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There is quite a procession of folks headed for Mars at the moment, according to this BBC report. Coming relatively soon after the awful Shuttle disaster, it is heartening to see some actual stirrings of decent activity in the space field at the moment. Godspeed to them all. June 9th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A quick suggestion – given the differences within the libertarian section of the political jungle about the case for or against armed intervention in other states, what do fellow contributors and commenters think about us setting up a one-day conference or suchlike on this topic? I’m really interested to set something up, probably here in London. (But of course I would hope some non-Brit folk could be persuaded into coming). Blogging is fantastic but sometimes there is still a place for face-to-face debate. And you get to hold the event right next to a pub! June 6th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Arthur Silber, whose “Light of Reason” blog I generally admire, is not very happy so it seems with our own Perry de Havilland for his recent dig at Jim Henley over the outcome of the recent Iraq war. Now, I am not going to revisit this increasingly well-flogged dead horse. No, what I want to consider is a more general issue of principle. Arthur is a follower, in broad terms, of the ethical egoist philosophy set out by the late Ayn Rand. Rand denounced all those philosophers who enjoined Man to sacrifice his happiness and values for some other, usually mystical or collective, “good”. Instead, she set out an alternative, the “virtue of selfishness”, questioning why it is wrong for man to acquire and keep a value, including non-material ones such as respect, and freedom. Arthur’s basic disagreement, so it appears, with those like Perry and I who have advocated toppling Saddam seems to rest on the idea that is is “altruistic” and hence wrong, to wish to liberate countries such as Iraq. No truly “selfish” libertarian could possibly endorse such regrettably altruistic behaviour, particularly if it costs blood and treasure. Force is only ever justified, on this view, if one has been directly attacked already and has the names, addresses and confessions of the attacker. I think Arthur misses a key point. Consider the following – suppose that it is clear (and it is) that the bulk of Iraqi people hate Saddam and want rid of him (the Baathist thugs who benefitted from his rule are naturally not so keen). Suppose that the Coalition’s armed forces regard it is a great value to them that they should serve in forces which enable them to liberate folks from tyranny. This would be even clearer if they were funded like mercenary armies by consenting adults rather than through coercive taxation. Well, if these sort of considerations apply, the liberation of Iraq is a deeply “selfish” act on the terms that Rand would have seen it. It is a positive sum-game for both the liberators and the liberated. Now of course none of the above resolves the more immediate issues of whether Bush and co exaggerated the WMD threat, whether Iraq was the most pressing issue after 9/11, or whether Saddam was clearly in direct cahoots with terror groups. My point is more fundamental. Many isolationists seem to have elevated the non-initiation of force principle to the level where it inadvertently seems to endorse the existence of particular nation states, including those run by the most brutal folk imaginable. What is so libertarian about this? Why should an Iraq, Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany’s national borders be accorded the same respect as those of a liberal democracy? By all means let us preserve good manners in the libertarian parish. But those who argue that intervention a la Iraq is always and everywhere wrong are not, in my humble opinion, entitled to claim that those who differ are not libertarians. And by the way, 99 percent of the stuff on Arthur’s blog is just brilliant. June 5th, 2003 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Howell Raines, chief editor of the New York Times, that bastion of liberal-left opinion, has resigned, following the recent scandal surrounding young ex-reporter Jayson Blair, who fabricated numerous reports for a period of several months. It would be arrogant to claim that Raines, who devoted inordinate editorial resources to covering such crucial matters as the admissions policy of the Augusta golf club while forces were fighting in Iraq, could be described as the victim of the blogosphere. But nonetheless bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have been relentless in chronicling how this paper has lost its way under Raines’ leadership. Perhaps, along the lines of a famous tune, Sullivan and the rest should be humming:
June 5th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
