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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All libertarians need to remember that capitalism eventually leads to liberty but Capitalism is not a synonym for Libertarianism. Once a society introduces a degree of capitalism, it starts to produce more wealth and more knowledge than it previously did. As this society trades amongst itself, competition occurs and comparative advantages start to emerge between businesses. This produces an imperative for the owners of these businesses to change the way they function in order to minimise competitive disadvantages and exploit comparative advantages…and to do that they must be free to make decisions.
It is this that is the truly subversive thing about capitalism: in order to make it work, people with the knowledge of running the business (the ‘owners’) must be allowed to actually use that knowledge to directly implement changes in a dynamic manner and people must be allowed the choice to purchase what they produce. This of course means that the owners of the business/knowledge and the people who decide to acquire what they produce, are the ones who cause things to happen, rather than the force based state… but states like more wealth they can tax and so allow the wealth creators to create yet more wealth by their own efforts. The paradox is then that for the state to accumulate more resources and grow in size, it must allow power to pass from its hands. The economy gets larger and wealthier, the state gets larger and less relevant. If the state tries to rein in the capitalists, once the economy has become globalized, their ability to do so decays rapidly as capital itself is no longer captive.
Hence even a totalitarian state like China can introduce a tiny sliver of capitalism and, in the short term, the Communist power structure is seen to benefit from increased wealth and knowledge. Yet this early capitalism is a distorted creature, as much of the entrepreneurial talent being freed is still being largely diverted from wealth creation by the time required to navigate the endless maze of regulations and state imposed obstacles.
Similarly, many of the ‘new capitalists’ will be creating wealth not by filling dynamically derived market needs but by finessing obscure and often contradictory state regulations.
However the new capitalists will inevitably start exerting pressure for a relaxation of a regulation here, a redrafting of a law there, and thus the virus of liberty is spread. Capitalism is nothing less than the impersonal and unintentional carrier wave of liberty.
But it does show that capitalism can coexist with profoundly unfree states for a considerable amount of time… and in the meantime, capitalists in that state will try to profit from the state’s apparatus of repression as well as free themselves from its effects.
So every time you see the leering face of Larry Ellison on television pushing for the national ID cards that will make him millions of dollars, remember that just because a person is a capitalist, that does not automatically make him a friend to the broader liberty of society. Next time you see Larry Ellison or an Oracle product, just change the channel: he has plenty of competitors.
Wired magazine reports that the nuclear bomb documents found by Times journalists in an abandoned Al Qaeda house in Kabul might be spoof plans published by some gonzo pranksters several years ago.
This is indeed hilarious and it should now be clear to all that Al Qaeda are downloading everything on the Internet with the word ‘thermonuclear’ in it because they too are just misunderstood pranksters. We must stop bombing Afghanistan forthwith as it must now be clear that flying airliners into the WTC was just a good natured jape that got a little out of hand.
Similarly, the only reason they have been sending anthrax through the post is a simple linguistic misunderstanding: they were told to send Andrex (a brand of toilet tissue) but as English is not their first language, they got a little confused…hey, anyone can make a mistake!
Any day now, intelligence sources report we will soon hear that Osama will be calling on Bert from Sesame Street to replace slain Al Qaeda number two, Muhammed Atef, as Chief Deputy Prankster.
Christian Michel’s high quality libertarian site LIBERALIA has some new papers well worth reading:
Oneworldism: The Leviathan strikes back by Alberto Mingardi
Immigration: controversies, libertarian principles & modern abolition by Ken Schoolland
Down with the EU by Martin Stefunko
What should we do with the rich? The welfare state and the question of poverty by Christian Michel
The LIBERALIA website is one of those ‘must visit’ places on the Internet for libertarians. If you ever get the opportunity to hear Christian in person, he is an engaging speaker and a most congenial gentleman. Highly recommended.
