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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Sean Gabb has been a busy chap lately. As mentioned in an earlier post, the latest issue of Free Life Commentary exposes the fraudulent nature of the British Conservative Party’s ‘intellectual revival’.
Also Sean will be on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sunday 1st April at 11:30am UK time, to discuss whether ‘junk food’ advertisements should be banned (no prizes for guessing what his position is). This programme takes calls and so some of Samizdata.net’s readers might like to ring the relevant number and air their views. All the BBC Radio 5 details, such as telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and on-line listening, can be found here.
Another thing of interest and relevance: the Libertarian Alliance has released its latest pamphlet called Habits Are Not Illnesses: A Response to Dr Robert Lefever, by Joe Peacott.
Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore’s vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier’s, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.
I am talking here about the “we are not doing enough” way of winning – and of losing – arguments.
You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the “not doing enough” argument
Who (approximately) said this?:
“Most people have no interest in liberty. The limit of their desires is a tolerable overseer.”
I ask not because I know and wish to show off, but because I do not but am curious. I found it here, and he would like to know too, but has so far had no suggestions.
The late FA Hayek once memorably denounced the way in which socialistically inclined writers used the word ‘social’ to shred any word with which it was conjoined of meaning. For instance, ‘social justice’ begs the question of what sort of ‘justice’ is involved: it is a term which implies that one accepts, for instance, the notion that wealth and property is held collectively and therefore must be ‘distributed’ in accordance with some sort of pattern deemed to be just. Social sucks the content out of the word it is put against, just as the weasel sucks the contents of an egg (hence ‘weasel word’).
So when I heard that the UK government had created a “social bank” to seize unclaimed money from “dormant” bank accounts, I knew what to expect:
AT LEAST £80m ($154m, €116m) of unclaimed monies left in high street bank accounts will be used to fund the establishment of a social investment bank.
The new institution, which will be unveiled at the end of this week, will help finance charities and community groups and lead to the emergence of a viable social investment market, its proponents claim.
What is so troubling about this creation is the assumption, baked into the very idea of this body, that wealth that has not been claimed for a set period is automatically the property of the State. In practical terms, it may be the case that very few people will be inconvenienced by this action, and for all I know, much good may be achieved by this bank. But the presumption on which it rests is a further step, a further sign, that property rights are under assault in this country.
For some enlightenment, meanwhile, I strongly recommend this collection of essays on property rights. I somehow doubt that Chancellor Gordon Brown has time to read it as he prepares his last budget next Wednesday, but it he could do a lot worse.
Jesus did not say, “I was hungry and you lobbied the government to tax others to feed me.” He said, “I was hungry and YOU fed me.”
– W. E. Messamore. Read the whole thing.
My inestimable thanks to the commenter who linked to this exquisitely germane wiki in the comments section of my post below:
Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and were usually used for social discrimination. This frequently meant preventing commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities.
I was wrong about Cameron. He is not trying to drag us back into the 19th Century, he is making a bid for the 14th Century!! I suppose it may be to some advantage that we know exactly what is driving him and his ilk. Of even more advantage is to accept that the struggle for freedom, prosperity and progress is necessarily going to encompass some degree of class war.
Do libertarians have anything useful to learn from Karl Marx?
It has often been pointed out that whilst government spending is seen as a proper way to express compassion we (meaning those of us who believe that government is too big) can not win.
The above was brought home to me, yet again, yesterday. I watched a person being interviewed by a television presenter, and the person was requesting yet more government spending.
A decade ago a new government scheme was set up to pay for medical cover for children from poor families not already covered by Medicaid (the ‘working poor’). As welfare state schemes tend to do, the scheme has greatly grown in expense and yet ‘essential needs’ are not being met and so the person was on television (with the full support of the television interviewer) saying that the budget suggested by President Bush was not enough.
That is right, the wild spending George Bush (a man who gives the impression that he has never come upon a welfare state scheme that he did not like) is being attacked for not spending enough taxpayers money.
The man who was speaking was Republican Governor Perdue, from conservative Georgia, who was in Washington DC (with other State Governors) to ask for yet more taxpayers money. After all Georgia has implemented the scheme ‘aggressively’ (this was assumed to be a good thing to do) and, therefore, was facing a serious financial problem. As the people talked film was shown of a poor little child getting medical care (subtext – if you oppose the scheme you are a monster).
And the interviewer? A presenter for Fox News (the only non leftist television network). If the ever-more-government-spending-on-welfare-state-schemes position wins by default (for there were no arguments) when the people in the conversation are a Republican Governor from a conservative State and a presenter from Fox News then what hope is there of victory, what hope of rolling back government? At present not much.
One can trace the roots of the problem as far back as one likes. Some trace it to the error made by the German Samuel Pufendorf and other scholars, in confusing taxes and government spending with the virtue of charity (as if there could be such a thing as compulsory charity). FA Hayek even traced the problem right back to human nature evolving when humans lived in hunter-gatherer packs, so that there is always a danger of civil society (or the ‘extended order’) breaking down under the pressure of our near-brute instincts – the atavistic instinct for ‘fair shares’ dignified as the doctrine of ‘social justice’.
However, be at that is it may, the belief that government spending = compassion is clearly deeply rooted. Is there anything that we can do?
Well we can argue against ever bigger government and we can try and get these arguments to the public. But many people before us have tried to do this, over the decades, and they have failed to roll back government or even prevent its growth (although we do not know how bad things would be if they had not tried). And we can do all we can to help people in need, but all the efforts of charity (or ‘benevolence’, or the ‘independent sector’ to those who have been taught to think of ‘charity’ as a dirty word), have not convinced most people that ‘helping’ is not a proper role for government.
Perhaps only the bankruptcy of the Welfare States of the modern world will make people think again. It is possible that even bankruptcy will not make people turn against statism, perhaps ‘pack instincts’ will take over totally with total collectivism and the break down of civil society. However, if we keep on arguing as well as can and trying to get our arguments before people as much as we can, then perhaps people will consider the path of freedom, the path of voluntary interaction that is civil society, when social and political bankruptcy finally occurs.
To date, libertarian ideas have had no material impact upon the body politic.
True or false?
It must be a good show when a sociologist (who does not seem to think his discipline is a by-word for socialism) says:
A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress… and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.
Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says
Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don’t realise that by going there and telling them ‘this is the way you must live your life’, you’re actually being fairly coercive; you’re imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people’s world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else’s becomes quite secondary.
[my emphasis – JW]
Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a ‘right-wing’ counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical – and enormously more believable – than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.
This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a ‘road to Damascus’ scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start – I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians – yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as “rugged individualism” by statists – until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics – the world’s poorest – those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine – help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone – in fact, they can be positively deadly.
Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large ‘catch-all’ political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics – that is, the realm of human welfare – Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth’s grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.
The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.
I have just discovered that I am clearly a member of the scofflaw demographic, as I suspect are a great many of Samizdata’s contributors and readers.
What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, by a credit card company, or when traffic at lighted intersections is tracked by remote cameras, or when our employers begin forcing us to piss in cups as a condition for keeping our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unrelenting psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers, our governments and everybody in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives.
Great article, read the whole thing.
We know what she is smoking (see below), so the real question is: What is taking her so long to move there?
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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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