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The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death. – Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775, at the second of the Virginia Conventions. The full speech is available here It’s not long so, as Glenn Reynolds would say, “read the whole thing.” March 23rd, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I was just about to do a posting here linking to this Anton Howes piece, but I see that Johnathan Pearce has go there first, see below. I strongly agree about the importance in particular of student libertarianism, which the Liberty League is doing so much to encourage. The only thing I now need to add to that is that earlier this week I promised Anton Howes I would mention here that the Liberty League‘s Freedom Forum 2012 is coming up soon, on the weekend of March 30th/April 1st, in Newcastle. This is not a convenient place for me, but is massively more convenient for northern English and Scottish libertarians than such an event as this would be if held in my own London, as most such British events have tended to be. I hope this event goes really well. I see that occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton is already signed up as a speaker. March 4th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fifty of these posters materialised this morning on the London Underground. Channel Four’s political correspondent, Michael Crick, noted their appearance, tweeting that: “Biteback [the publisher] are advertising Madsen Pirie’s book Think Tank, on ASI, with big underground posters. Amazing for such a limited interest topic”. Funnily enough, I think the book will sell quite well, but, more importantly, there is an important message put out by the posters. It is that free-marketeers hold their views, not because they are being paid by Big Business, but because… they believe in them.  February 20th, 2012 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
As already mentioned here from time to time in recent weeks, I have been doing some tidying up. My place was a mess. More politely, it was suffering from severe infrastructure overload, which is that terrible condition that sets in when each new thing that comes in or gets done causes a wave of knock-on chaos out of all proportion to what ought to be its impact. To put this down, I make some space for it by moving this important item, on top of that important item, and then forget where it all is … you get the picture. If you have never in your life suffered thus, that can only be because you have never done anything. Places where real stuff gets done frequently teeter on the edge of chaos. This is another Parkinson’s Law. I recall, in one of his books, contrasting pictures: of the Officers Mess (not a mess at all), and the Orderly Room (not orderly at all). The point being that it was in the latter place that all the work got done. But there comes a time when consoling yourself with the thought of all those chaos-inducing accomplishments just doesn’t do it for you any more. You just have to stop – at the very least interrupt – everything else and turn back the tide, which is what I have forced myself recently to do. This has already the most serious tide resistance I have done since moving in here over two decades ago. My problem was that although this task had become slowly more important, it had at no point become overwhemlingly urgent. So, how was I to motivate myself to get stuck into it? No externally imposed deadline loomed. No angry associates would punish me if I delayed. It was merely that if I delayed it yet longer, my life would work gradually less and less well. If you are the sort of person who needs only to know that some task is important in order to start attacking it with enthusiasm, confident that you will conquer it, then this posting is probably not for you. If on the other hand you are like me, easily daunted and tempted hideously to postpone tasks which combine non-urgency, great importance (but only to you) and demoralising hugeness, then maybe skipping this might be an omission of significance. If the question “where do I start?” regularly recurs in your life, then read on. You might discover things of value. → Continue reading: Urgent and Important versus Easy – on tidying up my home – and on how to do libertarianism February 17th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And as to neoliberalism laid bare. Yes, the industrial revolution is the only way we humans have found of improving the living standards of the average guy in the street. I, as a liberal (even if neo) would like the living standards of the average guy to increase. Thus I support the industrial revolution. Yes, in all its mess and clamour: for it is making things better. I’m out and I’m proud. As a neoliberal I buy things made by poor people in poor countries. For that’s how poor people and poor countries get rich.” I think I can formulate a new “Johnathan Pearce law”. Namely, the presence of the word “neoliberal” in a piece mocking markets and capitalism is almost always evidence that the author of said piece either does not understand what he or she is attacking, or is misrepresenting it, and also regards such ideas as being promoted by some sinister, all-powerful cabal, as suggested by that rather creepy use of the term “neo” in front of something else, such as “liberal”. February 2nd, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“More people have heard of Tom Cruise than Ben Bernanke, but that doesn’t mean that Bernanke hasn’t had a bigger impact on their life.” – Matt Zwolinski, a blogger at the recently expanded “Bleeding Heart Libertarian” group blog. He’s writing about the benefits and costs of intellectual versus political activism, as relating to Ron Paul. The failure of Tom Cruise to influence my life is, I guess, something I can live with, although I did rather enjoy the latest Mission Impossible flick. January 25th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mr. Sachs here performs the equivalent of, say, accusing someone who advocates