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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U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam’s Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.
I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.
Nice and fair piece on the late Arthur Seldon, for years the editorial powerhouse at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The writer, Simon Heffer, is not always to my taste, given some of his Blimpishness, but he hits the mark here. One thing that stands out for me about Arthur is that he was not remotely interested in pandering to the short-term vagaries of opinion or attracting the plaudits of the rich and famous. He was also a representative of a style of liberalism going back to Gladstone, one which Britain is sorely in need of.
Britain’s Tony Blair has taken a further step in his self-declared role of father, and quite possibly mother, of the nation. He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents.
Given the recent Orwellian remarks of Lord Gould, this all makes perfect sense. Blair and his ilk have no conception of civil society as a network of individuals, mediated via institutions, evolving slowly across time. He has no idea of how in such a society, values of self-restraint, civility towards others, concern for the weak, can be internalised rather than be handed down by dictat.
This is not to say that yobbery, uncouthness, family breakdown and other pathologies are not serious problems. Of course they are. Ask anyone who has walked through a major UK city centre on a Friday evening. There is now a large and impressive body of work pointing to both the problems and some possible solutions in this regard. (Go and read Theodore Dalrymple or James Bartholomew, for instance). What these books and other studies have in common is an understanding that the top-down model of social reform, with its legions of officials, laws, agencies and so forth, has manifestly failed. There is little prospect of further efforts in this mould working either. Yet for Blair and so many others – including Tory leader David Cameron no doubt – problems of yobbery or mass drunkeness call for an “top-down” set of “solutions”. All the while the behaviours that are crimes, such as murder, burglary and violence, are frequently met with police indifference or punished only haphazardly by the courts. The law turns topsy-turvy.
It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains – on tactics at least – one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that “eye-catching” gesture.
It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state.
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
The Swedish city of Stockholm – in which I spent an enjoyable short stay last year – has introduced congestion charges, much like those which now operate in central London. The supposed aim (supposed being the key word) is to reduce car use and get people to use public transport. Public transport is said to be very good in Sweden and I found it to be so, though it comes with a heavy tax bill.
The congestion charge issue is an interesting one because on one level, free marketeers can see a lot of merit in the idea of treating use of a road just like any other commodity. However, in today’s world, road tolls tend to be more of a revenue-raising device than part of a free market approach to transport. Roads are not built with the consent of other property owners, but mostly built at the behest of public authorities using compulsory purchase powers (what is called eminent domain in the United States). So the idea of road pricing, nice though it may sound in some sort of capitalist utopia, is in reality bound to operate in a monopolistic environment.
And as the British police have found, the C-Charge has brought certain unintended consequences. Not a great surprise.
Some time ago I referred to statistics on reported crimes in the UK, which prompted a rather heated discussion (that’s putting it mildly, ed) about the value of such numbers, given the obvious difficulties in knowing whether reporting of crimes gives an accurate picture of just how bad the situation really is. The British Crime Survey (BCS) which takes the public’s impressions of the impact of crime through interviews with thousands of people, can sometimes give a quite different picture.
This story shows that reports of armed violence are on the rise, and also contains data showing that experiences of crime have also gone up. A rather sobering set of numbers with which to start the New Year.
To say that the ancient Greeks have had a profound influence on Western civilisation is a truism so obvious to many who regularly read this site that it might seem silly to spell it out. The state of education in Britain, however, means that it is important and necessary to spell that achievement out and draw out the key elements of what the ancient Greeks ‘did for us’ as well as point to some of the shortcomings.
Charles Freeman’s The Greek Achievement is a splendid tour of ancient Greece, starting in the Bronze Age and finishing with the advent of the Middle Ages. It covers military campaigns, notably the long-running Peloponnese war; the changing fortunes of the dozens of city states; the development of democracy and city government and the eventual rise of Rome. Interwoven with this is a masterful survey of developments in philosophy, maths, science, astronomy, law and language. Freeman also is excellent at explaining the role of myth and ceremony in Greek culture, and does not fight shy of showing the lousy treatment of women and the huge use of slavery. → Continue reading: What the Greeks did for us
As 2005 draws to its close it is customary to make some predictions about the following year. I won’t do so. The world’s stock markets are ending the year in better shape than I would have expected a year before, notwithstanding the impact of higher oil prices and the devastating hurricanes that hit the U.S. gulf coast. What is interesting to me though is how the market in making predictions has continued to accelerate, spawining exotic derivatives connected even to the weather.
