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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The Law of Unintended Consequences is a popular one with libertarians seeking to highlight how government rules and actions have perverse consequences. So it was interesting to watch British parliamentarians being reminded about the perverse side-effects of government rules at a committee hearing at the House of Commons this afternoon.
A government-appointed adviser, Alan Pickering, was pointing out to MPs that legislation such as the 1995 Pensions Act, introduced after the Robert Maxwell scandal in the early 1990s, has in fact simply encouraged many firms to shut down pension schemes for their workers. “This is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences,” he told MPs. Quite.
Interesting to watch as MPs listened to this point with expressions of blank incomprehension. You could imagine this thought going through their heads: “You mean that our desire to better Mankind might backfire? Who would have thought it?”
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.
– Frédéric Bastiat
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
– Frédéric Bastiat
The Samizdata.net One Year Gathering last night seemed the perfect chance to get the ‘Global Conspiracy’ moving forward again…
We had everything required for a conspiracy by sinster globalist illuminati:
Gothic setting, endless supply of Guinness & crazy camera angles
However it proved hard to keep the conspirators focused on the job at hand
Very hard, in fact
  
It did not help that there were many distractions
But we did achieve something… we proved that Andrew Dodge not only wears his leather kilt in ‘true Scottish style’, someone has autographed his posterior!
We updated to a newer release of Movable Type around 1800 GMT today. If you commented on something around that time and it was lost during the shuffle, please accept our apologies!
Anyone who has had the misfortune to have seen many examples of Modern ‘Art’ recently can only concur with the British politician who described this year’s Turner Prize exhibits as “bullshit”.
Ok, not terribly polite, but a wonderfully lucid and accurate description of what is on display. Can we hope for similarly salty descriptions of the EU as a “crooked empire”, the British education system as a “Soviet disaster zone” from the UK’s political masters?
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder
– Frédéric Bastiat
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul
– George Bernard Shaw
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.
– G.K. Chesterton
A protester against a possible war against Iraq is urging fellow-minded people to observe a 24-hour period of total silence as a way of registering their views.
It is tempting to mock, but this writer cannot help feeling that if 99 percent of so-called peace activists took a Trappist monk-like vow of silence, the rest of us who do think there is a case for ridding the world of Saddam would be grateful. Come on you Ted Ralls, Robert Fisks, Michael Moores – shut your traps.
Sometimes politicians blurt out the pure unvarnished truth even against their devious instincts. I cannot beat this gem from French farm minister Herve Gaymard, who on Tuesday brushed aside British complaints over farm subsidies, saying the Brits only wanted the EU to be a free trade zone.
As the saying goes, I do believe he’s got it!
The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
-Jeff Cooper
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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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