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It's been twenty years since my firm belief in a better way of life was vindicated. 17th November was the beginning of the end of an era shaped by collectivism, brutality and industrialised inhumanity. I have written about my experiences of communism on Samizdata before. Today I'll use someone else's words to describe the wasteland communism leaves behind.

In 1992, Peter Saint-Andre has written a disturbing, brilliant and accurate description of what communism does to the soul:

...the hunger that I found most disturbing was not of the body but of the soul. [...] The socialist state cared nothing for the life of the individual, and this was driven home in innumerable ways.

Yet the overall effect was not merely physical -- it was a deeply spiritual degradation. It is difficult to put that degradation into words. To me, the most striking sign of it was what I called "Eastern eyes". I could see and feel the resignation, the defeat, the despair, in the eyes of people I knew. It was an all-too-rare occurrence to come upon a person with some spark of life in his or her eyes (the only exceptions were the children, who had yet to have the life beaten out of them). If it is true that the eyes are windows onto the soul, then the Czech soul under socialism went through life all but dead.

It is tough for me to come up with something to say 20 years on that is not tinged with bitterness and disappointment and if not for the significant anniversary, I would have left this memory unturned. Despite the amazing change 1989 and its aftermath brought to my life I feel no closure over the past and a sense of proportion in the way the fall of communism has been 'handled'. Today we should be looking back at the last 20 years counting the many communists who died in prison or are still rotting there... I can only hope that future generations will revisit the past and will have far lower tolerance of collectivism and totalitarianism. It may be a futile hope as today's teenagers have little knowledge of the world my generation grew up and my parents lived in. And so I am bitter and disappointed that people can say the word "communism" without spitting.

I am also bitter and disappointed because those who opposed communism have not won. It is still with us, in the idiotic juxtapositions of Nazism and communism, or socialism and free-market, used by those who aspire to communism and justify it by positing Nazism as the greater evil. It still raises its ugly head in those who despise free-markets and attempt to put a human mask on socialism by pointing out 'failures' of capitalism. Rather hard as socialism, like all totalitarianisms, has no face. It is the ultimate denigration of humanity, destruction of individuality, and subjugation of human beings to the vast merciless machine of control and power.

Communism is still with us in China and North Korea. One befriended by the West, the other frowned upon... but neither is ever challenged because of the oppression of its people, and only when it manages to 'inconvenience' the rest of the world. Once it falls, it will be horrifying and beyond belief to examine the monstrosities committed by the communists in the light of day. Again, I can only hope that the world will be shamed and aghast at letting this happen for so long. Until then, we only have testimonials such as this: Undercover in the Secret State

I am grateful to those who remember, struggle to understand and explain communism, and especially to those who have managed to capture something of the nature of the beast. Here are the ones I found. Please feel free to share yours.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression - the reference book of the communist evil with a tag line "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit"

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

The Lives Of Others captures the paranoia and danger of an Orwellian world where everyone is monitored and, unusually for such world, shows impact of the individual as making a difference. Here is my review.

Burnt By The Sun (Unaveni slnkom) from a sunny day to Stalin's terror... One of the most powerful films I have seen for a long time. Possibly ever.

No End (Bez konca) - a complex, subtle and haunting film set in Poland 1981.

Repentance (Pokayanie) - for the more surreal amongst us. The first 'anti-stalinism' film I have ever seen and will never forget. I remember sitting through the entire credits at the end, stunned and shaken. For context, this was screened in Czecho-Slovakia, publicly, in a cinema in 1987!

The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Terror in the 1930s - from the book review:

It is impossible, of course, to undo the tyrant's crimes. But one of the tasks writers have set themselves, in the last 50 years, is at least to preserve the memory of the dead, and so to resist the tyrant's historical arrogance.

The book's opening paragraph makes the history come the full circle, back to the suffering of the individual:

The dead cannot speak. Can one retrieve their voices? Death under I.V. Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953, has been written about but the dead themselves remain elusive because their voices have been lost to us. The present book is an attempt to recover the voices of those executed under Stalin.

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I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase "The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation".

It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of 'environmentally friendly' customers that would have approved of the bank's effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot.

But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394.

I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome.

(5)

Sometimes it is worth plagiarising yourself.

I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, "Why is the government doing this? 'Terrorism' doesn't seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it." It's hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing "Transformational Government". I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.

I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth's (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:

My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains "they" don't know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that's what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there's slightly more.

The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class ("class" in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally - and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn - holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough "best practice" followed.

It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.

It's not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in "new technology" and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.

The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek's explanation of why 5-year plans can't work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.

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I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be 'totalitarian'. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total... mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as 'tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).

As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls 'soft fascism') in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws "for your own good'' or "for the children" or "for the environment".

And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent's interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a 'licence to smoke'. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.

The person suggesting this latest delightfully totalitarian brick-in-the-wall, Professor Julian le Grand, says some very telling things:

"There is nothing evil about smoking as long as you are just hurting yourself. We have to try to help people stop smoking without encroaching on people's liberties." [...] But he said requiring them to fill in forms, have photographs taken in order to apply for a permit would prove a more effective deterrent.

No doubt Julian le Grand thinks that makes him seem reasonable and sensible, because he does not want people to have their civil liberties encroached upon... and he then proceeds to describe how he would like to do precisely that in order to 'deter' you from doing what you really wanted to do.

The reason for this seemingly strange approach is simple to understand because to the totalitarian, something does not have to be 'evil' to warrant the use of force to discourage it, you merely have to have (a) coercive power (b) disapprove of another person's choices regarding their own life. That is all the justification you need, simply the fact other people are not living the way you think they should, in your presumably infinite wisdom.

Notice how coercive actions imposed by state power are described as 'helping'. We will force you to pay more, force you to go to a doctor...but we will throw your arse in gaol if you dare try to circumvent our unasked for 'help'.

The 'paleo-totalitarian' simply uses force if you disobey, no messing about... however the post-modern totalitarian prefers to add a morally insulating intermediate step that allows his kind to talk about 'civil liberties': first he gives you a nice regulation to obey and only if you dare not comply with that do the Boys in Blue get sent to show you the error of your ways.

I can think of quite a few ways I would rather like to 'help' Julian le Grand and his ilk in order to mitigate their pathological need to interfere with other people's lives. All for the greater good of society, you understand.

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to·tal·i·tar·i·an
–adjective
1. of or pertaining to a centralized government that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
2. exercising control over the freedom, will, or thought of others; authoritarian; autocratic.
–noun.
3. an adherent of totalitarianism.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary

But are those really the best definitions of totalitarian?

When someone uses the term 'totalitarian', we think of Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China. Those were indisputably totalitarian states. We think of gulags and killing fields. We think of secret police and surveillance.

Yet I would argue that all those things can just as satisfactorily described as 'tyranny' of whatever political completion. The thing that makes a place 'totalitarian' is not the nastiness of it or even the repressiveness of it, but the totality of state control. The real defining characteristic of totalitarian seems obvious from the word itself.

And what is a total state? It is a state in which there is no civil society, just politically derived rules by which people may interact. And I would argue the key to that is removing the right to free association and by declaring private property to be 'public'.

Britain has no gulags, no killing fields, it has a relatively free press (though less so than it was), it has no internal passports (though they are working on that with ID cards and panoptic surveillance)... but every year we take more and more steps towards the destruction of a voluntary civil society of free interaction and its replacement with a state in which no aspect of life is not politically regulated. This is often described as making things 'more democratic'... and in that the supporters of the total state are not being disingenuous, for democracy is just a type of politics after all.

We are headed for a different kind of totalitarianism than that of Stalin or Hitler or Mao, but a total state really is what a great many people have in mind for us all. They seek a sort of 'smiley face fascism' in which all interactions are regulated in the name of preventing sexism, promoting health, and defending the environment. The excuses will not invoke the Glory of the Nation or the Proletariat or the Volk or the King or the Flag or any of those old fashioned tools for tyrants, but rather it will be "for our own good", "for the Planet", "for the whales", "for the children", "for the disabled" or "for equality".

But if they get their way it will be quite, quite totalitarian.

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A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:

The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.

The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.

Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. 'It is messy; we must coordinate it,' they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the 'backbone of the country', they think.

But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don't get established in the first place. "Interdependent vulnerabilities" are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can't directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.

The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors - millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the "strategic interventions" that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.

Livestock farming in Britain almost didn't survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs' "coordinated" response to the last "foot and mouth" outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn't see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that's why things were as bad as they were. The 'defect' has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Nobody in government had to tell Tesco's dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a 'strategic reserve' of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country's stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled - apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.

Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not "critical" and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can't predict what we will want. Nor can the state.

How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as "key"? Well there's a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn't be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.

The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren't. It may be good to have them in your own life - if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren't well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.

(29)

I came out of hospital yesterday. La Belle Dame is in America making money (one of us has to) so Dave picked me up and steered me home. I live quite close to the Chelsea & Westminster and needed some air to clear my head so we walked back. I felt surprisingly well considering I have been under a general anaesthetic and had quite a few squishy bits from inside lopped off me. In fact I felt amazingly well.

The journey back home was interesting. The colours were so very bright and someone seems to have turned up the contrast. Sometimes when I looked closely as the things written on the back of people's tee-shirts whilst walking down King's Road, the words seemed to suddenly zoom away from me towards some vanishing point.

Getting home and having a nice shower was a transcendent experience but the thing that really kept me captivated was the way the water fell down, coming from hundreds of feet above my head and travelling downwards towards the gleaming ceramic floor perhaps three yards below. I could feel the vibration of the water spiralling down the plughole and the strange flute-like sound it made.

I looked forward to getting some good food as being chopped up had not dented my appetite and the hospital food was moderately dreadful. When it came time to eat, for some reason Dave would not let me near the hot stove. The smell of bacon was almost erotic.

Dave and I work together and I had been struck by some really good creative ideas whilst pacing back and forth in the ward the night before last, waiting for the frigging painkillers to actually do something. The ideas kept pouring out of me and Dave just absorbed them like the 185 IQ colossus he is. For a while at least.

But then I noticed that I was having to force the ideas out through clenched teeth and they kept bouncing off Dave's head rather than going in. To make matters worse although the bacon surrendered to me willingly, the sausages were staring at me with ill concealed contempt. I stabbed a couple to death as punishment and gave the rest to Dave.

Today I find the internet in front of me and deep throbbing pains from within. Be prepared from some bad tempered blogging over the next few days when I can drag my fingers to the mouse. Tramadol, Co-Codamol and Diclofenac are pallid impostors. Sister Morphine is a fickle lover and she would not come home with me.

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I am feeling less of a lone loony than I did. After a decade of my saying the key thing wrong with the demon eyes campaign was that the slogan ought to have been: 'New Labour: Old Danger' because the electorate should not have the purported newness reinforced, more and more people in the chattering classes seem to be accepting that there is a danger. Even such fringe lefty agitators as Clifford Chance LLP have offered severe warnings about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Too late?

The War on Liberty may never end, but it became a general action only in the 90s - just about the time, the Wall being down, and the net routing round borders and censorship, we free-lifers had begun to feel we were winning. Now I find I am doing my bit with NO2ID and we are gearing up for a ten-year campaign. Grand constitutionalist coalitions are being proposed left, right, and centre (which I'm sure are meritorious). The differences between Peter Hitchens and Mark Thomas begin to be indistinguishable when the establishment is of the extreme centre...

What worries me is that this ferment is still superficial, a speck of mould on Mr Blair's Horlicks. It concerns the tiny minority of the population that reads the serious press, say 10% - and of those only the avid followers of politics, maybe a quarter of that. The readers and writers of blogs are fewer still, and more introrse.

The mass of the population of Britain is nescient, complacent, and has no interest in the abstractions of liberty, or the threats from power assumed only to be threats to others, to bad people. Many people are happy to claim the status of an 'ordinary' person, with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" from officialdom, while being paradoxically susceptible to fears of everything else. Passively concerned with material welfare, security against virtual risks, and gossip, they graze and are milked as the livestock of the state.

This is Foucault's concept of governmentality in action. Not, pace his fans on the left, a neo-liberal order, but a post-liberal order in which the foundational institutions of liberalism - liberty and individuality, rule of law, the separation of private and public life, a civil society and a political sphere distinct from one another - have ceased to have a meaning for even the bulk of the middle-classes.

Where is the cattle-prod that will change the public mood?

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The Tories could simply abolish entire government departments that the 'man in the street' really does not give a damn about (such as the DTI for example) and save huge amounts of money... but far from cutting pointless state expenditures, Cameron is in the process of making it politically impossible for him to do anything but ape Blair. Why? Because there has been no meaningful attempt by the Tories to even make the idea of a smaller state something that is simply a feature of normal political discourse. They have left the thinking to the other side and now have to fight every battle on ground Tony Blair has chosen for them.

The Tories have had more than a decade to put in the intellectual ground work for cutting the scope of the state and to argue their positions on the basis of several rights, and yet have done nothing of the sort because that is not what most of them believe. That is hardly surprising given the pathologies of the sort of people who are drawn to politics: they do not get involved because they want to wield less power than the previous guys who ran things. Understanding politicians and what they are likely to do is much easier once you realise that almost everyone in politics (even the 'nice guys' who wear sensible cardigans and remind you of Wallace and Gromit) have more in common psychologically and morally with your typical member of a street gang than with most of the people who actually vote for them.

However where does that leave people who do want a less intrusive state and cannot bring themselves to believe the Tory party does not give a damn about them? Well it leaves them trying to convince themselves that Cameron is just playing a clever game because the alternative is just too dreadful. He is the man who will save us from those who are incrementally destroying our competitiveness and strangling our civil liberties because, well, he has to be, who else is there?

But even if his conversion to 'soft socialist' economics is because he is going after LibDem voters who think high taxes and regulations are a good thing, it would at least require Cameron to also make a pitch based on civil liberties, the one differentiating issue where the LibDems make sense, and yet the main thrust of the inconstant Tory opposition to ID cards is based on their cost.

Those of you who think Cameron is just being clever should go watch Peter Sellers in 'Being There' and realise that what you are mistaking for cleverness is in fact just emptiness.

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Linux has been growing in popularity, now enjoying a higher market share than Mac OS. However, I fear that in all the hype and hysteria, the dangers have not had enough attention. We face a real possibility that the future of the creativity will be a barren world: a "tragedy of the digital commons" in which no one will create any content.

The truth is that Linux is one of the biggest threats to human creativity worldwide Some of you will find that statement remarkable, but it is true. As Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has said, "Linux is cancer." Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has said that: "Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

Moreover, because it is uncontrolled by a single entity, and because the source code is freely available and open to modification by anyone, it is a key way that pirated content can find its way onto the internet. Put a copy-protected CD into a Windows machine, and the copy protection kicks in. (OK you can get round it at the moment by doing things like pressing Shift while you put the CD in, but that's just teething troubles.) But put a copy-protected CD into Linux and it just ignores the copy protection. The software on Linux to rip CDs does not check whether publishers want their CDs copied. It will be easy to legislate against Microsoft's and Apple's tools that allow copying, but Linux is just too uncontrolled.

Fortunately, the US Congress is waking up the the threat of the tragedy of the digital commons. A new bill introduced to the US House Judiciary Committee before Christmas would ban the "analog hole". In other words, any equipment that can play music or films, like a DVD player or CD player, would be banned from having analogue outputs that could be used to pirate the content. Any outputs would have to use a "rights signaling system". Of course, certain professionals need access to analogue outputs and of course they would be allowed to have them.

That's the hardware side. But we will not succeed in fighting the evil of piracy unless we also deal with the software side. At the moment it is too easy to write software that can pirate content. Linux is just an anarchy and we need to ensure that all computer motherboards sold prevent Linux from being installed. We need a licensing scheme, headed by the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, for all programming tools so that only trusted individuals may use them, and that inappropriate use of them is communicated via the internet to the government. To put it simply, either Linux dies - or the whole of human creativity will become a stagnant swamp. Anyone who disagrees with this is a communist.

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My previous article seems to have sparked off a discussion amongst the commentariat on the difference between being called a 'subject' or a 'citizen'. To prevent that comment section from digressing too far, I thought it might be interesting to provide an article to revisit the topic even though I have written about it before.

There are some historical reasons why the British have been 'subjects' (as they were subject to the laws of the Crown), whereas Americans have been 'citizens'. The reality is that the British are subject to are the laws of a democratically elected Parliament. As in truth the Royal Assent is nothing more than a historical curiosity, the actual differences between the way individuals truly relate to state in the United States and Britain is less than it might seem. The principle differences of significance are be that as Britain is more democratic at th national level, individuals have less institutional defences against the power of the state, whereas in the United States, with its written constitution and clearer separation of powers, an individual has more structural defences against the excesses of democratic politics, at least in theory.

In my experience most people tend to think they are citizens rather than subjects of whatever nation issues their passport. However I have always though the term 'subject' was a far more honest word to describe the relationship between individuals and the state rather than the prouder egalitarian sounding 'citizen'. We are subject to taxes, we are subject to laws, we are subject to conscription of various sorts (be it military, educational or judicial). Sure, we 'citizens' are empowered via the glories of democracy, but quite how being out-voted and then being subject to some law you oppose 'empowers' you is unclear to me, even if it is a reasonable law. To be a subject may seem demeaning but in truth that is what we are: subjects.

As it happens, I think the term is even more appropriate for US 'citizens' given that at least in Britain and almost every other country, to avoid your particular state making ownership claims on the product of your labour, you just have to leave the country and live somewhere else. States generally do not claim to own you independent of your location, just the territory you live on and part of your labour within that territory in return for its 'protection' (capisce?).

The United States, on the other hand, claims you owe them the obeisance of taxes regardless of where you are physically located anywhere on the planet, although in practice it often makes arrangements with other nations to only impose its demands if you make more than a certain amount (double taxation treaties). Yet the obligation to report your income from overseas and to pay the IRS is still there if they wish you to do so.

So if it is not just sovereignty over a piece of land that the USA claims, it actually contends that it owns part of your labour regardless of where you live, making you subject to taxation for merely having the permission to live in America even if you choose to live elsewhere, then you sure sound like a 'subject' to me.

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"America's militant agnostic minority has totally distorted the meaning of separation of church and state. It doesn't mean banning religion and religious values from the public square. It doesn't mean Howard Stern's off-color (and frequently off-the-wall) 'humor' is protected speech, while the free _expression of religion is banned. It means the United States will establish no official religion, while remaining equally hospitable to all religions -- and to those who practice none. Religious principle is not something to fear and loathe and banish from the public square; it is a code of conduct on which we can and should rely to guide our personal and civic behavior"
- singer Pat Boone, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Contrary to popular belief, "separation of church and state" is not found in the US Constitution. What is found in the Constitution is a prohibition on the establishment of a state church (which is why it is known as the Establishment Clause) reading thusly "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." The 'separation' meme comes from correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, but was never enacted in Constitutional language.

A nice, fairly even-handed intro can be found here.

Personally, I think that the issue of impending theocracy and separation of church and state evaporates, once you take seriously the US Constitution's limited grant of power to the national government. If the national government is held to its enumerated powers, then it lacks the power to implement into civil law most behavioral controls that various religions might promote. Since the federal government restricted to its enumerated powers has no Constitutional basis to, for example, ban abortions, it simply cannot be used for that purpose by the purported theocrats among us.

The various left-wing ninnies who are running around bleating about theocracy are, in effect, hoist on their own petard. Having spent generations destroying the idea of limited government and creating an all-powerful national state, it ill becomes them to complain now that their tool is being turned to different ends. Even so, it is astonishing that virtually none of them realize that the uses to which the Republicans want to put federal power are inevitable, once you establish an all-powerful state in a country that is actually quite Christian and conservative, all told. It is sad but unsurprising that none of them are willing to attack the problem at its root by calling for limited government. No, the only solution the statists can imagine is seizing power again, themselves.

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It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that we have long regarded the Ban on Foxhunting with Dogs as having very little to do with foxhunting.

As David Carr has pointed out before, those who shout loudly that the move against hunting is 'undemocratic' are completely wrong: it is perfectly democratic. Welcome to the world in which there is no give and take of civil society... welcome to the world of total politics.

Mr Bradley says: 'We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom: it was class war.'

The MP for The Wrekin adds that it was the 'toffs' who declared war on Labour by resisting the ban, but agrees that both sides are battling for power, not animal welfare.

'This was not about the politics of envy but the polities of power. Ultimately it's about who governs Britain.'

[...]

'Labour governments have come and gone and left little impression on the gentry. But a ban on hunting touches them. It threatens their inalienable right to do as they please on their own land. For the first time, a decision of a Parliament they don't control has breached their wrought-iron gates.

No kidding. That is what we have been pointing out here on Samizdata.net for quite some time and why we have treated commenters who shrugged and said "why get worked up about foxhunting?" with such derision. It was never about hunting but rather things that are far, far more fundamental. It is about those who would make all things subject to democratically sanctified politics ('Rule by Activist') seeking to crush those who see private property and society, rather than state, as what matters.

Mr Bradley, 51, admits that he personally sees the campaign to save hunting as an assault on his right to govern as a Labour MP.

And Mr. Bradley is correct but for one thing: the battle in question is about the limits of political power and not just Labour's political power. Until the supporter of the Countryside Alliance see that they are actually struggling against the idea of a total political state, they will not even be fighting the right war. It is not about who controls the political system but what the political system is permitted to do under anyone's control. The United States has a system of separation of powers and constitutional governance which (at least in theory even though not in fact) places whole areas of civil society outside politics. Britain on the other hand has no such well defined system and the customary checks and balances have been all but swept away under the current regime. Britain's 'unwritten constitution' has been shown to be a paper tiger.

But those who look to the Tories to save them from the class warriors of the left are missing another fundamental truth. During their time in power, the Tory Party set the very foundations upon which Blair and Blunkett are building the apparatus for totally replacing social processes with political processes, a world in which nothing cannot be compelled by law if that is what 'The People' want: populist authoritarianism has been here for a while but now it no longer even feels it has to hide its true face behind a mask.

Moreover it would take another blind man to look back on Michael Howard's time as Home Secretary and see him as being less corrosive to civil liberties that the monstrous David Blunkett. Have you heard the outraged Tory opposition to the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act? Of course not, because the intellectual bankruptcy of the Tory party is now complete... for the most part they support it. If the so-called 'Conservatives' will not lift a finger to stop the destruction of the ancient underpinnings of British liberty, what exactly are they allegedly intending to 'conserve'? The Tories are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem and the sooner the UKIP destroy them by making them permanently unelectable, the better, so that some sort of real opposition can fill the ideological vacuum.

Those who were marching against banning foxhunting completely miss the issues at stake here. The issue is not and never has been foxhunting but rather the acceptable limits of politics. And you cannot resolve that issue via the political system in Britain. It is only once the people who oppose the ban on foxhunting and the people who oppose the Civil Contingencies Act and the people who oppose the introduction of ID cards and data pooling all realise that these are NOT separate issues but the same issue will effective opposition be possible. And I fear that opposition will, at least until the 'facts on the ground' can be established, have to be via civil disobedience and other ways to make sections of this country ungovernable by whatever means prove effective. The solution does not lie in 'democracy' but rather by enough people across the country asserting their right to free association and non-politically mediated social interaction by refusing to obey the entirely democratic laws which come out of Westminster.

Peter Bradley is right and he has provided any who are paying attention with a moment of utter clarity: It is time to challenge his right to 'rule' by whatever means necessary.

(7)

This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!

The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.

The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary - most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias - in the Post's world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.

The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.

But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.

First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn't there is, of course, a Bad Thing.

These final comments surely need no elaboration.

"It's a tool to clobber every effort to regulate," said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. "In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment." . . . .

Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB's involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.

(8)

Compared to other people (or rather, other people of my acquaintance) I joined the internet revolution rather late. While most people I meet are able to boast that they have had an e-mail address since the late (or even mid) 1980's, I was not similarly endowed until 1998.

But what I lacked in early adoption techniques I made up for in subsequent enthusiasm. This was a whole new frontier and I revelled and rejoiced in the exhilirating liberation it provided. I am sure that plenty of our readers have experienced that same feeling.

And it was while I was on this big journey of discovery and emancipation that I stumbled across a forum (there were no blogs in those olden times) run by LM Magazine. LM stands (or stood) for 'Living Marxism' and it was run by the same people who, today, run Spiked-Online.

As with most internet fora, there was a regular contingent of posters and, in the case of the LM Forum, this consisted of a whole gaggle of Marxists, Communists and Trotskyites. Into this lion's den barged (or perhaps blundered) two libertarians; one of them was me and the other was an American called Ed Collins.

