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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The Republican party fucked this up all by themselves – they could have made clear points to rebut the arguments that led my family members to making rational decisions to vote Obama. But they didn’t.
How hard would it have been to say “OK, we all know that entitlement spending is unsustainable. We also know that whole generations have made retirement plans that depend upon those entitlements. So we’ll guarantee to maintain them for anybody over (whatever age) but things must change for people who are younger.”
How hard would it have been to say “Abortion is a divisive issue, but the law is settled. America faces far more pressing challenges, right now, so I pledge not to mess with abortion – there are more immediate matters that demand my attention.”
Apparently, it was too hard. That’s what happens when a political party becomes nothing more than a cynical, office seeking, machine. It tries to pander to too many special interests and ends up satisfying none sufficiently
– Commenter ‘The Other Rob‘, discussing why the Stupid Party (USA branch) lost to the Evil Party (USA branch)
The Republican party saw an authoritarian, fiscally profligate, regulation crazy President whose flagship program was ObamaCare and who worked tirelessly to expand the remit of the state… and decided that what they needed to do was run a candidate whose entire political career featured expanding the remit of the state and … RomneyCare. Moreover they choose a candidate whose positions on civil liberties was every bit as odious (if not more so) than the dismal Obama.
So unsurprisingly to anyone thinking clearly, the Republican failed to retake the White House.
Good.
So let me repeat what I said in 2009 in ‘An appeal for disunity‘:
2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack “The One” Obama crushed Big State Republican John “I Support the Bail Outs” McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for… statism.
Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.
Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic ‘broad church’ politics no longer apply on the so-called ‘right’… no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.
In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.
I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become… conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question “do you want the state to have less control over people’s lives or more control?” If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller.
This is the time to apply that test to Republican politicians, every last one of them… and drive any who fail that simple test out of the party by whatever means necessary. Now is the time for a figurative internal ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This is the opportunity to destroy a great many political careers and remake the Republican Party into the party of constitutionally limited government and to start fighting the culture war that the party should have been fighting since the day Ronald Reagan left office with his job only half done.
It’s like deja vu all over again only this time the global economy is well into melt down and the money printing driven ‘recovery’ in the USA is taking it over a fiscal cliff.
Ok Tea Party, start your engines in earnest this time. Get nasty, really nasty. And all you Republican apparatchiks? Help the Tea Party drive the Big Government Republicans from office and drum them out the party, because not only are they The Enemy, they keep loosing elections and that can negatively impact your precious careers and that, even if you are almost all amoral scum no better than the Democrats you purport to oppose, should get your undivided attention.
Samizdata.
Eleven years. Blimey. Many thanks to all the contributors for 14,148 articles and to the commentariat for just under a quarter of a million comments.
Hopefully before the end of the year we might (maybe, perhaps, possibly) have a new improved Samizdata (hi Alec!) with new red knobs and extra added fiddly bits.
The deeper truth masked by all the ranting – and, it should be added, by the blinkers of many Western secularists – is that Christians are targeted in greater numbers than any other faith group on earth. About 200 million church members (10 per cent of the global total) face discrimination or persecution: it just isn’t fashionable to say so.
– Rupert Shortt
To be sure, all governments since the invention of papyrus have had cause to fear leaks, and all modern British governments have known that after 50, or 30, or 20 years most official paper will be released to the public. But when these documents were generated, their authors knew – or thought they knew – that, in principle, they were secure until that release. Their premature disclosure could not be ordered by an information commissioner or tribunal. Without such security, there can be no honesty. It is simple: if you fear your private communication will be laid before the world, you will write it quite differently, or not at all.
So the effect of FoI is to promote dishonesty and concealment. I pity any biographer of any prime minister from Tony Blair onwards. He or she will not be short of government paper. Thanks to the computer’s power of infinite reproduction and the advent of the email (to whose implications, by the way, FoI gave no thought), he will drown in material. Because of the cant in which modern administrative documents are expressed, words like “openness” and “transparency” will be spattered over thousands of pages. But there will be no such openness or transparency. The big decisions will all have been made in whispers in a corridor, or abbreviated in a text message. To find out what happened, the biographer will have to rely solely on the fallible memory of elderly ex-ministers and officials.
– Charles Moore
We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what’s OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere. This video – which is widely available on the Web – is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube
– YouTube Official Statement. Bravo YouTube!
I’m not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce the revenues going to the government.
– Mitt Romney
According to Ramadan, writes Ahmari, “the American government and ‘powerful American corporations’ nurtured the young activists who triggered the Arab Spring as a way of ‘opening up Arab markets and integrating the region into the global economy’.”
This analysis is magnificent in its idiocy. It is radiant, luminescent, in its absurdity. What on earth do “powerful American corporations” know about bringing down a totalitarian regime like Moammar Qaddafi’s in Libya, a military dictatorship like Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt, or the sectarian Soviet-style creature that the Assad family hatched upon the people of Syria?
Why on earth would “powerful American corporations” care about Egypt? There’s no money to be made there. Half the country lives on less than two dollars a day. It consumes little and exports nothing of value. India, China, and Brazil are serious emerging markets, but Egypt? Come on. And what corporate boardroom worth half a damn would waste time even discussing the “nurturing” of activists in a backwater like Yemen? Yemen, from the corporate point of view, is off-planet.
– Michael Totten
And consider dropping your mouse on his ‘donate’ button to fund his excellent work. Worth every Penny, Cent, Yen, Renminbi, Piastre, Swiss Franc, Crown or Groat you throw his way.
It would be fair to say us folks at Samizdata can be depended on to oppose state subsidies for, well, almost everything. But when I read this:
Companies including Siemens, Alstom UK and Mitsubishi Power Systems wrote a candid letter to Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, warning that a lack of decision-making and threats to relax key green targets “have caused us to reassess the level of political risk in the UK”.
My immediate response was “awesome! Now spend some tax money for their air fares to encourage the fuckers to leave sooner rather than later!”. The departure of rent seeking tax farming parasites is rarely a bad thing for the people whose taxes are being farmed.
So happy trails, guys! 
If Hobsbawm had been an unrepentant Nazi, I doubt he’d be getting so many tributes. Strange how that works out.
– Samizdata commenter ‘Vinegar Joe’
These are the facts. George W Bush left behind a set of books that were not so much unbalanced as vertiginous. At the end of 2008, US debt was $9.9 trillion, or 69.7 per cent of GDP, and the ballooning deficit was $683 billion. Since then, all the key indicators have worsened markedly. By the end of this year, gross debt is forecast to reach $16.3 trillion (the number to which Letterman was alluding), more than 100 per cent of GDP, or a rise of two thirds under Obama. The annual deficit is close to $1.5 trillion, 10 per cent of GDP. Worse still, according to official forecasts, US debt is on course to hit $20 trillion by 2016.
– Jeff Randall
David Leigh thinks that broadband needs to be taxed to keep him in his job at The Guardian:
A £2-a-month levy on broadband could save our newspapers. Proceeds could be distributed based on UK online readership and reinvested to protect great journalism
In case you do not know (and why should you in this age of a multiplicity of news sources?), The Guardian is a very pro-statist dead tree newspaper. I was going to explain what I thought of this notion but I will instead just quote the first commenter I saw who replied, someone calling themselves ‘romandavid’:
A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save our horse and cart business.
Quite. Moreover I have looked over some articles by David Leigh and it is unclear where this ‘great journalism’ is that so desperately needs protection. It is bad enough we have to pay for the crap on the BBC whether we watch it or not.
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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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