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]
|
Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.
Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.
Maybe so. But how could someone so opposed to free market notions here on earth be so keen on them in space? I would like to offer a version of President Obama which maybe makes sense of this puzzle. What follows is sort of a joke. I certainly hope that readers of it will be entertained. But I also think it might be true. → Continue reading: On the unintended consequences of President Obama
Every day – and I can’t remember when or why it started but it did – I get emails featuring James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” writings for the Wall Street Journal. Often I agree, insofar as I know enough to agree. But yesterday’s email was extremely odd. In it, Taranto quotes a certain Simon Moloy, writing at something called MediaMatters, who earlier in the week had accused Taranto of having said something racist, in this. Maloy wrote thus:
The implication of Taranto’s theory is that African-Americans aren’t sophisticated or observant or intelligent enough to know real racism when they see it, and are thus continuously duped en masse into voting for Democrats. It couldn’t be the case that black voters actually care about issues and have real reasons for voting Democratic, they’re just puppets who are motivated by racial sentiments that Democrats prey upon.
Now I don’t know how reasonable this complaint against Taranto is, which Taranto himself quotes in his reply, the one in yesterday’s email. To know about that, I would have to know a lot more about the USA than, having never even been there, I know now. But this I do know. Maloy was not himself saying that black voters are “just puppets”. When Maloy used this phrase, he was saying, rightly or wrongly, that that was what Taranto said. Any observer of this spat, with only Taranto’s reply to this critic to hand, can see that, because Taranto himself included the above quote. Taranto then accuses Maloy of believing this sock puppet thing himself. And Taranto calls him a racist. Says Taranto:
MediaMutters’ suggestion that black voters are “just puppets” is racist and repugnant.
It would be, if the suggestion had actually been suggested. But clearly, it was not.
I can think of nothing polite to say to defend Taranto on this, other than perhaps that the balance of his mind was disturbed by being called a racist himself. He seems to be combining illogicality (a clear misreading of something he actually quotes) and tactical stupidity (supplying all the evidence of his obvious misreading to even the most casual of readers) to a truly amazing degree. What was he thinking?
Don’t misunderstand me. I hate what the current clutch of Democrat politicians appear, from this side of the Atlantic, to be doing to the USA and its economy, and I hate what else they seem to want to do to the USA even more. I too wish that black people in the USA were more reluctant to support such disastrously statist policies, which I think will harm them along with everyone else except the posh people in charge of them. I rejoice when I hear that black people are participating in Tea Parties and arguing that the scope of the US Federal Government should be reduced.
But because of that I want to see arguments against the statist tendency that carry some weight. This latest counter-argument of Taranto’s, if you can call it that, can only expose Taranto to ridicule and contempt. Indeed, I presume that it already has. Were I a Democrat, I would trumpet Taranto’s foolishness as loudly as I could. No wonder Democrats like to call their opponents racists, if this is the kind of thing they can get them to say in reply.
I’m also not impressed that Instapundit (whom I admire greatly) recycles Taranto’s accusation for all the world as if it made perfect sense. I guess that’s the price you pay for Instapundit managing to link to so much, so often. Every so often he gets things wrong too.
I recall a time when President Clinton was really quite unpopular, or so it appeared from where I was sat, then as now, in London. It was during his first term. In particular, I recall a libertarian friend who had recently been in America (although he may not himself have been American – not sure about that), sitting on my sofa in my living room, at one of my last Friday of the month libertarian talk evenings, telling me that President Clinton was absolutely not going to be re-elected. Too many people just did not like him. I pressed for details. Are you sure it’s not just that you don’t want Clinton to be re-elected? No, he isn’t going to be re-elected. And the point is, my libertarian friend was sort of right. Clinton wasn’t going to be re-elected. At the very least he didn’t then look like being re-elected. But then, Timothy McVeigh blew up that big office block in Oklahoma and from then on, Clinton never looked back.
Politics is all about story telling. It is about, as we like to say here, the meta-context. And what this explosion accomplished for Clinton was that it completely changed the story being told at that time about what the state was and is. It turned the state from an economic and regulatory threat to the people, into the leading protector of the people. And it turned right wing grumblers about all those damned taxes and regulations into enemies of the state, and hence enemies of the people. Clinton no longer had to struggle to tell the story that he had been trying all along to tell, of the state as the necessary partner of the people, and of the people who were suspicious of the state as people who, at best, simply did not get this. Timothy McVeigh did that for him. And I remember how my heart sank when I heard about the Oklahoma bombing, and who had done it, and why, because I feared exactly the story switch that then happened.
Now the grumblers against taxes and regulations are back being the people. And the Democrats might yet find themselves losing their epic battle, the one which was supposed, in the words of Kyle-Anne Shiver, to have …
… delivered the plum of America to the international socialist collective, or at least pushed us past the point of no return.
Even if regular people forget what turned this kind of story around for Democrats last time around, Democrats surely do remember. And just in case anyone has forgotten what a difference Timothy McVeigh made to the story told by President Clinton in particular and the story of America in general, Clinton is himself now reminding everyone.
But Bill Clinton, not for the first time in his life, is taking a chance. The danger for the Democrats is that they risk looking like they want another Timothy McVeigh. As quite a few of them surely do.
However, if the Democrats do get lucky and another McVeigh really does materialise, there is a big difference between now and the time when the original McVeigh did his thing. Then, there was no internet. The story was whatever the then mainstream media decided it was. But that rule no longer applies.
This headline caught my eye:
Alan Greenspan to Testify on Subprime Lending, Securitization, and GSEs, Wednesday, April 7
Shame he was not grilled a bit more about the Fed’s free-money policy that fuelled much of the credit crisis back in the days leading up to the housing bubble. Goodness knows what his old mentor would have made of this charade.
