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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Italy is becoming interesting
Or, should I say, more interesting because Italy has always struck me as an intriguing place: exotic, sexy, creative, appealing and yet byzantine, noisy and chaotic.
Italy is notorious for its instability. It has had some ridiculously high number of governments since World War II all of which are coalitions of social democrats, christian democrats, communists, fascists and probably a few mafiosi. All of them collapse after a couple of years or so in an orgy of self-destructive conflict and raucous bickering. Corruption is famously rife and state regulation is so labrythine and ridiculous that something like 50% of the population earn their living in the ‘black economy’.
Despite this (or, more likely, because of it) Italy remains a prosperous country but it is clear that Silvio Berlusconi recognises that it will not remain one unless it liberalises its fossilised labour laws which, at present, guarantee a job for life.
“The protesters fear that workers’ rights will not be as well protected if the new laws come to fruition.”
The massive protest in Rome has been billed as a protest against terrorism following the assassination of government adviser Marco Biagi but let nobody be fooled. This was planned long before as a message to Berlusconi that the left are aiming to thwart him. The left and the public sector in Italy (as in the rest of Europe) is well-organised, stridently militant and relies on a hair-trigger willingness to adopt street confrontation as a tactic to defeat reformist politicians who, thus far, have lacked the cojones to face them down.
Berlusconi is talking tough:
“Nobody is going to stop us going ahead with our reforms,” he said. ” Terrorists and street protesters won’t stop us.”
Can he succeed where so many others have previously failed? If so, he will be leading Italy down the road of ‘Thatcherite’ revolution.
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.
Language expresses thought. But do the unexamined everyday idioms embedded in different languages cause bad thoughts to be thinkable, and good ones to be unthinkable? Are some truths suppressed by language, and are some falsehoods inculcated by it? George Orwell thought so.
An important bad idea from which we libertarians suffer is that, believing as we do in freedom, we are also assumed to believe in social isolation, in social “atomism”. This accusation is derived from another wrong idea, that sociability only happens because powerful politicians make it happen and pay for it to happen. So if someone doesn’t believe in compulsory, tax-funded sociability, then he must be against sociability itself. It is said that libertarians believe either that (in the notoriously wrong-headed pronouncement of Margaret Thatcher) “there is no such thing as society”, or that, insofar as there is such a thing as society, that’s bad, and that “freedom” must smash it to pieces.
The truth is that we libertarians are well aware of the reality of and value of society. We merely think that, like most things of importance, society shouldn’t be bossed about by the government. Society exists, but shouldn’t be a nationalised industry.
On Saturday morning I was tidying my desk and I chanced upon a print-out of the quotations section on the St Andrews University Liberty Club website. One of these quotes is from the film actor Clint Eastwood. In a March 1997 interview, Playboy magazine asked Eastwood how he would characterize himself politically. Eastwood replied:
“Libertarian … Everyone leaves everyone else alone.”
“Leave me alone!” We’ve all said it thousands of times. Sometimes we even mean exactly that. Someone is being nasty to you. Forget about them being nicer. You just want them to go away. But often we say “Leave me alone!” to soften the blow of the whole and real truth. What we really mean is: “It’s you I don’t want to be with. I want to be with others instead.”
You can see how a movie star might equate freedom, especially in his leisure hours or when trudging through extra-curricular duties in the company of a media-hack, with simply being left alone. And you can see why libertarians, dazzled by such stellar endorsement, might be glad to reproduce this hurtful little meme-package. But as a libertarian propagandist I insist that there is a fundamental difference between different company – company that I am glad to have, company that I have consented to – and no company at all.
The EU parliament has indicated its warm support for a new draft Directive which will regulate conversations between EU citizens.
The new Directive, which is the brainchild of French MEP, Bertrand Maginot will provide a legislative framework to ensure democratic oversight of all conversations which take place within the EU.
