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.
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Classical liberal scholar, Randy Barnett has a long and excellent post (which I came across via Instapundit) spelling out some of the contradictions that occur when libertarians, be they minarchists, anarchists or more ‘pragmatic’ types, get into arguments about events like the war in Iraq (I have been called a lot of names, but hey, I can deal with branded a warmonger and a sappy peacenic, as has happened).
In particular, he notes something that some of us at Samizdata have observed many times, which is that for a certain kind of isolationist libertarian, they almost endow foreign, sovereign governments with the sort of respect that they never have for their own states. Barnett calls this the “Westphalian” attitude (derived from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th Century which recognised sovereign state’s boundaries in Europe at the end of the 30 Years’ War). Barnett ends up by making a point that I would make, which is that judging the rightness or wrongness of certain wars cannot be done by simple recourse to a sort of Rothbardian non-initiation-of-force principle, even though that principle is mighty useful as a sort of discussion point (Rothbard is a hero of mine, notwithstanding certain problems I have with his specific views). Judging, for example, whether regime or thug X poses country Y an existential threat, and what to do about it, cannot be done simply by parroting a few principles. One has to judge the facts of the situation and ask questions such as, “is this war prudent”? or “Will it make threats to us worse rather than better?”, or “What are the balance of risks?”. Prudence, as the Greeks knew, is a virtue, although it seems at times a little unfashionable to point that out. With the benefit of hindsight, prudence might have led us to take a rather different view of what to do about Saddam, assuming we had to do anything other than deter him by threatening to nuke him out of existence (but then, that shows that acting in strict self defence can come at the cost of killing millions of innocent people, which is not exactly libertarian. Does this mean “strict” libertarians must be pacifists?).
Anyway, Barnett’s essay is first class. For the more straightforward anti-war line out of the libertarian tradition, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute still has what I think is the best essay on the subject. It reads pretty well in the light of events. Both articles are pretty long so brew up plenty of coffee first.
An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women – in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife.
As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject.
David Friedman has some thoughts on the whole business of human mating and money. I suppose I will be deemed incorrigibly flippant, but I could not help but immediately think of this crackerjack of a funny post on such matters by the one and only Harry Hutton.
Deplorable, obviously.
Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, “screwball” movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times – well, at least in the first series – but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there’s been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era).
Andrew Sullivan is a rum character. Columnists are not supposed to maintain an iron consistency in their views and I do not hold it against Sullivan that he has switched from being a rather embarrassingly full-on cheerleader for George W. Bush, for example, to an equally full-on despiser of said. I actually believe Sullivan when he claims that his anger at some of Bush’s policies is not primarily motivated by Bush’s stance on gay marriage, but more by Bush’s very un-conservative heavy public spending, abuse of certain powers, and above all, the bungling in Iraq. But Sullivan likes to act as a sort of arbiter of what a true “conservative” is, but I wonder about his credentials on this score. This post leaves a nasty taste, even though Sullivan does his utmost, quite rightly, to divorce himself from condoning acts of violence:
Enviro-activists go all terrorist on us. The Washington Post story is here. I have to say that while I completely abhor the violence, I do not abhor the sentiment. Parking a 7-foot high Hummer in your neighborhood is about as irritating as watching one careen down the small streets of Provincetown. We have to create a social stigma toward people totally contemptuous of the environment.
“We have to create a social stigma”. That is really nice, Andrew. Several decades ago, certain people thought that it was right to “create a social stigma”, involving lots of nasty expressions and social ostracism, against people who wanted to have sex with people of their own gender. People once thought about sexual morality in much the same way that some people think about those who delight in driving gas guzzling cars. I do not know: maybe driving a large car is morally worse than two men bonking one another, but many people might take a different view. Sullivan is a man who has benefited from the liberties afforded to him by the United States, and has written eloquently about the plight of gay people and their struggle to be accepted as normal. It is particularly disappointing to see him joining what amounts to the moral bullying tactics of the Greens and their hysterical invocations of global doom.
