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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In a nauseating opinion piece by authoritarian paleo-socialist Dea Birkett, writing in The Guardian (naturally), the state is urged to use force to abolish private education altogether in Britain. Birkett wants people to be deprived of even having the possibility of privately educating their children. We are told society must have a common purpose and once private education is made illegal, presumably socialist education police will start locking up people who dare to set up underground schools or educate at home. Birkett urges nothing less than universal forced backed nationally planned state education for all, regardless of what a family actually wants, in order to further national socialist goals.
But such a tiny minority holding on to such an outdated view on the right to exclusivity would increasingly appear absurd, as redundant as the royal family. Once private schools were reduced to such insignificant numbers, they could be easily, quietly closed down. The benefits would be enormous.
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Education would become something we all shared, equal stakeholders in its quality and worth. Education could be effectively and efficiently planned on a national basis, in the knowledge that every child would go to a local school.
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It’s no longer any good just offering carrots. It’s time to reach for the stick.
Will someone please remind me which side won the Cold War? Natalie Solent has described the equality and sense of common purpose Birkett demands as the equality and common purpose of galley slaves. If that ever comes to pass, Birkett and her ilk need to be shown that they are not the only ones who can reach for the stick.
“Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing on others, he has a right to do for himself… all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.”
Edmund Burke was born 273 years ago today.
A Reuters article has claimed that eating over 400 Euro notes could prove toxic due to the ink… but what I want to know is how do they know that? I will not believe them until someone holds down Romano Prodi and forces 400 Euro notes down his throat (ideally using European Commissioner Chris Patten‘s head as a ramrod).
If Prodi croaks, I will freely admit that perhaps I should not always be such a sceptic.
It is simple really… less, not more, public sending helps the economy. What is so hard to grasp about that? When the government taxes, it allocates resources in a way that would not have otherwise have occurred (and if it would have occurred like that, then why is that aspect of what government does being done by government at all?). If the government had not taken those resources and allocated them, the capital would not have just sat under a mattress… it would have gone elsewhere: that is what capital does.
So when the government proudly points to some wonderful things it has built and the alleged economic benefits they will bring, what you do not see is what that self same capital would have done if the state had not appropriated it from its previous owners… what they would have done, what they would have built.
So when Gerard Baker at the Financial Times says Bush may have harmed the US economy with his tax cuts, rather than saying he may have harmed the economy by not reducing spending, he is in effect saying that it is only deficits, rather than government spending itself, that hurts economies. By saying High-Tax-Tom Daschle has better economic policies, that must mean that government spending is actually better for an economy than private spending. How does that work? That must be why the many nations whose governments appropriate more of their national resources for spending are wealthier than the United States, you know, nations like…er…um…ah…
As the focus of events is less and less on Afghanistan, the focus of the blogger punditerati is likewise fragmenting in many directions… one of the interesting things about the many blogs over the last few months has been that many bloggers have been picking up the same news stories and it has been fascinating to see differing interpretations. With the advantage of many probing eyes, obscure on-line reports get picked up from more unusual regional newspapers or some out-of-the-way repository of cypherpunk web documents, and suddenly a new surge of interacting interpretations hits the blogs. I suspect this is what Glenn Reynolds meant when he once described himself as being part of a ‘hive mind’.
However as the focus of events becomes more fragmented and regionalized post-Taliban, the stories that get picked up and blogged becomes more regionalized as well. I am fascinated by Glenn Reynolds’ often innovative takes on geopolitics and other issues on Instapundit but when I get to his views on a US plagiarism scandal involving folks I have never heard of, I tend to wander off elsewhere after the third article on the subject, checking other blogs for war news or perhaps something more generally pan-Anglospherical in appeal.
Yet I suspect this is a natural process, a cycle rather than movement towards some less interacting endpoint… the ‘hive mind’ will fragment into locally focused clusters only to surge back together periodically as a global story catches the imagination. At the moment the Canadian bloggers are all bouncing off each other in a quite interesting manner over largely Canadian issues. In a similar way, certain blogs seem to hit ‘hot streaks’ and the rest start reacting to that blog’s interesting views rather than just what the established media is reporting, setting up an interesting interblog harmonic for a while. It will be intriguing to see what dynamics take hold in the longer term when the majority of blogs stop thinking of themselves as ‘warblogs’. I suspect blogs, or something like them, are here to stay but they are sure to start mutating over time into… well, good question… into whatever comes next. We will just have to wait and see what that is.
