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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As the US television journalist John Stossel points out, when politicians start calling for “windfall” taxes on oil or other evil firms for making “obscene” profits (which begs a question of what the right level is), they ignore the fact that such taxes will reduce dividends and shareholder returns, including those of pension funds. And the pension fund members – us ordinary Joes – lose out when politicians decide to come a-lootin’.
Part of the trouble is the vocabulary. “Windfall”, like “windfall apple”, implies that a good – such as a juicy apple – has fallen to earth and the acquirer of said has done nothing to earn it. It is, so the argument goes, just dumb luck that the chap who found the apple did so. And so, to switch to those Big Oil firms, there is no merit in clocking up monster profits when the oil price spikes. But this ignores the fact that oil firms and their investors took a risk in seeking to find, process and sell oil products and those risks could easily have gone wrong. We tend to forget how risky, both physically and economically, investing in oil is. When Brent crude was trading below $10 a barrel in the mid-90s, did those politicians who want to chase a few votes by bashing Big Oil cry any tears for the oil firms that were taking big losses at the time? No, of course they did not. And frankly, given that petrol is so heavily taxed in many major nations today, it is, to put it politely, rank hypocrisy for any politician to strike attitudes on the supposed venality of oil firms at all.
By the way, John Stossel is a marvel. If only we could have a few of him in the British television media.
The efforts to slay the tax dragon in Massachusetts have advanced past the last of the expensive hurdles. According to Carla Howell and Michael Cloud:
We collected over 22,117 raw signatures from around the state, sufficiently distributed to meet the state’s requirement that no more than 25% of them may come from any one county. We should end up with plenty to meet the 11,099 certified signature requirement – with a kevlar cushion to slow the challenges from the teachers’ union.
We’re jumping through the last legal hoops necessary to get on the ballot.
We already told you about the legal hoops we had to jump through last fall to get the first 76,000+ certified signatures.
We turned in these additional 22,117 signatures to 319 different town clerks June 18th.
Now we’re waiting for the town clerks to certify those signatures so we can turn them into the Secretary of State by July 2nd. That wouldn’t be very hard – except the town clerks don’t have to give us back our petitions until just two days before July 2nd.
Massachusetts signature drives are hard as hell. Ask the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who just failed to make the 2008 ballot.
We’re almost done. Finally.
it appears they have our enemies quaking in their boots this time around. According to
The North Attleboro Sun Chronicle:
In the meantime, legislators said the ballot initiative has an excellent chance of passing, considering a similar proposal got 45 percent of the vote in 2002.
Poirier said voters feel there is nothing they can do to lower gasoline or food costs and may see wiping out the income tax as the only step they can take to save themselves money.
This is the November contest I look forward to with glee. The passage is likely enough and the libertarian impact great enough that not even MSM will be able to ignore it. If we win this one, it will only be the first of a cascade with which we will sweep the nation.
So if you are in Massachusetts or nearby, get out there and help Carla and Michael fight the teachers union front organization and the AFL-CIO and other hard-line socialist organizations who will be out defending their God, the State.
Ron Paul and his campaign workers are still out there taking on the dirty job of rebuilding the Republican Party. If you are interested in what they are up to, you can watch this speech.
I might also add that I read “The Revolution: A Manifesto” while I was on the road for a month. It was pretty much as I expected: I disagreed with him on Iraq and vehemently agreed on almost everything else. It is a very readable tome and I will go so far as to say it will be seen as a classic. It should be on the shelf of every libertarian.
Blogger Timothy Sandefur has an interesting item questioning the argument that the inefficiency of using slaves rather than free labour would have gradually eroded the institution anyway, such as in the Old South of the US. He makes the point that as far as the owners of slaves are concerned, maximising wealth may not be the only reason why they keep slaves, so the inefficiency of this repulsive institution may not prove fatal to it. In other words, it would be naive for defenders of say, the Confederacy, to argue that a war was not necessary to get rid of this institution.
Sometimes, oppression does not just wither away. A loathesome institution or regime can endure for a long time. You need action, sometimes involving bullets, to remove these evils. For those of a pacific nature, this is not a comforting conclusion.
