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 Obama administration came into office promising to press the “reset” button with the rest of the world after eight years of the so-called arrogant, swaggering Texan cowboy blundering his way around the planet, offending peoples from many lands. Instead, Obama pressed the ejector-seat button: Brits, Czechs, Israelis, Indians found themselves given the brush. I gather the Queen was “amused” by the president’s thoughtful gift of an iPod preloaded with Obama speeches – and, fortunately for Her Majesty, the 160GB model only has storage capacity for two of them, or three if you include one of his shorter perorations.”
Mark Steyn.
It is amazing how a foreign leader can get away with being brusque to allies so long as he or she does not speak with a Texan accent. After all, Mr Obama got the Nobel Prize for Peace!
Iain Dale, the UK blogger and wannabe Tory MP, gets himself into a fearful mess in arguing as to why owners of privately owned businesses, such as hotels and the like, should be forced to accept any type of client, even if that offends the moral sensibilities of the owners. Much as I share Mr Dale’s dislike of bigotry, he’s just plain wrong when he writes:
“This is not about property rights. If you open your house to paying guests, it is no longer just your house. You are running a business, just the same as anyone else, and you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. If you do not wish gay people, black people, Jews or anyone else in your house, don’t open it to the public. Simple as that. No one would accept a shopowner refusing to serve a particular type of person, would they?”
He’s wrong here. So Mr Dale imagines, does he, that as soon as a person sets up – at their own risk and cost – in business, and chooses to make money in a particular way, that they suddenly forfeit any right to choose with whom they wish to make a living if the powers that be decide that such reasoning is prejudiced in some bad way? How the expletive deleted does that work, Mr Dale? Does this mean, for instance, that a business owner should be forced to serve anyone? Suppose a nightclub, say, insists on a dress code for its clientele (as happens). Does this mean that the scruffy are being discriminated against?
I don’t like homophobia any more than Mr Dale, but as a supposed Tory, he ought to realise that the best protection any group of persons have against bigotry is competition and several ownership of private property. In a free, robust market unimpeded by state privileges and taxes, bigotry carries a significant economic cost to the bigot. And I think it was Voltaire back in the 1740s who observed, how people of all faiths, for example, could and did transact in the early London Stock Exchange of the time. Filthy lucre is often the most corrosive solvent of bigotry that there is.
There is also an ancilliary point here. As a free marketeer in favour of honest money and competition in currencies, I think it should be the right of any businessman to refuse to accept payment in certain currencies that he, rationally or otherwise, does not trust. If we adopt Mr Dale’s line of reasoning on how a business owner’s property rights go up in smoke the moment a client comes through the door, he’s all in favour of forcing people to accept payment in whatever the state decrees is the “proper” form.
Sorry Mr Dale, but you just don’t accept the concept of free association as it applies to commerce. Property rights is most definitely what the issue is about.
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbours. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults. “Take Father Michael down our road a piece. I’m not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him. My next-door neighbour is a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat. No fee – no prospect of a fee – I believe in Doc. I believe in my townspeople. You can know on any door in our town saying, ‘I’m hungry,’ and you will be fed. Our town is no exception. I’ve found the same ready charity everywhere. But for the one who says, ‘To heck with you – I got mine,’ there are a hundred, a thousand who will say, “Sure, pal, sit down.” I know that despite all warnings against hitch-hikers I can step up to the highway, thumb for a ride and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, ‘Climb in Mac – how far you going?’
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land. I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones. I believe that almost all politicians are honest. . .there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work.
If this were not true we would never have gotten past the 13 colonies. I believe in Rodger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in – I am proud to belong to – the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.
And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet – will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.
– R. A. Heinlein.
One of the tedious features of that TV phenomenon, the celeb chef, is how so many of them go on and on about the wonderfulness of buying local ingredients, implying that those evil, globalised behemoths – supermarkets – grind the faces of farmers, sell insipid products to the masses, etc. Like the US blogger Timothy Sandefur, I tend to take a dim view of those who turn up their noses as the many benefits of trade and the division of labour. And Mr S. has spotted this rather grimly satisfying story.
As I have said before, people who refer to such things as “food security” or the supposed joys of self sufficiency can sometimes overlook the fact that Man’s best insurance policy against shortages is a global division of labour when it comes to producing food.
On the BBC’s morning news show, was a short spot about unruly school pupils. One of the issues that was raised by the presenter was the fact that in a lot of schools, headteachers do not really have a very strong idea of what goes on in the classroom. A bit later in the show, a female headteacher was asked about this and she said something to the effect of “Well, I am on the road a lot and out of the school attending conferences and so on, but I have children of my own”.
Nice.
