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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Yep, I know it was supported by taxpayers’ money (boo, hiss) but I think one would have a piece of brain missing not to feel a pang of sadness that Concorde, the world’s only supersonic jet airliner, has landed for the last time at Britain’s Heathrow airport. An incredible plane, beautiful and able to take folk across the Atlantic at a speed unthinkable to our ancestors.
As a free marketeer, I do of course recognise that state-backed endeavours such as this are largely indefensible, particularly as only the rich could take advantage of something paid for by the poorest taxpayer. But on a more upbeat note, let’s hope that in the years to come, the possibility of superfast transport such as this remains a reality, and not just the stuff of science fiction novels.
And that is why, like Dale Amon and other contributors to this blog, I am eagerly awaiting the start of the race for the X-:Prize. You can read about all the privately-funded space ventures involved here
The age of Concorde is over. But another age may hopefully be about to begin. Chocks away!
Adam Nicholson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, tells what presumably are its predominantly middle class readers that it is entirely fit and proper for Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, to take a big grab at the wealth locked up in our homes through a new tax .
I suppose Nicholson is one of those writers the Telegraph occasionally hires to annoy its usual readers. I was inclined to dismiss the piece as usual class-warfare nonsense until, after various paragraphs of tortuous logic and barely disguised dislike of Middle England, our scribe hit on a fair point. That point being that the construction of new housing in the south of England, the most prosperous bit of it, has fallen off dramatically in recent years.
I agree. Nicholson may be a jackass in his support for a swingeing tax assault on millions of people, who have already seen their pensions looted by the government, but he is right on the money in his understanding that unless supply of housing comes close to matching demand, the only way folks like me will be able to afford anything decent will be by winning the National Lottery.
Such a rise in supply will, of course, annoy a lot of people, particular those who’s homes have been made artificially expensive due to our planning and zoning laws. But Nicholson deserves some praise for grasping this point.
Of course, there is always the option of emigration. I have been thinking rather a lot about it lately.
I am glad to see that the august publishing house, the Oxford University Press, has recently published a monster-length encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment. For those who can stump up more than three hundred pounds, this would be a most impressive addition to any library. From David Hume to Diderot, the book is a treasure trove of facts and articles about the folk who helped shape our world and mostly for the better.
Let’s hope university libraries stock this book as essential item since it is bound to be beyond the financial means of most undergraduates. And perhaps the OEP could make a gesture of sending a few copies to the nascent academies I trust will be springing up in post-Saddam Iraq.
A new Sainsbury’s supermarket has opened near where I live in Pimlico, central London. Very good it is indeed. Just about every food obtainable that I would ever want plus lots more. I made my first trip the other day and it triggered off some thoughts about what these big food chains represent in our culture.
First off, the customers looked genuinely excited, cheerful. It may seem weird that in an age of abundance where we take such things for granted, but the opening of this store seems to have created quite a buzz in the area, rather like the opening of a multi-plex cinema. Shopping for many people is an extension of leisure activity rather than just about the utilitarian business of buying food for the table.
The neo-Luddites in our midst claim to despise all this. Supermarkets, they say, force smaller shops out of business and these big stores’ buying power squeezes the margins of suppliers. To the first charge, I say that if small stores are indeed being forced under, it has more to do with the burdens of regulation and tax which necessarily weigh more heavily on small firms than on larger, more established ones. And secondly, the increased buying power of large stores is indeed a fact, but that also means the consumer gets to benefit. And a big store’s brand-name visibility means the owners of the business have to fret constantly – and they do – about product quality. Let’s face it, if you buy a tin of beans from Megastore Inc and it turns out to poisonous, then think multi-zillion quid lawsuit. If it is bought from Uncle Fred Cornershop, probably not.
And a final point. Supermarkets, it seems to me, have played a considerable part in the liberation of women from traditional household chores, and hence made it easier for women to leave the home and go into work. If we had no superstores and only small stores, then shoppinig would take much, much longer, and hence put even more of a strain on family life where most couples have to be earners out of financial necessity.
Of course the anti-globalistas are none too keen to focus on the essentially conservative, dare I say, reactionary nature of what their hatred of big business means. No reason for us to be shy, however.
Right, off to explore the wine counter.
It is a beautiful day here in London, the sun is shining, I am looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend in the countryside. So this story comes along to make me lose a bit more sleep at night.
