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]
|
English taxpayers will see their Council Tax bills rise by 3.5% this year. The official line was predictable:
LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said that despite the difficulties, local authorities were doing their best to limit the rises in council tax. “Money is tight for everyone and nobody likes paying more council tax, but town halls are making enormous efforts to keep bills down,” she said. “Councils understand that people are suffering and they’re working flat out to keep council tax down, to keep local businesses afloat and help people deal with the impact of the recession. “More people are turning to councils to help them through the recession. Councils are responding by making services more efficient and they recognise that tax increases need to be kept to the absolute minimum.
The ‘money quote’ is of course: “More people are turning to councils to help them through the recession”… the idea that civil society revolves around the state is so deeply ingrained that the concept of less state and more civil society simply does not fit within their world view. Let me suggest that if a massive number of council employees in England were fired, very few of whom are net contributors of wealth to the ailing economy, that would do more to alleviate the recession than anything the state could do at the local level to ‘help people through the recession’. Less taxes, that would help.
The sheer arrogance is breathtaking. Expecting any increase in tax, when they should be shrinking themselves at the very least in step with the contracting economy, shows how rotten the system is. And of course the dependably useless Tory party, at their very best only a ‘lesser evil’, only want to ‘freeze’ local taxes for two years. They are not even contemplating actually rolling back the state even in line with the shrinking economy. Message to the vile Dave Cameron: if the economy is contracting, anything other than a reduction is an increase.
A Politico/Allstate poll at the end of last year suggested 79% of Americans support his stimulus plan and he has a 63% approval rating.
A year from now, when those who saved see the value of those saving buying a great deal less, and those who did not save see the empty shops and find themselves out of a job, will they see the sheer folly of expecting the state to manipulate the economy back to health? Perhaps they will.
Classical liberals and libertarians are often accused of being ‘utopian’ because of our reliance of the self correcting mechanism of markets. “That assumes people act rationally!” our critics say.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We know people do not act rationally, oh good grief you statists have no idea how profoundly we know that, and that is exactly why we do not trust the state to have so much power over the domestic life of its subjects. Amongst other things, a strong state, far from protecting us from mean old Big Business, actually entrenches Big Business and lets them limit competition.
People are not particularly rational, even less so in large groups… and that includes people with great political power. They make mistakes and then repeat those mistakes again and again and again. The true utopians are those who think it is wise to give demonstrably fallible people vast legal backed power over civil society.
But hey, if you clever and oh so rational statists do not get the results you expect from the ‘stimulus package’, just strap in and do it again… and again… and again. Have fun. This is indeed the end of an era, just not the one you think.
What 79% of Americans want apparently. Enjoy.
‘Bail-out fears hit banking shares‘ howls the BBC… “We know of no justification for the fall in share price. We are fully aware of our regulatory obligations and we have not said anything,” said a Barclays spokesman in a statement.
Hehehe. Could it be that more and more people do not believe the shit that government and the mainstream media keep peddling any more? The ‘bail outs’ are consuming a larger and larger proportion of the world’s ailing economies, with no end of ‘bailing’ in sight. Frankly why not bail out the porn industry? Why not ‘bail out’ every damn industry! Just print more money!
The system is devouring itself and no amount of manipulation can change that… because manipulation is why the system is collapsing. When the correcting mechanisms of markets are not permitted to work, it is like never allowing forest fires to clear out dead wood. In the end all you do it store up problems for later. Guess what? Later is now.
Let it burn.
The EU is bleating as people go cold due to Russian gas being shut off due to its disputes with the Ukraine. And the ever dependable Russian polity, moonbats to a man, blame the USA for the crisis.
The pragmatic Slovak government has made the very sensible decision to possibly restart Soviet era nuclear power plants that they were decommissioning as part of their accession to the EU, if the crisis drags on… and in doing so, they show the simple and ‘carbon footprint’ friendly (as if I care) solution to this and oh so many problems… nuclear power. How can a solution that dooms both the Kremlin and Middle East to long term strategic insignificance not be a Truly Many Splendored Thing?
The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to ‘vetted’ companies for ‘personalised advertising’. Extremely un-cool… catastrophically so if one of the ‘vetted’ companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government.
I despise most internet ‘push marketers’ at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying… those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea.
These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the “Global Internet Freedom Consortium’s” apple.
The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man… before you pull out that credit card.
