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]
|
This coming Friday evening (Aug 3rd), there will be a talk, at my home, on the subject of Bitcoin, given by a German libertarian who is now visiting London named Frank Braun.
Frank Braun is an acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter. Detlev wanted London to offer Frank Braun some kind of libertarian welcome, but many of the usual libertarian welcomers are now out of the country, on holiday and fleeing the Olympics. So, I’m doing some Frank Braun welcoming. Which suits me well because I have for some time been thinking of cranking up my Brian’s Fridays, and this will be a good way to see if that really appeals. Plus, any acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter is an acquaintance of mine. Certainly, this particular talk ought to be interesting.
There is a posting up at my personal blog about the event. If you’d like to attend, and are near enough actually to do that conveniently, please email me (follow the link to see how).
Now, back to all the tidying up that I must do before Friday. That has now become urgent. Which was another reason why I said yes to Frank Braun dropping by.
“The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematic violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.”
– Randy Barnett.
This inscription is carved onto the Memorial to those who died serving in Bomber Command during World War II.
The memorial was unveiled by the Queen just under a week ago, on June 28th. It is at Hyde Park Corner, in London, at the western end of Green Park. I photographed it this afternoon.
I found Michael Barone’s piece here (thank you Instapundit) about ideological self-sorting very thought provoking.
Barone mentions a book called The Big Sort, which says that such self-sorting within the USA is bad, because it is “tearing us apart”. The book, says Barone:
… describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference – and the others keep quiet about theirs.
Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they’re liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they’re conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.
Barone only concerns himself with how such self-sorting might be affecting the upcoming Presidential election, speculating that it causes liberals to live in an ideological cocoon and be bad at dealing with criticisms of their opinions. He instances the claim that Obamacare is unconstitutional, which liberals only took seriously when the Supreme Court suddenly did. Liberals had had months to prepare counter-arguments to that argument, or to rejig Obamacare so that it didn’t clash with the Constitution, but they saw no need to do either.
But there is plenty more to be said about ideological self-sorting. Might ideological self-sorting in due course become a major global tendency, with people choosing not just localities within countries, but actual countries, on ideological grounds? Is that already happening to any significant degree? If not, how likely is it that it might? And if it did start or has started, what might be its consequences?
The self-sorting Barone refers to is happening because moving within the USA is now quite easy. But time was when moving anywhere else was far harder, yet some people still did it, to particularly enticing destinations, from particularly abominable starting points. That people tried to hard to get out of the old USSR was one of the most damning and least answerable criticisms made against that horrible place.
The USA itself, all of it, is an exercise in ideological self-sorting, in the sense that most Americans are descended from people who bet the farm, metaphorically and often literally, on life in America being a better bet, even if they started out in America only with what they could carry. Americans are mostly descended from people who took a huge chance to make hugely better things happen for them. The great American exception to this is Americans descended from slaves, or from American natives. African slaves shipped to America placed no bets. They were chips in bets placed by others. Does that fact illuminate the seemingly still rather fraught relationship between black America and the rest of America? I think: yes.
But I am digressing into American history. What of the future of the world?
As a libertarian, I like the idea of ideological self-sorting, partly because it seems to me that there is a huge imbalance, in favour of minimal statism and against maximal statism, when it comes to how well each works out when practised only locally. Remember all those mental agonies suffered by Soviet communists when they started to realise that they were going to have to make do with “socialism in one country”, rather than everywhere? And remember how easy it then became to see which was better, Communism or not-Communism? Most of the world’s collectivists, although there are surely exceptions to this generalisation, are now collectivisms whose entire purpose is to deny “free riders” their free ride, anywhere on earth, thereby denying not only choice but exit. For collectivists, a world in which anti-collectivism flourishes, albeit only in some places, is anathema. They have to have it all, or their ideas won’t work, even in the limited sense of being inevitable and inescapable, and alternatives being hard to imagine because all suppressed. For most collectivists, it’s world government or nothing. But for libertarians, we only have to get a libertarian nation of some sort going, and to protect it from being completely shut down, and we’re in business.
We libertarians also have a big advantage in believing in being self-armed. Any libertarian national enclaves that emerge from the process of self-sorting that I envisage will, I believe, punch above their numerical weight, militarily speaking.
It is tempting to suppose that once ideological self-sorting gets seriously under way, if it does, it will then self-reinforce. As more people of one mind concentrate in particular places, those of other minds will have ever more reason to go elsewhere. This is the process that the author of The Big Sort dislikes, but which I favour for the world as a whole.