Here is an article I wrote some time back celebrating one of the great British campaigners against slavery, Thomas Clarkson, who is a lot less well known than William Wilberforce. Reading through the comment thread reminded me that a lot of people imagine that free marketeers like me claim that capitalism will inevitably weaken slavery. There is nothing inevitable about the demise of any human institution, certainly not one that satisifies the human lust for power over others.
The Libertarian Party convention has, as most of us expected, selected Bob Barr as our candidate. As I have been on the road the last month I have not had an opportunity to do much in the way of research on the man. I intend to correct that in the ensuing weeks.
The major party election landscape is about as dismal and disgusting as it has ever been. I would not support John McCain (author of the infamous anti-First Amendment limitation on political speech McCain-Feingold Act) if he were running against the Satan-Cthulu ticket. Had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic winner, I might have given her luke warm support simply because she is a rational political animal and thus predictable. She would be less likely to do something immature and stupid. True, she would have been as bad for our ideals as McCain, albeit in different areas, but at least she is not John McCain.
I might add that the bitter pill would have been considerably sweetened by the probable ascension of a very old and dear friend to top policy wonk in space affairs. There is barely day light between her ideas and mine on what has to happen to NASA over the next 20 years. It would have been a joy to have her in a high position, but that is not to be.
So… I am firmly back where I have been as a voter for the majority of my majority: it is the LP candidate or nothing. So who is Bob Barr? Is he a suitable carrier of our banner?
For those who know even less than I about the man, he is a former Republican Congressman from Georgia who became a card carrying Libertarian about a year and a half ago and seems to have accepted our ideas and platform in toto. His legislative history prior to that has some flaws from our perspective but he does not appear to have ever been a truly hard core statist. He does indeed appear to be someone who was philosophically close to us on many issues and finally crossed the line, decided some of his prior stands were in error and ‘outed’ himself as one of us.
We know we are not going to put our man in the Oval Office so our candidate requirements are different from those of the Republicans and Democrats. We need a communicator and a teacher. We need someone who will attract reasonable media attention. Our candidates job is to move another slice of the citizenry towards a belief in the importance of individual liberty. He must educate the electorate on the death of a thousand cuts the ‘major’ parties have been applying to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Purity is not as important as effectiveness.
I will naturally make up my own mind but at this point it is Barr or stay home. I am leaning towards supporting him and I am interested in the views, pro and con, of other libertarians. Can Bob Barr reap what Ron Paul has sown for us? Can he consolidate those gains and extend them over the next five months?
The ruling can be found here.
Via Ezra Levant. Mr Levant’s name, his own persecution, and that of Mark Steyn are both almost certainly familiar to Samizdata readers and probably familiar to an increasing number in the English speaking world. For that reason they may fare better in their own struggles with the witchfinders than those less widely liked.
Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter’s Big Government views and the former’s alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama’s recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:
The glee with which some have pounced on Obama’s decision to quit TUCC strikes me as unbecoming to anyone who takes faith seriously.
Maybe the “glee” has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let’s just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a “Christianist” (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer.
Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself.
In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period.
Even for critics of George Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism like yours truly, it is fair to accept that this Wall Street Journal author makes a good point:
“But when a professed enemy succeeds as wildly as al Qaeda did on 9/11, and seven years pass without an incident, there are two reasonable conclusions: Either, despite all the trash-talking videos, they have been taking a long, leisurely breather; or, something serious has been done to thwart and disable their operations. Whatever combination of psychology and insanity motivates a terrorist to blow himself up is not within my range of experience, but I’m betting the aggressive measures the president took, and the unequivocal message he sent, might have had something to do with it.”
And:
“Terrorism is now largely off the table in the minds of most Americans. But in gearing up to elect a new president, we are left to wonder how, in spite of numerous failed policies and poor judgement, President Bush’s greatest achievement was denied to him by people who ungratefully availed themselves of the protection that his administration provided.”