I am certainly not an Objectivist, though it would be fair to say I have been influenced by Ayn Rand’s works. For me, the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper makes more sense, but I am also of the view that Rand is not without her merits.
Thus when I saw Tech pundit Andrew Orlowski writing in an article in The Register that Ayn Rand was a crypto-fascist, that was not something I could leave unchallenged. I must confess I have never been a great fan of Andrew Orlowski, as he also writes for New Statesman, a publication that the excellent Will Quick of DailyPundit described exquisitely as “a haven of fluorescent idiocy”.
I e-mailed Orlowski as follows:
Sir,
I would have assumed that, given your well known statist beliefs, you would have known what the word ‘fascist’ actually means. It would seem not. But let me guess… you take the Chomsky line on language and my attempt to impose coherent meaning on a word is just evidence of my desire to oppress you. Yeah, that must be it.
Had you indicated Rand’s ideas were not entirely rational, then certainly you would have made a valid point. Her non-conjectural objective epistemology does have its weaknesses, but fascist? Ludicrous. Fascism is a form of nationalist collectivism, a socialist offshoot, and which part of Rand’s ideology have you identified as collectivist? Or have you identified some form of fascism I was previously unaware of that is not in fact collectivist? Some sort of ‘individualist fascism’? That would certainly be a fascinating concept: mass rallies of one at Nuremburg perhaps?
Fascist economics involve national control (but not necessarily nominal ownership) of the means of production in the service of (ethnic) national objectives… can you point me at the remarks in Rand’s works where she advocates that?
Clearly you do not know what you are talking about and thus I am disinclined to believe anything else you write.
By your own words you are revealed, sir.
Perry de Havilland …-
Samizdata reader Jim Muchow answers my question about why Tony Blair does not do anything forceful in Zimbabwe
In hopes of resolving your befuddlement as to why Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones, I refer you to your post Our good friends, the Police further down the page.
If Blair (or the British government in general) can’t or won’t protect landowners at home, why would they want to protect British citizens in foreign countries?
Wonderful site, by the way. It is refreshing to read commentary by people who DON’T have their heads up their ass. And using the list of links to other similar sites, I see I stumbled onto their nest.
JM – I used to be disgusted, [but] now I try to be amused
He has a point there.
The US has made it clear that acts of terrorism involving Americans will not be tolerated and will be met with military action. Anyone doubting US resolve has but to look at Afghanistan to see the truth. Tony Blair stands with George Bush on this issue, supporting and indeed participating in US military actions with both Royal Navy sub-launched cruise missiles and Britain’s peerless special forces. Clearly where the US is concerned, tyranny and murder will not be tolerated by Her Majesties Government, and quite right too I might add.
What a pity the many British citizens who own land in Zimbabwe are not instead US citizens…because if they were, rather than threatening tyrant and mass murderer Robert Mugabe with expulsion from the Commonwealth, something which no doubt has him quaking in his boots, the UK Government would be planning military action against him. However it appears Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones.
Perhaps Blair will send his precious friend Peter Mandelson to Harare to meet with Mugabe. No doubt he will be invited to join the British government if only he will agree to stop murdering people. After all, that seems to have been the approach favoured by Mandelson in Northern Ireland, so why not try it in Zimbabwe?
As you can probably deduce, we are having technical problems with both blogger.com and our template. Everything should still be readable so please don’t run away screaming. We are working to fix things as soon as we are able.
