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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Fine and detailed article here over at The Register, a techie website, laying out many of the pitfalls associated with the British government’s wretched ID card measures. Some of the arguments are pretty familiar terrain to Samizdata regulars but in the current climate it pays to repeat an argument as loudly as possible.
I have already made it clear in the comments, but I’d like to repeat how much I like the look of Michael Taylor’s idea on naming and shaming the businesses, officials and politicians backing this proposal. The Freedom of Information Act can be a highly effective weapon in the hands of those skilled at digging out information and we should make use of it.
Having some experience of investigations, I’ll be hoping to post up more details of the sort Michael Taylor referred to in the next few days. Please keep the comments coming in and hopefully this blog can kick up a storm.
Still buzzing with pleasure after a terrific day with pals at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday, it struck me as I walked around the ground and past the huge car park as to how fantastic is the level of motoring engineering, aesthetics and of course safety these days. But we are hemmed in as never before by rules and regulations, speed cameras and road humps, the combined effect of which is to make driving in most of Britain a frustrating experience. The joys of flooring the accelerator on the open road, with the roar of wind in the hair, are over.
Such a shame. As my dad said, it is a bit like being surrounded by the world’s most beautiful women and then to be told by the State that you are not allowed to ask any of them for a date.
Richard B. North has a terrific set of articles about the current focus on Africa, debt-relief and poverty brought about partly by the efforts of Sir Bob “keep it off eBay” Geldof. It is fair to summarise that North is not totally blown away with admiration by the scruffy former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, or indeed with the grandstanding of our own wonderful PM, Tony Blair.
Definitely not the sort of articles one would expect to get on a college degree reading list. How I wish the weblog existed when studying for my degree back in the 80s.
I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator).
So where did the reference to the “Dick Durbin slanders our boys” come from? Seriously, I’d like to know.
I posted similar thoughts over here.
It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn’t overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech.
“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.”
– The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is.
Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing.
Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore.
Perhaps one should call this the “Yukos Effect.” In many respects the seizure of the oil firm’s assets by Putin’s Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters – its owner was a decidely shady character – but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers.
Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet.
As I remarked in my previous post, Sir Bob Geldof is an annoying gentleman but capable of moments of lucidity. (I was a bit rude about him in my previous post. Sorry Bob). As an act of charity to the fellow, here is a quotation he might like to ponder:
“I see in the free trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe- drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creeds and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace… I believe the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires and gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labor with his brother Man.”
Those words were uttered by Richard Cobden about 150 years ago, a man who saw a congruence between the ideals of personal liberty, concern for the welfare of one’s fellows, and the free market order. For him, like his great Victorian contemporaries like Sir Robert Peel, free trade was a progressive cause to be championed in the interests of the little guy, and not the cause of big powerful interests. It is a message that urgently needs to be understood by those who, no doubt from fine motives in a few cases, rail against global capitalism.
If the case for the free market is to be more widely advanced, we have to appeal to the sense of idealism and concern for the downtrodden that animated our ancestors and could still appeal to the decent folk on the left. It is worth a try, anyway.
Sir Bob “Make Poverty History” Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.
Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.
If Africa’s economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.
UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.
UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.
The following meme has been bouncing around blogdom and what the heck, I’ll join in.
What are the five books that mean most to me?
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. This blockbuster of treachery, revenge and high excitement reads as fresh today as when I first came across the tale of Edmond Dantes’ imprisonment and dramatic escape. Some say it is the best thriller ever written, and I am not going to disagree.
- The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (the movie is pretty good too). As an unashamed fan of aviation and Wolfe, I reckon this is his best non-fiction work. His description of Chuck Yeager’s record-breaking adventures and the early Mercury rocket series has not been bettered.
- The Happy Return. Never mind Patrick O’Brien, who was excellent, but C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels are my favourite stories of life set in the age of Lord Nelson. You can smell the gunpowder and the salt air.
- Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, in my view. Complex and very moving at times.
- The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek lays out the case for classical liberalism and I pretty much agree with every word of what the great Austrian said.
Honourable mentions: Heinlein, Ayn Rand (of course!), John Varley, Vernor Vinge, Ian Fleming, Joseph Conrad, Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh and Wodehouse.
The UK government has floated the idea of fitting GPS tracking devices into cars as part of a way to enforce road tolls, with a pilot project starting in a few years’ time before going nationwide. One can immediately see how civil libertarians might object to such a setup, given that it could further consolidate the surveillance state.
Even so, the idea of charging for road use has a strong free market pedigree, as the Adam Smith Institute blog makes clear here. Road toll systems operated by private firms need not necessarily involve the centralised data collection systems that our present UK government might favour.
One little detail of the ASI comment made me grin, in that apparently, road tolls in Hong Kong failed in the 1980s to become law because men feared the toll invoices would reveal they had been spending their evenings down the local bordellos. Okaaaay.
As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam’s nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force.
In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam’s massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning.
Israel’s bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid.
What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog.
But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real.
The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:
Although the alternatives are considerably more costly, deterrence is the riskiest of all the policy options available to the United States. We would be betting that we could deter a man who has proven to be hard (at times impossible) to deter and who seems to believe that if he possessed nuclear weapons, it is the United States that would be deterred… The use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world would be terrible. Their use on the Persian Gulf oil fields; against Tel Aviv, Ankara, Riyadh, or another regional city; or against U.S. military forces in the region is unimaginable… Beyond this, Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons has the potential to push the world into a second Great Depression while killing millions of people.
The Threatening Storm, 2002
The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam’s threat was not imminent – though possibly inevitable – there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences.
Jonathan Wilde of the admirable libertarian group blog, Catallarchy, argues that poverty, rather than wealth, is “unnatural”, in as much as it is the stupidity of governments, rather than some ineradicable feature of our world, that prevents humans from attaining the opulence (to use that lovely 18th Century word) that we are capable of attaining in co-operation with our fellows.
I am not so sure that Wilde is entirely right. Is it only the state that has in the past blocked the path to wealth? Surely the lack of scientific knowledge, limited division of labour and so forth played a part in poverty.
Don’t misunderstand me – I think that Wilde makes a good point, but to say that wealth and happiness is the natural state of mankind begs as many questions as it may answer. All the more reason, of course, to ram home the fact that our capitalist civilisation should be regarded as a marvel to be celebrated and defended.
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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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