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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Part 1 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.
I have often pondered what principles are shared by all real libertarians, and have periodically tried to produce a set of ‘distilled axioms’ that we all share. This has always proved harder than one might think. Minarchism, Objectivism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Agorism, Dynamism, capital ‘L’ Political Party Libertarianism, Hoppeism, cultural conservative libertarianism, classical liberalism, Whigs, etc. etc. all more or less fall within the nebulous taxonomy of ‘libertarians’ whilst at the same time often vilifying each other’s ‘-isms’.
I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not the ‘non-initiation of force principle’ which is frequently offered up as the core axiom that characterises us all (I regard that as emergent default behaviour, which is to say a consequence, not an underlying axiom). What I offer up is:
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.
Now the reason I think this is the case is that whilst we objectively derive our rights as individuals, we nevertheless exist within a social setting. We are not isolated atomic entities living in fortified towers, we are social individuals. Misrepresenting this self-evident fact results in people thinking that ‘libertarians’ are in fact nihilists and therefore treating libertarian theories on ‘anarchy’ (the rule of no-one) as synonym for ‘disorder’. Now part of the reason for this is that libertarian revulsion for the statist force based collective in all its modern forms (socialism, the overt end of the collectivist continuum… and statist conservatism, the covert end of the continuum), makes them condemn any function of the modern state because that what is being done is currently being carried out by the state, rather than because the function is inherently antithetical to liberty: the military immediately springs to mind.
This has blinded many to the fact collectivist and collective are not the same thing at all. We can come together to create wealth (for example, getting a job and working for someone else) or band together to deal with an emergency when one or all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come calling, i.e. act collectively without without becoming collectivists, because a collectivist does not accept that you, an individual, actually owns anything… and so how can you voluntarily elect for collective action what is not yours to loan or dispose of. To them is was never your land, your capital, your labour to begin with because several property does not exist.
And therein also lies the difference between the covert form of collectivism, statist conservativism, and actual libertarians. A conservative will accept the concept of several property, but only sort of. This also has misleading echoes of the difference between the libertarian propertarian/anarcho-capitalist view of absolute personal sovereignty over several property and the libertarian minarchist views to which folks like me subscribe to, which sees property rights as contextual: within the context of a forest fire or war, your property rights are subordinated to the reality of non-civil society, without being alienated once civil society is restored. Conservatives on the other hand will sing paeans to private property whilst supporting compulsory purchase (US: eminent domain) for ‘important’ yet non-emergency reasons, such as roads, parks, urban redevelopments or whatever seems ‘sensible’ for the ‘common good’. Yes, you can own property but not if Donald Trump really wants to build on it.
Statist conservatives generally see societies as having separate ‘rights’ too, as it they were somehow more than shorthand for an aggregated expression of individual decisions, blurring the boundary between society and state in the process and masking the reality that they really agree with the socialists that the collective trumps the individual when push comes to shove. Socialists take that a giant step further, seeing state and society as one just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau always argued, the individual as no more independent from the society-as-state than a blood cell from a human body. So a libertarian is someone who thinks rights are something only individuals have but opinions vary greatly how we actually interact socially within the context of our objectively (or naturally or divinely or even subjectively…pick one depending on your -ism) derived rights.
The awful disappearance of two young girls in Britain who were possibly lured to a meeting via the Internet and then kidnapped by some vile monster has renewed calls for a clamp down on the Internet. The sort of things being talked about to contain the perceived threat from on-line ‘paedophiles’ (by which people really mean pederasts) is fairly mild stuff but that is always how it starts out. I just hope that this is not used as yet another excuse for the Panopticon state to stick its proboscis ever deeper into our private on-line lives.
I am quite satisfied with the Café Press on-line shop we already have for Samizdata.net (they are currently running a sale in fact!), but does anyone out there know of any other on-line shop providers which offer tee-shirts in colours other than Ash Grey and White? I would love to do black and/or deep blue shirts with our logo in white as well!
Please e-mail us (see sidebar) if you know of any.
Thanks.
Yes, that is right. Regardless of the facts presented about how nationalised industries fail in every other sector, the moral (it is funded by theft) and intellectual (it makes no economic sense) arguments against a socialist health service that is based on force backed appropriation has fallen on deaf ears in Britain.
So how about a purely utilitarian analysis based on life and death? The NHS is institutionally incapable of not perpetrating horrors like this. If you pay taxes in the UK, that is what you are paying for. On nothing other than utilitarian grounds based on self-preservation, do you still want the NHS to survive?
I occasionally use the NHS myself under the logic as as the state forces me to contribute to it regardless of alternate arrangements I might make, I may as well use it to recoup at least some of my own money. In fact I am going to submit to its ‘tender cares’ tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Calling all you former anti-Apartheid protesters of years gone by: do you miss the comradery of old days standing in front of the South African embassies in London or Washington DC or Paris in protest at a regime that treated people not as individuals but just as a collective racial category? Have you not been able to bring yourself to throw out the old placards and tee-shirts? Well have I got some great news for you! Britain is introducing overt political Apartheid and so your time has come again!
Huh? You’re not interested? Oh, I see… it is only so called right wing collectivist racial discrimination you were against, not collectivist racial discrimination itself.
Sorry to have bothered you.
