and spread their kindness to the rest of the world."
ReplyDeleteIt's sort of true for Jamaica in a way. With some of the highest brain drain and external migration rates in the world, great Jamaicans have made their mark across the world.
While it is unfortunate that Jamaica has largely stagnated, with an economy growing at a rate 1/4th of the global average, it certainly has made Jamaica's most distinguished men and women strive harder to leave it and make their mark elsewhere.