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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Some readers may have heard of the Institute for Justice, a U.S. organisation which fights the legal battles of property owners resisting the odious power of what is called eminent domain. Eminent domain powers, which were originally designed to give governments the ability to seize private property to build facilities for so-called “public use” like an airforce runway, prison or road, have also been used by said governments to build things like condos purely in order to boost tax revenues. It goes without saying that such a power is a powerful force of corruption, since a large property developer who wants to build a supermarket or whatever can get his political chums to use ED to kick small businessmen and homeowners out of their property. The politicians get lots of campaign contributions. The whole business stinks, and flagrantly abuses property rights. In any event, if the re-development of an area really made financial sense, that would be reflected in the increased prices of the houses and shops targeted for demolition, in which case the issue can be left to the market.
The Institute for Justice is, quite possibly, the most important libertarian organisation now in existence. I can also recommend the Free Space blog for regular updates on this issue and I also love the book, Defending the Undefendable, by Walter Block, on the same subject.
I often do not see eye to eye with James Taranto but he does point out some good stories in his “Best of the Web” email newsletter. He highlighted this Drudge Report today. Drudge reports Michelle Zipp, editor of Playgirl magazine, was fired for being a Republican. It contains an e-mail from Ms. Zipp:
After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine.
After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.”
I just wanted to let you know of the fear the liberal left has about a woman with power possessing Republican views.
I would go further. The currently constituted Democratic Party is based on victimology. ‘Minorities’ must be victims. Victims must be helped. The only way to help victims is through regulation, law and massive Federal spending. If a member of a Democratically important minority breaks ranks, they are endangering the core beliefs which bind the party together. Thus that individual must be silenced or put in their proper place as a victim.
Minorities contain intelligent, hardworking and resourceful people. You can not keep them ‘down on the farm’. You can not pretend to speak for all of ‘them’ because they are not really a ‘them’. As any libertarian will tell you, there is no such thing as a Class. There are only individuals with temporarily aligned self-interests.
This is a problem for the Democrats. As soon as the underlying self-interests of their pet victim classes were met, those classes began to dissolve. The Democrats do not have an acceptance of this, let alone a plan to understand and deal with new alignments. All they can do is individually lash out against ‘class’ defectors. It solves nothing, it wins them no friends… but perhaps it makes them feel better.
The American diplomat George Kennan passed away on Thursday night, at the ripe old age of 101.
George Kennan was famous for being the principle intellectual architect of the US policy of ‘containment’, as applied to the USSR. As a diplomat who served in the USSR, he composed what is known as the ‘Long Telegram’, which had a considerable impact on the thinking of US policymakers, which became even greater when it was expanded into a longer essay, ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’.
Kennan’s view was that Soviet expansionist tendencies were internally driven, and based on the fundamental illegitimate nature of Soviet power:
At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundations, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
Kennan’s view was that US policy should be to meet the Soviet challenge with firmness, patience and intelligent policymaking. In the ‘Long Telegram’, he compares the relationship between the US and the USSR as that of a doctor and a disturbed patient.
What is curious though is that Kennan thought this would be solely a political and diplomatic effort. He deplored the US military buildup in the Cold War. It strikes me as curious that a diplomat that lived through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany would under-rate the importance of military preparedness in dealing with militant totalitarian dictatorships.
But then Kennan had many curious views.
→ Continue reading: George Kennan 1904-2005
Instapundit has already just linked to it, and to other responses to the same story, and copied and pasted the first two paragraphs. It being a CNN report about how Forbes has included Fidel Castro in its list of the world’s richest people, and about how Fidel Castro is not amused. This story will soon be everywhere, but I do not care. Count me in, if only as one delighted heckler among millions.
Funny as those first two paragraphs are, I think this sentence is my particular favourite:
Castro, 78, and in power since a 1959 revolution, said he was considering suing.
I cannot believe he really said that, but in the event that he did… you go grandad.
This reminds me of Danny de Vito’s line in Mars Attacks, where he says (if memory serves), to the invading Martians, something like: “You want to take over the world. You’re gonna need lawyers, right?”
