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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Bohemia has been banned.
– David Hockney denounces the smoking ban.
I am not entirely happy about an article, which is fine as far as it goes in defending libertarians from the idea that we are all callous brutes who would rather walk by the other side of the road, so to speak. I agree that that is wrong. Of course, there are one or two so-called libertarians who might not give a damn about anyone else but themselves, and they are happily avoided. In my experience, however, the vast majority of libertarians are not just right-thinking, they are fine individuals: generous, creative and benevolent to their fellows. But this is a rationally selfish thing. Think about it: if you believe freedom is a good thing because of the wealth and opportunities that it leads to, you will realise pretty fast that it is inconsistent to want freedom for yourself but not for anyone else. Not just inconsistent, but dumb.
However, for all that the article does make that sort of point, citing fine groups such as the Institute for Justice, the article is somewhat spoiled by this rather silly paragraph:
“There are a lot of libertarians working on issues that could be construed as self-interested – lowering taxes is the obvious example. There are even some hard core Ayn Rand sycophants who embrace little more than themselves. Find that repugnant? Have at ’em! But you’re just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves. Often they do so more consistently than some of the liberals who sneer at them.”
He’s making a fairly basic mistake here. The pursuit of rational, long term self interest – the words “rational” and “long-term” are crucial – is totally congruent with spending time and money to support the genuine freedoms of others. After all, as any Rand “sycophant” would argue, if we do not defend freedoms with a bit of effort, and go into bat to defend causes that are important, even if they are unpopular, or appear weird, then they will find themselves in a very lonely place if their own freedoms are attacked. A genuinely selfish person, who holds his own life and flourishing as his ultimate value and cultivates the virtues to achieve it fully (reason, independence, honesty, pride, productiveness, justice and integrity), will want to see freedom expand. The cost of spending a bit of time lobbying, arguing and campaigning is, for such a person, outweighed by the long term benefits. The individual benefits if the total sum of liberty is increased, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. For the Rand “sycophant”, the real stupidity would be to ignore the wider world and its problems. By the same token, libertarians understand the Law of Unintended Consequences: a lot of supposedly “altruistic” government interventions, for example (I use the word altruist in the usual, not Randian sense) make many real or imaginary problems far worse (examples: the War on Drugs, Prohibition, state education, etc).
One example of “selfish activism” might illustrate the point. For a long time I have been going along to events hosted by FOREST, the UK-based pressure group that defends the rights of people to smoke in privately owned places such as pubs. I don’t smoke, in fact I dislike the stink of tobacco and ask people not to spark up in my apartment. But I defend the libertarian line on smoking because I realise that if such freedoms get eroded without protest, then things I want to do could be banned next. For similar reasons, I’ll defend the right of people to publish hateful remarks (so long as they don’t demand I have to republish them), or practice non-conventional lifestyles I might abhor (so long it is consensual), and so on. For me, the long-term payoff – more freedom – is the point. I don’t see campaigning for justice or freedom as intrinsically good. It is much more important than that – it benefits me.
Another way of putting it is that life is not a zero-sum game. I obviously cannot spend all my time trying to defend freedoms or other issues; I have my own business and personal life and various interests to pursue. (My golf swing needs a lot of attention). But if I can, by my advocacy of hopefully good ideas and opposition to bad ones, make the world a marginally better place for myself and others, then I cannot think of a more truly selfish objective than that. In other words, I am not a classical liberal because it is an unchosen duty. I enjoy it and see the benefits.
And let’s not forget, another reason why libertarians defend the causes they do is that, despite the odd glitch, we get to meet some excellent people and make good friends. Some of my greatest mates are those I have encountered through such networks.
“The serf first obtained chattels and then land in property; on them he won his first power, and that meant his first liberty – meaning thereby his personal liberty. His title to these things, that is, his right to appropriate them to his own exclusive use and enjoyment, and to be sustained by the power of the state in so doing, was his first step in civil liberty. It was by this movement that he ceased to be a serf. This movement has produced the great middle class of modern times; and the elements in it have been property, science and liberty. The first and chief of these, however, is property; there is no liberty without property, because there is nothing else without property on this earth.”
– The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner, “On Liberty, Society and Politics”, (Edited by Robert C. Bannister), page 247.
Koran burnings predictably lead to murders.
So what. Free speech kills, we knew that. The lack of it kills more. Blame the murders on the murderers.
It should be allowed, but is it, or can it be, right to burn the Koran? In general I have contempt for those who deliberately insult what another holds dear. The fact that I uphold the right to say anything should strengthen, not weaken, my willingness to judge what is said. I despise Pastor Jones. I despise the members of Al-Muhajiroun whose insults to dead soldiers gave birth to the English Defence League.
However now that Jones has burned his Koran, and it has led to murders by Muslim fanatics as he must have known it would, I now see an argument that further murders will be made less likely by further burnings. If they keep happening it will have a desensitising effect.
