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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Here is a great new book to cheer libertarians as we draw close to the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service. Written by the director of Nurses for Reform, Dr. Helen Evans, and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’ not only shows that the country’s top 100 health opinion formers no longer actually believe in nationalised healthcare but, gloriously, this book fundamentally challenges the medical monopoly inherent in all health systems around the world.
Citing a huge array of free marketeers the work is awash with glorious quotes like this one from David Friedman:
Both barbers and physicians are licensed; both professions have for decades used licensing to keep their numbers down and their salaries up. Government regulation of barbers makes haircuts more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have fewer haircuts and longer hair. Government regulation of physicians makes medical care more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have less medical care and shorter lives. Given the choice of deregulating one profession or the other, I would choose the physicians.
Quoting our own Brian Micklethwait we again read:
Far from being obvious to me that a truly free medical market would be disastrous, I believe on the contrary that such arrangements would be of huge benefit to mankind, and that the sooner medicine is done this way the better.
Things would not, inevitably, be perfect. Some fools would make crass blunders, by ignoring manifestly superior medical services for the most frivolous of reasons, and by patronising the most notoriously incompetent. Some such fools would perish from their foolishness. Others would merely be unlucky. No law can prevent either stupidity or bad luck, although the world is now filled with the particular stupidity which consists of refusing to face this truth, and with the many luckless victims of this stupidity.
Powerfully, he concludes:
Given that for most people the avoidance of suicide rather than suicide is the objective, a truly free medical market would enable them, for the first time ever, to purchase steadily improving medical advice and medical help, and at a steadily diminishing price.
One of the most pernicious restrictions on medicine imposed by the current medical regime is the restriction on advertising. In a free market rival medical procedures, rival medical ‘philosophies’, rival views on the relative importance of confidentiality, hygiene, speed of treatment, riskiness of treatment, and so forth, would all battle it out in the market place. ‘Alternative’ therapists would be allowed to prescribe potentially dangerous drugs, as only government favoured therapists may now. It would be up to the patients to pick therapists who seemed to know what they were doing and their look out if they chose badly. The already thriving medical periodical press would assist with voluminous comparative advice, praise and criticism.
In such a free market, any number of different medical styles could be practised, and patients would make their choices.
Evans’s book is a must read for libertarians. It is also a tonic for the period of NHS propaganda we will no doubt endure over the next couple of weeks.
“Freedom is participation in power.”
– Mike Gravell, on Thom Hartmann’s Air America show.
“O, RLY?”
– Commenter Sunfish, when he heard that.
Yes, Sunfish, ‘Freedom’ is the freedom to join a gang and fight over who gets plundering rights on ‘your’ turf, I thought everyone knew that!
What it [the UK Libertarian Party] will do, like the Libertarian Party has done in the United States, is to tarnish the libertarian brand, allowing the crazier aspects of libertarian thinking to come to the fore, and achieving nothing of any merit.
– Alex Singleton, ‘How Libertarians undermine liberty‘
Just straying off the Samizdata reservation for a moment…a pointer for Nine Inch Nails fans: Trent Reznor is giving away his latest record The Slip, and it is 100% free… to download it, go here. Reznor has released it under Creative Commons, which is a very interesting development.
Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune…
Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:
Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it’s inconsiderate.
Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that the establishment of a formal, state-run empire was a mistake, both from the point of view of the conquered peoples and from that of Britain. The first phase of British expansion – our informal mercantile dominion – was much the more successful. It is at least arguable that the nationalisation of the East India Company marked the moment when things started to go badly wrong.
– Daniel Hannan
It is not the level of wealth that makes us happy. Instead, it is the process of betterment – the pursuit of it – that makes us happy. Whether we are twice as rich today as in 1971 has little bearing on our happiness, because it is in the past. Whether people can see their lives improving in the future is what counts. That is why economic growth remains a key component in happiness, despite what the happiness researchers might tell us.
– Alex Singleton, Comment is Free
Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.
– W. W. Bartley, Philosophia (September–December 1976)
The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:
I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn’t have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as “you” believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.
That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who… did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn’t actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can’t let the proles know the truth now, can we?
Will the BBC’s Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.
It has been revealed that the Europhiles in the Tory party, led by John Maples MP, rigged the Tories’ recent primary for Members of the European Parliament in order to prevent the deselection of Europhile incumbents and to promote women that had received too few votes. ConservativeHome has the full, sordid account.
‘Market’ was the sixth word I ever learnt – after ‘This little piggy goes to…’
– Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn’t it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them?
… this guy needs to buy a cat and take some well deserved ‘chill time’ for, oh, the rest of his life maybe?
“So I got down with my back to the grenade and used my body as a shield. It was a case of either having four of us as fatalities or badly wounded – or one. I brought my legs up to my chest in the brace position and waited for the explosion.”
The short version: he set off a booby-trap (the old tripwire/grenade shtick) in the middle of his patrol, jumped on the grenade and his body armour and the stuff in his backpack took the brunt of the explosion. Other than getting blown through the air, this Royal Marine walked away pretty much in one piece. Fortitude and insane luck are a very cool combination.
Let me offer the Lance Corporal a career suggestion: head back to civilian life and get a job doing endorsements for a certain backpack manufacturer.
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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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