And then, when we all get to see which places work well and which work badly, you would at least hope that lessons would be learned. Sometimes that happens, as when many Eastern Europeans fled from Communism to America and then provided the political fuel for what America’s Communists and their useful idiots still describe as anti-Communist “hysteria”, in other words opposition to Communism and the belief that Communists ought not to infest the American government.
However, a big problem with ideological self-selection is that sometimes, having helped to wreck their original home, ideologically stupid people then move to other more successful places, but bringing their own stupid ideological opinions with them. Think of all the Muslims who now run away from overwhelmingly Islamic countries because of Islam’s despotic habits of government, only to bring those despotic tendencies with them to their new homes.
I’ve never been to the USA, but I occasionally read reports (and I seem to recall comments at this blog along these lines) that something similar happens there quite a lot, and is happening now, as “Blue” Staters run away from Blue States, but then vote for more Blue State stupidity in their new and formerly Red State homes. I trust I have the colour coding the right way round there. Personally I think this coding is wrong. How did the damn pinko taxers-and-spenders manage to get themselves coloured blue, and to colour their more enlightened and less parasitical enemies red?
So, to sum up, and hence to enable me to bring this rather unwieldy posting to a close, I think that, although it might not work out as well as I hope, I’m in favour of ideological self-sorting, and especially when it comes to self-sorting between different countries. But I’m sure I’ve missed out a lot of important things that could be said further on this topic, and I look forward to any such things that our commentariat might want to add to this.
One of the things I most admire about capitalism is its willingness to pay attention to what for many are utterly extraneous details, details that many would consider far too insignificant to be concentrating on – even morally rather degraded, but which many others have been begging for someone to sort out. In among solving world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah.
One of the many disagreeable features of tyranny, on the other hand, is that everyone has to obsess about whatever happens to be the dominant obsession, such as world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah. People aren’t allowed to concentrate entirely on their own thing and ignore whatever public mood has been officially decided upon. With the result that very little actually gets accomplished. Progress, which usually takes the form of a large succession of small steps, just does not happen. While everyone is shouting about world peace, imperialism, poverty, AIDS, blah blah blah, nobody is taking care of it, by doing little bits of it.
So, all hail to the team of super-geeks who may (probably a bit early to say for sure yet) have cracked (which is the opposite of the right word) the problem of tomato ketchup getting stuck in the tomato ketchup bottle.
David Thompson has details:
Because the world has been waiting for a low-friction ketchup bottle.
Indeed it has. Not all of it, mind. But, a lot of it.
What law of physics obligates the existence of a moral code? Why don’t rocks and trees and lions and zebras have moral codes? What is it that makes human decisions a special case that is different from all other things and creatures? Philosophers have struggled over the concept of right and wrong since before fire was captured for domestic use. In the time since then there have probably been as many moral codes as there have been philosophers to think of them. Most of them have one thing in common; they are claiming a lever to compel the behavior of others. Do lions and zebras have moral codes? Of course not. Lions attack and zebras defend. Zebras are (I’ve heard) a principal non-human killer of lions. They break the lion’s jaw with well placed kicks while attempting to escape. Unable to eat, the lion starves to death. Is a lion committing a moral wrong when it attacks a zebra? Is a zebra committing a moral wrong when it kicks a lion? Of course not, lions are lions and zebras are zebras. There is no moral code for lions and zebras beyond continuing their gene pool. With only that for guidance, all of their interactions tend towards extreme violence. Carrying on one’s gene pool is an internal imperative to each individual. There is no external imperative in the laws of physics that a particular gene pool must be continued. If one line ends, (other) life goes on. There is no external imperative for a lion or zebras’ moral code. Nor for a human’s. → Continue reading: On originalism
Last night I learned a new word: “Rawlsekian”. Apparently Rawlsekian is a thing that you can now be.
I don’t know exactly what others mean by this word, although this morning I made a start by reading this, by Will Wilkinson. But, I have long believed in at least one notion that could well be described as Rawlsekian, that is to say, combining a John Rawls idea which I consider to be good with all the good ideas of persons such as Friedrich Hayek.
The Rawls idea that strikes me as good is the veil of ignorance idea. This (commenters will please correct me if I have it wrong) says that a very good way to judge the relative merit of two contrasting societies is to say to oneself: Which would I rather be a citizen of, if I have to take my chances as to whereabouts I land up in each society? Choosing either society is a lottery. You could be a duke or a dustman, a government apparatchnik or a concentration camp inmate, a plutocrat or a pauper, or anything in between. The question is: Which society offers you your best chance of a good life? The “ignorance” bit being that whereas you do know quite a lot about the contending societies, you do not know where you might land in whichever one you decide to pick.