Yet I still think burning someone’s holy symbol is a contemptible act. To hurt a group (and hurt feelings are a form of hurt) because some of its members are bad people is just another instance of the collectivist error. I would not do it. I suppose what I am saying is that given that it will happen somewhere in the world fairly regularly, this fact should be publicised. Eventually the mobs will get tired of assembling yet again.
There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom – no longer.
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.
I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.
A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you “liberals”. But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.
“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.”
The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side’s definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky’s haste to explain Loughner’s murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan’s murders here.
Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.
A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of “treatment” (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient’s will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.
And yet – there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. “He should have been locked up before this” does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.
Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.
Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
Instapundit quotes an emailer (Ed Stephens), on the subject of the TSA and its intrusive gropings at airports:
Remember how not long ago the President was so upset about the possibility of people being stopped and asked for “their papers” while going to get ice cream? It was the height of living in a police state. Yet we’ve not heard a peep out of him while TSA goons grope the general public (including nuns and little kids) on the way to grandma’s house.
If we are expected to put up with this, asking to see “your papers” suddenly seems a less onerous request.
Which was perhaps always the idea? Getting libertarians to beg to have to show only their papers. How perfectly statist is that?
This is how you get what you want in this world, whether you are trying to expand the powers of the state or to chip away at them. Demand something that is, to your enemies, totally outrageous. Then, with a great show of reluctance, settle for something only moderately outrageous. Repeat indefinitely. Sadly, for the time being, the expanders of the state are more numerous and more powerful than us chippers-away.
The secret of chipping away successfully is to continue to discuss the dynamiting of the whole damn mountain. How might that be contrived? How nice would that be? Then settle for dynamiting only half of it …
Remember Paul Chambers?
Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
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As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.
This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.
Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown ‘stoning’ tweet
Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.
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The message – now apparently deleted – said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
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Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: “It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.”
You’ve brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.
“You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken.”
She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.
“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately. I don’t think the nasty Tories went away.”
Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness – that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.
Many pixels have given their life on this site in discussions about how supporters of constitutionally limited government must ‘compromise’ to achieve their goals. Such people urging compromise are usually ‘sensible conservatives’ but see us wild eyed ‘libertarian’ types as potentially useful ‘fellow travellers’ if only we would learn to be more pragmatic.
And my view is usually to find out if the person telling me to compromise supported Bush or McCain, if American or Cameron if a Brit. And if they did, I try to discover if they are having serious buyers remorse… and if not, I tag them not as a ‘fellow traveller’ but as a political enemy to be opposed at every level.
But as in the USA there is at least a viable opposition movement to the Leviathan State whereas in the UK the now out-of-office Demonic Party and the ruling Stupid Party/Stupider Party coalition agree on all the Important Roles of the State, I will confine my remarks to America-centric ones because the vast majority of folks in the UK seem to rather enjoy the whole ‘circling the drain’ sensation and after all, the NHS is ‘the envy of the world’.
It seems clear that the best chance for ‘small staters’ (which means small-L libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives) in America is taking over the Republican Party and that is exactly what the Tea Party is all about.
However the self identified libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives within the Republican Party over the last 15 years have not been the solution to anything, indeed they have been the root of the problem…
…why?
Because in thinking that they must compromise on even the fundamental core principle of constitutionally limited government, large numbers of ostensibly pro-liberty people have voted for and abetted Big State Republicans like George “I started the bailout” Bush and John “I support the bailout” McCain. If you can ‘compromise’ to that extent, you are either lying about being in favour of limited government or you have no conception of what the word ‘limited’ means. ‘Limited’ does not mean “vast-but-growing-less-than-the-other-guy”.
It is the very fact so many people who want a smaller state refused to ever say “THIS IS A DEAL BREAKER“… and really mean it… but rather kept endlessly holding their nose and voting for The Lesser Evil that made it possible for the state to keep growing remorselessly under Republican governments.
But the Cold War in over, we won, so Reagan’s excuse no longer applies.
I have nothing against compromise with fellow travellers and usually see little value in obsessive purity tests, but the key here is compromise with fellow travellers (such as libertarians compromising with conservatives and visa versa), but what has happened over and over and over again is endless ‘compromise’ with people whose objectives are in fact antithetical.
So in short, what oh so many ‘small staters’ have been calling ‘compromise’ when they hold their nose and vote for a Big State politician just because he is running as a Republican, is not “compromise” at all… it is surrender.
What possible reason did the likes of Bush or McCain have to accommodate the views of ‘small staters’ when they knew they would vote for them regardless of how much they grew the state? No reason at all. None.
You want to know the problem? Look in the mirror and the problem will look back at you. That was the realisation that spawned the Tea Party and I was calling for that before the Tea Party even existed.
Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism – and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones – is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily (approve) of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.
– James Delingpole, with his obvious typo corrected.
Great essay by Sean Gabb on the UK government and supposed plans to reduce public spending. The article contains a lovely line in relation to Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister.
Along with Sean and others, I will be at the two-day Libertarian Alliance annual conference tomorrow, held at that ancestral seat of 19th Century liberal politics, the National Liberal Club.
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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.
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