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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Just in case you have not been already doing so, essential blog commentary on Germany’s cliff-hanger can be found over on David’s Medienkritik.
It will be interested to see if just under 12% unemployment has actually got the attention of the German electorate or is it going to be more of the same old stuff? Angela Merkel is something of an unknown quantity and the mere fact she is described as a ‘loose cannon’ by the political chattering classes makes her someone worth watching with at least a soupcon of hope. Germany badly needs an ‘Iron Lady’ so it will be interesting to see if Angela Merkel has what it takes or will the entrenched system just make her one of them.
The election hangs on a knife edge…
I think it is a mistake to assume that the motivations of all people in government, or most of the people who vote for governments, is knowingly malevolent. Most people want to believe the policies they support are ‘helping people’ because voting or passing a law makes them feel good about themselves as they are ‘doing something’. Consequently such people really dislike having it pointed out that their ‘something’ actually makes things worse more often than not, regardless of what their motives are.
That said, I think there are indeed quite a few people who understand full well the real harmful consequences of what they do, and they do it anyway because all they care about is maintaining the political apparatus from which they benefit at the expense of others. Those people will also react angrily to this being pointed out, because what they do requires their motives to be thought of as benevolent by the wider public whereas in reality it is just a force backed appropriation that benefits a favoured constituency at the expense of those less favoured.
My view is that ‘doing something’ via the state is sometimes the correct thing in an emergency (most obviously during a war, plague or natural disaster). Alas people often then apply the same logic to normal civil society outside the context of the emergency, acting as if the social logic of the lifeboat and normal civil society were one and the same (libertarians of some ilk often make the same mistake but from the opposite direction). A leitmotif of the post war British election in 1945 was “Look what we achieved together in wartime, think what we can do in peacetime!”… as if life in a total war and life in the social context of peacetime were much the same thing. The same logic used when being threatened by a totalitarian state is then applied to the ebb and flow of normal social life generally with monstrous results.
But cynical politicians who know full well the real consequences of their actions have powerful reasons to misrepresent the truth bacause all they care about is maintaining their personal power and influence and they do this by playing to people’s need to feel good by ‘doing something’… and they are the people who will do it. For this reason I think it is very important to keep pointing out the true effects of actions that governments take, and the consequences of participating in a process designed to lead to those sorts of interventions in civil society. Sometimes it is important to make people feel bad about themselves for ‘doing something’.
And that would be the law of unintended consequences.
The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.
But then the truth often hurts.
Well, sort of…
Actually I have long taken a similar view that without the distortions of the Common Agricultural Policy, many farm would and should go out of business or at least change what they do. My guess is that it would mostly be those who concentrate on the high end ‘premium’ end of the market (such as pandering to the demand for ‘organic’ food) who would survive.
Remove the barriers to trade and let the agricultural economies of less developed parts of the world feed us. Does it really make sense to artificially keep so much of the First World under cultivation?
The EU Courts have just given themselves the power to impose European criminal laws, by which I mean to decide itself if an offence against an EU regulation is now a criminal matter, even against the wishes of an EU states own government and legal system. How anyone who is even a casual observer of the EU could not have predicted this was on the cards is a mystery to me.
So next time you hear someone tell you that the real power remains, and will always remain, at the national level, perhaps you might like to ask them if deciding if something is, or is not, a criminal matter is a core function of a state’s legislative and judicial structures.
If people like Tony Blair and Ken Clarke want to dismantle Britain and make it a European province, well would it not be better if they just said as much and argued why that was the best course of action?
But Foreign Office sources said that, although the judgment raised the possibility of Britain having to create new criminal offences against the wishes of the Government, in practice EU member states would never agree to such a loss of sovereignty.
Any time you hear ‘Foreign Office sources’ say something will not happen ‘in practice’, of course that means the opposite is usually true. I expect within 18 months or so Britain will indeed be enacting criminal legislation imposed by European Courts on a regular basis.
There is an interesting article on American Thinker about the institutional mindset of political correctness.
A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity
And a useful comment on that story that quotes Theodore Dalrymple can be found on No Pasaran
The Tory party has been an ideology-free zone for quite some time now, defying any but the more internally focused Tory activist to really have any notion of what the Tory Party truly stands for. Not that the Labour Party actually wears its ideological heart on its sleeve any more, but at least the Labour Party clearly still believes in the Labour Party. The Tories on the other hand, well…
There is a very strange article by Peter Osborne in The Spectator in which he marvels that Tories cannot see that Ken Clarke is the solution to their woes, by which presumably he means that what the Tories need is a leader who wants to give more power to European Union institutions and run the economy pretty much as Tony Blair has. He also marvels at the ‘lurch to the right’ that the Tory Party has taken…
Yeah, that notion had me rather puzzled too. In short, Osborne seems to think that rather than search for ideological purity (!), the Tory Party need to just throw their lot in with Ken Clarke’s favour of regulatory statism.