Perhaps Dubya has unhinged the man. I wish Sullivan would cheer up: he used to be a great writer. Perhaps he should come back home to Britain for a few years and rediscover his English sense of humour.
Simon Heffer is one of those occasionally convincing but also maddening right-wing commentators who talks the free market talk, but is as prone as any Fabian socialist to the idea of preventing the market from operating if it suits. His latest tirade is against the UK government’s aim to build more housing and hence meet skyrocketing demand. Heffer is of course correct to lambast what might be a state-driven process, but I get the impression that he is pretty much deaf to the idea that high house prices reflect a serious scarcity of supply, which needs to be met if people who are not as rich as Croesus have a chance of buying a home.
The old bogeyman of “concreting over southeast England” is brought up; yes, the southeast is densely populated, but not as densely, say, as Holland or some other parts of the world. And one possible consequence of our planning laws is that it may have unwittingly encouraged people to build on floodplains, which clearly has borne bitter fruit for some householders this year due to the torrential rains of the English “summer”.
Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.
Steve Martin. (My favourite Martin film is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine.)
“I like Canary Wharf. It is where Dr Who fought against the Cybermen.”
A friend of mine, who as you can tell, is a Dr Who fanatic. I will never be able to think of London’s new financial district in quite the same way again.
In his defence of classical liberalism and critique of 20th Century state welfarism, F.A. Hayek argued that one of the dangers of socialised medicine (Michael Moore, please note) is that if health care is not rationed by price and expanded by the freely chosen actions of patients and doctors, then some other means of allocating scarce resources, and making them hopefully less scarce, will be needed. That “other” way is state coercion and control. Because healthcare is delivered in Britain free at the point of use – of course it is not free at all – the individual patient does not directly see the price of the health care he or she receives, such as in the form of an insurance premium. There is no price incentive, therefore, for a person to, say, cut out smoking, cut the beer and the beef burgers, get in shape by frequenting a gym, etc.
I wrote some time ago about the scarcity of human organs such as kidneys and livers, and how much of the western world suffers from a strange form or hypocrisy: we say it is great that people volunteer to donate organs (the libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has done just that by donating a kidney to a friend) but we recoil in horror at the idea that a person might ever be persuaded to sell an organ or be paid for such a donation, even though there is, in some countries, a commercial market in the business of using such organs and the related human tissue. (There is some legitimate worry that very poor people who do not realise the health implications might undergo surgery to sell their body parts, to be fair).
I thought again about such mixed attitudes when I saw the front page of the Sunday Times this morning:
THE chief medical officer wants everyone to be treated as organ donors after death unless they explicitly opt out of the scheme.
Sir Liam Donaldson believes the shortage of kidneys, livers and hearts is so acute that the country needs a donation system that will presume patients have given consent for their body parts to be transplanted.
Those who wanted to opt out would have to register in a similar way to those who now carry organ donor cards. This could be done through a central NHS database or through other documentation, such as driving licences.
But ranting away about the presumptious tendencies of a state doctor is all very well for relieving a bit of blood pressure, but there clearly is a problem with shortages of organs and how to save the lives of people in desperate need. Donation, either for no money or for a payment (with safeguards, if need be), can work only so far. We need to encourage biotechnological fixes: and a good place to see what sort of fixes might be out there is this interesting study by Ronald Bailey.
The doctors are right to highlight that there is a problem, but how less depressing would it be if they could think about ways of solving it without recourse to asuming that your body belongs to the collective, just for once.
Via Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog, here is this rather amusing item about how French motorists with clean driving licences sell their speeding points online for a fee to drivers who are in danger of using up all their points and then getting banned. Yes, yes, I can see the usual Dudley Do-Rights out there bleating that this is all terribly naughty, a sign of decadence, blah, but in fact what this demonstrates, in a slightly naughty French way, is how if you oppress people enough with laws and taxes over a period of time, it breeds such disregard for the law that even laws that have sense – and driving very fast can be bloody dangerous – get spurned. (It appears the French are smarter at getting around certain rules – look at what happened to former Spurs, Manchester United and England player Teddy Sheringham for allegedly trying to pull the same speeding-point move).
