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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“I fear that today’s way of life is not our strength but has become our weakness. It has become debilitating and corrupting. The two world wars spawned an enlarged public sector that has, in the past 30 years, become the insatiable cuckoo in the next, pushing out other activities by absorbing resources, increasing debt, raising taxes, creating unproductive employments, encouraging people not to work, over-regulating while under-performing, promoting mass immigration to feed its preference for cheap labour, and destroying vital industries in the pursuit of a green fantasy. It has created dependency and encouraged irresponsibility – all the more damaging in a society that has jettisoned much of its identity and pride. I have never felt more pessimistic about our ability to change.
“Our `progressives’ still inhabit a dream-world: globalisation, `rules-based order’, open borders and the EU. They depend on perpetual public sector expansion for their existence,. This is, say Labour MPs, `in the party’s DNA’. It cannot face reality, as the recent Budget shows. The only part of the public sector not in their DNA is defence. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are even worse. A coalition of the three would be a nightmare.
“We cannot defend ourselves while the present system prevails. Hence the contempt of Trump and Putin. People have of course been saying this for years and like the boy who cried wolf, they have been ignored. Now, however, the wolf is at the door.”
– Robert Toombs, Daily Telegraph (£)
I called the author “richard” – apologies for the goof.
“The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($), in one of his best recent columns IMHO, gently taking apart a new book by Sven Beckert that purports to show how we have become rich primarily through violence and enslavement, not mutual exchange. The book is apparently more than 1,300 pages long, and the largest ever published by Penguin. To write a book that long, and miss the key elements of why free enterprise is as great as it is, seems a lot of work for scant reward. Alas, I suspect Beckert’s book will be treated as reverently on parts of the Left as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, which turned out to be built on proverbial sand.
A recent Nobel prizewinner in economics, Joel Mokyr, has written a book that I think rather more accurately identifies why, for instance, the UK became as wealthy as it did during the Industrial Revolution, and plays far more attention to the role of ideas. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes is also a good study, in my view. Anything by Deidre McCloskey is also good.
I wrote these thoughts on my Facebook page yesterday, and I have taken a few elements out and added others. Anyway, let me know what you think:
The State’s share of the total economy continues to rise, putting even more pressure on those who are still here, working, building business, etc. There are one or two decent elements in it (stamp duty suspended on new share listings in London) but the general direction is bad. Unfortunately, given the reluctance of backbench Labour MPs to accept any meaningful welfare reforms, the total public spending bill will continue to rise. So next year we could have more of the same. That means more emigration of young, ambitious people to lower-tax places such as Dubai, Australia (relatively), etc. The tax base will contract.
One element in particular – the so-called “mansion tax” levy on high-value properties – bothers me not just because of the specifics (it will gum up the real estate market, and thresholds are bound to be frozen, drawing in more over time), but because of a principle.
If I own something that is valuable, why should I pay tax on it purely for that reason? Does the imposition of such a levy equate to the State acting as a landlord, demanding a rent? I can understand the point that a property that is valuable partly because of state action should therefore bear some tax (this is the argument for land value taxes or even council taxes, although LVT is problematic); there is also some sense in taxing property owners to pay for local services (back in the 19th C, only freeholders could vote in elections, which meant they had a vested interest in frugal government).
But taxing something that is worth X, and purely for that reason, is punitive. It also means that the asset-rich/cash-poor issue arises. Some people will need to sell, or at least downsize earlier than they perhaps wanted. Some folk might rent out a room to a tenant, or take out a second mortgage to find the cash. That could have a cascade impact on property prices, perhaps undermining the point of the tax. But maybe that is the point of this tax: it is designed to push property values down. And ironically, that will mean that on death of the owner (s), the haul in inheritance tax will be lower than otherwise.
If you own your home – you have paid for it fair and square, then it is yours. Period. A tax puts the State in the position of a sort of supreme landlord.
I realise that some people will say that there is a generational wealth injustice issue here, because lots of younger adults cannot afford to buy or even rent a decent place. That’s a genuine issue. The solution, broadly, is to free up the planning system, and control net immigration. Another factor is that we must stop artificially holding down interest rates, which has enriched some people with large homes, particularly if they are leveraged.
In some ways, the situation today is the long-drawn out consequence of the 2008 financial bust and a decade-plus of very low interest rates.
