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]

Samizdata quote of the day – UK home-schooling edition

“Now of course it’s true that the nature of home-schooling will vary family by family. That is precisely the point of it.”

David Frost, Daily Telegraph, warning about the move by the UK government to try and severely curtail home-schooling, which he correctly identifies as a way to enforce ideological conformity on the education of the young – something that the Left (and sometimes also on the Right too) has long sought. Frost writers about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

Samizdata quote of the day: how Britain is seen abroad edition

“We are seen, bluntly, as a country run by student union activists, a place where violent criminals are released from prison to free up space for people who have posted nasty comments online. If you’re British, you might protest that things are more complicated than that, but you must also concede that our critics have the big picture right.”

Daniel Hannan

Paine and Locke – Flawed Advocates Of Liberty

The following article comes from Paul Marks, regular commenter here. Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and others) is someone who, at one point, would have been as familiar to an American or Briton of decent reading as, say, the Founders, or a character such as Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Paine’s books were read as avidly as any social media post today, and were arguably far more influential and profound. Paine was immensely influential in his time. But he had serious flaws in his views, as Paul Marks argues, and was foolish in the extreme about the French Revolution and where it might lead. He ended up nearly losing his life in France.
Another person who wielded great influence in the ideas of the Founders was John Locke, the English writer. Views such as the idea that Man is a “self owner”, for example, and of how property legitimately comes into existence, are often associated with Locke.

I can recommend this book by Yuval Levin, comparing and contrasting Edmund Burke (who supported the American colonists in their bid for independence), and Paine. See also this book about the Founding by Timothy Sandefur, which readers might enjoy. And one more is America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C Bradley Thompson.

Of course, this sort of topic might appear “arcane” to some, but at a time when the Founding, and the the origins of the greatest free nation on earth, are sometimes questioned and even attacked, it is never a waste of time to re-visit the territory and learn new lessons.

Anyway, over to the “Sage of Kettering”:

Thomas “Tom” Paine is mocked for holding that it was wrong for monarchies to have fiat money (rather than gold and silver coin), and high taxes and lots of government spending – but just fine for democratically elected governments to-do-the-same-things. His position was indeed absurd – but what was the source of his specific economic position that high taxes, specifically high land taxes, should fund lots of benefits, education for the poor, old age pensions, money for the poor generally – and-so-on?

Well Adam Smith implied there was something special about land taxation – and David Ricardo and Henry George developed this idea long after the death of Mr Paine – and the idea was not fully refuted till the American economist Frank Fetter just over a century ago, although experience in Ireland in the 1840s where the British government tried to run the Poor Law welfare schemes by a land tax, assuming that this would just hurt “the landowners”, should have discredited the idea that taxing land is somehow special – in Ireland the economy totally collapsed and between a quarter and a third of the population either died or fled the country. But there is more to all this than just taking a few, false, hints from Adam Smith and running wild with them.

As far back as John Locke there was a mixing (by slight of hand) of individual consent and majority consent. Gough (Oriel Oxford about 70 years ago now) showed in his book on Locke that medieval thinkers understood the difference between majority consent and individual consent – and that Locke, in his “Two Treatises on Government” mixed them up – in order to imply that a government is not coercive if it has majority support, that you as an individual are not being coerced, no matter what government does to you, if you had a vote – if only one vote out of millions (a doctrine that makes no sense – but a doctrine that both Mr Paine and Rousseau before him, later ran wild with).

Nor is it just the political side – there is also an element of economic thinking that Mr Paine may (perhaps) have taken from John Locke. Locke held, contrary to Hugo Grotius (the Dutch theologian and legal thinker) and other theologians and legal thinkers, that God gave land (the world) to humanity in-common – rather than land being unowned till claimed (the Roman or Common Law position).

As Locke held (by his interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible – thinkers such as Hugo Grotius held to a very different interpretation) that the land was originally given to humans in-common, he held that private ownership had to be “justified” – either by “as much and as good left for others” (clearly impossible with a rising population) or by some sort of payment to meet the “Lockian Proviso” – see how Mr Paine might get the idea of a land tax and various benefits funded by it, from this position of John Locke? Although, yes, Thomas Paine rejected Christianity – and it was from his interpretation of Christianity (opposed by many other Christian thinkers) that Locke got his ideas, in this area, from.

John Locke even held that if a ship’s captain with a cargo of food refused to sell it in a port where there starving people, seeking a better price at another port, the captain was “guilty of murder” – seemingly oblivious to the fact that this would (given there have always been hungry people in some part of the world) bid the price of food down to zero, bankrupting not just the captain – but also the farmers. It is also just legally wrong – as the captain may (may) be a very morally bad person (lacking in the virtue of charity – mercy), but he is NOT “guilty of murder” as any lawyer (of either English Common Law or Roman Law) could have told Mr Locke.

