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]
I saw this on Fraser Nelson’s Substack (it seems everyone has a Substack these days). The British journalist has been to Thailand with his wife, and noted this positive healthcare outcome in Thailand:
Thai private hospitals are a phenomenon. I had a foot complaint that had me hobbling around London for months, wearing trainers into the office. My local GP was of no use; I wasted money on private MRI scans and consultants trying to diagnose the problem. Nothing worked. But when I went into Wattanapat hospital in Aonang the problem was diagnosed, surgery carried out and completed all within 90 minutes. I felt like Lazarus for the rest of the holiday. In Bangkok, one of my friends had a trapped nerve in her leg – which was diagnosed and treated in two hours. She walked in without an appointment and was never unattended for more than a few minutes. Blood tests, x-rays, intravenous painkillers, specialist diagnosis, treatment pathway for when she returned home: all for 7,500 bhat (~£175). I was operated on by the same doctor who diagnosed me: they don’t seem to fragment it into specialities. I paid about £400. The UK has a good private health sector, but money cannot buy the integration or speed that Thai hospitals offer.
I found out later that people now travel to Thailand to bypass European hospital logjams. Most Thai private hospitals hold Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation, a gold standard for global healthcare quality with ~350 standards for things like surgical hygiene, anaesthesia protocols, medical personnel qualifications and patient safety. I suspect most NHS trusts would fail to meet this standard, even though they cost far more money. UK private healthcare is more a premium-priced overlay on NHS infrastructure rather than a reimagined delivery model. Thailand shows what proper integration achieves: clinical outcomes Western healthcare once promised but increasingly fails to deliver.
I had the same frustrating experience in dealing with my own ankle/knee pain issues about six years ago, but unlike Nelson, I did not fly thousands of miles to get treated (which clearly has to be factored in for the health tourist equation to work. But then Fraser Nelson was in the country anyway on holiday.) I have private medical cover, but did not use it on this occasion, and got sorted with specially made insoles, and did physio and various exercises – including barbell lifts such as the deadlift – to strengthen my knees, and so forth. I am a lot better and feel fitter than when I was a decade younger.
Whatever the specifics, the example given from Thailand shows that the UK’s free-at-the-point-of-use system has major faults, because there’s less of a price incentive to focus on what people are looking for, and therefore fresh sources of supply aren’t drawn in. Prices are information carriers, and like a clogged artery, a healthcare system run on socialist lines can produce the national equivalent of a stroke. (This in some ways describes the economy of the UK.)
Healthcare needs a sharp dose of capitalism along with green veggies and a daily walk. Think of how under free market healthcare, technologies such as 3-D printing/processing scale up production, in a customised way, of items such as hip replacement parts, knee replacement parts, insoles, and other things. This tech already is being used, but under a more market-based UK system, this will accelerate. The toolkit that is promised by AI could really drive change in a positive way (and I am not as starry eyed about AI as some might be). Healthcare needs its Jobs, Dyson and Rockefeller.
Anyway , thoughts about health and wellbeing often crop up in the cold, post-Christmas days of January, so it is time for me to hit the weights. Wishing everyone here a happy 2026.
This holiday, unwrap the power of one: USB-C for all.
Yes, not just phones, tablets, and laptops. In three years, every charger will be under the same tree.
Because less waste, smarter choices, mean more for everyone, all year long.
https://link.europa.eu/QDMFTh
This is an excerpt from a scholarly article about the history of Islam:
By the beginning of the fourth century of the hijra (about A.D. 900), however, the point had been reached when scholars of all schools felt that all essential questions had been thoroughly discussed and finally settled, and a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one might be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all. This ‘closing of the door of ijtihad‘, as it was called, amounted to the demand for taklid, a term which had originally denoted the kind of reference to Companions of the Prophet that had been customary in the ancient schools of law, and which now came to mean the unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines of established schools and authorities.
If you think that the ability of the European Commission to recognise when something has reached a point where no improvement is possible is good enough to allow it to safely close the door of ijtihad on charger cable design, consider the evident fact that none of the multiple people in the Berlaymont building over whose desks the draft of that tweet must have passed knew enough history to veto that title.
For a couple of decades now I’ve been insisting that China is the most free market economy on the planet. In some senses of course this is laughably untrue. In others, or in at least one, remarkably close to the bone.
I left this comment on another place and thought I’d share it here. I was responding to an American pal – whom I normally agree with – who said the the UK’s vote for independence outside the EU was a disaster. I have jazzed it up a bit and added links. Well, it is Christmas!
The EU has become an increasingly regulated, bureaucratic entity, and while the UK tried to pull it in a different direction, the sclerosis of the continent got worse. The Single Market and “freedom of movement” aspect had their positives – up to a point. The Customs Union (external tariff wall, in other words) was a clear negative, however.
The structure of the EU is hostile to classical liberal economics in the medium term, not a plus.