I have to tell you that Ed and I had a whale of a time thrashing away at this brigade of assorted bolsheviks and, while the debates became intense and vigourous, it all remained remarkably even-tempered. In fact, and strange as it may sound, the whole forum was awash with a consistent and comprehensive good humour. I suppose this was, at least partly, down to the fact that the LM regulars were old-school lefties who still had some respect for intellectual rigour and a contempt for emotionalism and establishment conformity (unlike their po-faced, post-modern successors). There were even some things which united us all. For example, we all loathed the PC paternalism of people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and we all really, really, really hated the Greens.

I have truly fond memories of the old LM Forum and its idiosyncratic spirit of freewheeling, anarchic political debate.

In 2000, LM Magazine was on the wrong end of a disastrous libel suit as a result of which it was driven into bankruptcy. The magazine closed down and the forum went with it. I know not what became of its revolutionary leftie cadres but Ed Collins and I stayed in touch. In fact, we became pen-friends.

Ed and I would exchange letters by e-mail in which we discussed our ideas, disected current affairs and, occasionally, expressed our despair at that state of things on both sides of the Atlantic. From his postings on the LM Forum, I already knew that Ed was one of the good guys but it was not until we started to correspond regularly that I learned to appreciate his wit, his humanity and his majestic intellect. He has truly been an inspiration to me.

Ed and I would often speculate on the possibilities of actually meeting face-to-face. Either I could take a trip to Colorado or he to London but, either way, we always planned to meet up at some point, sit down together with a few frosty beers and set the world to rights. But we both had careers to pursue and busy lives and, somehow, that meeting did not come to pass.

And now it never will.

In the Spring of 2003, Ed wrote to me with the gut-wrenching news that he had been diagnosed as suffering from cancer. In response, I was as tongue-tied as most other people seem to be when presented with such a bombshell. All I could do was to assure him of my friendship and support and offer up my hopes and prayers for a full and speedy recovery.

Since then, Ed has stayed in touch with me, despite having to endure this savage affliction and the necessary, but debilitating, medical treatments. For a while the prospects for a recovery looked quite promising but, as time passed, it became clear that the tumours were spreading and that the cancer was voraciously and inexorably consuming him. As a helpless onlooker on another Continent, all I could do was to continue sending him my prayers and my support.

It was not enough. Ed Collins is now in hospice care at the Denver VA Medical Centre where he is living out the last few days of his life.

I have never met Ed Collins. I have never even spoken to him on the telephone. I do not know what he looks like or how old he is and I really know very little about his life. I know that he had a good life and I know this because he told me so in one of the letters he sent to me at a time when he was already expecting with worst. I am grateful that he chose to share some of that good life with me and, in doing so, make my life better than it otherwise would have been.

I must also take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Ed's friend, Jeff LeFlore. Jeff and his family have looked after Ed these past few months while his health and body were deteriorating. Jeff has also taken the time and trouble to speak to me by telephone and act as a go-between to pass my last letter to Ed now that Ed is no longer capable of corresponding himself. Thank you, Jeff.

The last communication I received from Ed was on 12th January this year. At that time, although I knew that things looked rather grim, I do not suppose I really appreciated just how bad they were. This is an excerpt from that e-mail:

I've tremendously enjoyed reading your stuff over on Samizdata and other places, and wish I felt like participating rather than merely being passive.

I rather like the sane and thoughtful comments of the Samizatistas. Keep up the good work, David, and always remember that there is Hope in the world.

I am sure that Ed knew exactly how bad things were and just how close he was to the end. Yet, there was no faltering in the towering dignity and resilient heroism that was the mark of the man.

Yes, there is hope for the world. But I cannot help but feel that there will be marginally less of it when Ed Collins dies.

I am writing this not because I want to share my grief and sadness at his passing. That is, and will remain, a private matter. But I want the world to know about Ed Collins. I want the world to know that he is among the best of us. Above all, I want the world to know that I am honoured and privileged to be able to call him my friend.

(24)

Almost anything you say about how ideas spread and eventually get accepted and acted upon is liable to be (a) true, but (b) over-simplified, because the whole truth about how ideas spread and get acted upon is far, far too complicated ever to keep complete track of. Where the definite falsehood creeps in is when people say, or more commonly imply through the other things that they say, that ideas can only spread in this way or that way, and that all the other ways they can spread don't count for anything.

There is one such implied falsehood which we at Samizdata, for humiliatingly obvious reasons, are likely to be particularly interested in and cheered up by contesting. This is the idea that what matters when it comes to spreading ideas is sheer weight of numbers. It's the idea that getting some other idea to catch on and be acted upon is a question of assembling a sufficiently huge number of people who believe this idea to be true or good or appealing, and then for this vast throng of supporting people to prevail against the other almost equally vast (but not quite) throng of people who believe the opposite.

Clearly, as a partial description about how some ideas spread, at some times and in some places, this kind of thing can definitely happen. Political elections are often just like this. This vast throng of humanity votes for this idea, that throng votes for that idea, and the winners are the ones who appeal to the biggest throng.

But as a complete description of how ideas spread this picture is false. Most things, after all, are not decided by political elections. For example, I would say that when historians look back on our era, they will say that the development of the Internet was a huge historical event, up there with the first printed bibles in local languages, or with the development of the railways or of the motor car. Yet neither the internet, nor printing, nor railways, nor motor cars were any of them set in motion merely by political electorates, and nor, once they had got underway, were any political electorates ever invited to vote against them.

The weight-of-numbers model is even seriously false when it comes to understanding the full story of most political elections. Yes, elections decide who will occupy various political offices, and what will be written about in newspaper editorials for the next few years. But these elections seldom decide very much about what actually gets done from these offices. Instead, democratic true believers (the ones who really do believe that absolutely everything should be decided with a head count) constantly rage at how "undemocratic" democracy typically turns out to be. They have a point.

I will now offer you a thought experiment, the point of which is to explain how unimportant mere numbers of believers in an idea can be, and how much more interesting and complicated the spread of and adoption of ideas can sometimes be.

Suppose that a group of about a dozen men are stuck in the first floor of a building, the ground floor of which is seriously on fire. They can't run down stairs, because if they do they will be greeted by a deadly wall of flames. Worse, if they don't somehow escape by some other means they will also die horribly, just as soon as the fire reaches the first floor, and only a few minutes later than they would if they tried to run through the flames.

What to do?

There are two schools of thought, consisting of One Man with a Plan, and Eleven Men telling that One Man that his damned Plan is crazy.

The One Man with a Plan says: We must all jump out of the window.

The Other Eleven all say: No! The ground on which you want us to jump is hard, not soft. The window from which we must jump is quite a long way off that hard ground. Most of us are likely to get hurt, and maybe some of us quite badly. One or two of us might even die.

Not content with denouncing the Plan of the One Man for being mistaken, the Other Eleven ? who are panicking and consequently desperate for someone or something to blame ? actually get quite angry, and start calling the One Man a fiend and a sadist and a murderer, who seems to want them all to get hurt and even to want all of them to die. What kind of monster are you? ? etc. etc. etc., blah blah blah.

Nevertheless, the One Man wins the argument, and all twelve of them do duly jump out of the window.

Many of the gloomy prophecies about the harm this might do are proved right. One guy does get killed, and almost all of them suffer more or less severe injuries. As a result of these misfortunes, although some of the Other Eleven realise afterwards that the One Man was right and even say thank you to him, others among them go to their more or less speeded up deaths cursing the One Man for "making us do that".

The reason this One Man won this argument, and his Eleven opponents lost is that the contending ideas were of two different kinds. The Eleven were not actually offering any answer to the question posed by Reality, in the form of the fire. They were merely saying that getting out of this mess was going to be painful and dangerous, which added nothing to the debate because all present already knew that. They might just as well have said "oh bugger", for all the difference they were making with their "argument". The One Man, on the other hand, was answering the question posed by Reality, and was supplying the only answer that anyone was offering. Therefore, that is what ended up being done.

That Reality is what it is doesn't mean that men like my One Man will always be heeded. I can reveal that this One Man had spent the previous few years before the fire arguing that the building they all ended up jumping out of needed a fire escape. He also argued for better anti-fire safety procedures in the restaurant below that started the fire. The Eleven pointed out, again quite correctly, that a fire escape would be costly, and furthermore that it would increase the chances of burglary. They added that starting an argument with the restaurateurs downstairs would be most unpleasant, and once again, they were correct. And because not having a fire escape and not arguing with their neighbours were decisions which it was possible to make without immediate disaster, that is what was decided, even though the One Man was later able to claim that he'd been proved right about all of that also. So sometimes, weight of numbers wins.

But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is enough simply to flag up, so to speak, a set of ideas, which are of the sort that can now be ignored in relative safety and relatively easily, but which in the future will not be so easy to ignore, because in the future Reality may be asking different questions. At which point, this set of ideas stands ready to save the day.

Our answers here at Samizdata may not now be doing very well, numerically speaking. But the questions can change, and if they do our answers might suddenly become very popular indeed. Meanwhile we must keep them visible and ready. (This is one of the reasons why sheer repetition is such an important propaganda technique. Repetition means that if the question changes to something more favourable, the answer will still be around to answer it.)

Final point. My "thought experiment"? All very nice in theory, Brian, but give us an example. Right? Okay: Margaret Thatcher. She had a Plan to rescue the British economy from going down the toilet in the early 1980s. Her vastly more numerous opponents merely said ad nauseam that her Plan was itself decidedly toilet-like also. They were right about that, but they lost the argument that mattered most, the one about what should be done. That there were about a thousand of them to every "Thatcherite" had nothing to do with anything. She had a Plan. Her opponents, as she constantly challenged them to admit ? "There is no alternative!" ? had no Plan. Therefore, she won.

A week or two ago, it was rather fancifully suggested in a comment thread here that the British electorate had voted to "roll back the state". They did no such thing.

All they did was prefer Britain jumping out of the window to Britain getting burned to death. At which point my metaphor breaks down because then we get involved in arguing about whether what I've been calling "jumping out of the window" wouldn't actually be rather a good thing, which of course really jumping out of the window wouldn't be.

But as I said at the beginning of this, it can get complicated. Any short description of how ideas catch on and get acted upon is going to be an over-simplication, but I trust that this particular over-simplication has been useful.

I hope to have many further over-simplications to offer on this topic of how ideas spread and catch on in future postings.

(7)

There's an article in today's New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won't find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler's "Bavarian retreat".

The predominant color scheme of Hitler's "bright, airy chalet" was "a light jade green." Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, "a droll raconteur," decorated his entrance hall with "cactus plants in majolica pots."

Such are the precious and chilling observations in an irony-free 1938 article in Homes & Gardens, a British magazine, on Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A bit of arcana, to be sure, but one that has dropped squarely into the current debate over the Internet and intellectual property. This file, too, is being shared.

The resurrection of the article can be traced to Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers in Britain, who says he was given a vintage issue of the magazine by his father-in-law. Noticing the Hitler spread, which doted on the compound's high-mountain beauty ("the fairest view in all Europe") at a time when the Nazis had already gobbled up Austria, Mr. Waldman scanned the three pages and posted them on his personal Web site last May. They sat largely unnoticed until about three weeks ago, when Mr. Waldman made them more prominent on his site and sent an e-mail message to the current editor of Homes & Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, pointing up the article as a historical curiosity.

Ms. McKenzie-Price, citing copyright rules, politely requested that he remove the pages. Mr. Waldman did so, but not before other Web users had turned the pages into communal property, like so many songs and photographs and movies and words that have been illegally traded for more than a decade in the Internet's back alleys.

Still, there was a question of whether the magazine's position was a stance against property theft or a bit of red-faced persnicketiness.

Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that's what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they've written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought.

This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place.

Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it.

But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed.

This posting of mine may now seem like a typical example of the media, in this case a blog, telling some wretched victim of a media frenzy (such as this story now surely is) that they "now have the opportunity to tell their side of the story", to yet another bit of the same damned media, who will then slant that new bit of the story as cruelly as they have slanted every other bit of it. But that isn't how this part of the media works. If you take the minimum bit of trouble you need to take (e.g. by setting up your own blog), you really can, these days, "tell your side of the story" in a manner over which you can have editorial control. Be interesting. Be honest. Don't be boring. Follow rules like that, and you can influence all stories about you in a very big way, because any decent journalist will want to refer to anything you have to say, simply to prove that he is on top of the story.

The same new media world which makes it impossible for you to snuff out the original article (still less the media frenzy about the original article), no matter how much the law may be on your side, also makes it impossible for you to be silenced, unless you silence yourself.

As the New York Times piece concludes:

For all of that, though, IPC Media's unwillingness to discuss even the content of the Hitler article is puzzling to Mr. Waldman. This skeleton was abruptly yanked from the Homes & Gardens closet, yes, but the article reflects more about the mind of aristocratic Britain in 1938 – well known to have given Hitler the benefit of the doubt – than it does about the magazine itself. Even the American press noted the beauty of Hitler's compound, including The New York Times, which on Sept. 18, 1938, wrote that the chalet was "simple in its appointments" and that it commanded "a magnificent highland panorama."

Posting these pages online "doesn't damage Homes & Garden's reputation," Mr. Waldman said. "In fact, putting them up, along with a letter from the editor explaining a bit about them, could be a very positive thing for them to do."

I do admit that, done wrongly, such a letter might only fan the flames of the story, but what are the alternatives? Either you feed your genuine opinion of what is being said about you into the frenzy, or you don't. The frenzy still happens. The situation is either: definitely bad – or: it could vary anywhere from bad through okay considering and we held up our end, and onwards and upwards to downright excellent and we made a stack more money this year than we ever expected to, and all because of something rather stupid we said about Hitler in 1938.

Maybe in the next few days Homes & Gardens will, under the pressure of events, change their tune, and end up singing the one I here recommend for them. But my guess is they'll say to themselves, better play it safe.

But my point is: safe isn't safe these days. There's only truthful and positive and risky, and evasive and negative and risky. The biggest risk being that you turn your back on all the gains you might have won if you'd played your hand right.

(56)

One of the more annoying things about modern large bookshops is that they divide the non-fiction books into a vast number of over-defined categories. This is not a huge difficulty if you are looking for a cookbook, or a book about trains, or a travel guidebook, as it is pretty clear what sections those books belong in. However, when we get to the social sciences things get hazy. If I am looking for (say) one of Ian Buruma's books on Asia (which are all worth a read, by the way), it is impossible to know whether the book in question will be on the shelves in "Asian History", "Eastern culture", "Travel writing", "Sociology", "Chinese History", or one several other categories, even though if you look at all his books together they are clearly all have a very similar theme. It just does not fit into bookshop categorisation.

This is fine if you are looking for a particular book. You just ask at the information counter, they look it up in the computer and they tell you where it is and whether they have any copies. However, if you are trying to find it without help it can be close to impossible.

In any event, when I was wandering through my local branch of Books etc the other day, I found myself walking past a section I hadn't noticed before, labelled "anti-globalisation". That's right, they had a section devoted to the works of Michael Moore, Noam Chomksy and the like. People who wanted to read such books can go straight to that section without having to be exposed to anything else. I'm sure they find this very convenient.

Even better, the bookshop encourages its staff to recommend books to customers. They even go to the trouble of giving their staff members little cards on which they can write down their recommendations and attach them to the shelves in the store. This is a good practice, as it may help readers find books and it also makes it clear that the booksellers are people who like to read themselves. But, even so, I had personal issues with the anti-globalisation recommendations.

Ugh.

Save me.

Seriously, I suspect that the number of people who have read Michael Moore and are not already aware of the existence of John Pilger and Noam Chomsky already is small (or perhaps I overestimate them). I think recommendations like this are better when they refer people who have read something well known to something that is both rather more obscure and also good. And Pilger and Chomsky are not especially obscure, however much I might wish it were so.

However, in the chance that there might be anyone walking through the bookshop who might have discovered Michael Moore but not Pilger or Chomsky, I thought I had a duty to save them from this (and also there was a Samizdata post in it). Therefore, although it was a bit naughty of me I removed the little cards from the shelf and walked out with them. (Yes, okay, technically I stole them. However, sometimes the ends do justify the means).

As I was walking out of the shop, it struck me that it would be kind of cool to get a few of the blank cards, write out a few book recommendations of my own, and then attach them to the shelves. However, when I thought about it some more, I realised I didn't need anyone to supply me with a stock of blank cards. For I have the miracles of modern technology at my disposal, and I could produce some of my own. I could go back into the bookshop and leave something like this.

Or perhaps this.

The fun could be never ending.

Perhaps I could attempt to send people to little sections of the bookshop they hadn't found before. "If you have enjoyed Michael Moore, then try Brink Lindsey. He'll help you get over it". "If you have enjoyed Paul Erlich, then we have many equally enjoyable books in the humor section". The potential fun is endless.

The nice irony about all this is that Borders, the American owned chain of bookstores, likes to operate a dual brand strategy. It reserves the Borders name only for its very large book megastores, and uses other brand names for smaller stores, mostly in malls. In the US, its smaller stores make up the Waldenbooks chain. In the UK, its smaller stores are called, you guessed it, Books etc. What this means is that the salaries of the people recommending the anti-globalisation books are being paid by a rapacious global bookshop brand, that is ravaging and homogenising the world (or at least the Anglosphere), destroying local cultures as they do so. Seriously, how can you possibly overstate the damage done by large, globally minded bookstore chains that provide foreign countries with far better stocked bookshops than anything they had before, in which local people can sit in nice comfortable chairs as they browse books and sip excellent espresso based coffee from the very pleasant in-store cafes. It's clearly another cultural Chernobyl.

I mean, how can these people live with themselves?

(41)

Whilst perusing Harry's Place, I discovered a reference to an essay written by Labour MP Peter Hain in 2000 about 'libertarian socialism' over on the Chartist website called Rediscovering our libertarian roots.

The whole notion of this alleged form of libertarianism is something I have commented on before, but I have probably never seen a more clearly written explanation of the true thinking that underpins 'libertarian socialism' than this article by Hain.

It is very important to understand what Hain's essay is and is not. It is not a philosophical paper making logical links between socialism and libertarianism. What it is is a tactical paper very much along the lines of the one I wrote called Giving libertarianism a left hook, only with the opposite objective.

Rather than fisking Hain's article, I will just quote what I think are the most illustrative sections:

The key elements of libertarian socialism - decentralisation, democracy, popular sovereignty and a refusal to accept that collectivism means subjugating individual liberty.

[...]

Discredited by its association with statism, socialism's rehabilitation can only be achieved through a recovery of its libertarian roots, applying these to the modern age through Labour's Third Way.

[...]

Underlying libertarian socialism is a different and distinct notion of politics which rests on the belief that it is only through interaction with others in political activity and civic action that individuals will fully realise their humanity. Democracy should therefore extend not simply to government but throughout society: in industry, in the neighbourhood or in any arrangement by which people organise their lives.

[...]

However, power can only be spread downwards in an equitable manner if there is a national framework where opportunities, resources, wealth and income are distributed fairly, where democratic rights are constitutionally entrenched, and where there is equal sexual and racial opportunity. This is where socialism becomes the essential counterpart to libertarianism which could otherwise, and indeed sometimes is, right wing. It means nationally established minimum levels of public provision, such as for housing, public transport, social services, day-care facilities, home helps and so on. The extent to which these are 'topped up' and different priorities set between them, is then a matter for local decision.

[...]

Most individuals need active government to intervene and curb market excess and distortions of market power. For choice and individual aspiration to be real for the many, and not simply for the privileged few, people must have the power to choose.

Nevertheless the old left nostrum that markets equal capitalism and the absence of markets equals socialism, is utterly simplistic. As Aneurin Bevan argued, the extent to which markets are regulated or subjected to strategic intervention by government is not a matter of theoretical dogma, but a practical matter to be judged on its merit. That is why a Third Way Labour government is not passive, but highly active, working in partnership with business and investing in the skills and modern infrastructure which market forces and the private sector do not provide

There are so many problems and manifest contradictions that leap off the page it is difficult to know where to start. The core of what makes this so wrong lies as usual at the meta-contextual level. The problem is one of the distorting lens of the writer's world view, based as they clearly are on utterly utilitarian principles. Hain says libertarian socialists are characterised by a "refusal to accept that collectivism means subjugating individual liberty", whereupon he follows with an article which lists the many ways in which his socialist system would in fact do precisely that.

The core of Hain's view is that politics, which is a euphemism for 'the control of the collective means of violence backed coercion', is the essential core around which 'society' exists and interacts. Thus when he says society must be 'completely democratic', he means society must be completely political. Yet the argument that it is only by this that individual liberty can be realised falls at the first fence by virtue of the fact you cannot opt out of a political society and particularly a democratic political society: if my neighbour gets to vote on all aspects of "any arrangement by which people organise their lives", then clearly my individual wish regarding what I may do with my own life is by no means my choice unless that choice is quite literally a popular one.

Secondly, if democratic rights are to be 'constitutionally enshrined' and the society completely democratic in all its aspects and therefore completely political, then how can the individual rights of people be insulated from the democratic political process which may seek to abridge them? You can either have complete democracy enshrined or, as the American founding fathers tried with limited success, you can have individual rights enshrined and placed outside the reach of democratic politics, but you cannot logically have both.

The notion that a completely politicized democratic 'society' of the kind advocated by Hain could by its very nature allow any personal liberty whatsoever in a meaningful sense is manifestly absurd. If you cannot opt out of something you have not previously agreed to, in what manner are you free? If society is totally political, then you may have 'permissions' to do this or that, won by the give and take of democratic political processes but you do not have super-political inalienable rights at all. Politics can in theory make you 'free from starving' perhaps (in practise of course it tends to do the opposite), but what about being free to try or not try, some course of action? When every aspect of life is subject to the views of a plurality of other people, there is no liberty to just try anything at all on your own initiative. What Hain is arguing for is by his own words collectivism.

It seems to me that one thing all forms of collectivism share is that individual choice is always subordinate to The Group, be it the fascist volk or a local soviet or an anarcho-syndicalist people's council or whatever other fiction of 'society' the state decides to use. So talk of individual rights within the context of a collectivist 'society' is either incoherence or if not is nothing more than a tactical ploy to conflate a violence based system of total governance with its antithesis in a manner well understood. As I wrote in a recent article, unlike a collectivist kibbutz, which is a voluntary collectivist commune, you cannot just walk out of the door of a collectivist 'society' and start setting up private arrangements with other willing people if the majority do not want you to do that: they will in fact deputise the use of violence to prevent it.

The logical flaws in the 'collectivist society replacing collectivist state' notion are so obvious that they have been pointed out a great many times by a great many people, but I will add my voice to the throng anyway. Hain, like Marx before him, clearly sees libertarian socialism as working towards the 'withering away of the state' as a true collectivist 'society' comes to replace it. But to maintain such a condition of total political governance will require the use of force to prevent any consensual but not democratically sanctioned acts between willing individuals. To maintain this suppression of spontaneous several relationships, a collectivist socialist 'society' must be organised and structured in certain ways that make it indistinguishable from a collectivist socialist state.

So if for a collectivist 'society' to function there must be a high degree of politically imposed non-spontaneous behaviour from its 'citizens' (such as preventing a person selling their own labour for less than the political community will allow them to), and those mandates must be backed with the threat of violence (i.e. law) if they are not to be ignored, then what we have a political State by any reasonable definition of the word 'State', much as Rousseau would have defined one. In fact, socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.

Now of course all societies have laws, be it polycentric law or state imposed law. Even the most libertarian society plausibly imaginable will have force backed prohibitions against the unjustified use of violence, which is to say (in very crude and simplified terms) libertarian law deals with 'that which you may not do without consent of the person to or with whom you are doing it'. You may not cause me harm with dioxin from your factory because I have not given you leave to put your chemicals in my lungs. This law is based on the principle that the individual's rights to his body (and property) are his own.

However the collectivist places the protection of the political collective as more important than the individual and thus collective law is whatever the political collective says it is. If the political collective says 'a factory may not put dioxin in Fred's lungs because we want a more environmentally safe place to live for all of us', then that is the law because the political collective has said so, not because Fred has the right to control the contents of his own lungs.

But if they say 'a factory may indeed put dioxin in Fred's lungs because we want a better economy and more stuff for the rest of us' then that too is the voice of the collective. And Fred? If he does not like it, well, it is "only through interaction with others in political activity and civic action that individuals will fully realise their humanity". And if Fred finds himself in the minority? Now Fred has a problem because as the society is 'totally democratic', we will have none of this nonsense of independent and politically neutral courts stepping in to support the objective and several rights of Fred against the collective, as if that could happen in our libertarian socialist paradise, we would no longer have our totally democratic society.

So as Hain says it is only through trying to control the means of collective coercion, the means to use force to make people do things, that Fred can 'fully realise his humanity', how is this 'libertarian socialism' going to protect the individual called Fred's rights? What if the majority in Hain's total democracy don't like Fred? And who will define these 'individual' rights? The political collective, of course. Forget constitutions which constrain democracy because those are anti-democratic (which is rather the point). Forget consensual several relationships because everything is democratic, meaning no politically unpopular relationships will be allowed. Forget custom and culture as a means to moderate interactions because that is not political. If Fred is not popular, Fred is just out of luck.

