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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A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?
Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don’t have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn’t you call the police. Mostly this works. It’s called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.
But most schools, and especially most state schools, don’t work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won’t be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.
It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don’t like what they’re getting keep looking. It’s called freedom.
I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport, although less expert about education “policy” than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.
If you have such stories now, don’t wait for Brian’s Education Blog… send them to Samizdata!
Sex doesn’t interfere with the tennis. It’s staying out all night trying to find it that affects your tennis.
-Andre Agassi
(Agassi, now happily married to Steffi Graf, didn’t make it to the last sixteen in the men’s singles at this year’s Wimbledon, and nor did any other Americans, the first time this has happened since nineteen twenty something. Maybe they should get out more.)
It’s bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you’re there. That’s the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. “It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry,” he says. “I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating.”
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don’t misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What’s wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there’s another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn’t need any.) Presumably they couldn’t think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That’s the way to do these things.
I received this email from Sean Gabb today. It deserves a wider readership:
I did the Mike Parr show this morning – BBC Radio Newcastle – about ID cards. I was very polite to the local police boss who was on against me. He ended by agreeing that he’d rather have more officers than a scheme that he though might easily be abused.
Sean Gabb does lots of this kind of thing.
Patrick Crozier says that he’s finding it harder to do UK Transport than when he first started it, because he’s running out of things he’s burning to say. That’s partly why I’ve accepted his invitation to become a regular (although I’ve warned him that it won’t be that regular) contributor to UKT. I don’t think that Patrick will be the only blogmeister who moves towards the Samizdata team-of-writers approach.
I did a piece for UKT last week (complete with a photo I took at Clapham Junction) about the blessing of electric signs which say when trains are coming and where they’re going, and I did another piece last Sunday about the important transport option of just saying no and staying put and not using any transport. Both are unashamedly amateur writings. I have little idea of what government transport policy is this week, not having read any of the relevant pronouncements. I merely travel, sometimes. Go and read these pieces if you want to, but like the second one says, maybe you could rearrange your life a little and not go there.
Last night I found myself watching the BBC2 rerun of Pride and Prejudice, and was held. It was better than I remember it as having been the first time around, I suspect because this time I actually watched it instead of merely taping it and reading the reviews. It’s about a family with five daughters, and the agonies suffered while the daughters set about trying to find husbands.
In those pre-industrial days, the marital desirability of a woman seemed to involve singing and piano playing a lot. There’s a cruelly memorable moment when paterfamilias, a man fonder of being witty than of being kind, even to his own daughters, tells one of the less musically sparkling ones that she has “delighted us enough” with her music-making.
This emphasis on music as a man-getting asset used to puzzle me. Wasn’t looking good and cooking good sufficient? (Or at least supervising the people who did do the cooking.) But if you think of women as hi-fi sets for their husbands, before hi-fi sets actually existed, it all makes sense.
The idea that big white machines have replaced many of the domestic duties of women is a familiar one. That smaller blacker machines may also have had the same kind of effect only occurred to me more recently.
It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.
-William Connor Magee (1821-1891), clergyman, speech on the Intoxicating Liquor Bill, House of Lords, May 2, 1872
Over on the Liberty Log there’s a recent reference to one of those reports, which says that Britain’s economy is fourth freest in the world. The implication is: hurrah! But this means that only three economies in the world are less gummed up with governmental and other bullshit than this one. What the hell must the others be like?
On June 18th I attended an IEA lecture addressed by the Peruvian property rights advocate and analyst Hernando de Soto, author of The Other Path and more recently The Mystery of Capital, and I promised a report. I apologise that this is a belated report, but this has also given me time to think. (I also said I hoped to get a picture of the great man, but he rushed away as soon as he’d given his talk and I didn’t manage this.)
De Soto understands that property is a social fact. Property rights are triggered by ownership documents and written records and de Soto makes much of these triggers, often to the point of saying that they are the property. No, the property is the property. But the bits of paper make it clear to the world that this is what it is and who owns it.
De Soto’s key insight is that poor countries are poor not because they don’t contain enough potential property, but because the abundance of informal property that they do contain has mostly not yet been nailed down in writing. It therefore can’t be traded, or used as collateral. There can’t be a modern economy. De Soto’s life’s work is to try to set in motion the political and legal processes necessary to correct this. He lobbies politicians, he speechifies, he writes books. He gives lectures like the one I attended.
Most of what de Soto said at the lecture echoed things I’d already read in The Mystery of Capital. But the question and answer session contained what for me were novelties.
He said that the reason so many of the world’s poor like growing “drugs” is that drugs offer a quick return, in a world of insecure property rights. Contrive more secure property rights, and the poor of, e.g., Columbia would have an incentive to go into more respectable businesses which take longer to yield a profit. Interesting.
How, someone asked do you persuade the existing powers-that-be that clearer property rights are good? How about the police? You have to look at things from their point of view, he said. It is easier to catch criminals if you have a property rights paper trail to follow. Property in other words, doesn’t just attach my home to me, it attaches me to my home. It tells the police where to go if they want to talk to me. Interesting, and somewhat creepy.
He said that that if he wants to get the right things done, he has to let the politicians take the credit. Accordingly he no longer boasts about what “he” has been doing, which is why the website of his Institute for Liberty and Democracy has gone so quiet lately. (I’d wondered about why that was.) So, how much notice are governments actually taking of this man? That he was in a great rush after giving his IEA lecture suggested that he has vital business constantly on the go, but who knows? Not me.
