We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The barrister, novelist and essayist Helen Dale is not a lady to mince her words. She talks about the Jason Arday fiasco at Cambridge University:
“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.
I love the Ulpian reference. I wonder if the Cambridge dons who initially approved Arday’s PhD have heard of him.
“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.
“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s Saga to The Godfather – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.
“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”
There is a line in the film, For Your Eyes Only, starring Roger Moore as James Bond, where he tells Melina Havelock, daughter of the slain Havelocks, that she should remember the Chinese proverb that before entering on revenge, first dig two graves. I think that a lot of DEI and related ideological stuff is driven by revenge, by a desire to “settle scores”, even if the score-settling activity is self-destructive. Many graves end up being dug. This is why I think it is right, as several Samizdata and other commenters have said over the years, that there is a thick seam of moral nihilism that runs through all this. Drill into it, to maintain this geological metaphor, and all you will hit is darkness rather than a reef of gold.
Peggy Noonan is not a columnist I agree with on everything but she seems at times to have a knack of getting to the nub of a trend, a cultural shift, or however else one wants to call it. She has this WSJ ($) article out about the socialists now pushing – successfully it seems – to take over control of the Democratic Party. It means that the US will at some point face an unappealing choice if, say, JD Vance, who appears to be quite hostile on the free market, is the Republican Party nominee. (For what it is worth, that’s not a foregone conclusion in my view.)
A few paragraphs:
Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan on Tuesday by racking up huge margins in progressive enclaves and university towns.
Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.
I am sorry to say these democratic socialists never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.
I think the lack of empathy and a sense of rootedness to the realities of most people is what will hopefully be fatal to these folk (consider that lout, Hasan Piker, with his apologetics and even open admiration for the Soviet Union, Mao and even N. Korea and his hatred of Israel). But the implosion of this trend is not a given. It has to be argued against, unpacked and exposed. My worry is that too few are doing it. (In Piker’s case, I see him as someone who is trying to be more and more disgusting and outrageous in pursuit of attention. However, there is a chance that he actually believes what he writes and says, and that he has gone psychotic, which is where I think the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are now these days.)
Noonan identifies what she thinks are three causal factors behind this resurgent socialism, or at least a desire by socialists to proclaim that is what they are, rather than use euphemisms:
A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.
A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?
The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.
As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.
Towards the end of the article Noonan (a former speechwriter for Reagan), has this:
It’s our view here that free-market capitalism is organic and flows upward from the human person—man wants to build, trade, invent, provide for and rise, and he erects laws and a way of economic being that allows the realization of those desires. Economic freedom works with human nature. The rules and regulations it produces, the economic framework it creates, are like what Churchill said of democracy: the worst system except for all the others. Socialism is a more abstract and ideological vision of justice that doesn’t flow up but must be imposed from the top down. It isn’t based on the natural, or on man as he is; it’s a construct that involves coercion.
There is a problem with the Noonan article, however, which slightly taints it. I would dissent from saying that capitalism, or open market economy, is the “worst possible system except for all the others”, to borrow from Churchill, because I think that concedes too much to those who want to tap into the idealism of youth. That sort of perspective does not appeal to people with ideological fire in their belly. It also sells free market capitalism and several private property short. “The free market“ is a term that covers the idea of people using their skills and talents to obtain their wants and goals in voluntary interactions with their fellows, recognising that ownership of property – an extension of the of idea of humans as owning their own lives. This is not just the “least-worst” state of affairs. It is a positive, glowing, glorious good set of values to set out and defend. Defenders of the classical liberal tradition, to use that term, need to stop the throat-clearing urge to half-apologise for this worldview before getting going. When they do that, they’ve already lost people.
There is intriguing paragraph, regarding a biography of the French political figure Andre Malraux, about whom a biography has been written:
At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.
Definitely one of the better articles on what has been going on in the US, in my view.
I have visited this topic about forest/open heathland fires, the positive externalities of private property ownership, Tragedy of the Commons and the unintended consequences of Green not-so-benign neglect before (remember those bad fires in Australia?), but here’s a reminder, given recent fires in Spain, France, Greece and my native Suffolk in the UK:
Wall Street Journal:
Under its Green Deal and related policies, the European Union is designating 30% of the continent as nature-protected by 2030. Goals include increasing the amount of deadwood and the density of tree cover in forests. Whatever their environmental merit, such measures increase the amount of highly flammable fuel for fires, make it easier for blazes to spread and harder to extinguish.
