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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Harry Browne, former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, writer on business and the author of the very interesting book, How I Found Freedom In an Unfree World, has died. Here is an article about his life and contribution to the libertarian political cause in the United States.
I think his book cited above is the thing I am most grateful to Browne for. It points out the many ways in which, right now, you can make your life freer, less dependent on the State and open your eyes to making the most of life without waiting for someone’s permission. At a time when the prospects for liberty seem rather gloomy in some ways, that is a good message to spread around.
I am sure those closer to the coalface of U.S. politics might have less kind things to say about Browne’s activities in the LP, but I’ll leave that to others if they are so inclined.
The other day I made a less-than-complimentary reference to the thoughts of so-called “crunchy con” Rod Dreher, who has taken against the ugliness of modern capitalism and its assorted vulgarity. Blogger Clive Davis thought that I was being a touch unfair.
Well, if you thought I was harsh, then check this out by Radley Balko:
“Only after raw, unabashed capitalism has taken care of more primitive problems can we begin to have places like Whole Foods, or targeted products like no-chemical, no-additive, no-hormone, free-range chicken. Only after industry has knocked down a lot of trees and sullied a lot of streams on its way to feeding us, medicating us, and giving us good reason to think we’ll live past the age of forty do we get the luxury of beginning to worry about the health of the environment, and the survival of beings outside our own families, much less outside our own species.
I don’t begrudge Dreher his Birks and his granola, but talk about the excesses of capitalism and so-called conspicuous consumption are innevitably followed by calls to slow things down — maybe idle the engines of progress for a bit. There’s generally little acknowledgement that it is excess and consumption that have put them in the position of being able to write books about the problems associated with…you guessed it…excess and consumption.”
Absolutely. My only query: what on earth is a Birk?
A friend of mine in Manhattan has joined an effort to save St Brigid’s Church in the Lower East side and I find myself sufficiently drawn to the cause to support them in print.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.St Brigids was built on the old waterfront of New York at the time of the Irish famine. It was perhaps the first stop for those who escaped the horror which starved one and a half million of their fellow citizens to death in Ireland and then survived the unspeakable conditions of the Atlantic crossing. The trip alone killed perhaps one of every five who attempted it. As one British Captain put it at the time, the difference between carrying slaves and Irish to the new world was that you did not get paid for a slave unless you delivered him alive.
The church was built in a time when the majority religion in Ireland was outlawed; those landing on New York’s quays built their own place of worship on the shore to celebrate the freedom of religion they found in their new home. The ceiling was built by boatbuilders and carried some of the characteristics of that trade. You can read more about the history here.
The Catholic Diocese of New York has decided to tear it down and has thus far turned a deaf ear to the sometimes strident cries from parishioners. I agree the Diocese is legally the owner and does have the legal right to do with the property as they choose. I do not agree they are doing the right thing. Quite the contrary, I feel they are going down a path that runs counter to the long term interests of their religion, their members, the community the church has served for over a century and a half; and those who wish to see a bit of the historical roots of their own families kept alive.
This is not a problem unique to this small parish; due to costly recent legal problems the Catholic church in America has been destroying small congregations in the same way a national store would cut costs and sell assets to raise capital in hard times: by chopping off all marginal operations. The problem is, a church is not a business, or at least that is not why it exists. A small congregation is not a cost center; it is the very reason the religion exists. If religion is to have any meaning at all in the 21st Century it has to be as the last bastion of community. We used to have small community schools in America. The State destroyed education and communities to gain ‘economies of scale’ and to ‘pay teachers more’. I would hate to see Big Religion join Big Government as yet another destructive force in our society.
If you find this argument compelling; if you want to save a bit of 19th century American architecture or have strong feelings about the immigrant history of the Irish, Italians and Hispanics, contact these people and see what you can do to help.
It is a given in libertarian circles that property rights are an absolute right. You will find no one at Samizdata who will stray from that view. This does not mean libertarians like myself turn a blind eye to what their neighbors do or what happens in the community around them. The actions of others can affect my quality of life, and I feel it my duty to use strong but peaceful persuasion when I feel someone is harming others. Many find it confusing that libertarians will at the same time defend someone’s right to do something while saying they are a bloody immoral fool if they actually do it.
