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.
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Ever since Ezra Levant came to the attention of Samizdata readers, thanks to a posting by Perry just over a year ago, I have had his blog on my personal blogroll and have occasionally visited there. But I do not read all of it. Sometimes the sheer detail of Canadian politics becomes too much to endure. But this recent posting I did read, right through, with great pleasure. Some political hack called Warren Kinsella, who sounds like a cross between Alastair Campbell and Derek Draper, has sued Levant for defamation, demanding five million dollars. The idea was presumably to make people scared of Kinsella, and maybe it has. But not Levant.
Filing a $5-million lawsuit to try to silence questions about his Adscam involvement probably isn’t Kinsella’s smartest move. I’m not sure why someone who wants to stop people talking about Adscam would create a conversation-starter like a massive lawsuit. And then there’s the prickly matter of Kinsella subjecting himself (and his private documents) to unlimited cross-examination by me – I mean days or weeks, not the brief appearance he made before Justice John Gomery’s Inquiry.
What is Adscam, I wonder? Something that makes Kinsella look bad, presumably. I ask this to show how right Levant is about how this bizarre and way-over-the-top lawsuit causes faraway people like me with no direct interest in any of this to get drawn into the story. Levant is asking for donations. Defending against lawsuits like this, thanks to the internet, can now be paid for by sympathisers.
The bigger picture here, or part of it, is that the political left is losing its grip on the means of political communication, and it does not like it. Time was when people like Kinsella could get up to all kinds of mischief and nobody would say a word. If anyone did complain, the story would be told from Kinsella’s point of view and then forgotten. Thanks to people like Ezra Levant, those days are passing. But Kinsella seems to be having a problem adjusting to this new media reality. It looks to me like Kinsella is really suing Levant for the more elemental crime, if that’s the right phrase, of not grovelling. Levant doesn’t know his place. But Levant does know his place. It is Kinsella who no longer seems to understand his.
The bigger party political picture is that Kinsella risks damaging his political master. This is a certain Michael Ignatieff, known to Brits only as a talking head on late night culture shows on the telly, but now a Big Cheese politician in Canada.
It is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I came across this powerfully argued article stating what a great man he was. I strongly recommend it, particularly as it wrestles directly with the accusation, made by some writers in the libertarian camp, that Lincoln was some sort of demon. The author, David Mayer, argues that with some exceptions, the accusations made against Lincoln were and are unjustified.
Update: Well that was a bracing set of mostly hostile responses about Lincoln! A question that I would put to those who claim that the secessionists were justified and Lincoln was a monster is why are some libertarians so willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a group of men who kept slaves and defended the practice? Several commenters argue that slavery was never what the civil war was about, but that is a bit like saying that the English Civil War was never about religion. Plainly it was a factor. Not necessarily as big as the Unionist defenders always claimed, but a factor nonetheless.
The buyers will take possession of this seat April 7, 2009 at 8:00pm and retain custody for 10 years.
Rent seekers and power crazed collectivists from the ruling class, your bids are recorded here.
Small government conservatives and people who believe in personal rights and responsibilities, your bids are recorded here.
Aaaannnnd, (suspenseful pause) as of February 2nd, 2009 the totals are:
Rent seeking collectivists and associated members of the ruling class – $1,068,551
Small government conservatives and supporters of individuals rights and responsibilities – $53,674
I often hear people on this blog and elsewhere say “the voters are idiots, we get what we deserve.” Leaving aside the grating sound of “we”, when the small government conservative is outbid by a 20 to 1 margin, there is no way the message of small government and liberty can be heard. Incidentally, over $20,000 of his $54,000 came from his own pocket. And while your at it, compare Abrahamson’s and Koschnick’s statements of financial interest. I thought the small government conservatives were supposed to be the rich ones.
MSNBC reports that:
The Capitol Hill publication Congressional Quarterly yesterday reported that the White House, responding to minority groups’ concerns about Gregg’s commitment to funding the census, has decided to have the director of the Census Bureau report directly to the White House.
Why am I expecting ACORN to get the census contract?
In Article I, Section 2 the US Constitution orders that “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
The Congress, by law directed that:
“The Secretary [of Commerce] shall perform the functions and duties imposed upon him by this title, may issue such rules and regulations as he deems necessary to carry out such functions and duties, and may delegate the performance of such functions and duties and the authority to issue such rules and regulations to such officers and employees of the Department of Commerce as he may designate.”
As I read it, the Director of the Census must, by law, be within the Department of Commerce and under the direction of the (Senate approved) Secretary of Commerce who then reports to the president. Am I missing something?
