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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Beyond moronic It is nice to see that a compatriot of mine is presently making the case for free trade at the WTO summit in Hong Kong, at which the usual bunch of vested interest and anti-globalisation protestors have shown up.
Seriously, that anyone can go to Hong Kong and then attempt to argue that free trade is against the interests of the poor just boggles the mind. But they do.
(link once again via Tim Blair).
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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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You look right, at Hong Kong, the city capitalism and global trade built, and then you look left at the rest of China… yes, it really is beyond moronic that a person could not see the advantages of globalized trade.
Even the bits of mainland China experiencing explosive growth now… why? Globalized trade.
But them some people cannot see what they do not want to see.
But then again, I can remember the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, looking ineluctably plump and corrupt, standing at the podium of the HK Convention Centre and lecturing an assembly of the Hong Kong great and good that “no one can be an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty”.
For me, it is one of Hong Kong’s defining characteristics that I caught not one of the assembly blinking at this denial of their very raison d’etre.
I’m not making that up, by the way.
“ineluctably plump and corrupt”. An excellent phrase, which I am going to apply to Cherie Blair.
I wonder whether she’s ever paid all the Customs duty she owes from having walked through the Green Channel with gifts worth thousands of pounds? Probably not. Paying duty is for the little people.
Makes about as much sense as the Seattle longshoremen rioting against free trade, but they did.