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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“One curious and unintended consequence of the aeroplane ban [on smoking] was that airlines began to save money by changing the air in the cabin less frequently. Traditionally, this was done every two minutes and old air was never recirculated, but with no tobacco smoke to draw attention to the quality of air, the carriers reduced air changes to once every twenty minutes. This led to a musty aroma on board and, according to a report in The Lancet, contributed to the appearance of Deep Vein Thrombosis, a disease unknown in airline passengers until the 1990s.”
Page 163 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A history of anti-smoking. By Christopher Snowdon.
Entirely selfishly, I am delighted that I travel in a smoke-free airline industry, although it is a shame that this change came about through the coercion of the state and not in reaction to consumer choice via a market. After all, there are many irritations involved in flying that might be amenable to a market solution, if it was available, such as screaming young children or patronising and idiotic flight attendants.
“Hitler remained closely involved with the crusade against tobacco to the very end. He banned smoking at his Austrian base, the Wolf’s Lair, and in the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin. In 1942, he voiced regret that he had ever allowed his troops a tobacco ration; a ration he would soon be forced to increase to boost morale when the war went from bad to worse. In 1943 he made it illegal for persons under the age of 18 to smoke in public places. A year later, with the Third Reich crumbling around him, Hitler personally ordered smoking to be banned on city trains and to protect female staff from second-hand smoke.”
“Hitler committed suicide in April 1945 and, after burning his body, SS troops lit cigarettes in the Fuhrerbunker for the first time. Within weeks, cigarettes became the unofficial currency of Germany, with a value of fifty US cents each. Hitler ultimately, if inadvertently, succeeded in reducing smoking in Germany but only by bringing the country to its knees.”
Pages 76 to 76 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking, by Christopher Snowdon.
In Italy last week, where I holidayed, I also attended the ISIL conference with a great bunch of fellow libertarian conspirators, such as Kevin Dowd, Tom Palmer and Detlev Schlichter. One of the talks was by Mary Ruwart, who has worked for many years in the medical field and has first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of the US Food and Drugs Administration. She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects.
As Ruwart said, one of the issues that comes up in any discussion about drugs are patents. She disapproves of them – she called the process of getting a patent a “game”; but at the same time she pointed out that if drug firms have no certainty of being able to recoup some of their research costs due to a patent, and those research costs are inflated by the FDA and other regulators, then abolishing patents without first removing such regulators would be bad. In my view, it would be disastrous.
I thought about her talk when I came across this rather lame article by the Economist, in which the publication wonders why US drugs are so expensive and why production of them has slowed. Wow, I wonder why that can be?
Update: the FDA has been carrying out an absurd attempt to hammer dietary supplements. US citizens who want to stop this nonsense can register their views at this site.
Felicity Lawrence. Describing her as a health dominatrix doesn’t really work; some people find that fun. In this article, Why the new McDonald’s menu won’t make us thin, she writes:
The coalition government has chosen to cast public health as a matter of personal responsibility. It takes the classical liberal view that individuals should make their own choices, free from state intrusion. Nudging us to healthier choices is OK, but regulating is not.
On this liberal reading, the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.
This is a dangerous misrepresentation. It conflates the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. It ignores the fact that business intrudes on our choices constantly with its powerful marketing and sales strategies.
The part where she is projecting is the part I have put in bold type. It is Felicity Lawrence, not the supporters of a belief that individuals should make their own choices, who is conflating the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. She is conflating the two rights so as to get her Guardian audience, generally hostile to business, to give up their residual hippy belief in freedom to do what one likes with one’s own body in return for the quick thrill of an anti-business sugar rush.
Those who believe that individuals should be able to do what they like with their own bodies may also believe that businesses should be free from government constraint. I do. They are both freedoms. They are not the same freedom. I would say that the freedom to do what you like with your own body, and mind, and life, is the fundamental freedom – is, in fact, freedom. The specific freedom of businesses is merely an application of that to certain uses of your time and applied to specific types of groups.
I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read ‘Freedom of information is for businesses too’ by Heather Brooke.
A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research.
The UK’s FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public’s name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.
Taking a break from life in riot-torn London, I came across this item at the FT about some of the implications of longer lifespans. It is a mixed situation. Excerpt:
“Maxmin admits there are no miraculous solutions to the problems of a fast-ageing society. We will all have to work longer, save more and pay more in tax to cover the costs of a world with a greyer population. Even so, he thinks models like Elder Power can have a much wider application. Perhaps moments like the collapse of Southern Cross, he tells me, could (in the right hands) become moments of opportunity. More generally, models like Beacon Hill Village, ITNAmerica and Elder Power show glimpses of a future in which more elderly people can stay in their homes for longer. All three use innovative technology, make use of assets in their local community and bring together the resources of local businesses, volunteers and the state to solve problems none could have solved individually, at reasonable cost.”