Correction: From reading through Title 13, Chapter 1 it appears obvious to me that the POTUS has no role in the census whatsoever beyond, with Senate approval, selecting the Secretary of Commerce and, also with Senate approval, selecting the Director of the Census who ” shall perform such duties as may be imposed upon him by law, regulations, or orders of the Secretary.” Hhmmm… No president mentioned.
The Secretary of Commerce is the only authority the law recognizes. Since as commenter Laird points out, the Constitution did not place the census function in Article II – the Executive branch but in Article I – the Legislative branch, it is not at all within the President’s reach unless the legislature places it there.
I think that interpretation is supported by phrasing such as this taken from Subchapter 1 section 9 “No department, bureau, agency, officer, or employee of the Government, except the Secretary in carrying out the purposes of this title, shall …”
The Secretary of Commerce does not even report his findings to the President, but rather is instructed to ‘publish’ them. It looks quite clear to me that any incursion by the White House after those two Senate approved appointments is clearly against the law.
Here is a collection of good articles attacking the massive US stimulus plan. Fair play to Andrew Sullivan for linking to them. There’s hope for him yet.
Nicolas Chatfort calls foul on the absurd sense of moral superiority trumpeted by Paul Krugman when the man’s own pronouncements are riddled with falsehoods
In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote about what he called the bad faith of the opponents of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan. Krugman is apparently labouring under the view that his side has a monopoly of virtue in the current debate and that the Obama plan can not possibly be attacked on the merits. It must be comforting to be allied with people of such beneficence and infallibility.
Perhaps Krugman, however, should examine the good faith of his own claims before casting aspersions against his opponents. At first glance his counter arguments appear cogent, but a closer look reveals that Krugman is a master of illusion, employing many tricks that would do any sideshow magician proud.
First, Krugman assails the criticism that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created as being a bogus talking point. His reasoning is that this figure involves taking the multi-year cost of the program and divides it by the number of jobs created in just one year. Krugman claims that the true cost per job is closer to $100,000 – or even a net cost of only $60,000 if you take into account the higher taxes that would be generated from a stronger economy.
Let us examine this counter argument carefully as Krugman is employing some slight of hand here. He is pulling a switch by re-framing the costs from a total program basis to an annual basis. The critics of the plan never claimed that the $275,000 per job was an annual cost. By the way, the $275,000 per job estimate is generous as it cedes the point that the plan will create the 3 million new jobs claimed for it by President Obama. Not all economists believe that anywhere near this number of new jobs will be created under this plan. → Continue reading: On true ‘Bad Faith Economists’
There is a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times written by Mickey Edwards, a Republican Party apparatchik of many years standing, called Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP. This was the ‘money quote’ for me:
Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.
So George W. Bush and John “I support the Bailout” McCain represented the worship of… small government??? So presumably this ‘small’ government must have consumed a smaller portion of the national wealth when it left office compared to when it took office, right? I mean is that not surely the most direct and uncontroversial measure of the size of a government? Ok, 9/11 happened… so if we were to factor out all military spending, would that give us a smaller state at the end of the Bush presidency than at the start? I will leave you to guess the answer to that very simple question. And are there more regulations governing, well, almost everything, now compared when Bush took power? If there are more, then how is that either small or limited?
In America, government is … us. What is “exceptional” about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.
Of course this ‘us’ of whom he speaks are in reality the political activists who gain the support of a plurality to sanctify the latest looting schedules. His contempt for ‘ Joe the Plumber’ says it all. Joe was indeed one of ‘us’, one of the great unwashed who dared to fart loudly during the chorus of media hosannas surrounding Obama’s stately progress across The Blessed Land. Mickey Edwards on the other hand was a career politician who now lectures on Legislative Politics and International Affairs… in other words, he is about as much one of ‘them’ as you can get.
And there is nothing particularly ‘exceptional’ about his description of American government unless Mickey Edwards thinks most of the rest of the ‘first world’ are organised as feudal states. The ‘limits’ to government expressed in the sainted US Constitution may be still be a viable tool for securing thing like freedom of expression and the right to defend yourself, well at least somewhat, but they do less than nothing to make anyone secure in their property or in any way less vulnerable to the political looter class (whom Mickey Edward could identify by simply looking in a mirror) from using the political system to help themselves to other people’s money.
And that, my chums across the ocean, is exactly why you are just as totally fucked as the rest of us.
