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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Election interference and its consequences The Guardian, 6th December 2024: Romanian court annuls first round of presidential election
The Guardian, 9th March 2025: Pro-Russia Călin Georgescu barred from Romanian presidential election re-run
The Guardian, 15th May 2025: Romania might be about to make a Trump-admiring former football hooligan its president. This is why
Georgescu sounds a nasty piece of work, and Simion not much better, but the “election interference” that might truly kill off Romanians’ faith in democracy is not coming from them.
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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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One assumes “Trump-admiring” is considered the more serious issue or else why would it be stated first.
As far as the Guardian is concerned, there is nothing worse than admiring Trump. He is literally Hitler.
It is sometimes to remember that the Manchester Guardian (as it then was) was founded to support individual liberty and government that was under the control of the taxpayers – it now stand for the opposite of these things. The Guardian stands for tyranny and for government bureaucracy over which the taxpayers have no control.
As for election interference, indeed outright election rigging (ask the taxpayers of Arizona about that – most of them did NOT support the puppet of vicious criminal cartels who is presently the Governor of Arizona), the Guardian supports such things – whilst dishonestly denying it does support such corruption.
As for Romania – Mr Simion will clearly have most people voting for him on Sunday. Whether the establishment will declare him the loser, by rigging the ballot, I do not know – but if they do rig the election there will be bloodshed. It may well be that, as the powers of a Romanian President are quite limited, they will allow him to win – reasoning that real power will remain with the European Union and the accursed “International Community” in general.
The International Community (those heirs of Henri Saint-Simon and his Collectivism imposed by banks and other corporate bodies idea) also face a test in Poland on Sunday – again a President of Poland has little power, so the “liberal” (who are anything but liberal) international forces may allow the Conservative Law and Justice Party candidate to win.
By the way – “Governor” Katie Hobbs is now trying to appease the Trump Administration – by promising support against the Cartels. K. Hobbs has no gratitude to the people who put her in office – no loyalty, but then there is no honour among thieves.
I’ll bet few inside The Guardian ever even knew the original definition of “liberal.”
And, from what little I’ve read, Simion might be a more effectively-conservative president than Georgescu would have been, making it seem like the first annulled election was the Left shooting itself in its collective foot. Good times.
@Paul Marks
A philosopher once argued that ‘things’ turn into their reverse over time. Another recent example is the Republican Party in the USA is becoming the party of the ‘working man’ while the Democrats are becoming the party of the well-connected.
DiscovereJoys.
Historically the United States did not have economic class-based politics – that was really the tactic of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 (NOT 1932) election (Franklin Roosevelt was himself from a wealthy family but claimed to represent the poor against the wealthy) – although some Democrats, such as the despicable Mayor Curley in Boston and the despicable Governor Bilbo in Mississippi, had been playing this vile game decades before – at a local or State level, and many of the Democrats (under Woodrow Wilson) had supported the “Progressive” Income Tax in 1913.
Republicans tended to support the tariff to fund government, rather than a “Progressive” Income Tax, although President Taft brought in the Corporation Tax (and most Republicans were also open to a flat-rate Income Tax – such as the one that was established in Massachusetts in 1915, replaced by a Democrat “Progressive” State Income tax in 2023) – with the justification that incorporation was a gift from government and, so, should be paid for. The current situation where Corporations (controlled by managers, the bureaucrats of the financial institutions – such as Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard, and the Credit Bubble banks, NOT, contrary to the late Milton Friedman, by individual share holders) pay LOWER tax rates than individuals would have horrified just about everyone in the early 1900s – and rightly so.
But the big thing of the Republican Party was opposition to mass immigration and the corrupt Big City Democrat “machines” (although, to complicate things, Philadelphia had a Republican run “machine”) – who promised the immigrants XYZ in return for control of their votes.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…..
But there is a massive difference – in the 19th and most of the 20th century there was large scale industry in the big American cities. Governments there had a real economic base to exploit.
Now I can think of only a few Democrat ruled cities that have a real economic base – Houston being the largest.
Cities such as New York and Chicago do not really have an economic base – they are Credit Bubbles. There is little real economy (actual industry) left for Democrats to exploit to fund their spending promises. The university academics, and establishment media (and the Credit Bubble shysters of “Wall Street” – the bankers and other fraudsters) say that one can have cities of millions of people without industry – that “Free Trade” means borrowing endlessly to fund consumption (a definition of Free Trade that would have baffled Adan Smith), but they are mistaken.
This is going to end badly – it will end in terrible suffering for millions of people.
As for the “well connected” Democrats – with their Ivy League university degrees, and their positions as high Corporate bureaucrats (this system being no more free market capitalism than water is dry) – I suspect they are already making preparations to leave the big cities, before these cities fall apart. Indeed quite a lot of them have already left.
They can sense that the Federal Reserve dependent system, is coming to an end.
The Cantillon Effect (on a scale that Richard Cantillon could not have dreamed of) has produced a class of very wealthy people (normally Democrat voters) who do not actually produce anything.
But they are unlikely to suffer (see above) – they have, most likely, cashed out and bought themselves real assets (such as farm land) already.
The people who will suffer (suffer horribly) will be the people left in these vast cities that no longer have industry to support them.
As for the United Kingdom….
British industrial output is about one tenth that of the United States – and America is not very strong (it has only half the industrial output of China – remember military power is, in-the-end – eventually, dependent on manufacturing strength).
British farming is also being destroyed – and can, even now, only feed a minority of the population.
And what is left of British manufacturing is being destroyed by artificially high energy costs.
The implications of all this are obvious and horrible.
Back in 2016 I wrote about how the conduct of the Romanian government at the time undermined the case for the EU Arrest Warrant system then in force. https://www.samizdata.net/2016/09/reasons-for-the-uk-to-leave-the-eu-keep-piling-up-the-eu-arrest-warrant/
Life after communism.
Yes indeed Johnathan Pearce – yes indeed.
Although it is clear that, at least now, the Romanian government, including the Romanian judges, are not acting independently – but are part of the International Community.
Sadly that is at least partly true of the British establishment, including British judges, as well = in-the-sense-that they serve the same international establishment fads-and-fashions.
Remember the British judge who declared there was a right to abortion in Northern Ireland – on the basis of a “right to family life” in some international charter.
As for Freedom of Speech – the British establishment has followed international fashions (of censorship) for 60 years – indeed been one of the leaders in pushing these fashions of censorship, just as it has been a leader in crushing any real principle of Self Defense.
For example, a young woman in Peterborough (a few miles down the road from me) has been sentenced to 17 years in prison – her “crime” killing a man who was strangling her and trying to rape her (the young women had already been raped previously).
You see the young women was carrying a KNIFE for self defense (had started to do so after she had been raped previously) and used it on the man who was strangling her and sexually abusing her.
In many nations on Earth, even in Russia and China, the woman would have been found innocent – but not here in Britain.
My thanks to Dr Sean Gabb (an old enemy of mine in some ways) for drawing attention to this case.
Americans please note – his is what the left wants for your country, “family life” to mean killing children, no Freedom of Speech, and no real Right of Self Defense.
For it is NOT just a British thing – it is the agenda of the International Community. Including in Romania and Poland – voters in these nations beware.
A philosopher once argued that ‘things’ turn into their reverse over time.
Why do I keep thinking of Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party)?