I saw a few people on other social media forums saying that objectors should stop bellyaching and pay up. Apart from the oafishness of this sort of response (“do what you are told!”), it ignores the principle of absolute property ownership. Another objection I’ve seen is that lots of people have to downsize, so those affected can do so. However, this is not that easy. Who’s going to buy, particularly when stamp duties are high and taxes in general are crimping growth? Underlying liquidity in the UK housing market is weak and unlikely to improve fast, although it might pick up a bit. Some owners might rent out part of their home to make a bit of cash to cover the tax, but not all such homes are easily changeable for that purpose, and rental income is now taxed anyway. Even so, I would expect some of this to happen in the years before the measure is hopefully repealed. The new tax will not come in immediately – and might get snarled up as the general election nears (it must be held by July 2029).
Of course, people downsize their property for various reasons: their children flee the nest; people want a smaller place to look after, unlock value and buy a holiday home, travel, invest in a business or hobby, etc. it’s natural and normal. But it’s not the State’s role to force the pace on this, to create a sense of duress.
The levy on high-value homes is a form of wealth tax. Even someone who is generally favourable towards the UK government, Dan Neidle, says they are a really bad idea.
Of course, I don’t need to spell it out to the sensible Samizdata regulars that what is wanted are taxes that are as low, flat and simple as possible.
Final random thought: property taxes could be defended in the past when only freeholders could vote in elections, and they tended to have an incentive to vote for stuff that would protect the value of what they had, such as sewage, water supply, electrification, parks, amenities, law enforcement of various kinds, and so on. I sometimes hope, however, naively, that we could bring such an approach back. Voting ought to involve some beneficial ownership “buy-in” to one’s neighbourhood.
“It [taxes on property values] is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between the individual and the state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians as the ultimate landlords. Her `high value council tax surcharge’ is best understood as a rent, to be paid to [Rachel] Reeves for the right to stay in one’s home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft.”
– Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 27 November, on yesterday’s Autumn Budget from Rachel Reeves, UK finance minister. He’s right that things such as “mansion taxes” – which in reality raise relatively paltry sums – are about forcing owners of properties deemed to be above £X or whatever into a situation where they own them at the sufferance of the State, rather than outright. And the temptation to lower the threshold on such a tax, along with everything else, will be irresistable.
On a related point, now seems a good time to introduce readers again to an essay in defence of absolute property right ownership – rather than the idea of owning it at the sufferance of the State. The essay, “Your Dog Owns Your House”, by the late French writer and classical liberal, Anthony de Jasay, is a masterpiece.
On paper, he is the kind of Democrat that might have been invented in a laboratory of perverted social science by a MAGA Dr. Frankenstein: a socialist, an immigrant, a Muslim, son of a movie director and a professor of postcolonialism, holder of a degree in “Africana studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience runs the gamut from co-founder of the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to membership of the New York state Assembly for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Have I missed anything? Well, his employment experience does include a gig as “third assistant director” on the 2016 Disney movie “Queen of Katwe,” whose director, Mira Nair, is Zohran’s mom.
– Gerard Baker, writing in the Wall Street Journal about Zohran Mamdani, who won by a clear vote yesterday night.
That old line from H L Mencken of people getting the government they want “good and hard” is getting a lot of use these days.
Someone I know recently put up on Facebook what I thought was an excellent commentary about the Israel situation, its history, the actions of those who have tried to destroy it, and the arguments used by those who say it is an illegitimate state. The commentator, whom I won’t name as this wasn’t made available outside his own circle of online contacts, made a number of astute points that I think are just too important not to be shared on a blog like this. A question I ask is why are no major Western politicians making these points?
Apartheid in South Africa:
From 1948 until the early 1990s, apartheid in South Africa was a legally codified system that entrenched white minority rule over the black majority. It was characterised by:
• The removal of citizenship and voting rights from black South Africans;
• Legal racial classification of every individual, determining where they could live, work, go to school and whom they could marry;
• Enforced residential separation, with large‑scale forced removals to poor, remote “homelands”;
• Segregation of public facilities including hospitals, schools, beaches, transport and parks;
• Criminalisation of interracial relationships; and
• A web of pass laws controlling the movement of black South Africans.
This was an explicit racial caste system designed to preserve white supremacy.