I have recently come across two cases which have impacts in areas which I care about. I have dealt with one of them above; the other is a far more complex issue of regulatory distortions which may soon cause disastrous and irreversible secondary harm and are perhaps only answerable in the time available by a devil’s deal. I have yet to figure that one out, so I decided, for the moment, to stick with this far simpler and clearer issue of property rights in an unfree world.
It has been said that the best political arrangement when it comes to protecting liberty and constraining the size of government is when no party controls all branches of government. Gridlock is liberty-friendly, on this view. Well, the idea that it is bad for a single party to run the entire shebang does seem to be borne out by the skyrocketing spending going on in the United States under George W. Bush. Bruce Bartlett, a Reaganite Republican of long standing, has written a blistering indictment of Bush’s record on spending.
Bush ran back in 2000 (it already seems a long time ago) as a “compassionate conservative”, and only the most gullible must have ignored the fact that this was codespeak for spending lots of other people’s money. I fear very much that we could get the same outcome if David Cameron ever leads the Tories back to power by promising the same menu as his Labour opponent.
I get the impression – and that is all that it is – that some conservative writers are getting a bit fed up with Bush, and I am not just talking about the cack-handed post-invasion phase in Iraq. On a whole list of bedrock issues for conservatives, such as federalism, free markets, respect for liberty and privacy, this administration has fallen way short. It has not even delivered on Social Security reform in any meaningful way, and the tax code is as hideously complex and full of distortions as ever.
You may have already heard this but I laughed out loud when I came across this: an officer involved in Dick Cheney’s recent difficulties is called Captain Kirk.
Phasers off, gentlemen.
Popular Mechanics takes look at the myths that sprung up after Hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans. Some of their findings will be of no surprise to samizdatistas, I’m sure, including:
Folks in Tornado Alley and along the San Andreas fault don’t get federally backed insurance, so why should taxpayers subsidize coastal homes, many of them vacation properties? Before we start rebuilding “bigger and better,” Congress should reform the flood insurance program. A good start: Structure premiums so the program is actuarially sound and clamps down on repetitive claims.
Three major policy changes could help make our energy system more resilient in the face of disasters. 1) Loosen restrictions on refinery construction to encourage new refineries in more diverse locations. 2) Expand port facilities for Liquefied Natural Gas to help supplement domestic supply. 3) Relax the current ban on offshore natural gas drilling along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Others point to a civil society that is capable of functioning with relatively low levels of government supervision:
In reality, although looting and other property crimes were widespread after the flooding on Monday, Aug. 29, almost none of the stories about violent crime turned out to be true. Col. Thomas Beron, the National Guard commander of Task Force Orleans, arrived at the Superdome on Aug. 29 and took command of 400 soldiers. He told PM that when the Dome’s main power failed around 5 am, “it became a hot, humid, miserable place. There was some pushing, people were irritable. There was one attempted rape that the New Orleans police stopped.”
When Nagin issued his voluntary evacuation order, a contraflow plan that turned inbound interstate lanes into outbound lanes enabled 1.2 million people to leave New Orleans out of a metro population of 1.5 million. “The Corps estimated we would need 72 hours [to evacuate that many people],” says Brian Wolshon, an LSU civil engineer. “Instead, it took 38 hours.”
Disasters such as this pose a challenge for minarchists and anarchists, because they present situations where government can apparently make a difference for the better. The article looks at the government response, and although it has suggestions for improvement, is somewhat favorable.
Interesting stuff.
Various precincts of the respectable press and the blogosphere having gotten wrapped around the axle regarding Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, I thought a little background on quail hunting in Texas (by an actual Texas quail hunter!) might be in order.
It is not uncommon for a quail hunter to get “peppered”, due to the tendency of quail to fly somewhat erratically at relatively low levels. Unlike ducks and dove, which come in high, and pheasant, which take off vertically, quail often fly at head level. Not to mention that quail often live in brushy country where visibility can get a little short, and people tend to hunt them with open chokes which spread the pattern out. Serious injuries are rare, due to the small pellet size, open chokes, and (often) smaller gauge guns used by quail hunters.
