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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When I read this first paragraph in a longer piece about Rowan Williams the intrinsically hilarious next Archbishop of Canterbury (he even looks funny), I could not help but marvel over the sheer linguistic and logical absurdity of it
ST DAVID’S (Reuters) – The future Archbishop of Canterbury has been made an honorary druid at a colourful pageant in his native Wales, but he denies that the ceremony makes him some kind of pagan.
Actually it does indeed mean precisely that. The next Archbishop of Canterbury has been made ‘some sort of pagan’, namely an honourary pagan. The Druids are a pre-Christian order whose spirituality is by definition pagan: it pretty much has to be if it is pre-Christian! The Archbishop designate has allowed them to make him an honourary Druid, therefore…
I suppose having some facility with simple logic is not a pre-requisite for a job of such passing consequence to the Church of England.
When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
– H.L. Mencken
Now that we have a European ‘single market’, trade is much easier between companies across EU national borders right? Well, not necessarily.
In today’s Sunday Telegraph, the nightmares experienced by a British fireworks company trying to do its lawful business across Europe highlights the reality of Europe’s so-called single market.
What a superb showing by British shooter Mick Gault. He keeps winning at the Commonwealth Games in spite of having to do all his training in Switzerland.
The reason he has to train in another country is that Britain took a giant lurch towards becoming a police state in 1997 by outlawing all handguns (not to mention seeing firearms crimes soar since then).
It has long seemed to me that as interest rates have been forced to a ludicrous 40 year low, there is no real reason to keep money sitting in a bank as once the government appropriates a chunk of the pitiful interest on your cash, you might just as well have it stashed under your bed.
The rational view is that rather that seeing a bank as intermediary to invest your money for you, it is really just a glorified piggy bank… a supposedly safe place to invest your money. But then when you add in the fact retail banks go out of their way to pile on service costs and pull such ‘fast ones’ as taking up to four days to clear cheques (thereby pocketing a few days interest on the uncleared funds), when in reality they are capable of clearing the transaction before you have walked away from the counter, it is hardly surprising that retail banks are hearing the first rumblings of a consumer revolt.
I have always thought consumer boycotts were splendid things but quite why the inane Independent Banking Advisory Service (IBAS), a bank consumer group, is calling for a windfall tax (free registration required for link to ERisk Portal) on banks as a result is not so clear.
[Eddie Wetherill of the IBAS says] Nobody can understand how charges are calculated or precisely when they apply. The banks appear a law unto themselves.The Government has made fancy promises to be the consumer champion, but in reality it appears to have been in the pockets of the banks. We are calling for a windfall tax. They have ripped off the public and ought to be paying back £5-10 billion. We have seen ten years of plundering.
And as a consumer of retail banking services, exactly how do I benefit from having the government help itself to the bank’s funds? Does Wetherill think the state is going to appropriate £5-10 billion from the banks and then dole it out to retail banking customers? How idiotic. The government already takes a great deal more of my money that my bank ever has and any ‘windfall tax’ is just going to make the bank a less solvent less secure piggy bank without helping me one iota. With ‘friends’ like the Independent Banking Advisory Service, who needs enemies?
It is nice to see HM Customs and Excise get one in the eye from a British court. These people would have you believe they are just acting to ‘protect’ Britain from ‘evil drug smugglers’ whilst in reality just engaging in capricious power trips, confiscating property of travellers without any evidence of wrong doing and reversing the burden of proof with a presumption of guilt.
It is particularly bizarre that Customs and Excise claim:
Cigarette, tobacco and alcohol smugglers cost taxpayers £9 million a day
How does depriving the British state of £9 million per day in taxes, and thereby allowing British consumers to purchase cheaper tax free ‘smuggled’ goods, actually cost British taxpayers? Surly it is the British taxes on cigarettes, tobacco and alcohol that is the added cost to British taxpayers, not the avoidance thereof. Since when is not being forced to pay more money a ‘cost’? The ‘smuggler’ makes a profit by purchasing cheaper goods taxed at lower French levels and then importing said goodies to Britain… and the millions of Britons each year who purchase those less costly tax-free goods are thereby able to afford more of what they want… and the state gets less money to spend on surveillance, property redistribution, bureaucracy etc. etc. etc.
Sounds like a win-win-win situation to me.
Canadian Leah McLaren‘s remarks about the sexuality of English males amused Adriana but a gentleman who actually dated the winsome Ms. McLaren has a rather less charitable view on why she wrote the things she did.
Victor Davis Hanson has written a truly bizarre and confused article in National Review in which he attempts to define the widening gulf between the ‘Europeans’ and the United States (he does not really explain which Europeans he has in mind… Greeks? Germans? Portuguese? Finns?).
He suggests that one reason for ‘European’ disdain for the United States, not just amongst some poisoned social elite ruling class but the man in the street, comes from dislike of the middle and lower class orientation of American culture.
[America is] the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically and have fully taken control of the popular culture to create strange institutions from Sunday cookouts and do-it-yourself home improvement to tasteless appurtenances such as Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs.
Ah yes, I frequently hear ‘European’ taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other… oh pleeeease. I don’t know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to ‘Europe’ (I guess ‘Europe’ is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs… and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like ‘Big Brother’ on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class ‘cultural empowerment’. The reality of what common people in ‘Europe’ think about the United States is that for the most part they don’t really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.