The Situation Within Israel’s Recognised Borders
Inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders, about one fifth of the citizens are Arabs. They:
• Have full voting rights and are elected to the Knesset, sometimes holding ministerial positions;
• Serve as judges, including on the Supreme Court;
• Use the same hospitals, transport systems, beaches, restaurants, shops and parks as Jewish citizens;
• Have Arabic recognised along with Hebrew as an official language;
• Send their children to state‑funded schools and universities; and
• Operate political parties that campaign openly, including against government policies
There is no legal system of racial segregation. Social or residential clustering tends to be the product of history and community choice, not forced separation by law.
The West Bank and Gaza:
The governance of the West Bank and Gaza is more complex. Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military law, while Jewish settlers there are under Israeli civil law. This dual legal framework is the result of the unresolved status of the territory and long‑running security concerns, not a codified system of ethnic superiority.
Gaza has been under the control of Hamas since 2007. Israel withdrew its settlers and military in 2005. Since then, security blockades have been imposed by both Israel and Egypt to restrict the smuggling of weapons and the movement of militants. The political and legal conditions in Gaza are dictated by an armed conflict and separation of governance, making the apartheid analogy inapplicable.
International Comparisons:
Other states have systems of ethnic preference or sectarian limits without being described as apartheid regimes:
• Malaysia privileges ethnic Malays through the *Bumiputera* policy, giving preference in education, business ownership and civil service;
• Saudi Arabia and several Gulf states impose restrictions on non‑Muslims, including on religious practice, political participation and property ownership;
• Lebanon denies many rights to Palestinian refugees, restricting their employment opportunities and property rights;
• Myanmar has persecuted the Rohingya Muslim minority, involving mass killings and expulsions;
• PRC suppresses Uyghur Muslim religion and culture through detention, forced labour and restrictions on family life; and…
None of these are routinely called apartheid states. The label is selectively applied.
“Nuclear has re-entered the chat because it’s the only energy source that can deliver enough clean, safe, round-the-clock electricity to feed AI. Nuclear is to AI what oil was to the Industrial Age. It’s the fuel for a new era of exponential progress.”
– Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, from the Rational Optimist Society.
(Update, it turns out I was mistaken on the date of Margaret Thatcher’s 100th birthday. It was 13 October, 2025, and not before, as my comments might have implied.)
Mrs Thatcher’s 100th birthday was recently marked, and a few commentators, not all of them friendly, have remarked on her influence and the way that she still casts a shadow over our times.
Adrian Wooldridge at Bloomberg is a columnist I follow. I like and dislike some of his stuff. (His book on Meritocracy and the co-authored one with Alan Greenspan on American capitalism are both excellent, in my view.)
Let’s go:
Far be it from me to spit upon the grave: Thatcher was a great prime minister, up there with William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, and Thatcherism was a necessary response to a set of pressing problems. But a serious politician deserves a serious assessment: We need now to address the fact that the Conservative Party to which she devoted her life lies in ruins, that its sister Republican Party has been hijacked by an authoritarian populist, and that Thatcher herself bears some responsibility for this. Indeed, she was a leading player in the transformation of Anglo-Saxon conservatism into a revolutionary political doctrine that may have destroyed conservativism itself.
The idea that Mrs T’s brand of political views were “revolutionary” only works if you have a particular view of what a revolution means. Mrs Thatcher thought that the post-1945 “settlement” – to give it a term, of high progressive tax, high regulation, nationalised industry, powerful unions, Keynesian demand management, state-run schools, socialised medicine, etc, was in broad terms, a disaster. Also, she took the view that the things that conservatives of the large C and small c variety cared about, such as civil society, property rights, ordered liberty, strong defence, and certain values, were damaged by this post-1945 settlement. Therefore, to conserve, one must also sweep much of this away, or at the very least, reform and constrain it. It is a paradox, but not that hard to grasp really.
There is more:
Tory Brexiteers were the most revolutionary people ever to wear the blue rosette.
Well, leaving a federal union with a demographic deficit with its desire to be a new super-national bloc, is I suppose “revolutionary” in the sense of “revolve” back to where the UK was prior to that development. To plead the case for change necessarily is going to irritate many: not just those of goodwill who thought the EU was marvellous in most respects, but of course to all the lobbyists, special interests etc who were happy to ride on the train. Contesting that makes one come across as abrasive and harsh. Soft voices, and “moderation”, gets one no-where, as several UK prime ministers would find out.