I think that this is a very good way to judge the relative merits of different societies. It is not the only way, by any means, but it is a very good way.
So far so Rawlsian. What puts the -ekian on the end of Rawls, when it comes to describing me and my opinions, is that if my understanding of Rawls’s many other and far worse ideas is even approximately right, I believe that Hayek World scores much better, by the Rawls veil of ignorance test, than does Rawls World. Rawls is not just wrong by the standards of other and wiser persons. He is wrong by his own standard, at any rate by this particular standard.
Follow that veil of ignorance link (that’s it again) and you will find that Rawls talked about “justice” rather than the more general idea of a good life. But it is my further understanding that Rawls did not mean by justice what I mean by justice. For me justice is a particular aspect of a society. A society can be hideously unpleasant, but quite just, or quite pleasant but hideously unjust. For Rawls “justice” was the entire deal, including such things as the government imposing a high degree of equality of economic outcome. So what he calls “justice” is what I prefer to call, in a deliberately rather vague way, “a good life”.
(I consider equality of economic outcome to be, among many other wrong things, very unjust.)
Something almost all effective polemicists have in common is a degree of optimism. They believe that their polemic can – at the very least might – make a difference. You can be as clever as all hell, but if all you do is cleverly convince yourself that your side in the argument is doomed, then mostly you will contribute only a lowering of morale.
Which is one of many reasons why, as JP noted the other day, I like Delingpole so much. He may be a bit naïve sometimes, a bit too boyishly enthusiastic for some tastes. But far better that than been-there said-that done-that seen-it-all certainty that there is damn all any of us can do about anything. Delingpole is always on the lookout for where a difference is there to be made in whatever argument he is involved in, and eager to make it.
In Australia for instance:
… in Australia, climate change is probably a more pressing political issue than it is anywhere else in the world. Australia after all is a ruddy great island made of fossil fuels. It has an economy which is dependent on fossil fuels. Therefore, when Australia finds itself burdened with an administration which decides to put a swingeing tax on fossil fuels – Gillard’s hated Carbon Tax – in the name of saving the earth from “Climate Change” then clearly Climate Change becomes of pressing concern not just to enviro-loon activists but also to ordinary, sane people who worry about tedious stuff like paying their bills, keeping their jobs and ensuring that their kids have some kind of economic future. The Queensland election result was, I suspect, just the beginning. The tide against the Great Global Warming Scam – the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history – is turning and, right now, Australia is the best place in the world to go for a beachside view.
I don’t know if Delingpole is entirely correct about Australia being the best place on earth to set about saving the earth from the pseudo-earth-savers, but I like his attitude.
I have been ruminating quite a bit lately on the phenomenon of argumentative pessimism, and what causes it.
Pessimists will tell you that the reason they are miserable is that their team is losing the argument, and that nothing can be done about this. Which may, in this or that case, be true. But if, like the Delingpoles of this world, you think you might win, you might. If you think you won’t, then you still might, but it’s a lot less likely. If others win, it is likely to be in spite of you.
But I think there are many other and rather less honourable reasons for argumentative pessimism, less honourable simply because they are based on making various sorts of mistake.
One common error, similar to that made by the critics of the free market when they confuse their own inability to imagine an entrepreneurial (rather than state-imposed) solution to this or that problem that is exercising them, is to confuse one’s own personal inability to win some particular argument with the claim that therefore this argument is unwinnable, by anyone on your side. This is a form of arrogance. “If I can’t win this, nobody can.” Really?
Another error, I think, is the tendency to remember argumentative defeats but to forget argumentative victories. Victories mean that you tend then to move on to other arguments. But when you lose an argument you are liable to brood about it, and to remember it, and to hang around until you can reverse things. The cure for this is not necessarily to abandon fights that you are losing or have lost but believe that you might win in the future. Don’t be pessimistic about your chances of reversing matters. But it is worth recalling all those arguments that your team has won, but which you personally have then forgotten about. This exercise will remind that you although not all arguments are won, arguments at least can be won, because they have been.
I agree, before lots of commenters queue up to say it, that naïve optimism, especially when it takes the form of believing that total argumentative victory is just around the corner when actually it is not – that people “just need to be told” etc. – is also a mistake.
But one of the many reasons why excessively naïve optimism is such a big mistake is because it is yet another cause of pessimism.
“I’ve never been a fan of John Stuart Mill. Yes, he had a massive IQ and a dreadful Tiger Dad. But his thinking is shockingly muddled.”
Bryan Caplan.
