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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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
This started off as a reply to a comment on Samizdata but by the time I reached the fifth paragraph, I realised it might as well be a full blown blog post. Below is the remark to which I was replying but this article is now really about explaining why I have moved from tentative opposition to inescapable support for Wikileaks.
When the Saudi diplomat expressed concern about Iran – something that he would not have done without the presumption of secrecy – that information was intended for the American government and no one else.
This is actually the very core of the ‘systemic attack’ that Assange has made on nation-states. It is precisely by attacking their ability to informally and easily exchange casual and often banal information that has such remarkable implications on the ability of states to act the way states act.
It does not need to be “the date of D-Day” kind of revelations (the kind I too want to remain secret) that can significantly interfere with a state’s ability to act as a ‘conspiracy’ (and not in the “Grassy Knoll” or “Bilderburg” or similar gonzo conspiracy theory sense)… indeed I wish Assange had never used the word ‘conspiracy’… I have long described the Green movement ‘Warmists’ as a ‘confluence of interests’ rather than a ‘conspiracy’… but I actually mean the exact same thing when discussing the Greens as Assange means when he describes Government as a ‘conspiracy’…
But if you are someone of the view that the modern regulatory welfare state has vastly too much power over its subjects, and that these states are unreformable from within the ‘democratic’ systems… the very systems that have been in place during the growth of this overweening state power, then a valid way to oppose that power is to carry out systemic attacks on the very networks that allow that ‘confluence of interests’ to express what those interests are and to thereby find ways to achieve that confluence. → Continue reading: Why I support Wikileaks
If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet?
– Ron Paul
It seems almost unbelievably crass that attempts to take down Julian Assange should revolve around such a patently obvious ploy as concocting ‘sexual assault‘ charges against him.
It reminds me of some other oh so obvious black bag operations, i.e. the patently absurd planted media articles to link Saddam (a secular socialist) to Al Qaeda (Islamists) in the run up to the allied attack on Iraq.
I have grave misgiving about Wikileaks releasing operational military information but the fact the governments of the world are all baying for his blood and starting to cooperate with operations to discredit him speaks volumes about the damage he has done to the leviathan state everywhere… as was always his intention…and for that Assange has already assured himself a very special place in history. I suspect people will be talking about him long after the current crop of political leaders have been consigned to the mundane sections of historical record.
To anyone with a vaguely libertarian perspective observing the relentless creep of regulatory politics into ever more aspects of civil life, it has long been self evident that as a practical matter the statist right are largely interchangeable with the statist left. After all David “I see no liberty” Blunkett was simply standing on the shoulders of Michael “there is something of the night about him” Howard, no?
Hence the recent remark by the dependably dismal John Major that he likes being in coalition come as no surprise to me whatsoever. Indeed the only thing that ever so slightly raised one eyebrow on my part was his willingness to left the mask slip.
And with this in mind, I left a comment on Norman Tebbit’s blog in response to this:
“I respect those who are working in UKIP, but I would hope that you would respect us Eurosceptics in the Tory Party too.”
“Well I would respect you a lot more if you were not aiding and abetting the people who have turned the Conservative party into a party of Big Euro Statism… but the fact is they could not have done it without folks such as yourself helping to keep a critical mass of genuine conservatives voting for the party despite profound unease with the likes of Cameron, Major et al.
If you are hanging in there because you seek to take over the Tory party (re-take really) and drive out the twerps who now freely admit they are ideologically fungible with the left (something I have been pointing out for a decade, so Major’s remarks are hardly a revelation to me)… ie you remain a Tory so you can do a UK version of the Tea Party… well great, that is certainly something I could get behind… but if you are just going to be enablers for people who frankly do not share your conservative views, then with all due respect Norman (and I do mean that) you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and that is a great pity.”
It is not necessary to have divine permission to know right from wrong
– Christopher Hitchens
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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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