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]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – Instruments of tyranny No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.
– William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State
|
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.
|
Agreed – on-this-matter William Butler Yeats was clearly correct.
As is often said “if government is give the power to do something “in an emergency” you will have an endless “emergency”.
And it is the same for economic liberty as for censorship (John Stuart Mill was mistaken – these are not different principles, they are the SAME principle – the non aggression principle of the Common Law, of Natural Justice) – for example the United States “emergency” of 1933, the Federal Government defaulting on the gold debt to private citizens (yes it was a de facto default – by violating the gold clauses in contracts, public and private) is still in force after 93 years, and the “emergency” default of 1971 (President Nixon defaulting on American gold obligations to foreign governments) is still in force after 55 years.
Give government the power to censor – and it will use it, using the excuse of “national security” or “protecting the children” – for what is really about crushing political and cultural opinions the establishment do not like.
There will always be tyrants, or the equivalent in authoritarian political organisations. The trick is to keep them from the levers of power, or take back control of those levers.
Much easier said than done.
I read just today that an estimated quarter million British girls have been raped by Muslim gangs. Is this true?
Discovered Joys – no, the point is to make sure “the levers of power” do-not-exist, not to make sure they are in the right hands – there are no right hands, not when it comes to basic liberties.
Lord Acton covered the point about such powers being in the right hands – pointing out that there were no right hands for such powers.
When President Nixon said “conservative men, liberal measures” (a line he claimed to have got from, the dreadful – utterly dreadful, Disraeli) he showed that he did not understand what “liberal” meant (it means pro liberty – not pro statism, “FDR” and other such were NOT liberals) and that he, Nixon, was not a conservative at all.
But then Richard Nixon never was a conservative – he had a picture of “Teddy” Roosevelt on his wall even as a child, and the Progressive Party Platform of 1912 is one long attack on everything that conservatives believe – it is a Collectivist screed. And Theodore Roosevelt being an attractive personality (and he was an attractive personality – unlike his fellow statist Woodrow Wilson, who was a deeply unpleasant man) does NOT change that.
The Progressives (“Bull Moose”) of 1912 looked at the most prosperous society that had ever existed in the history of humanity – and decided they wanted to destroy it, destroy its basic, foundational, principles – including private ownership of natural resources.
As President Coolidge said in his speeches of the 1920s – it is not “Progress” to reject liberty and embrace tyranny.
And, contra the letters of J.M. Keynes to F.A. Hayek, it is NOT a question of whose hands the tyrannical powers are in (Keynes falsely claimed such powers were fine, indeed good, if good people had the powers), the tyrannical powers should not exist.
On Disraeli – I keep coming upon podcasts and YouTube films where people say they oppose the left, but praise the “reforms of Disraeli” – so we had better know what those “reforms” actually were……
An Act of Parliament concerning housing – when questioned it was clear that Disraeli did not even know what was in “his” Act, he just wanted to be seen to be “doing” something about housing – and why housing is a concern of the national Parliament, and why Parliament should be any good at providing housing, he did not explain. Are there any limits on government at all?
A violated promise to abolish Income Tax – Income Tax had been abolished after the Napoleonic Wars, but came back in the 1840s (Sir Robert Peel) and was gradually reduced, reaching a low point in 1874 – Disraeli (in the election of that year) promised to abolish it, but instead increased it.
The local government Act of 1875 – which undermined the fundamental principle of local democracy that the people who pay the rates (the property tax) should decide how high the tax is and what it should be spent on, instead the Disraeli Act listed about 40 things that local councils MUST do – regardless of what the ratepayers wanted.
And the Trade Union Act of 1875 – this did NOT legalise unions, they had been legal for more than 40 years (even since the war-time Combination Acts had been repealed) – what the Act did was to legalize paramilitary tactics by unions, such as “picket lines” (a military term) blocking the entrances of a place of business – the idea being to push “Collective Bargaining” – i.e. create INSTITUTIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT- made worse by the, utterly insane, Act of 1906 (long after Disraeli died – but the same, demented, principle of “Collective Bargaining”).
Those who praise the “reforms of Disraeli” do not appear to know what he did, and can not explain why, for example, creating unemployment (indeed Institutional Unemployment) is a good thing.
@Paul Marks
I’ll argue that whatever political system, theocratic system, or even anarchy there will always be people willing to create and use levers of power. It’s what leaders or exemplars do. It’s one reason why Utopias will never be achieved.
Discovered Joys – I repeat that what you call “the leavers of power”, i.e. unlimited state power, should not exist. It is not a matter of who has this power – no one should have this power. Thomas Hobbes was wrong.
I think we AGREE – which is why we both support such thing as the right to keep and bear arms.
From WB Yeats, “The Second Coming”.