I myself have just barely avoided shooting an actual pickup (bright red, thank you, about 20 yards away) while quail hunting, and have had a member of my party peppered (not by me, thank the gods). It was a pretty typical incident – a few stray pellets in the neck, no harm done. It is, in short, easy even for a very conscientious shooter to have an accident.
That said, based on the rumor and speculation in the press, it sounds like what happened to Mr. Whittington was a little more than your typical peppering. The length of his hospital stay alone points to more of a direct blast than a few stray pellets.
The typical rules of gun safety simply do not apply in their usual way when hunting upland game. To verify, to the same degree as with a rifle or pistol, that there is nothing at all in your line of fire before shooting would preclude wingshooting at quail, grouse, and other birds, where you are swinging your gun through a low-flying bird at high speed. For that reason, safety is assured to a large degree by having a disciplined shooting line – everyone stays more or less in line, and everyone knows where their zone of fire is.
The story is that Whittington came up behind Cheney, or that Cheney shot Whittington when he was behind him. Someone can come up behind another hunter and still be in his designated zone of fire, and everyone in the party has a responsibility to stay clear of each other and not show up where unexpected. Its possible but by no means certain that Vice President Cheney was only negligent, and that there was some contributory negligence by Mr. Whittington.
Here in Texas its just good manners to say that it is your fault if you get involved an accident like this (as Mr. Whittington has apparently done). That said, the crashing silence from the Vice President is a little disturbing. Not to blow this accident out of proportion (as the partisan press is busily doing), but he needs to stand up and take responsibility like a man.
The current complaint from the press that they were left out of the loop tells us a lot more about their self-regard, and about how well they have trained the Bush White House to treat them as enemies and tell them nothing, than it does about anything else. Still, the VP needs to hold a press conference, say his mea culpas, mix in some good words for Mr. Whittington, utter a few nostrums about gun safety, and generally be a gentleman (in the older sense of the word) about this.
UPDATE: Cheney finally takes the podium. Looks like the mea culpa I would expect of him.
U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney wounded a fellow shooter of quail in an accident. Well, I guess it shows what a gulf now exists between the U.S. government and our own. I cannot imagine a single senior Labour politician who would spend time out shooting. (Imagine John Prescott doing it. Actually, don’t). The story reminds me of another deputy leader, the late William Whitelaw (a decorated soldier in the Normandy WW2 campaign), who managed to fire some buckshot at someone during a grouse shooting meeting in the Scottish highlands.
Many politicians in the past have enjoyed the pastime of shooting game. Many MPs were landed gentry, who could not wait to get out of smelly London in the summer months and, once the game season started in August, would blast away at hapless birds, bagging them in prodigious quantities. And several paid the price. Robert Peel, Prime Minister in the 1840s, suffered a nasty buzzing in one of his ears after a gun went off too close. Salisbury and Churchill shot game, as did Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home. Across the big pond there was no greater hunter of game, of course, than Teddy Roosevelt.
All that tradition is fading out. I cannot imagine Tory leader David Cameron shooting game (imagine how that would jar with his trendy image) although his ancestors probably nailed whole flocks of pheasants in their time.
Anyway, the lesson of all this is that if you find yourself in the company of a politician holding a shotgun, stand well behind.
Just as newspapers around Europe and beyond are coming to the support of Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, US State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper has said that freedom of expression in a European country is “not acceptable”.
Firstly, who the hell asked the US State Department to opine on something in a newspaper in Denmark? Secondly, if they are going to take a side here, are religious extremists so deeply entrenched in the US political establishment that they cannot understand the importance maintaining secular rights to free expression in the face of attempts at religious censorship and overt intimidation?
Land of the free, home of the brave, eh? Not in Washington DC it seems. Rather than face down the intolerant face of radical Islam, the US State Department is pandering to it. This is a national disgrace and I hope some US newspapers will show how they feel by supporting their colleagues in Denmark and publishing the damn cartoons themselves and telling Kurtis Cooper where he can stick his political master’s craven opinions.