How we deal with ageing, and the issue of longer lifespans, is of course intertwined with the current fiscal breakdown of many developed economies. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. And in that Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda book I have been linking to lately, about the impact of mass aviation, there is a segment on how said aviation can be used to dramatically reshape healthcare, such as by flying people with problems to cheaper, but arguably better run, hospitals in Asia. It struck me while reading this book that while automobiles and consumer electronics have been propelled by their Henry Fords, Michael Dells and Steve Jobses, we haven’t really had, in healthcare, a similar set of individuals to drive innovation and push things sharply down the price curve. The dynamics of Silicon Valley, allied with cheap Chinese manufacturing and just-in-time stock inventory systems, hardly touches healthcare at all, although this is starting to change, perhaps. Of course, much of this is caused by how healthcare is seen, wrongly in my view, as somehow “different” from such vulgar things as selling flatscreen TVs or cars. Healthcare is political. That’s the problem.
A few days ago Phlip Davies MP suggested that disabled workers or those with mental health problems could get work more easily if they had the right to voluntarily opt out of the minimum wage.
He said,
“Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, can’t be as productive in their work as somebody who hasn’t got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that given that the employer was going to have to pay them both the same they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk, and that was doing those people a huge disservice.”
Within hours so much outraged commentary flowed out of newspaper columnists, charity representatives and politicians of all parties, including Mr Davies’ own, that you’d think there’d been an outbreak of indignation dysentery.
Let us look at a few of the responses.
“A lower minimum wage if you’re disabled? Not acceptable, sorry,” says Lucy Glennon in the Guardian.
“It is a preposterous suggestion,” MIND spokeswoman Sophie Corlett was quoted as saying in the Yorkshire Post, “that someone who has a mental health problem should be prepared to accept less than the minimum wage to get their foot in the door with an employer.
“People with mental health problems should not be considered a source of cheap labour and should be paid appropriately for the jobs they do.”
“Philip Davies’s comments are another obstacle to disabled workers being treated as equal,” said Paul Farmer, chief executive of MIND, writing in the Telegraph. He added, “He has caused offence to many people who work with a mental health problem and those who want to work on an equal footing, yet struggle to overcome the stigma they face.”
Jody McIntyre in the Independent was also outraged. His suggestion that Members of Parliament should work for less than minimum wage was not bad, though. Of the mentally disabled, he said “A strong test of any progressive society is how it’s most vulnerable people are valued for their worth, rather than pitied for their faults. Philip Davies clearly places little value on the role of people with learning difficulties in our society; instead of celebrating their diversity, he chooses to reinforce the discriminatory myth that people with learning difficulties are more of a risk to employers.”
There was more, much more. After reading loads of responses I noticed something that they all had in common… as not having.
Not one response of all the many I read even tried to argue that Mr Davies was factually wrong. They were outraged, disgusted. They asserted what no one denies: that mentally disabled people are equal citizens and often prove to be hardworking employees, valued by their employers. But I could not find one article that argued that Davies’ description of the way things go when a person with an IQ of 60 or a history of insanity seeks a job was inaccurate, or gave reasons to believe his proposal would not increase their chances of landing one.
“Philip Davies is right, of course,” says Tim Worstall. “But so profoundly unfashionable that no one will say so”. He then goes on to argue that Davies is right. His views will not be purist enough for some libertarians, but the novelty of reading someone bother to put forward a chain of reasoning when talking about this topic is a bit of a thrill. The fact that he bothers to think about what will actually happen to disabled people, particularly mentally disabled people, under various scenarios shows a thousand times more compassion than the people whose response is mostly concerned with their own emotions.
A quote from Charles Murray: “It seems that those who legislate and administer and write about social policy can tolerate any increase in actual suffering so long as the system does not explicitly permit it.”
Though a World Health Organization study concluded cell phones may cause cancer, some are wondering why, if their truly is a link, there not been a significant worldwide increase in brain cancers.
Go figure. But of course providing excuses for more regulations, and more funding for further studies, is the reason bodies such as the World Health Organisation exist.
The gradual but inexorable illegalisation of smoking is arriving at its end-game, as many bloggers of the sort I like have been complaining about, and no doubt as many bloggers of the sort I don’t like have been celebrating.
Here is the Radio Times, describing a show done by Panorama last Monday (March 7th) entitled Smoking and the Bandits:
Criminal gangs are believed to be supplying half of all hand-rolled tobacco and in five cigarettes in the United Kingdom. … their products are also up to 30 times more toxic than ordinary cigarettes.