I have driven a few times along France’s magnificent, sweeping autoroutes, and am occasionally reminded that France invented Formula 1 motor racing. Maybe there’s plenty of life left in Gaul yet. If only they could do capitalism in a slightly more routine way.
Talking of such alternative markets, here is an old article about the market in air miles.
They never give up. An article nicely slams attempts by UK neo-Malthusians to get us all frightened about the terrible idea of people wanting to have babies. Selfish, cruel to the Planet Earth, a drain on “resources”: you know the litany. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which I recommend:
Of all the bogeys you might have thought well and truly nailed in the past decade or so, the population control movement seemed most obviously to have a stake through its heart. At a time when we – I mean, anyone over 35 – are all horribly conscious that there won’t be enough taxpayers to support us in gin and cigarettes in our old age, the very last thing we need to worry about is excess population growth. On the contrary: as seen from the dinner party circuit, the real crisis is the difficulty for female graduates in getting anyone to breed with. Forty per cent of women graduates don’t have a single baby at the age of 35.
Quite. The obsession with their being “too many” people (quite how anyone can work that out is a mystery) is something I find rather malevolent. In any event, as the writer quoted makes clear, it seems a bit weird for the population worriers to go on about supposedly high birthrates when in fact a lot of recent commentary – from the likes of Mark Steyn – has tended to suggest quite the opposite. Indeed, Steyn and others argue that the indigenous population of western Europe, or parts of it, is stagnating and birthrates have fallen below the replacement level (the level required to maintain a stable level). And of course, to enforce strict population controls, even if it makes any kind of sense (it does not) begs the question of how. Does it require China-style policies that lead to mass abortions and an imbalance between girls and boys? I ask these questions now because while watching the BBC television show this morning as I got ready for work, I saw some middle-aged, white-haired woman, a sort of genteel Rosa Klebb, arguing very emphatically against large families. The BBC hosts gave her only the most gentle of grillings. Sitting next to her on the couch was a black couple with 8 children (and very happy and relaxed they looked). The grey-haired lady made all kinds of claims that big families “put too much stress on the planet” and completely dismissed any idea that low population growth, or decline, was a problem. The issue of how to pay for an increasingly ageing workforce and the pressures on pension systems was also dismissed.
In the end of the day, rational debate works only so far with these fanatics. Some of them look quite nice, they wear suits or woolly jumpers, but their demand for state power over the most intimate aspects of your life – having children and raising a family – is implacable. They haven’t gone away.
Great piece today in the Times (of London) asking why businesses are not more vigorous in defending themselves and why they do not demand that people, as individuals, stop looking to the ‘blame culture’ and demand that people take more responsibility for their actions:
So where is the business voice telling us that we the public – egged on by politicians, the media and NGOs – have got it all wrong? Where are the companies fighting back at the wilder allegations of publicity-hungry campaign groups, self-interested organisations and junk scientists? I’ll tell you where they are: they are at corporate social responsibility conferences, “engaging” with other people’s agendas.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with listening. Companies must always listen, learn and seek to improve. But this ‘engagement’ is too often a one-way street: the terms of engagement are dictated by others. The ‘corporate responsibility’ agenda in particular is dominated by anti-business campaigners. And their style is not generally to engage; it is to criticise, demand and oppose. This is understandable: NGOs, like the media and politicians, all thrive on conflict. Quiet and constructive dialogue is rarely in their interests
Amen, brother. One quick observation from me on this is that the litigation culture, which is still far worse in the United States, has spread to our shores; also, the general desire to blame others for our misfortune is possibly also a side-effect of the Welfare State and encouraged by the MSM.
Nice to see such forthright sanity from a major newspaper.
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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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