The other night I enjoyed a pleasant meal with a business contact, who works in the property industry and for a large U.S. company. He was talking to a group of people and struck me as a thoroughly charming fellow: articulate, funny, interested in other people, highly intelligent. And then he said something that slightly vexed me in that he started to go on and on about how we must be so appalled by this nutcase rightwinger in the White House, how most Americans were insular and dumb, yadda-yadda. It was so obviously an attempt to deflect what anti-American prejudices potentially might have existed by getting in the blow first. He was, then, slightly surprised me when I said over a drink later that I did not like the way that Americans felt the need to abase themselves this way, or denigrate their home country, or its people. In fact, I told him that, much that I disagreed with many of Bush’s policies, such as his fiscal profiligacy and Big Government leanings, I liked the United States a great deal, not least much of its culture, its vitality and the niceness of most Americans.
So a gentle tip for American travellers from this Brit: don’t slag off your own country when abroad. The locals will see through it and despise you for it. Be proud of what you are as an individual living in Jefferson’s Republic, which for all its faults is the greatest free nation on the planet, and likely to be so for a while to come.
Efforts continue to use powers of eminent domain (UK = compulsory purchase) to take US Supreme Court Judge David Souter’s home away from him in order to use the land for a hotel and tourist attraction called the Lost Liberty Hotel.
However New Hampshire State Representative Neal Kurk, in spite of being behind worthy measures to prohibit in his state the sort of abuses of eminent domain that the US Supreme Court okayed with their monstrous Kelo judgement, is nevertheless opposed to the plan to use eminent domain against Souter.
“Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system,” Kurk said. “You don’t go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments.”
Why not? If Souter was part of the system underwriting a grotesque abridgement of liberty, who not grotesquely abridge his liberty? I suppose being a politician himself, the notion of using laws against the people responsible for them might be a little too close to home for Kurk even if he is sponsoring a measure to prevent such abuses in New Hampshire. Yet why should people whose liberty is abridged and rights to property threatened not want to punish the guilty parties with the tools they themselves have no problem seeing used against others? I am a great believer in revenge.
Do unto others as they do unto you.
For those of you that have enjoyed your Festive break and have not been keeping up with political happenings ‘over the pond’, there has been an eye-opening little scandal going on in Washington.
A member of the Most Honourable Order of Washington Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, has pleaded guilty to the heinous crimes of fraud, bribery and tax evasion. In a plea bargain deal, Abramoff will face nine to eleven years of penal servitude in exchange testifying against the sundry Congresscritters that may face prosecution.
Clearly, Mr. Abramoff is a menace to society:
Among the allegations in the court documents is that Abramoff arranged for payments totaling $50,000 for the wife of an unnamed congressional staffer in return for the staffer’s help in killing an Internet gambling measure. The Washington Post has previously reported that Tony Rudy, a former top aide to DeLay, worked with Abramoff to kill such a bill in 2000 before going to work for Abramoff.
An internet gambling measure? Not surprisingly, it turns out that Mr. Abramoff was getting a large part of his money from Native American tribes who have a large stake in gambling operations in the United States outside of Las Vegus.
Abramoff’s appearance in U.S. District Court came nearly two years after his lobbying practices gained public notice because of the enormous payments — eventually tallied at $82 million — that he and a public relations partner received from casino-rich Indian tribes. Yesterday, he admitted defrauding four of those tribal clients out of millions of dollars.
As you can imagine, that part of the Washington elite that has emerged from their Holiday cheer is agog with the news. Wonkette, for example, took time out from promoting her book to pass comment on the latest news, which is that Republican politicians are falling over themselves to ‘return’ money that Abramoff donated to them. Starting at the top, President Bush is returning the $6,000 that he donated to his re-election campaign. Abramoff was a generous soul; 24 figures from both political parties in Washington have announced that they are following the President’s lead. Oddly enough, a leading Democrat Senator, Harry Reid, is declining to return his $47,000 booty, saying that it is basically a Republican problem.
I was bemused that there was no follow-up from the media on that point. It would seem that it is okay for Democrats to take money from a crook, but not Republicans. It must be that ‘liberal media’ that they talk about over there. → Continue reading: Mr. Abramoff went to Washington
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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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