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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For those who are inexplicably worried about Russia’s alleged ‘resurgence’ as a major world power now that it’s economy is about the size of Italy’s economy (albeit far less diversified), the following article should be unalloyed good news:
In the Russian Federation, a country where hundreds of companies are launched every year, the plans to create yet another one would not be particularly noteworthy. Except that Russian Technologies is to be very different from most of the rest. It will be no capitalist venture conceived by a profit-seeking entrepreneur, but a corporation established by a decree of the Russian Parliament. A giant conglomerate with the state apparatus behind it, its official mandate will be to ‘develop Russia’s heavy industry.’
The ‘money quote’ being “with the state apparatus behind it”…presumably because it was proven that “state apparatus” was the key to how the Soviets developed technology and business methods far superior to those in the capitalist west, became fabulously wealthy and as a result won the Cold War and… oh, hang on… In other words, the clowns who run the Kremlin are going to try an approach used in the West in the 1960s and 1970’s of creating large bureaucratic ‘national champions’. And that is because that worked soooo well for us, right?
So clearly those who feel “something must be done about resurgent Russia” can now relax and just let nature take its course. Putin and his entourage of economic ignoramuses are screwing Russia and crippling its ability to ever develop a dynamic market economy. This will weaken the nation far more effectively than anything anyone else could do to them. I just happen to think it is a pathetic waste of people’s talents and potential.
Over on The First Post, Richard Ehrman has written an article called Immigration: Britain’s wake-up call that gives us a splendid example of how the left and right generally share ‘meta-context’ (the unspoken axioms that we take for granted when we discuss something):
The new population projections are shocking […] Over the next 25 years, the Office of National Statistics expects the British population to rise to 71million, from 60m today. After that, it is on course to hit 75m by mid-century. […] And because we are not producing enough children to replace ourselves, most of this dramatic growth will be due to immigration. […] Population projections have proved wildly out in the past, so this latest version should be taken with a pinch of salt. But it should serve as a wake-up call, too.
If we are going to rely on immigrants to pay our pensions and do the jobs we don’t want to do, we are also going to have to build an awful lot of new houses, roads, schools and hospitals to accommodate them.
The fact the population is growing in Britain is shocking, apparently. Okay, yet for some reason I am not shocked. However why is this something we should regard as a “wake up call”? Personally I am hearing something more like a dinner bell being rung. Richard Ehrman is associated with Politeia, an allegedly market-friendly think tank, so why should ‘we’, by which I very strongly suspect he means ‘we-as-taxpayers’, be building houses, roads, schools and hospitals for anyone? In less benighted times the arrival of more people would have been referred to as a ‘growing market’ (i.e. a good thing) rather than an impending liability which needs a “wake-up call” to alert us to a problem.
Let me quote something very germane that was uttered yesterday at the Libertarian Alliance conference in London, by Shane Frith of Progressive Vision on more or less the same subject:
“The claim that immigration puts strain on ‘vital public services’ is a myth. The reality is that immigration only puts ‘pressure’ on the inefficient state sector such as state schools and NHS hospitals. Vital public services provided by the private sector welcome the additional customers. In the vital field of food supply, you don’t hear Tesco complaining that they hadn’t planned on the increased business – we face no food shortages. Neither does Vodafone struggle with the technical demands of providing mobile phones to all these immigrants. Immigration merely highlights the existing failure of the inefficient, unreformed state sector.”
Quite! If indeed much of Central Europe is decamping from their homelands and heading for this Sceptred Isle, what an excellent time to abolish the decrepit socialist legacy systems (which are rather like running 1980’s era computers in 2007 and then wondering why things do not work) that have inexplicably survived into the Twenty First century. Time to replace them with adaptive market driven approaches that are neither distorted nor crowded out by an idiotic and fantastically inefficient state run medical system, preposterous public sector housing and ever more dumbed down state schools. None of these things, not one, is logically something the state should have anything to do with. As I have argued before, perhaps the changing demographic realities may force exactly the sort of changes that should have been introduced decades ago.
And if that is true, it is yet another reason to thank the latest wave of immigrants. Guys, you might actually save us from ourselves.
Vitajte v Londyne!
I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total… mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as ‘tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).
As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good” or “for the children” or “for the environment”.
And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘licence to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.
The person suggesting this latest delightfully totalitarian brick-in-the-wall, Professor Julian le Grand, says some very telling things:
“There is nothing evil about smoking as long as you are just hurting yourself. We have to try to help people stop smoking without encroaching on people’s liberties.” […] But he said requiring them to fill in forms, have photographs taken in order to apply for a permit would prove a more effective deterrent.
No doubt Julian le Grand thinks that makes him seem reasonable and sensible, because he does not want people to have their civil liberties encroached upon… and he then proceeds to describe how he would like to do precisely that in order to ‘deter’ you from doing what you really wanted to do.
The reason for this seemingly strange approach is simple to understand because to the totalitarian, something does not have to be ‘evil’ to warrant the use of force to discourage it, you merely have to have (a) coercive power (b) disapprove of another person’s choices regarding their own life. That is all the justification you need, simply the fact other people are not living the way you think they should, in your presumably infinite wisdom.
Notice how coercive actions imposed by state power are described as ‘helping’. We will force you to pay more, force you to go to a doctor…but we will throw your arse in gaol if you dare try to circumvent our unasked for ‘help’.