Wooldridge then goes on to claim that Mrs Thatcher’s approach led the way to the kind of populist politics on the Right in the US, first with Reagan (although American conservativism was taking a more vigorous turn back in the 60s under Goldwater) and then in particular with the rise of Trump. But that seems a stretch. Trump, a former registered Democrat, fixed on specific grievances, but it was more than that. He also tried to convey a more hopeful message of return to greatness. But there are many differences too. For all her dislike of the EU, Mrs Thatcher also favoured alliances of nation states, and the importance of close co-operation where necessary. And she could temporise when necessary.
In another line, Wooldridge repeats Mrs Thatcher’s line about “there is no such thing as society” – condemned as much on the socialist left as it is on the paternalist right – and falls into the trap of so many of not seeing the full quote in context. If I had been paid a pound every time I heard that line to denounce Mrs Thatcher, I’d be able to buy a vintage Ferrari. Wooldridge is being lazy.
Here is the quote in full: “There is no such thing as society. [end p30] There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.”
However you want to parse that, this is not someone saying that we can live our lives in self-contained boxes, not interacting or engaging with our fellow humans in all kinds of nourishing and supportive ways. She understood Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”. Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights about the voluntaristic energies of the young American republic also tap into the same point.
The core of all this is for Mrs Thatcher is that, as much as possible, our interactions are voluntary. Even in the case of care for children, that obligation stems from the choice of having a child in the first place.
There is not much else left to discuss in the article, but here is a point where Wooldridge makes what I think is a reasonable point but also over-eggs it:
Both Thatcher and Reagan enjoyed extraordinary success in privatizing industries, deregulating markets and generally unleashing entrepreneurial energies. That encouraged their successors to imitate their radicalism. But they also failed to arrest the shift of the culture to the left or to get a grip on the independent-minded permanent state. That failure provoked a combination of fury at the status quo and calls for further radicalism.
But how can a tamer, more “moderate” or “Burkean” conservatism have worked in this case? Inevitably, and certainly with Mrs Thatcher, there was only so much she could do in her decade in office. On education, for example, it was a topic that fascinated her, but how far can one political leader go in arresting its Leftward tilt? I have read Charles Moore’s three-volume biography of her and it is clear that she minded furiously about all this. (There is a single-volume version to coincided with her 100th birthday.) And I think that whatever solutions might be applied, they must involve removing government as much as possible from education, not the other way around. That is, in current terms, a “revolutionary” position to take.
Caution and moderation are not virtues in and of themselves as it depends what one is moderate and cautious about, and why. Mark Sidwell at CapX has these observations about Mrs Thatcher and her political importance. I like this line: “Thatcher’s politics was all about agency: embracing it, restoring it and trusting it.”
Also, if you can hold of a copy, I recommend Shirley Robin Letwin’s “An Anatomy of Thatcherism”, a sympathetic and closely reasoned analysis of what she was about.
Happy birthday to the lady.
“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note than in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent hold less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p per cent (where p is greater than n) and so forth. They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered. On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at the distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends upon how the distribution came about.” (page 232)
– Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick, First published in 1974.
I wonder if any of the leaders of today’s political parties in the UK have read it, still less understood the profound way that the late Harvard professor eviscerated egalitarian “patterned” ideas of justice more incisively than arguably anyone else, before or since. Somehow, I doubt they have. In this day and age of talk about wealth taxes and other horrors, Nozick is well worth reading again.
“…there is surely no doubt that politics has a bitter tone, a harsher edge, a public unpleasantness that occasionally spills over into crisis or just onto the streets. Why is this so? It’s nothing to do with social media. It’s nothing to do with “populism”. It’s none of the fashionable solutions. It’s simple. Politics is more polarised than ever before because more is at stake in politics than ever before. When is a lot is at stake, people argue more loudly. They are less willing to accept defeat. They want their views pressed hard.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph (£)
His article is entitled “Blame the Big State For Our Polarisation Crisis.”
“Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.”
– John Hardy
One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense?
Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”.
Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it.
All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours.
But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation.
“There is no ‘right’ to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed — a state created as a haven for a people nearly annihilated, and after a defensive war they won. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed right of return, there will be no peace and certainly no two-state solution. Because the refusal to abandon this made-up ‘right’ means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.”
– Micha Danzig
For those interested, I can recommend this overview about some of the issues from a pro-Israel, but not uncritically so, writer – Noa Tishby.
Another book by two authors, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, dissects, in painstaking detail, how the “right of return” claim lies at the heart of why two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestinian conflict have foundered in the past. Here’s a review of that book.
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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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