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 readers distressed that there has been no mention here for two whole days of the World Cup can slake their soccer thirst over at UK Transport. Or should that be UKTran Sport? Some while ago, Patrick Crozier explained that since he finds the World Cup more interesting than transport, he was going to talk about the World Cup more and transport less. I just went looking for the relevant posting, but couldn’t find it in his voluminous archives (although I did chance upon an interesting posting with guest emails galore about compulsory purchase orders/eminent domain of May 7 2002 that I missed the first time around). Anyway, Patrick is taking his own threat seriously and has done several World Cup postings without even the pretence of transport relevance, culminating in a long report this morning of the televising on BBC1 last night of the 1970 Brazil/England game.
Samizdata is intended to be somewhat self-indulgent. We’re supposed to be talking about whatever takes our fancy. And we’ve at least made some effort to relate the World Cup to the libertarian agenda, for example by wondering what is the relationship between the apparent collectivism of a pub crowd watching the World Cup to the individualism we’re supposed to believe in? Football, soccer I should say, has also proved to be a fun way to get to know some of our American readers better.
But I think that Patrick is taking the joke a step too far. There’s plenty he could say about the World Cup that is transport related. What are the problems of shifting crowds around which are huge but which will only be there for a few weeks? What is transport like generally in the places where the World Cup is taking place? Where, because of transport considerations, does it make sense to put football stadiums in the first place? What sort of buses do the various teams like to use? Are their any ex-bus-drivers or ex-train-drivers or qualified pilots in any of the teams? But Patrick isn’t handling the World Cup like that. He’s just plain writing about it. To hell with transport. If I was a journalist looking in at UK Transport for a possible transport story, I might be seriously irritated, and that might very well my story.
Actually, GBRI stands for Global Business Research Initiative, and to call it the brainchild of my good friend Syed Kamall somewhat exaggerates its current level of development. The enterprise is now hardly more than a strand of intellectual DNA.
Mission
– The GBRI exists to promote a greater public understanding of the role of business in spreading prosperity across the globe.
The GBRI’s Work
– Our initial work will concentrate on barriers to free trade.
– We will identify and expose human and cultural barriers to trade, as well as traditional barriers such as tariffs.
– We aim to educate people about different business cultures across the world.
– We will publish the work of leading businessmen, economists and policy thinkers from across the globe.
– We will also seek to promote new, young intellectual talent and fresh perspectives.
And so on. A few more bullet points follow. If all I knew of the GBRI was the small amount of verbiage currently on offer at its website, I’d be saying: could mean anything and probably means nothing. However, I had supper with Syed yesterday evening at his home and it all sounded decidedly promising. The Internet has massively reduced the costs in cash, office space, time and emotional wear-and-tear of running something like the GBRI, and Syed is not merely enthusiastic; he is also capable and not given to exaggeration. So I too am optimistic, and will keep you posted of developments, as and when.
This posting began life as a continuation of the previous posting, which I suggest you read first. Adriana read the previous thing and said you’ve got two blogs there, not just one. I’ll take her word for it, and this is Part 2.
So, we’re comparing the actual Economic Calculation debate (Mises, Hayek etc.) with a proposed equivalent in the realm of Public Safety. Continue…
Another big point, which was made by Richard Miniter at the Simon Davies meeting, concerns the matter of what kind of information we’re talking about here. (Miniter is a colleague of Tim Evans at the Centre for the New Europe. His book The Myth of Market Share is coming out in October, and he will also be bringing out another book soon about the Clinton regime’s handling of Al-Qaeda. Verdict: they handled it badly.)
One of the basic impossibilities of central planning, made much of especially by Hayek, concerned the importance of “unexplicit” knowledge, the sort of knowledge that consists of knowing, without having a prayer of being able to convince a state bureaucrat about it, that this kind of product would be just, you know, nicer than that one, and that people will prefer the nicer one. An entrepreneur in a free economy is able to back his hunch with his own money.
Hunch. Now there’s an interesting word. Hunches are those things that old-fashioned policemen also used to have. They would have a feeling that something bad was being planned, or that someone bad had already done something bad, and they’d act.
Mostly how they’d act is by trying to obtain some more information, of the explicit sort, the sort that you can type into a computerised database without being accused of unsubstantiated waffling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that people should be banged up in jail just because some old copper doesn’t like the smell of them. What I am arguing is that the shift from observation to action and hence, perhaps, to something like prevention, should not depend on persuading the Great Centralised Security Beast in Washington or London or wherever that this is a good idea. Public safety, I’m arguing, is a lot more like washing machines that work and for which you can get decent spare parts and maintenance than public safety is now assumed to be.
