We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Certainly flirtation is gone from the workplace. Some years ago your humble correspondent was an intern at a National Public Radio affiliate station in Chicago. The chief engineer had a habit of referring to me as Legs, as in, ‘Woooah, here she comes. It’s Legs Gutmann.’ Dear Reader, I am not ashamed to admit I liked it. I flashed him a big smile and a giggle. He was a very decent chap and I have no doubt that if I had instead looked wounded and frightened he would have cut the ‘Legs’ thing faster than he could unplug a sound cable.
Now, of course, he wouldn’t even try such hijinks. The risk is too great. He could be fired for such ‘sexual harassment’. Or what if I had been fired by National Public Radio (if you can be fired from an internship)? I could have retaliated by claiming that NPR (of all places) created a ‘hostile work environment’ in allowing such a beast continued employment. At the very least I could get my internship back; at most, I might be able to snare a big payoff. Sexual-harassment allegations can make you rich.
– Stephanie Gutmann
We do note that there’s often enough an attempt to rewrite history. Or, perhaps, to emphasise one aspect rather than another. The New York Times recently ran a piece insisting that communism had its good parts as women had more orgasms. Female sexual pleasure is indeed important but we’re deeply unsure that it’s a justification for the Holodomor.
– Tim Worstall
Complaints about the water industry, meanwhile, are at an all-time low and, according to the independent water consumer watchdog, satisfaction with the industry is at record levels.
If there ever was a time when water customers were ripped-off it was when water was state-owned and millions of households were sometimes paying for a service that had been cut off.
– Ian King
But I do think King is making a fundamental error by assuming the motives for nationalising has anything whatsoever to do with about producing better value, or improved management 😆, or in any way yielding more of the thing an industry does. Yes, I know what they say, and I can say I am a hippopotamus with opposable thumbs (I am, of course). Nationalisation is about a total world view, in which the state is all, and nothing must be beyond the reach of its unfettered power: the state is an end in and of itself. Quoting facts about the water industry at Corbyn supporters is not just an exercise in futility, it indicates a complete failure to understand the enemy. Indeed, the only reason to talk to them at all is for the benefit of third parties who may be listening.
The social justice warrior’s gain is the civil libertarian’s loss. The ACLU still engages in the fight for civil liberty, especially in opposition to the post-9/11 security state and as part of the anti-Trump ‘resistance’. But the 21st-century ACLU has chosen its battles with a progressive sensibility that devalues free speech and due process for all. Most notably, it has shied away from confronting campus-censorship crusades and the threat of an ideology that equates allegedly hateful speech with discriminatory action, subordinating the right to speak to the imagined rights of particular listeners to suppress what offends them.
– Wendy Kaminer
Uber drivers often explain why they choose to drive for the company in terms of more flexible working arrangements. Last month, an independent poll revealed that 80% of Uber drivers in the UK would prefer to remain as contractors, but the unions campaigning to give these drivers worker status don’t seem to care about the views of the people they’re claiming to help.
[…]
Although the study’s conclusions are more directly relevant to U.S. lawmakers, they are also a reminder to UK regulators that Uber’s more flexible working arrangements are highly valued by its drivers. They care about having greater freedom to choose their own hours: so much so that they are willing to trade off potentially higher earnings in order to preserve that freedom. The same is also true of Uber’s customers, who benefit from the influx of supply during predictable peak hours that Uber’s flexible surge-pricing model makes possible. If Uber loses its appeal against last year’s ruling that its UK drivers are workers rather than contractors, many of the benefits of flexibility will be lost.
– Daniel Pryor
Opt-out organ donation expands the state’s power over the individual. There may be a shortage of donors, and doing more to encourage people to sign up is no bad thing. But a person should never have to opt out of state control. It is individual rights and choice that should always be the default position.
– Emily Dinsmore
It’s as if the Conservative Party no longer believes in itself. Or better still, it no longer knows what there is to believe in. No market-based economics; no law-and-order ideal; no sense of tradition. And it is this ideological lack and its accompaniment — complete political incoherence — that fuel the open, petty infighting we have witnessed over the past few months, with every over-promoted non-entity loyally lining up behind May, knife in hand. After all, who can blame them? In the modern Tory Party, there’s nothing – no idea, no principle – to be loyal to, apart from one’s own career. Hence the endless interventions from foreign secretary and leader-always-in-waiting Boris Johnson.
– Tim Black
As the Stupid Party is all that stands between us and the Evil Party, the Tories desperately need to get rid of Theresa May, a woman who should not be a member of the party, let alone leading it. This needs to happen without delay.
“The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.”
– Thucydides
This quote appears in an article pointing out that present UK Conservative Party seems to have more or less given up on making the case for liberty.
From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.
– Robert Nozick. This essay is several years’ old and it remains in my view one of the very best explanations of why universities and other such places are full of persons so hostile to the open market economy. Given current angst over why so many young graduates, especially in fields such as the arts, are all keen on the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, its certainly worth thinking through.
Then last week we got news that “Russians” had placed adverts on Facebook during the presidential election, paying in the region of $50k-$100k for them. As Streetwise Professor points out, Hillary spent $400 million on adverts. And she still lost. Whatever the causes of her loss, a hundred grand on Facebook adverts wasn’t it.
– Tim Newman
The best way to make people bad and poor is the illiberality of communism and fascism, and even the slow if sweet socialism of over-regulation. Women among the theocratic despots of Saudi Arabia are quartered at home, unable to flourish so much as driving an automobile. The economic nationalism of the new Alt-Right is impoverishing, and anyway closes us to ideas from the wide world. If betterment is slowing in the United States — a widely held if doubtful claim — we need the betterment coming from newly enriching countries such as China or India, not cutting ourselves off to “protect jobs” at home. Protectionist logic would have us make everything in Illinois or Chicago or our local street. Breakfast cereal. Accordions. Computers. It is childishly silly as economics, though stirring as nationalism.
– Deirdre N. McCloskey
Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce.
– Daniel Mitchell
Now this might seem screamingly obvious, yet even the UK is full of people who are either utterly oblivious to this self-evident and often demonstrated fact, or simply do not care, as equality via privation-for-all is actually their objective, with Venezuela’s example on that score being much admired.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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