Recommended reading for insomniacs with enquiring minds
We have received a few e-mails asking what books we would recommend for aspiring (or even perspiring) libertarians:
Dale Amon recommends for essential reading:
David Bergland “Libertarianism in One Lesson”
Frederick Hayek “The Road to Serfdom”
Murray Rothbard “For a New Liberty”
Bob Poole “Defending a Free Society”
Carl Hess “Capitalism for Kids”
Wendy McElroy “Freedom, Feminism and the State”
Thomas Sowell “The Economics and Politics of Race”
Perry de Havilland recommends for essential reading:
Murray Rothbard “The Ethics of Liberty”
Frederick Hayek “The Fatal Conceit”
Karl Popper “Open Society and its Enemies”
Virginia Postrel “The Future and its Enemies”
Also well worth a read:
Ayn Rand “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”
David Deutsch “The Fabric of Reality”
Murray Rothbard “Man, Economy and State”
Edmund Burke “Reflections on the Revolution in France”
Karl Marx “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (know thine enemy)
Jean Monnet “Memoirs” (know thine enemy, part deux)
However if you like tracts on political economy served up as more bite sized morsels, you would be hard pressed to find a more varied body of works than the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance. Browse through the huge number of works on the Libertarian Alliance website, all available for free on-line in pdf format pertaining to all manner of topics (html format coming in the not-to-distant future).
The Libertarian Alliance website is undergoing a bit of an overhaul so it might look a bit strange in some platform/browser combinations. Feel free to complain to the Libertarian Alliance webmaster there and urge them to get it fixed 🙂
In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different.
Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots.
Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction.
However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment.
However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly.
Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me.
My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock.
Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended).
A personal and long standing view of Lord of the Rings
[Boromir speaks]
“I do not understand all this,” he said. “Saruman is a traitor, but did he not have a glimpse of wisdom? Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem. The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, The Council of Elrond
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[Sam Speaks]
“But if you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folks pay for their dirty work.”
[Galadriel replies]
“I would” she said. “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Seven, The Mirror of Galadriel
For me, the Lord of the Rings works on every level, and I refer to both the magnificent new motion picture and the trilogy of books, which I first read in the early 1970’s as a child and have re-read many times since. It works on the most basic level as a glorious epic, rich with its own mythic cycle that borrows from Celtic, Nordic and Saxon traditions. Simply put, it is a bloody good read and the motion picture captures that most effectively, editing and abridging where needed without doing a fatal violence to the source.
Yet The Lord of the Rings can be read in many other ways as well. It also works extraordinarily well as a series of quite deep allegories. Certainly many people have subjected J. R. R. Tolkien’s remarkable epic to the Bunsen burner of allegorical analysis before, particularly those looking to divine a racist subtext. I have only ever read a couple such works and to be honest was unimpressed. I have read a few summaries of others but it has always struck me that the arguments of this or that critique of his work usually skirt around the core issue, for there are really only two facets of the story that truly matter: Frodo and the Ring itself.
I have always thought the allegorical meaning of The Lord of the Rings is starkly obvious and quite profound. Mankind in all its varied forms and mythic archetypes can be found with the story, yet in truth the reader is presented with a single representation of themselves: Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit. Frodo is us.
The entire story is about Frodo and his relationship with the Ring. Everything else is the supporting artifice. Frodo is Everyman, who does not choose the world in which he lives, rather the world is thrust upon him by forces at first seemingly outside his power to influence or even understand fully. It is Frodo, more than any other character, who dwells most upon the issue not just of dynamic reaction to events, but of moral choice. Although surrounded by mythic heroic characters of every shape and form, Frodo is physically puny, banal by predisposition and would be hard pressed to intimidate an irritable rabbit. Yet he is indeed strong, in that his strength is entirely moral strength… and because he chooses to exercise that moral strength, in the end he has no equal. We are shown that it is from personal moral courage that all other strengths derive and that all the weapons in the world count for little without that.
So if the Hobbit is us, then what is the Ring?
The Ring is everything that Frodo is not. He is a weak little man, vulnerable and multifaceted. The Ring is strong, almost indestructible and pure in its single minded malevolence. It tries to corrupt all who touch it or are ever associated with it and it is about absolute pitiless control of others. Frodo deals not through agents or proxies, but directly, face to face, whereas the Ring makes its wearer invisible and extends its power terribly through its influence over the other Rings. It is the antithesis of interpersonal morality. No matter how pure of heart the person who wields it is, no matter how just their motivation for taking that power upon themselves, the end result is always corruption. Yet the lure of such power is so overwhelming that only the most truly moral can resist it when it is dangled in front of them: Gandalf and Galadriel are both offered the Ring but refuse it. Elrond too sees it for what it is and will have none of it.
We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know all too well. It’s strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear.
Powerful, corrupting and impersonal. The Ring is of course an allegory for the modern state.
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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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