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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Here is a website for the film Amazing Grace, due for release soon. It centres on the life of William Wilberforce, friend of great British Prime Minister William Pitt, and the man most people will associate with the abolitionist movement. The campaign to end slavery lasted for years before eventually succeeding in the first decade of the 19th Century, although it lingered as an institution in the colonies for many years before ending in the conflagration of the US civil war. I have no idea whether this new film will be any good and what sort of “point” it will make, but if there is a point worth making on a libertarian blog like this, it is that slavery in all its forms is an abomination, a stain on humanity and should be resisted. Furthermore, man since ancient times has known that slavery is an evil but for many centuries was either resigned to the institution, or was cowed into thinking that it was part of the natural order of things. I have read comments on this blog – by an individual who thankfully no longer bothers us – that slavery was a product of its economic times and it would be quite wrong for us to “lord it over” our ancestors by condemning the practice. This is moral relativism, pure and simple.
Some people have tried to argue that the British slave trade proves the wickedness possible through capitalism, although I think it demonstrates a quite different point. Kidnapping people from their homes and then forcing them to work in conditions as appalling as a plantation has not, as far as I know, got anything to do with consensual acts of commerce as classical liberals might understand it. Quite the reverse. What slavery shows is that trade without respect for the rights of individuals is in fact a form of thuggery.
Here is an article I wrote over a year ago about a less well known opponent of slavery, Thomas Clarkson. On the 200th anniversary of Britain’s outlawing the slave trade, let’s celebrate what these men achieved.
“I always felt this country was going down the tubes when the television folk replaced Basil Brush with Roland Rat.”
My dad, with his finger on the pulse as usual. Here is a tribute page to television’s most superior fox.
Richard North has a terrific review of the book “Affluenza” by Oliver James. Even reading the cover of this book while browsing through a Waterstone’s shop the other day, I could tell that a book called “Affluenza” was bound to trot out the argument that we comfortably-off westerners were being ruined by too much of a good thing. Flumoxxed by thousands of choices of toothpaste, CDs, breakfast cereals, cars, wallpapers, books, foreign holidays and designer clothes, we just cannot cope. All this stuff, all this wealth, is crippling us.
North will have none of it:
The book’s macro case – the case it makes about society and economics – is that “selfish capitalism” is bad for the middle class (it makes them greedy and nasty). It insists that there is a powerful correlation between a nation’s mental distress and the selfishness of its capitalism. James seeks to substantiate this case by asserting that a “definitive WHO study” and “14 national studies” rank mental ill health in just the way he’d like, and that they prove the more orientated toward affluence people are, the more miserable they are. That is: the Anglosphere is sickest and everywhere else is healthier.
Well, since “selfishness” is often a pejorative way of saying that people wish to be happy and prefer to breathe and have a good time rather than be miserable, I usually automatically tune out criticisms of capitalism on the grounds that it fosters selfishness. Even if one is not a great admirer of the late novelist Ayn Rand, I think it is fair to credit her with re-connecting with the old Aristotelian tradition in pointing out that happiness, enjoyment of the material things of life can and do go hand in hand with virtue and goodness. Well all is said and done, when a collectivist/socialist/fascist/some other bully attacks liberalism for “selfishness”, what they are really demanding is that we live our lives according to their – selfish – desires for a particular utopia. → Continue reading: A great demolition of a very, very silly book
A U.S. politician wants to pass a law that would make it a crime to cross the road while listening to an MP3 player or some other device that presumably screens out the noise of approaching traffic. For one’s own safety, naturally. People who wear iPods while walking around are a menace to themselves and this sort of bad behaviour should be banned immediately, naturally (sarcasm alert).
Alas, the story I have linked to does not give any examples of where a pedestrian was run over by a car because the person happened to be daydreaming while listening to Mozart or for that matter rocking to ACDC.
Music, it’s the new menace.
Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start any sword fights. I’m over that phase.
– Captain Malcolm Reynolds, one of the many fine characters in the television series, Firefly.
Here is the latest Papal Bull from the European Union:
A series of “green crimes”, enforceable across the EU and punishable by prison sentences and hefty fines, are to be proposed under a contentious push by the European Commission into the sensitive area of criminal lawmaking.
The drive by Brussels to apply penalties for ecological crime reflects concerns that some countries treat offences such as pollution and illegal dumping of waste more seriously than others, allowing criminals to exploit loopholes.
It used to be the dream of socialists and utopians of varying degrees of malevolence or stupidity to want a world state. In a world state, pesky local regulatory differences would be obliterated and replaced by a rational grid of laws from which no escape was possible. In true ‘watermelon’ fashion – green on the outside, red in the core – the Greens are embracing the instruments of a pan-national state to enforce their ideas.
There is a superficial plausibility to this. Pollution knows no barriers. If a German coal-fired power station emits carbon dioxide and other things, that will not just affect the Germans living near to the station but other nations. If a Swiss chemicals firm accidentally spills toxic material in to the Rhine – this has happened – then people in Holland get affected, and so on.
But what these sort of cases do is not to suggest that we need to give a centralised, international body coercive powers over people living across a whole continent. Rather, we should keep reminding people that rigorous enforcement of existing property rights, and creation of such rights in hitherto unowned resources, allied to the incentive structures of markets, provide the best route for tackling real environmental problems such as pollution. In any case, with certain emissions, it pays to remember that a pollutant for one person might be a positive benefit – or “externality” – for someone else.
