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There is a splendid little article in the NY Post about well known Tranzi, Idiotarian and British national embarrassment Anita Roddick, of Body Shop fame. That she sees herself as being martyred by the ‘right wing’ along with a veritable ‘who’s who’ list idiotarians like Noam Chomsky, is particularly entertaining. We are not ‘right wing’ Anita, and we think you are a buffoon too. Think what fun it would be to see the results of half a ton of Body Shop bubble bath being dumped in Boston Harbour! September 26th, 2002 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 How can I count the ways! Well first, let me say what is right with him… namely that as a future constitutional figurehead monarch, he is in fact powerless to do jack shit to impose his world view on the rest of us and his ideas are in reality no more significant than John Bull the Greengrocer. That is a very good thing indeed because unlike members of the government, we are free to ignore his bleating if we wish. The thing that annoys me however is that when Charles opines in some issues, such as hunting, people misunderstand his underpinning philosophy. People think of him as advocating liberties against the encroachment of the state because he supports the right of hunters to hunt in Britain, but this is utterly incorrect. Prince Charles is in fact an advocate of big interventionist redistributive government: for example see his calls for taxpayers to be forced to subsidise organic farms (which overwhelmingly sell to higher income members of the public). Most significantly he has no problem whatsoever with the philosophical position that rights exist collectively, which is the underpinning of every tyranny imaginable. In a letter to Downing Street, the Prince wrote:
So when Charles says:
He is not arguing against the morality of the state interfering in people’s lives, just the fact that it is not being done in a way he approves of. Like so many paleo-conservatives, he thinks the state telling you how to live your life is just fine, provided ‘sensible chaps from Eton’ are the ones in control of that state. September 25th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is the UK government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. As it is rather extensive I have yet to wade through the whole thing. Read it and see what you think.
Well the UN has no authority, moral or practical, so that point means exactly nothing. On the last point, that is putting it mildly! I rather suspect it will not change too many people’s minds regarding the justification of military action against Saddam Hussain’s regime as I have observed that the facts of the matter have only a limited bearing on the positions people take. September 24th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Jim Bennett‘s latest Anglosphere article is a particularly good one called The European Roach Motel. It addressed in more depth the same issues we touched on in The traitor class at work. September 23rd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The lack of new articles and comments has been due to a period of server problems… We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming! September 22nd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 We have had a few e-mails (plus a couple comment entries) asking how is it that whilst numerous articles on Samizdata.net have bitterly decried farm subsidies of any sort, we are also writing articles in support of tomorrows Countryside Alliance March in London. The answer is to be found in the slogan of the Countryside Alliance March itself: for Liberty & Livelihood. Supporting ‘Liberty’ is not exactly unusual for us: we are libertarians! The liberty in question is the right of country people to hunt in Britain as they have done for centuries, without bigoted class warriors using the violence of law to criminalise their way of life. Hunting is an activity not of ‘state’ but of civil society… and the state simply has no business intruding into what goes on across privately owned land (and of course as libertarians, we believe that the only ownership of land that is legitimate is private ownership). That is why we support the Countryside Alliance’s March. As for ‘Livelihood’… Hunting is also a significant source of jobs in many areas and in that respect we are all in favour of the state not putting those people on the dole queue. The most vexed issue however is that of farm subsidies. It must be clear to all who regularly read Samizdata.net that all of our contributing writers are in favour of true laissez-faire capitalism and therefore resolutely opposed to subsidising any businesses (i.e. farm subsidies or industrial subsidies)… and the great granddaddy of all market distorting, theft based systems of redistribution-by-subsidy is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). What CAP means is that efficient farms (and by European standards, British farms are indeed efficient) are made to subsidise inefficient farms, and other sectors of the economy are forced to prop up agriculture generally. Moreover, even the way efficient farms are run is distorted by subsidies and directives that have the effect of addicting even the stoutest souls to state handouts like so many heroin addicts. One major result of this being massive overproduction of food and agricultural overcapacity on a truly epic scale. So for a farmer to remain in business when competing within the massively subsidised and mind-bogglingly regulated British and European agricultural market, clearly just cutting all subsidies to the UK would mean capital intensive UK agriculture more or less drops dead over night. Thus clearly the most rational solution is a complete Europe-wide ban on all farm subsidies in any form… with no exceptions whatsoever. No doubt many farms would indeed go bust as there is simply no rational economic reason for their existence when detached from the fantasy world of state planning… and that is just too damn bad. Yet business go bust all the time, so why should farms be any different? Food is a colossal interlinked global market and so there is no reason at all for the great trading nations of the world to protect indigenous food production on non-economic grounds. The fact is socialist and paleo-conservative farm policies are the reason food is so damn expensive in the developed world. The so called ‘friends to the poor’ in the Labour Party in Britain and their friends in the dominant statist wing of the Conservative Party are the self same people who are responsible for poor working men and women in Britain paying vastly more for food, the very stuff of life, than would be the case if free markets decided what things would cost. Not only that, these are the self same people who claim to care about poverty in the Third World whilst at the same time denying the First World consumer access to their cheap agricultural products whose sale would actually improve the economic situation in the Third World. Of course the situation in the United States is only slightly less subsidy distorted than the EU, so one would hope that eventually taxpayers over there will also decide it is time for some ‘tough love’. Therefore when we go to the march tomorrow, we will be supporting the liberty of entire communities to not be beggared and persecuted by state sponsored bigots regardless of the sanctification of such tyrannous acts by democratic politics… and we will also be reminding the country folk that if they want to insist the state stop interfering in countryside pursuits, that should logically also mean an end to interference by subsidy and regulation. British agriculture is more than capable of looking after itself, if only it is allowed to play on a level playing, field rather than a CAP distorted one. September 21st, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Insights come in varied and peculiar forms, such as those decanted from the lips of such British sages as Rab C. Nesbit to the north and the Macc Lads from a tad further south. To be honest I think the Macc Lads are at least as reliable as DEBKA when it comes to military analysis and probably rather better… well certainly more forthright. Read the article and make up your own mind.
