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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Arthur Seldon, one of the founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a think thank that has played a crucial role in the fightback against collectivism, has died. Even though he was heading towards his 90th year – he was born in 1916 – his death is still a sad shock to me. I met him several times, both at IEA receptions at the organisation’s offices and at numerous conferences. He was a lovely man.
Every time I met him, Arthur always treated you with respect and kindness. He had the ability to make his arguments without implying that people who disagree have base motives, which is a sensible strategy. He regarded the prophets of Fabian socialism, who have wreaked so much havoc in this country, as well intentioned fools rather than knaves (with the possible exception of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whom he loathed). Arthur was, to use an old fashioned word, a gentleman.
His contribution to the re-birth of liberal ideas (to use it in its proper sense) cannot be exaggerated. Many friends of mine, including such fellow bloggers as Brian Micklethwait, have been touched by Arthur’s influence.
I shall raise a glass to a great classical liberal writer tonight. May he rest in peace.
The BBC top brass are demanding a rise in the licence fee, which is levied on all people who buy a television regardless of whether they watch BBC programmes or not. The fee increase is – so we are told – designed to fund the various digital television ventures the BBC believes it needs.
As I frequently have to explain to my American friends who are left aghast at the situation, the BBC licence fee must be paid, on penalty of a heavy fine, and possibly gaol. In reality, there are people who probably have gotten away with non-payment but the threat is real enough.
In the age of the Internet, satellite and cable, how long can this monster remain in existence? And for how long can it claim that without its privileged source of income, exacted with the ultimate sanction of imprisonment, our culture would be in ruins? Who seriously believes that argument today?
Compared to this disaster in Pakistan, that has killed tens of thousands of people, this story is pretty tiny in the big scheme of things, but by god, it still sucks:
A fire has destroyed the Bristol warehouse containing the theatrical props for the plasticine film characters Wallace and Gromit.
Fire at factory
The news comes at the same time figures show their latest movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, topped the American box office over the weekend.
The story does not contain any suggestion as to what caused the blaze, although on a BBC 6 pm news item I saw, it was suggested that arson might, just might, be a factor. If so then I hope the perpetrators suffer some very unpleasant outcome indeed.
We seem to be talking rather a lot about cool movies at the moment and jolly right too (as the film critic Barry Norman used to say). I intend to see this film in the company of some fellow Londoners as soon as possible.
“I’ve had enough of running…It’s time to misbehave”.
“Mal” Reynolds, captain of the very excellent Serenity.
I must admit that at some stages I thought that Andrew Sullivan had slightly lost the plot in his apparent obsession with the torture issue concerning the treatment of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere. At one stage Sullivan seemed to take upon himself the task of scolding other bloggers (notably Glenn Reynolds) for not buying into his argument. Well, this story today suggests that Sullivan has been right to bang on about the issue and to champion the cause of people in the military looking to clean house. I think this also counts as a genuine victory for a blogger and shows the power of this medium. I don’t doubt, for example, that Senator McCain and his allies read blogs like Sullivan’s.
In case anyone thinks this is some sort of anti-American or anti-Iraq war issue, it is not. I want to finish the job properly in Iraq and let it be done with honour as well as competence. The U.S. Senate just took a step in that direction.
This may not be the most exciting story of the day, but it caught my eye as an example of how, despite its fine words, the present government has allowed our education system to crumble:
Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the “unsupportable” decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.
Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, representing leading boys’ and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.
“Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed,” he said. “Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status.”
India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.
Superficially, it may be a smart move to make it easier for parents to send their children to private schools. My only problem is that if the current Labour government were to embark on such a course, it would demand, as part of such a deal, greater control over what is left of the non-state education system. (That remains a key drawback of education vouchers). Do we really want the half-educated dolts and knaves running this government to get their hands on Eton, Harrow or Winchester?
Update: a commenter disputes whether British state schools are so lousy. Perhaps he should study this OECD report, which contains damning data on illiteracy in Britain. I should also remind readers of the terrific work being done by Professor James Tooley to debunk the shibboleths of statist thinking on education.
Update 2: Here is another link to a site about literacy issues in Britain and other countries. If you scroll down there are dozens of stories, from as recently as September 2005, expressing employers’ concerns about the skills of the students they take on. A couple of commenters persist in claiming that our state education system is better than it has ever been. If so, why the company complaints? I presume that CEOs are not making this stuff up.