All the papers on the LIBERALIA site are available in English and French.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
– Rudyard Kipling (extract from ‘The Young British Soldier’)
For more Kipling verse, see everypoet.com.
The Americans have the right idea: get involved with the enemies of our enemies, and make it clear to them all we want to do is kill said mutual enemies, not mess in their internal affairs. Offer them money by all means but to even contemplate ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘stabilisation forces’ is utter madness.
The West, no, who are we kidding…the USA and to a lesser extent the UK, can play a constructive role by tying ongoing aid to more moderate behaviour by the future rulers in Kabul. But for goodness sake, realise that the victorious army we have backed hates Taliban/Al Qaeda because they allowed large numbers of armed foreigners into the country (Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens etc.). It is absurd to suggest large numbers of British troops are going to be any more acceptable.
It is obvious that the anti-Taliban/anti-Al Qaeda forces are more than happy to work with small scale deployment of special forces, but to suggest 6,000 regular British soldiers will be seen the same way is a grave misjudgement. A brigade sized British force would be there for only one reason: to act as a counter balance to the various local armies. From the perspective of the ‘Northern Alliance’, what possible good could that serve other than to dilute their hard won gains?
Let’s keep our eyes on the ball people. We are in this ghastly hell hole called Afghanistan for one purpose and one purpose only: to destroy Al Qaeda and just incidentally to destroy the Taliban because they stand in the way of that objective. Sure, lets help them form a stable society that suits not just their interests but also our own by removing a breeding ground for terrorist vipers… but leave the armed aspect of politics and the ‘peacekeeping’ to the locals. We can give wise counsel but to suggest we could forcibly keep this armed-to-the-teeth society from fighting amongst themselves if they are determined to do so is ridiculous.
Julian Manyon sees the devastation wrought by the B-52s, but says that the fall of Kabul is not the end of the struggle. He gives an excellent eyewitness report in The Spectator from the front line in Afghanistan.
I look forward to hearing from all those out there in ‘establishment pundit land’ who sneered at the effect of the US bombing.
What Dale writes is quite correct but it is just another manifestation of American ‘liberal’ media racism. When eighteen US Army Rangers dies that is horrifying because eighteen American lives are valuable. As Somali lives are irrelevent, who gives a damn if one thousand Somali irregulars got smoked? The important fact was that here was a chance to dwell on the negative aspects, namely American deaths. Regardless of the fact the US soldiers gave a fine account of themselves before being overwhelmed, why not just use this as an excuse to point out the US military are the bad guys yet again?
Whilst I do think the whole mission to Somalia was a noble but naive mistake from the outset, is it too much to expect the US media to realise it was actually a far from ignoble episode in US military history? I guess so.
Another example of US ‘liberal’ media racism was the reporting of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa. It as widely reported that twelve Americans died and almost as an afterthought, oh yes, about 300 or so Africans were killed plus nearly 4000 wounded. This need to be repeated again and again to people across the world who claim Al Qaeda only want to kill Americans.
Similarly as commented on by Opinionated Bastard (now is that a great name for a blog or what?), once it became clear most of the people on Flight 587 which crashed in Rockaway were not from the USA, media interest tailed off rapidly (no pun intended):
This is infuriating because the passengers on Flight 587 were almost entirely from the Dominican Republic. We get ’round the clock coverage of whatever civilian casualties may or may not have actually happened in Afghanistan, but when poor folks in our own hemisphere are suffering, it’s shuffled off to the back page.
I guess those people just did not count for much.
Events in Afghanistan bring to mind a large container truck suddenly tipping over and spilling its load across a busy highway in front of traffic moving in both directions. As we see the situation shift not by the day but by the hour, it is important that people look not just at Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Kabul and Khandahar, but also at nuclear Pakistan: what happens in Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Quetta will certainly end up being far more important in the long run.
