|
|||||
|
‘The state hates competition… this is why it tries so hard to stamp out organised crime’ So goes the old joke. Yet there actually is more than a little truth to it. As someone who views conscripting children against their will into vast ‘educational factories’ as institutionalized child abuse, the fact that members of the state’s educational conscription elite should pick on a few isolated cases of private sector child abuse to justify moving against home educators surprises me not one jot. February 28th, 2004 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There is an article in the Telegraph titled Slovakian troops sent in to stop gypsy riots that reports what is happening but makes no comment on what seems to me the key underlying reason it is happening:
It is regrettable for anyone to go hungry but for 100% unemployment to prevail amongst significant sections of the gypsy community in Slovakia, that is not bad luck or economic vagaries, it is a lifestyle choice. What is more, what Tibor Tutak is actually saying is that he dislikes having to do the stealing himself, given that he and his community had gotten used to having the state do it for them. The fact is no one owes anyone else a living by right at their expense, particularly not if they decline to participate in the economy as anything other than parasites. The forceful official Slovak response seem entirely appropriate to me and I hope they do not even consider allowing themselves to be shook down for larger the ‘welfare’ payments. No one is forced to live in a gypsy community in this day and age… yes, I know some people will bring up the infamous walls built Czech authorities after years of complains by local people. These were designed specifically to keep gypsies away from the rest of the community in a town near Ostrava a few years ago, but that was hardly an enforced ghetto in the traditional European sense of the word, as there were no laws compelling gypsies not to live elsewhere. I also realise gypsy communities are on the receiving end of considerable prejudice and discrimination, though it needs to be said that not all of the reasons for the wider community’s hostility towards them are baseless. The gypsies are a separate cultural group and are certainly entitled to live according to their ways… provided these ways are not based on theft, be it directly or via the state and therein lies the issue at the heart of what is happening now in the Slovak Republic. Let me give the last word to Czech blogger Tomas Kohl who writes what the Telegraph article conspicuously did not:
February 27th, 2004 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sorry about the brief but painful service outage some of you make have experienced. Our hosting server had a spot of dispepsia but the good folks at Hosting Matters got us up and running again in no time. February 26th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years. One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970’s with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt. 
click for bigger image The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one’s hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling. February 25th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson’s acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ
The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews. This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying “John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians”. This is just history, guys! What is the big deal? February 24th, 2004 | 97 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Catholic Communications Service for England & Wales have delivered a nifty rejection of a host of the intellectual bits of the Catholic church’s philosophical underpinnings which actually make sense, via a press release called Catholic Bishops: Why we must render unto Caesar. This pertains to a booklet called ‘Taxation for the Common Good’. Yet again the church in England shows it has no problem superceding individual moral choice (there is no other kind really because a decision cannot be moral if it is not the product of individual free will) by using the collective force of the state. Moreover taking the property of others is just fine by them. The problem is that when they say the word ‘moral’, they do not actually know what that means. Hint: it is not the same as ‘manners’ or ‘social conventions’ and is certainly not the same issue as ‘desirable outcomes’. If some members of a church (i.e. Catholic bishops in England and Wales) find the rarified air of pure moral theory too taxing compared to issuing pronouncements on plain ol’ politics, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
Presumably this has now been updated:
If the Catholic church wants to spurn its role as a persuader of individual moral decisions and instead be just another collectivist political advocacy group, albeit one with rather interesting buildings and distinctively dressed employees, that is fine by me… but it should not then be surprised if people treat it as just another shrill NGO or perhaps think of it as being rather like that paragon of virtues, the United Nations. For a far more interesting discussion regarding Christianity and Liberty than you will ever find on the arid pages of the Catholic Communication Service, take a peek at the interesting Volconvo site. February 23rd, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The week’s edition of the Economist is a rather good one. It is a publication which although generally on the side of the angels, often infuriates me with its statist meta-contextual inconsistencies. Likewise they are at their worst when describing broader civil liberties issues, particularly self-defence. That said it is a magazine which is often a bloody good read. The leader article is called The new jobs migration and discusses a subject dear to my heart: free trade and outsourcing.