The global warming/pollution/generally-we-are-all-doomed agenda is a significant threat to our liberties at the moment, so I make no apologies for going on about it.
Following on from Thaddus’s recent posting about how politicians are trying to enlist children in the Green agenda, it is worthwhile pondering why environmentalism, even the more scientifically credible sort, is often depressing, puritanical and unpleasant. Let’s face it, a lot of libertarians’ hostility to Greenery is a suspicion that the Greens are “watermelons” – green on the outside, and socialists on the inside. Socialism, in as much as it has ever been a coherent political and economic point of view, has been economically if not entirely intellectually discredited. It has been a failure, with varying degrees of nastiness, ranging from the stifling if relatively benign version of Sweden through the to mass killing fields of Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. So if you hate capitalism and material wealth then the Green agenda comes in very handy.
There is a danger in this approach, however, and not just because ad hominem points about the motives of one’s ideological opponents often put off the uncommitted. The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad. So I can see why environmentalism appeals not just to anti-capitalists, but to conservatives and liberals who want to live the good life and ensure there is plenty of that good life around for future generations. There is in fact a school of environmental thought that harnesses ideas of property and markets to make its case.
Another point I’d make is this: why cannot the Greens, or at least the more sensible ones, throw off the image of po-faced puritanism that so often hangs around their pronouncements. His Supreme Blogness, Glenn Reynolds, has interesting thoughts here on how technologies like electric cars and so forth should be sold not as a sort of “hair-shirt” consumer gesture but because such technologies might be fun and interesting for people.
Fun – that is a word one does not hear much about when discussing technological fixes for our planet. Perhaps we should hear it a good deal more.
“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”.
– Alfred Hitchcock, who was always a practical fellow.
I have no idea whether the journalists at the Daily Telegraph make it their business to read this blog (although they most certainly should do so, naturally) but this article nicely backed up my point the other day about the economic upsurge of India.
In my posting here, a number of commenters scoffed with disbelief that some jumped up rating agency should be so daft as to proclaim that India’s debt rating has improved, and that the country'[s economy is improving. “My dear boy, this is India!” you can hear them cry. And one commenter, bless him, even suggested that India is still far behind most of Latin America, a comment sure to provoke hollow laughs from any entrepreneural type hoping to prosper in Chavez’s Venezuela. Of course, as I said at the time, India is still moving up from a relatively low base. During the immediate post-war years, the East Asian economies in places like South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan powered ahead while India, influenced by those dreadful Fabians and London School of Economics types who stuffed the old colonial service, embraced socialism, planning and progressive taxes. But the fact, that cannot be denied, is that this country, with its vast, English-speaking population, relatively stable system of property rights and its admirable enthusiasm for the world’s greatest sport, is shooting the economic lights out.
There is just no pleasing some people, it seems.
The row about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to refuse to give children up to gay couples has already caused a great deal of controversy, and there is a very, smart article on the issue at The Devil’s Kitchen blog which takes a pretty firm libertarian line on the matter. In my view, if a Catholic or any other religious organisation wishes to refuse to hand over children entrusted to it to certain sorts of people on grounds of religious doctrine, then one can certainly object to those views, but they should not be banned, in my view.
The problem, however, is that such adoption organisations receive money from the taxpayer: you and me. I am not a Catholic (although my wife is) and I am not happy that I may be financially enabling people to act on views I regard as wrong. This in my view demonstrates the great dangers of encouraging charities to receive tax moneys or indeed to get involved in state initiatives of any kind. By receiving such moneys, these bodies will slowly but surely lose their autonomy. The Catholic charities that are involved in areas like adoption may choose to sever any links with the state apparatus, and I strongly urge them to do so.
This government, remember, is one that regards autonomous institutions, be they businesses, charities, or any associations of people, as a threat to its power and designs. It wishes to bend these institutions to its corporatist, collectivist ends. In a sense, this is in fact a profoundly fascist government, in that it maintains the appearance of tolerating private property rights and institutions, but in fact seeks to regulate them so closely as to turn them into empty husks.
I hope this whole episode drives home in people’s minds the extent to which civil society, traditionally understood, has been weakened by this government. It was the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen I think, who once remarked that NuLabour would no longer seek to nationalise industries. Instead, it would nationalise people.
The good news from India keeps coming. This week, the international credit rating agency, Standard & Poors pronounced that the “Third World” nation had become so prosperous that the risk of lending money to the country had fallen significantly.
New York-based Standard & Poor’s said it upgraded India’s sovereign rating to BBB-, the lowest investment grade rating, from BB+, the highest junk rating.
The rating revision could help reduce India’s borrowing costs on the global market.
As anyone who has taken out a personal loan or mortgage will know, getting a stronger credit rating is a big deal. India is now ahead of economic basket-cases such as Argentina or Venezuela, and has got there by a programme of economic liberalisation. I keep banging on about the vigour of the Indian economy – notwithstanding the still-grinding poverty in parts of the country – because it is probably the most positive economic story of our times. It shouts, loud and clear, that markets work. Market economics is doubly potent when combined with a relatively robust civil society, protection of property rights and the priceless asset of an international language like English.
Meanwhile, India-based Tata Steel has sealed its purchase of UK steelmaker Corus.
“I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.”
– Denis Leary.
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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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