The ‘paleo-totalitarian’ simply uses force if you disobey, no messing about… however the post-modern totalitarian prefers to add a morally insulating intermediate step that allows his kind to talk about ‘civil liberties’: first he gives you a nice regulation to obey and only if you dare not comply with that do the Boys in Blue get sent to show you the error of your ways.
I can think of quite a few ways I would rather like to ‘help’ Julian le Grand and his ilk in order to mitigate their pathological need to interfere with other people’s lives. All for the greater good of society, you understand.
I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:
I would like to thank you for writing this article.
Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!
But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake”
I hope he is still writing such articles.
As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).
Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.
I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.
Oh joy.
Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.
One of the best debunkers of lazy, collectivist economic thinking is the blogger Tim Worstall, who lives in the sunny climes of Portugal. His take-down of Polly Toynbee is just too good to miss. I particularly cannot help noticing the point about Sweden; the country, often held up as a model of social democratic goodness, is in fact moving in liberal directions in areas like education (vouchers), although it remains shockingly heavily taxed.
The BBC is reporting one of the most grotesque things I have seen for a while…
Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain “sleepwalking” into a crisis, a report has concluded.
So, you are not responsible for what you stick in your own damned mouth. Think about that and the implications that pulse out of those words like a neutron bomb’s radiation.
I have long said that in the western world the fascist approach to control (you may ‘own’ the means of production but you must used them in accordance with national political directives, i.e you are completely regulated and thus have liability without control) has completely triumphed over the socialist approach to control (the state, euphemised as ‘The People’, directly owns everything and you are simply a politically directed deployable unit of labour). And of course ‘labour’ means you and what you do with your body. This particular means of production is already only ‘owned’ by you provided you use it in a politically approved manner. And that will soon include what you may eat or may not eat.
This BBC article makes me wonder if the time to start throwing rocks could be closer than we like to think.
As I have had several people ask, I have set up a Samizdata Facebook group.
Now all I have to do if figure out what to do with it as I am new to Facebook.
I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, “Infidel,” has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, “Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him.”
“There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice”… truly words worth burning into one’s soul.
Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The postal strike in Britain would seem like the perfect opportunity to not privatise the Royal Mail but to acknowledge that in an era of competing global courier companies and e-mail, there is no long any need for the state to have a ‘national’ postal service at all.
As Dave Cameron never misses the opportunity to miss an opportunity, I do not suppose we will be hearing this from the Conservative Party any time soon then, eh?
I like to figure out the appropriate term for collections of things (a disorganisation of libertarians?), and upon reading the bizarre responses to Dave Cameron’s speech at the Tory Party conference, a ‘credulousness of Conservatives’ came to mind.
The Times writes of the speech, remarkably describing the entire exercise in dissembling as ‘refreshingly spin-free’:
By the time David Cameron got up to give his conference speech yesterday, it had become an awful lot easier to present him as a man of integrity in a world of spin. That was not the main theme of his speech, but it was a clear subtext. The Old Politics is failing, he said. And he explained why: top-down statism has not wrought the improvements that everyone seeks. This was an argument for limited government, not merely another shopping list.
Clearly there must be someone else in the party who just happens to share a name with party leader Dave Cameron, as obviously no one who writes for an august publication like The Times could have mistaken Dave “greener-than-thou we will match Labour’s spending on public services” Cameron for an honest advocate of limited government in any way, shape or form (or in fact a honest advocate of anything other than the notion “Dave Cameron should be Prime Minister”).
Now, if it was in fact the same Dave Cameron who runs the party who said things to indicate he is a supporter of limited government, do you think that maybe, just maybe, he is saying those things not because he believes it but because he is at a conference attended by activists for whom the term “limited government” is not a dirty word? And if so, could he just possibly be saying those things so these activists do not defect to UKIP in disgust or, more likely, spend next election day gardening or playing Halo 3 or just about anything else to deaden the pain rather than vote for someone who has lied and lied and lied to them and who is not in fact a conservative at all? Could he just possibly be saying what they want to hear in the hope they will pretend they never heard him advocate more ‘green’ taxes, sumptuary laws in the form of de facto rationing of air travel for the plebs, more public spending and more regulation, allowing those things to vanish down the ‘memory hole’ because they want to believe their woeful party still stands for limited government regardless of all the evidence to the contrary?
Just askin’.
Dave Cameron is actually a very funny guy. His faux sincerity and Forceful Leader hand gestures (no doubt practised in front of a mirror for best effect), combined with crassly obvious weathervane-like changes of political position, are the perfect stuff of parody. I expect most politicians to be insincere as it is more or less a job requirement, but I find the combination of mannered earnestness and whore-like opinion poll based ideology-of-the-week strangely compelling viewing.
In truth the principle-free pursuit of power he represents is so toxic that I want to have an endless series of Two Minute Hates at the mere mention of his name… but then when I see that phoney baloney shtick of his in full televisual motion and pimple enhancing digital hi-rez colour, I find myself grinning from ear to ear at the sheer absurdity of the man (and indeed the party that voted for this bozo to be its boss). He changes direction faster than a startled fish and the fact anyone believes anything that comes out of his mouth is a source of morbid fascination to me.
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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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