As is obvious from reading this blog, we boys and girls at Samizdata are not exactly big fans of the European Union and its attendant horrors of red tape and regulation. So, here’s an interesting experience of mine from last weekend. I managed to leave and enter France and then return without having a single item of paperwork inspected, including my passport. How come? Well, I sailed to Cherbourg on a yacht from Portsmouth, stayed overnight in France and came back to Portsmouth. No passport check was carried out at either end. Now, I am sure if British Home Secretary David Blunkett were reading this (dream on!), he’d be aghast. (“You mean people can travel, breathe and eat without my express permission? Form a committee!”). But actually, I found the experience rather liberating. I was able to travel, using my own humble skills as a yacht sailor, to travel to and from a Continent without being troubled by officialdom. And of course I loaded up the boat on cheap wine due to lower French duties on booze. So all in all the whole weekend was a poke in the eye for the offices of the Blairite state. C’est magnifique! June 2nd, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am all in favour of the recent decision by shareholders of European drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline to vote down a proposed ‘golden parachute’ payout to its chief executive in the event that he ever got the boot. The payment would have been $36 million, and while I yield to no-body in my admiration for the capitalist system, it seems perfectly fair if the owners of the firm – the shareholders – felt such a proposal was going too far. A case of property owners using their property as they say fit. Of course, by ‘too far’ we are entering the field of subjective judgement. It seems a bit odd that in an age where few bat an eyelid at the sums earned by Formula One racing drivers or footballers, so many get riled at such payouts to company bosses. In any event, we are going to see more examples of big groups of shareholders like pension funds getting upset about this sort of pay regime. One thing slightly bugs me in that some of these pension funds are increasingly being seen by anti-globalistas and similar-minded folk as ways of inflicting their views on the world. The buzzword out there is ‘shareholder activism’. Let’s be clear here. It is our retirement money at stake. By all means let’s not vote in big pay rises for hopeless bosses, but tomorrow’s pensioners need the wealth generated by good firms of today – and often that means hiring the best people. And that sort of thing comes at a price. May 29th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Cultural commentator – from a generally conservative vantage point – David Brooks has some interesting things to note about the popularity of men’s magazines like Maxim, and about what this says about our culture. In a nutshell, he suggests that this shows that the advance of feminism and even political correctness (however you want to define that) may not have produced the results some commentators may have wanted. He also makes the point, which to my mind rang true, that ‘reactionary’ attitudes are often not the preserve of the upper classes, but often most deeply held elsewhere, such as among America’s rap music artists. Here’s a nice quote:
This observation is hardly new. Yet even someone like yours truly, who likes to watch action movies, dreams of fast cars and feels no shame in enjoying pictures of lovely women, can feel a bit troubled about where things can be headed. I don’t know if the kind of things Brooks frets about are problems that have to be ‘fixed’ in some way. There definitely has been something of a backlash in parts of our culture against the dictates of political correctness. It doesn’t surprise me all that much that the kind of mindless dreck published by the Maxim mags of this world is so popular. Maybe we are just observing the cultural equivalent of Newton’s law at work – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It applies to space rockets and it applies to culture as well, maybe. May 20th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
An update following my article on the Bruges Group meeting on Thursday (right before our previous hosting server went nuclear). The Daily Telegraph is reporting that opinion polls show that the UK public both opposes the single currency and a proposed new EU Constitution. Okay, okay, I hear folk say, opinion polls are not everything, and the ability of the British political class to stiff the public they are supposed to represent is a matter of record. Even so, Prime Minister Tony Blair is famed for his attention to the focus group. And if public opinion can be galvanised, he may stay his hand at wiping out what remains of Britain as an independent, self-governing nation. Well, I always was the optimistic type of guy.  May 16th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“How and by whom do you wish to be governed?”