For weeks since the US bombing started, the Islamic political parties in Pakistan have been whipping up sentiment with a world view that pits Islam against the godless foreigner. Large numbers of young Pakistanis heard the call for jihad against the United States and were urged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the defence of Islam. Thousands streamed across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan seething with religious zeal to take up arms against the hated infidel.
The secular General Musharraf looked on uneasy as the streets swelled with crowds incited by his political enemies and has also been forced to keep looking over his shoulder at his own intelligence service, the ISI, who have always been the Taliban’s primary patron.
And then, the container truck unexpectedly tips over, scattering its cargo of… jack-in-the-boxes.
Weakened by the USAF/USN airstrikes far more than the ignorant and willfully pessimistic western pundits would have had us believe, the Taliban suddenly starts to collapse. Like dominos, town after town falls to the various anti-Taliban forces.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, we have learned that the Afghan Taliban forces took all the available motor vehicles and retreated as Abdul Rashid Dostam’s forces enveloped the city, leaving about 600 newly arrived pro-Taliban Pakistanis to face Dostam’s soldiers alone. The school in which they made their last stand is now a twisted ruin and at least 400 Pakistanis were wiped out in the bitter fighting.
In Kunduz, accounts suggest most of the Afghan Taliban forces have either defected or bailed out of the town prior to it being completely surrounded. What is left are largely Chechens, Chinese Muslims and Pakistani fighters. They are clearly doomed.
And so, it is interesting to note that the streets of Pakistan are surprisingly subdued. Far from ‘Islam’ rising up against the United States and its anti-Taliban friends in Afghanistan, city after city is filled with cheering throngs and America is saluted by the very people who lived through the bombing for contributing to the Taliban’s misfortunes. Hundreds and possibly thousands of young Pakistanis are already dead, killed not as Islamic holy warriors but as hated foreigners by Afghans who have had it up to ‘here’ with the interference of its neighbours.
So as the Islamic politicians of Pakistan survey how in the matter of eight days the entire situation in Afghanistan has turned upside down, the families and friends of the dead Pakistani boys who listened and then marched to their deaths across the Khyber pass are going to start asking ‘why?’ When people start to figure out the answer, I don’t think the forces of Islamo-fascism are going to like what happens next. It must be slowly dawning on the more secular forces in Pakistan that their Islamist political enemies are starting to look very exposed indeed.
For the west, nuclear armed Pakistan is far more important in the long run than that ‘Mad Max’ nation called Afghanistan.
Yes, the leitmotif for Afghanistan and Pakistan really is a jack-in-the-box. You heard it here first.
On the sometimes inspired, sometimes misguided but always interesting anti-state.com site, there is an very interesting article about a major credit card company electing to use private binding arbitration rather than the coercive and clumsy state legal system to resolve disputes.
An interest development and, I suspect, an sign of things to come.
Herbert London, another voice of critical rationality, points out the self-destructive absurdity of post-modern ‘thought’ in his short but on-target article.
“This argument is mere subterfuge for the central postmodernist view that we don’t know what we mean when universal terms are used. In the September 11 attacks, I maintain Americans were not the least bit confused about terminology. We saw the face of evil; it did not require an interpreter.”
Yes, it really is that simple.
For media establishment pundits ranging from lowly tabloid hacks all the way up to the Brahmins of academic political correctness, the world seems to be a much more intellectually hostile place since September 11 2001. Previously unchallenged opinions about the way the world works are now being judged under the harsh light of reality cast by two burning skyscrapers in New York.
One of the good things to come out of the horrors of that day is that the western world, or at least the dynamic Anglosphere part of it, is undergoing a most astonishing intellectual ‘shake out’. The system is in a state of flux and it is unclear what the zeitgeist is going to feel like when it all starts to settle down again. One thing is for sure, it will be different.