Fascist collectivists try to prevent mixed race sex, socialist collectivists try to prevent 'undemocratic' private trade, but the principle of collectivism is always the same. If an individual does something he wants to do in a collectivist 'society', it is because the political collective allows him to do it, not because it is his right to do as he pleases with those who are willing participants.

Clearly this democratic 'society' of Hain's is willing to use force to prevent free trade between willing individuals unless they happen to be acting in a manner which is politically favoured. Much as most states currently use force to try and prevent free trade in drugs between willing individuals, the same will be done to any relationship the political collective dislikes. Put another way, this democratic society is in fact a state which will be organised to enforce the political will of the plurality on an epic scale, given that this would be a totally political society. Any time some tried to opt out, they will quickly discover just how 'withered away' the state is under 'socialist libertarianism'.

Of course just as modern states may be more repressive or less repressive (running on a continuum from, say, Switzerland to North Korea), some implementations of so-called 'socialist libertarianism' may be more or less savage in their interpretation of an unfettered total political democracy at a given point in time. An individual who shares the views, aspirations and prejudices of the majority may well think that life seems equitable and good. After all, if he is allowed to do the things he wishes to do, why complain? But as the democracy advocated by Hain is total, what if he wants to do that which not popular?

I have long thought that supporters of collectivism (be it of the socialist, nationalist or conservative kind) who are homosexuals or who are people with others lifestyles that will never be popular (in the literal sense of the word) are unwise in the extreme to advocate anything that does not reserve rights to individuals before collectives. Socialism is by Hain's own words seen as "...where socialism becomes the essential counterpart to libertarianism which could otherwise - and indeed sometimes is - right wing". Of course by 'right wing' Hain means individualist. Libertarianism puts the rights of the individual as the first of all virtues. Libertarian socialism is individualist collectivism, egro libertarian socialism is an oxymoron.

So what is Hain's total political 'society' in reality? It is locally organised totalitarianism with Big Brother based in the local town hall rather than in Whitehall.

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One of the news headlines today was about the discovery of mass grave in Mahawil area in Iraq. So far remains of more than 3,000 people have been found but Iraqis fear up to 15,000 people reported missing in the area may have been buried there during Saddam's government crackdown on Shi'ites when they launched an uprising in 1991. Reuters reports:

Many families stood silently behind a ring of barbed wire coils separating them from the excavation in an attempt to preserve the site but others walked through the piles.

As an earthmover scraped heaps of rich brown earth from the site, bones protruded from the dirt. Once extricated, skulls and what look like the bones from the rest of the bodies were heaped into crumbled piles or stuffed into plastic bags. Clothing hung from the bones. Some skulls were cracked.

Since Saddam's fall in the U.S.-led war on Iraq, mass graves have been unearthed in Najaf, Basra, Babylon and other areas and are still being found as Iraqis feel free to recount tales of arrests, torture and killings once too risky to tell.

To all those protesters whose righteous hatred for the United States and Britain was declared out of self-proclaimed desire for peace. Is this the kind of 'peace' you wanted to preserve when you cried "not in my name"?

Araya Hussein carried the remains of her husband in a bag away from the site weeping.

He went missing in 1991 when we had 10 children. I thought he was a prisoner and would one day come home. I never imagined I would be carrying his bones home.

Explain to this woman why your righteous wrath was directed at Bush and Blair but not at Saddam. Explain how according to your warped view of the world Saddam has 'the right' to rule Iraq and kill thousands without any fear of retribution. Explain how you can end up supporting an evil and oppressive regime and distance yourself from the long awaited liberation.

Damn you and your coddled, self-centered and twisted minds. You have caused enough misery and suffering by your irrational and irresponsible opposition to anything that might bring freedom to those parts of the world where free expression is an unknown concept. Perhaps you should change your slogans and cry for 'peace of mind', your minds that is, in the face of the gruesome truth emerging from Iraq.

The mass murders in Iraq have been stopped... but not in your name

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If you oppose a war to overthrow Ba'athist Socialism in Iraq but also claim to despise Saddam Hussain, then I can only assume that you are a 'containment' advocate... which is to say you view the policy of the last 12 years which prevented the Iraqi regime attacking it neighbours as an adequate response. You probably also think that containing Hussain within Iraq's borders is all that is really in the interests of any outsiders (which in practice means primarily the USA and UK)... therefore what happens inside Iraq is really not germane. You might even add that you would be quite happy to see the Iraqi people overthrow Hussain, just not with our tax money or the blood of US and UK soldiers, thanks.

Okay, I do not agree but that is indeed a coherent argument to make.

However if part of your argument against this impending war is 'many Iraqi civilians will be killed and thus it is unjustified', then you are not making the 'containment' argument, nor are you making a 'not in our national interest' argument. What you are saying is that the interests of the Iraqi people are actually important to you and presumably have some objective value.

So ponder this: Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Socialist regime has been in power since 1979... about 22 years. Although the figures for how many people his regime has murdered varies hugely depending on the source and which axe they are grinding (with the high figure being 2 million), I will assume that the one million statistic being widely bandied about is correct... and lets for now just gloss over the number of people tortured, imprisoned or driven into exile.

That is approximately 45,500 Iraqi and Kurdish people per year murdered inside Iraq by the Ba'athist government... about 125 people per day that Saddam Hussein has been in power (or equal to about two Waco massacres every day). This is a crude blood calculus of course but it does put the Butcher's Bill up where it can be seen and priced. Even if the number was half that, it gives us some measure of the scale of the horror involved.

So if your argument against a (hopefully short) war to overthrow Iraq's Socialist regime is based on the undeniable fact innocent people will die, you would seem to be saying that it only matters when Iraqis are killed if outsiders are the ones killing them... because Iraqis are already dying at the hands of the Iraqi state in prodigious numbers. If that is indeed your position, I would contend that you really do not give a damn about what is best for the Iraqi people.

When the air turned to poison in Halabja: the reality of peace in Iraq

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I have seen many good ideas put forth about why taking on Iraq is a good strategy, and how different approaches to the other members of the "axis of evil" are appropriate. I think there is something more profound happening in the Bush administration, a policy change whose outlines are now appearing and whose scope is breathtaking in its sweep.

Prior to 9/11, Bush was considered an isolationist. There were worries about America disengaging from the rest of the world. Folks, that is exactly where the endgame of the current global strategy is leading. President Bush and his advisors are cutting the Gordian knots which tie the US into permanent global deployment.

We've got large numbers of troops pinned down in the Middle East. Steven den Beste has already shown how the conquest of Iraq removes the reason for basing large numbers of forces in the Middle East. Troops can be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Turkey and god knows where else. Remove Saddam and there is suddenly no need for it. True, it will take some years to get Iraq Inc up and running the way we got Japan Inc going 50 years ago, but it will happen.

With Iran moving towards liberalization; with Iraq a capitalist democracy and with the Russians building a huge new oil terminal in Murmansk for sales to America, we not only get cheap oil... we undermine the very tool which allows Saudi's to support billion dollar terrorist movements.

And then there are the Cold War leftovers in Europe... Another commentator I've read recently - where I unfortuneately do not recall - has suggested Rumsfeld wants to return the US to its classical military stance: a sea power. Maritime powers do not need large numbers of troops permanently based around the world. They only need ports for repair and refueling.

Where else are we pinned down? Korea... 37,000 Americans in harms way on that hellish armistice line. It is a no-man's land of a half century old war that has never ended. Rumsfeld's latest move in Korea is telling. US troops are to be pulled back. They will no longer be the Korean's border canary.

SecDef Rumsfeld has stated in a number of recent public appearances South Korea has an economic capacity over thirty times that of North Korea and should be able to defend itself. He has suggestd it would be better for our soldiers and their families if they were based at home rather than in long overseas rotations.

In each area where there are large permanent American troop deployments, we see disengagement. It might take a war in at least one case to get us extricated. We are getting extricated nonetheless.

There is even a bonus prize. The UN is about to self-destruct. Put it all together and project ten years into the future. We see an America with a powerful naval and air force; with relatively few soldiers based outside the nation. An America looking out for its' own interests and finally rid of most of the "entangling alliances" brought about by World War II and its' aftermath.

We're at the start not of Empire, but of the return to Fortress America... with a global reach via naval and air capacity to handle anyone who comes to our shores looking for trouble.

I think I could live with that.

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The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.

How much is an Iraqi life worth? To me personally, about zero. Here's why:
- I have no friends in Iraq (and doubt I ever will by the end of this post)
- No Iraqi signs my paycheck
- No Iraqi makes anything special that I can't buy anywhere else (oil?)
- Iraq is on the other side of the globe

"But they're being killed" you say. So are many other people. What about the North Koreans? What about the people who will effectively be killed because they cannot afford medical care due to this war? What about third world countries where parents have more children than they can afford to feed? Please make an objective, logical argument why the life of an Iraqi rates above (not just equal to) these others.

There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question "Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?" We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It's long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what's left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy.

The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata's eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state.

More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)?

I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every 'utopia' has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the 'mountain of skulls' left behind.

 

Savonarola's Florence, Robespierre's France, Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Kim Jong-il's North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, note that there is an individual's name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to 'care' about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence.

We see people suffer on TV everyday. They suffer even more off screen. Should we mobilise the world every time this happens until there is no more pain? Sounds like utopia to me. However, there is a difference between suffering caused by natural disasters and pain inflicted on an individual by another. The first inspires compassion and assistance, the second moral outrage and a corresponding action to remove the oppression.

"But why should I care about someone else being oppressed when I am busy building my life to my specifications and according to my abilities?" I hear you say. You attach certain importance to yourself, which is natural and right. An individual Iraqi, North Korean, Chinese would feel the same, if not for some homicidal megalomaniac ruling his country. Self-awareness is the most fundamental expression of a human being as an individual and one of the greatest sources of evil is the ability of one human being to deny this to another.

Again, why should 'we', individuals living in another country, 'other side of the globe', do anything about it? The first part of the comment reads to me exactly as this (in)famous quote:

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...[and elsewhere]...My answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country...

These words were uttered by Neville Chamberlain before one of the most appalling episodes in modern European history. His 'sensible' attitude did f**k-all to prevent or restrain what followed. These words were said after:

The rights of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man, trampled upon by a state in a manner shocking the sense of mankind, has long been considered to form part of the recognized law of nations. If murder, rapine, and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries, shall those who differ from the common criminal only by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation?

These crimes [crimes against humanity] were committed both before and after Nazi Germany had launched her series of aggressions. They were committed within Germany and in foreign countries as well. Although separated in time and space, these crimes had, of course, an inter-relationship which resulted from their having a common source in Nazi ideology; for we shall show that within Germany the conspirators had made hatred and destruction of the Jews an official philosophy and a public duty, that they had preached the concept of the master race with its corollary of slavery for others, that they had denied and destroyed the dignity and the rights of the individual human being. They had organized force, brutality, and terror into instruments of political power and had made them commonplaces of daily existence. We propose to prove that they had placed the concentration camp and a vast apparatus of force behind their racial and political myths, their laws and polices.

As every German Cabinet minister or high official knew, behind the laws and decrees in the Reichsgesetzblatt was not the agreement of the people or their representatives but the terror of the concentration camps and the police state. The conspirators had preached that war was a noble activity and that force was the appropriate means of resolving international differences; and having mobilized all aspects of German life for war, they plunged Germany and the world into war.

We say this system of hatred, savagery, and denial of individual rights, which the conspirators erected into a philosophy of government within Germany or into what we may call the Nazi constitution, followed the Nazi armies as they swept over Europe. For the Jews of the occupied countries suffered the same fate as the Jews of Germany, and foreign laborers became the serfs of the "master race," and they were deported and enslaved by the million. Many of the deported and enslaved laborers joined the victims of the concentration camps, where they were literally worked to death in the course of the Nazi program of extermination through work. We propose to show that this Nazi combination of the assembly line, the torture chamber, and the executioner's rack in a single institution has a horrible repugnance to the twentieth century mind.

You might have guessed that these are extracts from the prosecuting speeches at Nuremberg Trials. (The first paragraph was from one made by Sir Hartley Shawcross, Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom. The rest is from the speech of Mr. Thomas J. Dodd, Executive Trial Counsel for the United States.) I resorted to this historical example of tyranny, oppression, human misery caused by the Nazi state, ideology, bureaucracy and most of all individual Nazis, because it is recent, well documented and its horrors rarely denied. The consensus is that defeat of Germany had been necessary not only for strategic and military reasons but also from a human standpoint. The aftermath may have spawned international laws and institutions that deserve severe criticism in their present form. Nevertheless I would argue that the moral force of their underlying principles remains unabated.

It is an impossible and ungrateful task to try provide irrefutable grounds to those who do not already believe in the intrinsic need to defend individual freedom whenever it is seriously threatened. To insist on such a moral imperative for everyone would be foolish. Instead I insist on consistency. If you believe that it was important to fight the likes of Nazi Germany and its ideology not only as self-defense measure, then extend that reasoning to Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran. To argue that the US, UK and other governments are not worthy to be moved by such considerations and that their actions are driven by non-humanitarian, self-interested or utilitarian objectives is a non-starter. The countries fighting in the WWII were far from perfect. The Allied armies were commanded by the same kind of statists as the ones that live off our taxes and erode our civil liberties. Indeed, after the war, they all got back to doing so with greater vigor. But that is the stuff of daily posts on Samizdata.net.

If freedom of individual matters sufficiently to oppose the US and UK state, it matters more in Iraq and anywhere where such expression is suppressed and our 'libertarian' truths ring hollow, if we deny them to anyone but ourselves.

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When looking at the world around us, it is impossible to constantly take everything upon which we must form an opinion back to first principles: life is simply too short for that.

But to decide if a dog might be about to bite you, one must have at least some understanding of the nature of dogs and how they might act differently to cats or parrots or foxes or hippopotamuses (the later being a rare sight in London it must be noted). Whilst the propensity of a Golden Labrador and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier to chomp on you varies considerably, both are nevertheless dogs and thus act within the range of doglike behaviours to which their natures impel them.

And so to understand anything done by a state, the workings of its parts and how they are likely to impact upon your life, one must understand some of the basic underlying truth about the nature of states. All states are not exactly the same just as all dogs are not exactly the same: whilst a libertarian such as myself might lambast the United States or the United Kingdom for many and varied sins, it is clear to all but the 'rationality impaired' that the USA and UK are currently significantly less harmful to their subjects than the likes of Iraq or Myanmar or China or Belarus or Zimbabwe.

So when I recently wrote a couple articles about posters by a government body (Transport for London) aimed at garnering public support for increasingly panoptic mass surveillance, some commenters (a minority it must be said) took exception to the idea there might be anything sinister about the vast proliferation of CCTV cameras in Britain to which the state has access. Britain after all, is not Nazi Germany or North Korea, so what is the problem?

Trust us. Constantly. The second you step out of your front door.

Nevertheless, all states, like all dogs, do indeed share some common irreducible aspects to their natures. Without getting into the intractable and interminable minarchist versus anarchist inter-libertarian debates of the legitimacy of any form of state, it is fair to say all modern states however democratic and 'liberal' suffer from a type of progressive moral cirrhosis. Take the remarks in the Telegraph regarding Britain's socialist National Health Service:

Rather as in the old Soviet Union, many managers now think it safer to fiddle their returns rather than send bad news back to the centre. This week, for instance, the Department of Health claimed that no one now has to wait more than 24 hours in accident and emergency, a claim that was flatly contradicted by the BMA [British Medical Association]. It has got to the point where we now routinely expect schools to massage their test results and hospital managers to fiddle their waiting lists. No wonder people's everyday experience of schools and hospitals so rarely seems to accord with the glowing reports presented by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the House of Commons.

Yet Britain is not the Soviet Union and although it does imprison the most number of people per capita in Europe, there is no network of gulags or mass murders to enforce the governing party's supremacy. Unlike Saddam Hussain, who holds sham elections in which 100 percent ('if not more') vote for him, in the democratic western world, elections are free and fair. Well, sort of. They just gerrymander the way people vote. Of course this is not the same as what Saddam Hussain does but it is certainly the same species of behaviour.

Democracy, Iraqi style: happiness is mandatory




Democracy, American style: representing who exactly?




Democracy, British style: looking after you, like it or not.
(Photo: Mike Scott)

So why, given that we are constantly told how superior democratic states are to their benighted totalitarian counterparts, do we see time and time again the same toxic behavioral characteristics, albeit manifested in less homicidal ways?

It is because all modern states exist primarily to do things. By this I mean do more than just guard the boundaries of society (i.e. keep out marauding Turks, put out fires, run law courts). All states have always done things, such as waged wars, built aqueducts or whatever, but not all states have existed to primarily do things beyond aggrandise the King/Tzar/Chief/Khan/Sultan etc... stay out of the state's way and it tended to leave you alone. That did not mean that such states were not capable of acts of breathtaking tyranny, just that unlike an overtly interventionist state such as we all live under these days, to a large extent the pattern of your life was social rather than political: if your children were schooled, it was because that was the custom and it seemed the thing to do, rather than because the state threatened you with arrest if you did not acquiesce to your children being conscripted for mandatory collective education.

Much like dogs, some states are more vicious than others but ultimately the people who grasp the levers of power do so in the knowledge that they are there to do things and that knowledge alone is the source of their inevitable corruption by the system they are part of. That is why in the long run it does not matter which state wants to envelop their subjects in panoptic surveillance, because in the end no state can be trusted to have such information at its casual disposal because states cannot be trusted to act other than as states, and all states are to a lesser or greater extent corrupt. It is the nature of the beast.

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Across London, these posters can be seen telling us all that we are 'Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes' of the Metropolitan Police. I cannot tell you how much better that makes me feel. The imagery is pure 1930's/1940's and conjurors up the 'Golden Age of Totalitarianism'.

Britain is already a Police State in so far as the means for total repression are already well and truly in place. As the poster indicates all too well, Britain is the nation most under surveillance on Earth, Echelon monitors our domestic communications, our Internet usage is logged for years due to the Draconian RIP Act, our locations detected via our mobile phones and logged, all for the apparatus of state to access on very low level authority. Civilians are not just deprived of any firearms, in reality we are forbidden to defend ourselves and our property with so much as a broom stick. Our right to trial by Jury faces abridgement, even our ancient protection of Habeas Corpus is now a dead letter under European extradition laws.

Yes, we still have a fairly free press, in so far as the media are strong enough to prevent restrictions against their actions... yet do not dare to make an allegedly 'racist' remark or pour scorn on someone's religion or make a joke about Wales: if you do then expect to find yourself up in front of the Beak justifying yourself under threat of fine or gaol, and forget saying "I was just exercising my right to freedom of speech".

Is it any surprise that the powers that be feel they can dare put posters announcing that you are 'Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes'. Secure? From what? Surveillance increases daily at the same times as crime soars out of control, so if we are not 'secure' from crime, then what exactly is being secured? We face many threats in the modern world but the biggest comes from the people who would watch our every action so that the State may choose to judge us when it sees fit.

How long before we start seeing this poster?

Update: See follow up articles to this one on Samizdata.net here and here

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Part II of III

What would be the requirements of a libertarian just war? Libertarianism permits the killing of another if it is an act of reasonable self-defence. Nothing in libertarianism precludes the possibility of a collectively exercised right to self-defence. This has been accepted by most libertarians as one of the few valid functions of a 'night-watchman' state. As long as every individual in a society agreed to be defended by a state and the state acted against only those individuals who were actual aggressors, e.g. an invading army, on what grounds could a libertarian object?

Given that it is not practically possible to fulfil the above conditions, especially the first one, it seems to me that many of those who engage in the debate about war on Iraq for genuine and morally inspired reasons are trying to choose between two evils. Their side in the debate usually depends on which of the two evils seems more morally unacceptable to them. There are also those who find it impossible to choose, their instincts oscillating between the need for self-defence and protection, and fear of compromising their fundamental principles by condoning killing of innocent civilians. One of those is Chris Newman whose comment captures the agony of such moral choice.

The statement 'as long as harming innocents is not the objective, if a given use of force is justified then innocent bystanders are often just a regrettable consequence' is based on the acceptance of the doctrine of double effect. It is a useful rule, often used in moral dilemmas that can be summed up as "damned if you do, damned if you don't". An act with both good and bad effects is morally permissible if and only if the following conditions are all met:

1. The action itself is not forbidden by a moral rule.
2. Only the good effect is intended.
3. The bad effect is proportional to the good.
4. The bad effect is not a direct means to the good effect (e.g. bombing cities to demoralise a population and hence hasten a war’s end).
   And since Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars (1971), in the context of war it is common to see added the following condition:
5. Actions are taken to minimise the foreseeable bad effects, even if this means accepting an increased risk to one’s own combatants (e.g. one’s own soldiers)

In modern warfare the principle of the double effect is frequently applicable. In waging a just war a nation may launch an air attack on an important military objective of the enemy even though a comparatively small number of non-combatants are killed. This evil effect can be compensated for by the great benefit gained through the destruction of the target. This would not be true if the number of non-combatants slain in the attack were out of proportion to the benefits gained, as is clear from the fourth condition. Furthermore, if the direct purpose of the attack were to kill a large number of non-combatants, so that the morale of the enemy would be broken down and they would sue for peace, the attack would be immoral because the third condition for the lawful use of the principle would not be fulfilled. It would be a case of the use of a bad means to obtain a good end.

Chris Newman takes a similar route but ends up with a different point and in the utilitarian camp:

"…our moral calculus has at least three variables: the importance of the objective, the efficacy of a given type of force in achieving that objective, and the cost in innocent lives of using that type of force. Presumably, for any given values of the first two variables, there will be a point at which the value of the third becomes too high, so that the action cannot be justified..."

There appears to be a conflict between a moral justification for waging a just war and a strategic aspect of it. But does exploiting the advantage of superior military capabilities amount to using incommensurate or disproportionate force? It doesn't because force is defined by effect on the enemy including the civilians, not by the amount of firepower. You can use superior fighting force and technology in order to shorten the war and ensure you destroy enemy fighting forces rather than civilians.

There are criteria for determining whether a war is conducted in a morally acceptable manner i.e. whether it is a just war. The exact number and nature of the conditions for just war varies from writer to writer although there is a great deal of overlap:

1. Just authority. Only the legitimate rulers of the state may declare war.
2. Just cause. In general, nation X may wage war on nation Y only if Y has done some injury either to X or to X's allies or friends. [It isn't clear whether Y having harmed Y's own people is also a just cause for X to wage war on it].
3. Right intentions. The intentions of the warriors taking part must be the achievement of peace and of the just cause - not revenge, the desire for plunder or the suffering or destruction of the people on the other side.
4. Proportionality. The anticipated good must not be outweighed by the bad likely to be caused along the way.
5. Probability of success. There must be a reasonable prospect that the war will succeed.
6. Last resort. Peaceful alternatives must all have been exhausted first.

1. Proportionality (again). Acts of war must not be out of proportion to the provocation or the needs of the situation.
2. Discrimination. No killing of innocent civilians or of non-combatants such as medics and camp followers.

"In fact, if we're talking about a country in which public opinion has any effect on control of the armed forces, one could logically conclude that it is legitimate to destroy the country's ability to make war through attacks directly on the civilian population that will destroy their will to make war. We thus reach the perverse result that, if you have a legitimate reason to be at war with a country, the more democratic it is the more justified you are in targeting civilians."

The crux of the argument lies in the understanding of democracy and the nature of the democratic state. If by democratic we mean an open and free society, then waging a war on another country would most certainly be an act of self-defence. This has to do more with my view of society rather than any implicit faith in democracy. I believe that a society, consisting of freely associating individuals, will not wage a war as an act of aggression, although it must be capable of effective self-defence. (For example, Nazi Germany was not democratic in the first sense, despite Hitler's legalistically 'democratic' ascent to power. In any case, by the time WWII was declared, Germany had long turned into a totalitarian and autocratic state).

If, however, democracy is taken to mean literally the rule of the people or the majority, then it is possible for a dictator to have sufficient popular support to engage in an act of aggression on behalf of that majority. This hardly merits the description of democracy in the classical liberal tradition – rule of the mob seems to be a more appropriate definition. The 'paradox' disappears.

