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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Rowan Williams, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has stated that it is more important to “maintain the society of states” than to depose a murderous dictator, namely Saddam Hussain.
Now if Williams was of the opinion that Saddam Hussain was just the victim of western calumny and he was in fact the generous benefactor of the Iraqi people, then it would be quite understandable that he would oppose starting (or more accurately, completing) a war with the object of deposing him and crushing Ba’athist Socialism.
Yet that is not the case: Williams describes Saddam Hussain as “brutal and violent” and yet still takes the view that the stability of those collective edifices called ‘states’ is more important that the right of Iraqi civilians not to be murdered in order to ensure the supremacy of the Ba’athist Party.
Here is a man who, as an Anglican Archbishop, is presumably concerned not with geopolitics but with Christian morality and yet takes the view that the political stability of the Islamic world’s sundry despotisms matters more ending the nightmare of the 23 million people who live or die at Saddam Hussain’s whim. The fact Hussain is “brutal and violent” matters less than the needs of Realpolitik.
This is exactly where collectivism can lead even an Archbishop, because morality and collectivism are antithetical.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason,
why gunpowder treason,
should ever be forgot!
– Traditional English, sung on 5th November.
I wonder if in the future, the ‘Guy’ burnt in effigy on the bonfires around Britain on the 5th November will be known by the name of other more recent traitors, as a ‘Chris’ or a ‘Ted’1 rather than a ‘Guy’.
Rest in peace, Guy Fawkes… the only honest man to ever enter Parliament.
Eurosceptic views are not a new thing in Britain
1 = Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link
When looking at the world around us, it is impossible to constantly take everything upon which we must form an opinion back to first principles: life is simply too short for that.
But to decide if a dog might be about to bite you, one must have at least some understanding of the nature of dogs and how they might act differently to cats or parrots or foxes or hippopotamuses (the later being a rare sight in London it must be noted). Whilst the propensity of a Golden Labrador and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier to chomp on you varies considerably, both are nevertheless dogs and thus act within the range of doglike behaviours to which their natures impel them.
And so to understand anything done by a state, the workings of its parts and how they are likely to impact upon your life, one must understand some of the basic underlying truth about the nature of states. All states are not exactly the same just as all dogs are not exactly the same: whilst a libertarian such as myself might lambast the United States or the United Kingdom for many and varied sins, it is clear to all but the ‘rationality impaired’ that the USA and UK are currently significantly less harmful to their subjects than the likes of Iraq or Myanmar or China or Belarus or Zimbabwe.
So when I recently wrote a couple articles about posters by a government body (Transport for London) aimed at garnering public support for increasingly panoptic mass surveillance, some commenters (a minority it must be said) took exception to the idea there might be anything sinister about the vast proliferation of CCTV cameras in Britain to which the state has access. Britain after all, is not Nazi Germany or North Korea, so what is the problem?
Trust us. Constantly. The second you step out of your front door. Nevertheless, all states, like all dogs, do indeed share some common irreducible aspects to their natures. Without getting into the intractable and interminable minarchist versus anarchist inter-libertarian debates of the legitimacy of any form of state, it is fair to say all modern states however democratic and ‘liberal’ suffer from a type of progressive moral cirrhosis. Take the remarks in the Telegraph regarding Britain’s socialist National Health Service:
Rather as in the old Soviet Union, many managers now think it safer to fiddle their returns rather than send bad news back to the centre. This week, for instance, the Department of Health claimed that no one now has to wait more than 24 hours in accident and emergency, a claim that was flatly contradicted by the BMA [British Medical Association]. It has got to the point where we now routinely expect schools to massage their test results and hospital managers to fiddle their waiting lists. No wonder people’s everyday experience of schools and hospitals so rarely seems to accord with the glowing reports presented by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the House of Commons.