Adriana, who knows a thing or two about the reality of living in a repressive regime, points out that doing business in a place in China is not a morally unambiguous matter and asked
[D]id anyone call for a boycott of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies during the Cold War? I remember the drinks in their distinctive bottles that put some fizz into my rather gloomy childhood under communism.
I guess my answer is that I have no problem with selling Coca Cola to communist states, after all it is communism’s hapless victim for the most part who will be drinking it. Also trade itself can be wonderfully subversive… but what Yahoo is doing is analogous to Coca Cola agreeing to embed a recording device in each bottle so that the state can hear what each person is talking about whilst they sip their drink…ie, not just trading with tyrants but actually collaborating with the repression of their subject peoples. That is what Yahoo (and Cisco, Oracle and their ilk) are indeed doing.
And that I rather do have a problem with.
However please do not think I want just Yahoo singled out. As Adriana said, Cisco thought nothing of installing the telecom architecture to enable the Chinese Panopticon approach to the Internet. Whenever companies do business with those who would abridge our liberties, they rarely do so for reasons of sheer malevolence but rather due to the cost-benefit to shareholders of working in such regions of the world (though Oracle chief Larry Elison does like to hold up pro-fascist Napoleon as a paragon of virtue so in his case who knows).
My view is that not just Yahoo but Cisco, Oracle and anyone else who wants to get rich selling the apparatus of repression should be given to understand when they make their utilitarian business decisions that part of the cost will be people who see the world in more moral terms taking their business elsewhere. Do not underestimate the value to a company of its corporate image:
‘Cisco and Yahoo, Big Satan and Little Satan: international partners in repression’
…is not the sort of meme these guys want in circulation as it is just not good for business, and that is why I support noisy boycotts which involve saying things that people in boardrooms do not want to hear.
Far left statist Christian peace campaigners Pax Christi have issued a declaration on the impending war to depose Iraqi despot Saddam Hussain. It makes for a fascinating insight into the meta-context of the organization’s members, which include former KGB favourite cleric, Bruce Kent:
The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is an act of political rhetoric that must be distinguished from a military campaign against a sovereign state. It cannot be used to justify an attack on Iraq, and any offensive planned to counteract the perceived threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should not be represented as a war against terrorists.
What the hell is morally enabling about a sovereign state as opposed to a bunch of trans-national terrorists? How does an act by a state or against a state somehow take on a different moral quality simply by virtue of the fact it is carried out by or against a collective? Are there no objective moral qualities? Because Saddam Hussain presides over a sovereign nation and Osama bin Laden did not, what is the difference morally how they may be attacked? Surely an attacks is objectively just (or not) regardless of the fact a nation state is (is not) involved.
We are pleased to note that Prime Minister Tony Blair has assured Parliament that Britain will not support any military action against Iraq without the authority of the United Nations.
As I mentioned yesterday when I attacked the next Archbishop of Canterbury, what possible moral authority can spring from a ghastly cabal of benighted states like the UN? To get approval from the UN for something is not a moral matter but rather a political matter… the calculus is ‘We’ll vote to lift restrictions on ivory sales if The Peoples Republic of Kleptostan votes for x in the general assembly’. Why the hell do these people hold up UN authority as having any validating moral quality whatsoever? As our resident Reuters wonk Tom Burroughes said yesterday, people like the excellent Jim Henley have made all manner of rational arguments against going to war with Saddam Hussain, but people like Pax Christi are incoherence incarnate and with a sense of their own moral superiority to boot which is insufferable and laughable equal measure.
Ace blogger John Weidner of Random Jottings has written about a truly shocking decision by Yahoo to help the Chinese government censor the Internet for the 1 billion people living in China (and of course that open air prison camp called Tibet).
There is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and that is to made them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking: Boycott Yahoo!
The next Archbishop of Canterbury tells us that without a new UN resolution authorizing the United States and its allies (meaning Britain) to attack the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain:
…any US-led invasion of Iraq [would be] “immoral and illegal.” Yesterday he softened his stance to say that he would support only a UN-sanctioned invasion of Iraq.
Firstly, Rowan Williams is not a lawyer and his legal opinions are about as meaningful as those of David Beckham or Mariah Carey or Joe Blogs who works flipping burgers in a fast food joint near you. The Nazi race laws were passed by the duly constituted judiciary and therefore ‘legal’, Pol Pot murdered a third of Cambodia under the duly constituted law of the land, slaves were ‘legally’ owned in the USA and Jesus Christ was not lynched but rather was crucified perfectly ‘legally’ by the Imperial Roman and Jewish authorities. Since when has the utterances of churchmen been relevant to an act’s legality as opposed to its morality? Legality and morality are only passing acquaintances.
Secondly, as for moralitry, the majority of member states of the UN are, by ‘western’ standards, abusers of human rights. A substantial minority of those states are out and out tyrannies, such as Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, Belarus and Burma to name but five. How does this body somehow become a font of moral authority? By what logic does this parliament of thieves and murderers become transformed into a source of moral authority whose imprimatur transforms a act from illegal and immoral to one he can support? Are there no objective moral reasons involved in making a choice here, merely the machinations of a corrupt transnational bureaucracy?
As of yesterday, the Japanese government brought a nightmarish integrated national resident registry network system on-line called Juki Net. Privacy activists in Japan see this as an alarming tool in the hands of a state with a long history of intrusion into civil society and even some municipal authorities are uneasy about the privacy implications.
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
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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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