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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How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:
A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America’s closest allies.
The move will affect visitors from 27 countries – including the UK, Japan and Australia – whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.
Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.
I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990’s that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.
But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state’s often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators.
You think not? Well that is what Georgia’s political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than ‘citizens’) even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA’s interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia).
Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends.
(via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis)
Barbara Amiel is someone I frequently find disagreements with but when she is right, boy, is she right. Whilst I am usually rather prone to point the finger of blame at the state as the font of all evils when things go wrong, Amiel makes the reasonable point that even with the best intelligence in the world, the prevailing zeitgeist in the United State (and elsewhere) on and before September 10th 2001 meant that there was very little support for anything which could really have stopped Al Qaeda’s infamous arrival onto the world’s front pages.
The question is not whether Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush actually knew about the murderous intentions of radical Islam or whether they took what they knew seriously, but what the public mood would have let them do about it before 9/11.
Not much, I wager. What administration could, before 9/11, have sent in American boys to fight a regime in Afghanistan because it was implementing the ideas of an old man with a long white beard, sitting crossed-legged in the mountains talking about Satan America? Had I been in Congress before 9/11, knowing everything that was knowable about the Islamists, I still doubt if I would have voted to send troops to the Hindu Kush to topple the Taliban. Eardrums would have exploded all over Capital Hill from outcries of racism and imperialism if there had been serious efforts, pre-9/11, to round up suspected Muslim militants in the United States and tighten security on Muslims entering the country. As it is, the post-9/11 sensitivity to racial profiling makes travel hazardous for white grannies who dislike body-searches.
All too true. Read the whole article.
For a good look at what pissed-off Middle America is thinking, check out the invaluable James Lilek’s bleat (actually, more of a screed) today.
Immediately below the picture of the protestor with the sign saying “I (heart) New York even more without the World Trade Center,”* Lileks cuts to the heart of the matter:
That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a traitor. He may be an idiot, a maroon, a 33rd degree moonbat, but he’s still a traitor. That is a man who celebrates the death of Americans (and others) and supports the people who killed them. Oh, sure, he’s nuts. But he fits right in. So what were all these people against, exactly?
A free press in Iraq. Freedom to own a satellite dish. Freedom to vote. A new Constitution that might actually be worth the paper on which it’s printed. Oil revenues going to the people instead of Saddam, or French oligopolies. Freedom to leave the country. Freedom to demonstrate against the people who made it possible for you to demonstrate.
Freedom. More freedom now than before, and yes it comes with peril; it always does, at first. But freedom is either in retreat, or on the advance. These people marched to protest the premature bestowal of freedom by exterior forces. Better the Iraqi people live under the boot for 20 years, and rise up and get slaughtered and rise up again and slaughter those who killed their kin, then have Bush push the FF button and get it over with now. Better they suffer for the right reasons than live better for the wrong ones.
As the man says, read the whole thing.
The major obstacle faced by many opponents of the war in Iraq is that already, a year later, Iraq is demonstrably better off in almost every way than it was under Hussein. Even the worst feature of the current scene, the terror attacks, pose less of a threat to most Iraqis than Saddam’s regime did. It is very difficult to argue against a war that has been so immediately and obviously beneficial; that is why opponents so often have to resort to abstractions and platitudes about the UN and lack of international cooperation. Underneath it all, it is more important to the committed Left and its new Islamist allies that the US lose than that a nation of millions be given a decent shot at freedom and prosperity.
*= I believe this sign to be genuine, and not a photoshop job. If you believe otherwise, well, comments are open.
One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Tired of the orgy of Kerry worship from the British media, not just the BBC, but also from ITV and C4, I turned to the internet for some other news from the United States.
As expected, propositions 57 and 58 passed in California. Prop 57 being approval to borrow billions of Dollars (sorry ‘issue bonds’) in order to ‘pay for’ already agreed government spending, and Prop 58 being a promise (sort of) not to borrow money in future.
However, I came upon another proposition – Prop 55. This prop was a request to borrow (again sorry ‘issue bonds’) – $12.3 billion for government education spending on top of what had already been agreed. This bond debt to be on top of the $73 billion bond debt that the State already has.
The prop passed – I admit that it passed only narrowly (50.6% to 49.4%), but it passed.
So on the same day that Californians agreed (in Prop 57) to borrow another $15 billion (or so) for existing spending and (in Prop 58) overwhelmingly voted not to pile up more spending… they in fact did just that.
“We will not add deficit spending on to the deficit spending we already have”
…except that more deficit spending is indeed added and on the very same day.
That sums up politics – not just in California, but everywhere.
Nick Forte has some good news in the struggle for ideas in the USA
The advocates for smaller government appear to be winning the war of ideas on this side of the pond if the following Rasmussen poll is accurate. For a long time I believed this to be the case, but I was surprised by the margin shown in the poll.
February 16, 2004–Sixty-four percent (64%) of American voters say that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that just 22% would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes.
What is even more amazing is that even a majority of Democrats hold this view. Only the extreme left prefer more government over less government, and even then by not as large of a margin as one might have guessed.
Support for smaller government cuts across just about all demographic lines . It is the preference for 67% of men and 62% of…
[…]
… group, 49% say they want a more active government with more services and higher taxes. Just 40% prefer smaller government
It will be interesting to see how this will affect US politics. So far, President Bush has not been able to capitalize on what should be a Republican issue because he has been seen (accurately) as big spender despite his tax cuts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, an earlier Rasmussen poll shows that more Americans voters view the front running liberal New England Democratic presidential candidate as better able to control spending than the purportedly conservative Texan Republican candidate (42% to 33%).