So, in all this, if (if) ideas are developed in a certain way it is quite possible to go from John Locke (supposedly the founder of English liberalism) to the Collectivism of Thomas Paine or even Rousseau – and of the French Revolution rather than individual private property based American Revolution. This is one of the reasons why American Founding Fathers such as Roger Sherman and John Adams were so opposed to Thomas Paine.

Samizdata quote of the day – people don’t want freedom edition

“Most voters don’t want tax cuts. They don’t want personal responsibility. They don’t want limited government. Britain was already in a dirigiste mood going into the lockdown. But, since coming out of it, it has been downright authoritarian.”

Daniel Hannan.

Samizdata quote of the day – generational differences edition

“But I must say the general mood of many people my age is an astounded sense that we began in our youth, in the 1960s and ’70s, saying `Don’t trust anyone over 30.’ And now, as we survey the wreckage the woke regime has done to the academy, the arts, the corporate office, we are thinking something that had never crossed our minds. `Don’t trust anyone under 30.'”

Peggy Noonan, WSJ ($). She’s reflecting on the conduct of college students in the wake of the atrocities against Israel. In another passage, she writes that when students in a college were told that what happened on 7 October was a “pogrom”, they didn’t know what the word means.

Oh Canada!

I get press releases. Here is the text from one of them, via Ideas Beyond Borders. I repeat most of the content, and I am sure IBB won’t object.

New standards for library book removal left students, parents, teachers, and board members of the Peel District School Board confused recently as they noticed the number of books in various school libraries drop by what may be as much as half. Adding to the confusion is the assertion by some that books, including significant titles such as Harry Potter, The Hungry Caterpillar, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, were removed simply because they were published before 2008. The situation has prompted so much discontent that Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce wrote to the PDSB around September 13th, requesting a halt to the removals.

Like most school districts in Canada and other countries across the globe, libraries periodically conduct a process sometimes referred to as “weeding,” where some books are added, some removed, and some replaced with newer editions. Unheard of, however, is removing a book solely because of its publication date, particularly one as seemingly arbitrary as the year 2008. Getting a straight answer to what happened hasn’t been easy for parents, students, community members, or the media. The board’s education director, Rashmi Swarup, said in a statement, “PDSB teacher librarians have not been given the direction to remove all books published with a publication date older than 2008, nor has the board received provincial direction to remove particular books from our collections.” The chair of PDSB’s board of trustees, David Green, claims staff were told to focus on books published around 2008 or older as that was when there was last a major weeding. Students and other community members claim staff told them they were told to remove anything pre-2008.

Documents obtained by a group of parents, teachers, and other community members known as Libraries Not Landfills show that PDSB formulated their weeding methodology to comply with a directive issued by (plot twist!) Education Minister Stephen Lecce himself based upon a 2020 report commenting on systematic discrimination in the district. According to the documents, the first step of the process apparently places the age limit in question before two other measures aimed at improving equity and diversity. The district’s guidelines were written by the non-profit Canadian School Libraries (CSL) and are known as “MUSTIE”.

● M (Misleading) – a book is factually inaccurate/obsolete or contains stereotypes

● U (Ugly) – a book is torn, dirty, moldy, etc.

● S (Superseded) – a book has a newer edition

● T (Trivial) – a book has no literary/artistic merit or is poorly written

● I (Irrelevant) – a book doesn’t interest or serve the needs of its target community

● E (Elsewhere) – the book’s info can be better explored in another book or format

Some of these guidelines seem obvious – nobody wants a moldy book lying around. Others can be left to a troubling amount of interpretation – whether or not a book is trivial or irrelevant can vary wildly from student to student. Weeding out books with stereotypes is tricky too – what constitutes a “harmful” stereotype is somewhat subjective, and the line between that and accurately depicting certain cultural tropes can be quite blurry. Too heavy-handed an approach on this metric could lead to such important Canadian authors as Richard Wagamese, Margaret Atwood, and Dionne Brand being unfairly targeted for removal because they tackle race, ethnicity and gender in a manner some may find uncomfortable.

So what happens to the books that get weeded? The physically damaged ones should be thrown away, but what about those that don’t meet the trusted MUSTIE standards? Donating them might be nice, but no, apparently not. According to the documents obtained by Libraries Not Landfills, PDSB is straight up destroying many of the weeded books because “they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate” and therefore “not suitable for any learners.” Tom Ellard, the founder of Libraries Not Landfills, says a landfill in the area told him they’re looking to hire extra staff because of all the discarded books they’ve received. That’s pretty astonishing (assuming it’s accurate) and incredibly troubling, evoking images and memories of tactics used by authoritarian regimes across history.