sobriety of thereby being indifferent to other values such parental responsibility, financial prudence, and neighborliness. But just as being sober in no way precludes – and likely promotes – other values such as parental responsibility, being a libertarian in no way precludes any of the values and causes that Mr. Sachs lists. Indeed, libertarians argue that these other values and causes are best promoted by individual liberty, and that too many people who insist that achieving these other values requires the suppression of liberty are cynically seeking convenient cover for their own self-aggrandizement. Of course, libertarians might be mistaken about liberty’s merits. But that Mr. Sachs presumes that libertarians hold cheap such values as compassion, civic responsibility, and honesty proves that what Lord Acton wrote about Robert Kemp Philp’s description of history applies perfectly to Mr. Sachs’s description of libertarianism: “It were well if he knew his subject as well as he knows his own mind about it.” – Two quotes there from Donald J. Boudreaux (responding to this). There is his own own eloquence, and there is the Acton quote at the end of what he himself says. January 20th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was struck by the tone of an article I recently read by a conservative journalist who simply could not understand why libertarians have not abandoned Ron Paul now that the supposedly deadly leftist power word has been uttered against him along with great waggling of magic wands. My answer to him and others is that we are a tough lot and I laugh in the face of the PC power words. Unlike Conservative journalists I do not wet my knickers at the thought of someone attempting to tar me with it. Since I know I am not a racist, I simply do not care what anyone says or writes. I am immune, and that is perhaps one of the things which makes people like me and other libertarians even more frightening to the powers that be. We lack proper fear. Anyone who like myself has been on the front lines of libertarianism for years, for decades even, understands. We have been fighting our battle against hopeless odds with pretty much everyone against us except when it was to their advantage and they felt they had nothing to lose. We are used to losing and then dusting ourselves off and going off to the next battle, and the next battle. Like a horde of Don Quixote’s we have continued to attack the blades of the windmill, but unlike him we are having an effect. Every strike of the lance vibrates the blade, every vibration wears on the bearings, and the wear is starting to make the axle wobble. One day the entire Statist enterprise will tear itself apart and send blades cartwheeling over the countryside and it will be in no small thanks to us. This is not to say we do not hunger for personal tastes of victory, even if in small ways. The Ron Paul candidacy is one of those. No matter what happens now, we have won hugely. Millions of people have been introduced to ideas that will resonate long after they forget where they heard them. The libertarian genie is well and truly out of the bottle. We win with every day that goes by with us in the race. We win with every million dollars the Ron Paul campaign pours into broadcasting our message, a message of freedom and individualism the media has long ignored, filtered, twisted or blocked. Should he take Iowa and New Hampshire the old boys network of the Republican Party will be out in even more force with their friends in the Democratic Party to stop him. The two may be very different in what they want to do, but they both share a common love of power and your money. Some made the mistake of thinking the Conservatives were our friends. I knew that was not true. They were only interested in us so long as they thought they could use us to their advantage. Has anyone noticed how the Conservative media turned against us as soon as it looked like we might actually have a real effect on the election? Even Pajamas Media has taken a decidly anti-libertarian turn. I must admit that one surprised me a bit, but as to the rest, I fully expected it. I still do not expect Ron Paul will win, but God Almighty, I do intend to let those Sons of Bitches know we libertarians were there. If you are Conservative and you still do not understand why we fight after reading this missive… you are really rather dense. It is simple. After thirty-five years, we have finally tasted blood in the political scene and for once it is not our own. December 28th, 2011 | 135 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not long ago, Rob Fisher asked, back at his blog, before he started writing here, whether there is a correlation between an early enthusiasm for science fiction and later being a libertarian, and if so what might be the cause of such a correlation. And I seem to recall the notion finding its way here also, although I can’t recall or find where. It may have been in a comment thread. My take is that SF embodies the idea that things could be very different. Maybe a more general version of the same idea is that SF leads to political radicalism of all kinds. There was certainly a huge enthusiasm for SF on the left before World War 2. Think only of H. G. Wells. I recently mentioned to Michael Jennings that I too went through a big SF phase in my teens and twenties, while in the process of becoming a libertarian, and that although I subsequently stopped reading much SF, I did later become very keen on reading history. I still am. The connection between reading SF and reading history, at any rate in my mind, is that just as SF says that the world can be very different, history is all about the fact that, in the past, the world actually was very different. Things change, from era to era, from epoch to epoch. History and SF both say that very loudly. Libertarianism, and all the other isms, say that also. As far as history is concerned, I’m thinking of things like how the sea, in the European Middle Ages, far from being any sort of defensive wall (as Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt