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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Thought for the day “It is a irresistible to note that nearly everyone, including the wealth creator, is inclined to see the world of inner being, of the heart and soul, as being at odds with the commercial. Wealth creators seem shy of their success. It is often said that the Englishman has always preferred to be seen as a gentleman than as a creative, industrious or commercial person.”
Richard D. North, Rich is Beautiful, (page 199).
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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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That is a thought provoking thought. Whilst I see no need for a wealth creator to even come close to apologising for his success that last line about the Englishman preferring to be seen as a gentleman does have me wondering.
Without the wealth creators we would still be subsistence farmers at best. However we are taught that wealth creation is exploititive, which u=is why we struggle as a nation.
If only we were still the despised nation of shopkeepers
Probably something to do with the love of money being the root of evil, I suspect.
EG
A landed proprietor who tends his acres and its people faithfully is more creative, industrious and commercial than 99% of the higher serfs toiling for they know not what ends in globalised corporations or State bureaucracies. The strongest of all society’s little platoons is the country estate: in better days, a self-sufficient world of shared faith, interlocking specialisms and understood duties and privileges which also generated the main artistic heritage of this nation.
Our peaceful green and pleasant land was an interlaced series of thousands of such little geodesic worlds: the closest *practical* approach to libertarian desiderata we have ever attained. Once the dead end of ‘wealth creation’, waste and pollution is universally recognised, let us hope that Britain, which led the world into industrial revolution via the success of its agriculture– for it was the despised gentleman who started the ball rolling– will be the first country to find a new dispensation that replaces the brittle, unsustainable regime of contract with that of good old status. May the impertinent and oppressively impersonal tyranny of the bureaucrat be replaced by the easy yoke of the godly squire and the comfort of knowing one’s place.
Rand very clearly diagnosed this moral inversion in conventional culture a half century ago.
As in the animal rights discussion in the adjacent thread, we routinely allow those who hate and despise the creative and industrious aspects in the human consciousness to set the agenda for ethical discussions.
The mystics of muscle and of spirit have not cooperated all these centuries without effect.
Luniversal, this is the first time I have read reference to wate and pollution. Bravo. These are the things that will do for us if we don’t change. Wealth creation without waste and the poisoning of the water we drink and the air we breathe is what we all should aspire too, in a non collectivist way of course ;-).
This is because they do not have a propper attitude about the virtues of selfishness…
td