It is about three months since the dreadful ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Kelo ruling, authorising public authorities to grab people’s homes and businesses so that corporations – with political favours to grant, no doubt – can build big developments on the land and promise a big tax flow for the public purse. The battle is continuing to rage, even though some individual jurisdictions in the U.S. have passed laws trying to contain this monstrous use of what is called “eminent domain”.
It is well worth keeping a beady eye on this issue from here in Britain because so much of what happens in the legal and economic sphere in the U.S. tends to eventually hit our shores.
In the meantime, I continue to recommend this blog for regular updates on eminent domain, as well as the Institute for Justice, and this excellent book on property rights issues.
Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:
Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?
I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed – key qualification – to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker’s coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don’t demand that people remove expressions such as “For God’s Sake” or “Heaven Help Us” from their vocabulary.
This story by the BBC lays out how public sector jobs have outpaced those in the domestic private sector for some time, a statement that is hardly likely to surprise regular visitors to Samizdata.
The public sector is creating new jobs at a faster rate than private business, according to the latest official data.
At the same time, UK productivity is now at its lowest level for 15 years, further figures from the Office for National Statistics showed.
Analysts have long argued that the government sector trails behind the wider economy in terms of productivity.
Overall productivity grew by 0.5% in the year to July, the lowest since 1990 and down from 2.5% a year earlier.
The ranks of the public sector expand and of course, the government is quite happy about this state of affairs, since people who work on the taxpayer’s pound are unlikely to be keen on a drastic rollback of said state. Every additional worker adds to this ratchet effect.
As the public sector balloons, the cost frequently falls on those least able to bear it, such as this retired lady who went to gaol rather than pay a council tax bill that has risen far faster than inflation.
People like this lady probably voted for that nice, vaguely Tory-looking Mr Blair back in 1997 and who knows, gave him a second and third chance in the subsequent elections. But the question for the Tories, now gathering for their annual conference in Blackpool this week, is how to credibly halt and roll back the public sector juggernaut and thus make room for sweeping tax cuts. If they cannot do so, then frankly there is no point to them.
UPDATE: Noted libertarian author Sean Gabb gave an excellent talk in Westminster tonight. One of his central themes is that we will not be able to push back the onslaught on our traditional institutions until we understand the nature of what the “enemy” is. A key point is class. Class analysis is not and should not be a tool only of collectivists. The NuLab “project” can be thought in class terms, and the relentless expansion of public sector employment can be seen as a way of entrenching that class and its hold on society.
I love this story:
Historians have found that Britain’s first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and during the period in which Austen set Pride and Prejudice.
The Hindoostane Coffee House was established by Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian-born entrepreneur, as a purveyor of Oriental food of the “highest perfection” in Marylebone, London, which at the time was a residential district for the well-off.
In my area of Pimlico, central London, there is an Indian restaurant right near my flat (aaahhh!) – said to be one of the oldest in London, dating back to the 1950s. But it appears that this now-established feature of culinary life has been going on since the age of Nelson, Wellington and William Wordsworth. An early example, in fact, of culinary globalization. It is not, in fact, all that surprising, since the desire for eastern spices and foodstuffs was an important economic incentive behind much of global trade at that time.
I can imagine how this story is going to change all those costume dramas set in the early 19th Century: “Pray excuse me sir X, but I am in urgent need of a chicken korma.”
In these days of concern about violent Islamists running amok on our cities, it is always important to remember that other sources of violence can be found, such as the so-called animal rights campaigners:
A children’s nursery has become the latest target of animal rights threats, forcing it to stop providing child care vouchers to parents working for the animal testing group Huntingdon Life Sciences.
Leapfrog Day Nurseries, part of the education business Nord Anglia, said it was reviewing whether extra security measures were needed at its Peterborough nursery, which is nearest to the Life Sciences headquarters in Cambridgesire. It said it already employed “stringent security measures” to protect the children in its care.
Threatening a kiddies’ nursery. They must be so proud.
On a related matter, here is a fine essay taking the incoherent doctrine of animal rights apart. In my view, the doctrine is incoherent, although at the same time I think humans should seek to treat animals as kindly as possible, which is a very human-centric opinion to hold, of course.
“It is a irresistible to note that nearly everyone, including the wealth creator, is inclined to see the world of inner being, of the heart and soul, as being at odds with the commercial. Wealth creators seem shy of their success. It is often said that the Englishman has always preferred to be seen as a gentleman than as a creative, industrious or commercial person.”
Richard D. North, Rich is Beautiful, (page 199).
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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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