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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In Los Angeles, as the hunt for another registered Democrat on a killing spree continues, police opened fire on two innocent ladies delivering newspapers from the same kind of truck as the suspect. They seem to have done so without any attempt at identification. They didn’t even shout a warning first.
It seems that those drawn to jobs as the state’s armed enforcers are also among those not to be trusted with weapons. I suggest it’s for the same psychological reasons. As the validated agents of what they see as a superior moral force, they feel justified in their appalling actions, but also sure that if they get it wrong the state will defend them. Reckless and panicky they may be, but having injured two innocents they “protect and serve” they are safe. At least as safe, say, as an NHS mandarin who presided over the deaths of thousands.
I conclude, then, that it is not good long-term libertarian propaganda to argue for various alternative systems of politics, or incremental political changes, on the basis that they are somewhat better than what we have now and they are more easily achievable than radical libertarianism. For such a strategy can only waste endless time in endless compromise, while failing to explain properly the libertarian alternative and thereby making converts. It is far better to argue immediately and always for the radical libertarian option.
– Jan C Lester puts the case for libertarianism and against compromise in a talk, entitled “Democracies, Republics and other unnecessary evils”, which he gave to Libertarian Home at the Rose and Crown in August of last year.
I first heard Lester speak these words while watching this video of the event, but I was later able to copy and paste them to here from this full text of the talk, also made available by Libertarian Home.
Following the highly successful (nobody has said otherwise to me) relaunch of Brian’s Fridays with a talk by Sam Bowman on January 25th, the last Friday of February is now approaching fast, in fact it is about as early in the month as a last Friday is capable of being, namely February 22nd. Tomorrow week, in other words. And my speaker will be my good friend and fellow Samizdatista, Michael Jennings, talking about How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised. (And yes, isn’t it great that we now have author archives here?)
It will not amaze Samizdata readers to learn that Michael’s talk will be making maximum use of his impressive understanding of business and of technology, together with the fact that for as long as any of his London friends have known him he has been roaming the globe, looking at the impact of such things at first hand. Follow the above link if you doubt this, and look in particular at postings like this one, from last Christmas Eve. Many speak these days about globalisation. Michael really does know a great deal about what this process now consists of.
As I have earlier said here, one of my purposes in relaunching these evenings is to stir up more blogging than might otherwise have happened, by me and by others, both before and in response to these events. And that is now starting to happen. So far such blogging has mostly been me, but now Michael has joined in, with a couple of postings at my personal blog which are his in all but name, here and here, mentioning some of the themes he is now busy wrestling down into a forty minute talk.
The second of these two postings includes four photos, taken in Georgia, Cyprus, Tianjin (which is the fourth largest city in China), and Mumbai. He will be showing us further photos on the night. It also contains this line (under the Tianjin picture):
One could write an entire book about fake Apple Stores.
I wanted to make that today’s SQOTD, but the spot had already been taken.
What such bloggage means is that these meetings will have an impact way beyond the mere people who happen to show up on the night, in a way that was very hard to contrive with meetings of this sort in the days before the internet. As so often, when it comes to newly devised ways of communicating, the new ways don’t render the old ways obsolete. On the contrary, they make the old ways both easier to organise and more significant in their impact. Even if you don’t ever come within a thousand miles of my home, you may still benefit, albeit indirectly, from these meetings taking place.
As to the obvious way of multiplying the impact of these talks, by video-ing them, at present I am not doing this. Opinion, what I know of it, is divided on the wisdom of this decision, but my feeling is (a) that video works better when it is shorter and more visually punchy than just a person talking for half an hour or more, and (b) that there is value in at least some speaker meetings not being videoed. (If no other libertarians were videoing meetings, I probably would.) Speakers, especially the sort of younger and less experienced speakers whom I intend quite often to invite, may feel freer, in such unimortalised circumstances, to explore subjects outside their comfort zones and off the beaten tracks of the usual libertarian topics and arguments. Unvideoed meetings are a chance for people to think aloud, and perhaps attempt a talk which they will later perfect and want to have videoed, when it is good and ready.
If you would like to attend Michael’s globralisation talk, or would like information about future Brian’s Fridays, please email me (by clicking where it says “Contact”, top left, there), or leave a comment here (or there).