Great stuff. When people argue that they just want to ‘protect American (or British/French/Japanese) jobs’, what they are really demanding is that force be used to ensure that other people’s purchasing power within their own nation not be allowed to grow because of their own sectional interests. When people look at cases of folks loosing their jobs in the USA or UK because an Indian or Philippine call centre can do it cheaper, and then call for this to stop, they are not looking beyond the first causal link of costs and benefits. Moreover, they are ignoring that we live in an extended and (largely) capitalist society which is extraordinarily good at dealing with such problems when the ‘invisible hand’ is free to work its ‘magic’. Some people are losing their jobs, ergo, this is bad and must be stopped… this rather like concluding as the world seems intuitively to be flat, therefore it must be flat. By this logic all labour saving devices should have been declared ’employment destroying devices’ and banned long ago. There is also another splendid article in the United States section called The Great Hollowing-out Myth which roundly rubbishes the notion that outsourcing damages the US (or other) economy and overall employment prospects (alas that article is available only via on-line subscription or in the print version):
Run, do not walk, to your nearest newsstand. February 23rd, 2004 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
So Britain will indeed remain more enlightened than the Continent, allowing people from the new EU member nations in Eastern Europe to live here: the proviso being that they will not be allowed to partake of state benefits for a few years. So in other words, they are welcome (and they certainly are welcome by me) to come here and work just so long as they leave the theft of other people’s money (via the state, of course), to native English people or resident French, Germans, Italians etc… or our very own local Arab terrorist supporters, come to think of it. On a related note, it never ceases to amuse me to hear how politicos can make dissembling use of language. Following an attack by that paragon of liberal values and freedom, Tory leader Michael Howard, in which he asked “Will the government do what other countries are doing, and what the prime minister said he was looking at, will he impose transitional controls on immigration from the accession countries or not”, Tony Blair replied:
And this is presumably because workers are not… people? Anyway, I thought it was only a problem when the people in question turn out to not to be ‘workers’. In reality, most of the ‘Old’ EU is not allowing free movement at all but rather highly regulated and restricted movement. February 23rd, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
CNetnews.com has an article about radio frequency identification that has become a hot concept, promising to streamline how businesses track and stock inventory, warning that companies may need to rethink their software infrastructures in order to make RFID work as advertised, say analysts and technology makers. Early resistance to RFID adoption has come from civil liberties groups, which fear that the technology could lead to unprecedented surveillance of consumers. But industry watchers and technology vendors have identified a more mundane potential problem for RFID adopters. They warn that in the rush to launch RFID projects, businesses may be overlooking a crucial element necessary to allow the technology to work smoothly: Making sure back-end databases and business applications can handle the massive amounts of information generated by RFID-enabled systems. Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston said:
Romanow believes that there are two popular scenarios among businesses working to develop RFID capabilities today: those doing just enough to keep demanding companies like Wal-Mart as a customer, and those with real long-term vision. According to the analyst, the first group will garner few returns other than short-term bragging rights to getting RFID up and running, while the second group will see true return on investment down the road. February 20th, 2004 | Comments are closed
I rarely write articles about ongoing discussions in the comment sections of Samizdata.net, but I think this is an appropriate continuation of the discourse. Whilst I find being referred to as ‘dear leader’ a bit disconcerting, Frank McGahon does ask the questions which have vexed me for quite a long time. I refer to myself as a ‘social individualist’, as does Gabriel Syme. I also have no problem with ‘minarchist’. Others tend to call me a ‘libertarian’. Whatever… the general thrust of what I think is no secret to any regular reader of this blog. I see the state as at best a necessary evil and generally just an evil; I see constrained democracy as a tool to secure liberty, not an end in and of itself; I am all for free markets and ‘Austrian’ economics; I regard several property as the key underpinning of any civilization worth having; I see individual liberty as first amongst many virtues. Label all that as you wish. So how does a person with such views, i.e. someone who is profoundly at odds with the system of regulatory democratic governance that prevails in the First World, and who regards so much of underpins everyday life in a legal sense as essentially illegitimate, act to advance his or her objectives? Or more particularly, how does one take action without legitimising what they regard as nothing less than threat-backed theft? How does one act without either fatally compromising one’s beliefs or alternatively retreating into intellectually pure ineffectiveness? This is a question I keep kicking around… over and over again. The problem with voting Tory (or in many states in the USA, voting Republican) is that it rewards both outright lying when they describe themselves as ‘the party of free trade’ and does little more than slow the rot of regulatory statism rather than reverse it. If they know you will just hold your nose and vote for them regardless just to keep Labour out (or the Democrats out), what possible motivation do they have to actually pander to your views in any meaningful way? → Continue reading: Going for the zeitgest February 19th, 2004 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our most splendid Frogman has added another wallpaper to the Samizdata.net wallpaper page (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Check them out!  February 17th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
A 365 day per year strike of course, but I suppose that is too much to hope for. Tens of thousands of civil servants of sundry favours are walking out in all manner of protests at plans to cut the vast throng of half a million or so people employed by the state by a paltry 80,000. Yes, I realise those people will get paid for the time they are off the job but I wonder what might happen if folks noticed that the world did not come to an end just because chunks of the state stopped working? Perhaps people might actually get used to the idea of living without them. More and faster, please. February 17th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||