The EU also wants at least a third of this protected land to fall under “strict protection,” which means it will be left “essentially undisturbed from human pressures and threats,” according to European Commission guidance. It allows for some natural disaster prevention measures, but only “when such activities are compatible with the conservation objectives of the areas on the basis of a case-by-case assessment,” the guidance says.
Ranchers and farmers in Spain and France have historically managed their land to mitigate the risk of megafires. But the EU’s regulations have made it harder for small farms to survive across Europe, accelerating a rural exodus. Red tape often hinders those who remain from carrying out preventive actions like controlled burns.
The European Forest Fire Information System publishes maps and data, updated daily, on the current blazes. They show considerable overlap between the protected nature areas in Spain and France and the wildfires. That suggests in addition to the vagaries of weather, a policy failure.
Blaming climate change is the default explanation these days for any natural disaster, but Europe’s costly solutions will make little difference to global temperatures. Better forest management and fire prevention can make a difference, however. And they would reduce the CO2 emissions from fires that now overwhelm much of the reduction from electric vehicles or other climate nostrums.
Some advocates of “rewilding” claim that fires are part of nature, and that over time, fires will trigger a response in the form, for example, of more fire-resistant species (also, certain seeds are only germinated once a fire has happened). That sounds plausible, but the problem is that in a densely populated part of the world, such as the UK southeast, people want the loveliness of nature but without a raging fire nearby, however “natural” that is. And it is worth remembering that even if you take out the Man-made global warming argument and accept that fires are part of nature – they are – that much of our visually attractive landscape is not the result of Man leaving nature alone, but of crafting and caring for it. (This all makes sense once, like good students of Aristotle, we recognise that Man is as much part of nature as a beetle, shark or buzzard).
In the meantime, I am doing the very non-atheist thing and praying for rain.
“The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and day care workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.”
– “Ivana“, a Substack author.
The whole item is a gem. It is also funny because it is true, even if I quibble about the author’s comment that housing is a “right” and that big business should be broken up by anti-trust. Even so, for political perceptiveness, this is good.
“We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government offered some funding that allowed Chinese researchers to continue independently tinkering with deadly viruses until one accidentally escaped the lab. From the start, the NIAID head used his enormous bureaucratic clout to make sure no one explored that relationship. While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was “just conspiracy theories,” he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.”
– James B. Meigs, in the Wall St Journal ($)
Here are a couple more paragraphs for those of you unable or unwilling to get past the paywall. I think it is notable that a bastion of free market, centre-right opinion, the Wall Street effing Journal no less, is letting rip in this vein:
How did Dr. Fauci enforce public unanimity, despite these scientists’ private doubts? Power and money, for one thing. As the head of the NIAID, he operated with minimal political oversight and supervised a $6 billion research budget. Politics also played a role. Once President Trump mentioned the possibility of a lab leak in April 2020, few scientists or media figures wanted to be seen as carrying water for the White House. For science reporters, the question of Covid’s origin should have been the story of a lifetime. But almost no one touched the topic for the first year of the pandemic. When a few later did, a New York Times reporter said, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”
This is not the way a healthy democracy responds to a disaster. After the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, President Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate. NASA opened its books and answered every question. When a mysterious virus began killing thousands of Americans a week, Dr. Fauci and other public-health leaders did the opposite. They gaslit reporters, stonewalled congressional inquiries and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests. In two recently released emails, another Dr. Fauci ally urged the Wuhan lab’s Dr. Shi not to share information with a respected American virus researcher. Talk about a coverup.
A reason why this matters as much as it does in my view is that it shows the extent of the intellectual and moral corruption of parts of the scientific/public health/media/public policy community, and that corruption is a major reason for loss of trust, a loss that alas extends to those who don’t deserve it. And it also shows how people are more willing to give cover to the likes of a brutal regime – China – than they are to be open about the causes of this pandemic. It raises questions about the merits or otherwise of “gain of function” research and why countries should engage in it, given that on a risk-reward tradeoff, chances of catastrophe, even if small, are enough to get people to press the “no” button. For that matter, I wonder what happens when such research intersects with AI, but that’s a topic for another time.