A few days ago I was asked why I hold Dave Cameron in such utter contempt and I am sure that person soon regretted provoking such a lengthy invective filled rant from me. Well here is another example why he is a complete waste of space. In an article titled Tories ‘would wipe slate clean’, Dave Cameron promptly precedes to explain that far from wiping the slate clean, he represents philosophical continuity with the people he wishes to replace:
Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year – rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: “That’s not what they should be thinking…
If ever there was an example of John McCain style “I am the Lesser Evil” politics, this is it.
…”They should be thinking this would be a responsible government that would make government live within its means, that would relieve some of the debt burden being piled up on our children.”
…he says blithely immediately after having promised to increase spending by £25 BILLION at a time when the economy is actually contracting. What sort of mathematics is ‘Dave’ using in which an increase in spending by the state whilst a decrease in economic activity is under way does not add more god damn debt to ‘our children’? He wants to strip money from productive sectors at the worst possible time and pass the debt on to future generations but we should vote for him because he wants to do this slightly less than the other guy? Are you starting to understand my transcendent loathing of the man yet?
And he is not even a clever politician as he has the example of what happened to John “I support the bailout” McCain when the half-witted Republicans ran a Big Government Statist against an Even Bigger Government Statist. Truly a waste of space and a pox on the party who tolerates him as leader.
And the Labour party response?
His proposals are economic madness – cutting training budgets, housing and transport investment plans and help for people to get jobs just at a time when they need it most.
It is like listening to two madmen arguing over how full an invisible jar of jam is… and each insisting that as the other cannot see what they see, they must be insane. The lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum.
Who would have thought it? Prince Harry is just a normal bloke in spite of the weird circumstances of his upbringing.
The News of the World said it had a video of the army lieutenant calling a colleague a “Paki” while pretending to make a phonecall to the Queen. […] During the faked call to the Queen, as the Commander in Chief of the British Army, the prince says, “Granny I’ve got to go, send my love to the Corgis and Grandpa.” He finishes saying: “I’ve got to go, got to go, bye. God Save You … yeah, that’s great.”
[…]
In a separate incident, Prince Harry is heard calling another officer cadet a “raghead”, the News of the World said. […] The statement continued: “Prince Harry used the term ‘raghead’ to mean Taleban or Iraqi insurgent.”
Sounds like a great guy to me. Sure, I am all for abominating racism like any other form of odious collectivism (like socialism for example, which is tyranny for all rather than just tyranny for certain racial groups), but this hypersensitivity to any politically incorrect use of language is really annoying. I know Pakistani people who use the word ‘Paki’ for Christ’s sake! And ‘raghead’? Kill the enemy by all means but lets not insult them, eh?
This is the comment I left on the BBC site:
Wow, you mean he actually speaks like the 90% of the population who are not members of the media/political class?
There is an outpouring of ‘good will’ towards Obama coming from the statist establishment on the so called ‘right’, whatever that means, in the USA, such as this fellow. These are exactly the sort of apparatchiks I have talking about before who are at the very heart of the Republican party’s problems. They may well be personable but now is the time for radicalisation and resistance, not conciliation and surrender.
Noting how specific Republicans react to the beatification, sorry I mean inauguration of Obama will be a useful guide to who ‘gets it’ and who does not… who is part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course the easy entries on the ‘kick the fools out’ list needs to start with the party worthies who actually thought it was even good politics, let alone good for the country, to run such a profoundly statist candidate like McCain against the most left wing Democrat since FDR. Even the most clueless of marketing men (and that is an industry more awash with cluelessness than most) understand the importance of product differentiation.
Feel free to use the comment section to stay who on the Big Government wing of the Republican Party most urgently needs to be given the boot so that the Republicans have any value at all as a worthwhile alternative. Of course I am well aware that the answer may be ‘kick out all of them’ but that is not a very useful observation. The current crisis is a golden opportunity to actually do some creative destruction that could yield interesting results in the years to come. If that possibility is not of interest to you, then you have nothing to add to this particular discussion.
“Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment and the American dream slipping further and further out of reach,” Mr Obama said.
Across the political spectrum eh? And which spectrum would that be? Let me guess… the spectrum that runs from Democrat regulatory statist to Republican regulatory statist? There is no ‘spectrum‘ in front bench congressional politics in the USA (or the UK), just a groups of people who are arguing over how much deeper the same hole they are standing in should be dug in order to get out of said hole.
