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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Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
… Kenneth Clarke invariably supports anything with “european” in front of it. If they re-named ebola virus “european virus”, I expect he’d declare himself in favour of that, too.
– Owen Morgan commenting on James Kirkup’s Daily Telegraph blog
A rat has been photographed outside 10 Downing Street. Presumably the only thing that makes this news worthy is it was not exiting the building and getting into an official chauffeured government vehicle on its way to Parliament.
John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts?
Thomas Sowell: Good idea.
John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do?
Thomas Sowell: Well it’s like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with?
I reacted rather badly the other day to Baroness Warsi’s weird rant about ‘bigotry‘ towards Muslims but it is gratifying to see I was not the only one who her remarks rubbed the wrong way.
Warsi seems to be of the view that unless you have a positive view of Islam, it is not really acceptable for you to express your opinions in polite society even in private ‘around the dinner table’. That someone who is a member of the establishment in the UK could think that notion was going to fly is a measure of the disconnect between some people ‘at the top’ and us oiks out in the real world.
Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.
It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.
Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly ‘grass roots’ movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover ‘individual defence’ is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists… the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.
But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that… well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain’t going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.
Where Tony Blair had no reverse gear, and Lady T was not for turning, Mr Cameron has a full gearbox and power steering that allow him to execute swerves and three point turns.
– Benedict Brogan
… yet again I find myself pondering adding a “No shit Sherlock” category… maybe more decorously listed as “I told you so” or some such.
George Osborne was recently in New York, soaking up plaudits for boldly leading Britain into fiscal austerity at a time when, apparently in contrast, America’s feckless political elite has allowed the national debt to balloon. The problem is that UK austerity, so far at least, is a myth.
November’s national accounts, released last week, were shocking. Government spending last month was sharply up on the same month in 2009 – yes, up! British state borrowing is still escalating, with the national debt rising very quickly.
– Liam Halligan.
However I do rather roll my eyes at the word ‘shocking’ as it has been screamingly obvious what was happening for quite some time. Sometimes I think Samizdata needs a category called ‘No shit, Sherlock’. How anyone could have thought Cameron’s dismal followers were ever serious about actually cutting back the state is hard to fathom.
I’m against the rise in student fees… ‘cos it ain’t fuckin’ high enough
– Thaddeus Tremayne
If you think the previous leaks were amazing, check out this.
Philip Johnston write that “Vested interests are protecting administrators and forcing cuts to vital services” in an article about PFI contracts (Public Finance Initiative).
But for the most part “privatisation” is a meaningless distraction. The only realistic way to reduce state expenditure is to actually shed state functions as the root cause is not which mechanism the state uses: direct employees funded with taxes or outside hired hands funded with taxes.
Either way, the people who carry out state functions are creatures of a system funded by taxes rather than subject to the rigours of actual market pressures… until everyone in the chain can go broke as a consequence of their actions, it is still a state structure regardless of who is making the wheels go around.
Indeed every time the state bales out a bank regardless of the moral hazard, they spread the decision skewing and insulated-from-consequence disease associated with being supported by taxes.
To reduce state expenditure, you need to get the state out of all but its “core business”. You need to remove whole function of what the state does, not just hire different people to do it. The real problem is a century of ‘mission creep’. Until you can countenance that you are not serious about reducing the bloated state.
But I don’t get the impression that Cameron and his Coalition are any more interested in personal liberty or rolling back the frontiers of state than their predecessors. The “Big Society”, indeed, is a watered-down version of the sort of bogus, grand, unifying scheme employed in the Fascist Italy of the Thirties.
–James Delingpole
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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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