This is without a doubt the most horrifying piece of news yet to come out of the Western side of the Cold War.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/nearly-two-decades-nuclear-launch-code-minuteman-silos-united-states-00000000/
it seems that the American military had effectively worked to remove the supposed control over nuclear weapon from the President, and effectively allow any four officers who wished to to launch a missile. The considerations behind this piece of total insanity were purely military: suppose the C-in-C were disabled or otherwise unable to react, there could be no effective response to any kind of Soviet aggression. Well, DUH!! If the President had been taken out of the equation, then the war leadership would be probably gone, and all that would be left would be stupid, uncoordinated slaughter. Besides, the point with atomic weapon was not to use them, but to avoid using them, and above all to prevent the other side using them. Say what you will about mutual assured destruction, but it kept two power groups that hated each other's guts from replying the horrible, destructive folly of the two world wars.

But never mind the "Dr.Strangelove" option with four junior officers just deciding to go off and fire a Minuteman rocket on their own. Do you have the least idea what would have happened if this piece of idiocy by US armed forces had ever got out? NATO would have been finished, that's what. Are any of you old enough to remember the huge pacifist demonstrations of 1980-1982? I was there, and I can tell you what they were about. They were not Communist-led or pro-Russian; almost everyone who took part despised Soviet Russia as a backward, vicious tyranny. They were about the feeling that the USA were playing dice with the lives and future of Europeans. If WWIII ever came, it would have been fought in Europe. Every one of us was aware of that; many had been through military service - most European armies at the time were still conscript - and we were all aware that we were constantly staring down a lot of Russian barrels. We hated the idea that the American forces could essentially use our countries as a nuclear chessboard. That being the case, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if the European public had known that the armed aliens in their midst could launch nuclear strikes virtually at will, and that they had deliberately cut out both the US civilian leadership AND the European governments, there would have been a political earthquake. No country from Norway to Turkey and from West Germany to Portugal would have allowed a single American soldier to remain on its territory. It would have been the end of the alliance. And for that alone one has to say that the generals who had this bright idea were stupid beyond criminality.

Yet more evidence that "war is too important a matter to leave to generals" (Georges Clemenceau said that, and he knew a thing or two about it). It is an ugly thought that, today, an army that was capable of such folly remains the most respected - or at least least despised - institution in America. A few generations of corrupt and incompetent politicians have salted the fields of democratic institutions, making half the population hate one half of government and the other half the other. Let us just hope that we don't pay for this collective loss of faith.

It is typical of the whole spirit of willing self-deception with which the average educated person approaches the so-called Enlightenment, that the most famous quote about it is false. Voltaire never said: "I disagree with your views, but I will fight to the death for your right to hold them", and if he had he would have been a liar. Voltaire was thoroughly intolerant and spent half his time insulting, slandering and ridiculing anyone who even slightly disagreed with him, and, even worse, anyone who actually agreed with him but threatened to become a rival. As for toleration, his best-known genuine quotation - "Crush that infamous thing!" - does not promise much, and would not do so even if it was turned to any other object but the Catholic Church. To demand the "crushing" of a large religion hardly proves tolerance. (With the ignorant and often fraudulent picture that justifies this attack in the minds of those who know about it, I may deal elsewhere.) And Voltaire was not as bad as the atheist and totalitarian d'Holbach, or as the totalitarian Rousseau. Of no phenomenon as much as the so-called Enlightenment can it so truly be said that Vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; beginning with the fact that no-one - no, not even Chesterton! - has ever stopped to wonder just how arrogant and, yes, self-deceived a generation must be, to call itself "enlightened".

But if the most famous false quotation from the period at least flatters it in a humane and decent direction, one in which one would be happy to move even if it had in fact anything to do with Voltaire, the most famous true one does not. It has been repeated for 250 years with every sign of admiration, as a kind of acquired if not revealed truth, without anyone ever awakening to the kind of thing it is: a piece of brutish, adolescent cynicism, false on all but the most superficial level, that falsifies and blights a whole area of human life, pure poison to mind and to morality.

The quotation is this: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Why has it taken so long, why does it have to be this poor fool who writes, to point out that this is rubbish, that this is the viewpoint of business of a man who has never transacted any in his life, that it has precisely zero to do with any of the reasons why any of us work and with any of the satisfactions we look for from work? Adam Smith had never worked in a shop. I have. I know selling, if I know anything. And I can tell you this: that no technique of selling will work half as well as the tongue of a man or woman who has a good product and knows it is good. Which would please the butcher best: to squeeze his client, or to be told that he produces the best meat in town? Would the baker be pleased if he made money by selling bread so bad that he himself wouldn't touch it? What delights the brewer's heart: to count the money in his cash register, or to know that his beer is being spoken about in distant towns and that people come out of their way to taste it?