Of course, it may be that America has avoided a major attack after 9/11 due to good fortune, or that Islamic terrorists hit their peak on that horrific day and have not been able to muster the co-ordination or resources to do anything so spectacular since. I hope that is right. I think some of the security measures, such as the Patriot Act, have added a further layer of red tape and intrusion without boosting security. But on the face of it, Bush has done something right in helping prevent a further attack on US soil. It is unlikely, however, to be a fact that gets much attention these days. It does not fit with the narrative of Dubya The Texan Idiot that so many supposedly intelligent people like to play at dinner parties.
Its always so gratifying when you can say “I told you so”, especially when you have an appellate court backing you up.
As I noted a month ago, it seemed to me there were serious questions about the State of Texas taking custody of all 460-odd children living at the YFZ Ranch, a fundamentalist polygamy sect located in Eldorado, Texas, just south of my home in San Angelo.
Background (shamefully omitted from my first post): The YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch was founded by the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) a few years ago. The FLDS split off from mainstream Mormons back when the Mormons officially gave up polygamy. They have run into trouble with the law at some of their other locations, and their current “Prophet”, one Warren Jeffs, is actually serving time as an accessory to (statutory) rape in connection with an underage marriage in his church. Their Eldorado ranch was raided after an anonymous call, since determined to have been a hoax, in which a “16 year old girl” (actually a woman in her thirties with no connection to the FLDS) claimed to have been beaten and raped there.
The Texas Court of Appeals heard an appeal relating to the seizure of children at the ranch, and threw the state out on its ear. Basically, the Court of Appeals found that the state had presented no evidence that met the statutory requirements for summarily seizing children from their parents, namely, that the children were in imminent physical danger and that there was no alternative to seizing them.
The appeal related only to 38 children, and so its not entirely clear yet exactly what its effect will be on the other 400-odd children (the number jumps around as some are found to be adults, and others are born). The language of the opinion is pretty sweeping, though. The state presented exactly the same case with respect to all of the children, and the Court of Appeals even indulged in a bit of obiter dicta, noting (even though none of the children in the appeal were pubescent girls) that the state had not even presented evidence that the pubescent girls at the ranch were in imminent physical danger.
The local court was in the process of grinding through the “60 day hearings” (so called because the state has to come back and make a full case 60 days after the emergency seizures). An attorney I know who is involved in the case told me the 60 day hearings had been cancelled. At this point, I see little alternative for the state other than returning the children to the ranch, but the state has obviously been planning to shut down the YFZ Ranch for some time, and I don’t expect it to just give up and go home. Careers are on the line, after all.
Certainly the FLDS is a distasteful lot, but this seems a pretty clear case of state overreach. The core of the state’s case can be fairly summarized as a claim that being raised in the FLDS is per se abuse. The Court of Appeals declined to start down that dangerous road, and should be applauded for it.
Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
Glenn Reynolds links to this article on not one, but two different pipe bombings in San Diego.
I suspect the answer to the question “Why Haven’t We Heard About This” is to be found in the lack of blood and bodies.
No bleed, no lead.
From time to time I have covered the efforts of libertarian heroes Carla Howell and Michael Cloud to bring about an end to the Massachusetts income tax. They succeeded in the collection and complex certification of a huge number of signatures; they defeated an underhanded counter-attack by the teachers union; they even overcame a law-breaking legislature:
Fourth, although the Massachusetts Constitution requires the state legislature to take testimony on and vote on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative, the legislature refused to obey the Constitution. The legislature refused to invite us to give testimony. They refused to vote on our initiative.
Fortunately, the legislature cannot exercise a “pocket veto,” cannot block a ballot initiative by refusing to comply with the state Constitution. A Massachusetts Supreme Court decision allows our Initiative to move forward – even when the legislature violates the state Constitution.
Now they have one more hurdle before they get on the ballot. Another twenty thousand signature collected, distributed to each town for certification and then delivered to the appropriate State official by June 9.
Should be a dawdle for those two, but if you want to help you can do so here.
By the way, I will be working the JPMorgan Tech08 show in Boston later this month.
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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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