Not that Fidel is trying to take over the world any more. It is just the idea of a hitherto unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist trying to protect what’s left of his revolutionary reputation by calling in the lawyers.
It is, alas, far too much to hope that he will really do it.
“To permit an entire class of political communications to be completely unregulated… would permit an evasion of campaign finance laws…”
The American regions of the blogosphere has been reverberating after Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly stated that blogs must be regulated in order to comply with US campaign finance laws.
However I do not propose to add my voice to the myriad of other commentators decrying this or explaining why it is such a bad idea, as regular readers of this blog can pretty much join the dots to guess The Samizdata Position on that issue. What I will do though is point out that as well as being a threat to freedom of expression, this has huge positive potential as well.
There are few things more corrosive to the power of the state than for it to decree something and then be seen to be unable to enforce its writ. So let Colleen Kollar-Kotelly do her worst. You want to link to a Democratic or Republican campaign site regardless of what regulations say you can or cannot do? Simple… off-shore hosting. Host your blog outside the USA and post using a pseudonym (like maybe “Tom Paine” or “Ben Franklin”) and then link to whoever the hell you want to. Moreover put a banner on your blog saying “This Blog is in wilful violation of US Campaign Laws and there is not a damn thing you can do about it”.
Hell, my ‘inner capitalist’ is whispering in my ear as I write this… I just might talk to some chums of mine who are hosting experts with a view to setting up Samizdata.net branded non-US based hosting, available for bloggers across the political spectrum who want to stick their thumb in the eye of those people who want to control free political expression. Anything which weakens the authority of the state, shows the limits of political power and makes enterprising folks some money whilst helping people to do all that is too good for me to pass up. Yeah, I really hope this travesty becomes law in the USA… stay tuned <evil laugh>
My former flatmate Drew Johnson has been setting up a new think tank. It has just launched a website. Called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, the organization aims to do for the US state of Tennessee the excellent job that many state-based think tanks have been doing elsewhere in the United States. So get to work with the Jack Daniels and Coke and give Drew some moral support by visiting his site.
Irony, or hypocrisy? You decide.
In one of those events that barely even raises an eyebrow anymore, one of the leaders of the “Million Mom March” in favor of (even more) gun control, was arrested on firearms violations.
A Springfield woman who began lobbying against gun violence after her son was shot to death in 2002 was arrested last week when police allegedly found an illegal gun and drugs in her home.
First, lets be clear – she wasn’t lobbying against gun violence, she was lobbying against gun ownership. The Million Mom March was all about driving guns out of everyone’s hands, regardless of criminality.
So just what was she busted for? Having a gun with a scratched-off serial number, and not having firearms owner ID card (required by Illinois). Two classic gun-grabber laws, here being applied to someone who admits that she had the gun in question.
In other words, she admits violating the laws in question. One wonders if she will plead guilty and volunteer for jail time, as her beliefs would seem to require. Well, one wonders only if one is terminally naive – she is fighting the case, apparently unwilling to live with the consequences of the restrictions she wants to impose on others.
Michael Barone is truly the dean of American political analysis. Throughout last year’s election, his analysis was spot-on, and his recent post mortem continues in the same vein.
I have long thought that the way to win elections in the US was not to chase the apathetic and uninformed “undecided” voters, but rather to “motivate your base”, that is, to give people who care about goverance and who lean your way philosophically a reason to vote for you. I was particularly gratified to have a strategy that is generally dismissed by the American commentariat ratified by Michael Barone:
But polling in late 2003 and for most of 2004 indicated a very close presidential race. Bush strategist Karl Rove keeps a card in his pocket showing that the percentage of voters who were behaviorally “independent” declined from 15 percent in 1988 to 7 percent in 2002. The strategy that Rove designed and that Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman executed was geared not to persuading the undecided and weakly committed voters, but to turning out the maximum number of Republicans. The Kerry campaign and other Democrats likewise saw their main task as turning out the party faithful.
Rove won the turnout war (although not for lack of, erm, “creative” attempts by the Democrats to get the Deceased-American and Fictional-American communities to the polls in critical precincts), and the rest is history.