Former prince of the statist ‘left’ Christopher Hitchens is a striking example of this process. Whilst always articulate and insightful, it seems he is also possessed of a critically rational mind capable of simply jettisoning the demonstrably false when the evidence deems that the correct thing to do. One only has to read his devastating carve-up of former fellow travellers like Noam Chomsky to see just how far he has come. In his article in the Guardian called “Ha ha ha to the pacifists” he pours scorn on those who would side with the vilest regimes in the world and claim moral superiority.
Of course people do not like being proved wrong, and they like others pointing out their cock-ups even less. Last night I was listening to pundit-lite Michael Brunson on the TV reviewing the early editions of the British newspapers. At one point he became almost apoplectic with a double page spread in the print version of The Sun (a low-brow tabloid) titled ‘Shame of the Traitors’. This article quotes the Guardian, New Statesman, the Independent, the Mirror, members of Parliament, members of the European ‘Parliament’ and sundry others. All made dire predictions about the war, questioned the morality of it and scorned its progress.
So was Michael Brunson angry that the pundits had got it so wrong? Hell no! He was outraged that a lowly tabloid like The Sun had questioned the motivation of people making clearly ridiculous unsupported claims to the point they could be described as giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’. He said “I fail to see the point of this whole article” and “Why should they criticize people for saying that they believe?”.
To give you some idea of what the people whose ‘honour’ Michael Brunson was defending were actually writing:
“Opposition leaders about to quit battle against Taliban. US blunders leave key fighters disillusioned. Key Afghan opposition commanders are on the verge of abandoning the fight against the Taliban because their confidence in US military strategy has collapsed. Insurgents are no longer willing to infiltrate eastern Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because they believe American blunders are destroying the opportunity to spread revolt against the Islamist regime.”
Rory Carroll, the Guardian, November 9: the day Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance! This ‘news’ is either Taliban propaganda, astonishingly bad reporting or simply made up to suit Rory Carroll’s anti-Americanism. Take your pick.
“If the Northern Alliance does take Kabul on, the battle is likely to be very bloody. The recent successes of the Northern Alliance are unsurprising but it will take more than carpet bombing to win southern Afghanistan.”
Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian, November 13: The recent successes are… unsurprising? I guess Norton-Taylor was not reading the Guardian on November 9 beacuse if he had, he should have been utterly astonished that the Northern Alliance was winning! Moreover in reality Kabul fell with a whimper, not a roar.
“The message we want to get out is simple – stop the bombing…Recognize that bombing pleases one person above all others – Osama bin Laden.”
Tam Dalyell, Labour Member of Parliament, November 1: so if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were asked “would you like the bombing to continue or stop?”… presumably Tam Dayell would have us believe that they would say “Continue, we would like some more of that invigorating bombing please”.
Judging from Michael Brunson’s remarks, it seems that being correct is not a very important part of a pundit’s job. However what is really important is not to point out the stupidity of other pundits or, even worse, that a great chunk of what they said was proved by events to be completely incorrect. That simply is not cricket!
And higher up the established media food chain, no wonder they really hate people like Christopher Hitchens, as he cannot be dismissed as a mere hack for some boorish English tabloid… not only is he making the doves of the ‘left’ and ostriches of the ‘right’ look extremely bad, he is an apostate who has been attacking Sauron Chomsky himself. Hitchens is actually calling himself a libertarian these days. As Bob Dylan sang: Oh the times, they are a’ changin’
or Fred Bastiat gets all warm, loving and huggy with Natalie…
Arbitrage itself is not a zero sum game as the buying/selling of both sides of the arbitrage adds liquidity to the market, which adds value to the market itself by making trades easier for all participants and reducing volatility.
As for ‘arbitraging’ sovereign services, anything which reduces the distortions of the state by reducing the power of the state to do, well, much of anything, is hardly a ‘zero-sum-game’. Allowing the market to actually work better adds value that would otherwise be lost to the state. Government by its nature destroys wealth by using force to allocate resources, thus removing the ability of those resources to flow where they otherwise would have been employed with profit.
