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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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?
Last week I was interviewed by David Grossman of the BBC, on the subject of Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes. When I did the pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, we published three pieces by Paul (this, this, and this), hence the BBC’s interest. The show I was contributing to, a Radio 4 programme called Profile, was first broadcast at 7pm on Saturday night, and you can listen to it by rootling around here.
The impressive thing about Paul Staines is that he has always understood the connection between political freedom – civil liberties etc. – economic freedom, and what for want of a better phrase is called lifestyle freedom, i.e. sex and drugs and rock and roll. All are but different faces of the same thing: freedom! Most self-styled enthusiasts for freedom tend to emphasise some freedoms but to downplay and even oppose others. Paul Staines always was (and now Guido is) in favour of freedom across the board. Those three LA publications – about human rights abuses around the world, about acid house parties and the efforts of bossy Conservative politicians and of newer varieties of lefty safety nazis to shut them down and to stop anyone having any fun, and about the benefits of unfettered financial markets – cover pretty much the whole spectrum of freedom. When it comes to freedom of any sort, Paul Staines is on the side of the angels.
He is particularly good at distinguishing between the idea of free market capitalism, which is about how we may all do what we want with and trade with what is rightly ours, and the mere interests of particular capitalists.
Not that the man himself is always an angel. He is very flawed, very human. As are all the politicians whom he now torments. Their problem being that they often try to present themselves to the world as something rather more elevated than that, and accordingly as people who know better than we do what is best for us.
This man writes very well and very entertainingly, but I wish he would stop using the word ‘liberal’ to describe people who want to restrict and often abolish liberty.
Liberal is a good word, and we who believe in liberty should keep hold of the word tight. Calling shameless collectivists, who believe neither in economic nor ‘social’ liberty nor any other kind of liberty, ‘liberal’ will destroy this good word.
When someone disagrees with you about how to protect and extend liberty, he is still entitled to be called a liberal. When he stops even bothering about liberty and starts saying that liberty is neither an important end, nor even an important means towards the achievement of other worthy ends, then what sense does it make to let him take the word liberal off with him into the tyrannical bog that he has blundered or marched into?
In the USA, it would appear that the battle for this word was won and lost long ago. But on this side of the Atlantic, the word ‘liberal’ still means something far more truly liberal. We must keep it that way.
This short posting is the sort of thing I am objecting to:
Further proof of the moral degeneracy of Liberals. Not only pushing even more legislation restricting free speech, but loading it down with caveats to protect people whitewashing their favourite murderers.
The point is a good one, as are so many points made by this writer. But… Liberals?
I also think that describing your very sharp views as coming from the ‘House of Dumb’ is, well, dumb. He is not a bit dumb, and I am sure he has his reasons for doing this, but whatever they may be, if I learn them I do not expect to be persuaded by them. Irony perhaps? Whatever. Argumentatively speaking, calling yourself dumb amounts to constructing a huge open goal for your opponents to tap in a succession of soft goals. One of the basic rules of propaganda is: do not put yourself down. Speak out with clarity, seriousness and sincerity. By all means make trivial jokes about yourself, but the seriously wounding jokes should always be on the other fellows. ‘House of Dumb’ ought to be a blog dedicated to the idiocies of the non-liberal, anti-liberal collectivist creeps, and it briefly crossed my mind while writing this sentence that maybe this is what the man had in mind, which would have made this sentence read very foolishly. But then I remembered that he calls himself ‘DumbJon’. It is his own house that he is talking about, just as I had been assuming. And his very name, never mind his blog’s name, is a pre-emptive cringe. Right wingers bloggers do this a lot, with their I-know-what-you-think-I-am-but-I-don’t-care names. They think it is showing toughness and wit. It think it is admitting that you are wrong before you even open your mouth.
I repeat, I really like how ‘DumbJon’ writes, and I agree with point after point that he scores against his hated “liberal” anti-liberals. I particular, agree with him, as many ferocious opponents of Islamism or “Islamic extremism” often do not that Islam itself is a huge problem for the West, rather than the Islam problem merely being a few nutters who take it too far. What the nutters do is take Islam seriously, just as they claim to.
Anyway, having made my points about liberality and dumbness, I will leave it at that and continue to read House of Dumb with profit and pleasure. It is obviously far too late for ‘DumbJon’ himself to consider any name changes. But, to any other worthy people with ideas like his who are still wondering what to call their blogs, I say: do not be ironic about yourself if you want to be truly persuasive and truly wounding to those whom you seek to wound. Do not build the insults of your opponents into your descriptions of yourself and of your ideas.
And do not hand your opponents compliments that they do not deserve. Do not, for example, call people ‘liberal’ when they are nothing of the kind.
