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Sitting in London and watching the New Hampshire primary is a strange experience. The ‘Republicrats’ have a disgraceful advantage built into the US election process with different laws applying to their candidates than for those of other parties.
For British readers it is as though the Liberal Democrats had to get up to three or four million signatures on a petition to be allowed to appear on the ballot paper, as opposed to the £150 fee and a copy of the party’s constitution to the Electoral Commission and 6,590 voters to sign nomination papers for the whole country.
The good bit about primaries, which have no equivalent in the UK, is that the remote suited class gets a sustained exposure to public opinion, before the voters have to choose which licensed thief to put in charge. In Britain, all the Democrat nominees would be elected to Parliament, however extreme or daft their ideas, because of the way that candidates are appointed. Those that failed to win an election would stand a good chance of being appointed to the House of Lords for life or made the director of some welfare agency. → Continue reading: Primary colours
Thought Mesh has a post that captures the lefty/statist mindset like an entomologist with a nice long needle.
I made the mistake (again!) of listening to the local NPR station. One of their features is a segment where a law professor opines on society and the law. She’s not always a complete loon. Today she was only semi-loony in a paean to an associate of hers who was a crusader for the poor. What he did, according to her, was encourage the “oppressed” to become involved in politics. The view was that this was not only a good thing in itself, but enabled those involved to “take charge of their own lives”. But politics is primarily about taking charge of other people’s lives. It is precisely those in charge of themselves that have no need of politics. The commentator then listed the marvelous things that this involvement in politics had yielded – primarily recreational projects built at taxpayer expense. So it boiled down in the end to forming gangs and using the power of that gang to extract money from other people. I was hoping for “started businesses”, “got jobs”, “became educated” kind of things. But apparently that’s not the way the poor and oppressed should improve their lot, by improving themselves and their families. Instead they should get together to get their slice of pork. Not quite the uplifting saga of the American Dream one might hope for.
Of course, the fact that this particular lefty statist found a taxpayer-subsidized outlet on National Public Radio is just the icing on the cake.
From the Guardian, a perfect illustration of the importance of ‘anti-junk-food’ campaigning as the newfound cause du jour of the British left. It is hard to tell which aspect of his own report the author finds more disturbing: capital punishment or the lack of healthy food options for the condemned:
Raymond Rowsey got his deadly dose on January 9, in North Carolina. The sole white among these executed men, Rowsey was convicted for the killing of a convenience store clerk – or perhaps his accomplice half-brother did it, no one seemed quite sure at the trial. Their takings? Two pornographic magazines and $54. Rowsey had a history of horrific childhood abuse. His last meal was pizza, chicken wings, two packets of peanut M&Ms, and a Pepsi.
Junk food and judicial killing. Feel queasy?
But would not the offer of a balanced, healthy last meal be a bit…well, redundant?
A sign of health from the larger body politic spotted at, of all places, the Detroit Auto Show. Brock Yates of the Wall Street Journal notes that the massively cool show features gargantuan amounts of the horsepower so beloved of the masses, and very little of that underpowered PC crap prescribed by our putative betters.
Utopians might expect that the auto makers will offer countless octane-stingy hybrids and zero-emission fuel-cell vehicles to a public seeking to wean itself from all addiction to the cursed internal combustion engine. Sadly, this is not the case. Tree-huggers and Friends of the Earth would be better advised to picnic on the banks of the Love Canal than to set foot in the vast precincts of Detroit’s Cobo Hall.
On the pole position, as it were, was the rakish Chrysler ME412, a so-called halo car (read image-builder) coupe that, thanks to four turbochargers pumping high-test into its gasping 12 cylinders, produces 850 horsepower. DaimlerChrysler engineers who developed the monster claim it will generate top speeds approaching 250 miles an hour.
Throughout Cobo Hall lurk dozens of such muscle cars, Ferraris, Vipers, Lamborghinis, BMWs, Jaguars, Audis, Acuras, et al., ready and willing to tear up pavements and strike the fear of God into unwitting passengers at the touch of the throttle. Four hundred horsepower is not unusual. Three hundred horsepower can be found under the hoods of literally dozens of sedans and SUVs. Two hundred horsepower is simply not worth mentioning.