The climax of Chris's argument ties the discussion back to the current affairs:

"Why can't they [Al-Qaeda] legitimately respond that since we practice the notion of popular sovereignty, we are all ultimately members of the command structure of the U.S. military and thus legitimate targets? Their ultimate "objective" isn't killing civilians per se—it's getting the U.S. to stop doing X, Y and Z, which they regard as acts of aggression. If this is not a legitimate position, why not exactly?… I'm groping toward a clearly articulable set of principles with which to establish beyond peradventure that we're not [morally equivalent to al-Qaeda]"

It is possible (and necessary) to have a set of principles that one can apply rigorously and objectively to one's actions as well as those of one's enemies, in order to make consistent moral judgements. The problem is that formulation, understanding and interpretation of such principles is rooted in the fundamental world-view of those who apply them. This is not moral relativism, but an epistemological one. It means that I could refute Al-Qaeda's logic of aggression by rejecting the notion of collective responsibility and so argue that civilians can not be in any sense 'members of the command structure of the U.S. military'. I could also say that targeting civilians is never justified. In western society the monopoly on force is owned by the state. Therefore, targeting civilians amounts to taking defenceless hostages, which is seen as morally unacceptable. But to argue so universally, the understanding of society and individual upon which such principles are based would have to be shared universally too. And as I understand it that is the battle…

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Part I of III

Arguments over war in Iraq and its justification, recently fuelled by emotions running high over the first anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, have been plaguing the libertarian camp. Samizdata decided to summarise its contributors' positions on war in general and Iraq in particular and received some interesting responses. There are many strands of arguments for and against war on Iraq and it is impossible to even mention them all in one posting. There are several interesting points I wish to add to or stress in the debate.

One of the objections to Perry's position on the destruction of tyranny and libertarian opposition to it comes from Julian Morrison (a comment on the above linked article):

There are many ways and means of destroying tyranny, but the only ones that are "libertarianly correct" are those which do not involve harm to innocents. Assassination is far preferable, for example, to war - and hand-to-hand war is preferable to blanket bombing. There exists no right to murder, regardless of how convenient it might be.

Here justification of war is reduced to the effects it may have on the civilian population or innocents. This makes opposition to tyranny impossible. For example, makes it impossible to fight anybody ruthless enough to use human hostages.

Ignoring for a moment the other important conditions of just war, which I will deal with in Part II, I want to look at Nazism and communism as examples of historical tyrannies that were accepted as evil to be justifiably eliminated. Opposing Nazism by force was justified as self-defence and the war against Hitler and Germany has been accepted as a just war. The WWII experience proves appeasement wrong on both grounds – moral (fails in self-defence) as well as strategic or practical (gives the enemy opportunity to accumulate weapons and pose a greater threat).

Although during WWII the distinction between a dictator and the nation he lead was blurred, the Cold War made abundantly clear that there is a difference between a dictator waging a war with the country behind him and a dictator with the civilian population being at his mercy and under the same threat as his opponents.

Perry mentions Czechoslovakia as a case in point and I will merely add to his voice. During 1968 Prague Spring civil resistance the Warsaw pact used military threat on the civilian population and in the early days of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 there was in our minds a real threat that the communist government would use the army on the demonstrators. How could an attack by the West make the situation any worse in a country where the state is ready to use 'military force' (not just law enforcement) on its citizens? Whether I die being run over by a T-55, shot by AK-47 or by a stray 'Western' bomb does not make much difference to me as an individual in such situation. In fact, young and idealistic as I was in those days, I'd probably prefer the latter, given that being killed during a 'Western liberation' would at least serve a purpose I agreed with, whereas being killed by communists wouldn't.

We know Saddam has used military force and chemical weapons on Kurds and will not hesitate to use such force again… Those who oppose war on Iraq on 'moral grounds' will find it hard to wriggle out of agreeing that it was right for the West to fight Nazism and wrong to leave the nations of Eastern Europe under communism. The problem is that Nazism and communism are obviously wrong ex-post and the current debate is about determining the moral and strategic position ex-ante.

To be continued...

Doctrine of Just war and libertarians (Part II)
Strategic considerations for attack on Iraq (Part III)

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Pubs, ladies fashion stores, restaurants, banks, cafes, mobile phone stores, boutiques, gift shops...

If you are looking for the real England, you will not find it in the pages of the Guardian, but rather on the high streets and in the shop windows.

I have just got back from lunch and what I saw on the King's Road in Chelsea, here in London, amazed me. There is no law requiring it, no government departments 'encouraging' it loudly, yet shop after shop are displaying signs saying words to the effects of "At 1:46 pm to day, we will be observing two minutes silence in remembrance of the atrocities on September 11^th of last year in the United States." Others are expressing memorial sentiments, still others just displaying small American flags. No doubt these signs will all be gone by this evening, but they are there now.

Some signs are hand written by shop managers, others were clearly printed by a head office... but the signs are there and they come not from above, passed down from the salons of the chattering classes, but from below, from the true heart of England.

There is indeed an Anglosphere and it is very, very real.

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"Good evening, this is the news from the BBC. Peace Activists are still besieging the Saudi Arabian embassy in London to protest at Saudi Arabian funding of violent terrorist organisations and aggressively exporting Wahhabist Islam. Although there are no reports of any violence, the activists have been handing out sample bottles of Vodka and girlie magazines to passers-by as a symbol of their disapproval of the Saudi regime.

A spokesperson for the activists said that the American military campaign will not stop until the root causes of American anger had been addressed.

Root causes of American anger

Meanwhile at a meeting of European Heads of State in Strasbourg, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder issued a joint statement again condemning Al-Qaeda as a gang of ruthless savages and a threat to the entire civilised world. They also issued a warning to Saddam Hussein not to indulge in any aggressive, unilateralist behaviour that would lead to more conflict and cause even more anger in the West. Monsieur Chirac was particularly forthcoming, describing the Iraqi regime as 'simplistic bedouin warriors'. His words were warmly welcomed by Church leaders and trade union representatives. Now over to Caroline for the weather..."

(1)

The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister's 'passionate' calls for African development and increased 'aid' to Africa by the West.

But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants... ungrateful tyrants at that.

Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party's leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.

Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the 'Third World'.

So when you read of calls for an 'answer' to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe's political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe's ruined farmlands.

Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa's ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.

The always interesting Brendan O'Neill has written an article called Why I hate slackers. As is often the case, I see things rather differently:

As always the 1960s has a lot to answer for. The hippies of the anti-Vietnam War brigade were the original slacker generation. There were no doubt some positive elements in the opposition to the Vietnam War - there were some anti-imperialists in there, who were keen to kick interfering America in the teeth and to defend independence and democracy in Vietnam.

I am anti-imperialist because I do not think it is right to impose non-consensual force backed rule on other people at bayonet point. That is also why I am anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-statist conservative, anti-democratic (at least in the sense Brendan uses the word) and above all, anti-political. All these things are based on intermediation-by-force.

Today, such slackerdom is writ large across society. Today's privileged youth don't seem to believe in anything very much. Among the young, membership of political parties is breathtakingly low

The very essence of modern democratic politics is that it is okay to collectively use the state to by-pass normal contractual relationships between individuals and redistribute wealth in certain ways, which is a euphemism for forcibly stealing private property. That so few people should join political parties is a sign of the incremental de-legitimisation of this entire process. Splendid!

very few teenagers and twentysomethings, in both America and Britain, are signing up for the military; even in the private sphere, young people are staying at the parental home for longer and are putting off getting married and having children until much later in life, if not altogether.

In reality, this is just a return to the historical norm: prior to World War II, except during major wars themselves, both Britain and the USA maintained small non-conscript professional militaries. The large peacetime militaries of the cold war era were aberrations. As for living at home, this is largely a function of caring statists 'helping' the housing market with rent controls that are a dis-incentivization to rent out properties in the first place, planning regulations that discourage new building, high levels of taxation etc.

As for not having children, exactly what is so bad about that? Women are not baby factories and actually want more from life than just to reproduce. Having children is a choice, not an obligation.

Some might see these as positive developments – as signs that young people are not prepared to go along with the mainstream and are refusing to do what the authorities expect of them. But when such opting out seems to be driven more by insecurity and uncertainty than by a determination to do things differently, how positive is that? So to slackers everywhere: get a life. And a job. And a home of your own. And some conviction. And...

The world is an insecure place and if people are acting accordingly, that suggests to me an outbreak of realism. The statist world view of the left and right within which Brendan seems to be operating is the meta-context of stasis, in which the certainty and predictability of the collective replaces the messy dynamism and uncertainty of an increasingly apolitical world in which people are more concerned for their own interests.

By looking at 'slackerdom', Brendan has actually touched on one of the societal manifestations of two important opposing forces at work: as the state imposes itself (i.e. intermediates politics) into private life in ever more pervasive ways, non-state based apolitical spontaneous network effects are pulling hard in the opposite direction by allowing people to manage information in ways previously only available to the top of the pyramid.

There are very good reasons more and more people are not dutifully tramping down the treadmill of life in the manner those whose views rely on planning want them to. Slackers have conviction, Brendan: they have the conviction that what they want as individuals actually matters regardless of what other people think they should do.

Remember Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for admitting gays into the US military? It appears that Big Media has adopted a "Don't Know, Don't Care" approach to covering the tumultuous stock market. Cal-Berkeley journalism prof Orville Schell says that Big Media's obliviousness to the looming financial scandals stemmed in part from the fact that they are part of the corporate world too.

Maybe that's why Big Media failed on the investigative side, but that still doesn't explain how it is that the largest and most reputable media outlets in the world are simply at a loss to tell their readers what is happening in the financial markets. Instead of providing answers, they rely on pop-culture cliches, psychobabble and a Rolodex full of self-serving "experts." Here are three of the worst examples of the DK/DC mentality in recent days from three major news sources: MSNBC, the New York Times, and CNN.

Exhibit 1: MSNBC on Market timing

MSNBC wonders out loud whether it is possible to "time" the market -- that is, can investors count on making extra money in the stock market by picking the optimal times to buy and sell? This is hardly a controversial issue in the finance community -- the weakest version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) says that you cannot forecast stock prices by extrapolating present trends or by overlaying historical cycles -- that "market timing" is fool's gold. Yet in an attempt to make the story "balanced," MSNBC gives disproportionate weight to the crankish opinions of a "stock cycle" fetishist named Peter Eliades. The author of the story is totally unable to critically assess Eliades' claims.

Never mind that stock cycle theory is the phrenology of the finance world -- Peter Eliades is telling us that he can make money timing stocks. His "proof": stock prices fluctuate, so it is critical to buy and sell at the right times. Gee, you mean I would make more money if I bought at a lower price and sold at a higher one? That is a tautology, not an argument; it is not proof that any valid strategy for forecasting the peaks and valleys of the market can be devised. The MSNBC author seems totally incapable of making this critical distinction.

As for Mr. Eliades, we are told that he "[has] his money in cash until the market shows clearer signs of its next move." So he essentially concedes that he doesn't know how to time the market either, but this point is also lost on the author of the piece. And why on earth is he in cash? Is cash the only alternative to corporate equities? But since MSNBC knows as much about securities markets as Mr. Eliades -- next to nothing -- he is their peer, and as such is taken at face value by clueless Big Media scribes.

If you are concerned about when to get out of the stock market, you can always hedge your bets by selling off your stock portfolio a little at a time, smoothing out the bumps in the ride. Market timing poses no crisis to smart, disciplined investors.

Exhibit 2: The NY Times on the recovery

I picked this next quote not because I felt like picking on the New York Times, but because I think that it is all too typical of pseudoscientific analysis of the stock market and the sheer pervasiveness of the DK/DC policy by Big Media in general. It could have come from any newspaper. This is how The Gray Lady attempts to explain Monday's stock market rally:

Emboldened by the broad market's ability last week to snap a three-week losing streak, investors jumped back into the market on Monday, scooping up stocks with beaten-down prices.

Stock prices rose because investors jumped back into the market? Hmmm ... how did these investors "jump into" the stock market? By purchasing stocks from the Stock Market Fairy, right? No, they bought shares from willing sellers who were already in the market and wanted to reduce their exposure to those particular securities. Every share of stock that is traded on the NYSE is simultaneously bought and sold, by definition. Duh!

And what is with this psychobabble? In an absurd anthropomorphosis, the Times tells us that the market had the "ability" to snap a losing streak. Markets don't have "abilities" -- markets do not "struggle" to "find their level" or "seek to reverse their losses" or whatever other characteristics journalists assign; markets simply calculate the prices needed to avoid surplus or shortage conditions. If the buyers were "emboldened," what does that say about the investors who sold their shares to the emboldened buyers? Are they wusses?

Exhibit 3: CNN on the scandals

This CNN piece is typical of the media's DK/DC attitude toward the
corporate earnings scandals. Investors, we are told over and over again, have been "alarmed" and "shaken" by various scandals in which senior management "cooked the books" to overstate profits. Well, maybe rank amateurs and ham-fisted day traders allow measures like "earnings per share" drive their investment decisions, but as they tell you in accounting courses -- profit is opinion, cash flow is fact.

If I am a CFO, which would I rather do: report higher earnings or lower earnings? Suppose that I have the option of valuing inventory in two ways, one of which would result in a higher cost of goods sold; or suppose that I can choose from two depreciation schedules for my fixed assets, one of which would cause me to take more depreciation expense sooner in the life of the asset. In either case, I'll take the option that depresses current earnings, thus minimizing current tax liability and giving me more cash sooner. Tax reforms such as accelerated depreciation and LIFO (last in, first out) inventory modelling would allow corporations to report LESS taxable income while INCREASING their cash flow by decreasing their tax liability. Investors value a stock for the company's ability to generate cash to pay dividends, not for its ability to enrich Uncle Sam.

A healthy firm is going to try to err on the low side when reporting earnings. For a struggling, nearly insolvent firm like MCI WorldCom or Enron, the incentives might be reversed if, for example, reporting very low or negative earnings would cause the firm's bond rating to fall substantially. WorldCom and Enron were highly leveraged, which means (1) that they are extremely sensitive to the cost of financing their debt and (2) that they are extremely sensitive to downturns in the business cycle. Firms that are fighting for survival, and management that is trying to hold on to power, might try anything. But it is fatuous to treat every business as the exception to the rule.

Here is something that Big Media is not going to tell you: the outright majority of the value of the US stock market is owned by financial institutions (e.g. investing intermediaries such as mutual funds, and contractual intermediaries such as pension funds and life insurance.) Households are net sellers of individual stocks, but they are net buyers of mutual funds. In other words, households are still heavily vested in the stock market, but they are investing indirectly through professionally managed mutual funds and pension funds, etc. A pension fund manager is not going to be swayed by a cash flow statement that tries to shift $4 billion from operating activities to financing activities (as WorldCom did) -- these people are just not duped that easily.

So is "shattered investor confidence" the reason the stock market is falling? Call me a heretic, but I think the scandals have relatively little to do with the declining US stock market. I think it has more to do with the EU Savings Tax Directive, which Perry has discussed below. The US stock market was fueled in the '90s by massive foreign investment in American equities (British Petroleum buying Amoco, Daimler-Benz buying Chrysler, etc.) Europeans prefer to set up American holding companies to invest in the US, earning income on their investments that is taxed at (comparably low) American corporate tax rates.

The US attracts massive amounts of foreign investment (another way to say this is that the US has a massive current account deficit) because the US has relatively low tax rates, and relatively light regulatory burdens. But the EU considers this "unfair tax competition" and is trying to establish a tax cartel that would tax receipts of income earned in the US by Europeans at higher European rates. To the extent that such a thing would make investment in the US less profitable, it has reduced the global demand for American corporate equities. It's just a theory, but at least it is a theory backed by some evidence, not just a bunch of tiresome cliches pastiched together into a jejune news story.

Science is a volatile subject. Traditional science originated from observations of the physical, specific and the immediate. As it progressed to modern science, the turning point being the Newtonian framework for understanding the universe, its evolution to Einstein's theory of relativity and later quantum theory and computational science, it has increasingly concerned itself with abstract and often counter-intuitive concepts. In recent years a number of alternative scientific paradigms have sprung up and regardless of whether they end up being the next orthodoxy, they have already demolished some of the foundational theories in many scientific fields. Science, itself subject to evolution, pushes the Final Theory further as its horizons expand.

Religion is a stable and more or less fixed subject, certainly compared to science. It does make statements about physical reality and human affairs, but it does not concern itself with the temporary and the transient. I am therefore surprised that Brian can make such definite comparative statements about the two:

...the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.

You can't have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there's no argument here.

I do not know whether you can have it both ways, but I am certainly not convinced by Brian's argument. It doesn't do to point out that one is 'an orthodox twentieth century boy' in one's scientific 'dogmatism' and then proceed making sweeping suggestions as to intellectual viability of religion as a whole. The underlying assumptions at work here seem to be: a) the religious texts can only be interpreted in the 19^th century fashion and b) the traditional understanding of evolution is correct and/or final. I shall not grace Brian's use of the Church of England's website with any assumptive force or category.

The book of Genesis, written many moons ago, does contain some very specific and visual claims about how the world came about. The interpretation Brian is familiar with would have been based on 18^th century 'deism', a rather mechanistic understanding of the world, gradually upgraded with the scientific knowledge as it progressed into 19^th century. It wasn't until 20^th century that several scientific disciplines have been shaken to their axioms but none of the tremors have yet been translated into a wider meta-contextual knowledge, quantum theory being a good case in point.

Brian says that 'creationism' is in total opposition to 'evolution'. Without getting bogged down in definitions, if creationism means that the world was created, word by word, according to the book of Genesis, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, then I agree with Brian. However, that neither confirms validity of evolution as currently understood nor confines Christianity to the dustbin of the unscientific and irrational.

Let's have a look at evolution. One of the foundations of the theory of evolution is natural selection. According to a modern paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. According to my favourite scientist and complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram, you don't need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. He also discovered a mathematical error in Gould's argument and there are, in fact, only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world.

Organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms avaiable to them by the rules of cellular automata. [ed.note: Cellular automata are a set of self-reproducing mathematical rules.] Complexity is destiny - and Darwin becomes a footnote. A mollusk is essentially running a biological software programme.

Stephen Wolfram's discovery about the nature of the universe suggests that the complexity that we see in the natural world can originate from very simple rule(s). One of the implications of his work is that it creates a 'bleeding-edge' scientific theory that proposes that the entire universe - with its perplexing combination of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark - could have been started by a First Mover using a dozen rules.

It is therefore possible that neither science nor religion are 'finished' with their understanding of the nature of reality. For science, new paradigms may change the way it views the universe(s). For religion, it may not be necessary to revise its texts as the 'creationist' interpretation becomes irrelevant in the light of new scientific knowledge. One thing is certain though, I have more sense than to start debating religion with a devout atheist and especially one whose atheism, in his more lucid (i.e. not anti-religious) moments, is entirely rational. I merely object to the very narrow interpretation of 'science' and 'religion', namely Christianity, used to make a rather glove-in-your-face point.

I cringe when Philosophers begin arguing Ethical Systems from First Principles. Codes of behavior built from argument based on mathematical rigour have a place in academia but are extremely dangerous when applied to the real world. People are not logical programs built from a rational base. They are a collection of hundreds of millions of years of gene based behavioral evolution and some thousands of years of mind based cultural evolution. Only the later of these is "perfectable". One who thinks otherwise carries the shadow of Gulags Yet To Come in their eyes.

More so than the practitioners of many disciplines I've delved into, philosophers seem to place Humanity on a high pedestal of Rationality. I don't. I see people as one more data point on a continuum of data points; a vector of traits which exist elsewhere but reach their highest expression (so far, and in our own biased eyes) in our species.

If you have decided by this point I am a follower of Richard Dawkins, then you are an astute observer and commendably well read. Dawkins changed our way of looking at evolution from one based on populations of individuals to one of populations of genes. Genes do not care about individuals (or anything else for that matter, so excuse my anthropomorphics). If a behavioral pattern kills 10% of a population but causes the other 90% to be fruitful and multiply, there will be more copies of the gene or genes (or memes if we are dealing with culture-based behavior) responsible for that behavior. Genes are the individuals which compete with each other and evolve. Not cells. Not tissues. Not wombats. Genes.

Altruism may be emphasized or de-emphasized by cultural traits and training but it can never be eliminated. It is a part of our hardwired animal program. Species with altruistic behavioral patterns will thrive at the expense of those which do not have them. It may be rather hard on an individual to throw themselves on a handgrenade or charge a machine gun nest, but by their action a larger number of the genes and memes expressed in them will survive and propagate than would otherwise have done so. It's purely a numbers game.

I chose altruism as an example because it is currently under discussion, but the point I wish to make is a much more encompassing one. Human beings are not empty general purpose computers to be programmed at will to whatever happens to be the Perfect Ethics of the day. They come with a very large baggage of hardwired behavioral preferences which will make a mockery of the Perfectionist's attempts to create the perfect "Your-favorite-ism" Man.

The attempt may be akin to bean-bag punching but this has never stopped Perfectionists from trying as we can see from Cambodia, Siberia, Dachau and Srbenica and Paris in the Ideological Centuries and the long line of religious pogroms stretching back into the mists of pre-history.

I am probably opening a can of worm or poking a hornet's nest or something with equally disturbing consequences but I cannot let John Webb's posting go without comment.

He correctly identified Paul Foot's assumptions that enable him to spew out such blatant and primitive fallacies about capitalism in particular and economic reality in general. The bit I found unpalatable was his analysis of Paul Foots 'motivation' for such statements and his sin of 'failure of morality', which is supposed to be altruism. I have encountered this 'belief' before as it seems to be a staple argument among the libertarians of the Objectivist variety and I have always been taken aback by the ferocity of their insistence on ethical and psychological egoism and the corresponding denial of altruism. I shall take this opportunity to spell out my objections to what seem to me to be an irrational strain in libertarian thought.

John Webb states that 'many people today mistakenly assume that altruism means having a regard for the well-being of others.' Actually, one of the most common definitions of altruism is 'concern for other people, or unselfish or helpful actions'. True, in evolutionary biology, it is defined as 'behaviour by an animal that decreases its chances of survival or reproduction while increasing those of another member of the same species'. Needless to say, altruism in its biological sense does not imply any conscious benevolence on the part of the performer, imposition of which is what John Webb rallies against.

Then John Webb redefines altruism as meaning:

..."in practice, having a necessary hostility to others as a consequence of adopting something other than oneself as the very standard of evaluation. Though the precise standard of altruist morality varies depending on the prevailing ideology, the People, the Race, the Proletariat, the Gender, the God, the Prophet, the Environment, the Social Organism etc., the premise which always remains constant in the altruist's world-view is the notion that there is some overriding standard, something other, something above and beyond and greater than the individual to which everyone should gratefully and enthusiastically sacrifice themselves."

This is a description of collectivism (and totalitarian at that) and not altruism. The distinction is an important one, as you can have altruism without collectivism. It seems that the collapse of altruism into collectivism and vice versa for the likes of John Webb is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what psychological egoism and self-interest mean.

If we understand psychological egoism as the theory that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, this taken as a factual claim based on observation, is obviously false: people are often motivated by emotions like anger, love, or fear, by altruism or pride, by the desire for knowledge or the hatred of injustice.

Also, it is not true that everything we can be said to 'want' or 'desire' is an enhancement or fulfillment of the self. We may want to give way to irrational rage or to wayward sexual desire, to hurt another or indeed to help another - without manifesting 'self-love' in any of these instances. My rage or aggression may in fact be self-destructive. The beginning of altruism is the realisation that not all good and bad are good-for-me and bad-for-me: that certain others - my close friends, say - have joys and sufferings distinct from mine, but for which I have a sympathetic concern - and for their sake, not my own. I may then acknowledge that others beyond the small circle of my friends are not fundamentally different - and so reach the belief that there are objective goods and bads as such. As one self among the others I cannot claim special privileges simply for being the individual that I am! If it is neither impossible nor irrational to act simply for the sake of another, the occurrence of satisfaction or 'good conscience' when we have done so is not sufficient ground for the egoist to claim that it was only for these 'rewards' that the acts were performed.

Nor on the other hand does the possibility of altruism mean that it is a constant moral necessity: an altruist can allow that in most circumstances I can act far more effectively on my own behalf than can any other person. A simple but crucial step separates a broken-backed ethical egoism from a minimally acceptable and consistent moral theory. It involves the recognition of others as more than instrumental to my fulfillment. I may promote my own interests and personal fulfillment, so long as I do not encroach upon the pursuit by others of their fulfillment. That is to recognize other persons as limits to my action: altruism may, of course, go beyond that in seeking positively to advance their good.

I have come across one more 'philosophical' misunderstanding – that of Kant's ethics - also common among some libertarians. I will comment in a later posting.

My aim today is to point out that the often-hysterical denial of altruism is rooted in a belief rather than a rational argument. Some libertarians seem to believe that it is necessary to insist that altruism is wrong or immoral in order to provide firmer grounds for conclusions that are central and essential to their world-view. This is a world-view that espouses individualism and liberty, the belief that prosperity and freedom is best achieved by pursuit of self-interest and many other conclusions that I share. It is also a world-view that often must be expounded by what amounts to an intellectual crusade, fighting the collectivist, totalitarian and socialist dark forces. I have had the 'privilege' of facing those at their darkest and at the peak of their powers in a communist regime. Nevertheless, I do not think you have to deny altruism in order to defend pursuit of individual good, happiness, free market and liberty.