There is indeed growing discontent among conservatives over Bush’s spending record. Last week, House Republicans held a ‘mandatory’ conference to come up with ideas to curtail runaway government spending. Among the more radical initiatives under discussion are measures to curb the power of House authorizers and appropriators who have routinely ignored budget limits, giving the budget resolution the force of law, and requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House and the Senate to pass spending provisions which exceed the budget.
Although some Republican members of Congress are true believers in the need to reduce the size of government, many more are probably reacting to concerns that Americans are turning to the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, undercutting a traditional GOP advantage. Could it be that political pressures for lower spending has finally overtaken the normal election year drive by politicians to buy more votes through higher government spending? Recent actions by Congress suggest not, but I remain cautiously optimistic.
Nick Forte
Falls Church, Virginia
Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait
Midge Decter
Regan Books, 2003
This sympathetic study can almost be regarded as a pre-emptive strike from the right from someone whose neo-con credentials are impeccable. Her personal motives or incentives to write the book are not clearly and explicitly given, but the Prelude, which comes between the Acknowledgements and the Introduction, gives perhaps a hint that Rumsfeld’s appeal to women, even at age 70, might have something to do with it. Perhaps again she views him at the right distance; she has known him for several years, certainly not intimately and through official contact. The inside of the dustjacket has a sub-title, not found elsewhere: The Making of an American Icon. The man himself is not given to self-revelation and the impression is that he knows when best to keep his mouth shut – and those of any others that might be tempted to speak for him.
Born in 1932 and therefore “too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam” (p. 178), the chief influences on his early life, though indirect, were the Depression and World War II; his father, who worked as an estate agent, first for a firm, then for himself, went into the US Navy at a mature age and his mother followed him with her family to each port nearest his assignment. Donald was successful at school; though too lightly built for American football, he became a champion wrestler, continuing to be one when he followed his father into the Navy.
He went to Princeton ( “the most military of the Ivy League colleges” – p. 31) on a scholarship, studying “government and politics” and passed into the US naval air arm, also on a scholarship and hence as an officer, marrying his schoolmate Joyce and introducing her into the same peripatetic way of life his parents had had. During his years of service, 1955-7, he became a pilot trainer and then went to Washington to enter politics as a Republican, working first as a staff assistant for a member of the House of Representatives.
He was elected to Congress himself in 1962. He served for six years (3 terms) and was then invited by Nixon in 1968 to join the Executive in the White House. He was put in charge of the Office for Economic Opportunity, about as far left an organisation as a Republican could stomach and the setting up of which he’d opposed – but Nixon had, after all, been elected after the student riots and general mayhem that concluded Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Even worse was to be put in charge of a Cost of Living Council, a thinly disguised Prices and Incomes Enforcement Body, a concept to which he was totally opposed. Neither of these bodies, both totally of the contemporary Zeitgeist, would work – or survive.
Soon after Nixon was re-elected in 1972, he appointed Rumsfeld US Ambassador to NATO, who thus avoided contamination with the messiness associated with Nixon’s having to resign in 1974 because of Watergate. He was recalled to the White House by Ford, an old friend, first to sort out the new presidential team, then to become Ford’s Chief of Staff and finally his Secretary for Defence. He was thus involved with the policy of detente with the USSR and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), but though loyal to Ford’s initiatives, clashed with Kissinger about how far to follow them up, making Kissinger characterise him as “ruthless”, i.e., someone who stood up to him and carried his point. → Continue reading: Rumsfeld – American Icon
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet.
Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
The original design for the Coronado Bridge was a much shorter, and almost straight span to the Island (actually, peninsula). Then in order to qualify for federal funding, (whereby our government pays most of the tab), the City of San Diego curved and lengthened the bridge to meet the minimum length standard that would qualify the Coronado Bridge for Federal funding.
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge!
If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map!
It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point.
Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more.
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add).
The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
President Bush went on the defensive Thursday on the issue of outsourcing after a firestorm erupted over an aide’s contention that free flow of jobs, including the migration of services to India, benefited the US economy in the long run.
Although the aide, White House economic adviser Greg Mankiw, was merely echoing what was stated in Bush’s economic report to Congress, Washington’s political class came down on him like a ton of bricks.
Lawmakers from both parties, including Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, demanded he be fired. The criticism forced Mankiw, a Harvard economist, to clarify that he did not mean to support or praise loss shifting of US jobs overseas.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should!
However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed.
It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?”
If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you.
While searching for an article I am absolutely certain I wrote but cannot find, I came across this article. I wrote it not long after 9/11 and I would not change a word of it.
Let me first of all state my basic position. I love America. There, I have said it. But I think there is a problem. I think the citizens of the United States are deluding themselves that they live in the ‘Land of the Free’.
As I write this, in the downtown financial district of Boston Massachusetts, I am a hundred and fifty yards from the site of the historic Boston Tea Party, right here on the harbour lip of Fort Point Channel. In my opinion this site rates as one of the most significant places on Earth, third in my list of inspirational locations which I have personally visited, right behind Avebury and Stonehenge, and even creeping ahead of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Yes, I am one of those obsessive libertarians. I really am that sad.
Because in the future, when all of the current omnipotent state machines of the world have shrunk to nothing, this site in Boston harbour will be hailed as the Mohawk-dressed pinprick which first burst their bubble, the very point in space and time where the idea of the necessity of the state first started to die.
Birthplace of a libertarian revolution But I fear we have a long road to travel before we reach that heady day, when the final Byzantine Emperor of the state is killed defending its walls of mediocrity, defending its rights to general taxation, and defending its monopoly provision of both justice and security. Because what I discovered, in Boston, admittedly in a state which ought to be renamed Taxachusetts, was a shock. → Continue reading: Letter from America – Land of the Free?
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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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