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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As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£)
So, why did we stop this taxation of “excessive” pensions pots? Because it lost revenue. It took tax rates well over the Laffer Curve peak if you prefer.
So, what’s Ms. Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, suggesting today? That we reimpose a policy that we already know fails.
Idiot’s a bit mild really, isn’t it? Also, it’s rather a pity that Googlebombs don’t work these days.
– Tim Worstall
Millennials are an ultra-conformist generation. If you tell them that something is “cringe”, they won’t go there. If you tell them that it’s “cringe” to say that 2+2=4, they’ll think that this somehow stops 2+2 from being 4.
It was with this style that the Left managed to distance itself from Venezuelan socialism a few years later. They couldn’t delete all their old articles fawning over Venezuelan socialism, but they could make it “cringe” to mention it. And so, people stopped mentioning it.
– Kristian Niemietz
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen.
[…]
To the extent that we’ve got a scandium expert lying around I’m it. Niocorp isn’t going to work. But the British government, using your and my money, is eager to invest in it?
Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters?
– Tim Worstall
The wealthy don’t protest. They exit.
– Alessandro Palombo
Asmongold is a Twitch streamer whose output is also edited and put on YouTube.
A funny example (specifically the timestamp at 14:20).
He is making fun of some protestors. At first glance it is inane. But there is more here.
He makes several points. Free speech and peaceful protest are important. As soon as people are setting fire to things, it is no longer a protest but a riot. Rioters should be dealt with swiftly and severely to discourage others. Blocking the highway or taking over buildings is infringing on others’ rights.
Here he is covering conflict between India and Pakistan.
This is how The Kids are getting The News These Days. Streamers are surfacing, and commenting on, both mainstream and social media content.
This is no bad thing. Mainstream media getting to set the narrative has proven unhealthy. Blogs had their day. Video is now where it’s at. Streamers and influencers are filtering things.
This could be good or bad. It depends on the streamer. Asmongold is thoughtful, non-partisan, exercises critical thinking, caveats and bounds his opinions, avoids giving opinions where he lacks knowledge (such as specifics of politics between India and Pakistan in the above example), avoids (when he is being serious) sweeping generalisations, has views mostly compatible with maximising freedom and in general seems pretty smart.
That he is one of the most successful and influential at doing this, is more successful than others in a similar line of work who might charitably be considered dangerous idiots, gives hope that the natural filter of the algorithms can do good.
You put in self check out in response to high wage costs, but then you find new problems. High trust systems cannot survive in the presence of low trust people. And this is why, in the second world, you cannot have nice things…
And ultimately, the incentives and selectors turn the systems into pastiches of their intent.
– El Gato Malo
Our diagnosis is that what really worries The Guardian here [about Argentina] is that this will all work. For where would the progressives be if classical liberalism were shown – once again – to work?
– Tim Worstall
In The Times, no less:
…evidence has emerged of letters from Dutch premier division women’s rugby teams and players expressing concerns about trans women players and specifically warning about injuries linked to one person…A rugby player knocked unconscious last year in a collision with the same athlete as King told The Sunday Times she had written to Rugby Nederland calling for clarity…
Safety is one thing. The article goes on to discuss consent and the risks to female athletes of speaking out on this topic.
Democracy tends towards protectionism when those harmed by free trade are numerous enough to count. But democracy also demands cheap goods. No one has yet squared that circle.
– Robert Tombs
What’s more, the imposition of punitive tariffs on poorer countries like Vietnam will simply impoverish rather than improve the potential importing power of these countries. Disrupting the economic development of poorer countries isn’t going to improve the chances of selling to them.
The irony is brutal. Trump’s fixation with trade-deficit “offenders” is punishing the very nations that could one day erase those deficits through development and prosperity. US consumers, businesses, and economic growth will all suffer as a result of the US president’s inability to grasp this elementary logic. There seems to be just one long-term strategy behind all this: unleash populism for immediate electoral returns, blame someone else for the problems that populism inevitably causes, and let someone else deal with the long-term consequences.
– Robert Johnson
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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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