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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Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).
It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine’s writers. This has to hurt:
I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.
This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).
This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.
How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics – either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.
– David Aranovich, who is not entirely impressed by the Barack Obama phenomenon. Count me in on that.
I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.
Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words “tequila slammer” would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker’s head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state’s whim. They’d have thought you a paranoid loon.
– Samizdata commenter Ian B. We do not have to imagine these things any more, alas. The only problem with his quote is that he omitted to mention assault on jury trials, Habeas Corpus, double-jeopardy…
In some of the recent understandable moans about the sheer awfulness of Britain’s state-controlled rail network – please don’t try and tell me it has much to do with laissez faire capitalism – several commentators have complained about the dearth of people entering the fields of engineering. Jeff Randall in today’s Daily Telegraph does so. Various reasons are given for this lack of talent: the education system, an anti-science, anti-technology culture, etc. While some of these factors have a part to play in this, I do not think these explanations get to the core of the issue. If railway engineers do not earn large salaries and the job is not seen to be worth the hassle compared with say, becoming a hedge fund manager in London’s West End, it is not a surprise to see what will happen. If or when the remuneration for being a new Brunel rivals or even exceeds that of being a Goldman Sachs derivatives dealer, we will get more engineers, and of higher quality. It is that simple.
Or maybe one problem is that railways, perhaps because of the problems now facing the UK industry, are seen as just plain dull. As Randall says, confessing to being a railway engineer may not always be a great move at a dinner party, or for that matter, on a hot date. I am not sure how one changes that.
A smaller state in Victorian terms isn’t on the cards. The electorate would take flight at such talk. What the electorate is after, however, is a redrawing of the state’s boundaries. There is no fall in demand for collective services like health and education but voters are seeking two clear advances in their freedom from such a redrawing exercise. The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time. The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.
– Frank Field, Labour MP. He is probably right, but once people get into this habit of choosing to live their lives as they please, who knows where it may end up.
This item in the FT reminds us that the spirit of enterprise has not reached all pockets of British society:
More than half a million young Britons are officially too sick to work and claiming incapacity benefits, a higher tally than the number claiming unemployment benefit, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.
The word I think the FT is looking for but reluctant to use, I think, is “lazy”.
The figure, which includes more than 300,000 young people claiming for “mental and behavioural disorders”, shows continuing high levels of worklessness among the young, in spite of 10 years of steady economic growth and a concerted attempt to move people off welfare and into work.
I will not dismiss problems of mental health – this is a serious subject, but 300,000?
This does rather throw the issue of economic immigration – and indeed, emigration – into sharper relief. If a significant chunk of the potential working population is mentally not the full set of cards, or lazy, no wonder it is proving easy for motiviated, not-ill foreigners to enter the UK job market. Contrary to the Rod Liddles of this world, I dread to think what would have happened to the British economy had it not been for the influx of immigrants over the past decade or so.
Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I came across this rather nifty map showing how different countries around the world vary in their treatment of privacy. Both Britain and America get a black. Some parts of the world are a sort of grey, like Africa (I guess the thugs that run parts of that continent have other things to worry about besides snooping on everyone). It looks as if Germany is less intrusive than France, and less than Britain. Canada is less intrusive than the USA, etc. The link takes you to the methodology that Privacy International, a civil lberties group, uses to calculate its rankings.
Here’s hoping that British lovers of liberty have rather more reason to feel less ashamed of what has happened in this nation in 12 months’ time.
Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, has a pretty good item over at Bloomberg about the good economic developments over the past 12 months, which inevitably get overlooked with so much understandable focus on the sub-prime mortgage snafu and the associated mega-buck losses sustained by some of the world’s top financial institutions, such as Citi and Merrill. But much of the economic news is good; when I punch some numbers on my Bloomberg machine, I am reminded that a goodly number of African stock markets are up strongly this year – that nicely upsets the usual cliches of Africa as a story of unmitigated woe, not that there are not serious problems there of course. China’s stock market looks like a bubble but the growth of the economy is real enough, whatever one thinks of government statistics; one of the best performing stock markets of 2007 has been Germany’s, up more than 20% this year, despite the high exchange rate of the euro. France may be starting to turn a corner, despite my doubts on how far Sarkozy will go in liberalising that country’s economy. A weak dollar should boost American exports and hence help the US economy close its trade deficit. Most Latin American economies are on an upward curve and Venezuela’s Chavez received an admirable rebuff in his attempt to seize permanent power late in the year. (Quick question: what are readers’ bets for most promising economy in 2008?). Russia is problematic: its status as an energy exporter means it is enjoying a bonanza of revenues, but this needs to be matched the emergence of a large, broad middle class able to sustain the sort of entrepreneurial economy for the long term; India is a bright spot; most of central Europe, Scandanavia is in decent shape. Italy is a permanent car accident and a possible quitter of the euro, but Italy seems to have incredible powers of survival.
All of these developments should be borne in mind when you look at how Britain’s economy has performed. On one level, the figures are poor: we have UK public deficits despite years of economic growth; tax burdens are rising and productivity is not what it could be; but from my admittedly biased vantage point in central London, I do not see a country in crisis (what I do see is a statist political culture in decline or at best, paralysis, which is not quite the same thing); the inventiveness and entrepreneurial gusto in this country is impressive, although one worries about the impact of an exodus of bright talents to foreign, sunnier climes. All in all though, I think it quite wrong to end 2007 on a whiny note, so I will not. As far as the cause of liberty is concerned, there is all to play for; the ID card venture is not a done deal and the Big Brother state received a mighty poke in the eye this year with the fiasco of the lost data on 25m people. I get more and more sense from the media that Britons are losing patience with this state of affairs. Let’s hope so.
Wishing my fellow contributors and our readers a very happy, prosperous and healthy 2008.
Wired has a list of what it regards as the top scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Some of the technologists and scientifically literate folk who read our blog might disagree, so comment away with your own suggestions.
I missed this when it came out before Christmas, but this crackerjack of an article by the often-excellent Martin Samuel in the Times (of London) about the hypocritical attitudes of the press towards burglaries on well-paid footballers is a good read. It had me nodding in agreement. So footballers have terrible taste in jewellery and cars? So what? Burgling their homes, particularly when family members are in the premises, is a heinous crime and should be punished with heavy restitution by the offender (if it takes the yob years to pay off such a debt, well tough). And yet the attitude of some parts of the press, if Samuel’s take is correct, is that rich sportsmen somehow have it coming. It reminds us of an unpleasant combination of anti-wealth snobbery mixed with the current loathing of “Chav” culture that brings together some fairly weird mixtures of political and cultural views. A bling-wearing Liverpool footballer is as entitled to the protection of his life and property as any Torygraph reader in Tonbridge Wells.
Read the whole thing. I like the Mossad reference at the end.
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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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