That is why the USA needs vastly less bipartisanship and a whole lot more disunity. The truth is that NOTHING the US government will do is going to prevent double digit unemployment and economic depression. Both parties were the authors of this situation and every time some jackanapes in Washington DC uses the term ‘bipartisanship’, it is worth pointing out the discreditable Republican role creating a vast edifice of state controls that prevent markets from actually working.
Outside the USA, explicit attacks on capitalism are perfectly acceptable by leading politicos, so it is unsurprising to see Britain’s dismal prime minister Gordon Brown petulantly blaming ‘unbridled capitalism’ when Britain’s regulation smothered and very much ‘bridled’ economy refuses to respond to his ever more pointless orders. But in truth politicians in the USA, the ones in both parties who have done equally absurd things to bury the US economy, in practice share much the same views about ‘capitalism’ as Gordon Brown does. The reasons for that are not hard to figure out.
They are trying to blame everyone other than the predatory political class and its army of tax funded clients and instead point at those pesky people who actually create wealth rather than destroy it as the problem. It is not so much that they are consciously lying about the nature of reality but rather their underpinning axioms within which they see everything simply cannot cope with a world view that does not place politics and regulation at the heart of absolutely everything and as the solution to everything. And if vast reams of regulations are a given then problems cannot be regulation per se but rather that the wrong regulation was tried this time and so ‘we’ need to try different ones. The notion that there is something systemically wrong with creating a massive impenetrably complex tower of (often contradictory) laws simply does not compute. Most politicians, and indeed most people generally, do not even see the teetering structure in totality, just the changes compared to the last time they looked. The tower of regulations simply is… the only ‘sensible’ discussion they will even entertain is how much more should ‘we’ pile on this year.
But then that is one of the major upsides of the massive global crash that is coming down upon us all… the tower that has been created has been struck by lightning and yet they want to save it by piling the structure higher even as it is tipping over… whereas the correct course of action is to get out from underneath it.
Now let us make sure that the people responsible from the largely interchangeable statist ‘right’ and ‘left’ are the ones who get the blame because the smarter ones are already trying to shift it to anyone else but themselves. Our job in the non-mainstream media is to make sure the political life gets crushed out of them as they so richly deserve.
The ‘Crisis of Regulatory Statism’ meme needs to spread.
As of today, the Czech President Václav Klaus takes control of the largely symbolic but quite high profile office of President of the EU. Given his stridently pro-free market and highly Euro-sceptic utterances in the past, the sense of dread in Brussels is palpable. He is a brusquely outspoken man and I cannot wait to see how he uses the bully pulpit that the EU Presidency provides.
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. → Continue reading: An appeal for disunity
The UK Culture Gauleiter, Andy Burnham, gives an interview in the Telegraph today in which he says:
If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.
Actually the people who ‘created’ the internet did it so that parts of the state could stay in touch after a nuclear attack… the idea the net does not need the government was an emergent realisation that came later. And of course there is nothing a government hates more that being thought irrelevent, which is what this is really about. Internet censorship is never ever about ‘protecting’ people, it is about extending and maintaining state power. That is the whole reason why advocates of censorship pretend child pornography is vastly more prevalent than it actually is. And you may be sure kiddie porn will be wheeled out yet again in this latest attempt to expand the power of the state.
There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.
Which of course is indeed a naked, direct and unambiguous attack on free speech.
He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites. The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.
Yes, no doubt Andy Burnham dreams of marching forward with The One across the internet in a sort of virtual Operation Barbarosa, presumably with UKGov in the roll of the Loyal Ally. But then unlike Barbarosa, this attack comes as no surprise to the ‘enemy’ (i.e. folks like us) and there is that pesky ‘First Amendment’ on the other side of the Atlantic sitting like 20,000 T-34 tanks waiting at Kursk. There is a reason Samizdata is hosted in the USA and not on this side of the puddle.
This crass power grab needs to be opposed on every level and not just attacked on the sheer technical difficulty of making it happen but also assaulted morally and politically.
But I agree when he says “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.” Yes we do need to revisit that and remind everyone that if the history of the previous century teaches us anything, it is that governments cannot be trusted. Free speech cannot be left to the sufferance of political systems and venal politicians like Andrew Burnham. We need to smite any attempt to encroach on the internet at every level and distribute technical ‘solutions’ to every initiative the state comes up as widely as possible regardless of what laws they pass.
We simply will not cooperate.
|
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.
|