“Most people still think SpaceX is ‘just’ a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk ‘way’ of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.”
– Stephen McBridge, at The Rational Optimist Substack.
A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relevant revenue body, and job done. Oddly, I rarely see such “Patriotic” rich folk saying “yes, of course, I will get that done immediately”. And I suspect a reason is that they want to sound good, and also like the idea of people being coerced. The coerced transfer in the name of “fairness” is the point. Voluntarily giving some of your money to the State is a bit, well, too voluntary.
Anyway, some paragraphs from Mr Russo:
I realised there’s a special kind of hypocrisy in preaching equality from the elevated comfort of elite media, elite networks, and elite platforms.
The idea of a wealth tax has been around for decades, but suddenly it’s being sold as the grand answer to Britain’s economic and social problems.
That’s the pitch. Simple. Catchy. Morally flattering. And, if you don’t look too closely, it’s vaguely heroic.
But the truth is less glamorous. A wealth tax isn’t a bold reform. It’s often a slogan in search of a serious policy, and a performance of fairness that doesn’t come close to fixing the machinery underneath.
Yes, Britain has inequality. Yes, too many people feel shut out while a narrow group sits on significant assets. But that does not make every proposal for taxing wealth a useful one. Britain isn’t America. We don’t have California-scale concentrations of extreme wealth, and we don’t have an economic structure that can pretend a wealth tax is some great fiscal breakthrough.
The sums being talked about sound large until you place them next to the scale of the state. Then they look less like transformation and more like loose change with a manifesto attached.
The hypocrisy is that some of the loudest advocates of wealth taxes talk as though they are speaking for the squeezed and the overlooked. In reality, they are often highly visible, highly connected, and very comfortable participants in the same media and political ecosystem they claim to be challenging. They denounce concentrated power while depending on the attention economy, elite networks and moral theatre to amplify their own status. It’s a neat trick. Condemn privilege from within a system that rewards you for sounding rebellious.
Clive Crook, a columnist in Bloomberg, does not mince his words about the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who appears to be of the view that the pro-market reforms of Mrs Thatcher and some of her successors (not nearly pro-market enough, in my view), were all a terrible mistake. We should, according to Mr Burnham, look back with fondness with what came before. (The Institute of Economic Affairs has this rather nice takedown.)
Crook is having none of this blather. Here are a few paragraphs from the article, which is paywalled, so I won’t quote the whole piece.
If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.
To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.
The nadir was the “winter of discontent”: strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.
This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.
Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic center-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but “four decades of neoliberalism.”
Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organized labor. Nationalize a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal).
“Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years. He appears to be confessing to having been part of the neoliberalist regime which ruined Britain.
Burnham is a substitute prime minister in a party which two years ago won 34 per cent of the vote in a general election, yet you would think from the tone of his address today that he had just won a large personal mandate. He has none, and that is not a great basis on which to announce a grand plan to reverse 40 years of anything: neoliberalism, socialism of whatever else. Moreover, Burnham appeared to confirm that he will not be seeking a mandate. After paying a warm tribute to what he saw as the great achievements of Keir Starmer – the man he has just deposed – he said that the people of Makerfield had spoken on behalf of all forgotten communities. Really? I don’t recall the people of Scunthorpe, Teesside or Barrow in Furness asking Burnham to speak on their behalf. In reality, Burnham simply held onto an existing Labour seat, and our new PM is going to treat that as carte blanche to reverse 40 years of economic policy.”
– Ross Clark, Spectator.
“The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the patenting of James Watt’s double-acting steam engine. Each event marks a profound shift in how human beings understood and interacted with the physical world and with each other. Before this cluster of anniversaries, we’ve just passed another related semiquincentennial, of the birth of one of our most influential applied moral philosophers. I am speaking, of course, of Jane Austen.”
– Lynne Kiesling, at the Knowledge Problem substack. The article came out on New Year’s Eve, 2025. Definitely worth a read.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.”
– A J P Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. From the first page.
(Hat-tip: Institute of Economic Affairs at its new site. It manages to tie its insights about licensing laws and trade to the glorious English football victory over Mexico last night in the latter country.)
“The more big and active the state is, the more it is worth purchasing.”
– Deidre N McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (page 97).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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