Sounds like fun to me. Chicago is having its auto show in a few weeks. Its been a few years since I went, so I do believe I will drive (yes, drive – probably in my full-size pickup, thank you) down for a look. The larger point is slipped in at the end of the piece:
The lure of the open road increases by the day. With it comes the romance–perceived or otherwise–of a freedom ride at the wheel of an automobile. This is a hateful thought for greenies, social engineers, media elites and intellectuals everywhere, but the lunatic love affair with the car remains in a state of steamy passion.
There is no debating that hybrids and fuel cells make sense in terms of the environment and reducing fossil-fuel dependence. But until these new powerplants can equal current conventional gasoline engines in terms of performance, cost and durability, auto makers will respond to the harsh realities of the marketplace. No amount of government mandates, media pressure or high-minded pontifications can replace the simple laws of supply and demand.
The internal combustion automobile is one of the biggest engines of personal liberty ever created, right up there with the firearm. With it, the individual is free to leave the jurisdiction, free to travel on his own schedule, and free to haul an enormous amount of stuff around with him if he desires. “Mass” transit trains its users to be livestock, and so it is no wonder that our putative betters are constantly trying force us into its cattle cars. The old saw about totalitarian governments making the trains run on time cuts deeper than many think. By contrast, the automobile makes you captain of your own ship.
Enough with the mixed metaphors. The American insistence on bigger and more powerful automobiles, and continued avoidance of mass transit except as an utter last resort, should give lovers of liberty cause for cheer.
The trial of American businesswoman Martha Stewart is shortly about to get underway. I am, on the basis of what I have read about the charges brought against her, unconvinced she was guilty of insider trading, and in fact deeply disturbed that prosecutors have chosen to go ahead with this case on the basis of what looks like thin evidence, as described in detail in this article in Reason magazine.
I have a problem with insider trading as it is defined by lawmakers in the United States, Europe, and in certain other parts of the world. In all too many cases, insider trading is so loosely defined that any entrepreneur with a quick dialing finger and fast ability to spot information – surely a praiseworthy thing – could, according to some definitions, be found guilty of insider trading. Insider trading has become rather similar to anti-trust in this regard, in that capitalist-bashing lawmakers can use it to cut down the successful.
I do not see any relief coming soon from our legislators. Insider trading is often a way for politically ambitious legislators and public prosecutors to make a name for themselves. And even in those cases where a chief executive or other senior business person has acted wrongly, one usually finds that the act in question amounted to fraud, theft or some other crime already covered in company and in our existing Common law. For example, if say, CEO Fred Smith uses information obtained in secret and in a way that violates his own company’s rules, he should be sacked for breaking company rules and the terms of his contract. No broader insider trading law is necessary.
Also, there is no reason why, for example, a market like the Nasdaq exchange could not stipulate that all listed firms adhere to certain standards of corporate behaviour. Exchanges which let companies do what they want may have to pay a “reputational price” in that some investors will choose to migrate to more upright exchanges. This happens to a certain extent already, because stock exchanges in countries with loose regulations and opaque reporting standards – as has been the case in parts of Latin America, for example – lose out to exchanges like the Dow Jones our own FTSE. In fact, globalisation is forcing a “race to the top” in terms of corporate behaviour as stock market leaders around the world seek to attract capital. The market wins again. (By the way, the collapse of Italian food group Parmalat has helped underscore the reputational damage to a whole country – in this case Italy – when a firm is thought to have behaved wrongly).
On a more economically theoretical basis, insider trading, even if one could definite it clearly, usually poses no actual “harm” either to the broader investor if one accepts that capital markets are typically highly efficient in these days, when price anomalies are usually exposed in seconds in this electronic age.
Time to put insider trading laws under the spotlight, and hopefully, in the dustbin.
Is it still the law in America that a person has to be born in the USA in order to be elected as President?
If so, then doesn’t that rather scupper the prospects of this campaign to get Tony Blair elected as US President in 2004?
Between the babbling of George W. Bush on the right, the blathering of the anti-war left, and the cluck-clucking of media hens everywhere, stands Tony Blair, articulate and principled.
Many Americans understand and support Iraqi Freedom because of the leadership provided by Mr. Blair, and many of us would feel much safer if Mr. Blair occupied the White House.
I have chosen to ignore the instincts that are screaming the word ‘spoof’ into my ear and play along with this for a moment because I can wholly understand where these people are coming from. Would not Our Glorious Leader, a slick, media-savvy (but ‘principled’) social democrat internationalist with hawkish defence policy credentials, make for the ideal Democrat candidate? Would those qualities not press the all the right buttons in just about every constituency to which the Democrats can possibly hope to appeal? Could he even win?
