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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I’ve just listened to Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on Free Culture and highly recommend it. Larry describes how much liberty we have lost in the last fifty years. A small number of giant media Corps have used their lobbying power to criminalize more and more of what was once unregulated behavior.
Government acting alone is not the only threat to liberty. The self interest of exceedingly greedy corporations in conjunction with exceedingly greedy lawmakers is a formula for the destruction of civil society. Think how close the world of William Gibson’s Corp ruled dystopia is. The combination of latent totalitarians such as Jack Valenti and outright crooked politicians – Sen Hollings (D Disney) comes to mind – is a deadly one for everything we as libertarians stand for. It is also an attack on the core of everything the Left and the Right believe in as well.
Therein lies our hope.
As Ben Franklin said: “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
A few weeks ago I emailed an American who contacted Samizdata, wanting to know about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the libertarian movement in the US and the UK.
I included in my response the sentence: “America is the worst country in the world to have a libertarian party”, without qualification (it would have taken too long to cover all the ground).
However this extract from an appeal email sent out from the US Libertarian Party gives a flavour of one of the problems:
“And, unless we can raise a lot more than $2,375 for ballot access right away, we aren’t going to be able to help other at-risk ballot drives and candidates around the country. We need:
· Up to $6,000 for filing fees and petitioning costs to qualify six U.S. House candidates in Kentucky. Deadline: August 13.
· Up to $4,200 in Louisiana to run a full slate of seven U.S. House candidates. Deadline: August 23.
· Up to $1,500 to qualify a full slate of five U.S. House candidates on the ballot in Iowa. Deadline: August 16.
· Up to $4,000 to petition the ballot in Washington, DC, which gives us a shot at major-party status in our nation’s capitol. Deadline: August 28.
· Up to $5,000 to put the Maryland ballot drive over the top. Deadline: August 5.
And, there may be other drives that will require last minute assistance to succeed.
For example, over the past month, we had to step in and provide $8,000 to Illinois and $5,000 to Pennsylvania to put those ballot drives over the top. Both drives would have probably failed without our last-minute assistance.”
Now compare this with the barriers to entry in the UK.
1) To register a political party costs £150 (about 220 US dollars) for mainland Britain and the same again for registering in Northern Ireland. To comply with this a party has to send in a list of national officers, audited accounts, and a copy of the party’s constitution. This allows the name to be registered and a logo to be displayed on ballot papers. The charge includes a web page for the party which lists public contacts, constitution etc.
2) Local council elections require no deposit and there is a spending limit for all candidates. Ten signatures of local registered voters (who don’t need to be supporters) and the candidate must live or work in the borough are the only requirements. A typical spending limit per candidate is about £400 (600 dollars US). This limit obviously favours poorer political parties.
3) Parliamentary elections (legislature) there is a deposit of £ 500 (about 750 US dollars). Ten signatures from local electorate must be found. The candidate doesn’t need to be local, there is a free postal delivery, and each candidate has a spending restriction. The spending limit is under £20,000 (30,000 US dollars). National campaigning which doesn’t promote individual candidates are currently exempt from spending limits.
4) European Parliament and regional elections are by party list and cost about £3,000 (4,500 US dollars). I forget how many signatures must be gathered but I’m sure it’s 100 or less. For these elections the parties have one page in a booklet sent to every registered voter. In Greater London this amounts to over five million copies.
N.B. All deposits are refundable to the candidate if he or she scores 5 per cent of the total polled. The two Independent Libertarian Party election campaigns to date have cost less than £100 between them.
The contrast with the US is astonishing: in one state, the LP has to gather 5 per cent of the entire electorate’s support to be allowed to put up a candidate for the presidency. Yet neither Republican nor Democrat party have to comply with this barrier to entry: they are simply excused. In the UK this would require over two million signatures, as opposed to the 6,570 needed to contest every Parliamentary seat.
Another significant problem for the LP is that it is illegal for the party to receive donations from non-US citizens, so I can’t give money to the LP. But I can send money to the US on behalf of the Costa Rica Movimiento Libertario and US citizens can send money to the UK for a British political party, provided donations don’t exceed £5,000 (7,500 US dollars).