As for me, describing the United States as ‘the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically’ causes a wry smile. I wish it was more generally true. Unfortunately the USA is just as much in the grip of statist corporatism as Europe, only unlike Europe, the opposition to it is better organised. I wish Hanson’s rose tinted view of the USA was correct because I see much in American enterprise culture to admire but there are two Americas… one of which twice elected President Clinton on a platform not of economic empowerment but of welfare dependency and statism. Unfortunately it is not too hard to find the views Hanson thinks particularly ‘European’ being aired in Los Angeles and Boston.
Now whilst I have long known that there are tiny fringe communist parties quixotically tilting at windmills in the United States, until I read an article about so-called September 11th ‘profiteers’ on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, I had no idea that any of them were in fact in power. Yet it seems that Michigan’s Attorney General Jennifer Granholm not only believes that the State owns the means of production and distribution, but is willing to use the force of state to simply impose by edict (not even by ‘law’) how people dispose of property they have legally purchased for resale.
I strongly recommend this article to anyone who still blithely feels that ‘America is the freest country in the world’ and ‘it couldn’t happen here’ and ‘that sorta thing only goes on in Europe’. Dream on. The enemy is not at the gate enviously looking in, she is sitting in an office in a state capital near you.
The Commonwealth games have been organised to be a ‘logo free’ event so that they are not ‘tainted’ by commercialism. Ok, now let me get this straight… the Commonwealth, an association of kleptocratic nation states that includes mass murdering tyrants like Robert Mugabe, think it is okay to celebrate nationality, a concept in whose name Commonwealth subjects are robbed and imprisoned, but it is not okay to celebrate commercialism, a concept that allows people to gain employment and acquire the money that the state then steals in taxes. Riiiiiiight, gotcha.
However when I saw that the game’s organisers were annoyed at David Beckham for wearing a track-suit with ‘Adidas’ sequined across it when he presented the weird looking baton to the Queen, Beckham went up in my estimations. Way to go, Becks, you subversive capitalist tool you!
Yo, Mugabe! Guess where I’m gonna to stick this thing!
Due to the chaos caused by the change over to the new blog format (plus the fact we actually have lives beyond blogging… shocking I know), many people to whom we have written saying we would link to them have not seen the link appear.
We will try to catch up with all the additional blog links (and perhaps cut a few inactive ones) over the next week or so. Feel free to remind us if we have previously promised to link to you 
There are several companies that anti-capitalist protestors love to hate and two of them are Disney and MacDonalds. These companies are seen as the very embodiment of American ‘economic and cultural imperialism’. Samizdata contributor and blogger in her own right Natalie Solent once remarked on the Libertarian Alliance Forum (20 June 2002) that there is a near 1:1 correlation between people who slag off MacDonalds, using derisory terms like ‘MacJobs’, and people who are in reality advocating a nihilistic communistic reordering of society.
And yet whilst I think Natalie is generally correct on that point, in the right leaning Daily Telegraph, Andrew Gimson also writes a rather flaccid article about why he too does not like Disney and it has nothing to do with big business.
Like Andrew Gimson, I have nothing against big business and am an avid supporter of globalization. As a result I regard Disney and MacDonalds as remarkable examples of international commerce and I have no problem with them plying their toxic wares everywhere across the globe… hang on a minute…’toxic wares’?
Yes, the truth is, I detest both Disney and MacDonalds. 
Much in the same way as I support the right of looney toon Nazis and incoherent socialists to publicly advocate their idiotic views, so too do I support the right of Disney and MacDonalds to hawk their wares from Peoria to Petropavlovsk… and just as I support the right of people to shout abuse and pour scorn on Nazis and Socialists when they do air their views, so too do I support the right of people to vote with closed wallets in order to protect their children from near-fraudulent cultural hijacking by Disney and heart disease and obesity by garbage-like ‘food’ sold by MacDonalds.
If Disney wants to create animated movies (that are in reality little more than an exercise in merchandising) from whole cloth, then I have no real objection. But when they produce something like ‘The Little Mermaid’, I find my blood boiling. The Little Mermaid is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, and was written not as Disney would have us believe, to convey the message ‘go for your dream, girl, and live happily ever after’. No, not at all.
Your tail will then disappear, and shrink up into what mankind calls legs, and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow. If you will bear all this, I will help you.”
“Yes, I will,” said the little princess in a trembling voice, as she thought of the prince and the immortal soul.
This is far from the pallid castrated ‘culture’ that Disney’s marketing wonks would have you believe the story contains. Now I realise this sort of gritty prose might not sell so well in some places with sugar coated rose tinted views of what children should hear and read, but then why the hell call it ‘The Little Mermaid’ then? Call it ‘The Adventures of Ariel’ or ‘Fishgirl gets her Prince’ or anything that does not claim to have the slightest intellectual similarity to what Hans Christian Andersen was actually trying to say.
Feel free to purchase Disney’s drivel if you wish for your hamburger bloated offspring, but do not kid yourself that your children are hearing anything whatsoever from probably the most famous writer of children’s stories who ever lived.
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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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