Whatever you think about George W. Bush’s pre-emption doctrine – and I confess to being a bit more doubtful than some more hawkish folk – this is worrying. Iran may still be some way off from developing nuclear weapons, but it appears the threat is getting closer. Stay tuned.
Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch, who occasionally writes quite sensible things about Iraq and All That, has decided to resume normal service as Bullying Blairite Columnist, on the subject of compulsory ID cards.
The usual reasons in favour are trotted out. He says they are convenient. No doubt they are in many cases. So, for that matter, would be carrying a tattoo on one’s forehead with an ID number and message, saying, ‘State Licensed Guardianista’ or whatever.
I can quite see how, in a minimal or even anarcho-capitalist private ‘state’, how citizens could freely choose to have ID cards carrying all kinds of info. Then again, they might not choose to do so. I find it a great bore to point out to collectivists of various hues that if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X. Take banks, for instance. I see no reason why, in a truly liberal order, banks could not give clients incentives to carry photo-ID credit cards to cut fraud and hence cut charges to their customers. Indeed such transactions would be quite normal and no-one would have grounds to complain given sufficient consumer freedom.
Then, perhaps realising that the usual reasons for compulsory ID cards amount to little more than making life easy for the police and the security authorities, Aaronovitch comes to his guiding motive: “What is convenient or aesthetic for the individual is not, unfailingly, what is good for society.”
That is true. It’s one reason I always rather liked Mrs Thatcher’s misquoted remark about there being no such thing as society. ‘Society’ may indeed in some sense be better off if Pc Plod and his colleagues knew of my wherabouts 24 hours a day. ‘Society’ can take a hike, thankyou very much.
So when Liberty (one of those annoying civil liberties groups, ed) talks of ID cards turning people into “suspects not citizens”, I am bound to ask whether Liberty has any concept of the duties – as opposed to the rights – of citizenship.
Well, those folk over at Liberty can no doubt answer Aaronovitch’s question for themselves. But I think we ought to feel grateful to him for framing the question so bluntly. He is right. Social democrat statists like him think that the entity he calls ‘society’ is somehow possessed of some claim on the citizens who compose it. For him, carrying an ID card is a badge of collective solidarity and hence non-ownership of such a thing demonstrates one’s anti-social (heaven forbid) character.
One thing is for sure. No one is ever likely to be in danger of thinking Aaronovitch believes in personal liberty. The next time I read one of his more sensible pieces about the Middle East, I will bear that in mind.
Peter Hitchens, the arch-conservative (small-c) journalist and detester of Blairite Britain, might be thought on the surface to have a few things in common with the scribes at this blog. Well, this article in The Spectator in which he defends the British Broadcasting Corporation, should nail that idea in short order.
Hitchens – brother of maverick left-liberal fellow journalist Christopher – shares with many people a widespread loathing of the BBC, the trashiness of its downmarket programmes, the bias of its news service, and so forth. And yet he is fiercely opposed to abolishing the BBC’s licence fee, the tax which is imposed on all current purchasers of television sets to fund that organisation.
Indeed, Hitchens seems to bemoan the rise of commercial television, cable and satellite outlets, as having created pressures on the BBC to dumb down. He yearns for the days before the mid-1950s when the BBC had a total monopoly on broadcasting. He seems to be saying that the BBC is okay so long as it is run in the way he likes. It is totally outside his frame of mental reference to imagine how quality television, however defined, can thrive in a market where consumers pay out of their own free will.
To be fair, he says the BBC should openly allow its broadcasters to admit their political biases in full rather than cover them up under a pretence of impartiality, but also ensure that for each avowed leftwing journalist, there should be a counterpart of a conservative. This may sound quite an improvement, but it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that the programme makers who run the BBC in its present privileged state would concede such ground. The beast cannot be tamed. It must be consigned to the abbatoir.
There is a broader point. Even if the BBC was a genuine paragon of truth, objectivity and high culture, its licence fee would still be unjustified. It is a tax and increasingly hard to justify in a world of diverse broadcasting channels, not to mention the Internet.
In his great book, The Constitution of Liberty, the late FA Hayek wrote in his final chapter, “Why I am Not a conservative.” Hitchens’ article is a good reminder to me why I am of the same view as the great Austrian economist.