The Dems achieved impressive turnout gains, Barone notes, using their old, command-and-control, industrial-era model. They were, however, buried by Republicans using a new networked model for campaign organization. As a result, the Republicans under George W. Bush may well have turned the Democrat’s flank , inaugurating an era of Republican dominance.
The 2004 election has also reshaped the American electorate, in part through the invention of new political techniques. It is too early to say that it produced a natural majority for the winning party. But it has laid the groundwork.
In this article, Barone shows how it is done, using historical perspective and current data to put forth a predictive and testable thesis. If you get all wonky over American politics, read the whole thing. Peddling its insights at cocktail parties will make you seem smarter than you are, and isn’t that the ultimate payoff for all the blogs you read?
For a while now, I have reading about how the mighty U.S. economy, heavily in debt, with big budget deficits and a large current account black hole, is headed for the rocks. The dollar is on the skids, inflationary pressures are rising, the Fed has been putting up interest rates, the coming Social Security crunch… you know the drill. And some of these worries are to my mind justified, which explains why, with all the plan’s faults, I broadly applaud the efforts of President Bush to overhaul the state pensions system.
Is the situation really as grim as some of the jeremiads claim, however? This suitably wonkish article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal argues that things are not nearly as worrying as some might make out and that if anyone has cause for worry, it is Europe with its shrinking birth rates.
The article concudes with this paragraph, and it seems to hit the mark, in my view:
Only one development could upset this optimistic prognosis: an end to the technological dynamism, openness to trade, and flexibility that have powered the U.S. economy. The biggest threat to U.S. hegemony, accordingly, stems not from the sentiments of foreign investors, but from protectionism and isolationism at home
Indeed.
He may not be the sort of man who gets the attention of the ordinary citizen, or the sort of man one talks about down the Dog and Duck on a Friday night, but New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, wannabe Democrat politician and formidable lawyer, is making quite a name for himself as a legal terror of big Wall Street businesses, launching a flood of suits against insurers, brokerages, fund management companies and banks.
Some of his suits may have an element of justice behind them and no doubt he has calculated that bashing the Gordon Gekko classes makes for good copy and will no doubt endear him to the sort of folk who regard Michael Moore as a political seer. To the rest of us, however, who make a living in the financial markets, his zeal is troubling. Take the recent so-called “scandal” surrounding the case of mutual fund firms which allowed certain types of quick-fire trades to happen in and out of their funds. The activity, while not illegal, is considered harmful because it can damage the long term investments of ordinary investors. Well maybe, maybe not. I find it worrying, however, that the cumulative impact of Spitzer’s energies will be to push up the costs of doing business in the U.S. capital markets, and drive many smart would-be financiers into other fields.
We tend to forget that despite high-level scandals such as the collapse of energy giant Enron, the world economy has greatly benefitted from the efficiencies and new products driven by the entrepreneurs of the modern age. My worry about the whole raft of laws spawned in recent years, such as Sarbanes-Oxley or even the awful Patriot Act, is that financial innovation will be curbed. And as a result, many businesses will shun the public listed stock market and choose to go private instead if that is the way to avoid the glare of the Eliot Spitzers of this world.
Regulatory growth is not a sexy subject, I admit, but let’s not forget that the destruction of wealth and entrepreneurial morale will end up biting us in the economic behind if we don’t take a full regard to the effects.
I was on the road again today, or perhaps I should say ‘rail’. The US northeast is still very much in the deep freeze as one can see from this photo I took somewhere before Baltimore.
 Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
The AMTRAK Acela train seemed to require more resets than a Microsoft Operating system. We were stopped a half hour on a siding while they attempted to ‘reset the air’; and later for problems in the lead locomotive. My ‘express’ train trip took nearly five hours from Penn Station NYC to Union Station DC and wrecked my plans for meeting up with some aerospace types in town. I will not complain too loudly though. The trains have normal AC power available for your laptops, you have enough legroom and arm room to actually type… and you can use your mobile phone.
As opportunity arises – I am now on another gig and my meter is running – I will catch up on a few photo stories left over from Manhattan.
Today is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 1916 that income tax is a violation of the Constitution.
So the politicians had to change to Constitution.
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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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