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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Samizdat quote of the day – Civil service GOAT Sir John Cowperthwaite ran Hong Kong’s finances from 1961 to 1971 and treated regulation like a tax on discovery. Nobody in government can know which business will work, so he refused to pick, plan, or protect.
Whitehall sent officials to Hong Kong to push for economic statistics, and he sent them home. When Milton Friedman asked in 1963 why he collected so little data, Cowperthwaite answered: “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” Numbers give planners a reason to act, and every plan arrives as a rule that tells entrepreneurs what they may not try. Asked what poor countries should do to grow, he said they should abolish the office of national statistics.
– Handre van Heerden
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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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What an interesting story. I’ll have to read more about this guy.
What it tells me is that thing which is the great weakness of democracy. In almost all cases the best thing for the government to do is nothing, or to stop doing what they are doing. However, politicians don’t get elected on a promise to do nothing, only on promises to do something. And civil servants, seeking to build their empires, don’t get more staff and budgets on the promise of doing nothing or stopping doing things.
Here in America we just elected a government on a promise to do something, in fact a promise to do a LOT of things. Of course Trump promised to do a lot of things too, and look where that got us.