“This law is both overdue and necessary” said Monsieur Maginot. “At present there are absolutely no controls over the things people say to each other. This is dangerous and unacceptable”
British Commissioner, Sir Crispin D’oilly-Gitte also gave his full-hearted support to the new legislation.
“We must protect our citizens from being exposed to inaccurate or dishonest things”, he said. “This law is an important step forward to a safer and more democratic Europe”
Dismissing the concerns of civil liberties groups, he added:
“These people are just wreckers. This law will increase freedom in Europe. Everyone will be able to converse with confidence; safe in the knowledge that they are not being exposed to wrong ideas and bad information”
The new law will require any EU citizen wishing to have a conversation with another EU citizen, to first send a draft text of their proposed conversation to a Conversation Monitoring Officer (CMO) who will be appointed at national level. The CMO will check the text for honesty, accuracy and consistency with democratic European values.
Provided the text meets the required standards, the applicant will be given permission to hold their conversation with such other person or persons as are identified in the initial application.
“It is a simple safeguard”, said Monsieur Maginot.
Whilst the new Directive is not expected to be opposed, there is some concern at the dispute about exactly how the new regulatory regime will be funded. Swedish Social Democrat MEP, Helena Hankart has proposed that the CMO service be free to all applicants and funded out of general national taxation. However, Greek Commissioner Taxis Mitopisis is campaigning strongly for all applicants to pay a fee which will be charged according the applicant’s income.
“We have several committee meetings planned and I have no doubt we will achieve harmony on this issue”, said Ms.Hankart.
The new Directive is expected to be in force by January 1st 2003.
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.
Margaret Thatcher‘s remarks are hardly surprising to anyone who has read what she has said over the years but it was a surprise to me as an outsider looking in to read the negative response from so many British Conservatives.
For years Perry has been telling me that they are ‘The Stupid Party’ and are not committed to resisting EU envelopment and super-statism. I see now that he is quite correct. [Ed: like I said about the Libertarian Party in the USA, there are some good people in the Tory Party, but they are not the ones running it]
It seems that the only argument between the much of the Tory party and their political enemies in Britain is the rate at which British is to be enveloped by Euro-statism. The British Army was once said to be ‘Lions lead by Donkeys’. It would seem the Tory Party are ‘Donkeys once lead by a Lioness’. As the contrast between the more dynamic economy of the USA and Euro-sclerosis grows harder to miss by even the most willfully blind, how can the party which actually started the privatising ball rolling that shattered the seemingly unstoppable advance of ‘democratic’ socialism in the 1980’s have come to being in step with histories obvious losers? The Stupid Party indeed.
You are the perfect example of a man too lazy to fail
– Kristine Blauser Scalzi
Let’s hear it for successful indolence! Yeah! 
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
For much of today, we have been having e-mail problems (i.e. the domain hosting server is down), so if you e-mailed any of the usual addresses, we probably did not get it.
As a temporary measure, please send all e-mails to samizdata at cloister.dircon.co.uk until you get the all clear.
Oh happy happy joy joy, we love our domain server!
My friend Kristine Löwe, a Norwegian now living in London, is deep into that post-university battle to get started in Real Life, and I want to give her all the help I can. She’s just had a piece about European drugs policies published in the electronic version of the Guardian.
“Not very exciting stuff” she says modestly in her e-mail to her friends and contacts, and a ringing cry for total legalisation her piece definitely is not. The story is of a shift from treating heavy drug users as criminals to treating them as medical patients, and I don’t know which idea depresses me more. Nevertheless, this is a useful way to learn the latest about the official drugs policy mindset this side of the Atlantic, and next to Kristine’s piece you’ll find further links to other interesting drug-related stories from the Guardian’s electronic archives.
Thieves tried to grab a diamond necklace from U.S. entertainer Liza Minnelli while she was honeymooning with her new husband David Gest. The Oscar-winning star was the victim of an attempted robbery when the car in which she was a passenger stopped at traffic lights in Holland Park, west London.
That should boost the British tourist trade – not!
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.
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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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