To be continued: In Kant's defence

A few days ago, I received through the post one of those half-book half-pamphlet things (only 85 pages long but with a readable spine) that have so abounded ever since the Institute of Economic Affairs got into its stride, this one being from the Social Affairs Unit. It is called Marketing The Revolution: The New Anti-Capitalism and The Attack Upon Corporate Brands. It's by Michael Mosbacher, who is a longish standing friend/acquaintance of mine. It's good.

There's a biographical note at the back which tells us that Mike, who is now the Deputy Director of the Social Affairs Unit, once upon a time "studied politics at Exeter University, writing his Master's dissertation on the impact of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union upon the British Communist movement". This, or something pretty like it, was published by the Libertarian Alliance as Political Notes No. 127. This new piece is the logical successor of that earlier one. It describes some of the new globalised groups and campaigning methods and ideological themes that have elbowed their way forward to fill the void once occupied by those pathetic old Bolsheviks and all their massed ranks of useful and not so useful idiots.

Here's a chunk, not from the piece itself, but from the press release that arrived with it:

The broader message is an old, and rather tired one, hatred of capitalism, the belief that the world is diametrically and permanently divided between the exploiting corporate fat cat few and the exploited masses. What's changed is the way that message is now being marketed to a new, wider audience by piggy-backing on the corporations' own publicity. The activists do this, often via websites, by cleverly parodying corporate ads, organising media-friendly stunts at AGMs and launching boycotts.

That you can play games with a famous brand and get your joke bounced around the world at virtually no cost to yourself is a fact that Samizdata readers have several times also been invited to enjoy. Think of the logo adaptations we've featured of London Underground ("take a taxi"), and of Intel ("Big Brother inside").

Would that Mike Mosbacher's work was making equally clever use of the Internet. Alas, the Social Affairs Unit website makes that of my dear old Libertarian Alliance look downright advanced. That it doesn't refer in any way to this publication is peculiar (although technical difficulties have also prevented any reference to the LA's latest batch of paper yet finding its way onto our site). But far worse than that, the SAU website commits the basic old-school sin of using the internet only to try to sell paper, instead of also to distribute text free of charge. There's nowhere on the site from which you can download anything "published" by the SAU, other than short bits of sales blurb. If you actually want to read anything substantial that they've "published", you have to order it through the post. You have to pay money. (For all the difference it can make me saying it here, you can buy Marketing the Revolution by sending GBP9.95p plus GBP1 for postage and packing (blogspotbollocks won't do pound signs so please decypher that as best you can) to: Social Affairs Unit, 314-322 Regent Street, London, W1B 3BB. Or ring Mike Mosbacher himself on 020 7637 4356.)

You've got to make a living, and if you are in politics, "public affairs" etc., that tends to involve doing things that ignorant old people think will influence the young, rather than doing things that actually will influence them. I don't blame Mike Mosbacher for the foolishness of writing interesting things about the internet but then publishing them in an internet-hostile manner. Well, maybe I do, because like I say he doesn't just write for the SAU; he is its Deputy Director. Whatever. But let's be clear what the next step is: an internet presentation of Mike's stuff which actually deploys some of the good work that he's been doing in an internet-usable form.

Because it is good work. Mike is not overwhelmingly strong, for my taste, on analysis. His big picture is somewhat unpersuasive. He makes much, for example, of the fact that anti-capitalists make a living within the world of actually existing capitalism by having capitalist money of their own, and by accepting great lashings of it from others who do if they don't. So what? This is like moaning about Soviet dissidents who also had jobs as government scientists. What were they supposed to do? Starve? The case against these anti-capitalists isn't that they are taking money from capitalism to trash capitalism; it is that they are trashing capitalism.

But if the big picture is somewhat blurred, the small pictures are in exact focus again and again. Just as with PN127, Mike digs into just how this campaign operates, and what that bunch of lefty-capitalist self-haters actually say and do and ill-spend their well-gotten gains. Waffle it is not. And again as with PN127 (communists who reviewed that said it was very accurate), those it describes would recognise the details as accurate rather than the polemical and inaccurate waffle that is often presented as anti-anti-capitalist "analysis".

Mike is good on the way that capitalism appropriates the imagery of youthful rebellion and uses it to sell things to those same youths when they get a bit older. (While doing this I also noted a TV advert featuring the late Jimmy Hendricks emitting all manner of anti-establishmentarian vibrations via the latest psychedelic computer-graphical trickeries, in honour of the latest Audi.)

But one of the better bits of analysis comes not from the text itself, but from that same press release which I've already referred to. Just after the bit quoted above, it goes on to say:

Because its impulse is anti-capitalism rather than ameliorating the practice of corporations, the anti-corporate movement views progressive corporate policies as simply an attempt to mask the true nature of capitalism; which it is their mission to unmask. The harder an individual corporation seeks to show that it is doing good, the more important it becomes for these activists to seek to show that it is not. Progressive companies are attacked not in spite of, but because of their progressiveness.

I don't remember anything as bang-on-the-nail as that in the thing itself, although of course in Marketing the Revolution itself there's much more detail:

The TV stations of Turner and the skin care products and lotions of the Roddicks are, of course, themselves identified by the anti-branders with all the alleged sins of branding. They are, in fact, seen as especially heinous offenders by some: the mainstream media represented by Ted Turner is seen as the engine behind the construction of the branded world and Anita Roddick is the champion of what they see as the blind alley of 'ethical consumerism'. Hence, The Body Shop was a prominent target on the web-based hit list of corporations to be subject to 'anti-capitalist actions on Tuesday 1st May 2001'.

Here we have a principle that might enable the pro-capitalist movement to start making some waves of its own, by piggy-backing on the anti-capitalists. We can note which corporations are trying to be seriously "progressive" to the point of being actually anti- any capitalism but their own, and especially if they are doing this not just with their messages but with their money. We can point out to them not only that they are asking for trouble, but that, if they don't stop letting the capitalist side down, we will set the anti-capitalist dogs on them.

It's no use blaming anti-capitalists from getting money from whoever they can, but you damn well can blame capitalists for giving it to them.

Josh Chafetz over on OxBlog has an interesting post about the nature of order, touching on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith but mostly about Fred Hayek. He also brings up a useful point about a Pejman Pundit post ridiculing the idea of an anarchy club. In a later posting Pejman insists he does understand the definition of the word 'anarchy' and points out his first posting was mostly in jest.

There is indeed a useful point being made here and one I have made to several Libertarian Alliance members before: we understand what we mean when we say 'anarchy' but when the term is used in common parlance, it is generally a synonym for 'nihilism'. For example when a bunch of scruffy self-described anti-globalisation protestors set fire to a MacDonalds in Paris and smash up a Mercedes parked near by, those so-called 'anarchists' are not doing those things because they want more kosmos (spontaneous or natural order) and less taxis (imposed order), leading to a morality based anarcho-capitalist golden age... no, they are mostly just nihilists whose vision of the future is little different from that of the bikers from hell in the movie 'Mad Max'. The few of them who actually do have a semi-coherent idea of what the future should look like are Spanish style (circa 1938) 'anarcho-syndicalists'... which is to say they are rather like meat eating vegetarians (see the 'related article' link below).

It is for this reason I usually urge libertarians to stay away from the 'A' word because it is so widely misused. Josh Chafetz also expresses his views about anarchy as an objective that shows he more or less does understand the true nature of what real anarchists are arguing for:

That is to say, there is nothing absurd about people organizing in favor of anarchy. What they are doing is stating a preference for absolute kosmos with no taxis. Again, I think this preference is folly. I think that it is neither possible nor desirable to do away with all taxis. I am not an anarchist.

I said more or less understand because taxis does not necessarily mean state imposed order: for example most of the rules within a stock exchange are 'taxis' rather than 'kosmos' and are analogous to the rules of a private club.. a few are imposed by the state but most are imposed by the exchange itself. No one is forced to trade in a stock exchange and thus in some hypothetical anarchist future, there may well still be 'taxis' intensive stock exchanges.

However like Josh, I too am not an anarchist. I am a minarchist but where I depart from Josh is that whilst I agree it is probably not possible to depart from a system in which there is a state, I do think it is desirable. In essence I believe in systems involving the one word conspicuous by its absence in this interesting but utilitarian discussion: morality. I believe in objective morality, albeit imperfectly understood and conjecturally proposed. That, rather than the force of state or vox pop, is the one and only source of legitimacy in any system.

Probably not what you had in mind

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle...
This precious stone set in the silver sea...
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...
- William Shakespeare

My views on the state of The State (not just Britain, any state) are well known: I am a libertarian up towards the radical end of the minarchist spectrum.

Yet whilst going out for lunch today, I walked past The Trafalgar, a popular pub on King's Road in Chelsea, and ended up watching the match between England and Argentina which resulted in a gripping and hard won 1-Nil victory by England. The roar and fierce chants of the English supporters in the pub was utterly magnetic and I found myself pulled in almost against my will, swept up in an irresistible atavistic fervour as if the blood of my ancestors on both sides of the line on Senlac Hill was calling to me to join the shield wall, to add my strength to theirs... now does this sound like the rationalist libertarian who writes anti-state polemics on the Samizdata?

Well, a society is not a state and a nation is not a government. Some libertarians may think that a libertarian future will have evolved beyond tribal yearning as we all live in rational individually determined free associations, but they are quite incorrect... because it is those very yearnings which will lead to many of our free associations.

Many hear echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg mass rallies in the football terraces and pubs of England but they are wrong because coming together to act collectively is not the same as collectivism. Only the state could have caused the Nazi mass rallies, but only the state could prevent such freely associated mass rallies we call football matches, because they are the expression of a deep seated need that will never ever disappear, no matter how rationally centred a society is. The need to wave the tribal banner and roar the latter day war cry can be turned to evil, but what great collective assemblies like football matches show that there is indeed another way to express those feelings which do not involve invading Poland or conquering India.

Here we go again... ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.

The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week's proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and '60s - days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.

The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:

"I hate to be in a position of telling people 'don't go online and speak' or 'watch what you say,' but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,"

Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to 'protect' me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.

So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.

I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement's ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.

It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers ...or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people's communications and the FBI's agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn't that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!

The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don't trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state's hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.

So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff - discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don't have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that...

I'm a fan of Charles Murray's writings on the "underclass" which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian's neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.

Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily "cared for" places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to "help" immigrant communities.

As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I've often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven't been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they're fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they're mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.

When there's a riot in a town "by Moslems" it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew "finds"), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.

I'm guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of "Rebel Without A Cause", except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?

None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren't Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).

The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to "blow it all away" and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can't remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.

The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don't understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won't be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.

The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don't believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.

So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.

Roger Dorrington is a builder with two teenage sons, called Nick and Joseph, who have a problem with heroin. There is another man called James White who provides them with that heroin since they were 14 and 15 respectively, in return for money. As most people would correctly surmise, the British state says it is illegal to sell heroin to children like Nick and Joseph.

Now as a libertarian, I think that blanket prohibitions are not the way to deal with the problems caused by addictive drugs like heroin. But I also think that addictive drugs are a problem and that this is best dealt with via social mechanisms like families and in particular 'robustly engaged' fathers like Roger Dorrington. However in the here and now of Britain 2002, heroin is a Prohibited Class A drug and the state would have us believe that this makes dealing such drugs A Serious Matter which should be left to the state's blue clad enforcers.

Now Roger Dorrington is by all accounts a fine caring father to his children and thus does not want drug dealer James White giving Nick and Joseph heroin. As a result he warned the man to stay the hell out of his family house. So when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found White cutting up heroin in his own house, he beat the drug dealer up and ejected him from his property.

White complained to the police and Dorrington was arrested for assault. White was not arrested at all in spite of the fact he brought a class A drug into Dorrington's house to give to Dorrington's children. People must not 'take the law into their own hands' says the state and yesterday a judge ordered Roger Dorrington to pay £250 (US $360) to the injured drug dealer and do 100 hours of 'community service'. Dorrington says he will refuse to comply with either order and will no doubt suffer more later as a result.

So what exactly is going on here? Well it is not about justice, but then nothing whatsoever any state does is in reality about justice. It is not even about The Law, which is certainly what states say they are about in their tenuous claim to be legitimate expressions of a society rather than a vast engine of criminality. No, it is about what is the true priority of nation states. It is about power. 9 times out of 10, if a person sells (highly illegal) a class A drug (possession of which is illegal) on private property from which they have been explicitly excluded (illegal trespass), this will not rouse the state to do anything at all... yet when a private individual himself uses force to prohibit three illegal acts on his own property the state arrests the enforcer of its own laws and does not arrest the violator of several of its other laws.

This is the true face of the modern British state and yet more proof of what both Frédéric Bastiat and Thomas Paine said about State and Society being two fundamentally different things. States only provide justice incidentally en-passant to enforcing their laws. It seems now even that pretence is fading. The only illegal acts that truly stirs Leviathan from its theft bloated torpor is a challenge to its own monopoly of violence backed enforcement. The state not only wants you helpless, it takes concrete measures to make you helpless. No wonder they took our guns away.

It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words 'left' and 'right' are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.

An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.

Take this dumb paragraph:

"Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture... Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem."

Phillips' attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such "libertarianism" undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not - I am not entirely convinced either way - but Fortuyn's views struck me as entirely coherent.

As for liberalism's roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?

Phillips' analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.

Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person's whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.

I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: "Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts"

For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous 'war crime' resulted in:

"...no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community."

Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being 'menaced' in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!

On the other hand, don't bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).

Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.

Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.

Don't fry your food, don't butter your bread
Don't drink at work, don't smoke in bed

Don't try too hard, don't fool around
Don't hunt with guns, don't hunt with hounds

Don't be too fat, don't be too lean
Don't eat red meat, don't eat fresh cream

Don't drink and drive
Don't smoke and drive
Don't eat and drive
Don't talk and drive
Don't sneeze and drive
Don't drive

Don't mobile phone, don't stare at screens
Don't buy hot drinks, don't wear tight jeans

Don't play with knives, don't make a fist
Don't play with fire, don't take a risk

Don't have sex, don't procreate
Don't fantasise, don't masturbate

Don't stay up late, don't exercise
Don't innovate, don't theorise

Don't dare to dream, don't raise your voice
Don't make a fuss, don't make a noise

Don't climb mountains, don't sail oceans
Don't make sudden, jerking motions

Don't play sports, don't break sweat
Don't play roulette, don't make a bet

Don't brave the storm, don't ride the waves
Don't get too cold and don't sunbathe

Don't ride a horse, don't fly a plane
Don't strain your heart, don't use your brain

Don't read a book, don't get too tense
Don't say a word, don't cause offence

Don't run, don't jump, don't stretch, don�t fly
And above all don't do DIY

Don't lust for life, don't dance till dawn
Best of all, just don't be born

In his Weekly Standard article Condi Crazy, Lee Bockthorn goes straight to the heart of why I never have and never, ever will vote for a Republican:

But no matter how much these pro-choice Republicans whine, the GOP will always be a pro-life party. Why? Because the abortion issue goes to the heart of what both major parties are about. For Democrats, it's a proxy for their entire worldview regarding sexual freedom and unfettered moral autonomy. For Republicans, being pro-life is about remaining the party of Lincoln: Just like slavery, unlimited abortion on demand threatens equality (and thus liberty) by denying a class of human beings their inalienable rights and equal dignity merely because it is convenient to do so.

It is not even the abortion issue per-se that angers me. Libertarians are split across the issue. I'm solidly pro-choice: others are not. That's fine so long as we all agree to keep the State out of it. What is key is Mr Bockhorn sees Republicans as inherently anti-sexual. I am profoundly pro-sexual freedom and unfettered moral autonomy... within the limits consensual activity and personal responsibility for the results. Some libertarians may prefer a more "traditional" family, but they would never consider ramming it down my throat.

The quote shows how fundamentally flawed it is to ever think we as Libertarians can accomplish anything at all with the Republicans.

We just don't have all that much in common.

This is an issue that often brings out the divisions amongst libertarians. There are two broad camps on this matter:

Most libertarians take the view that it is just a matter of free association and thus the state has no business preventing people from seeking opportunities wherever they are found. Within this group, most also hold that the new arrivals should not be given access to welfare or other transfer payments, taking the view that such redistributions of wealth are just theft in any case and should not be made to anyone, let alone immigrants.

The other camp of people with more or less libertarian views, such as Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe take the view that unrestricted immigration is actually a facet of statism, not liberty. They argue that as all property should be private, mass immigration only occurs when the state takes a hand to prevent people from excluding the new arrivals from privately owned housing and jobs in the manner they assume existing property owners would naturally choose to pursue.

The two main reasons held up to justify this opposition to open immigration is firstly that of the risk of swamping their freedom loving culture that is evolving towards libertarian understandings... and secondly that new and economically unproductive arrivals often hugely increase demand on social security and welfare systems, thereby leading to an increase in unjustified appropriation by the state of tax monies.

The first argument, to which Hans-Hermann Hoppe addresses at great length has two main strands. Firstly the risk of crime and violence posed by a large underclass of non-assimilated immigrants and secondly the moral right of 'citizen' peoples to naturally form communities of cultural affinity and 'dis-affinity' (i.e. to accept and reject certain types of people without being coerced by the state).

The argument goes that it is the state which 'imposes' immigrants on communities and to make it worse there is little motivation to assimilate but rather to just line up for welfare handouts. Additionally, without the coercion of the state, societies in their natural form have deep genetic, racial and ethnic elements which will militate towards evolving to a series of economically interlinked but spatially separated communities, presumably rather like ancient Greek city-states. Whilst the corrosive effects of welfare are undeniably true, the foundation of both these ideas is, I believe, quite false.

It is only due to active state efforts to prevent assimilation (called 'multiculturalism') that the ghettoization of sections of society are more than a passing phase in the immigration process. Unless they are uprooted forcibly (as was the case with the arrival of Africans as slaves in North America), people do not emigrate great distances to a foreign land in this modern era because they are happy with their existing way of life and culture. For an Indian or Chinese family to move to Britain, it does not mean they are completely rejecting their original culture and family ties, but it does mean they are making a value judgement that life and culture is at least in some significant measure superior in their destination of choice. Thus to argue that it is intrinsically rational to reject immigrants from different cultures if natural social forces are allowed to work seems to misunderstand why people become immigrants in the first place.

Some like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have what I believe to be quite incorrect understandings of not just the inevitably fluid nature of society in a modern extended order but have also failed to grasp the dramatic effect of capitalist trade based economics on making societies more dynamic and adaptive when they interact increasingly globally. As a result, Hoppe takes an extremely non-Anglosphere, quintessentially Germanic view of the nature of civil society when viewed separately from the state: at its core he sees a blood and soil Volk, racially, genetically as well as culturally based and therefore leading to self reinforcing communities of 'like cultures'.

Thus he takes the view that were it not for the imposed integration of the state, whilst people may wish to trade with anyone, they would inevitably not freely wish to live and work in close physical proximity with different cultures, races and lifestyles. Different races, homosexuals, libertines, people who take siestas in the afternoon etc. etc. (i.e. anyone who was not a member of the Volk either racially or culturally) would be either excluded from the community of free property owning citizens all together or at the very least banished to enforced ghettos like medieval Jews. I do not feel I am overstating Hoppe's position (see ch.9 'On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State' in 'Democracy-The God that failed' (2001, Transaction Publisher)).

Yet I look around at London and see a very different world to that of Hoppe. It is abundantly clear that when the state does not enforce distorting multiculturalism, social values will naturally evolve not to Hoppe's hypothetical future libertarian neo-tribalism but rather to cosmopolitanism, right here and right now. The only Volk of the future is the Volkswagen. When people of different cultures and races actually interact economically, the inevitable consequence is familiarity, cultural confluence and ultimately miscegenation, not a regression to atavistic tribalism. One only has to walk down the streets of London to see the truth of that.

Sure, areas of minority racial and to a lesser extent cultural concentration can be found in Britain, yet one does not have to look far to see an expanding and entirely British black and Asian population already in the mainstream of cultural and economic life of the country... and not just flipping burgers and digging up roads. In racial flash points, such as Oldham, it is racially ghettoized low income supporters of socialist largess who exchange barrages of bricks and bottles over which community is getting the bigger handout from local government. In less radically separated and far less state dependent majority black communities like Clapham in London, for instance, economics un-mediated by the state lead to a very different and altogether better result.

Ilana Mercer makes several excellent points as to the harmful effects of the welfare state on creating an 'acculturation' to largess. In this as in so many things she is manifestly correct. Certainly people who see political favour rather than economic interaction as the means to support ones self are indeed the 'wrong' sort of immigrant (not to mention the wrong sort of domestic 'citizen') who are little more than muggers-by-proxy. However this is not then an argument against open immigration on economic grounds but rather a self-evident argument against the welfare state and all other forms of democratically sanctioned criminality that falls under the 'redistribution of wealth' category.

As far as I am concerned Hans-Hermann and Ilana are free to feel distaste at the idea of the close proximity of alien cultures, races and lifestyles (clearly the case for Hoppe) but for them to then deduce that their sentiments are in fact what would be the 'natural' sentiments of the majority if it were not for state enforced integration is not really born out by the evidence.

I share the view that socialist multiculturalism is in fact just an attempt to dismantle Anglosphere civil society with its dynamist adaptive nature and replace it with 'social' values more amenable to state centred stasis collectivism. However again this is not an argument against immigration but against state interference in the values of civil society. In reality I am probably much more of a cultural chauvinist than Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are. They fear the 'other' out of alarm for the fate of liberty based civil society in the face of more primitive collectivist based social values that they see as inevitably (and often incorrectly) defining Third World newcomers.

However I do not fear the cultural alien at all because it is the anti-culture of collectivism which should be afraid and not Anglosphere civil society. I am so convinced of the seductive, viral nature of the core value of our civil society (severalty, unenumerated rights, free contract, personal choice) that unless the dead hand of the state actively prevents it from spreading (i.e. by enforcing 'multiculturalism' legislation), the triumph of liberty's cultural underpinnings is pretty much just a matter of time. The reason for this is that the modern dynamist technological networked extended order is so much more economically effective than every single one of the collectivist state centred stasis based alternatives... all we have to do to 'win' is continue to produce the things other societies want and yet are incapable of actually producing.

Just as Hoppe's 'Volk' based understanding of what lies at the core of society was archaic and false even 100 years ago, it is reduced to complete nonsense by the subversive, dynamic, eclectic and market driven screech of the modem, the convenience of the mobile phone and TV screens filled with The History Channel, Australian Soap Operas, Star Trek, Monty Python and Baywatch (quite possibly dubbed in Urdu) and other irresistible bourgeois banalities. Do not fear the immigrant because freed from the baleful distortions of statism, they wish to be us, only more colourfully so. Let them get on with it and thereby enrich us all.

Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must 'take him to task' over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of 'citizenship'. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:

To my mind, this isn't a conservative view. It's a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That's what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.

He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes 'citizenship' is indeed 'liberal' (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call 'democratic socialist'). The 'political community' Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is 'The State' because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a 'political' community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.

In a sense I suppose it's not a very big deal. But doesn't this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It's sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn't just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it's something more than that -- particularly in the context of American citizenship.

Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marx with his disdain for 'rootless cosmopolitans'. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a 'Jet Set' of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have 'emigrated' yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact.

However in this era of global communications, it is a simple matter of picking up a mobile (cell) phone whilst out shopping to call your similarly equipped cousin 'in the old country'. I have myself moved continents several times in my life and yet have never thought of myself as an 'immigrant'. It was just that I moved to a place, acquired a house, worked there for as long as it suited me, and then... went somewhere else because that suited me better now. Britain, Ireland, South Africa, India, USA, Canada... so what? Each has their own cultures yet that Anglosphere meta-culture (and not just the language) is more similar than dissimilar on so many levels.

So when Josh says "It's sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom", well yeah... that really is all that we are talking about. A heritage knickknack. The Brits with their flavour of popular culture, Marmite, localised curries, irony intensive humour... the Yanks with their u starved spelling, shopping malls in the middle of nowhere, high fat diets, dynamic business culture... these are interesting and also trivial because compared to the shared cultural connections and similarities that are Anglosphere in nature and essentially trans-national, these other things are just the result of localised quirk rather than the rapidly evolving commonality of assumptions of the emerging cosmopolitanism.