“So you live beyond your means and rack up a bunch of bills you can’t cover. So you go to your rich uncle. He’s tapped out, alas. And tired of supporting you. So he goes to his rich uncle who’s even richer and known for his desire to keep the family name unsullied. But what if he’s tapped out? Those are my thoughts when I read this story that Sarkozy is supporting Merkel in getting the IMF to bail out the Greeks. The IMF is the richer uncle. Eventually the other guy runs out of money. We’re going to have to start borrowing from Mars or Venus soon.”
– Russ Roberts, at the Cafe Hayek blog.
When I was a wee kid growing up on my folks’ farm in East Anglia, it was a common sight, in the 1970s and 80s, to see RAF Jaguar and Tornado jet aircraft practicing very low flying over the flat (ish) fields of that part of the UK. Typically, a Jag could fly no more than 100 ft off the deck, so low in fact that you could see all the markings on the side of the aircraft, what sort of stuff it was carrying, etc. The idea was to get under the opposition’s radar. These aircraft were practicing the sort of flying that would be needed against the-then Warsaw Pact ground forces of the time. (The Jaguar was a very effective strike aircraft).
But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with flying as low as this. Ye gods!
Here’s another.
And guess who the new owner of this leftist newspaper is? I wonder how Robert “my brain hurts” Fisk, columnist at that paper, is taking the news.
It was grimly amusing to watch as TV interviewers tried to get some straight answers out of the UK government and the Tory opposition about what items of public spending would and could be cut to get the finances under control. George Osborne, shadow Chancellor, was pretty evasive, as I have come to expect. Well, for those who want to see some sort of shopping list of cuts, the Taxpayers’ Alliance has come up with a handy list of items deserving of termination.
A quick entry from me: take a look at this item via Reason TV spot about the monster of a healthcare bill that passed at the weekend in the US. (I love the Incredibles-style music in it, by the way). As Gillespie puts it, the government underestimates of spending on things like health is not a bug, but a feature. The message that comes through, of course, is one that applies to governments worldwide. Do we honestly expect that politicians who are capable of the sort of accounting tricks surrounding building projects like the Olympic Games in London can be trusted to give accurate, costed predictions on things like healthcare spending, or education, or defence procurement?
Bear that in mind as we read the latest performance by UK finance minister, Alistair Darling, today.
“Congratulations, Democrats. Beginning now, you own the health-care system in America. Every hiccup. Every complaint. Every long line. All yours.”
– Kathryn Jean-Lopez.
I wish that were true. Here in Britain, where filthy wards in NHS hospitals, for example, have been a regular staple of the UK newspapers, the standard response is usually to demand even more money, more rules, and so forth. If you challenge the model of tax-funded healthcare free at the point of delivery, then you are political dogfood. And Mr Obama and his allies know that. As Mark Steyn has been putting since before Mr Obama’s election, Mr O. is counting on what the UK politician Sir Keith Joseph once dubbed the “ratchet effect”: ratchet socialism a little more, and make it harder and harder for anyone to push back.
Of course, sometimes this argument will be proven wrong. I do get the impression that a lot of Americans, including those middle-of-the-road voters who gave Obama a chance in 2008, are now very alarmed at the huge debt that his administration seems to be encouraging. So it may be that Mr Obama is a one-term POTUS. But his legacy might take a lot longer to reverse.
On a more philosophical line, here is what I wrote a while back about the bogus nature of healthcare “rights”.
It is a melancholy fact to face that while most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we live our lives by some sort of moral code, and respect our fellows as beings deserving of respect if they do not threaten our lives or property, some people do not live by such a code, nor care. One particular species of maggot in our world is the person who likes to verbally and physically abuse disabled persons.
The issue of care and protection of the mentally and physically handicapped, raising as it does issues of personal autonomy, concerns about abuse of state power and medicine, etc, is too big an issue to push into a blog post. No, the point I want to address is the narrower one of whether it makes any sense at all to create another “hate crime”: the crime, as it were, of hating disabled people. In brief, I think creating such a “hate crime” is foolish, albeit an understandable move driven by those with honorable motives to protect the weak.
Let’s be clear from the get-go that I regard those who hate, and who act on that hate, of disabled people to be scum of the earth. It does bother me, though, that a crime of say, assault on a person and his property should be treated as being far more serious because the state has tried to measure, or establish, the hate that exists in the mind of the attacker. A crime is a crime, surely. If an able-bodied man is mugged in the street, does it make any specific difference in terms of sentencing the criminal, assuming the criminal is caught? The area where physical or mental disability comes into play in sentencing a criminal is where, say, the disability clearly meant that the disabled victim could not defend himself. That is why assaults on the aged and infirm, and on children, are treated – at least supposedly – more severely than assaults on say, the holder of a karate black belt. Of course, in investigating a crime, the fact that a suspect has a motive such as hate of group X or Y might be useful in helping to narrow down a list of suspects. However, as a factor in sentencing, the idea of “hate crime” strikes me as nonsense.
What next – political hate crimes where a person is sentenced for the crime of “hating” those in public office or who are members of certain ideological/political groupings?
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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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