“More regulation” is the cry in every gagging throat, following the revelation that numerous cheap meat dishes in several supermarkets that were labelled as beef or lamb actually contained horsemeat.
Regulation caused the problem in the first place.
From today’s Times (subscriber only):
The Government knew last summer that a sudden ban on cheap British beef and lamb meant it was “inevitable” that unlawful meat would be imported from Europe.
Unintended consequences, again. It would make a horse laugh.
Jim Paice, the former Agriculture Minister, warned the committee last summer that unlawful meat would be imported from Europe as manufacturers sought cheap sources to make up for banned British supplies.
The warning came after the FSA [Food Standards Agency] suddenly told meat processors to halt the production of “desinewed” beef and lamb, which was used in tens of millions of ready meals, burgers and kebabs each year, after orders from European Commission inspectors.
The committee demanded in July last year that the Government set out its plans to prevent illegal imports, stating: “The Agriculture Minister’s evidence suggested that it was inevitable that wrongly labelled or unlawful meat products would be importing into the UK to replace UK produced desinewed meat.”
Emphasis added. Do not, however, expect this aspect to be emphasised in the Radio 4 Food Programme. I could be proved wrong; there is a podcast here which I am not in the mood to listen to, but so far the BBC’s coverage has been a relentless flow of, if you will forgive yet another revolting processed meat metaphor, pink slime.
Why does Barack Obama hate black people?
Don’t get me wrong…I love the minimum wage, because I’m white. My daughter is white, and also has established plenty of work experience. She was offered jobs at more than 40K per year at the age of 20. Minimum wage legislation will ensure that we’re the last to be laid off. We got skills!!!
But does Barack Obama really hate black people? Or is he just not very smart?
– The Whited Sepulchre
Yes, the Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 is coming to London soon, and yesterday I booked my place at it. This cost me twenty five quid plus a small booking fee, and that price includes meals, so this would be quite a bargain even if all that the product consisted of was the meals. And if you are one of those peculiar people who does not live in London or nearby, and you take the “with accommodation” option, that will cost you a further … ten quid! For two nights of “hostel” accommodation. What that means I am not sure, but if a roof is involved it is also quite a bargain.
Common courtesy, however, demands that if one takes one of these amazingly enticing deals, as I just have, that one will also pay at least some attention to the events during the day, in between the eating and the hostelling.
So it helps that there is an impressive array of speakers. There are names that are familiar to me, like: Baker, Bowman, Davies, Dowd, Singleton, Wellings, to name but a few of the ones I know well. And there are others I hardly know at all, which you also want when you attend something like this, like Abebe Gellaw, exiled Ethiopian journalist and activist, and Wolf von Laer, Chairman of European Students for Liberty. And there are in-between people, whom I approximately know or know of, but would love to get to know better. Here is the full list of speakers and subjects. (Well, fuller, see below.)
The talk I am most looking forward to is the one by libertarian historian Steve Davies, entitled: “Health Costs: Always Up?” Good question. And given what a great speaker Davies always is, great answers are bound to be supplied.
Recommended. Given the prices being asked, I would recommend that you consider, soon, if you would like to go, and if you decide that you would, to book soon also.
Plus, I just re-read the email I got from Liberty League yesterday, which got me thinking about this event, and it started like this:
The UK’s biggest pro-liberty conference is only a few weeks away. We have even more speakers now confirmed, with legal expert Professor Randy Barnett on libertarian law, Professor Terence Kealey on the “Innovation versus Leviathan” panel, Peter Botting leading the public speaking workshop, Dr Tim Evans on anarcho-capitalism, Linda Whetstone on liberty movements around the world, along with the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Mark Littlewood, and author JP Floru.
They’ll have to talk fast.
You may be a staunch supporter of the welfare state, socialized medicine, gay marriage, preferential treatment of women and 75 percent taxation of all private income. It won’t help you if you have distanced yourself from the teachings of the prophet.