Yet Britain is not the Soviet Union and although it does imprison the most number of people per capita in Europe, there is no network of gulags or mass murders to enforce the governing party’s supremacy. Unlike Saddam Hussain, who holds sham elections in which 100 percent (‘if not more’) vote for him, in the democratic western world, elections are free and fair. Well, sort of. They just gerrymander the way people vote. Of course this is not the same as what Saddam Hussain does but it is certainly the same species of behaviour.
Democracy, Iraqi style: happiness is mandatory
Democracy, American style: representing who exactly?
Democracy, British style: looking after you, like it or not.
(Photo: Mike Scott) So why, given that we are constantly told how superior democratic states are to their benighted totalitarian counterparts, do we see time and time again the same toxic behavioral characteristics, albeit manifested in less homicidal ways?
It is because all modern states exist primarily to do things. By this I mean do more than just guard the boundaries of society (i.e. keep out marauding Turks, put out fires, run law courts). All states have always done things, such as waged wars, built aqueducts or whatever, but not all states have existed to primarily do things beyond aggrandise the King/Tzar/Chief/Khan/Sultan etc… stay out of the state’s way and it tended to leave you alone. That did not mean that such states were not capable of acts of breathtaking tyranny, just that unlike an overtly interventionist state such as we all live under these days, to a large extent the pattern of your life was social rather than political: if your children were schooled, it was because that was the custom and it seemed the thing to do, rather than because the state threatened you with arrest if you did not acquiesce to your children being conscripted for mandatory collective education.
Much like dogs, some states are more vicious than others but ultimately the people who grasp the levers of power do so in the knowledge that they are there to do things and that knowledge alone is the source of their inevitable corruption by the system they are part of. That is why in the long run it does not matter which state wants to envelop their subjects in panoptic surveillance, because in the end no state can be trusted to have such information at its casual disposal because states cannot be trusted to act other than as states, and all states are to a lesser or greater extent corrupt. It is the nature of the beast.
noun. A person who leaves remarks in the ‘comments’ section which many blogs offer.
One year ago today, we first started blighting the Internet with a pixilated stream of opinions, rants, pictures, invective and sundry insightful pontifications.
Like most bloggers, we started out using www.blogger.com to publish, using the vexed blogspot servers to host our site… and also like so many we migrated to the ever more powerful Movable Type. Nevertheless, credit where credit is due to Evan Williams of Blogger.com for making it possible for blogs to explode onto the Internet scene with such vigour.
Also special thanks to Glenn at Instapundit for providing the inspiration for starting this blog, not to mention a few early links that well and truly got the show on the road for us.
Above all, thanks to Dale Amon for bringing the whole concept of blogging to my attention. If you really love (or hate) us, he is the one you should thank (blame) for getting me started!
Tonight we are having the inevitable party (we never need much of an excuse for a party) at the Black Widow Pub to toast our continuing diatribes.
Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the ride as we lionise all that is right with the world and rail against everything that irks us.
We have only just begun to fight!
noun. Derived from anarchist. An advocate of minimal government, often described as the night watchman state, in which the state exist legitimately only to enable appropriate law and order and to deal with collective territorial defense.
Such as state can exist to reinforce the liberty of individuals but not to ‘do things’ and is therefore a largely ‘apolitical polity’ guarding the boundaries of civil society.
Some minarchists view this as a transitional state leading inevitably to completely stateless anarcho-capitalism, whilst others see minarchy as a stable end point.
Whilst this is not a blog specific term, it is often used on ‘pundit blogs’, many of which are libertarian, hence its inclusion here.
But what is the name of a group of jack-o’-lanterns? I think two names might be needed: On a crisp, cold and clear Halloween, they are perhaps a cackle… or maybe a coven, or a leering or even a haunting of jack-o’-lanterns.
But the day after the night before, in rainy grey London, they are just a sorry sight to behold: they are jack-o’-lanterns no more, misshapen and decaying …alas, nothing more than a woefulness of pumpkins.
An interesting hysterical historical document has come into the possession of Rand Simberg.