. Such was the simple and sharp question posed to a mostly grey-haired audience of eurosceptics at a meeting of the UK’s Bruges Group in London this evening by noted thriller writer, journalist and former RAF pilot, Frederick Forsyth. Your humble correspondent turned up to a packed audience to hear about Forsyth’s and noted EU legal expert Martin Howe on the subject of a possible new Constitution for Europe. It made for alarming hearing. While partly overshadowed by the recent war on terror and the Iraq campaign, a group of senior European politicians and bureaucrats have been working to set up the framework for a new European Constitution, which would effectively destroy the present EU member states as sovereign self governing nations. There can be no doubt about the outcome. The result would be an undemocratic, unaccountable monster. Here are some of the comments by Forsyth which I particularly liked: “I always took the view (during the development of the EU) that there was something to come, some finality, some point to be reached. We have now reached the stage….a single European nation state.” Martin Howe: “It (the constitution) will destroy the sovereignty which the UK parliament ultimately possesses.” Another: “It is very difficult to see how any democratic control can be exercised over the organs envisaged in this Constitution.” Howe said that the draft of the treaty for a new Constitution should be ready by the late summer of this year and could be ratified by member states in about two years’ time. That is right – just two years. My impressions: well the audience for the two men last night was packed and I would imagine that about 99 percent of those present agreed with more or less everything said by the speakers. I heard no dissenting voices there. Where does the libertarian meta-context relate to all this? After all, the desire for Britain to remain a parliamentary self-governing democracy is not the same thing as being, say, a minarchist libertarian who wants to get the State off his back. However, I would say from a pragmatic point of view, we have more chance of pushing forward our libertarian ideas within the framework of a common political entity underpinned by a shared culture and history than in a multi-lingual, multi-national behemoth headed by bureaucratic institutions with very sluggish lines of accountability. Hence I support the Bruges Group folk, even though my nose my wrinkle in distaste at some of the more reactionary language employed by some of its members. I don’t get much impression that the issue of the EU Constitution is grabbing a lot of attention in the mainstream British media, although some of the tabloid press (let’s not sneer at them) are beginning to get on to this. No doubt Prime Minister Tony Blair is betting that he can sleepwalk us into his European nirvana. Let’s not let him get away with it. May 15th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I detect a distinct air of despondency in the ranks of the libertarian camp in ever seeing any point in voting for, or co-opting with, right-of-centre parties such as the Conservatives in Britain (see David Carr’s remarks) or the Republican Party in the U.S. (see Jim Henley in similar vein). I see no reason for being surprised. Even if you support Bush on the war, as I do, albeit while detesting the Patriot act and the Dept. of Homeland Security, what is there to like? The vast increase in the budget deficit is a real worry – and I say that as a supply sider, not as a ‘deficit hawk’ – we have had the steel tariffs, the Farm bill, etc. Okay, the first tax cut was better than nothing, but not as good as a cut to marginal tax rates across the board. Oh, Dubya did at least stiff the Kyoto Treaty. But while he is probably a tad better than the likely alternatives, his GOP makes an unlikely suitor for libertarians. As for the Tories, I despair utterly of them being in a fit state for any outreach to us. With the sole and erratic exception of shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, there is not a single top-ranking Tory MP I come across who seems to have a thorough grasp of the extent to which our civil as well as economic liberties have been crushed. Which leaves us with the usual cul-de-sac of a possible new party. And I cannot see how that is going to work. May 14th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a fan of the the sci-fi dystopian film thriller, The Matrix, I am looking forward to the sequel, due out next week in Britain. This report via CNN suggests the next instalment is sure to be a rip-roaring treat for high-tech movie fans like me. Of course, part of the appeal of such films to many folk is the way they play on fears about the growth of Big Brother powers by the State, and also by corporations, many of which behave almost as if they were governments. Similarly, it helps explain the appeal of Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story, Minority Report about a year ago. …and, er, it appears that men and women will have, er, plenty to drool over in the next Matrix performance, judging by the publicity shots. Heh-heh. Roll on May 15. May 9th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rod Liddle in The Spectator was unimpressed by the BBC’s recent coverage of the British local municipal elections, saying that the BBC seemed determined to play down the Tory Party’s success in winning a lot of seats, and played down the losses suffered by Labour. The BBC is biased? Noooooooooooo! Say it ain’t so, folks. May 9th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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