Here is something very topical for today, Inaugaration Speech Generator:
A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he’s calling for the internet’s assistance one more time – to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever…
This is the result of my humble efforts to help out:
My fellow Americans, today is a psychadelic day. You have shown the world that “hope” is not just another word for “moon”, and that “change” is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually fly.
Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces confusing and rigorous challenges like never before. Our economy is embarassing. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for spaghetti. Our healthcare system is lethal. If your nostril is sick and you don’t have insurance, you might as well call a dustman. And America’s image overseas is tarnished like a aubergine bullet. But cookin’ together we can right this ship, and set a course for Hebrides.
Finally, I must thank my excruciating family, my beautiful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank bankers for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of shootin’ the American people. Without your rotting efforts, none of this would have been possible.
God Bless… the Internet!
Obama’s supporters should savour today, they really should. Even Obama’s detractors have at least something to be happy about. A black man has become President of the United States, The Leader of the Free-ish World, the Commander-in-Thief. And that at least is a fine thing.
But the mere fact it has happened shows it is much less important than it seems. A huge percentage of America’s blacks voted along racial lines, and thus presumably can have had no complaint if non-black people had likewise voted their race en-mass. Fortunately by and large even in race obsessed America most white people did not see it that way. Things have moved on, something obvious to anyone who has visited or worked in the US over the last few decades. Perhaps, just perhaps, the sheer folly of identity politics, the poison wellspring of all ethnic sectarianism, can be discarded once and for all. Yeah, as if. Well one can hope.
But today Obama does indeed become the very embodiment of a victory over an irrelevant thing which should never have divided people in the first place. And against that noble tableau, the calls for a New Hope and Bipartisan Unity will ring out strong and loud against a backdrop of Old Glory fluttering in the wind as Obama looks out at the horizon in all his Apollonian glory. Powerful stuff given how much Americans respond to appeals to the sentimental.
And the correct response to this is not to put your hand on your heart and get all misty eyed, it is to nod sagely at the agreeable symbolism of a clear triumph over America’s grotesquely racist past… and then, in answer to the calls for unity, raise your middle finger and make a loud raspberry sound. You will be drowned out by the cheering crowds but trust me when I say there will be millions of other people off-camera doing precisely that.
President Obama will only ever have one meaningful victory, and that is being a black man who was elected President. Cool. Seriously, very cool indeed. Celebrate that much in good faith. As for the rest, the things he actually wants to do, well that is the stuff that always should divide us and always will. Republicans and for that matter libertarians who cannot see that are, quite simply, political enemies who are part of the problem, not the solution.
So cheer the glorious apogee of the civil rights movement today because its significance ends the instant he takes the oath. Everything else that follows will be the start of a progressive and cumulative defeat for Obama. The One will get the laws he wants and his supporters will conclude that means he is winning, as if saying something is so makes it so. Let them do their worst because there is nothing anyone can do to stop them at this juncture in any case.
But Obama’s actual enemy is not the Republicans, who are prostrate at the moment and worthless as currently constituted. No, it is reality itself that is Obama’s utterly implacable opponent: that vast Ponzi scheme called ‘regulatory statism’ has reached the end of the cycle, as Ponzi schemes always do in the end. In previous times, economic growth has masked the pyramidal nature of what both parties did as they pushed the hard choices off into the future with the knowing connivance of millions of voters… but not this time. The future has arrived and the sainted American middle class, who acquiesced to it all and yet about whom no ill may be spoken, will find that future quite unsympathetic.
And when irksome reality stubbornly refuses to follow Hollywood’s script and accept the Triumph of the Will, more laws will follow. And then more. And more. The cannibalisation of the shrinking productive economy to ‘bail out’ the failing bits will become ever more intense. Much as John “I support the Bail Out” McCain would have done in fact. Pervasive political regulations trying to manipulate things back into health will become ever more pervasive, all to rapturous applause at first… and all to no avail. Obama’s progressive and spectacularly expensive defeat will be a defeat for the entire nation with implications that will be felt around the world. It will be a defeat that consumes much that is still gleaming and golden in the Republic and turns it into toxic waste.
So now is not the time for ‘unity’ and ‘bipartisanship’, which is just a genteel way of demanding surrender, it is the time for resistance and the renewal of purpose by those who see the liberty and prosperity that comes from constitutionally limited government as a prize worth any price to defend. This was never really about race other than as the final flourish of a very worthy battle that had already been won.
Andrew Roberts, the UK historian, pens what can only be described as a robust defence of soon-to-be-ex-US President, George W. Bush. It has stirred up a hornet’s nest of comments, some of which include open support for OBL’s cause, which makes me wonder about who edits the Telegraph blogs these days, if at all.
