Which should provoke the greater concern: corporations avoiding taxes or government projects wasting taxpayer money? Theodore Dalrymple has a clear answer in a new post at The Social Affairs Unit.

I might as well say straight out what I believe, though cannot prove: that the cost overruns and failures to function are, in fact, vital to the main purpose of the government IT projects, and not some unfortunate side effect such as dizziness that you get from taking an otherwise life-saving drug.

The failures to work and cost overruns are by now so regular, so predictable and so constant that they cannot be ascribed to mere error. They are indispensable to the corporatist state that Britain has become, and that goes some way to explain our failure in the world.

Read the post here

In his famous play Spring Awakening, German playwright Frank Wedekind portrayed doctors in a rather poor light. No wonder, since Wedekind hated his doctor father.

Read Dalrymple’s new essay at the British Medical Journal (purchase required)

One of the more admirable qualities of Dalrymple’s thinking is his appreciation for the complexity, indeed sometimes even the contradictoriness, of life, and his corresponding disdain for easy solutions. His new City Journal essay makes a case for the complexity of human life:

The need for a simplifying lens that can screen out the intractabilities of life, and of our own lives in particular, springs eternal…How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity!

By the way, he also writes, “The most popular and widest-ranging ideology in the West today is”….guess!

Read the essay here

Al Gore equated the failure to recycle to the Holocaust. Jesse Jackson, Jr. once compared a community service requirement for public housing recipients with slavery. And now a book reviewer has compared Thatcher to Hitler and Napoleon in the British publication, The Observer. Dalrymple’s latest contribution to the New English Review addresses the absence of proportion in politics.

Read the essay here

Dalrymple examines the play Whose Life Is It, Anyway? and addresses an argument often heard in the euthanasia, abortion and drug debates:

Even if one can be said to own one’s life, ownership does not always confer upon one the right, legal or moral, to dispose of the property just as one wishes….Our close relation with others and with society imposes obligations upon us that the law cannot impose, forbid, account for, or encompass.

Read the essay at The New Criterion (purchase required)

His new essay in Standpoint recapitulates an important and recurring Dalrymple argument: that at least some of the intelligentsia’s ostensible concern for the less fortunate is actually condescension. The specific instance of condescension referenced in the piece – a Guardian columnist’s disdain for supermarket shelf stacking as a vocation – was addressed in greater detail in Dalrymple’s 2007 book In Praise of Prejudice.

Read the essay at Standpoint Online

Dalrymple’s latest City Journal contribution is a short piece on youthful aversion to Bach:

There is surely something deeply emblematic about the use of one of the great glories of Western civilization, the music of Bach, to prevent the young inheritors of that civilization from committing crimes. The barbarians are well and truly within the gates.

Read the essay here