We will never know. If it was up to me, they could have him. Today. With considerable pleasure and relief. But it is not up to me. Had Mr and Mrs Blair senior taken it into their heads to up sticks and settle in California then I would not be in the least surprised to see Governor Blair as runaway favourite for the Democrat nomination in 2004.
And therein lies the story here. You can pretty much discount all the guff about ‘Iraqi Freedom’. Having decided that none of their home-grown candidates stands a cat in hell’s chance of dislodging George Bush, this particular faction is seeking comfort and refuge in an acted-out fantasy of what-might-have-been.
Nobody who has read The Road To Serfdom will have been in the least surprised at the increased use these days of the word “Czar” in political discourse. It signals the quite deliberate, conscious and explicit demand for governmental tyranny, not for its own sake, but to cut through all the crap deposited everywhere by previous government officials. Czarism signals the demand that government cease playing even by its own rules, let alone anyone else’s.
To dig a bit deeper into the subject I tried typing “czar” into Google.
I actually didn’t get as many different Czarships as I was hoping for. Not really hoping, you understand, but hoping for the purposes of this posting. I had in mind a posting along the lines of this one, which lists all the different ways in which “the public needs to be educated“. Googling reaped a rich harvest with that one. But czardoms proved to be in relatively short supply. So, in a way, I have good news to report. Not as many czardoms as you might think.
I found this Privacy Czar and a call, reported on here, for him to be replaced by the current US administration. And inevitably there is this personage, who is genuinely scary of course, to be laughed and sneered at only as part of the deadly serious business of running him out of office and abolishing his job, and strangling the fatuous ambitions it is based on.
There is this cybersecurity czar. Apart from that, very little, apparently. Is there a list of czardoms somewhere that I have missed?
In other words, and I’m really very pleased about this, truly, what I actually discovered was what these people at the Cornell University Computing Science Department, way ahead of me, had long ago spotted, which is that czardom in your average democracy is usually only a word, not to say a poisoned chalice. A czar is a commissioner, an under-secretary with special responsibility for, a “co-ordinator”, a gopher, with a grander and scarier sounding title than those, but with none of the means on his desk actually to solve the problem he has been put in charge of, which in any case has only reached the czar stage because it is insoluble.
The Cornell computerfolk would seem to have been watching all this, because they’ve taken to calling their own functionaries “czars” also.
In their case the insoluble problem is somewhat different to those confronted with czardom by your average government. Their problem is to get people to do boring things without being paid anything. And it seems that the thrill of being a czar doesn’t work any better there than elsewhere, as they foresaw.
Replacements have been requested for the following czarships. If you are interested in taking up one of these positions, or would like to have a position listed as available, please contact either the current czar listed for that position or the Czar Czar. Please remember that it is the current czar’s responsibility to find a replacement when they wish to give up a czarship, though the Czar Czar can offer suggestions of people who might be available to fill the position.
Czardom as slavery! You have to find some other poor sap to do it before you are allowed to stop. It would seem that the current Colloquium Czar is anxious to replace himself. He’s got fed up with doing this.
The Colloquium Czar unlocks the lecture hall for the weekly department colloquium and makes sure that any overhead projectors or other equipment that is needed is available. They also close up the room after the colloquium is over.
Well, at least the job is doable, for as long as you can stand doing it.
But of course, having to replace yourself is only a rule, which can be Cut Through like any other piece of Red Tape. The people in charge of these arrangements can’t actually do anything if the slave simply buggers off the plantation while neglecting to entice any other slave to perform his ex-duties. And if there are no volunteers in the first place, what do you do then?
The following czarships are no longer active, due to lack of interest or judgment that they are no longer needed. If you would like to see one of these czarships reactivated, contact the Czar Czar.
That has to be the job description of the century so far:
The overseer of the czarships, the Czar Czar maintains the current list of czarships and their corresponding czars. In addition, they keep track of any information about performing particular czar duties. If a czar wishes to retire from their position, the Czar Czar can help find possible replacements.
The name of the current Czar Czar is Stephen Chong. I know, he/she should be called “Gabor” – glad we’ve got that out of the way. But how long before a “Czar Czar” pops up for real, in a real public sector, somewhere?