I’m currently looking into registering for next year’s London elections.
It seems Britain’s Labour government is quite keen to confer honorary knighthoods on men not usually regarded as being on the left from the United States. Earlier this year former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani was so honoured, and now it’s the turn of Federal Reserve Chairman no less.
Greenspan has come in for some stick of late for perhaps allowing the money supply to grow too fast during the helter-skelter stock market of the late 1990s, though as with all these things, hindsight is easy. But surely it’s ironic that the jazz-loving central banker, a former acolyte of Ayn Rand and one-time supporter of gold-backed money should receive a gong from a left-wing British government.
In the United States, property forfeiture laws effectively make the ‘protection’ of their vaunted constitution meaningless against seizure of pretty much anything, as various arms of the state can help themselves to property without the owner having ever been convicted of a crime and often without even being charged with one.
Alas this tyrannous state of affairs can now be found in Britain as well, at least when it comes to HM Customs and Excise. The fact that just on the opinion of a customs inspector that you have too much alcohol or tobacco for personal use, the presumption of innocence can be swept away, reversed in fact, and your property stolen by the state without you ever being convicted of smuggling. Without so much as setting foot in a court of law, if the representative of the state says you are a criminal smuggler, then you must prove otherwise on the spot or not only will he take the goods you are trying to bring into the country but he will also appropriate the vehicle in which you are transporting them, i.e. your car or van. You are guilty unless you can prove otherwise.
There are many things to admire in the USA that Britain should seek to emulate… however its legal system that allows convictionless theft by the state just on the say-so of state functionaries is not one of those things.
A few days ago I did a posting about the EU, and ended it by saying that all Americans should oppose the EU because the EU is anti-American. But then I thought, yes, but so are lots of Americans, so maybe that won’t work so well as an argument as it should. Great minds think alike (but the winner is the one who writes it first). Read this, from “Anglosphere: Why I am not an Anglophile”, a UPI piece of yesterday (Saturday) by Mr Anglosphere himself, James C. Bennett:
Of course there are anti-American idiots wherever one goes. However, this is true of America as well. The only difference is that anti-Americans in the rest of the Anglosphere can disguise themselves as nationalists; but they are pretty much the same types of people, and for the most part have the same things to say. Anti-Americanism has itself been globalized, with a sort of McChomsky franchise in every city.
Presumably anti-American Americans like the EU because it is anti-American. My thanks to Professor Instapundit himself for guiding me to this piece.
Anglosphere writer Jim Bennett weighs in with another fine salvo against EU Commissioner Chris (oh no, not him again!) Patten. Rather than repeat my earlier comments last week about the wretched Commissioner, just take a look at what Mr Bennett has to say. What impresses me so much about Bennett’s writing is that he manages to maintain a civil, pleasant tone even when trashing ideas he regards as dumb.
Oh, and changing the subject, another excellent article, if one has the time, is Andrew Sullivan‘s Sunday Times column on the vast wealth of what he calls the Western world’s “overclass”. Sullivan makes the point – obvious to we libertarians if not to collectivists – that the tremendous wealth of Bill Gates and the like is not made at the expense of we humbler mortals, but is part of an ever-increasing pie. However, Sullivan frets that the growth of such an overclass” is a problem, since society can become fragmented if the very rich are seen as detached from the mores and concerns of the middle class. A sort of mirror-problem of the “underclass”. I am not entirely sure he is right, but agree this is worth thinking about. It is also instructive to look at what Sullivan says about the proportion of tax paid by rich Americans. Completely undermines the idea that supply-side tax cuts are unfair. If anything, the rich were entitled to a bigger cut than that which Bush gave them last year.
However, Sullivan backs away from the obvious conclusion – the moral tax rate is Nil!
It is not often that I use this blog as an advertising medium. In fact, I cannot remember ever having done so. So this is a first.
We Brits at the Samizdata require some help from our American readers (we know you’re out there, we can hear you breathing). We have decided that we need a change of political representation, our own having chucked its lot in with Soviet EUnion. We need to ‘clean house’ and begin again and we think we can best do this by appointing a US Senator for Britain
We think this is a marvelous way of reconnecting us with our Anglo-Saxon heritage and of bringing the two most dynamic lynchpins of that community closer together. As well as that, it will help in the drive to get Britain out of the EU and, without Britain, the EU will not survive.