Great personal friend, long-standing libertarian and self-defence enthusiast Russell Whitaker is back with his blog Survival Arts after a brief hiatus. Good to have you back!
And I was particularly interested in his take on the California recall election. In a nutshell, he is profoundly unimpressed with Arnold, preferring Republican alternative Tom McKlintock. The latter has gone on record time and again vowing to shrink the State’s crippling government spending and is a hardline defender of the Second Amendment.
Of course, can you imagine a single major Tory MP on this side of the Big Pond arguing such views at the moment?
Exactly.
Great story here that the canned voice of Sean Connery, Scotland’s greatest living actor, will be used in the lifts at the new Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh.
Brilliant. This idea could run and run. How about characters – still alive, obviously – who played various Bond villains to lend their voices for lifts in, say, the EU headquarters in Brussels?
“Ladies and gentlemen, velcome to my lair heeere in ze Brussels center of my power. Vee haf been expectink you”.
The British media this morning, including the Daily Telegraph is reporting that Prime Minister Tony Blair was warned of a heightened terrorist threat in the event that we went to war in Iraq. And the coverage implies that somehow that it was a great scandal that he failed – allegedly – to make this warning public.
I don’t know. It should have been blindlingly obvious to all that by threatening to topple Saddam, terror groups with a vested interest in his staying in power would try to foil said effort by attacking us.
Of course it is a repeated refrain from the tin-foil hat brigade on the pacifist left pessimistc right and head-in-sand Raimondo libertarian sect that if we act, we will only make Islamic groups even angrier. Problem is with this argument is that it is a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of position. If we act – such as topple Saddam – the Islamo-loons will get mad. If we do nothing, they will hold us in contempt and attack us again for being weak.
Personally, I can live with their hate. They hate us anyway, so we might as well give them something to actually hate us for, by trying to establish liberty and prosperity in the Middle East.
There has not been much discussion in the blog world that I have seen of late about the British government’s apparent fierce determination to make us sign up to the proposed EU Constitution. While we ponder the difficulties of trying to establish some form of piece and liberty in Iraq, we ought to think a bit more about the threat to our liberties nearer to home.
Unlike some EU sceptics and foreign policy isolationists, I don’t elevate national sovereignty into some kind of religion. The only sovereignty I recognise is that over my own person. I take the practical view that if we are to try to reverse the trend towards ever bigger government, it will be even harder to achieve such a task at pan-European level than at the national one. In the UK we do – in a rough fashion – have a shared political tradition, a common language, and a broadly similar culture. While multi-lingual political unions are conceivable, they are not, as far as I can see, easily sustainable without a lot of positive factors such as shared cultural and economic interests, and so forth.
The fine print of the EU constitution is not the sort of thing to get voters charged up. But I have a sickly feeling in my stomach that unless the process is stopped very soon, we will wake up to find that the juggernaut of the State is even more resistant to control than ever before. Time is running short.
The movie moguls and their sidekicks in the film industry are being urged to tone down their campaigning to win the forthcoming Oscars.
Presumably the heads of the film industry in the U.S. and elsewhere are concerned that an unseemly rush by actors, actresses and others to plug their films is already annoying the public. I honestly don’t know if people really are all that concerned if, say, Cameron Diaz or Russell Crowe are on the stump advocating the merits of their films. (If Ms Diaz wants me to interview her about her work, she is only too welcome).
The film industry, both in the States as well as elsewhere, has become so large in its financial strength that it is hard to see how much can, or should be done to restrain artists from doing their all to grab one of the golden statues. It may be crass, but what can you do, apart from ask for polite restraint? Personally, I nurse a slight antipathy to the Oscars, which usually provide an opportunity for blowhards like hard-left progagandist Michael Moore to harangue the audience with his paranoid views at the reward ceremonies, or else give the back-scratchers in the business a chance to do what they know best.
But really, in the big scheme of things, it is hard to get too upset. The Oscars have become a circus and they look set to remain that way, barring a catastrophic drop in the movie industry’s fortunes. Michael Jennings of this parish had some good things to say in this vein in his superb piece here a few days ago.
Of course the surreal nature of lobbying for Oscar slots gets even more Daliesque when juxtaposed next to the recall election in California. Here’s a poser for you – which is more out of touch with reality, the Oscars, or California’s politicians? Discuss.
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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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