Although I have mentioned before on this blog that I reject the moral validity of the very concept of 'citizenship', as a practical matter I think that because the state likes to insist on the importance of citizenship, well, the more the merrier then. The Smorgasbord approach to nationality is very appealing to 'rootless cosmopolitans' of the rapidly developing Anglosphere meta-culture, for exactly the reasons why Marx (and presumably Joshua) dislike it. Gaining the perspectives of not just Britain or America but Britain and America... and Israel and China and Slovakia and India and Croatia and Italy and Australia and Turkey... this is the 'cosmopolitanisation' process at work and also does wonders to export Anglosphere values of severalty, contract, technological civilisation and civil society to the rest of the world via the web of family and relationships, rather that the directed, force backed arbitration of what 'culture' should be that exclusionary states try to impose.

American civil society is something I admire and which spreads the values conducive to liberty as no other society currently does... but American citizenship particularly (more than any other advanced nation's citizenship) is rather like being branded like livestock. To have that brand means that, unlike almost every other state on earth, the US government will always claim a pecuniary interest in the private property that you acquire, even if you live outside the USA and make your living outside the USA and keep your assets outside the USA. Unlike other countries, which by and large lose interest in you the moment you step outside their borders, the USA actually makes itself your super-owner. The USA do not just claim a territorial monopoly on the means of force, it actually claims to own part of your labour regardless of where you are. It owns your labour not because you are in America, but because you are a citizen. That is the reality of how the US state actually sees its people (i.e. that citizens are the property of the state) even though that is not how most US citizens perceive the nature of the 'relationship'. Yet that is what I think the truth is beyond the perception: The USA does not just control land and what people do on that land (all states do that), it actually claims ownership of the anointed inhabitants themselves regardless of where they are.

The basis of the club and our membership in it is our fundamental equality. And the essence of that equality, as I see it, is that we've all thrown in our lots together. Some of us who were born here do it implicitly others who are newcomers did explicitly. But we've all committed ourselves to this group, this enterprise, this club, this nation. If some of us are American citizens and others of us are citizens of this and another country then we're not quite equal anymore. The basis of our equality and citizenship is challenged.

Indeed. But then I do not regard myself as 'equal' to other people. And nor does anyone else if they are being sensible. I regard myself as interacting within the frames of reference of a society and that, the shared understandings, the common axioms, the cultural shorthand...that is the basis for my ability to engage fellow members of this society, not some coloured bit of cloth or weird hand-over-heart declaiming and certainly not some damn bureaucrat or judge's imprimatur of 'citizenship'. Nor have I 'thrown my lot in' with anyone nor given them the right to presume that I have. When the state requires me to give my monies to others in tax, if I do so it is the vote of force, not some implied social contract. I have thrown my lot in with my friends and business associates, the ones I choose, and their citizenship means less than nothing to me when I judge the value of my relationship to them.

In much the same way that if I ever marry again, I will not even tell the state because I refuse to accept it is anyone else's business, so too I urge people to regard their passports as an imposition, not a privilege. Treat your national passport as a way of getting to stand in the shorter line at the airport and not some sacred document. You do not have to be a citizen to be a member of a society, regardless of what the state says. If I can find a way to marketize citizenship, that might be my next entrepreneurial venture. Hmm... maybe 'Free American Passport with all purchases of fitted kitchens over $5,000: order a fitted Italian marble bathroom at the same time and we will throw in a Italian citizenship and 1,000 Frequent Flyer Miles!'...

Yes, I like the sound of that.

It is a widely accepted axiom that our memory plays tricks on us. I beg to differ; it does not play tricks, it is just pitifully unreliable.

Technology is always a good indicator as to the truth of this. Many of us are rather wary of ‘new fangled things’ when they first appear on the market. But enough of us adopt them to make them viable. Then more of us adopt them and, before long, they are universal.

I bought my first mobile phone (cellphone) back in 1994 and have had one ever since. I was in the minority then. Now I am just a part of the crowd. More than that I can barely remember how I managed to cope without my mobile phone. How on earth did I ever get along without the convenience it provides? But I know that must have done.

A similar phenomenon applies to state regulatory regimes. Governments enact them to initial responses of suspicion and confusion but, applied vigourously, in a few short years they become a part of the social fabric and nobody can imagine living without them nor how we all coped beforehand.

A perfect example of this is Britain’s planning and building control regime which requires all new building (and even alteration of existing buildings) to be approved by a committee of local bureaucrats who, in turn, are answerable to central government.

Now, it will come as a surprise to nobody to learn that I think the whole mountain of legislation in this area should be scrapped; placed on a bonfire and burned to ashes while we all dance wildly around till dawn. I have good reason for wishing it so and I am not reluctant to broadcast this view.

Yet, whenever I do, I am greeted with almost uniform blank incomprehension.

Don’t be ridiculous. How could we live in a civilised society without planning laws? How would buildings be planned? Who would control land use and building quality?

My answer is, of course, nobody. The first planning laws were not enacted until 1949 amidst the post-war euphoria for sovietisation and when bureaucratic planning of every aspect of modern life was considered by all to be the wave of the future. Yet the vast majority of Britain’s towns and cities grew and prospered without the benefit of such mandates.

But how would I stop my next-door neighbour from opening an all-night discotheque? How would we stop greedy developers ruining our country with monstrosities and eyesores?

Valid concerns but long before we handed over responsibility for them to our elected officials, they were more than adequately dealt with by private treaty and mutually enforceable land covenants. Indeed, they are still in use today only now they are subordinate to the wishes of state-appointed officials who minister for our alleged good.

But what about architectural quality? How would this survive were it not for the state intervening?

In my view, it would not only survive but true architectural achievement would undergo a rebirth. Britain is fortunate to still retain so many buildings from its glorious past; the kind of buildings that inspire Hollywood movies and which tourists travel from all over the world to marvel at and photograph. All of them were built before 1949 and just about every soul-destroying eyesore and ugly edifice of urban blight in this country has been built since 1949.

It would not be right to say, though, that the dead hand of planning regulations have no effect because they do. They have the effect of suppressing innovation, reducing available housing stock and unnecessarily inflating the cost of the housing stock that does exist.

Yet, everybody believes that we would be lost without them despite that fact that we fared far better without them and within living memory.

The analogy with my mobile phone ends here because I can dispense with my mobile phone if I wish to. However, it benefits me both professionally and socially by facilitating communication at a reasonable price. Therefore it improves the quality of my life and I choose to keep paying for that.

Would that I could exercise such freedom of judgement when it comes to building a home.

When economist and law professor, Marco Biagi began advising the Italian government on reforms to Italy's ossified Labour Laws, the Italian left sprang into immediate action. Using the rationale of marxist production theory and by the rigourous employment of dialectic method, they planned to confound Biagi by convincing him of the systemic contradictions of free-market ideology.

But that didn't work so they just shot him.

"Investigators said flatly Wednesday that they had no doubt Biagi was slain over his controversial efforts to help Silvio Berlusconi's center-right government rewrite Italian labor law in a way that would make it easier to fire workers. The unions, and the left in general, vehemently oppose any challenge to the current labor law, which effectively guarantees many workers lifetime job security."

We have seen this in Europe before. In the late 60's and early 70's a number of marxist terror gangs starting springing up as the cracks in the heads of their own 'intellectuals' began to show. But, they were assuaged as Europe embraced the 'Third Way' and thus cocooned them from the chill wind of Reagan/Thatcher capitalism.

Only now, the cracks are starting to appear in the 'Third Way' as well and they know it. Having nothing else to offer, the die-hard disciples must resort to terror and murder. What else can they do when they have invested so much of their lives in a bankrupt philosophy that fewer and fewer people wish to buy or even browse? Like their apprentices in the anti-globo movement, they seethe within the spiritual prison cells of their own incoherent minds.

"An intelligence report to Parliament last week had warned of the risk of terror attacks in response to the conservative government's policies."

The article makes it clear that we are not dealing with Islamic radicals here but, in a sense, we might as well be. The same flat-earth mentality is at work; an identical impotent rage in the face of better people and better ideas. Wahabbism and marxism are merely two sides of the same psychotic coin and it is entirely predictable that they are undertaking a congruence of method.

The poor Mr.Biagi deserves better then to be a chilling portent of things to come. Tragically, though, that is exactly what he might be.

It is interesting how one things leads to another. Following a totally parochial inter-Samizdata phone (i.e. telephone) conversation between Perry de Havilland and myself in which he pointed out how we must not confuse Americans, South Africans, Indians or New Zealanders with unexplained British words like "tube" (London's underground railway system) or with unexplained British acronyms like "HSE" (which is Britain's "Health and Safety Executive", not a cow disease) provoked thoughts in me of a grander sort. For what Perry is urging upon us is a new "international" variant of the English language, comprehensible all over the Anglosphere.

Jim Bennett, popularised the term "Anglosphere" to describe a set of shared cultural values, a meme-stream of common references, that is not just the British Isles and North America or even the USA plus the 'white commonwealth'. It is the totality of the English speaking world united by more than just a common language: an English speaking cosmopolitan meta-culture.

Most discussions of the "Anglosphere" that I've read have concentrated on the ideological affinities of the nations and cultures thus alluded to. Common law, liberal democracy, and so forth. That's not wrong, but there is a more mundane affinity at work here.

It is no accident that the word "Anglosphere" has erupted into vigorous life at the same time as the eruption of the Internet. Language zones are strengthened by international electronic communication, and physical distance rendered relatively less important, and this would be true even if ideology counted for nothing. We can be sure, for example, that in Spain (or is it Portugal, I can never remember which, and that's my point), there are 'internetted' networks devoted to every tiny detail of what's now happening in Argentina, patronised by readers on both sides of the Atlantic who never give a single thought from one month to the next about happenings in the USA or Britain or Germany or China, and all because of language. Spanish versions of Perry link Spaniards to the dramas of Spanish South America, just as Perry himself links us all to the dramas going on in Anglo-speaking America, Britain, India, New Zealand, etc.

With the modern "knowledge" economy heading the way it is, this is bound to count economically for more and more as the years go by. Which presents us in little old Britain with a dilemma. A generation ago, in the pre-internet age, geography ("zone") counted for relatively more than it does now. Hence, partly, our desire to hook up economically with mainland Europe. But what if the new economy is now knowledge and language dominated, and trade of this newer sort with Tasmania is now massively easier for us mostly stubbornly mono-linguistic British than trade with France or Germany or China? And what if the English-language-based culture of the internet is creating (re-creating) stubbornly unbreakable bonds of loyalty and friendship, as it surely is? You would expect a drawing back by Britain from the European political commitment, wouldn't you? A period of Euro-revisionism. Which might be a part of why that's what is now happening.

But now forget politics, and think of sport. A few weeks back I did a semi-triumphalist semi-jocular posting about how England now has the best international rugby team on earth. Antipodeans were complaining furiously about this post by e-mail long before France made nonsense of it by beating England in Paris on March 2nd. The Antipodeans protested, quite rightly, that England's alleged rugby superiority over South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wasn't based on regularly beating these guys in actual serious rugby games, but on guesswork based on England regularly annihilating the likes of Wales and Scotland, and doing okay in very occasional and not-that-vital games involving touring sides, ours and Antipodean, with home advantage going massively to whoever is playing at home. That one simple barrier, jet lag, dooms us to playing regularly only against people geographically close to us. France has the same problem.

So what do we do? Send our entire international rugby squad out to Australia for the entire season, every season? Doesn't work. If they can't also play locally, how do we decide who these people are to be? Yet the alternative seems to be that England will remain stuck permanently just below the very top level. Here's a case where zone counts for more than phone, even though phone is almost the entire reason that all these geographically dispersed countries are still playing the same game by the same rules. (On the other hand, if all the teams played each other regularly anyway, the rugby World Cup wouldn't count for nearly so much…)

I don't have an "answer" to this phone versus zone stuff. I'm just saying that this is an interesting way of looking at the world.

For a more detailed introduction to Jim Bennett's fascinating Anglosphere ideas, the Anglosphere Primer can be downloaded here in rich text format.

Neel Krishnaswami writes:

Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries.

...and...

A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.

I definitely agree with Neel in the sense that theoretical concepts ought to be supported by empirical evidence and facts. My dislike of utilitarianism is based on one of its consequences – ultimate disregard for the individual. Numerous amendments and elaborations of utilitarian ethics and political theories fail, in my eyes, to remedy this serious flaw. Neel is clearly aware of it and provides examples to this effect himself. If I understand his point correctly it is more about the workings of the human mind and its susceptibility to be convinced by 'utilitarian arguments' more successfully than by statements of 'ideological bullshit'.

In my experience utilitarian arguments that focus strictly on consequences or plain facts and numbers create one of two reactions in the opposing party - either attempts to discredit the source of the information and/or desire to go forth and collect similar 'statistics' supporting their views.

My second reservation about utilitarian methods of a debate is that they don't work. How else do you explain the fact that the vast regiments of lefties (apologies to Perry for using the term out of meta-context) are still polluting the media and public life with their incandescently idiotic convictions about socialism, communism and current authoritarian regimes? No statistics, facts and numbers about Stalin and other communists and the atrocities they committed on the Russian and surrounding nations managed to eliminate communism as an ideology and barely forced its metamorphosis into a ‘benign’ socialism. The facts are dismissed as inconvenient and unconvincing if they clash with fundamental beliefs. Some are happy to use utilitarian arguments to defend communism even in its original guise - I have come across people who argue that Stalin may have done some naughty things but he also turned Russia into an industrial nation. 'nuff said.

I find that the best strategy, and perhaps the most difficult, is one of exposing inconsistencies in the opponent’s ideas and hope to identify the beliefs that get in the way of a rational discourse. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. As one of the characters in my favourite film points out:

You can't change people’s beliefs but you can change their ideas.

If however by utilitarian we mean anything relating to the specific, concrete and non-theoretical then we are simply using the term in different ways. Let me explain what I believe, that is, what my idea of a sound theory is and why I find utilitarianism pitifully inadequate in dealing with reality’s bigger picture. My judgement of a theory depends on three elements:

1. its content, that is its premises, logical consistency and order, its relation to reality
2. the motivation of its author and propagators
3. consequences of the theory when tested or put into practice.

To me consequences are secondary elements of a theory. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the theory’s credibility and its popularity. They can also influence the motivation of its supporters and their responsibility in upholding it. However, consequences in themselves cannot change the correctness of a theory itself; they can make neither true nor false a theory that is in itself flawed.

I must confess that I don't know much about software. I know that it is logical instruction stuff that enables me to do interesting things with my computer and that it is made up of bits, bytes, bobs, bangles, beads and a couple of egg-whites. I also know that it is fabricated by frightfully whizz-bang clever chaps who possess powers far beyond my ken.

I did not know, though, that they were the footsoldiers fighting to bring down Capitalism but, according to Mr. Soderberg, that is exactly what they are.

A word of warning before you open the linked article (if, indeed, that is what you are minded to do): it is a ponderously long and narcolepsy-inducing marxist tract of the kind that I seldom can be bothered to wade through any more but for the inclusion of this early caveat:

"The article address readers sympathetic to the Marxist project and it presumes a basic knowledge of Marxist terminology"

Clearly, it was not meant for the flinty-eyes of a Mammon-Worshipper such as me. It is a sort of shrunken-head-on-a-stick warning that all ye who venture beyond this point risk mortal peril. Well, how could I resist? That's not a warning, it's a challenge.

Disappointingly, though, there was no peril, mortal or otherwise and negligible challenge. The thrust of the whole piece is that there are a whole slew of software designers out there beavering away designing excellent software which they then give away for free, thus undermining the corporations who exploit their capitalist intellectual property rights to charge for their (allegedly) inferior products. According to Mr. Soderberg, this heralds the dawn of a new age when the principle of giving away one's software products for free will be applied to all other products and thus bring about a gift-based society.

All very tedious and all very wrong. As usual when these flat-earthers pop their heads over the parapet, the article is not so much an analysis as an extensive extrapolation of wishful thinking and deeply erroneous assumptions. All Marxists tend to get throbbingly priapic at the thought of folks giving their labour and ideas away for free. For them, it is a validation of their absurd insistence that everyone must give away their labour and ideas for free whereas, truly, it is an example of the kind of voluntarism that lies at the heart of the libertarian view of capitalism.

In other words, if said designers (or collectives thereof) decide to labour for no return then that is tickety-boo by me. And if others decide to that they want a return for their labour that is also tickety-boo. They will only get that return if they produce software that pikers like me are prepared to pay for. In other words, they have to compete and whether they do so successfully is entirely a matter for them.

However the corporations that Mr.Soderberg so dislikes must be churning out some good software because if they were not, they would go bust and in quick time. But that point seems to have been lost on him. Not surprising when you see assertions like this:

"Quite to the contrary, the study supports a connection between general welfare systems and commitment to non-commercial projects"

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but there aren't a whole lot of magnificent software programmes emerging from, say, Cuba are there?

Mistake compounds mistake as Mr. Soderberg unmasks his vision of a society changed into a gift-society by the act of giving away the software while wholly ignoring the products of capitalism that enable the volunteer designers to do what they do. Nobody is giving away computers for free, or desks or chairs or Kangol hats or pizza or Diet Coke. If Mr. Soderberg wants to excite himself over free information and ideas then let him look no further than this blog and its copious links: loads and loads of folks giving away their intellectual product for free. Does this mean we are all Marxists? Not in my reckoning.

Like all unreconstructed lefties, Mr. Soderberg believes that capitalism insists on the pursuit of profit. Capitalism neither insists nor requires any such thing. It merely requires the voluntary exchange of goods and services upon whatever terms contracting parties agree. People labouring for free is not marxism; people being forced to labour for free is marxism. It is a very easy distinction to grasp and you certainly don't have to be a software designer to do so.

A.N. Wilson is one of that species of writers that Britain has in abundance: well educated, articulate and not excessively intelligent. He is an exemplar of a particular strain of well heeled British thought that will praise a well crafted essay that states the received wisdom with an air of wise engagement and formulaic cynicism. However such people are deeply suspicious of anything resembling a rigorous argument (for that might imply the truth is not self-evident) or any attempt to make causal links beyond the second logical tier. This species of writer's forbearers were the people who knew that ending unemployment was good, and that The National Socialist German Workers Party had ended unemployment in the 1930's. Thus as they looked on and saw a tidy, neat Germany arise from the social and economic chaos of the Depression Years, they would state at parties in their Eton and Oxford educated accents that that Hitler chap might be on to something.

And so we have A.N. Wilson writing about Eugenics on Sunday, 10^th March 2002 in The Future lies with Eugenics. He quite interestingly and articulately describes an underclass in Britain that lives a life of state subsidised indolence, crime and childbirth, leading to generations predisposed genetically from birth to become predatory unemployed drains on the diminishing public purse that would otherwise be setting aside tax money for more worthy retirees.

And his solution? Keeping in the tradition of not so much Occam's razor but rather Occam's chainsaw, all problems are resolved in one causal step:

(A) The children of 'hooligan parentage' provide the majority of repeat offending criminals.
(B) Therefore the solution is to forcibly sterilise repeat offenders to prevent the birth of more congenital criminals.

The justification for this is that these hooligan elements not only absorb a disproportionate amount of appropriated state tax monies containing, housing and feeding them but also will have the temerity to demand an equal share of nationalised state welfare benefits in their dotage.

Now a more rigorous mind might have noted that the common thread here is not some societal line of poison genetics but rather who gets to share in the money the state has appropriated from its hapless taxpayers. The concept that perhaps it is the very structure of the predatory wealth destroying state that is the problem, rather than a genetic underclass, would appear to be a causal link too far for a writer whose primary aim is to be articulate rather than intelligent.

So house prices are skewed by state intervention in tenancy relationships, low end jobs are priced out of existence with minimum wages, undercapitalised businesses are bankrupted with taxes and regulations, tax monies are forcibly taken from the productive and given to subsidise unproductive behaviour and yet somehow the emergence of a perpetually unemployed underclass is deduced to be a genetic problem? Well perhaps it is. Maybe if a few more of A.N. Wilson's class had contrived to get themselves slaughtered in Britain's 20^th century wars, we would not have developed a political and media elite that seems genetically predisposed to blame everyone for the miserable state of Britain except themselves.

I cannot think of a more compelling argument for the importance of the libertarian argument that no state can be trusted with such a high degree of power over civil society as states have today. The likes of A.N. Wilson would have people castrated and spayed by the state because those people have to live in the reality that the likes of A.N. Wilson helped to create.

The murderers of Daniel Pearl live in another world. It is a world in which acts of deception that result in the murder of an unarmed noncombatant is seen as somehow heroic. It is an inverted world in which showing your weakness by murdering the would-be journalistic bearer of your own message is seen as showing your enemies that you are strong. It is a world with a chain of unfathomable logic that suggests that a course of action that murders a single fine but helpless American in Pakistan will change America foreign policy more to the murderers' liking even when killing 3,000 helpless Americans in New York did not.

Well in the last one they are at least partially correct. By killing 3,000 Americans they filled the skies of Afghanistan with thunder and caused the destruction of their patron government, which was indeed a change in American foreign policy. And by killing this good man they move America closer to another change. Pakistan must now realise that they have no choice any longer but to crush the serpent in its midst with whatever force it takes or the United States will rightly do it for them in Daniel Pearl's name. Just as these monsters filmed their foul acts of cowardice, so too we may soon see the deaths of his murderers, if not from the forces of the Pakistani state then through the green light of night vision scopes and guided bomb cameras of a vengeful America.

A meta-context is not a philosophy or a political belief, but rather the way someone sees the world. It is a tradition of thought, a vibe, set of 'givens', the frame of reference in which questions are posed and answers found.

A person's prevailing meta-context has an enormous impact on the way they make decisions and evaluate evidence. Imagine a series of laws has been enacted to create programmes for alleviating poverty in London or Warsaw or Accra or Miami. Imagine also that year after year poverty remains in those places much as before, regardless of the well intentioned programmes. Many would say, most in fact, that clearly better laws are needed and better programmes. This is not a matter of 'left versus right'. The socialist (or 'liberal' in the USA) might argue that the reason the worthy programmes have not succeeded is that the root causes remain, and more needs to be spent on state education/racial sensitivity training/murals on playground walls. Laws must be adjusted to serve the objectives of 'social' need. The conservative however might argue that what is needed is less dependency on state handouts and demand that people take whatever jobs can be found or lose all state benefits... and maybe a partnership between state and faith-based organisations to do something or other would be good. Laws must be adjusted within the bounds of some form of 'constitution'. The state does much the same sort of thing, just a bit less of it and favouring different 'social' objectives (discouraging single mothers/pornography/extroverted sexuality etc.).

Both left and right see themselves as opposed and on some levels indeed they are. Yet both are arguing with each other within a profoundly statist meta-context: if only the unitary state was organised this way with our safe pair of hands on the political tiller, things would get so much better.

An example of this mindset on the right can be found in the United States when people cannot have a discussion about economics, philosophy or even morality on the Internet, addressing a global audience, without bringing up constitutionality, in every case meaning the US Constitution and not the constitution of Uzbekistan or Australia or Senegal. Not only is this amusingly provincial, it presupposes that all matters of morality and interaction revolve around boundaries defined by the state and its legal documents.

A leftist example however is something I heard on the BBC News just today, reporting that disgruntled university students in England are 'forced to work part-time due to the fact they now receive student loans rather than student grants from the state'. The news reader put emphasis on the word 'forced'. Clearly it is implicit, a meta-contextual 'given', that the fact a person is having to earn the means to support a service they are receiving (education) for their own benefit, is regarded as an imposition, a questionable compulsion. I wonder if the BBC feels students are 'forced' to pay for the food they eat, the beer they drink and the clothes they wear? Perhaps they do.

To view the world within a statist meta-context is to view the world as being entirely politicised and politics is just a euphemism for the application of force-by-proxy. No interaction between people can therefore be truly free of the state. Unregulated interaction becomes interaction not yet regulated. Most people would not care to have their neighbours provide unsolicited and mandatory input on their conduct as parents. Yet the democratically mandated state does that all the time, politicizing the act of raising your own children. Only a pervasive statist meta-context allows this to happen at the same time as people bizarrely think they live in a 'free society'. In fact they hardly live in a 'society' at all, but rather a state which has nationalised private life itself.

Tom Paine would not have approved.

...and a bit of hijacked satire, but more on that bit later. Scott Rubush replies to a pair of articles by David Carr and myself. In response to my view that technologically unsophisticated societies do not produce great thinkers Scott replied:

To which I would say, show me the modern Socrates, and the 21st century Aquinas. When I turn on the television, I don’t see sages like these; I see Oprah and Jerry Springer. When I turn on the radio, I don’t hear the Beethovens and Mozarts of our generation; instead I hear Britney and the Backstreet Boys. Ultimately I think that’s what we could expect from the democratized, progressive materialist society advocated by D’Souza. Is that really progress? Certainly D'Souza's society would be capable of genius, but his value-neutral "dynamist" regime would do nothing to steer its citizens toward it. The result would be the social equivilent of Gresham's law, where bad culture drives out good culture.