We should make it clear that we do not have the time or resources to mount any sort of election campaign so we simply intend to appoint the said Senator without he/she having any say in the matter. It may be somewhat presumptuous but these are interesting times and they call for interesting measures.
We have already pledged that we will not bother add to their administrative burdens by sending letters to their office but we do intend to write open letters to them on this blog for time to time as occasion requires.
However, we being Brits and all that, have no idea to appoint and this is where our US contributors and readers come in. If you really want to stick it to the Euro-snots, then unzip your trusty computer keyboards and mail us with your suggestions for a suitable Senator for Britain and the reasons why he/she would be suitable.
Mock not. We are serious.
Patrick Hayden over on Electolite makes ‘A brief detour into wild generalizations’ when talking about the supposed ‘cultural cringe’ that characterises part of the transatlantic relationship:
But it is hard to imagine anything in recent American history to compare with (for instance) Margaret Thatcher’s comprehensive destruction of autonomous local government bodies or the widespread European surrender of regulatory power to unelected transnational officials.
That is an interesting perspective but looking the other way across the Atlantic I see the RICO statutes wiping out at a stroke two of the supposedly sacrosanct amendments of the Bill of Rights, not to mention the lives of thousands of people each year that they are used against.
Whilst I certainly abominate the transfer of powers of criminal appropriation and force to EU bodies (because they are force backed appropriators, not because they are undemocratic), I also see Margaret Thatcher’s hatchet job on local authorities in Britain as a good thing which just did not go far enough. I saw local bodies engaged in democratically sanctioned theft of wealth, taking money by force from one section of the community and giving it to another more numerous section, being restrained in the extent they could continue to do so by the central government (via rate capping, or abolition in the case of the GLC). I used to work in UK local authority finance and I for one was delighted to see them reined in. Theft is still theft regardless of which tier of government is engaged in it, but obviously less theft is better than more.
Romano Prodi may be a hackneyed old Eurocrat but he is definitely onto something when he says that the British are afraid of full engagement in the EU.
According to The Great Protuberant One, Britain is:
“…constantly on the defensive, putting the brakes on, dragging its feet on vital issues, fighting a rearguard action that can hold up, but cannot stem, the tide of history.”
Sadly, that’s not how it looks from where I sit. And would that we could ‘stem’ this particular ‘tide of history’. Unfortunately, we can’t. The only thing we can do is save our nation and watch from the sidelines as this ‘tide of history’ drowns all those it engulfs.
Nonetheless, credit where it is due. Prodi is on an honesty roll as he notes:
“I wonder what makes this great nation happy to be a junior partner in a transatlantic relationship, but afraid to take its rightful place alongside its European allies?”
Allow me to clue you in, Prodi: it’s because the Channel is wider than the Atlantic. Across the Channel are friends, across the Atlantic is family.
In 1909, British prime minister Lloyd George imposed a levy which was transformed by William Beveridge in 1946 into the modern idea of ‘National Insurance’ by which the welfare state would appropriate money from people to fund various socialist objectives. William Beveridge was the main architect of the British model of force based theft by the state of a huge chunk of national private property.
Today, Britain’s socialist ‘National Health Service’ (NHS) is set to consume £184 billion per year soon… which an article in the Times today pointed put was enough to fight the 1982 Falklands War with Argentine 40 times, or about the same at the total Gross Domestic Product of Belgium or twice that of the GDP of Saudi Arabia or South Africa… and this is just Britain’s appropriated healthcare budget.
In the US, the process has not really been all that different, merely started somewhat later. This process really began under FDR during the Depression but did not start in earnest until the ‘Great Society’ programmes of Lyndon B. Johnson. Clinton recently tried to go a more socialist route by moving US healthcare towards a more state-based system of appropriated funding, which thankfully failed.
