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 quote of the day Once upon a time there were Progressives who actually believed in progress, who despite their flaws did believe in a brighter and better future. These were supplanted c. 1970 by a new Left with the new motto “Learn to live with less, you hate-filled greedy bastards!” The Apollo program was the last hurrah of the old Progressives and Earth Day environmentalism was a manifestation of the new Left that supplanted them.
Now those actually-for-progress Progressives had some major flaws. One was a willingness to bulldoze people’s personal plans in favor of their own Big Plans For Society. Another was to seriously underestimate just how poisonous socialism and government regulation are to an economy. But they still favored a better, brighter, more prosperous future in a way the “Learn to live with less!” Earth Day leftists did not.
– Deep Lurker
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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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There’s a fun film called Capricorn One about a Mars shot that turns into a fraud and a chase caper, with the excellent Hal Holbrook as the NASA swamp creature pulling the strings. Apart from being a pretty good adventure yarn, it beautifully captures the sense of the air departing from the space balloon in the public imagination, after the first Moon landing. And it really did too.
OK. Moon. Done that. What next ? OK then, let’s watch a Lucy rerun.
Relevant post at Ricochet: My Dear Friends on the Left, What Happened to You?
See Ayn Rand’s essay on “Apollo and Dionysus” and her larger collection on “The Anti-Industrial Revolution.”
Clement Atlee was in favour of rationing
In fairness to Clem he was in favour of the UK not going bankrupt, which it nearly did on his watch when the US ended Lend/Lease and the bill came due.
As you say though, the fact that rationing actually got worse after the war certainly contributed to Labour being ousted in 1951, despite the whirlwind of “progressive” reforms that Labour brought about during their term of office.
Whether actual progress was achieved is debatable.
I always think that is am excuse, there is no logical explanation for rationing in Britain while countries that were occupied or had very heavy destruction could get out of it earlier. It was a political socialist choice.
How (West)Germany was starting pro free market reforms against even the Allied military ideas with the country destroyed? or France with much more destruction than UK?
+1 lucklucky (April 28, 2022 at 8:05 pm). The post-war rationing in the UK was tougher than during the war years. Labour owned it directly (they liked state power) and indirectly (socialist policies slowed our recovery).