I hope that powerful people are paying attention to this man, because what he says still sounds convincing. Indeed it is the best big idea about ending world poverty that I know of. But although I still think de Soto is a great man, under his influence I find myself seeing property – indeed the entire modern world – in a different and rather gloomier light, almost as a pact with the devil. We must have it, but we all know where “paper trails” can lead.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.
-Felix Frankfurter
I’m glad that one of us is having a philosophically serious go at that bizarre Randian diatribe of some days ago
My problem is that I so utterly despise Randian philosophy that I cannot make myself take it seriously. I am also put off by the vicious religiosity of so many Randian responses to any criticisms of their sacred texts.
But if Randians boom forth with their nonsense while the rest of us just suffer in silence, observers of the libertarian scene are liable to get the idea that Randian philosophy is a far more important part of the libertarian movement in general than it really is.
My take on the Randians is that, like the Marxists (“exploitation”, “labour”), they are definition hoppers. By “altruism” they don’t mean what the rest of us mean. If you explain to a Randian that you are an altruistic sort of a person from time to time, that you don’t always behave selfishly, etc. etc., he’ll tie himself into knots explaining that you are really being totally anti-altruistic and completely selfish, all the time, even if you have just rescued a complete stranger from drowning in a freezing cold lake at definite risk to your own life. Something to do with selfishly choosing to live by your own values, blah blah blah.
Meanwhile back in normal-land, altruism means what Adriana says it means, and capitalism is relentlessly altruistic. Tradesmen spend their entire working lives obsessing not just about what they would like to be doing all day long, but also about what their customers would most appreciate them doing, the trick for happy capitalist life being to find things to do that satisfy on both counts.
Which leads to the other great folly that I see embedded in Randianism, namely fixed sum economics. The world is now, as it always has been, full of the foolishness that you can only get rich and happy if other people are made to sacrifice their riches and happiness for your benefit. It’s not that Randians believe explicitly and self-consciously in fixed-sum economics, any more than most other people do. It’s merely that everything else they say is said as if they believed in fixed sum economics.
The proper way to deal with this falsehood is to deal with it. (See my Libertarian Alliance piece called The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy: How To Make Yourself Miserable About the Past, The Present and The Future of Mankind.)
Fail to deal with it and there are two characteristic ways in which the fixed quantity of happiness/wealth fallacy will deal with you.
People who are nice, and who don’t like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.
But then there is the screw-you-Jack response, which consists of saying that I want to be happy and goddammit I’ve a right to be happy! And that if that means others have be unhappy, then to hell with them!! And we see that all around us also, in the form of exuberantly busy capitalists who just want to get rich, and if that means they have to think of themselves as quasi-criminals, then so be it. They can live with it. With friends like these, capitalism doesn’t need enemies. (Screw-you-Jack capitalism is especially rampant in the financial world, where it takes a little bit of imagination to realise just how much good you are doing for the world by, e.g., placing a bet on the price of next year’s corn crop. It’s obvious that you do a bit of good for other people if you sell them newspapers and sweeties, but perhaps not quite so clear that you and your confreres are actually making modern agriculture possible if you trade in agricultural futures.)
These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other’s existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.
Randians don’t fit exactly into either of these boxes, because they actually come in both forms! Randians are anything but straightforward advocates of selfishness, even though they insist hysterically that they are. Atlas, the ultimate miserably self-sacrificial altruist who eventually can take it no longer and who shrugs, is one of their biggest heroes! And when Atlas does shrug, that also turns out to be partly a selfish act of self-liberation, but also partly a contribution to an altruistic movement of general social redemption.
But back in normal-land again (where “selfishness” is assumed to mean selfishness), the Randians, with their bellowings forth about the virtues of capitalism and of selfishness, are heard to be supporting screw-you-Jack capitalism, that is, they reinforce rather than challenge the idea that capitalism is rooted in an active hostility to – in an active determination to destroy – the happiness of the non-capitalist masses.
Which is just one of the reasons why the Randians must be regularly denounced by the rest of us.
The quotes below come from a new blog called This Blog has no Title just Words and a Loon. I’m indirectly responsible for this. After posting my personal attack on Patrick Crozier the other day I rang him up to tell him not to take it personally, and it emerged that he had all sorts of other non-transport thoughts he wanted to blog and talked about starting Words and a Loon, although not by that name. For whatever difference it may have made I said go ahead, because I admire Patrick as a writer and will go there regularly. Patrick explained the thinking behind W&L in another non-transport posting on UK Transport. Then he started W&L, and it already has several bits including “The newspaper is dead”. At first I thought of just cutting and pasting the concluding paragraph, which has stuff like:
Newspapers exist (I presume) because it is not actually possible for one person to write the article, print it and distribute it to the millions of possible customers. There has to be some kind of division of labour. But the internet changes that.
But we’ve most of us had thoughts like that. I reckon these earlier ones are more illuminating.
I have no principled objection to paying for content. What I would object to is having to subscribe to masses of different publications. It might work for some of the bigger publications but if it comes to a choice of fumbling for my credit card for that one article in Peruvian Railways Monthly then it’s a non-starter.
What I would like to be able to do is to make ONE payment of, say, £20 a month and then be able to access everything.
Like all good libertarians, Patrick invents new businesses by just thinking aloud. He describes what they might look like, anyway. I don’t think he’s a loon.
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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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