Thus, in the Netherlands, Islam’s critics are also “extreme right-wing racists” – if by “extreme”, “right-wing” and “racist’ you mean gay hedonists (Pim Fortuyn), anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilists (Theo van Gogh) and liberal black feminists (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Whichever of these novel permutations of “right-wing” you fall into, you wind up either on trial (Nekschot, Geert Wilders), forced into exile (Miss Ali) or pushing up tulips (Fortuyn, van Gogh). Likewise, the artists and comedians I met through Lars in Copenhagen had been variously arrested, subjected to death threats, had homes firebombed and a family restaurant shot up. And in the final indignity they’d wound up sharing a stage with a right-wing loon like me because their leftie pals weren’t there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty International fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – they all stayed utterly silent. C’mon, nobody’s asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled Tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax.
– Mark Steyn
I am not much impressed with Roger Bootle’s drearily conventional arguments for what the UK economy needs.
“I have banged on before about decisions on key projects which have large public sector involvement but which may also hold the key to major private sector spending, e.g. over London’s airport capacity.”
Preposterous Keynesian fallacy at work. It presupposes that money allocated to some project via the political process is more likely to create a ‘multiplier’ than market driven uses of that money… and it assumes that the money taken by the state by force would not have been invested in something more worthwhile in aggregate if the decisions were left to its original owners before it was confiscated by the state.
But of course as it is easier to see something like an airport rather than the myriad of other uses the money would have gone to had it not been forced into that project, so somehow the big flashy ‘infrastructure’ protect is claimed to have driven knock-on investment and is therefore an obvious Good Thing. As Bastiat put it “That which is seen versus that which is not seen”.
Ain’t necessarily so and given the record of government decision making versus the more diffused decision making of markets, usually ain’t so.
“But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.”
– John Horgan, giving Sam Harris a bit of a kicking.
Read the whole piece. Food for thought.
Many months ago I recorded a BBC documentary called “Health before the NHS”. Not having much of a stomach for statist propaganda I had been putting off watching it. The other night I finally got round to doing so.
Now, you will be shocked (shocked I tell you!) to hear, that the conclusion they reached was that the creation of the NHS was a very wonderful thing indeed. The problem was that if you actually looked at the evidence they presented – without making allowances for cherry picking – you’d have to reach precisely the opposite conclusion. This is what the BBC thought counted as evidence:
- There have always been state hospitals.
- They have always been awful. Dirty, miserable, useless.
- Before 1900 most operations were carried out at home
- Almost all developments in medicine in the first half of the 20th Century were pioneered by voluntary hospitals (ie private hospitals).
- It was voluntary hospitals that pioneered the idea that you might have an operation in a hospital and not at home.
- Voluntary hospitals were able to survive on charity until taxation in the 1920s got so high that this became increasingly difficult.
Something they did not cover was the introduction of a state general practitioner service in 1912. This was the real beginning of the NHS. At the time, I assume, no one in government thought voluntary hospitals particularly important, so they were ignored and, of course, they went on to transform healthcare. It really is amazing what a little freedom can do. It was only in 1948 that the government realised its “mistake” and nationalised the voluntary hospitals as well.
The BBC even opined that the NHS “integrated” healthcare (whatever that might mean) and managed to give the impression that it brought forth infinite resources for its activities. You have to admire their chutzpah.
 Hospital subscribers in 1916. For further info see here.
Kim Jong-un is looking at things, just like his father!
The Kim is dead, long look the Kim!
– commenter Alisa
It is officially calculated that, between 2005 and 2009, up to 1,200 patients at Stafford Hospital died needlessly. Let us imagine that a comparable disaster occurred in any other institution or enterprise in this country. Suppose that hundreds of customers of the cold food counter at Sainsbury’s or Tesco died of food poisoning. Suppose that, at an army barracks, large comprehensive, steelworks, bank, hotel, university campus or holiday theme park, people died, and went on dying for years, at rates that hugely exceeded anything that could be attributed to the normal course of nature.
What would happen? In all cases – though more quickly in the private sector than in the public – the relevant management would be sacked. Indeed, the very idea of unnecessary deaths taking years to notice is almost inconceivable. Criminal charges would be brought. In many cases, the offending institution would close down.
But this is the National Health Service, and so we approach it with superstitious reverence, as if the fact that Stafford Hospital performed so many human sacrifices is so awe-inspiring that little can be done about it. For all its rhetoric of condemnation, this week’s report of the Mid Staffs inquiry by Robert Francis QC argues, in effect, that those in charge should stay in charge.
– Charles Moore
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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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