The bureaucratic mission creep of the European Commission, unhampered by a largely toothless E. Parliament (it cannot initiate or repeal directives), meant the EU economy decelerated, imperceptibly at first. Its share of global GDP has shrunk and not just because other, non-European countries such as China and India have grown over the past few decades. While some of the reasons for Brexit were grounded in nationalism, which I dislike, some reasons were more classically liberal. Those reasons should not be discounted. Another point: for far too many, the ideas of free enterprise and freedom of trade became entwined, in a poisonous way, with the creation of transnational, bureaucratic structures distant from ordinary people. To that extent, the EU is part of the problem for those making the case for capitalism and open markets. When you say those words, far too many think of men and women in suits in Brussels regulating this and that, not entrepreneurship, trade and human interaction. That’s a problem.
For Americans reading this, remember that when the original 13 colonies broke free from the UK in the 1770s, they did so in part for reasons around representative government and the powers to tax with legitimate power. The EU increasingly came to the point where member states were reduced to regions of a centralising state.
Ross Clark’s Far From EUtopia is a marvellous read about Brexit, what went wrong, and more.
There is strategic competition with economic rivals, notably China, especially around advanced technology, supply-chain dominance, and industrial sovereignty.
But tariffs raise costs for domestic firms that rely on imported components, in some cases hurting US manufacturers rather than helping them. Indeed, recent data show US manufacturing has contracted, with some firms citing tariffs as a reason for layoffs or relocation. Retaliation from trade partners can offset gains via higher tariffs abroad, disrupted supply chains, and increased uncertainty.
The welfare benefits of rising domestic output are modest under many models because gains might be outweighed by efficiency losses, higher consumer prices, and reduced variety. And the government risks politicizing trade decisions, which may lead to cronyism or poorly targeted protection by helping politically connected sectors rather than broadly boosting national economic health
That is not how wealth works of course. The people who have piles of money do not in fact have piles of money they’ve got piles of paper signifying ownership of companies and businesses.
Which leads to the third problem with the idea. Which is that taxing these billionaires on their stacks of ownership of assets does not, in fact, free up money into the economy. It doesn’t reverse hoarding that is – just changes who hoards.
“The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($), in one of his best recent columns IMHO, gently taking apart a new book by Sven Beckert that purports to show how we have become rich primarily through violence and enslavement, not mutual exchange. The book is apparently more than 1,300 pages long, and the largest ever published by Penguin. To write a book that long, and miss the key elements of why free enterprise is as great as it is, seems a lot of work for scant reward. Alas, I suspect Beckert’s book will be treated as reverently on parts of the Left as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, which turned out to be built on proverbial sand.
A recent Nobel prizewinner in economics, Joel Mokyr, has written a book that I think rather more accurately identifies why, for instance, the UK became as wealthy as it did during the Industrial Revolution, and plays far more attention to the role of ideas. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes is also a good study, in my view. Anything by Deidre McCloskey is also good.
Cash savings are not dead money – they’re the deposits that finance the banks’ loan books.
Tossery built upon ignorance. Richard Murphy – that Sage of Ely – is one of the few people in the country able to proffer up budget ideas even worse than the ones we’re going to get from Rachel this week.
Now, zoom out to the regulatory burden, a beast fed by both parties. The Tories kicked it off with gusto. In 2015, George Osborne slashed mortgage interest relief, fully phasing it out by 2020, landlords could no longer deduct full interest from taxable income, effectively hiking taxes by up to 20% for higher-rate payers. Add the 2016 3% stamp duty land tax (SDLT) surcharge on buy-to-lets, which cooled purchases by 10-15% per industry estimates. EPC rules tightened too: from 2018, rentals needed at least an E rating, with fines for non-compliance; by 2025, proposals aimed for C by 2030, costing landlords £8,000-£15,000 per property in upgrades. Right to Rent, introduced in 2014 and expanded, mandated immigration checks with £3,000 fines per illegal tenant. The 2019 promise to scrap Section 21 evictions lingered unresolved until Labour grabbed the baton, but it fuelled uncertainty, prompting a landlord sell-off wave.
Labour, far from easing the pain, has doubled down. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, royal assent in October, bans Section 21 outright (implementation mid-2026), mandates periodic tenancies, and limits rent hikes to once yearly at market rates—with challenges via tribunals. Pets can’t be unreasonably refused, and bidding wars are outlawed. Selective licensing proliferates: councils like Southwark charge £600-£750 per property for five years, with paperwork galore. Fines for breaches? Up to £30,000, as Reeves learned. Right to Rent enforcement has “rocketed” under Labour, with penalties hitting £4.2m recently versus £596k pre-election, a 600%+ spike, per Home Office data. No wonder a 2025 Landlord Today survey cited “political pressure” as a top exit reason for 40% of landlords.
I have a feeling this Landeur chap on YouTube is rather capturing the UK zeitgeist right now. Here he is pointing out the dangers of ever increasing taxes.
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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