On the leverage of (rings of) power…
That is Galadriel She of course also turns down the offer. She will diminish and go into The West but remain Galadriel.
Obviously, Tolkien was just a writer of stories about funny little fellows with furry feet and clearly not a serious political thinker like that Karl Marx chap 😜
PS. Very alt fan-fic idea: Marx and Engels are actually Alatar and Pallando. Yes! And the background music is Maglor fronting a dark metal band in Helsinki – just as a singer – he can’t play guitar because his hand hurts…)
The levers of power will always exist when two men can work together to beat up one person and steal his stuff. That’s what moved me from libertarian (a philosophically strong, defensible, correct, and unworkable position) to reactionary. The levers will always exist so we might as well hold them instead of our enemies.
It is inevitable that the “levers of power” are concentrated in a minority of the citizenry, in something like a Pareto distribution.
What is important is that these “levers” do not control too much power.
It also helps if the Pareto distribution is something like 40-60 (40% of the population having 60% of the power), as opposed to 10-90.
Even more important are checks & balances: within the powerful minority, there should be competing factions (short of civil war).
Governments don’t have rights. They have power. It appears that governments DO have the power to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.
So the next question becomes, what powers do the citizens have? More, or fewer, than the government?
If fewer, they are not citizens, they are subjects.
Right? Moral or legal? Governments have the legal right to fo whatever they please.
NickM – yes indeed.
Flyover country – please read NickM’s comment, he explains the matter better than I did.
Snorri – interesting.
bobby b – yes.
Stuart Noyes – only if one takes the definition of “law” that Thomas Hobbes used, for example in his “Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the Common Law” (Hobbes being the “philosopher” and the other person being someone Hobbes invents to defeat in the “dialogue”).
Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke rejected this doctrine before Mr Hobbes had written a word – and rightly so, otherwise the oaths of Kings (going back to at least Henry the First in 1100 – and Charles the Bald of France as far back as 877 AD) that their power will be limited by the law are meaningless – if there is no natural law, no natural justice, just the will of the state. Sir Edward Coke held that neither King or Parliament could make practicing a profession without a piece of paper (a “license”) a “crime” – the case of Dr Bonham (1610).
Chief Justice Sir John Holt (Chief Justice from 1689 to 1710 – the high point of Whig Constitutionalism – before such things as the censorship of the theatre by Sir Robert Walpole, and before the writings of Sir William Blackstone that claimed that Parliament could do anything it felt like doing) held the same rule – against both King and Parliament.Indeed, for example, when he was told that people tried with treason could not have council for their defense – he himself acted as their defender, from the bench, asking the prosecutors questions that showed the jury, that the case of the prosecutors was false.
Sadly now judges have rejected the old principles of the Common Law – natural justice, and have adopted “Social Justice” principles instead.
Remember the “High Court of the King in Parliament” is supposed to FIND law (for the law is far older than Parliament – or the monarchy) not MAKE law.
But this, the fundamental principle of jurisprudence, is forgotten today.
Today the authorities hold the view that “Governments have the legal right do do whatever they please” to be correct – and such a view is evil, it is tyranny.
And often “the government” is not elected – it is the officials and “experts”, including intellectually corrupted judges, who have forgotten, or never knew, the true principles of law.
Paul,
I heard Ashley Mote discuss Magna Carta, the acts of supremacy, the Bill of rights and act of settlement during a Eurosceptic meeting in my town guildhall .
Ive had a brief look at how parliament was started and whether it has the power to amend Magna Carta which was a peace treaty between the barons and monarchy. My personal opinion being that without a formal codified constitution, if we want a bill of political rights that parliament cannot reverse or anul, it has to be a treaty between the people and monarchy.
I asked ai how parliament can amend a peace treaty between the barons and monarchy when Magna carta predates parliament. The answer given that Magna carta was created during the feudal period which was superseded by parliament and democracy.
Stuart Noyes – it is hard indeed.
And you are correct that since Sir William Blackstone the majority legal opinion (against the past – against Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke and Chief Justice Sir John Holt) that Parliament can do anything (anything) it likes.
The modern history books say that the American Founding Fathers were influenced by Sir William Blackstone – and, technically, the modern books are correct – they leave out that the influence included horror at his doctrine that Parliament could do anything it felt like doing and a strong conviction to prevent that in the United States.
Blackstone talks of liberty, he talks of natural law – natural justice, but he utterly failed to see that his doctrine that Parliament can do anything it likes, makes all such talk a nullity.
Of course – any Constitution (no matter how well written) needs intellectually honest judges to uphold it.
And such judges are in short supply.
However, a really “paranoid” Constitution, such as that of Texas (1876) or Alabama (1900) may reduce wiggle room for even the most dishonest judges.