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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Samizdata slogan of the day If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
– Frédéric Bastiat
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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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Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
That’s a rhetorical question, I think / hope.
Oh! how right you are! one only needs to look at the corrupt doings in Canada in recent days to understand the level of arrogance by politicians, It seems that theivery, lies, and corruptive activities is only allowed for politicians, the rest of us go to jail for crimes far less important than the billions politicians steal from the unwarry public every year. Signed ashamed to be a Canadian
Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Of course they’re better than us. That’s why the read the Guardian.
If you were to ask them straight out they would not say they are better than anyone else, they just have a better understanding of what the purpose of government is for and an agenda to fulfill. They aren’t better, the agenda is. And that is what makes it de facto theocratic, it’s not them, it’s the cause. At most they are merely an enlightened conduit of the Spirit.
But take the initial statement to the extreme and the end result is pure anarchy. No human can be deemed to be better than another, necessitating invoking an a priori collective so that no one person is better than another and the theocracy manifests itself. It’s the only way I can make sense of those who inhabit the left/socialist section of the political spectrum, burdened as they are with self deprecation, but also presuming no one is superior to them as well, then The State must be better than all, though they’ll just steer the bus for us.
The best I can do is say that the government exists as a social contract, modest funds are allocated, agents are hired who are responsible back to the people. The consideration of the individual is to assign use of force to the agents in its preventative and retributive forms. The State’s function is to provide those forms back in protecting property. When it 1) fails to do so or 2) becomes the biggest thief of all, then ony will take back the use of force assigned and should be allowed to own the means to do so. Under such a design it’s not so much a question of the patently superior nature of those who inhabit the State but merely are they performing their part of the contract, no more, no less.