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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Coffee House links to the latest example of a government minister/official leaving potentially sensitive information on the train. As usual, one expects such stories to undermine yet further the credibility of government-created ID systems and databases. But I think it was our own Brian Micklethwait who wrote, a few months back (cannot find the link, sorry) that there is a chance that such “cockups” are deliberate.
What if such papers are being left lying around to create a false trail? Fanciful? Maybe. But it may just be that such officials are not quite as moronic as these stories suggest, or at least that another intepretation is worth thinking about.
Oh scratch that: they are all morons!
Good on the Libertarian Alliance for publishing this. As it says, Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, is more than able to take care of himself, but given some pathetic attempts by the Daily Telegraph and a few others to sneer at him (what the heck has gone wrong at the Telegraph?), it is nice to have friendly comments.
Paul has probably raised the profile of the LA indirectly, quite a bit. He should get an award at this year’s annual LA conference. Even if it is not the whole truth, I think it is very, very good to be able to have it said that a “libertarian blogger has brought down minister X or civil servant Y”. The very fact that folk are going around saying this, or hinting at it, is gold-dust to libertarian activitsts such as the LA and its counterparts. In his way, Paul is doing for the free market movement what the Tea Party folks are doing, maybe, in the US. In fact, I’d be willing to state that relatively speaking, Paul’s site is now the most influential political blog in the world. I mean, is there a French, German or, heaven help us, an Italian equivalent?
Just askin’.
Roderick Long links to some good material about The Watchmen, both of the graphic novel and film made out of it. I saw the film at an IMAX cinema a few weeks ago. Stupendous in some ways; very violent, an interesting morality tale to boot. And not to mention one of the hottest female heroines I have ever seen and er, a blue guy in the buff. (A girl sitting next to me went bright red watching the enhanced Dr Manhattan and she got such a fit of the giggles that it proved dangerously infectious).
Here is a pretty good collection of reviews.
Mr Long also has wise words on the Tea Parties. Talking of which, here are some related thoughts from Maine.
The account of Gordon Brown’s vile political career will not remotely surprise Samizdata regulars but this summary of the man who is now, hopefully, in the final phases of his career before reaching oblivion is a great read. Tom Bower’s article reads like a judge’s sentencing comments about a particularly nasty gangster.
I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.
– Simon Heffer
I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling.
Matt Welch of Reason debates Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell over issues including the recent bouts of piracy in the Indian Ocean. One issue that comes up is whether the Somalia is a “libertarian nirvana”. Duh. Lefties love to sneer that such lawless parts of the world are some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise. Have they not figured out that free societies are saturated with notions of law and property boundaries, which need to be upheld and defended? Laws and liberty are intertwined – the problem is when laws violate the right of humans to live their lives unmolesed, rather than protect such rights. Since when did robbing merchant ships have anything to do with freedom, exactly?
Anyway, Mr Welch more than holds his own in this encounter. Worth a view.
Mr Obama’s administration has released documents about details of “harsh interrogation techniques” that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences – assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked – then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what “hope and change” meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)
Torture, and its use, is one of those “canary in the mineshaft” issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.
As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.
Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.
“There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers.”
David Thompson.
It occurs to me, reading this item about the decision by the authorities not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative MP, over his farcical arrest, that they decided that picking on this guy now that the UK government is in such a terrible mess might not be a runner. The police/Crown Prosecution Service might have been more confident of doing the government’s bidding when the government appeared all powerful. Now, I get the impression that in Whitehall, and across much of the government machine, arses are being covered, positions prepared. The police have probably woken up to the idea that soon, perhaps sooner than some imagine, their masters will be different, if only by political colouring.
This is how regimes die. Their toadies and functionaries start to turn on them.
Meanwhile, I wonder if we can persuade our American blogger friends to notice that the government of a G7 nation and NATO ally is, er, about to implode. I mean, I think that might even be of interest to The Community Organiser. Or maybe not.
A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog’s coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon’s time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.
Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration – I am a defender of free migration BTW – this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.
Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don’t say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green’s behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential “whistle-blowers” on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.
I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.
Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.
Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?
They still don’t get it. In what is a generally very good, readable account of the life and times so far of Andrew Sullivan and his role in driving the blog format, the author, Johann Hari, comes out with this:
Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.
Well I cannot recall what Oakeshott – a writer that I have studied a bit – said about the Road To Serfdom (both men taught at the London School of Economics, by the way), but that strikes me as a terribly confused paragraph. The whole point about Hayek’s demolition of the argument for central planning and socialism is that these ideas take no account of human ignorance, of the inability of any central planner, or group of planners, to have at their fingertips all the knowledge needed to co-ordinate supply and demand. Capitalism, and the “discovery process” of competitive markets, and risk-taking of entrepreneurs, works precisely because it does not require humans to be omniscient, but to capitalise on what they do know. Far from being a utopian, Hayek’s brand of classical liberalism – he called himself an “old Whig – is premised on the very kind of doubts and skepticisms that someone like Andrew Sullivan professes to hold. In fairness to Sullivan – to whom I have been rather unkind because of his support for a Big Government man like Mr Obama – he understands this point, or at least he used to do so.
Hari then goes on to approvingly quote a bete noire of mine, Naomi Klein:
This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”
The “real version” of free markets can be found in say, parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain, when wealth exploded by any historical precedents; in Hong Kong, a place with no natural resources other than the entrepreneurial vigour of its people, and in the US, for much of its history, etc.
The more free, the less distorted, such markets are, by such things as central banks, taxes and regulations, the better such places tend to be, although the public can be misled by the prophets of big government into thinking that further progress requires something different. As I unashamedly say over and over, the current financial snafu lies, at root, on the doorstep of central – state – banks. That is not just a quibble. It is at the heart of the issue. It is no good socialists like Ms Klein trying to compare free market critics of mixed-economies like the UK with socialists trying to claim that the Soviet Union did not work because it was not done right or was a bit oppressive. The two worldviews are coming from fundamentally different premises about the issue of how you deal with lack of complete knowledge by individuals who must still act and take decisions. The disasters of socialism are features, not bugs.
There is another point for Mr Hari and others to consider: when firms go bust, it actualy generates knowledge and encourages businesses to do something different, to adjust. When a government department fails, as the CIA failed in not stopping 9/11, or the SEC failed in not stopping Bernard Madoff, does the organisation suffer the equivalent of going bankrupt? No, of course not. Instead, there are calls for more regulations, more officials, bigger budgets. There is no negative feedback loop in government, apart from the highly unreliable process of the occasional general election.
At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, “Because they are evil”, since that clearly is not quite right. Why do such misconceptions stick, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, so tenaciously? Perhaps such people have crafted a viewpoint for themselves that defines their very being. I guess even I might have to admit some of that.
Update: Sullivan asks some hard but fair questions about the Tea Party protesters. He’s got a point. If opposing the bailouts means letting say, AIG go down the U-bend with all that implies, the protesters should perhaps concede as much. That is why the work of economists over in the UK such as Kevin Dowd is so important. We need to chart a course to a better, less imperfect, place.
“There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest.”
– Blognor Regis
And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.
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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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