Ask and you shall receive, for the names of the modern Socrates and the modern Aquinas are Frederick Hayek and Karl Popper. I turn on the radio and I also hear Aaron Copland and Lisa Gerard. I watch the cable television and learn of astonishing breakthroughs in genetic sciences and hear it explained for people like myself who did not study that field. I read accessible, inexpensive paperback books like David Deutsch's 'Fabric of Reality', purchased not from some sanctum of gnostic wisdom but available in a bookshop inside a train station. If all you see is Oprah and Jerry Springer then you need a new remote control, Scott (and quickly!). I also see a programme about anthropology and the Leaky family in Kenya, and with the push of a button I see a superb Japanese version of Macbeth and then a remarkable show about the fusion of Irish and Senegalese music. It is all there at the touch of a button and at prices the great majority of the population can afford.

Bad culture does not drive out good, it just looks for a different market niche. The low brow, scandalous, scurrilous and bawdy Hogarth prints of one era are the 'biting social commentary' of the next era. Back in the good old days, 'good culture' was not more pervasive than now as it was never available to more than the ruling classes... and ruling classes by their nature exist not to 'steer its citizens towards' good culture but rather towards a culture of deference to the rulers. Mozart is thought of now as 'good culture' but not because of anything intrinsic to the music, for it was once regarded as subversive. Rather it is because of who listens to it. One hundred years from now patrician critics might lament the fact people turn their backs on classics like Pink Floyd.

Far from being 'value neutral', a dynamist society must underpin itself with objective morality as the guide to the evolving new. Only this way can we know when 'tried-and-true' becomes untrue, and when to leave well enough alone, for just as the 'tried-and-true' evolves, so to does understanding. The greatest of many errors made by Marx was highlighted by Hayek when he pointed out that to remake society entirely by revolution implies that the revolutionary can know by the application of scientific reason what will always be the best, and therefore make it so at bayonet point. Yet society is not the product of reason, but of complex evolutionary processes. Once this is understood Marx's 'scientific socialism' is revealed to be nothing of the sort but rather an exercise in self-delusion, a 'fatal conceit'. This is also why when people refer to the remarkable events which came to a head in 1776, I have always depreciated the term 'American Revolution' which is so popular in the USA. I prefer the term 'American War of Independence' used more typically in the rest of the Anglosphere: What Jefferson et al did was free the thirteen colonies from the stasis imposed by the British Crown, not to radically remake society at bayonet point as would soon happen in France in 1789 and later in Russia in 1917, but rather to allow it to evolve in a manner consistent with the very best of the underlying civil society's values. The Constitution of the United States did not overthrow society, it enshrined its values and attempted to protect it from the encroachment of the state and the worst aspects of democratic mob rule, even if not entirely successfully. But that is also why I am not a conservative... the authors of America's Independence and others forsaw the problem intrinsic to any democratic system, that as Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813) put it:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The situation has developed in which nation states forcibly appropriate over 50 per cent of a nations wealth and yet this is seen as legitimate due to a 'democratic mandate'. Yet the reality is that not only is it immoral, it is unsupportable in the long run. As a libertarian I see that society must continue to evolve away from the all-consuming centralised state and towards a more spontaneous, truly capitalist and less rigid system. Just as the wealth gobbling nations of the world grow fatter by the year, the seeds of a freer future are also becoming more visible almost by the day. I suspect the difference between conservatives such as Scott and libertarians such as myself is that whilst we both abominate the statist impositions of the left, he sees a perpetual rear guard action of fighting the laws of the left with laws of the right as a viable option, whilst I see a very different future. I see the disintergration of the politicized legal edifice over which left and right fight as being a long term economic inevitability, not necessarily from catastrophic collapse (though most likely Japan and some of Europe will do just that) but from the gradual technologically driven creeping irrelevance that will see that what follows the current order is something both familiar and excitingly different. Unlike Scott, I see this as a good thing as I expect the good and enhancing aspects of culture to survive because such things are objectively good and efficacious.

Which brings me to Scott's ire regarding David's remarks. I suspect he took 'And what did the Romans ever do for us?' a tad too literally. David was using Scott's earlier remarks to reference a well known bit of British humour in the form of an extended skit from Monty Python's Life of Brian and thus was only indirectly addressing Scott.

And now for something completely different...

Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D'Souza.

The notion that libertarians always disdain the 'tried-and-true' is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the 'tried-and-true' common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the 'tried-and-true' with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is 'traditions' which have outlived their time, 'tried-and-no-longer-true', things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.

The second misunderstanding is what D'Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush's thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D'Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.

When Marx says in his well know remark "The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself", he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d'etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist 'New Man'.

However when D'Souza says "So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom", he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie... in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.

It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.

That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind's nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not... and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.

Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on 'scientific socialist' principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D'Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.

I think Tom Burroughes is far to genteel with his treatment of EU Commissioner Chris Patten's remarks in the Financial Times.

My answer is not that the unilateralist urge is wicked but that it is ultimately ineffective and self-defeating.

Here is the core of the crypto-socialist beliefs of purported conservatives like Chris Patten. Only the collective approach works.

The attacks of September 11, in which citizens of more than 80 countries lost their lives, brought home in a terrifying way the vulnerability of the US and the rest of us to the actions of extremists plotting from safe places in failed states such as Afghanistan.

Indeed. That is why the 'failed state' which harboured and succored Al Qaeda was overthrown by force of arms and replaced with one more to America's liking.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it seemed that the US had rediscovered its need for allies to confront this common menace. The stunning and un-expectedly rapid success of the military campaign in Afghanistan was a tribute to American capacity. But it has perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts: that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security; that the US can rely only on itself; and that allies may be useful as an optional extra but that the US is big and strong enough to manage without them if it must.

I suspect in fact the US actions were based on the quaint notion that a dead enemy tends not to plan further attacks against you and that time was of the essence, given that attack by Al Qaeda was not just a possibility but had actually occurred. Expeditious action was unlikely to have been served by waited for the participation of Belgian, Portuguese and Greek para-commandos. How long did it take for the Europeans to acquiesce in the tepid military action against the Bosnian Serbs who had been randomly shelling civilians in Sarajevo? Is that how long Patten expected the Americans to wait after September 11th?

I hope those instincts will not prevail, because I believe them to be profoundly misguided. The lesson of September 11 is that we need both American leadership and international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. It is in the world's interest, as it is in the interests of the world's greatest power, that leadership should be exercised in partnership.

The US said 'you are either with us or with the terrorists', which sounds like leadership to me. They then proceeded to blow seven shades of crap out of Afghanistan... at which point nations such as Syria, Sudan and Yemen started 'co-operation on an unprecedented scale' with the US. Sounds like leadership and co-operation to me. The problem lies in the Islamic world and this it is the co-operation of the relavent bits of the Islamic world that matters. If the people who flew the aircraft into the WTC were mostly French and German, no doubt there would be more of an imperitive to secure French and German co-operation. Of course partnership is pretty much the antithesis of leadership so quite what Patten means by leadership should be exercised in partnership is unclear to me.

Why is that so? Let me offer five reasons. First, every day makes us more aware of the interconnectedness of the modern world: a world in which America is at the centre of an increasingly integrated web, in which modern technology is corrosive of national boundaries and national jurisdictions. That makes it all the more important to work with those who share your values in order to protect them.

Exactly. Which is why the US worked with the UK and not Brussels. The US and the UK share values. The US and the EU do not.

Second, while globalisation - the combination of open trade, capitalism and technology - creates unparalleled opportunities, it also has a dark side. The European Union symbolises the ability of countries to come together to tackle common problems.

The 'dark side' of globalisation is creating global capitalist wealth generating networks which stasis based institutions like the EU and repressive regimes everywhere have great difficulty controlling. The 'common problems' Patten refers to are common to trade unions, subsidised farmers and protected national industries. The 'problem' they have is that they are trying to sunbathe and finding themselves in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Patten said a few days after September 11th that the attack was 'due to globalization'. So presumably if we restrict trade to within national borders and subject all economic activity to state regulation, Al-Qaeda would not have attacked the USA. Here is an alternate thesis: if for the last 50 years the EU and other trading nations had not protected their markets from Third World/Middle Eastern people trying to trade with them, the Islamic world would be far more prosperous and secular and integrated into the world economy and thus much less of a stagnant swamp of repressive governments and epistemologically crippled civil societies than they are now.In short, the September 11th attacks happened because people like Christopher Patten have limited globalization by trying to only let it happen on controlled statist terms.

Third, the international institutional architecture - from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation - owes more to the genius of American statesmen than to any other source. But these institutions are under threat. Their rulings are challenged with increasing truculence and impunity. They lack democratic legitimacy, which fuels the muddled movement against globalisation. They need to be nurtured or they will lose their authority - and we shall all be the poorer for it.

The UN, IMF, World Bank and WTO are idiotic institutions. Not because they are not 'democratic', which is just another way of saying 'politicized' , but because they are statist, which is to say, they are based on the premise that trade occurs between states rather than people and free associations (companies). Legitimacy does not come from democracy, it comes from non-coercion and free choice. And so does prosperity. Left to their own devises and without layer upon layer of regulations and tariffs, would companies trade more or less? Obviously more, and as more trade means more wealth is created, the problem is not how can states facilitate companies trading but how can companies prevent states and the whole alphabet soup of state-based organisations they create, from getting in the way.

Fourth, Europe cannot hope to match US military spending - nor should it even aspire to do so. Like Lord Robertson, the secretary-general of Nato, I feel strongly that European governments should increase their national military budgets, shouldering more of the burden for their own defence. But "security" is a wider concept. The EU, with its member states, is a massive provider of development assistance. We provide about 55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid. That too is a contribution to international security. No one disputes the need for tough military action to destroy the al-Qaeda network and its bases. But if we are to deny al-Qaeda, and other networks, the territory from which to plan future atrocities, we have to do all we can to bolster weak or failing states and prevent them falling into the clutches of the bin Ladens of this world.

By providing "55 per cent of total international assistance and as much as two-thirds of all grant aid"...TO STATES the EU underwrites 55% of the problem, not the solution. It takes money confiscated from EU taxpayers and gives it to kleptocratic regimes across the world, who allocate the money on socialist-statist principles. Far from adding to global security, the EU undermines it. Far better would be to take that 'aid' money, which only aids the very regimes which lock-in the self reinforcing doom loop of politicized economics, and leaving it with the individual EU taxpayers to whom it belongs. If the EU insists on stealing it however, they would do a hell of a lot more for global security by spending the money on aircraft carriers rather than supporting flawed third world governance.

There is a final point. I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world, there is also fear and resentment. As the world's only superpower, the US carries a particular responsibility to maintain moral authority for her leadership. Do your own thing and everything seems clear and purposeful; but there is a cost in terms of legitimacy and long-term effectiveness. That cost accumulates over time.

Almost invariably when someone says "I need hardly say that as well as affection and admiration for America around the world" it means nothing could be further from the truth and they are about to say something that proves quite the contrary. Patten represents a fundamentally illegitimate organisation which even by his own standards of advocating legitimacy-by-democracy is illegitimate. Who elected EU Commissioner Chris Patten.

So where does this leave us? It leaves me, at least, uneasy. I look to America - as I have always looked to America - to engage with a complex and dangerous world. There is much that is evil in that world. But to brand a disparate group of countries as an "axis of evil" did not strike me as the finest phrase ever produced by the president's speechwriters. Of course we must oppose what is evil. But we must also build on what is good - and on what offers hope of a better future.

And what exactly is the good that 'we' must build on in North Korea, Iraq and Iran?

In Iraq, for example, we must redouble our efforts to get the inspectors back in and to support the opposition to Saddam Hussein. But in Iran? When some in Washington say that European policy in Iran has failed, my immediate reaction is that we need to find new ways to support reform there, not that we should put up the shutters.

Militarily crushing the entire political and military apparatus of Iran and Iraq would be pretty much an unmatchable way of 'supporting reform'. That is no more 'putting up shutters' than the manner in which the US and UK interacted with Nazi Germany. We did not remove the 'problem' of Auschwitz and Belsen by prevailing upon the Nazis to allow inspectors to visit. If Iran and Iraq do indeed pose a clear and present danger, then it must be made clear to them in no uncertain terms that such actions will lead the USA to pose a clear and present danger to them. Publicly calling them part of an 'axis of evil' seems to achieve that pretty well.

In the case of North Korea, the sunshine policy of Kim Dae-jung offers the best prospect in years of bringing real change. In the Middle East, we need dialogue, not isolation and further radicalisation of the Palestinians.

Patten ended up by quoting Henry Kissinger:

"America's challenge is to transfer its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance in a world that, for all its seeming resistance, desperately needs enlightening leadership." That sentence is not mine but the final paragraph of a recent book by Henry Kissinger. Is it overly candid of this friend of America's to say that I agree with every word?

Finally I agree with Patten... or more accurately, with Henry Kissinger. Although the US should not seek to impose them, the sooner the US realises its policy of benign neglect is a mistake the better: it does indeed needs to encourage the willing acceptance of its values... by Europe.

Recent events in Argentina have helped drag quite a few things out into the light that would rather have remained skulking in the shadows.

One of the things that is now clear is that the idea a debtor nation can be 'too big to be allowed to fail' is revealed to be a myth. When Ecuador defaulted on $6 billion worth of bonds in 1999, people just shrugged it off as 'only Ecuador'. Yet now we see Argentina going the same way to the tune of $132 billion.

Another thing has become clear about the IMF. Anne Krueger, the IMF's deputy managing director, has let it be known that the fund is very keen to get out of the 'sovereign bailout business'. To this end the IMF has some fantastical plans for 'harmonising' international bankruptcy laws which will of course come to nothing. Yet the source of the impetus for restructuring the IMF's relations with debtor nations is quite revealing and not one you might think. Much of these 'new' ideas being floated come in almost whole cloth from Jubilee Plus, a leading anti-globalization pressure group whose very name you would think would be anathema within the hallowed halls of an ostensibly pro-capitalist organisation like the IMF purports to be. In fact what is clear is that Jubilee Plus and the IMF are just different sides of the same pro-stasis coin, profoundly hostile to dynamic free trade networks and in favour of state centred status rather than value based economics.

It says much about the inevitable evolution of the IMF from a supposed facilitator of the global capitalist economic order to being little more than the financial arm of a network of pro-stasis organisations underpinning almost every kleptocratic state on the planet. For as long as the IMF is not just happy to prop up heavily regulated force based value destroying economies of the sort favoured by Jubilee and its ilk, there is little motivation for financial institutions to tailor their lending to the economic realities of a nation's governance. Yet there is always the fond hope that while the IMF ponders its restructuring, a few really large international lenders will feel some serious pain.

What is really needed is for a few nice large international names to go belly up as there are few things that get the financial world's attention better than that. I am thinking of people like Citigroup, FleetBoston, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya and Santander Central Hispano, who are all massively exposed to the mess in Argentina... sadly this is probably not going to happen but if it did, what we would have is a clear causal link established between a willingness to lend to kleptocratic governments and disaster. This in turn would impose a real cost in terms of an inability to borrow on governments which pursue anti-economic statist/stasist policies.

Just as companies with bad ideas must be allowed to go broke, so must governments. Sovereign default can be very invigorating to the cause of liberty and advocates of true non-crony capitalism should oppose any institutions which seek to ameliorate the link between government actions and the consequences of those policies. And if those governments, such as in Argentina, are democratic then all the more reason for allowing the voters of that country to reap the bitter consequences of their theft-by-proxy mandates. Let the financial tumbrils roll and lets see whose heads get cut off without the Scarlet Pimpernel of the IMF to come to the rescue.

Over on Little Green Footballs (also see link under 'posh blogs' section in sidebar), there is a lengthy series of entries in the comments section under an article about globalization and the people who are heading to New York to protest against it. Someone called Michele stated that she was "strongly against world trade". This astonishing remark was something that had to be answered and so I will repeat my remarks here:

To be "strongly against world trade" is to be in favour of poverty and against free association. It is to favour force over choice. It is to favour death and famine in the third world. Anyone who actually wants for the peoples of South America, Africa and Asia to prosper should be demanding not an end to world trade but the removal of all barriers to entry to the US and EU markets. At a stroke that would result in cheaper products for common working western people as cheaper African, South American and Asian goods become available. Immediately the economies of third world nations would improve as they could sell their products without immoral grotesque discriminatory tariff barriers.

Also, as a laissez-faire capitalist libertarian, I am strongly opposed to the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF... these are institutions that support crony capitalism and big-government. They subsidise neo-national socialist stupidity like that in Argentina and despotic kleptocratic regimes across the globe.

I am in favour of true free association and therefore laissez-faire and true globalization. I reject collectivism in all its coercive left and right wing forms and the violence and poverty they always lead to. Individualism and laissez-faire capitalism without borders is the only moral option and the only option that can actually work at all in the long run.

...very different things to different people. Let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary:

patriot /n.a person who is devoted to and ready to support or defend his or her country. ../patriotic adj. //patriotically adv. //patriotism n. [F patriote f. LL patriota f. Gk. patriotes f. patros of one's father f. pater patros father]

Of course this also rather depends on what you mean by 'country'

country n. (pl.-ies) 1 a the territory of a nation with its own government; a State. b a territory possessing its own language, people, culture, etc. [...] 3 the land of a person's birth or citizenship; a fatherland or motherland.

And therein lies one of the problems with Patriotism. When some one says 'I am a patriot', what the hell does that actually mean? Let's take me, for example. My mother was American and I have lived about one quarter of my life in the USA. My father was British and I have lived a little under half my life here. For purely accidental reasons, I was actually born in the Netherlands. I feel both/neither British and/or American. So much for the complicated heredity and biology. Now for some ideology: I personally reject as illegitimate any function of the state which is not related to the defence of the individual liberty of people within their area of control, within a broad reasonable definition of those terms. I see the State as, at best, a provider of a service (security) in much the same way as I see the Pepsi-Cola Beverage Company as a provider of cans of fizzy brown liquid. I do not accept the very notion of 'citizenship' as I regard that as tantamount to denying me free association with non-citizens and implies the State somehow owns me in some way.

So can I be 'patriotic'?

To the State? Absolutely not. Try to make me pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the Union Jack or the Tricolour with the intention of extracting an admission of loyalty to the state and I will set it on fire instead. And if it is on a tee shirt saying "Try to burn these colors asshole", the wearer might just get their wish. Try to conscript me and the state will discover that I am not a pacifist and have no problem with using force against someone who tries to impose servitude upon me: starting with the guy who tries to serve call up papers on me.

And yet...

I live in London at the moment but I have 'Old Glory' displayed in my front window for all to see. Try walking down Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea and you will see which is my house. It has been there since September 12^th 2001. I do indeed feel an affinity for what James Bennett aptly calls The Anglosphere. I regard myself as a member of a cosmopolitan, English speaking global community, a civil society far greater than any mere nation state. For all its flaws, that extended society is the best hope for freedom and liberty the world has ever known and that is something worth defending. Unlike British society, which has a myriad cultural and regional symbols redolent with meaning, only Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Star Spangled Banner, truly represents not just the American state but also American society, warts and all. Truth is I much prefer the Gadsden flag (see side bar of this blog) but most people would not know what it means. And so that is why the Stars and Stripes is stuck in my window for all to see. It was not just the people of New York who were wounded, it was all of us and that is a point I think well worth making publicly.

So is that 'patriotism'? Opinions vary.

Glenn Reynolds has some well aimed remarks about Tim Cavanaugh's rather meandering article about bloggers. Whilst I concur with Glenn's remarks, he lets Cavanaugh off far too easy. Cavanaugh states:

For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they're wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media. You can cut on Salon all you like, Mr. Blogger, but they have a man in Afghanistan. Do you?

He does not seem to grasp that we are about punditry not field reporting. The fact is, there are bloggers all over the world pointing out obscure stuff and commenting on it... hell Samizdata alone has contributors in Britain, Ireland, USA, Croatia and Australia. Without Tim Blair and Jason Soon, how many of us would pick up on the Australian stories they bring to our attention? Salon may have a reporter in Afghanistan, but of all the commentary about Muslims that I have seen in Salon, is it really more insightful or informed than that found on Adil Farooq's blog Muslimpundit? No, it is not.

Instapundit has so many eye balls each day that it is clear from Glenn's posts he gets a huge amount of useful pointers and comments from readers, which provides news and perspectives in and of itself. Cavanaugh seems to have missed that altogether. There is a degree of responsiveness and dynamism that more established, less immediate media channels cannot match. We blogs are not trying to replace the established media, but rather we have popped up to fill an empty but useful ecological niche, rather like the birds hitching a ride on the back of a hippopotamus and in return nibbling at unwanted parasites in the hippo's unscratchable nooks and crannies. If we are the birds, and BigMedia^tm is the hippo, guess what that makes Tim Cavanaugh...

And as for Cavanaugh sneering at the fact we all refer to each other, there are two points:

1. Firstly, we can afford to be civil to each other because we are not all competing for a limited pool of jobs (no wonder he hates us)... we see each other as a resource rather than rivals, even more so when we disagree.
2. Secondly, it is that 'hive mind' thing Glenn once mentioned. Someone picks up on a story and the 'hive' swarms together, dissecting it and commenting, with a slew of follow up posts as the hive's different 'takes' collide...such as the various 'interblog' gun wars or Enron debates (for that is what they are, debates).

Established media pundits feed off their network reporters... bloggers feed off each other in much the same way, following their hyperlinks to their sources. And as our sources are far more varied (Peter Jennings is not prone to dissect all too many odd Pravda or Zambia Post or bonkers Feral Tribune articles he found by listening to someone else's broadcast), so too are the opinions and directions we go in.

And of course the editorless 'screw the received wisdom' blogger ethos was never going to make us friends in Cavanaugh's circles.

Glenn is of course right that bottom feeders like Cavanaugh just do not like the competition... and the fact many of us write better than he does and about more varied things. But most of all he dislikes us because we do not fit into any of his limited pigeon holes neatly. He reads us but his silly article shows he sure as hell does not understand us.

The traditional bestiary of belligerency is inhabited by two feathered beasts: the Hawk and the Dove. However, that is a very crude and misleading way of looking at things for there is a third beast to be found. The Ostrich.

The Dove constituency is essentially pacifist: whilst such folks are largely found amongst the 'soft' socialist left wing, there is also a small conservative constituency that is profoundly dovish on religious grounds. A few libertarians also fall into one or both of those categories of dove as well, though actually very few libertarians are true pacifists.

Hawks can be found on the left, particularly the communist left. Many of the anti-war left are far from pacifists, they are just opposed to all American use of force, rather than objecting to force per se. On the conservative right there are also many hawks of several different sub-species, such as the Jeffersonian 'aggressive defender' who was quite prepared to send the US Navy to shoot it out with Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, and Teddy Roosevelt style 'predators' who dream of Pax Americana and an American Imperium. Most libertarians fall into the 'aggressive defender' category despite what antiwar.com would have you believe.

The Ostrich is largely found within both the paleo-conservative right and the surrealist areas of libertarianism. This is a school of thought which is certainly not pacifist but regards the instances under which force can be legitimately, at least by America, Britain and Israel, used as being so narrow and constrained that many make the mistake of calling them doves, but this is quite incorrect. Amongst conservatives Pat Buchannan is a member of this flock and he is joined by quasi-surrealist libertarians like Lew Rockwell and full-blown psychedelic surrealists like the totally barking Justin Raimondo. Rockwell is a largely pukka and worthwhile commentator but who seems to become unhinged when the issue turns to military matters. Mr. Raimondo on the other hand is more florid in his views generally: imagine a version of Noam Chomsky but with at least some grasp of how economics actually work.

The essence of the ostrich is that of huddling behind national borders and refusing to use force against anything short of a homeland invasion of Pittsburg. The more florescent surrealist ostriches like Raimondo also take this view but adds some interesting touches, such as a fondness for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes under which he does not live himself, provided they dislike the United States.

I must confess I have occasionally wondered if he is 'for real'. He is a peculiar sort of libertarian, as he seem to view mass murder as being just fine provided it is confined to within national borders. Raimondo is an apologist for the Chinese massacre in Tiananmen Square, contending that in fact it was a triumph of capitalism over communist counter-revolutionaries. The non-Euclidian geometry of his logic is hardly worth the effort of trying to follow; suffice to say Occam's Razor does not feature prominently in his thinking. He also seems to be of the view that the press in China is as free as in the west, so I look forward to someone directing me to the Chinese publications and websites within China taking critical views of Chinese policy in Tibet and towards Taiwan (I have a Chinese reading friend). As for his contention that:

"Today, government-sanctioned "patriotic" churches, including Catholics and the various Protestant denominations, function openly"

...rather misses the point that the 'patriotic' catholic church is an adjunct of the Chinese Communist Party (which he thinks is actually a capitalist party)...the real Catholic church operates underground at great risk and I personally know a French priest who is a member of it in China. To put it bluntly Mr. Raimondo does not know of what he speaks. Typical ostrich.