Hmm. I haven’t read Mill for many years. Back when I was a student in the mid-80s, I read On Liberty, and like some people I was not entirely happy with the “harm principle” that Mill used in his formulation of a liberal order. And he was a bit flaky on economics, or at least there was enough ambiguity in there to presage the transformation into the “New Liberalism” of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (ie, greater state involvement).
The Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog think that Caplan is being unfair on Mill:
Mill’s view is clear: utility is the ultimate determinant of whether an act is (ethically) right or wrong. Given certain empirical assumptions, utility will be maximized overall by restricting the exercise of force over “human beings in the maturity of their faculties” to that which is required to prevent harm to others. Acting paternalistically towards children and incompetent adults is justified, for Mill, for to accord them the same range of liberty as competent adults would not (again, given certain empirical assumptions) maximize utility. To be sure, Mill’s views here are ripe for criticism, especially his (frankly appalling) claim that “barbarians” require a despotic government for their own good. (We might ask, for example, whether any acts can be completely self-regarding, and so harmless to others, and whether Mill’s empirical assumptions are correct.) But this isn’t “awful” philosophy by any means—and it doesn’t require any appeal to “fine and subtle distinctions” to be defended against this charge.
But what if we were to try to defend Mill by making such distinctions? Caplan charges that Mill “piles confusion on confusion” when he attempts this. Quoting Mill’s “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” Caplan writes “But a man’s “own good, either physical or moral” surely includes his “utility in the largest sense.” And Mill says that’s ‘not a sufficient warrant’ for violating his liberty.”
But the error here is Caplan’s, not Mill’s. Caplan fails to recognize the difference between the interests of “a man”, and “man as a progressive being”—the former refers to an individual man, the latter to mankind as a whole. A man’s own good thus doesn’t include “utility in the largest sense”, and to think that it does is to commit a simple category mistake.
Interesting stuff. Regardless of such disputes, one thing I am certain of is that Mill was one of the greatest defenders of free speech.
In my recent posting praising that Libertarian Home meeting addressed by Tom Burroughes about IP, I said that people wanting to know what Burroughes actually said about IP should await the video.
This is now available, together with abundant written details of the talk.
Simon Gibbs talks about how people “without means” to enjoy the video can read the text and summary instead. But it isn’t only those who are technically prevented from watching video who will appreciate text instead. Some just prefer text.
Concluding paragraph of the summary:
The talk does not suggest that there is a definite “right” or “wrong” answer, although having considered many of the arguments, I am more favourable to IP than I had expected when I started to explore this issue. It is hugely relevant: patent fights, for example, are frontpage news concerning firms such as Apple. And copyright fights feature regularly in the music and movie business.
Like I said, Burroughes sat on the fence. Watch the start of the video and you’ll see that SImon Gibbs introduced him by saying he would climb down off the fence and tell us all what to think. No such luck.
Last week I attended that Libertarian Home meeting that I mentioned here, addressed by Tom Burroughes, concerning intellectual property. (Pictures of it, and an outside view of the venue, here.)
I agree with Tom Burroughes about intellectual property. In his talk he sat – learnedly, naming and summarising lots of useful luminaries on both sides of it – on the fence. So do I. When it comes to theism, I am an atheist rather than an agnostic. But concerning IP my agnosticism is as strident as the theism and the atheism, so to speak, of all the other contending parties in this ongoing debate. I think IP has to exist if modern life is to flourish, and will emerge from the contracts people make if by no other means. But, I understand the objections to the various forms of IP that come in such abundance from those who disapprove, not least the fact that so much of IP enforcement seems to depend on the state chucking its weight around. IP needs to exist, but it also needs to be treated with suspicion.
I won’t say any more about IP than that. When I later emailed Simon Gibbs about what a good meeting I thought he had arranged and compered, adding that I hoped some time soon to be writing something to that effect for Samizdata, he suggested I might want to wait for the video. When it comes to us all arguing about what Tom Burroughes said about IP, that probably makes sense. But I also want to elaborate a bit about what a good meeting it was, as a distinct point. My basic point being that it really was very good. → Continue reading: The Libertarian Home meeting last Thursday and the difference that a speaker makes
This comment, from “James R”, made me laugh, in fact it made me LOL:
We need to avoid conflagrating copyright with patents.
If enough people say that confragrating conflagrating and conflating mean the same thing, then they do. But, I hope that isn’t what gets decided.
This comment was attached to a piece by Tom Burroughes about intellectual property, about which Tom will be speaking, at an event organised by Libertarian Home this evening, in Southwark. I hope to be there myself.
LATER: Oh dear. Another correction is required. The piece I linked to is not by tonight’s speaker Tom Burroughes, but by Libertarian Home’s Simon Gibbs. Apologies to both persons.
|
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.
|