Unfortunately, this piece suffers from a number of basic factual errors that make one wonder about the quality of the editing of the Daily Telegraph’s print edition, never mind the electronic version. He says, for example, that Oliver North directed a movie about Bush, when in fact he meant Oliver Stone. These Olivers are a bit of a pest: I mean, there’s Oliver Reed, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Twist, and loads of others. It might rather tickle both Messrs North and Stone – one a rather controversial soldier, the other a former-soldier-turned leftwing filmaker, to be so conflated.
On a more serious note, though, Mr Roberts suffers from over-reach in his understandable desire to set the record a bit straighter. For a start, any believer in the small government brand of conservatism, even a hawk who supported the overthrow of Saddam and the fight against the Taliban, has to confront the continuing expansion of government and debt under the Bush administration. Bush went over the heads of Congress to support the bailout of the US auto industry. Then there is the whole nonsense of No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, Patriot Act, and the rest.
As for protecting America from attack, it is true, that he deserves – as I said some time ago – some, if not a lot, of credit for the fact that there has been no major repeat of a 9-11 sort of attack on US soil since that terrible September morning; and yes, I happen to agree with Mr Roberts that paying a pure “wait-and-see”, defensive posture after that day was not really plausible.
Libertarians continue to argue among themselves, never mind with others and often vehemently, about the proper scope of foreign policy, or whether a libertarian foreign policy is an oxymoron. For me, the principle of self-defence cannot rule out the need, in certain circumstances, to go after declared enemies with a track record of violence and mayhem. Bush went after some of those enemies and made mistakes along the way. But I think, that on foreign policy at least, the judgement of history on this man will be rather kinder than at the present time.
There is an outpouring of ‘good will’ towards Obama coming from the statist establishment on the so called ‘right’, whatever that means, in the USA, such as this fellow. These are exactly the sort of apparatchiks I have talking about before who are at the very heart of the Republican party’s problems. They may well be personable but now is the time for radicalisation and resistance, not conciliation and surrender.
Noting how specific Republicans react to the beatification, sorry I mean inauguration of Obama will be a useful guide to who ‘gets it’ and who does not… who is part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course the easy entries on the ‘kick the fools out’ list needs to start with the party worthies who actually thought it was even good politics, let alone good for the country, to run such a profoundly statist candidate like McCain against the most left wing Democrat since FDR. Even the most clueless of marketing men (and that is an industry more awash with cluelessness than most) understand the importance of product differentiation.
Feel free to use the comment section to stay who on the Big Government wing of the Republican Party most urgently needs to be given the boot so that the Republicans have any value at all as a worthwhile alternative. Of course I am well aware that the answer may be ‘kick out all of them’ but that is not a very useful observation. The current crisis is a golden opportunity to actually do some creative destruction that could yield interesting results in the years to come. If that possibility is not of interest to you, then you have nothing to add to this particular discussion.
Take a look at this, and scroll down for some of the comments. I still occasionally come across the sort of comments in the vein of “would it not be a good idea to stick all those yobs in the Army/whatever or make them do unpaid work?” etc, etc. These comments come up when there is a discussion about problems of our terrible young people. And this seems to be a viewpoint that transcends the usual left/right political divide: conservatives like the “get em sorted out” mindset while the left goes more for the “building a sense of community” approach. As usual, the notion that individuals are entitled to live their lives for their own sakes gets lost. I mean, that is just so damned selfish.
The issue is quite simple: if the problem is youngsters getting bored and into trouble, then the obvious solution is paid work, hence removing all the legal and tax barriers to said, such as minimum wage laws, restrictions on hiring teenagers, and so on. Acquiring the pride of getting a paycheque strikes me as far more useful in encouraging positive behaviours than some sort of conscription plan for young adults, as seems to be on the cards in the US.
And I’ll repeat my point that it is not enough just to speak out against plans to conscript 18 to 25-year-olds, for example. Proposals to make people attend schools (or whatever euphemistic words for such places exist) until they are 18, for example, is also wrong, and in many cases, counterproductive, particularly where non-academic youngsters disrupt the teaching of their fellows because they are bored senseless. Far better to encourage apprenticeships, with things like tax breaks, than keeping them in one damned education project after another.
If this idea of a young civilian corps in the US becomes fact, I wonder how many of all those young Obama fans will became disenchanted with him? But then I recall that Mr McCain, his vanquished opponent, was pretty keen on all this service stuff as well.
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