(See also my short Libertarian Alliance piece The Menace of the Apocalyptic Individual (Political Notes 164), towards the end, for a brief elaboration of that last point. This was written before 9/11, but survives 9/11 really quite well.)
Well, I could go on, and at the privacy(?) of my own desk I intend to. But maybe all this has been said before and said better, and if so I’d like to know. I could live with that. I’m one of Hayek’s second-hand dealers in ideas. I only resort to trying to make an actual car in my own garage (or more realistically, to urging others to get to work on the thing) if the required intellectual vehicle does not already exist.
At the last two Putney Debates, the ones addressed by Simon Davies of Privacy International on May 10, and by Mark Littlewood of Liberty on June 14, I have heard myself giving a little speech and have liked what I heard. This speech has gone approximately as follows.
Current debate about the proper limits of anti-terrorism, internet snooping, sharing of such information by different government departments, and so on and so forth, is now framed as a conflict between the demands of, on the one hand, the ever more centralised and ever more powerful state, and on the other hand, the freedom and the privacy of the individual. The first is assumed to be necessary for the satisfactory achievement of public safety. The second is presented only as a privately desirable benefit that must inevitably be sacrificed to a lesser or greater degree, the argument being merely about how much of this private benefit should be sacrificed. “Is this a price worth paying?” “Are we paying too big a price?” That an improvement in public safety will be purchased with this price is assumed.
The likes of Simon Davies and Mark Littlewood are both painfully aware that they spend their lives saying “yes but”. “Yes”, protecting the public is indeed important. “But”, we shouldn’t be quite so ready as we seem to be now to sacrifice personal freedom and personal privacy for public safety. Adriana Cronin‘s piece just below this one is also a good example of the kind of fighting-a-losing-battle agonising that I have in mind. And Samizdata’s most recent Slogan of the day also embodied this assumed relationship, which we were urged to defy, but not to disagree with as a false assumption. Once again, safety was presented as a price worth paying, although by including the word “temporary”, Ben Franklin at least hinted at a contrary theory of how things might really be.
I believe that if public safety and liberty continue to be regarded, even (especially!) by libertarians, as things that the people in general are to be asked to choose between, liberty is bound to be the loser.
This dangerous contrast reminds me of an earlier time, somewhat less than a century ago, when liberty was widely regarded as being a private benefit that ought to be sacrificed for economic reasons. Centralised state control of the economy was presented as being essential to achieve the maximum of public prosperity, in much the same way that large convoys were a better way to protect wartime merchant shipping than individually scattered vessels. (By the way, the convoy parallel is not my illustration only. I distinctly remember reading George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his plays I think, using this illustration to make this exact argument.)
There then followed the “Economic Calculation Debate”, in which the likes of Hayek and von Mises did something that they are still not perhaps fully appreciated for. As academics they eventually triumphed. They stated their theoretical objections to centralised economic planning, and enough people in the West were convinced to keep capitalism bumbling onwards, thus enabling it to triumph utterly against centralised economic planning. In short, Mises and Hayek were right, and were proved right. But they also triumphed as propaganda street-fighters. What they did was turn the argument about economics from being freedom-versus-prosperty into freedom-is-necessary-for-prosperity. In order to have yourself an even semi-satisfactory twentieth century economy, you had to have freedom, if not for political stirrers then at least in the form of “economic freedom”, for people such as businessmen and industrial investors.
I wonder, might the same thing apply to public safety? Is centralised power the answer to achieving the defence of good people against bad people, or is centralised power actually one of the biggest problems? It is now being said, and I’m most definitely one of the ones saying it, that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were not completely missed. Quite a lot of people observed various fishy things going on. The problem was that the one almighty, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing Washington Public Protection Apparatus had its single, collective, bureaucratic mind on other things.
But suppose that the power to act had been as dispersed as the power to observe. Consider those people who picked up those vital stories that were actually not acted upon by the great Washington Security Monster, about strange Saudi Arabians taking flying lessons but being indifferent to the usually somewhat essential art of actually landing an airplane. Suppose that those people had been allowed simply to announce, perhaps to their local media, that these guys sure were behaving strangely, and suppose they’d urged the local media hacks to chase the story up. Hey, what are you guys doing? Who are you? What are your real names? Would those strange Saudis have had such an easy ride, so to speak? I think not. I think it distinctly possible that they might have called the whole thing off.
