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]
Let’s not kid ourselves, because the end of money, as we know it, really means the beginning of the transactional surveillance State, which makes this a serious debate about the boundaries of State power and the dignity of an individual.
Unfortunately, the real world extends beyond Wolman’s polite corner of Oregon.
There are activists and dissidents in hostile regions paying for Internet blogs, food supplies, and safe harbor. There are payments being made to border guards on a daily basis to flee a murderous government somewhere. There are women selling baskets and blankets at street markets to feed their hungry families. There are cancer patients buying weed from a friend if their state doesn’t accommodate medical marijuana. And even before and after the Third Reich, persecuted peoples have always needed a way to protect and transfer what little remained of their wealth.
The persistent war on cash has more to do with moralistic society than it does with civil society as Wolman claims. With ultimate tracking capabilities, how does Wolman decide when a government’s “right” becomes a wrong? Does he defend the victimless crime laws against online gambling and consensual sex for money between adults? Does he defend confiscation of private sector wealth when a socialistic regime runs out of funds? Does he defend an orchestrated payments blockade against whistleblower site Wikileaks? Does he defend brutal government law enforcement measures in Syria and Gaddafi’s Libya?
Anonymity and civil society do mix — it is omnipotent violent government and civil society that do not mix.
There is a very interesting article over on dropsafe about several people meeting with #HackedOff this evening regarding the Leveson Royal Charter… ie state regulation of the news in Britain.
To say Alec was not impressed would be a masterly understatement:
There’s a reason that I don’t like politics and prefer coding. Coding is clean. Politics at this level is not compromise, and it’s not about other peoples’ compromises either; it’s more like trying to waft the farts of other peoples’ compromises in a general direction which you hope will be least offensive to people you care about but who will definitely be impacted.
This will not end well.
The thingie below was kindly sent to me by Guido Fawkes.
The three main parties are all deciding how they will kill off the last vestiges of freedom of the press in Britain.
Ed Miliband was hoping to sit down with David Cameron and Nick Clegg later on Tuesday or Wednesday to agree a historic new deal which would see newspapers regulated like the BBC.
We will know soon enough exactly how they will do this, but do it they will. And you can be sure they will present it as protecting freedom of the press.
After a decade in the making, cost over-runs to the tune of billions of euros, and delays of more than three years, the next generation of European military transport aircraft is finally poised for entry into service.
We are in danger of replacing one brand of narrow-mindedness with another. Increasingly, the courts are being dragged into disputes between people who hold different opinions in what is really an attempt to close down debate on particular subjects. This is the very antithesis of free speech and unless there is an attempt to stir up hatred and violence, the fact that some people may dislike or object to what others say should not be a matter for the law, or for official censorship.
Where I differ is that “an attempt to stir up hatred and violence” are two very different things. One can hate a person without also wishing to see violence done to them. There are people in this world towards whom feeling hatred is entirely reasonable. Can someone give me a good reason for not publicly suggesting that any reasonable person should hate Kim Jong-un?
Taxing already acquired property drastically alters the relationship between citizen and state: we become leaseholders, rather than freeholders, with accumulated taxes over long periods of time eventually “returning” our wealth to the state. It breaches a key principle that has made this country great: the gradual expansion of property ownership and the democratisation of wealth. We need more of this, not less. A wealth tax – like the old window taxes, levied because it was too hard to assess people’s income – is a sign of failure: we can’t raise enough by taxing current economic activity, so we tax again the already taxed fruits of past activity. It is a pre-modern, obsolete concept. Wealth taxes also violate a state’s original mission, to protect the life, liberty and property of citizens.
Although it is an excellent article, I strongly disagree with Heath’s use of the term ‘democratisation of wealth’ rather than, perhaps, ‘widening’ or even ‘diffusion’.
‘Democracy’ is entirely about a state legitimising its use of the means of collective coercion. It is only about ‘wealth’ to the extent that the primary use of the means of collective coercion are to confiscate wealth at gunpoint for assorted pretexts, under the legitimising notion that there is a democratic mandate to do demand-money-with-menaces in any particular instance.
In Los Angeles, as the hunt for another registered Democrat on a killing spree continues, police opened fire on two innocent ladies delivering newspapers from the same kind of truck as the suspect. They seem to have done so without any attempt at identification. They didn’t even shout a warning first.
It seems that those drawn to jobs as the state’s armed enforcers are also among those not to be trusted with weapons. I suggest it’s for the same psychological reasons. As the validated agents of what they see as a superior moral force, they feel justified in their appalling actions, but also sure that if they get it wrong the state will defend them. Reckless and panicky they may be, but having injured two innocents they “protect and serve” they are safe. At least as safe, say, as an NHS mandarin who presided over the deaths of thousands.
Don’t get me wrong…I love the minimum wage, because I’m white. My daughter is white, and also has established plenty of work experience. She was offered jobs at more than 40K per year at the age of 20. Minimum wage legislation will ensure that we’re the last to be laid off. We got skills!!!
But does Barack Obama really hate black people? Or is he just not very smart?
You may be a staunch supporter of the welfare state, socialized medicine, gay marriage, preferential treatment of women and 75 percent taxation of all private income. It won’t help you if you have distanced yourself from the teachings of the prophet.
Thus, in the Netherlands, Islam’s critics are also “extreme right-wing racists” – if by “extreme”, “right-wing” and “racist’ you mean gay hedonists (Pim Fortuyn), anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilists (Theo van Gogh) and liberal black feminists (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Whichever of these novel permutations of “right-wing” you fall into, you wind up either on trial (Nekschot, Geert Wilders), forced into exile (Miss Ali) or pushing up tulips (Fortuyn, van Gogh). Likewise, the artists and comedians I met through Lars in Copenhagen had been variously arrested, subjected to death threats, had homes firebombed and a family restaurant shot up. And in the final indignity they’d wound up sharing a stage with a right-wing loon like me because their leftie pals weren’t there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty International fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – they all stayed utterly silent. C’mon, nobody’s asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled Tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax.
I am not much impressed with Roger Bootle’s drearily conventional arguments for what the UK economy needs.
“I have banged on before about decisions on key projects which have large public sector involvement but which may also hold the key to major private sector spending, e.g. over London’s airport capacity.”
Preposterous Keynesian fallacy at work. It presupposes that money allocated to some project via the political process is more likely to create a ‘multiplier’ than market driven uses of that money… and it assumes that the money taken by the state by force would not have been invested in something more worthwhile in aggregate if the decisions were left to its original owners before it was confiscated by the state.
But of course as it is easier to see something like an airport rather than the myriad of other uses the money would have gone to had it not been forced into that project, so somehow the big flashy ‘infrastructure’ protect is claimed to have driven knock-on investment and is therefore an obvious Good Thing. As Bastiat put it “That which is seen versus that which is not seen”.
Ain’t necessarily so and given the record of government decision making versus the more diffused decision making of markets, usually ain’t so.
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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