Seriously, I congratulate these Cornellians (?) for having (a) spotted something seriously funny and funnily serious going on out there in the real world, (b) deciding to take some appropriate piss out of it, and (c) doing so by having some fun with their own arrangements, thereby proving that they are not taking themselves and their own activities over-seriously either.
A true understanding of the world? A sense of their own relative unimportance in that larger scheme of things? A sense of humour? Can they really be students at all?
The fine science fiction writer Orson Scott Card delivers a brutal, and well-deserved, rebuff to the Democratic Party.
[The Democratic candidates] platforms range from Howard Dean’s “Bush is the devil” to everybody else’s “I’ll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil.” Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.
There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.
But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might–because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure–even though by every rational measure it is not.
God knows I am no fan of the Bush administration’s domestic policies, but for the most part the Dems promise more of what I don’t like about Bush. Fine, I can deal with that, I vote for a couple of Democrats consistently because they are sterling human beings, every political system needs to have legitimately competitive parties to keep the bastards in power honest, etc.
However, the truly disturbing development from the Dem side of the aisle is that they have, in important ways, ceased to be a loyal opposition. → Continue reading: If the shoe fits . . .
Wonderful editorial in the Wall Street Journal today that spins out one of my favorite conceits – that there is no difference between the Mafia (the mob, la cosa nostra, call it what you will) and party politics. The details are very much American politics “inside-baseball”, but I have no doubt that a similar column could be written in England or elsewhere. A taste:
Al Gore’s grandly public endorsement of Howard Dean last week confirms my view that the easiest way to understand the Democratic Party today is by watching “The Godfather.”
I think of Bill Clinton as the Don Corleone of the Democratic Party. In the organization, there is no one above him. Terry McAuliffe is his Tom Hagen, who talks to the outside world. I leave it to others to fill out the rest of the cast.
It has been talked about among the cognoscenti for some weeks now that the new Dean organization, if he secured the nomination, would challenge the Clintons’ control of the party apparatus, meaning mainly the cash flow from contributors and the unions. But I thought it more likely that if Mr. Dean got the nomination, he would be visited over a table in a nice restaurant, the Palm in Washington, by Mr. McAuliffe and Harold Ickes, who would explain that he could win the presidency with them, but not without them.
With this understanding, an alliance of partners would result. The old organization and its traditional sources of income–the patronage mills, the government contracts, the public-bond issues, the legal jobs–would survive, and Mr. Dean’s people would be given significant control, maybe half. Now it’s not so clear that Howard Dean needs to cut a deal with the Clinton factions, because maybe the factions aren’t so close to the Clintons anymore.
I have long suspected that by far the most important aspect of the current Democratic primary is the internal struggle for control of the party that it is part of. Howard Dean has never liked the Clintons, who now control the party, and owes them nothing – he has his own internet-based grassroots and fundraising machinery. If he wins the nomination, he will become the new head of the Democratic Party, displacing the Clintons.
The Clintons have to oppose Dean because they don’t have any hooks in him – if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand power politics at all. The Clintons have always been the primary motivator behind the Stop Dean movement. They must maintain their control of the Democratic Party, or Hillary’s Presidential ambitions will come to naught. Wesley Clark, the quintessential Stop Dean candidate, is wholly a creation of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t concerned that Dean will win the Presidency and prevent Hillary from running in 2008 (as the incumbent, Dean would be almost impossible for Hillary to challenge). They are concerned that Dean will win the nomination and control of the party, so that they will lose their only remaining fingerhold on influence, and the wealth and power it brings.
I regard the Clintons as a cancer on my country, and so, even though I think Howard Dean would make a dreadful President, I am all in favor of his winning the nomination.
The estimable Austin Bay has a midstream assessment of the Iraq campaign and occupation. Grades are mixed. Given Mr. Bay’s knowledge of things military and strategic insight (he was a supporter of the Iraqi campaign for hardnosed geopolitical reasons), the mixed grades bear some pondering. Read the whole thing (its not long), but a few excerpts struck my eye:
The number of Free Iraqi police and paramilitary personnel in the field is a rough yardstick, but ultimately Iraqi security is their job. The major U.S. mistake prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was failing to create a functioning Iraqi constabulary. The United States had 3,000 exiles training in Hungary, but that simply didn’t cut it. Interim coalition grade: D.