Frederic Bastiat wrote in 1850 about ‘that which is seen, and that which is not seen’, in which he explains how we can see how the state allocates resources which it has appropriated and we can see how it results in supposed productive activity. But what we do not see is what those resources would have done if allocated by the market if the state had not appropriated them. If the resources could have be used to create what the government wants at a profit, then why have the government do it at all? If the resources could not have been employed to create it at a profit, then clearly the actions of the government result in wealth destruction.
So I would contend anything people can do to keep the means of production out of the hands of the state, far from producing a zero sum game, actually adds to the total sum of wealth by allowing those means to engage in genuine wealth creation.
Capitalism, when warm, loving and huggy… or cold, bad tempered and grumpy, is a splendid thing because it creates wealth whilst not actually giving a damn. It is rather like the way the wind can move a sail ship forward if the ship is sailed correctly or sink it if the ship is sailed poorly. On the other tentacle, government, even when warm, loving and huggy, makes us all poorer, rather like a dreaded in-law who comes to visit and just will not go away again.
As for my glee at the idea of driving the tax men of several nations into a confused state of mental collapse, now that is a metacontext thing. It’s just the way I see the world.
… it can also lead to an interesting world view.
Arbitrage is an artful way to make money. When two (or more) items have a historical range of price relationship between them, temporary changes in these relationships provide an opportunity for profit. Often the relationships between the two different products is obscure, very indirect and sometimes quite counterintuitive. Yet many an arbitrageur (or just ‘arb’ as they are often known) has grown slowly and unflamboyantly wealthy, not in the high drama the great bull or bear markets, but just by watching relative price movements in products as diverse and seemingly unrelated as soybean oil and pork belly futures.
The same approach can be taken in other areas of endeavour too.
Globalization has brought many interesting and exciting things in its wake, not to mention hitherto unprecedented prosperity to more people on the planet than ever before. Capital is now almost totally fungible at the push of a button and this has had the effect of creating an interesting market. The sovereign law market.
I wrote about the most glaring example of this yesterday. States like to pass laws that say what their subject populations can and cannot say, write or publish. Yet now, people who wish to publish views that their local laws say are illegal have merely to host them on a server in some other country and viola! The ‘illegal’ views are on display for anyone who wishes to read them and there is not a damn thing the state can do about it. Information too is now fungible: if you can’t publish a dead tree pamphlet, a website will do just fine.
Which brings us again to laws. It use to matter very little in a nation what the laws were in some other country. But in this era of downloadable virtualized products, excellent communications, cosmopolitan entrepreneurship, ubiquitous spoken English and mobile capital, there is increasingly little reason why a business should be set up in a place which chooses to slather on tax and regulatory burdens. We are entering an era of the arbitrage of laws. Are the employment laws better in the Philippines or India? India eh? Ok, lets relocate our call centre from Los Angeles to India. What about corporate taxes? Ok, move the company’s brass plate to the British Virgin Islands. Where are the best programmers? Prague? Ok, lets outsource to a Czech codehaus…they even have the best beer there. Where will our data be safe? USA? Ok, I know a nice server farm in Fresno…yes, they have their own power generators…etc.
Rather than ‘investing’ a business in a single ‘national’ economy, the sovereign law arbitrageur modularizes and virtualizes and invests wherever their particular needs are best met by the state for that aspect of their business. No longer does he have to take a one-size fits all/one nation fits all approach. Analogous to arbitrage, this approach does not yield the big bucks won or lost by hitching one’s fortunes to a single state…yet by simply opting out of unreasonable laws by moving modularized companies to where they are best looked after (i.e. left the hell alone), capital is allowed to work more effectively.
The future is dispersed, virtual, anational and the bits send each other e-mail in English…even when one bit is in Calcutta and the other in Prague and they are talking about a client in New York. Of course an added bonus is driving the theft enforcement arm of several states utterly crazy trying to figure out not just how to tax you but just who the hell ‘you’ actually are!
The future is closer than you might think.
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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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