But it should show that regardless of the example of failed socialist programmes the world over, not even information rich societies such as the USA and UK are immune to the intellectually bankrupt and economically moronic lure of such ideas as nationally directed healthcare. You may be sure than the next time the Democrats are back in control in the USA, such ideas will reappear, suitably re-branded and re-spun.
Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
It is interesting how one things leads to another. Following a totally parochial inter-Samizdata phone (i.e. telephone) conversation between Perry de Havilland and myself in which he pointed out how we must not confuse Americans, South Africans, Indians or New Zealanders with unexplained British words like “tube” (London’s underground railway system) or with unexplained British acronyms like “HSE” (which is Britain’s “Health and Safety Executive”, not a cow disease) provoked thoughts in me of a grander sort. For what Perry is urging upon us is a new “international” variant of the English language, comprehensible all over the Anglosphere.
Jim Bennett, popularised the term “Anglosphere” to describe a set of shared cultural values, a meme-stream of common references, that is not just the British Isles and North America or even the USA plus the ‘white commonwealth’. It is the totality of the English speaking world united by more than just a common language: an English speaking cosmopolitan meta-culture.
Most discussions of the “Anglosphere” that I’ve read have concentrated on the ideological affinities of the nations and cultures thus alluded to. Common law, liberal democracy, and so forth. That’s not wrong, but there is a more mundane affinity at work here.
It is no accident that the word “Anglosphere” has erupted into vigorous life at the same time as the eruption of the Internet. Language zones are strengthened by international electronic communication, and physical distance rendered relatively less important, and this would be true even if ideology counted for nothing. We can be sure, for example, that in Spain (or is it Portugal, I can never remember which, and that’s my point), there are ‘internetted’ networks devoted to every tiny detail of what’s now happening in Argentina, patronised by readers on both sides of the Atlantic who never give a single thought from one month to the next about happenings in the USA or Britain or Germany or China, and all because of language. Spanish versions of Perry link Spaniards to the dramas of Spanish South America, just as Perry himself links us all to the dramas going on in Anglo-speaking America, Britain, India, New Zealand, etc.
With the modern “knowledge” economy heading the way it is, this is bound to count economically for more and more as the years go by. Which presents us in little old Britain with a dilemma. A generation ago, in the pre-internet age, geography (“zone”) counted for relatively more than it does now. Hence, partly, our desire to hook up economically with mainland Europe. But what if the new economy is now knowledge and language dominated, and trade of this newer sort with Tasmania is now massively easier for us mostly stubbornly mono-linguistic British than trade with France or Germany or China? And what if the English-language-based culture of the internet is creating (re-creating) stubbornly unbreakable bonds of loyalty and friendship, as it surely is? You would expect a drawing back by Britain from the European political commitment, wouldn’t you? A period of Euro-revisionism. Which might be a part of why that’s what is now happening.
But now forget politics, and think of sport. A few weeks back I did a semi-triumphalist semi-jocular posting about how England now has the best international rugby team on earth. Antipodeans were complaining furiously about this post by e-mail long before France made nonsense of it by beating England in Paris on March 2nd. The Antipodeans protested, quite rightly, that England’s alleged rugby superiority over South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wasn’t based on regularly beating these guys in actual serious rugby games, but on guesswork based on England regularly annihilating the likes of Wales and Scotland, and doing okay in very occasional and not-that-vital games involving touring sides, ours and Antipodean, with home advantage going massively to whoever is playing at home. That one simple barrier, jet lag, dooms us to playing regularly only against people geographically close to us. France has the same problem.
So what do we do? Send our entire international rugby squad out to Australia for the entire season, every season? Doesn’t work. If they can’t also play locally, how do we decide who these people are to be? Yet the alternative seems to be that England will remain stuck permanently just below the very top level. Here’s a case where zone counts for more than phone, even though phone is almost the entire reason that all these geographically dispersed countries are still playing the same game by the same rules. (On the other hand, if all the teams played each other regularly anyway, the rugby World Cup wouldn’t count for nearly so much…)
I don’t have an “answer” to this phone versus zone stuff. I’m just saying that this is an interesting way of looking at the world.
For a more detailed introduction to Jim Bennett‘s fascinating Anglosphere ideas, the Anglosphere Primer can be downloaded here in rich text format.
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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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