You’ll never prove this kind of thing (although you can illustrate your generalised theory/suspicions) merely with individual anecdotes. What’s needed is a transformed theoretical framework, a repainted big picture, a different and utterly contrary way of looking at things to the way things are looked at now. A new meta-context.
Ahn Jung Hwan, take a bow. He misses a penalty in the early minutes of the game, and then he scores the golden goal that ends it in extra time. What a story. South Korea 2 Italy 1. France, Argentina, Portugal, and now Italy. Who’s next in the cull of the Great Soccer Nations? Brazil? We wish. (Brazil play England in the next round, early in the morning on Friday.)
As for doing something about poverty, Antoine, maybe regular folks are better off giving the World Cup their undivided attention, but I think that we libertarians ought to be able to do better than that. In pursuit of such positivity I will tonight be attending a lecture organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs to be given by the great Hernando de Soto. Expect a report here, and hope also for a picture, of one of the truly great men of our time.
I did my best on the radio the other day, that is to say I tried to do my best. I pointed out that the Trade Justice campaigners were only fighting symptoms, and ignoring the “underlying causes” of why this nation (South Korea being a fine example) does well economically, while others do badly. (For a country that has done badly look no further than North Korea, who played with distinction in the 1966 World Cup Finals in England but who have since faded away football-wise, and done a hell – and I do mean hell – of a lot worse than that economically.) However I wasn’t persuaded by what I said. These trade justice campaigners are at least fighting some symptoms, even if not all or exactly the ones I would have liked.
I remember how Amnesty International used to be accused of the same thing. They too used to fight individual cases with individual faces, while carefully ignoring the ideologically divisive matter of what makes nasty governments nasty in the first place, and well done them. Amnesty went into decline, at any rate in my eyes, not because it “fought symptoms” and ignored the “causes” of tyranny, but because its literature switched from featuring photos of unjustly imprisoned poets and tortured opposition politicians from far away places to having photos of already much celebrated celebrity supporters from the world of showbiz, and because it branched out into the perhaps correct but in my opinion utterly unrelated matter of campaigning against the death penalty. Also, since the end of the Cold War, the enemy went from being Tyranny to being Chaos, and writing begging letters to Chaos asking it to be nicer doesn’t work so well.
Oh well, live and learn.
Also, British TV today is full of the video of a firefighting airplane in Colorado crashing after its wings had exploded and fallen off, killing all three on board. So no more jokes from me about people starting fires.
I ask for advice about what to say on the radio about Third World poverty. Nothing. I mention the USA soccer team and the emails flood in. Well, one did, from Radley Balko, whose email ends with @cato.org, which makes him something to do with the Cato Institute, which makes him someone with a back to be scratched.
Okay then. I said that our media are saying that the USA is ignoring the World Cup. Not so, says Bradley Balko. The USA’s media are ignoring the World Cup. But, says, Radley Balko, the USA’s people are paying it some definite attention.
I was at a bar in Arlington, VA this morning for the game. 2:30am on a Monday morning. Absolutely packed with soccer fans. As was the other bar up the street that stayed open for the game. This, and they weren’t even serving beer.
God bless Brad “John Malkovich” Friedel.
Radley Balko does a blog called The Agitator where he picks up on the rumours that the Portuguese tried to get the South Koreans to agree to a draw. I just heard from our TV that this rumour is all over our newspapers too. He also has pictures reinforcing the Malkovich/Friedel similarity. And he has things about civil liberties violations in the wake of 9/11, the crazinesses of the war on drugs, and such like. If you like personal-stroke-political-stroke-humorous, have a look at it.
Are you going to come quietly, or do I have do use ear-plugs?
-Spike Milligan in The Good Show
Yes, the USA is through to the last eight of the World Cup, despite, our news people are telling us, nobody in the USA giving a damn. But of course that’s the reason. Why did those wretched Irishmen miss all those penalties yesterday? Because the Irelandosphere in its entirety was watching in agony, and the poor fellows knew it. If you’re a Mexican with a chance of scoring, all those millions of Mexicans, brothers and cousins and uncles among them, clustered round their TV sets, howling and gasping like wounded animals, flash through your mind at the critical moment and your legs turn to seaweed. In contrast, when a US player gets a shot at goal, it’s between him and few dozen other Ivy League type blokes, none of whom are that bothered, so in it goes. USA 2 Mexico 0.
Nevertheless, my favourite US drama today is the lady forest ranger who confessed that, in the course of burning a letter from her estranged husband, she had also set fire to the entire state of Colorado. Why did she confess? Easy. This is the ultimate in saying: “Look what you made me do!” Hell hath no fury, and so on. But this does make we want to rethink female equality when it comes to owning or controlling thermonuclear weapons.