famously describes it – and as it later became) was actually more like a motorway system, for those able to command the vehicles to make use it of. I’m thinking of how very different life was if most of the people in the place you lived in were illiterate, perhaps including you. I’m thinking of how very hard it was even to preserve the great ideas of the past, let alone accumulate new ones with any success, before the printing press was contrived. I’m thinking of what a difference swords and bows-and-arrows and gunpowder and machine guns successively made, and what a difference atom bombs and hydrogen bombs have made to our own time. I’m thinking of what a different world it was when it was very hard to send messages of any complexity (or for that matter human beings) any faster than a succession of very expensive horses could gallop. Michael’s response was that reading lots of SF, then becoming something like a libertarian, then reading lots of history, is a fairly common intellectual biography. So rather than ramble on, let me ask commenters. Does that sequence of interests ring any bells with any of you good people? December 23rd, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is the headline:
The clear implication of the quotes in that headline is that whereas the person being reported doing the talking indeed said “unacceptable”, that doesn’t mean that the word makes much sense, and in fact it is probably rather ridiculous. Quite so. But to me the word “exclusion” is at least as much deserving of sneer quotes. I do not have a car, a smart phone, a garden, a hi-fi system that would enable me to get full sonic value from the quite numerous classical SACDs that I have acquired over the years, a cat, a Kindle, a wife, an exercise bike, an actual bike, any paintings on my walls, a Spurs season ticket (even though I like it when Spurs do well), a snooker table, a Bible (I lent mine to someone and never got it back), a blender (I did have one but didn’t use it much and didn’t much like it when I did so I sold it to a friend), a yacht, a space exploration company, or a collection of ornamental hippos. Just yesterday, I made the arrangements to get rid of my photocopier. I do have a personal blog, and also write for an impersonal blog (this one), but I use neither Twitter nor Facebook. Of none of these various things that I don’t have or don’t use does it make sense to say that I am “excluded” from them. I merely choose not to have or use these things, or, in the case of the rather expensive or inconvenient ones, I am put off by the money it would cost to buy or to accommodate them, and the effort that would be involved in acquiring the money to pay for such transformed personal arrangements. (I would really like a cat, but that would mean me getting a different home.) Martha Lane Fox says that lots of EU citizens not being connected to the internet is “unacceptable”. But instead of “not being connected”, she says “excluded”.
More quotation marks, signifying more ridiculousness. Evidently Martha Lane Fox is a women who is easily frightened. What on earth is so “terrifying” about people not using the internet? Not so long ago, nobody used the internet, because there was no internet. Life went on. Martha Lane Fox is apparently something called the “UK Digital Champion“. More sneer quotes there, this time from me. She was appointed this by Gordon Brown, and the current government carried on with this stupid arrangement. Should we perhaps start a series here, called something like: Public sector jobs that are stupid even by the usual standards of the public sector. It all very much reminds me of this excellent posting here not long ago by Rob Fisher, in which he said, among various other wise things:
This libertarian certainly is. The deeper meaning that Martha Lane Fox is in this case suffering from, and spreading, is the notion that Things Only Happen Because They Are Forced To Happen. I don’t have a cat or a Kindle, and that must mean that someone or something or some combination of someones and somethings must have forced me not to have a cat or a Kindle, just as if a gun had been pointing at me. Therefore, if “we” (another portentously wrongheaded word) think that cats and Kindles are good (as is many ways they are good, especially cats) it would be good also if “we” were to change the forces now forcing themselves upon me, and force me instead to have a cat and a Kindle. No more force would be involved. The forces in play would merely have been rearranged a little. I do not describe such ideas as “unacceptable”. The title of this posting is ironic, despite its lack of sneer quotes. I must accept that many stupid people, such as Martha Lane Fox, are in the grip of these ideas, partly because of various words that rattle about in their heads for which they know no better alternatives, even if they might like to, and that as a result I and many others are subjected to force in circumstance where we ought not to be. But just as I choose not have a cat, so too I also choose not to think in this silly way myself. December 18th, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just in case you missed it, the last of these Frank Jisms is this:
Earlier in the same posting Frank J quotes (admiringly) from and links to a piece (by him) about how, if cars were invented only now instead of when they were invented, we wouldn’t be allowed to drive them. Funny, and probably true. December 17th, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion – that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will be answered – “You yourself are occupied upon it all this time.” Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold. – from The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (on the penultimate page (54) of this pdf edition) Ah yes. To fight politics, you have to do politics. And before you know it, you are what you were earlier warning the world against. December 8th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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