I saw that coming in 1987. Under the bit in that pamphlet entitled THE BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING, AND OF PROPERTY (page 3) I wrote about how gangsters would, if the illegalisation process I was writing about even then continued, soon be running the tobacco business, supplying “these now genuinely lethal products”. Not that I was alone in possessing these prophetic powers. Just about every libertarian then writing saw this coming. Illegality equals toxicity. You merely had to apply what everyone already knew about other drugs markets that already were, even then, illegal, or for that matter acquaint yourself with a one page summary of the story of Prohibition, and the pattern of future events, if they insisted on continue to bear down on smoking with the force of law.
But going back to that bit in the Radio Times, where I put “…” above, it also says this:
However, not only are the criminals depriving British taxpayers of £4 billion in revenue, …
That’s right, there goes the exact same warped logic as Natalie Solent noted in her posting earlier today, immediately below this one. No, Radio Times, depriving taxpayers is what you do when you tax them. These “bandits” are thriving because, unlike our tyrannical government, they are not doing that.
It seems that the commenter quoted by Natalie is mistaken. It is not “only in the mind of Ms Lucas” that such warped thinking is being thought.
I believe I am the senior Samizdatista, in years if not in eloquence or influence. And one of the privileges of advancing years is the right to inflict upon strangers the details of one’s various medical infirmities and experiences. I can’t, yet, quite manage the truly, Platonically essential, shameless way of doing this, which is: in a very loud voice on the top deck of a double-decker bus. But, a blog is a satisfactory next best, so here goes. Stop whatever else you may be doing or trying to do, stop talking amongst yourselves, and listen to me.
A few months ago, a crown that had been attached to one of my disintegrating British teeth started to loosen, and about one month ago, this crown fell off. My non-British dentist advised that what remained of the real tooth was now useless and that it all should go. This was not a wisdom tooth; those are long gone. It was the next one in, top left. But I wouldn’t miss it, said my dentist. If I did, an “implant” could be contrived.
So, a week ago now, the tooth was duly removed. The NHS had been asked to do something about all this, as soon as the crown had become loose. But not a peep was heard from the NHS in three months (apparently a whole clutch of letters due to go out had been delayed for some obscure reason – waiting lists?), so when the crown finally did fall off, I decided to go private. Had I been content to lie about how much it was hurting (in reality it only started hurting after the tooth had been removed), the emergency bit of the NHS might have obliged. But, forced to choose, I preferred buying to lying, and so, for £150, the date was fixed and the deed was done.
Local anaesthetics do away with almost all pain, but I can’t get used to the notion that all that grinding and sawing is not hurting, and I love it when it ends. But taking out a tooth involves flesh, not just teeth. I had supposed that once the tooth had gone, any discomfort involved would end, but gouging out a tooth does damage. It does less damage if all of the tooth comes out in one go, but mine did not. After most of the tooth had been removed, a long, thin root remained, and further damage was done to my gum while that was dug out. So, not surprisingly when I actually thought about it, it was only when the local anaesthetic started to wear off that the serious discomfort began. The pain has by no means been unbearable, but it started out quite bad, and has still not truly abated. For a couple of days all but the smallest mouthful, the shallowest spoonful, involved a painfully slow wrenching open of the jaw. I am still chewing only with the other side of my mouth, not least because the hole takes time to fill itself in. Further dentistry may be required to this end.
Okay, so much for the shouting on a bus bit. Now it gets a little more officially Samizdata-esque. → Continue reading: Defensive British dentistry
“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.”
The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side’s definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky’s haste to explain Loughner’s murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan’s murders here.
Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.
A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of “treatment” (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient’s will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.
And yet – there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. “He should have been locked up before this” does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.
Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.
WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system.
According to the Guardian (!):
Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.
The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.
But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.
Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”
Back in 2007 I mentioned a milder version of the same reaction among British people to Moore’s depiction of “empty waiting rooms and happy, care-free health workers” in the NHS.
UPDATE: Hat tips to commenters Jock and Alisa. The Guardian story has now been corrected to say that Sicko was shown in Cuba, confirmed on Michael Moore’s own website. Pity. That was a fun meme while it lasted, but truth must prevail. Moore says that the cable was purely a lie. Not necessarily: indecision as to the “line to take” is not exactly unknown in totalitarian regimes. Both showing the film and forbidding it have their dangers from the point of view of the Cuban rulers.
This round to Michael Moore, but I shall defiantly repeat something I said in 2008:
When the history of Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba comes to be written all that stuff about the excellence of the healthcare system will turn out to be lies but the claim of high literacy rates will be more or less true.
Communist education gets results because force is near to the surface. I acknowledge but do not approve … A further advantage of communist education is that the wishes of the teachers are given almost as short a shrift as those of the pupils.
Force works well in education because the forcers can look at the forcees all the time they are doing the forcing. It works less well in healthcare and very badly indeed in agriculture.
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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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