Coverage of the removals has been non-existent since Lecce’s letter to Peel District School Board in which he requested the current removal process to “immediately end.” His initial statement was, “Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities. It is offensive, illogical and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada’s history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics,” which seems to be a defense of the program overall while criticizing the scope and severity of the removals. His office has not commented since.

There is a website called End Banned Books. Worth supporting.

Canada has become a shitshow, politically and culturally. People like to go on about how “nice” Canadians are, but I always thought that something a bit patronising about that. The Canadians who hit the beaches at Normandy in 1944, liberating the continent from the Nazis, were magnificantly not “nice”. The truckers who objected to the Trudeau insanity over vaccine mandates had some of that old grit. That country could sorely use that spirit now, assuming any of it is left.

Indiana Jones and the Renovation of Relics

These few paragraphs, transcribed from a (warning, very long) video essay by The Little Platoon about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, contain lots of interesting ideas. I do not have time to fact check it all, so please argue about it in the comments section.

Why do old things belong in museums? Because history and nostalgia rely on the same thing: a letting go; a leaving be; that switch in the collective subconscious that manifests in the want to preserve rather than to renovate. Increasingly common demands to lift artifacts from western museums and return them to their ancestral homes are more of a desire to renovate than to preserve. Lost amidst the tediously ahistorical narratives around colonial exploitation is the fact that historical preservation requires an act of will backed up by resources and learning. The marbles probably were better off in Elgin’s indelicate hands than they were adorning the ammo dump the Ottomans made of the Parthenon, much of which was blown up anyway when the Venetians, as only Venetians could, decided to shell it.

And Indian archaeology began as a purely colonial exercise. It was the likes of Sir William Jones, James Prinsep and the Asiatic Society, that thought it worth digging up India’s forgotten past and translating its fading texts: documenting its undocumented history, and rescuing relics from the longstanding and, it must be said, understandable native tendency to break them up and turn them into new buildings.

It’s an unpopular fact but it is a fact nonetheless that orientalists taught the Orient a great deal about itself because the west was rich enough to afford the luxury of knowledge. And it’s that, by the way, not capitalism that motivated Indiana Jones, whatever Phoebe Waller-Bridge might tell you later. Capitalism is actually not very good with history, and I speak as an ardent capitalist. Capitalism is a thing that demands new ways to find a material profit, and it’s instinctively uncomfortable with letting things move from present to past tense. Those old Indians turning ancient Buddhist relics into railway sleepers were arguably more capitalistic than the capitalistic orientalists like Jones and Prinsep who rescued them for posterity. And they were much more so than Islamist or Hindutva nutters who, much like the Nazis, would rather destroy heresy than preserve history.

But it’s the constant need to renew, to renovate, that seems to have taken hold in our own countries in our own times. Coming closer to the subject of this video, it’s the reason we cannot let old things lie. We don’t know how to make what our ancestors made. We can only bend their relics into new shapes. Indiana Jones belongs in our metaphorical museum (I think the original trilogy does currently sit in the library of congress) but the character himself has been dressed up and wheeled out and recontextualised and generally renovated twice since then, to worse results each time. Someone somewhere believes there’s monetary value to be extracted from re-using him which denies his sufficient value as history. It’s kind of ironic, really. Indy wants to rescue relics from those who would want to put them to new financial and material ends; he wants relics preserved as they are, studied and untouched, not put to heathen purposes, because they’ve had their day and no good can come of re-employing them. If, however you find yourself watching Dial of Destiny and you find your face melting, it’s because Disney couldn’t help but go to that big old warehouse, find the wooden crate, pull out the ark and open it on our screen to our collective horror.

Disney are the René Belloqs, the Walter Donovans of our world; Philistines, not Philanthropists donating treasures to the public.

The US Supreme Court judgement on affirmative action – a couple of brief reactions

“America doesn’t need more proficiency in Harvard’s Postmodern Nihilist indoctrination. What America needs are thousands of Neo-Enlightenment Revolutionaries.”

From a friend of mine called Steve on Facebook, writing about the US Supreme Court decision about Affirmative Action and its application to university admissions. He is pleased at the ruling, but of course hopes the students who are now able to get into university on merit, rather than via quotas, study subjects that are rather more intellectually rigrous than of late. (See Ilya Somin, who writes about these issues frequently, via Reason.)

Glenn Reynolds, who needs no introduction here, has related thoughts on his substack.

It is going to be bemusing to see the social justice crowd try and argue that Asian-Americans somehow “don’t count” in terms of the grievance bingo game that has been played recently. Popcorn is going to be in demand.

Of course, it would be even better if we stopped the whole hypenated-American thing at all, and treated people as individuals. How wild and crazy is that?

Among Asian-American voters in “blue” states, and those with children trying to get into higher education, this could have an interesting impact on how they vote in 2024.

