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 – African countries demanding reparations are astonishingly hypocritical David Eltis, described by Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University as “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade”, reckons that nineteenth-century expenditure on slavery-suppression outstripped the eighteenth-century benefits. And the political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.
The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their own country’s historical record, it will cost us all.
– Nigel Biggar (£)
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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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Are they demanding reparations from the Islamic powers who raided African nations for slaves for over a thousand years? If they were male these slaves were normally castrated – and if they were female their children (the product of the rape of their mothers) were often killed at birth.
Should Britain and other Western nations demand reparations for many centuries of Islamic slave taking – both from ships and from coastal villages and towns?
In the United States more white people are killed by black people than the other way round, so should white people demand reparations from black people? “No – as guilt is individual, not collective”.
Yes indeed – guilt is indeed individual not collective. So we have people who have never been slaves (indeed their ancestors sold their “African brothers and sisters” into slavery – or used them as slaves themselves, or for human sacrifices) are asking people who have never owned slaves for money – indeed they are DEMANDING money.
What should be the response?
All aid (all of it) should be ended at once – and European nations should defend their borders preventing “migrants” (invaders) landing.
As the population of areas in Africa, and elsewhere, increases – so the pressure will increase, European nations must defend their borders, or be wiped out.
And Europeans must have children again – “migrants” are not the children you did not have, and they have no interest in financially providing for your old age.
Indeed they want “reparations” from you.
Officially slavery ended in the Islamic world in the 1960s – yes the late 20th century. Unofficially it continues to this day.
Africans who went to North or South America were sold by other Africans – who, otherwise, would have kept them as slaves themselves (slavery had been endemic in Africa for thousands of years) or would have used them for human sacrifices.
As for Empire – one of the most impressive expansions has been that of the Bantu peoples, who (over the last few thousand years) have gone from controlling a small area of Africa – to controlling most of Africa.
Things did not go well for the people, of other races, in areas they conquered.
Seems pointless arguing rationally with Africans about this. It’s not about right or wrong, not about justice. It’s just opportunism, they want gibs. Just say no and move on. No dialogue, no debate.
They can just fuck off.
I have never owned a slave (I am enslaved by a pair of cats but that is a different thing) My parents never owned a slave*, our my grand-parents, or my great-grand parents, or…
Paul, excellent points about the Islamic World and the Bantu. The Middle East still has de-facto slavery. Who built all those football stadia?
*When they worked in Zambia in the very early seventies they had a servant but that was mandated by the post-colonial, independent, government of Zambia. All ex-pats had to employ a house-boy or similar. It was the law of Zambia.
What Martin said.
Ignore these grifters.
Come visit Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
I think WE now deserve reparations.
Thank you Nick.
bobby b.
I would be happy to visit in Minneapolis – as long as you have a time machine, and I can visit it in the past.
I have, of course, no desire to visit the place as it is now – filled with the Islamists that President Clinton and President Obama allowed in.
As for Mr George Floyd and his supporters – Mr Floyd (a man who had held a knife to the throat of a pregnant women in a robbery) died of drugs he willingly consumed, and innocent men were sent to prison, to be cut up with knives, by a corrupt judge and a cowardly (or worse than cowardly) jury.
When to visit Minneapolis?
I think the 1920s – in the 1930s things were decaying a bit, and then there were the World War II shortages, and rather than repair attractive buildings – they were torn down starting in the 1950s, and Republicans were as guilty as Democrats at the start of the sick (vile) “Urban Renewal” (what Martin Anderson called “The Federal Bulldozer” in 1965) movement.
Of course if you wanted to visit before Prohibition and and Income Tax one would have to go back before the First World War – but it was a very attractive (and prosperous) city in the 1920s – visiting a century ago would be good.
But then that is true in the late 1940s and early 1950s – before the bulldozers moved in.
The last time the county Minneapolis voted Republican was in 1972 (for Richard Nixon). Although the election was close in 1984.
To be fair not all American cities went insane with the bulldozers after World War II (as if they envied the damage done to European cities by bombing during the war) – for example Charleston South Carolina successfully resisted the insanity.
I believe Saint Augustine (Florida) also successfully resisted “Modernism” or the “International Style” – which seems to date back to the ravings of H.G. Wells and other socialists in the early 1900s (people who wanted cities and towns destroyed and replaced with tower blocks) – but, after World War II, was also endorsed by the “capitalist” Corporations.
We should build a statue of William Wilberforce on the 4th plinth and decorate the base with images of the ships sent to suppress the slave trade around the world.
Leave it up to the guilt-ridden aristocrats to atone for the perceived sins of their ancestors with their own family fortunes, if they wish to play along with this farce.
The vast majority of ordinary Britons, whose ancestors were farm labourers living in decrepit tied cottages at the squire’s pleasure, or ruining their lungs down mines, or slogging away in the ‘dark Satanic mills,’ or half-starved White-working-class orphans still being stuffed up chimneys decades after black slaves were freed, owe these handout-chasers not one single f##king penny. End of.
As for the idea of reparations for ‘climate change’ supposedly inflicted by the Industrial Revolution … well, when all these countries have fully divested themselves of all of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, from antibiotics to aircraft, to fertilizers and insecticides, to mobile phones and the Great Leader’s Mercedes stretch limousine, (oh, and rubber inflatable dinghies too) and have adopted a pre-industrial mode of living, even in the highest echelons of their societies – only then might I begin to believe they are sincere in their rejection, rather than just seeking to guilt-trip Western decision-makers into granting them a free ride on the backs of First-World taxpayers.
This is a classic misunderstanding and it’s fascinating how common it is because it cuts to the heart of the classical liberal ideology. On one hand liberalism declares a marketplace of ideas where unbound exchange of words is to the benefit of all. On the other, it advocates a rationalized, totalitarian economic view of the world as a market.
The concept of people using words for their economic benefit splits these two principles apart like an axe, and should be intuitively obvious to any human with a little life experience, but liberals devoutly refuse to face the consequences.
Because giving people choices (rather than the state imposing an economic order that benefits the state & state-adjacent people) is… totalitarian?
The market is not “totalitarian” Parmeni – the market is the choices of human beings, it is trying to crush these choices that is totalitarian.
I have no objection to people “using words for their economic benefit” – that is what a singer does, they sing words and people give them money because they enjoy the singing. What is wrong is people using FORCE (violence) for their economic benefit – which these regimes in Africa have long experience of doing. And which tribal groups in Africa, and elsewhere, have been doing for thousands of years.
By the way I include the taxes imposed in Africa in Colonial times in this. “But we needed the tax revenue for infrastructure” – if the local people do not want roads, rail links and so on, that is (or should be) up to them
Roads and canals in England and Wales (not in Scotland and Ireland – where there was more state investment) were funded privately – and paid for by fees.
Voluntary (voluntary) production and trade makes everyone involved better off than they otherwise would be.
The idea that it makes some people better off at the expense of others has been endorsed by some great thinkers (including Aristotle and Voltaire), but it is mistaken.
Of course, the above assumes a rational monetary and financial order – not some Credit Bubble, and Fiat Money, fraud which distorts everything.
As Professor Krugman says (and he says it as a complement – he thinks it is a good thing) the present monetary order rests on “men with guns” – it is NOT voluntary, fiat (after all) means – edict, command.
Imports need to be paid for with exports – this every Classical Free Trade economist understood.
The idea that imports can be paid for with Credit Money bubbles in an insane perversion of Free Trade – it is nothing to do with the great economists.