More than two years ago in the United States, some policymakers toyed with the idea of a predictions market to help figure out terrorist threats. The idea was killed off, partly, so it was argued, due to some terrible PR for the idea as well as a cowardly refusal to embrace controversial ideas. Lawrence Lessig takes a different view here.
The market in making predictions has, of course, been around for decades, if one thinks about the commodity futures markets such as the great wheat futures markets in Chicago, for instance. This Wikipedia entry I linked to shows just how broad the prediction market now goes, such as people taking bets on future scientific innovations, and so on. And these markets can be harnessed to garner useful knowledge about where certain things may be headed as well as fund valuable research.
That’s my prediction, anyway.
(Wikipedia link fixed. Thanks to a commenter for pointing out the error).
Wonderful news. Stephen Green, creator of the splendid Vodkapundit blog, and his wife Melissa, have had a baby son. I had the great pleasure of meeting Stephen at one of Perry de Havilland’s summer parties last year and can testify to what a nice fellow he is. Congratulations to the Green household. It would be only right to hoist a fine vodka martini to little Preston Davis Green.
David Cameron, newly elected leader of the Tories, has got off to a wonderful start, as I am sure readers will agree. He has signed up Sir Bob “give us yer fokkin’ money” Geldof to advise on world poverty; Zak Goldsmith, the environmentalist, has been also approached to advise on how to save the planet, and in a recent masterstroke, Oliver Letwin, a Tory MP, opined that the Tories should be concerned with redistributing wealth. Splendid. I am sure the sort of voters who deserted the Conservatives in 1997 and failed to return will be thrilled at this embrace of what looks like a sort of social democratic touchy-feely product by the Wonder Boy of Notting Hill. Or again, they may not.
All that remains is for Cameron to steal Labour’s old Clause Four promising nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then on to victory!
Meanwhile, Tim Worstall is similarly underwhelmed by Cameron.
Apologies for my sarcasm. Been a long day in the office.
He was controversial for other reasons, too. Brubeck’s music was too optimistic for the critics’ taste. There was and still is nothing cool about being an optimist. Cool, rather, is supposed to be about seeing the dark side, the essential absurdity of life, and taking pains to numb yourself against the existential angst of modern civilization. But here was modernism with a smiley face. Crazy Daddy-O.
Excerpt from a delightful piece marking jazz legend Dave Brubeck’s 85th birthday. The great man is still playing live gigs decades after many of his supposed “cooler” contemporaries have faded from the scene.
Yesterday, while briefly surfing Britain’s terrestrial TV channels in hope of something amusing to watch, I came across a film based on the old UK “comedy”, On the Buses, which chronicles the life of a bunch of London bus drivers and conductors. Made in the late 60s and early 70s, the series adopted the leery, bawdy humour of the Carry On Films, although unlike the Carry On movies at their best, (like the wonderful Carry on Up the Khyber) lacked the sort of great gags that to this day can make me laugh out loud. On the Buses can be safely relegated to a footnote of British television history, thank goodness.
It was quite a shock watching the film. It was a reminder of how greatly Britain has changed since the early 70s. For starters, the constant leeriness towards women, the assumption that any vaguely attractive woman was nothing more than mattress-fodder, makes even yours truly – no fan of political correctness – feel uneasy. One of the main themes of the story is how the manager, in a drive to improve the efficiency of the layabout male staff, decides to hire a group of women drivers. The men regard this move as a disaster and a threat to “their” jobs (probably correctly). What is particularly striking is how the shop steward of the bus-drivers’ union makes it clear that as far as his union is concerned, women have no place in a bus, except either as a customer or as someone he can molest. For any trade unionist watching this film today, the message must be most uncomfortable in that it reinforces the important idea that free markets and competition are in general good news in particular for women as well as racial groups often subject to discrimination, as noted U.S. economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have pointed out.
There were a few good things about the 1970s – although it is sometimes hard to think of any – but watching this low-point of British cinema only made me realise how much life has improved since then.
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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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