Many ostriches are strongly anti-Israel due to its repeated projection of force beyond its borders. Now defending Israel is something of a novel experience for me as I am highly critical of their behaviour: a case in point being the disgraceful bulldozing of 50 Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip last Sunday as collective punishment for the actions of a few: collectivist Israeli psychopathy at its most typical. And yet, I also argue that just because Israel frequently behaves criminally, Israeli society still has a right to defend itself from the clear and present dangers it faces. To do this effectively requires more than the reactive use of military force within Israel itself. An extreme example being the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981 by the Israeli airforce.

What many ostriches refuse to acknowledge is that if the IAF had not destroyed the Iraqi reactor, Saddam Hussain would have developed either nuclear weapons or at the very least 'dirty bombs'. Of course I am sure Mr. Raimondo probably refuses to believe that Iraq was in fact ever trying to develop nukes or might have stuck plutonium dust on a Scud. To see an ostensible libertarian acting as an apologist for yet another mass murderous regime is curious indeed. Surreal in fact.

One theory I have to explain the ostrich mindset (as found in libertarians, rather than paleo-conservatives) is that they are so reflexively hostile to the American and British states that anyone the American and/or British states opposes must therefore be one of the good guys. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Now anyone who has been reading my articles on Samizdata.net for a while can hardly have failed to notice I am hugely distrustful of nation states generally...yet I try to base my views on critically rational analysis and not just reflexive anti-statism. I realise states lie. They lie a lot. But that does not mean that everything a state says is automatically false. Yet I suspect that in reality that is what ostriches think, leading them into pretzel logic apologias for Chinese, Middle Eastern and Balkan tyrants under whose regimes the likes of Mr. Raimondo do not actually have to live and therefore do not reflexively distrust. Keeping ones head in the sand is not conducive to a realistic view of the wider world.

When Jorg Heider's Nationalist anti-EU party gained a small role in the Austrian government a while ago, the EU was so shocked that they actually imposed various diplomatic sanctions on Austria. Not surprisingly this caused an entirely understandable and entirely predictable upsurge in anti-EU sentiments in Austria from people resentful of crass interference in their own internal affairs.

But I have always though it ironic that this should have happened to Austria. In Bosnia- Herzegovina the EU has its own political gauleiter called the 'High Representative', namely Austrian Wolfgang Petritsch. Although his job is to implement the Dayton Peace Agreements, he has never really hidden his true objective. He has often said that Bosnia-Herzegovina must follow the same route as other countries in the region towards European Union membership. Similarly we are told how important the introduction of democratic institutions are for 'stability' in the region. Yet when the largest Croat political party in Bosnia, the HDZ-BiH, representing largest single bloc of Croat votes, dares to use its democratic mandate to oppose the will of both the EU and the socialists in Sarajevo, our Austrian ruler sends in NATO troops last April to seize Hercegovacka Banka, the bank used by the HDZ for its funds. Democratic politics is fine it seems, just so long as it does not actually do anything that displeases the EU. One does not have to be a supporter of the HDZ (and I am not) to be horrified.

So it is hardly surprising to me that various members of the EU elite across 'unified' Europe are expressing 'concern' and demands for 'explanations' why pro-superstatist Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero has been forced to resign from Silvio Berlusconi's government in Rome. The Spanish President of the EU Josep Picqué and Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel are going to deliver a report on this 'situation' in Italy. It seems they genuinely feel they must have some say in who is and is not in the Italian government, just as they felt towards Austria. I have no doubt that if Italy was not one of the larger EU nations that people in Brussels would not be at least making contingency plans for 'special action' if the grip of the EU started to seriously deteriorate in Italy (a remote possibility at best, to be frank). It is only a matter of time before even the smallest twitch of independent thinking from the elected representatives of an EU 'nation' (province) produces increasingly severe responses from the stasis superstatists. I wonder what bank Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia Political party keeps its money in?

However if you want to see a glimpse of the true future of 'democratic' Europe, don't look at Italy or Austria, look at post-war 'democratic' Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A personal and long standing view of Lord of the Rings

[Boromir speaks]
"I do not understand all this," he said. "Saruman is a traitor, but did he not have a glimpse of wisdom? Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem. The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!"

The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, The Council of Elrond

[Sam Speaks]
"But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folks pay for their dirty work."

[Galadriel replies]
"I would" she said. "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!"

The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Seven, The Mirror of Galadriel

For me, the Lord of the Rings works on every level, and I refer to both the magnificent new motion picture and the trilogy of books, which I first read in the early 1970's as a child and have re-read many times since. It works on the most basic level as a glorious epic, rich with its own mythic cycle that borrows from Celtic, Nordic and Saxon traditions. Simply put, it is a bloody good read and the motion picture captures that most effectively, editing and abridging where needed without doing a fatal violence to the source.

Yet The Lord of the Rings can be read in many other ways as well. It also works extraordinarily well as a series of quite deep allegories. Certainly many people have subjected J. R. R. Tolkien's remarkable epic to the Bunsen burner of allegorical analysis before, particularly those looking to divine a racist subtext. I have only ever read a couple such works and to be honest was unimpressed. I have read a few summaries of others but it has always struck me that the arguments of this or that critique of his work usually skirt around the core issue, for there are really only two facets of the story that truly matter: Frodo and the Ring itself .

I have always thought the allegorical meaning of The Lord of the Rings is starkly obvious and quite profound. Mankind in all its varied forms and mythic archetypes can be found with the story, yet in truth the reader is presented with a single representation of themselves: Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit. Frodo is us.

The entire story is about Frodo and his relationship with the Ring. Everything else is the supporting artifice. Frodo is Everyman, who does not choose the world in which he lives, rather the world is thrust upon him by forces at first seemingly outside his power to influence or even understand fully. It is Frodo, more than any other character, who dwells most upon the issue not just of dynamic reaction to events, but of moral choice. Although surrounded by mythic heroic archetypes of every shape and form, Frodo is physically puny, banal by predisposition and would be hard pressed to intimidate an irritable rabbit. Yet he is indeed strong, in that his strength is entirely moral strength... and because he chooses to exercise that moral strength, in the end he has no equal. We are shown that it is from personal moral courage that all other strengths derive and that all the weapons in the world count for little without that.

So if the Hobbit is us, then what is the Ring?

The Ring is everything which Frodo is not. He is a weak little man, vulnerable and multifaceted. The Ring is strong, almost indestructible and pure in its single minded malevolence. It tries to corrupt all who touch it or are ever associated with it and it is about absolute and pitiless control of others. Frodo deals not through agents or proxies, but directly, face to face... The Ring makes its wearer invisible and extends its power terribly through its influence over the other Rings. It is the antithesis of interpersonal morality. No matter how pure of heart the person who wields it is, no matter how just their motivation for taking that power upon themselves, the end result is always corruption. Yet the lure of such power is so overwhelming that only the most truly moral can resist it when it is dangled in front of them: Gandalf and Galadriel are both offered the Ring but refuse it. Elrond too sees it for what it is and will have none of it.

We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know all too well. It's strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear.

Powerful, corrupting and impersonal. The Ring is of course an allegory for the modern state.

Just a brief exchange of munitions this time as I am up to my eyeballs in editing something for Natalija (which she keeps changing every 15 minutes).

Esteemed ace meta-blogger Tony Adragna from Quasipundit replied to my remarks below thusly:

Of course, rational libertarians don't advocate "chaos or pious hopes", but that is precisely where "spontaneous ways of deriving order in which guns tend to feature rather prominently" lead us sans some form of regulation. Even in Switzerland - every gun rights advocate's favourite model of an armed citizenry - GUNS ARE REGULATED.

Quite so. But I have never been against the regulation of the actions of armed people (as in 'a well regulated militia') because I do not want to see my neighbour's teenage son riding down genteel Cheyne Row on his mountain bike firing off a Kalashnikov in a fit of youthful exuberance. What I oppose is anything that would inexorably lead to prohibitions on ownership. I have no problem with seeing unreasonable endangering behaviour with weapons punished severely, just as my support of free speech does not extend to support for fraudulence and criminal liable... I have no desire to see voices licensed, just their misuse punished.

The key difference between Switzerland and the USA, is that the Swiss state does not pose a serious risk to the right of its citizens to be armed with military weapons... I am not completely uncritical of the structure of the Swiss state either but there is no Swiss version of a powerful figure like Senator Charles Schumer or his myriad of political and media supporters. The same cannot be said of the USA circa 2001 AD.

Perry takes me to task over my contention that we have at least de jure if not de facto protection from an overreaching state. Again, I admit that it's a difficult argument for me to make, but then the real world is a difficult place to live - absent de facto protection from anything, I'm happy to at least have the de jure protection of my Bill of Rights.

As it clear from your own remarks that you are aware of your precarious position over exceedingly thin ice, I shall resist the urge to heave a stick of dynamite out onto the lake. Let me put it this way, you have just convincingly made my case for me: I support private ownership of arms because I do not actually think the state can ever be a reliable guarantor of my intrinsic rights. By agreeing that de facto protection from the state by the state does not in reality exist, you are actually saying the same thing I am, which is why I contend the state cannot be trusted to control to whom weapons are doled out.

Then you say you are happy with the de jure protection provided by the Bill of Rights, which in the previous sentence you admit means, de facto, not much. Tony, should you ever find yourself in a war zone, I strongly recommend against straw flak jackets that look good when worn and promise you invulnerability to the flying metal fragments of reality. I recommend the kevlar of objectively derived rights defended by a well armed culture of liberty. Accept no paper substitutes.

It is good to see views strongly and forthrightly put, but without rancour and rudeness. It seems that blog culture is developing along much more civil, albeit robust, lines than the puerile exchanges that characterize UseNet and e-groups.

Rather than fire off another long winded broadside in this quite interesting inter-blog debate, I shall confine myself to the most direct remarks by famed meta-blogger Tony Adragna from Quasipundit that are germane to the central argument here.

Tony accurately points out that the variously articulated Samizdata positions on gun ownership and that of Brian Linse (and himself) may be irreconcilable, as indeed they are... but Tony also unintentionally shows exactly why that is the case in his characterization of the duel as:

I have to throw in with Brian on the 2nd Amendment v. gun regulation debate.

In fact the debate is nothing of the kind. As I has said again and again, the Second Amendment is irrelevant. It is nothing more than a useful 200 year old honoured bookmark to remind people of certain things and has no intrinsic relevance to the discussion. If you genuinely think that the right to own weapons comes from the US Constitution, or that it can somehow protect that right from infringement, then I would urge you to take a look at a 1929 painting by the Belgian surrealist, René Magritte showing a picture of a pipe. In case you cannot speak French, the worlds within the painting translate as "This is not a pipe". When you understand what that means in that context, perhaps you will also understand what the US Constitution actually is and is not.

In the sidebar of the Samizdata is a little phase that explains why I keep hammering away at this point. I refuse to be drawn into defining moral theories which must underpin any legal discussion, within a meta-context in which the state, and its essential nature, is a given regardless of objectively derived first principals. I will not fight my battles on the ground chosen by liberty's enemies. Tony presents himself as a realist faced with libertarian utopianism, but the reality is actually quite different. Rational libertarians do not advocate either chaos or pious hopes. What we advocate is merely more spontaneous ways of deriving order in which guns tend to feature rather prominently as in reality there is no assumption that people will always act in their rational self interest.

Tony correctly sums up both his and Brian's position with a statist credo of earth shaking clarity and directness (no, I am not being sarcastic, I really mean it):

I acknowledge the evidence that suggests "registration leads to confiscation", but how relevant is that evidence in light of our 2nd Amendment? Not very!

I shall doubtless be quoting this single bit of text as the simplest and most elegant possible distillation of the 'Conservative Nicene Creed of Constitutionalist Faith' imaginable. Evidence suggests the state will take our weapons but fortunately we have the state to protect us from that happening. Tony then consistently applies the same logic to forfeiture laws:

I also have a problem with part of the argument at Samizdata that deals with forfieture laws. Should the government prove "proceeds of criminal activity" prior to siezure? Yes, I agree! But, that badly enacted forfieture laws exist does not refute the argument that our constitution protects us, and grants redress from, government acts under those badly enacted statutes. OK, it's hard for me to argue "protection" when there is no de facto protection, but is there de facto protection from anything. Not in the real world.

So here we have the contention that the state does indeed take property without due process because unconstitutional laws have been enacted by the state, thus it is fortunate we have the constitution to protect us from the state enacting unconstitutional laws.

I rest my case.

In an article in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes that after September 11, Americans were turning away from unimportant things like expensive clothes and luxury

But now we are supposed to be in the era of the real rather than the pretentious, the warm rather than the cool, the fundamental rather than the grandiose.

So we must ask: Is the vast new $40 million Prada store that has just opened not far from Ground Zero, trumpeted by the company as "the New York Epicenter" and designed by the hot architect Rem Koolhaas, a relic of our gluttonous ways or a resumption of them?

Of course I realise that Americans are going through a process of adapting and trying to understand new realities, but at the risk of sounding unkind, all they are really doing is waking up from a dream and finding themselves in the real world.

It broke my heart when I saw those terrible images on television on September 11 and oh how I wished a thousand deaths on the monsters who were responsible for it. But I felt nothing more, or less, than I felt when Sarajevo was besieged for 1400 days, during which 10,000 of its people died and 50,000 more were injured out of a population of just over 500,000.

During the war, everywhere in what used to be Yugoslavia experienced shortage and hardship and sudden horror. Americans watched this through the filtering eyes of CNN and the BBC for a few minutes each day before going back to their dinner or driving to the mall, yet it might as well have been occurring on another planet psychologically speaking.

People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.

I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about 'sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet'. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada's shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.

[Original link to NYT article via Instapundit]

Some people ask:

"Why shouldn't our government keep out products from third world countries? We don't owe them a living.

That is right, we don't. What we owe to them, and to our own people too, is the ordinary right to buy and sell what they please, along with all the other ordinary rights to life and respect for property. Tariffs against African imports mean that we in Britain pay more than we ought and the people in Africa are arbitrarily forbidden from bringing their wares to our attention - it's up to British individuals whether they buy or not.

So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via 'Third World Aid'. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.

An article in New Jersey Online (NJO link here no longer works) reports that President Hugo Chavez's ongoing strategy of bankrupting Venezuela and ensuring only a moron would invest their capital there is gathering momentum.

Chavez says his land reform law will correct the injustice of only 1 percent of the population owning more than 60 percent of the country's arable land. But business leaders says it violates private property rights by forcing farmers to conform to a national agricultural strategy or risk having their land confiscated. Fedecamaras is also protesting a law that requires the state-owned oil company to own a majority stake in all future joint ventures with private corporations.

Now this, boys and girls, is what is known as fascist economics. Nominal ownership is retained in private hands but de facto control over the means of production is in the hands of government agencies. The term 'fascist' is often used as an epithet meaning 'bad guys' or 'statist' but that merely devalues the term, leaving us with fuzzy stereotypes of Nazis á la 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. Understood properly, fascism or 'right-socialism' is a form of socialism that concerns itself with control of assets rather than ownership. Often there is a mixture of outright left style nationalisations of 'essential' industries (such as oil companies), but a fiction of private ownership persists at lower levels.

To understand Chavez, and any number of other modern 'socialists' in Latin America, Europe or elsewhere, it is important to understand they are a mixture of left and right socialism... naturally modern socialists or 'social democrats' dislike being told some of their economic policies are fascist but there you have it. Whilst there is vast body of definitions of what constitutes fascism, most are written by self-described leftists keen to differentiate 'nice' socialism from 'nasty' national socialism/fascism. Yet as early as 1940, Fred Hayek in The Road to Serfdom exposed fascism for what it was... a variant of socialism. The often quoted slogan that 'Fascism is late capitalism' is not just wrong, it is incoherent. An economic system in which the means of production are allocated by the state's commands, regardless of who 'owns' the bloody things, is not, by definition, capitalist, late or otherwise. The defining characteristic of CAPITALism is that CAPITAL is allocated via markets in accordance with the priorities of owner of the capital.

So let's call Hugo Chavez what he really is: a fascist.

I just got around to reading the PoliticalCompass.org FAQ in which they 'answer' the question of "You can't be libertarian and left wing" by claiming otherwise. Well before we even start with the body of the FAQ that is, yet again, a false dichotomy. Why? Because libertarians are neither 'left wing' nor 'right wing'. For my personal views on why 'left' and 'right' are just meta-contextual frames of reference which are really meaningless in actual ideological terms, read my Giving libertarianism a 'left hook'. Allow me to casually dissect the FAQ:

This is almost exclusively an American response, overlooking the undoubtedly libertarian tradition of European anarcho-syndicalism. It was, after all, the important French anarchist thinker Proudhon who declared that property is theft.

For one, I am British. For another, PoliticalCompass.org was the subject of informal discussion at a well attended and very British Libertarian Alliance meeting a few months ago and it was treated with complete derision.

To describe anarcho-syndicalism as 'libertarian' is preposterous as there is no individual liberty to do anything or even exist beyond the collective’s needs. It is a system that refuses to recognize the existence, much less the possibility of ownership, of several property beyond that which you have immediate use of. Let me put it this way: if you claim you own something that you are not in actual use of, you are thereby depriving someone else of using it, the anarcho-syndicalists regard it as perfectly legitimate to use force to take your stored goods for the collective’s perceived good. None of this 'freely entered contracts' or 'freely associated trading' nonsense for them. Although claims are made to the contrary, you do not in reality even have the liberty of owning your own labour, as if you produce something, you cannot freely trade it with another individual and acquire several property with it. Anarcho-syndicalism is communal living that is enforced with violence against any who claim ownership of any means of production with sophistication beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer (i.e. nothing less that primitive tribal Communism implemented at a local, rather than national, level).

Yes, yes, I realise theorists will leap up and down to disagree with my characterisation of anarcho-syndicalism but when you boil away the inane verbiage, that is the truth. That the people at PoliticalCompass.org cannot grasp that individual liberty and anti-collectivism are the defining characteristic of libertarianism is just an indication of their lack of comprehension of the words they use.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Emma Goldman were identified as libertarians long before the term was adopted by some economic rightwingers. And what about the libertarian collectives of the mid-late 1800s and 1960s? Americans like Noam Chomsky can claim the label 'libertarian socialist' with the same validity that Milton Friedman can be considered a 'libertarian capitalist'.

The concept of Chomsky, an apologist for the genocidal Khmer Rouge, as a libertarian is beyond parody. Presumably they regard a policy to slaughter class enemies by the million as a form of 'liberty' and hence libertarian? That they quote Chomsky is not surprising however. It is his linguistic theories that were to some extent responsible for the term 'liberal' changing meaning (in the USA) from an advocate of limited governance to a socialist. Chomsky is nothing less than an advocate of linguistic incoherence as the only non-oppressive way to use language. His views are best summed up as 'Truth is Oppression'. Thus the name for Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, was perfectly acceptable to him. Never mind that it was neither democratic nor a republic. Sure, Chomsky may have called himself a 'libertarian' but that does not make it true. PoliticalCompass.org use the word 'libertarian' in much the same way, stripping it of any meaning which inconveniently falls outside their own meta-context.

The assumption that Social Darwinism delivers more social freedom is questionable.

So here we are told that libertarians, by rejecting the welfare state, favour a system that will lead to less social freedom. That is of course the socialist (and fascist) view of the result of non-state centred society. But how does that change the fact that rejecting welfare states is indeed a view held by libertarians? All libertarians (and some conservatives) regard alternative ways of dealing with social problems as being better: ways that involve liberty rather than state imposed laws. If they do not think that, they are not libertarians.

Yet it is clear from the FAQ that PoliticalCompass.org think the alternative to a welfare state is people starving in the street rather than the growth of charitable institutions. Again, that is fine for socialists to think that…they are socialists after all. But for them to fail to understand that libertarians do not think that because a libertarian view of 'social justice' is based upon non-coercion is just proof that when they use the term 'libertarian' they do not actually know what they are talking about.

Which of these two views are correct is utterly irrelevant as all that matters within the context of what PoliticalCompass trying to do is to correctly characterise what the views associated with each label they bandy about actually is.

The welfare states of, for example, Denmark and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities - not to mention cannabis and anti-censorship. Such developments would presumably be envied by genuine libertarians in socially conservative countries - even if their taxes are lower.

It does not seem to occur to these people that genuine libertarians might not be any more at ease with 'conservative' statism that 'socialist' statism. So called 'progressive' legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities are just more violence backed statist interposing between private social interactions: there is nothing 'libertarian' about that, regardless of how commendable or not the objective is.

I do not expect the socialists at PoliticalCompass.org to agree with libertarian views. But if they cannot even understand that the essence of the libertarian position is that state legislation (i.e. violence based government action) to mediate the nature of voluntary interpersonal civil relationships is the antithesis of social liberty, then they are so uninformed, so ignorant of the political spectra they are purporting to describe with their 'compass' as to be completely incoherent and worthless as a measure of anything. It is not a matter of whose world view is correct, just a matter of knowing what other people actually think.

For media establishment pundits ranging from lowly tabloid hacks all the way up to the Brahmins of academic political correctness, the world seems to be a much more intellectually hostile place since September 11 2001. Previously unchallenged opinions about the way the world works are now being judged under the harsh light of reality cast by two burning skyscrapers in New York.

One of the good things to come out of the horrors of that day is that the western world, or at least the dynamic Anglosphere part of it, is undergoing a most astonishing intellectual 'shake out'. The system is in a state of flux and it is unclear what the zeitgeist is going to feel like when it all starts to settle down again. One thing is for sure, it will be different.

Former prince of the statist 'left' Christopher Hitchens is a striking example of this process. Whilst always articulate and insightful, it seems he is also possessed of a critically rational mind capable of simply jettisoning the demonstrably false when the evidence deems that the correct thing to do. One only has to read his devastating carve-up of former fellow travellers like Noam Chomsky to see just how far he has come. In his article in the Guardian called "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" he pours scorn on those who would side with the vilest regimes in the world and claim moral superiority.

Of course people do not like being proved wrong, and they like others pointing out their cock-ups even less. Last night I was listening to pundit-lite Michael Brunson on the TV reviewing the early editions of the British newspapers. At one point he became almost apoplectic with a double page spread in the print version of The Sun (a low-brow tabloid) titled 'Shame of the Traitors'. This article quotes the Guardian, New Statesman, the Independent, the Mirror, members of Parliament, members of the European 'Parliament' and sundry others. All made dire predictions about the war, questioned the morality of it and scorned its progress.

So was Michael Brunson angry that the pundits had got it so wrong? Hell no! He was outraged that a lowly tabloid like The Sun had questioned the motivation of people making clearly ridiculous unsupported claims to the point they could be described as giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'. He said "I fail to see the point of this whole article" and "Why should they criticize people for saying that they believe?".

To give you some idea of what the people whose 'honour' Michael Brunson was defending were actually writing:

"Opposition leaders about to quit battle against Taliban. US blunders leave key fighters disillusioned. Key Afghan opposition commanders are on the verge of abandoning the fight against the Taliban because their confidence in US military strategy has collapsed. Insurgents are no longer willing to infiltrate eastern Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because they believe American blunders are destroying the opportunity to spread revolt against the Islamist regime."

Rory Carroll, the Guardian, November 9: the day Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance! This 'news' is either Taliban propaganda, astonishingly bad reporting or simply made up to suit Rory Carroll's anti-Americanism. Take your pick.

"If the Northern Alliance does take Kabul on, the battle is likely to be very bloody. The recent successes of the Northern Alliance are unsurprising but it will take more than carpet bombing to win southern Afghanistan."

Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian, November 13: The recent successes are... unsurprising? I guess Norton-Taylor was not reading the Guardian on November 9 beacuse if he had, he should have been utterly astonished that the Northern Alliance was winning! Moreover in reality Kabul fell with a whimper, not a roar.

"The message we want to get out is simple - stop the bombing...Recognize that bombing pleases one person above all others - Osama bin Laden."

Tam Dalyell, Labour Member of Parliament, November 1: so if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were asked "would you like the bombing to continue or stop?"... presumably Tam Dayell would have us believe that they would say "Continue, we would like some more of that invigorating bombing please".

Judging from Michael Brunson's remarks, it seems that being correct is not a very important part of a pundit's job. However what is really important is not to point out the stupidity of other pundits or, even worse, that a great chunk of what they said was proved by events to be completely incorrect. That simply is not cricket!

And higher up the established media food chain, no wonder they really hate people like Christopher Hitchens, as he cannot be dismissed as a mere hack for some boorish English tabloid... not only is he making the doves of the 'left' and ostriches of the 'right' look extremely bad, he is an apostate who has been attacking Sauron Chomsky himself. Hitchens is actually calling himself a libertarian these days. As Bob Dylan sang: Oh the times, they are a’ changin'