Samizdata quote of the day – Elon Musk edition

“It might be exhausting just trying to keep up with Musk and he will get plenty wrong. And yet, all the criticism is hopelessly wide of the mark. Our political and economic culture sneers at and neglects men and women like him. But if Musk and his ilk ever chose to go on strike, like a seemingly endless number of workers in both the public and private sectors, the system could grind to a complete halt.”

Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph. Lynn’s article (£) is spot on. Yes, Musk received public subsidies for Tesla and the SpaceX business gets deals from NASA, but the point is also that he has made, particularly in the spacefaring area, a tremendous go of massively reducing launch costs via the recoverability of the rockets. He did it when far more expensive ways of space flight failed to deliver. If he did nothing else, that puts him on my list of heroes.

The line about him ever going on strike makes me wonder if Lynn thinks of Musk as a sort of Ayn Rand hero. It’s almost uncanny. Of course, some people, including Musk himself, tend to think of him more as a bit of a Tony Stark.

Musk can be maddening to some, and vexatious even to his admirers. But overall, I am glad he is around.

Do want subsidized chips with your policy, sir?

“Government subsidies are never free, and now we are learning the price U.S. semiconductor firms and others will pay for signing on to President Biden’s industrial policy. They will become the indentured servants of progressive social policy.”

Wall Street Journal. ($)

A couple of follow-ups:

Democrats last year snookered Republicans into passing their $280 billion Chips Act, which includes $39 billion in direct financial aid for chip makers and a 25% investment tax credit. Republicans hoped this would satisfy West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, but after Chips passed he quickly flipped and endorsed the Inflation Reduction Act.

Now the Administration is using the semiconductor subsidies to impose much of the social policy that was in the failed Build Back Better bill. On Tuesday Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo rolled out the new rules for chip makers and summed up the politics to the New York Times: “If Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation” of the subsidies.

For a fascinating insight into the arguments and geopolitical tensions around silicon chips (and the role of Taiwan), I recommend Chip Wars, by Chris Miller.

Every time I look at Joe Biden and his allies, and particularly at Biden, a machine politician with beady little eyes and wandering hands, I think of an Ayn Rand villain.

The EU stands up for financial privacy (yes, really)

For once (yes, it happens) the legal authorities of the EU are in the right, in my view, and their critics are wrong, contrary to what Henry Williams, author of this article in CapX, says.

A top EU court has ruled that creating public registers of beneficial ownership, so that everyone can just find out who owns what, is a dangerous loss of privacy. In my view, if people are concerned that X or Y is an owner of a company or trust and that is somehow nefarious, they should get clearance first from a court or suitable legal authority and show some reason for the desire to obtain that data. It is not, in my view, acceptable to put everyone’s beneficial ownership details in the public domain so that journalists and others, many of whom seem to have it in for anyone whom they deem rich, can put this information into the public domain. For instance, public registers means that people can simply go on “fishing expeditions” and dump all kinds of financial data into the public domain, and damn the consequences. Sure, if politicians and the like have questionable financial affairs, some on the libertarian side will think they are fair game, but those whose only “crime” is to be rich or successful will get caught in the crossfire.

There are also risks, as lawyers have pointed out, that such owners can be targeted by gangs. This is not paranoia. And paradoxically, the pressure for beneficial ownership disclosure clashes with data protection rules in the EU – known as GDPR.

It is arguable that Swiss bank secrecy was a step too far, but there is such a thing as legitimate privacy. Would, for example, the author of the linked article from CapX be happy for there to be public databases, accessible to all, of medical information, etc? (Maybe he is.) We seem to live in an era where due process of law and respect for privacy are forgotten or seen as old-fashioned issues.

Being independent of the EU does not mean that everything in the EU is bad or worse than in the UK. Occasionally, the EU gets things right. The key is that decisions rest in the hands of the UK electorate.

Financial privacy is not a popular subject, and there are lots of campaigners, sometimes coming from a good place, who think putting everything in the public domain is a good thing. They are wrong, and for once, a court has done the right thing. I doubt, of course, that this debate is over.

Samizdata quote of the day

“Don’t talk to me about Partygate. Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman’s emails. Talk to me about the fact that a 28-year-old man with devastating injuries was left in unimaginable pain and terror as fire engines drove in the other direction and ambulances stayed away. Talk to me about the fact that our emergency services step back from horrific incidents because of ‘safety fears’. Talk to me about this institutionalised cowardice, where the emergency services now make bureaucratic safety assessments rather than behaving with courage and bravery to assist people in dire need. Avoiding risk is a completely surreal principle for the emergency services to adopt. These people should take risks. They should be rushing into danger to help the men, women and children facing that danger.”

Brendan O’Neill, writing about the descriptions of shocking slowness by emergency services around the time of the Manchester terrorist attack of 2017. (Here is a link to the second report into the brutal attacks, and how services did, or did not, respond.)