It is a good thing this sort of idiotic nonsense would never happen in our more enlightened era, right? Right?
Greetings from London on this All Hallows Eve. I have always thought this festival was wasted on the very young… it is not a time for ‘friendly ghosts or good witches’, it is a time to get in touch with your inner werewolf
Wishing everyone a suitably ghastly Halloween. Just remember what happens if you have too much fun!
What so many of capitalism’s defenders seem to miss is that just because a large company is doing something legally, that does not mean it is ‘kosher’ capitalism. In Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, companies like Krupp and Seimens remained under entrenched private management in spite of the National Socialist German Workers Party coming to power, or more accurately, because of the new overtly anti-capitalist government.
They did this by running their companies in such a manner as to support the objectives of the National Socialists. In return, the state ensured they maintained a privileged position, insulated from upstart new market entrants in their respective fields. These companies, working hand in glove with the state, could ensure that national laws would be adjusted as needed to support whatever business models the entrenched companies liked, and the state could be sure that company strategies would be based servicing the needs and objectives of the Nazi Party, not to mention paying backhanders to leading Party members.
Of course, one does not have to look as far back as National Socialist Germany of the 1940’s to see examples of companies trying to manipulate the state to prop up an entrenched way of doing things: for the last few years the music industry in the United States has been trying to use the law of the land to crush challenges to its old physical media based business models. Rather than running their business in the interests of the state, nowadays in modern democratic statist political systems, large companies spend vast sums on lobbyists and on funding the election campaigns of politicians who might as well have an hourly rate for their services stamped on their foreheads.
Now in Australia, Microsoft looks ready to try and buy themselves some legislation for much the same reasons after an Australian court declined to stop people modifying XBox hardware:
Microsoft would be forced to reconsider selling the Xbox video game system in Australia, or seek changes to the law, following the acquittal in July of a Sydney man alleged to have sold chips that modify a Sony PlayStation 2 to play imported games, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said yesterday.
[…]
“Given the way the economic model works, and that is a subsidy followed, essentially, by fees for every piece of software sold, our licence framework has to do that,” Mr Ballmer said. “If there are aspects that are not allowed, it would encourage us to require a change in the legal framework. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make economic sense.”
As usual a pure laissez-faire solution beckons: if Australia refuses to criminalize innovation and therefore Microsoft declines to sell its XBox Games Consols down under, then simply abolish all the idiotic import restrictions and tariffs currently clogging up Australia’s economy and then… who gives a damn where Microsoft chooses to sell their products: if there is a demand for XBox in Oz, a ‘grey market’ will rapidly appear as capitalist importers across the world buy up XBoxs by the container load elsewhere (such as Taiwan, USA, India) and ship them in themselves.
If that busts MS’s business model, so what? Let them find another one that actually works without the involvement of police around the world to make it succeed.
End of problem.
So now we will see another test of George Bush’s very shaky Free Trader credentials. He rightly wants Latin America to open up its markets to mutually enriching capitalism via the Free Trade Area of Americas (FTAA) agreements… but will the USA do the same for its markets?
In order to make FTAA worthwhile, Brazil has demanded the United States open its fiercely protected sugar, steel and citrus markets to freer competition.
Analysts agree that without Brazil there will be no FTAA, and it is unclear how quickly Washington can lower key tariffs.
It amazes me how so many US Republicans who cursed every breath taken by Bill Clinton, damning him quite rightly as an unprincipled political weathervane, nevertheless just gloss over George Bush’s dismal record on liberalising world trade. Why is allowing the state to interfere in markets so as to make products such as sugar, lumber, steel and fruit more expensive to American consumers and industry just shrugged off?
The need for political support from key states, you say? Ah, I see. So you mean George Bush is just an unprincipled political weathervane, then. Gotcha.
There has been enormous interest regarding the Samizdata.net article last Wedneday about the bizarre poster appearing across London. The large number of comments and e-mails that people have left present a wide range of fascinating views and a few rather odd theories.
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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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