So I guess I must have missed the Tory Party advocating scrapping the NHS and coming up with a non-rationing based healthcare system. I must have missed the plans to end inheritance tax completely, the bold decision to scrap entire government departments and reduce the state take by 15% in the first term…
If the Tories had quixotically adopted meaningful ‘right wing’ (whatever that actually means) policies, that would indicate the Tory Party actually believed in something. Yet even flirting with a moderate and rather inconsequential idea like the flat tax apparently makes you ‘right wing’ in Osborn’s universe. I guess departing materially from the post-Thatcher Labour world view seen as weird extremism, which of course means only the CINOs like that clapped out old milker Ken Clarke actually seem ‘sensible’ to someone for whom politics only ever means arguing over the rate at which the state should grow.
But the Tory party as a whole have not seriously even had that discussion and unless David Davis actually gets into the hotseat, it probably never will. I think Peter Osborn must have had a Tory Party from some alternate reality in mind…
If you want to read a splendid and truly hilarious article about US politics from the Irish Times, written by Newton Emerson, then go take a peek at Slugger O’Toole, where the entire article has been reproduced with permission.
And the reason it is so damn funny is that it is entirely correct.
How else can you interpret the authorities intention to disarm people in New Orleans? We are not talking looters here, we are talking about people with legal weapons.
The shocking story I wrote about earlier today is now being taken apart and examined to see if it holds water (perhaps an unfortunate expression under the circumstances) and as a result, it will either be reinforced as a truly damning indictment of the powers-that-be in and around New Orleans… or it will be a rather different damning indictment of a couple of politically motivated para-medic writers who, far from recording their eyewitness experiences, cobbled together a polemical message hung on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations and other people’s stories. I really do want to know which it is but I am certainly not prepared to just discount this because I happen to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum to the socialists who wrote it.
Some commenters have said they suspect the article is ‘true in essence’ rather than a literally true account of events but that is far too ‘Oliver Stone’ for me (and trust me, that is not a nice thing to say given how I feel about Oliver Stone). I do not buy the idea of ‘true in essence’: it is either based on facts that happened and were witnessed by the authors… or it was not! It matters less if the authors were wrong about certain technical details or terminology or even the motivations of the actors in question, just so long as the actually basic facts are correct. It is their witness I am interested in, not their analysis. Once the facts are established beyond a reasonable doubt, we can argue over the whys and wherefores and justifications, but the accusations in this purported eyewitness account are just too damning to be left in doubt either way.
I find this whole thing really fascinating and I cannot thank enough all the people turning their analytical talents and local knowledge on this story for commenting! The truth will out and let the chips fall where they may.
This is not the first article with this title I have written but if some of the accounts coming out of New Orleans prove to be genuine and fair accounts, then I suspect a whole new generation of people who agree with my tagline have just been created on the Gulf Coast of the United States. This was written by a pair of paramedics who were trapped in New Orleans.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.
These are clearly admirable self-reliant people here, not a bunch of welfare addled ‘do nothings’ incapable of independent thinking. They came up with a solution to their problem and the state simply stole it from them.
And if this is true, I can think of no better justification to openly state that people should own firearms to defend themselves not just against criminals but from agents of the state when there is a crisis.
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
And the real stunner…
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims” they saw “mob” or “riot”. We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
Ok, now would someone like to tell me why these people (a) should not have been armed (b) would not have been entirely justified using deadly force against the ‘law enforcement’ officials who, at gunpoint, did their damnedest to reduce their chances of survival?
We have heard accounts by authorities of crazed looters inexplicably shooting at contractors who were just trying to repair essential infrastructure. You know what? Maybe that is what happened and maybe not. I find myself thinking the official version of a great deal of what went on is far from the truth. Yet all we are ever going to see on CNN is pictures of heroic cops and National Guardsmen saving the day.
Unless this account proves to be a hoax or a gross misrepresentation of what happened, nothing less than a root and branch purge of the power structures in Louisiana will be enough. This is a true national scandal of the highest magnitude. I am appalled but not entirely surprised.
Or more accurately, hear one of its editors. Adriana has participated in a BBC Radio 4 discussion about the use of blogs for businesses and how it is part of the way New Media is challenging entire business models.
If you are curious what blogs mean to the commercial world… or just want to hear what a great sounding voice Adriana has, you can listen to her here (requires Real Audio Player).
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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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