“Congratulations, Democrats. Beginning now, you own the health-care system in America. Every hiccup. Every complaint. Every long line. All yours.”
– Kathryn Jean-Lopez.
I wish that were true. Here in Britain, where filthy wards in NHS hospitals, for example, have been a regular staple of the UK newspapers, the standard response is usually to demand even more money, more rules, and so forth. If you challenge the model of tax-funded healthcare free at the point of delivery, then you are political dogfood. And Mr Obama and his allies know that. As Mark Steyn has been putting since before Mr Obama’s election, Mr O. is counting on what the UK politician Sir Keith Joseph once dubbed the “ratchet effect”: ratchet socialism a little more, and make it harder and harder for anyone to push back.
Of course, sometimes this argument will be proven wrong. I do get the impression that a lot of Americans, including those middle-of-the-road voters who gave Obama a chance in 2008, are now very alarmed at the huge debt that his administration seems to be encouraging. So it may be that Mr Obama is a one-term POTUS. But his legacy might take a lot longer to reverse.
On a more philosophical line, here is what I wrote a while back about the bogus nature of healthcare “rights”.
It has been urged and echoed, that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare.
[…] For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity,[…]
Answer here.
This is not exactly a John Brown incident but it is certainly a serious shot over the bow of the Federal government:
This week, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed House Joint Resolution 2 (HJ0002), claiming “sovereignty on behalf of the State of Wyoming and for its citizens under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government or reserved to the people by the Constitution of the United States.”
The warning in Resolution HJ0002 is pretty clear:
“That this resolution serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, from enacting mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers. The state of Wyoming will not enforce such mandates.”
Freudenthal himself states:
“For decades we have shared increased frustration dealing with the federal government and its agencies. What started out as a leak in the erosion of state prerogative and independence has today turned into a flood. From wolf and grizzly bear management, to gun control, to endless regulation and unfunded mandates – the federal government has become far too powerful and intrusive.”
If Wyoming were the only State to do this it would be interesting as it is the site of the libertarian Western ‘Free State’ project. As the article further reports, it is far more than that :
Wyoming joins 10 other states that have passed similar resolutions since last year; Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee passed theirs in 2009, and Utah, Alabama, and South Carolina have joined Wyoming in passing resolutions this year.
Let us pray that the second Revolution (or Civil War as the case may be) remains one fought out in legislatures and courts. Let us also pray that our side wins, because if it does not, the US is finished as a free and prosperous country.
Just a quick link on an interesting story about how the growing, affluent middle class in China is taking the view that it likes taxes as about as little as the Tea Party campaigners in the US.
Iowahawk has delved into Shakespeare and uncovered
this little known masterpiece.
Enjoy!
“In the 19th century, the British would have answered Mr Riley-Smith’s question “What has trade to do with human understanding” very readily. It has a great deal to do with it, we would have said. Commerce is the main means of peaceful intercourse with other people. It is the circulatory system of the world. It is part of the constitution of liberty which, as the author rightly says, we exported to America. If we have forgotten this, it is we, not the United States who are – both metaphorically and literally – the poorer.”
Charles Moore, writing about what he regards as an interesting but in some ways wrong-headed book about America by Tristram Riley-Smith.
Eric Raymond has a thoughtful and compassionate article at his blog about two people he knows who are down on their luck in the US economy. They are not uneducated bums, or lacking in motivation. But they are examples, he says, of how the rising costs of hiring and firing people has, when coupled to other factors, meant that many people will not enjoy the benefits of any subsequent economic recovery. Money quote:
“I now think the increasingly jobless recoveries from the last couple of downturns were leading indicators. The end of the post-New-Deal fantasy that we could increase the friction costs of capitalism without limit, regulating and redistributing our way to prosperity, is hurtling towards us like a dark sun. A and B are two of the luckless bastards who are spiraling down its gravity well. Multiply them by ten million to see what it’s like when the contradictions of socialism on the installment plan come home to roost.”
I tend to associate labour market rigidities with Western Europe – where high levels of unemployment have persisted alongside relatively high GDP growth (that’s assuming you believe government GDP figures, Ed). It is tragic that the same process is at work in the US, at least if Mr Raymond’s article is indicative of a broader trend.
I always knew that something like this would happen, sooner or later, justified by sentiments like this, which are not that different my own. Basically the guy drove his airplane into a tax office, causing his own death in a fireball, and much other damage besides.
This event may mean angst for libertarians like me. So, Mr Libertarian, Do you believe that such acts of violence are justified? Question mark, question mark. And we will prevaricate, like moderate Muslims being challenged to explain Muslim-inspired terrorism. I will, anyway, if asked. No, but. Or perhaps in some cases: yes, but. Personally, I don’t see how you can have tax gathering on the scale that prevails nowadays, and for purposes that prevail nowadays, without violent responses of this sort. Frivolous and somewhat incongruous thought, of the sort that pops into the head at such times: will gadgets like this hexakopter make such attacks easier?
I remember how President Clinton’s political fortunes took a turn for the better following that bomb attack by Timothy McVeigh. He went from looking like a probable one-termer to a two-termer, pretty much from that moment on, because it perfectly illustrated what loons his supporters thought his opponents were. Will something similar now happen for Obama? His supporters will surely have no problem explaining what they think about this, which is all part of the case against such attacks. How will the Tea Party movement be affected?
Further thought, the body count, including the man himself, seems to be low. Maybe, logically, that ought to make little difference, but low body counts are much sooner forgotten. Another thought: the pictures of this are dramatic. Not so soon fogotten, perhaps.
More here, and here.
Obsessed as I now am with Climategate, I first learned about this drama here.
|
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.
|