It is not mainly from the benevolence of the brewer, the baker and the butcher that we look for our daily meal; although, if we were unlucky enough to be destitute, we might hope that they have some of that natural human instinct that only Adam Smith is unable to see. It is from their own self-respect, and, even more, from their respect for their trade. People who feel that they are doing something good by preparing the food and the drink of the rest of mankind will apply themselves to the job; people who think of their own self-interest will do the least possible work and cut corners. And it follows that the person who has his own self-interest in mind will not even be as successful as the person who is willing to waste some time and some work, but wants to make sure that his work is of the best quality.

And there is yet another and deeper point. The city of Milan - one of the economic engines of the richest continent in the world, and a place where people know and have always known about wealth and success - has recently held a city-wide competition to find the best ten shop workers in town. A hundred were shortlisted, from businesses as different as fashion and flea markets, ice-cream stores and motorbike shops, butchers and goldsmiths. There were very different types: a former police sergeant who had gone on to be floor manager for a major fashion store, a Japanese man who had come to Milan apparently only out of love for male fashion design, a raspy-throated motorbike expert, a man who managed a xerox machine in the town's university quarter, a labourer in a small corner shop. A few things turned up over and over again, in spite of the immensely different fields covered: favourite shop workers worked hard, did not rush the customer, had the details of all the goods in the store at their fingertips, their advice was reliable, they did not make impecunious customers feel bad as compared with millionaires. Some made a special effort: three (including the corner shop employee) carried the shopping for elderly customers, even to their homes. Most were praised for finding solutions that would not cost too much but gave the customers exactly what they wanted; some for enthusiasm, some for restraint. But there is one feature that turned up in every one of the one hundred shortlisted, and it was summed up by the only American of the lot, a charming young lady who sells costume jewelry: "I want my customers to leave the shop happier than they came in."

Successful shop workers, shop workers who get customers to come again and again, are those who take a personal interest, who - in the words of many on the shortlist - make customers feel like friends. Buying and selling is a social business, and the whole person is engaged in it. I spoke of what delights the brewer's heart, but surely there is something even more significant - and daily - even than a reputation for excellence; and that is to see the regulars come back, smiling at you as often as not as they come, slowly growing in numbers year after year as your pub's reputation grows, chatting to each other, telling you their troubles. Money is the last consideration for any successful business; it is at best a tool for achieving all the rest - sound product pleasantly sold, a solid and growing reputation, the life of a self-respecting, satisfied worker.

Indeed, the main function of money is to serve as a tangible counter for good service and good product. Money represents value, and is given for value received. If I have been well served, I have no problem with paying a price, indeed I would feel a bit like a thief if I did not. In some trades, it is habitual to add a tip or gratification according to the satisfaction one has had in the product and service, but whether or not this is acceptable, money is the tangible evidence of the customer's satisfaction. Its main purpose, therefore, is to certify to the producer that their work and products are valued. So, to rephrase one last time Adam Smith's fallacious phrase, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from our own gratitude and honesty in properly compensating good work well done and well offered.

Because Adam Smith was mired in the dreary, valueless world of "self-interest", he could not insert the obvious in his work. So he resorted to the obviously fallacious labour theory of value, whereby money stands for the value of the work that went into the object being purchased - and a child could answer that a jeweller and a baker can put the same amount of work and price it very differently. Indeed, the baker himself can price his own work very differently according to the quality of the bread, even though the amount of work is largely the same.

The labour theory of value is the inevitable child of Adam Smith's immature, cynical, adolescent incapacity of appreciating value as it is, an inevitably subjective reaction given objective form. The "Enlightenment" obsession with being "rational", that is with excluding from reasoning all that human beings really live on, leads to a theory that is not only emotionally unlovable but flatly wrong and disastrous in its results. When Karl Marx elaborated his theory of plus-value, he was moving straight from Adam Smith; if monetary value is only bestowed by labour - disregarding quality and desirability, for instance - then the person who does not contribute labour is a thief, and anything that adds price without corresponding labour is theft. From this one could have predicted, right from the start, the collapse of the Soviet Union: a society that does not understand quality and value is never going to be able to function properly. People will always do as little work as is in their "self-interest", and standards will remain damagingly bad. The ugly Soviet joke "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" is the inevitable result of Smith's theory of value; Smith is the father of Marx and the grandfather of Lenin and Stalin.