Before you read the linked Spectator article, let me proffer some linguistic assistance to our non-British readers… ‘Boddingtons’ is an inexpensive but far from ineffective beer in considerable favour with the broader end of Britain’s socioeconomic pyramid. September 20th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The attempt by statist corporations to allow their Big Media interests to hack your computer with the US government’s blessing is moving into high gear with the Berman bill.
Ah yes, blesséd democracy… in fact the finest democracy money can buy. Of course what idiots like Professor Miller do not seem to grasp is that it is not “the essence of capitalism” at all: the essence of capitalism is allowing market forces (i.e. capital) to determine what is or is not a viable business model. By arguing that the state should prop up what is clearly becoming a non-viable business model (the existing music business), Miller is describing not capitalism but statist stasis based economic systems like socialism and fascism. Miller is free to propose what he likes for the benefit of th existing structure of Big Music but to describe propping it up with restrictive, innovation destroying, market mechanism deadening laws as “The essence of capitalism” suggests to me that perhaps the article has a typo and he is in fact a Professor of Ergonomics. And that is without even considering the civil liberties aspects to this.
Also does anyone seriously think that if this law makes it onto the books in the USA that Big Music will restrict its Denial of Service Attacks and direct hacks to computers and networks in the USA? You must be joking. Of course two can play at that game, fellahs. Hackers are a moving target… which cannot be said for the corporations now threatening to hack personal computers by the million. I wonder if the next ‘shot heard around the world’ will be fired at the state backed corporates from ten thousand keyboards of people who have finally seen an intrusion too far. We will just have to wait and see. September 20th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:
Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com! September 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Now corporate promotional calenders featuring scantily clad ladies draped over the company’s products is hardly a new or unusual concept… expect when the company in question is an Italian manufacturer of coffins! This article has induced me to add a new category to samizdata.net (see category archives) called ‘How very odd!’. September 20th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not a huge fan of Steven Den Beste’s blog USS Clueless, as I dislike the style and content on so many levels. I frankly regard his understanding of history, geopolitics and in particular anything beyond the shore of his home country as generally underpinned by misleading stereotypes and ‘Hollywoodized’ history. In particular I dislike his frequent risible saccharine paeans to the transcendent superiority of an imagined United States of America in which in one would scarcely believe Waco, Ruby Ridge, civil forfeiture and Ted Kennedy would even be conceivable, let alone a reality. Such ‘feelgood’ writing is undoubtedly very good for the hit rate but then the Mirror, Sun and Daily Mail will always outsell the Times, Telegraph and Guardian for much the same reason. In short, I regard USS Clueless as a prime example of American neo-conservative thought at its most blinkered and parochial. And so it is somewhat of a surprise to me to find myself in fairly robust broad agreement with Steven’s article about the fact the war against Iraq is in reality a manifestation of a cultural war. To me that is such a self evident truth that I am astonished that so many people find Den Beste’s essay so controversial. Now as a libertarian, I am highly critical of the way western nation states are structured. In fact I would say that Continental European and, to a slightly lesser extent, Anglosphere civil society has a deep rooted sickness brought on by a century of creeping statism. And yes, that includes the United States. The degree to which freedoms taken for granted by our grandparents are regulated and circumscribed grows almost daily. As I have often written, the state is not your friend. Of course the views I have just expressed would not come as any surprise to anyone who has read Samizdata.net for more than a few days: so far, so ‘typically libertarian’. However the idea that as the state (meaning for me, the British state, and for many of our readers, the American state (USA or Canada)) and the aspects of civil culture which support it, is something to be resisted and undermined until the state has been cut down to size and the culture put back in touch with the classical liberal roots from which it sprang, does not mean that I think therefore ‘western’ culture is not better than the alternatives. I am constantly threatened by the state which makes me its subject and constantly robbed by it under threat of violence. Yet it is not the British or American states which threatens to set off nuclear weapons in London or spread smallpox through the public transport system in New York. We are indeed threatened by the Islamic culture that is expressed by Wahhabism and Den Beste is entirely correct that we need to understand that what happened on September 11th was just a very visible expression of the kulturkampf that has already been going on for a long time. I strongly suspect it is because Islam is so clearly losing this ‘war’ that Al Qaeda was motivated to do the things it did. For much the same reason that this ‘war’ is so evidently real, I find myself grudgingly supportive of Israel on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is (sometimes) my friend, and also that Zionism is an entirely parochial -ism that will pose no threat to me either now or at any time in the future. So is Den Beste correct that the entire ‘Islamosphere’ needs to be destabilized as part of this kulturkampf? Yes, but that does not need to be done entirely by force of arms, not even primarily so. We do indeed have to make sure that the short/medium term threat of our literal destruction that springs from the ‘Islamosphere’ is dealt with forcefully by the equally literal destruction of Ba’athist Socialism and eventually (let us not kid ourselves) radical Wahhabism. Once that is done, there is no need to turn the Islamic world into an American province, even if that was possible… in the long run the comfortable banalities and sheer material success of the Western secular capitalist way will destroy the cultural underpinnings of the threat that became impossible to ignore on September 11th 2001. September 19th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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