The March-April military campaign was a huge success. Saddam’s regime collapsed quickly, with few civilian casualties. The strategic demonstration of American power was dramatic, and it put teeth in the U.N.’s 1991 resolutions. Some day, U.N. sanctions may mean something again. Final Grade: A (No attack from Turkey, so no A+. A northern attack would have swept Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, conceivably diminishing the current opposition in these Baathist districts.)
International contributions to Iraqi reconstruction, both in number of contributors and total capital is a strategic political measure. Interim Grade: C-
One measure that he does not address is control of Iraq’s borders with neighboring sponsors of terror. Until this occurs, Iraq is not secure. I’m not sure how we are doing on this front, but I read Austin Bay to find out stuff like this!
Interesting, and to my mind somewhat pessimistic, overview of the current situation.
The New York Times startles today with an editorial that is all in favor of personal responsibility rather than legal diktat. The topic: speed limits.
With the conviction Monday of Representative Bill Janklow of South Dakota for vehicular manslaughter, the West’s fondness for fast driving is again in the news, this time as part of a tragedy. Mr. Janklow sped through a stop sign near his hometown, Flandreau, S.D., last August and killed a motorcyclist. He has resigned from the House and faces up to 11 years in prison.
Mr. Janklow’s very conviction is proof that Westerners’ love of speed has its limits. But the limits are those dictated by duty and personal responsibility, not by law.
Western attitudes about speed limits have always been misconstrued: we do not encourage deviant behavior so much as personal responsibility. It’s an antiquated stance, this resistance to limiting individual freedom, and it is often used as evidence of our irresponsibility.
We can hold individuals accountable for bad choices without limiting everyone’s freedom.
Needless to say, the author is not a regular staff writer for the NYT, but nonetheless, the publication of these thoughts without a single sneer of condescension by the panjandrums of the Upper West Side is worth recognizing. It is almost impossible to find criticism of the nanny state in the Times, but here it is.
Hat tip to Samizdata reader Mr. Haas for the pointer.
Today, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that will live in infamy. It upheld the core provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I confess I have not yet digested the full 300 page turd dropped on the Constitution by our masters at the Supreme Court, but I would observe that any decision of this length is bound to be flawed. It does not take many words to apply the simple phrase “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” to overturn legislation; it does, however, take many, many words to obfuscate the meaning of that phrase sufficiently to uphold legislation that, in part, prohibits the airing of campaign commercials in the weeks before an election.
I will address one of the fundamental flaws underlying the entire project of regulating campaign finance – the claim that money does not equal speech.
First, though, allow me to state that it is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech to outlaw bribery and other permutations of the quid pro quo that may crop up in connection with campaign finance activities. Outlawing bribery in such circumstances is no more a restriction on freedom of speech than outlawing the fencing of stolen property is a restriction on freedom of contract.
It is a fundamental premise of campaign finance regulation that such laws do not restrict speech, but rather restrict only the raising and spending of money.
This distinction between speaking and expending resources on speaking is utterly fallacious, unless you believe that guarantees of free speech extend only to the fine art of conversation. Any attempt to distribute your thoughts to persons who are not in the room with you when you utter them requires the use of resources, and thus the expenditure of money. Allowing the state to prohibit the use of resources to broadcast or distribute speech means that freedom of speech is no more than freedom to converse.
Speech, for all practical purposes, is the distribution to an audience of your thoughts. In the political realm (and most others as well) this distribution cannot be made to any meaningful audience without applying resources, that is, spending money. You cannot print a newspaper, distribute a flyer, operate a website, or stand on a streetcorner ranting through a bullhorn, without using money to distribute your speech. Even bullhorns cost money, after all. The use of resources, the expenditure of money, to distribute your speech, is an absolutely indivisible part of freedom of speech.
Yet campaign finance regulation is nothing more than state limitations on the use of resources to distribute political speech, which is to say, state limitations on political speech. No one would say that a prohibition on expenditures by a publisher to print and mail a magazine, or on a publisher charging for subscriptions or advertising, are consistent with freedom of speech, yet these limitations are closely analogous to the campaign finance restrictions now blessed by the Supreme Court.
UPDATE: I was grousing about this to one of my partners, and he pointed out that apparently the Supreme Court was just being somewhat over-literal. The Constitution protects “free speech,” and they thought that meant it protected FREE speech. If you see what I mean. Sadly, that seems to be about the level of comprehension on display in the opinion.
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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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