A few days ago I did a posting about the EU, and ended it by saying that all Americans should oppose the EU because the EU is anti-American. But then I thought, yes, but so are lots of Americans, so maybe that won’t work so well as an argument as it should. Great minds think alike (but the winner is the one who writes it first). Read this, from “Anglosphere: Why I am not an Anglophile”, a UPI piece of yesterday (Saturday) by Mr Anglosphere himself, James C. Bennett:
Of course there are anti-American idiots wherever one goes. However, this is true of America as well. The only difference is that anti-Americans in the rest of the Anglosphere can disguise themselves as nationalists; but they are pretty much the same types of people, and for the most part have the same things to say. Anti-Americanism has itself been globalized, with a sort of McChomsky franchise in every city.
Presumably anti-American Americans like the EU because it is anti-American. My thanks to Professor Instapundit himself for guiding me to this piece.
Being young in those times meant suppressing the sound of one’s own breathing.
-Akira Kurosawa, describing pre-WWII Japan
England is at now a standstill watching the wretched Danish football team collapse in the face of England’s team, and thus allow England through to the last eight of the little soccer tournament in the Far East that we keep referring to. Watching and now celebrating. The Danes were never in it, poor fellows, and I really feel for their goalie, who had a “mare”, as one of our TV pundits rather charmingly describes unsatisfactory dreams. So some bloggage from me is in order, to keep the blog rolling.
Last night (Friday June 14) Mark Littlewood of Liberty spoke at the June Putney Debate, and confirmed how useful it was for the likes of Tom Burroughes and David Carr to show up at that Liberty Conference. Mark stressed how just a couple of questions from the floor can change the whole atmosphere of a day. So Tom was right about how it’s worth our team attending these things, and David probably did far better then he realised.
I committed a hideous social blunder. My socialising skills are excellent, with just four deviations from total perfection: (1) I have a shocking memory for names, (2) I have a shocking memory for faces, (3) I am shockingly bad at putting together any names and faces that I do sort of remember, and (4) I am, in general, often quite rude to people. So when I arrived I saw lots of familiar faces, and one that I knew I knew, but didn’t actually know. I know you, I said, but, please tell me who you are. It turned out to be Mark Littlewood. The last time I met Mark, he was a speaker at a libertarian conference and I was chairing the session. He’s a long time Libertarian Alliance supporter and we’re supposed to be well acquainted. We are well acquainted. What a mare. Oh well. Sorry Mark.
The most serious thoughts provoked in my mind by last night’s proceedings need to be thought about and written about separately, which I will do, hopefully today but if not then Real Soon Now. The most intriguing other titbit I picked up came courtesy of Christian Michel, who will be the speaker at my next Brian’s Friday (June 28). Christian said that, concerning the subject he will be addressing (what libertarianism should do about crime) he has now changed his mind. He did a piece a year or two ago about Restitution, which he has now removed from his Liberalia website, because it’s wrong, he now says. (Wrong? What kind of a reason is that to take something down from a website?) But aha! The Libertarian Alliance still has Christian’s now abandoned intellectual child (as Legal Notes No. 33: Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society), and always will have it. Anyway, my point is, it should be an amusing little gathering on June 28, and we all know what to read by way of preparation, to find out exactly which misguided fool it is that Christian Michel now disagrees with. Himself. Seriously, I believe that the willingness to reject what you later decide are your own errors is one of the key indicators of a superior mind.
Final titbit of news. Tim Evans has now moved to his new job with the Centre for the New Europe. He said that he was already agreeably surprised by the number, quality and academic grandeur of Continental Europe’s libertarians. You will definitely be hearing more from Samizdata about these people and their various writings, sayings and doings.
Bring on the Brazilians.
Doesn’t sound like such a big deal does it? Portugal out? What’s new? So are France. So are Argentina. No, the big story is that the USA are through to the last 16, despite being beaten 3-1 by Poland. Weird weird world (cup) or what?
On a more serious note, I’m doing a broadcast for BBC Radio Scotland this Sunday morning (at about 9.15 am) on the subject of what the Trade Justice Movement hopes will be a big demo by the Trade Justice Movement. What should I say? Their campaign seems to be big on waffle and weak on specifics, which I think is probably good because any specifics they favour would probably be bad. So what specifics (a particular identified tarriff barrier – a particular WTO procedure or rule or programme) should I talk about?
Please don’t email me with why free market economics in general is better than statism in general for getting rid of world poverty. I already know that.
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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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