This morning, when I read Guy’s post about his and the public’s responses to the letter bombing, I felt a thrill of excitement. I have been expecting and looking for signs that this time is finally coming. I actually have found some comfort in the acceleration of the recent decline of liberty and privacy in the UK. It is slow declines that go undetected and unchallenged. Generations may forget, but individuals remember. When good intentions run amok, individuals remember what the original justification was. James Madison in Federalist 51, said “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Recognition of this danger seems to be unique to English cultures.
Being farther removed from the UK, I have a different and wider perspective. My expectations come from reading more Tolkien than Times. And from reading history, not histrionics. English literary and political history is one of awakenings. In the past millennium, freedom has been won in sweeping victories, and is only lost through neglect. For two of my favorite authors, Lewis and Tolkien, awakening was the sole plot line of virtually their entire life’s work. Dickens’s best known character is Ebenezer Scrooge, and his story is the essence of an awakening.
This struggle against obsessive domination by a big brother state will be difficult with many wobbles and diversions. There will be times when backward steps out number the forward ones. But my confident expectation is that the history of Britain and of English speaking cultures everywhere is on our side. Liberty “lost in the pursuit,” will be reclaimed. It always has been.
This event inspires a feeling that confuses a lot of people. They cannot quite put their finger on it. Some have mentioned schadenfreude. No. That’s not it. In fact, that particular viciousness is so alien to English speakers that we need to borrow a European word for it. I am confident that no person here takes any sick pleasure from that clerk’s suffering. The trail of English history is a search for justice, not redistribution of suffering. The feeling this event inspires is deeper than that and it is a just and justified one. This feeling is coming from our recognition of possibility, of alliance, of purpose; the first perceptions of a change in the direction of history. Since this feeling is one we have felt seldom and mentioned even less, it does not surprise me that it should go unrecognized. But when I read Guy’s post this morning, I felt it.
Joy.
I am fed up with Western companies collaborating with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, helping them restrict the internet and monitor communications by those who disagree and oppose them. Julien Pain of Reporters without Borders writes in Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0.
These days, “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary” material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become “cyberdissidents” and “online journalists.” … The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.
He expands:
The predators of free expression are not all the same. China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users, spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment, and hires armies of informants and cyberpolice. It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector–such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems–to do what it wants them to; all have agreed to censor their search engines to filter out Web sites overcritical of the authorities.
Long-time readers of Samizdata.net will know that one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in any way but especially when it comes to limiting the technology that could help dissidents to communicate among themselves and with the outside world – the first step to any meaningful resistance. Both Perry and I and others have blogged about it when Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft or Google put their foot among the oppressors’ jackboots.
I have often said, although have not blogged it anywhere in detail yet, that had the internet existed in the days of the Cold War, its end would have come much sooner and possibly in a different manner. I say this on the basis of my own experience of the power of communication and information dissemination within an oppressed society. Not just the serious political information. I remember the first 15 minutes of any clandestine meeting was spent sharing new jokes. All of them political, of course. And then there were western adverts that caused considerable damage to the communist propaganda. Soft-focus commercials for washing powder, chocolates, electrical appliances that we did not know even existed. The images of a world beyond got through thanks to the clear reception of the few TV channels near the borders with the Western countries. Speed that up, add scale and the rips the internet could have made in the Iron Curtain are beyond measure… imagine all the YouTube videos testifying to the ubiquitous presence of technology (cameras, computers and connectivity, not to mention homes, past-times and the luxury of being able to post inane clips online) for the exploited workers in the corrupt and decaying capitalist countries. Hmmm.
Even without quaint anecdotes from dissident days, most people can appreciate the importance of free flow of information and see what the internet has done for freedom of speech. What I see is a shift in the balance of power between systems (political and corporate) and the individual (citizen or consumer). That is why I do what I do (crusade against advertising and for individual empowerment) and why I am a big fan of technology like blogs, wikis, tagging, VoIP etc, and especially of applications such as Skype that is P2P, encrypted and distributed by individuals. Since its beginnings a few years ago, it has spread like wildfire precisely because it is secure and decentralised and, most importantly, unmonitored.
The Web phone service Skype, for example, has made it much easier for journalists – and Reporters Without Borders – to communicate with their sources. It works especially well because it is encrypted, so conversations are hard to tap.
Apparently, not any longer, which is the source of my anger and disappointment:
But China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?
After Googling “Skype” and “Chinese government”, I found more about the story which broke some time ago. Shame on me for missing it:
In September 2005 Skype and TOM formed a joint venture company to “develop, customize and distribute a simplified Chinese version of the Skype software and premium services to Internet users and service providers in China.” The Chinese client distributed by TOM Online employs a filtering mechanism that prevents users from sending text messages with banned phrases such as “Falungong” and “Dalai Lama.”
Human Rights Watch provides a comprehensive summary well worth reading in How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China. (Scroll down to point 4 for Skype.)
The real issue for me here is a moral one, not political or technological, although they define the context within which the moral choice should be exercised. I know and believe that technological innovation will prevail in the end. In fact, I am banking on it. For each repressive use of technology there will be new ways of bypassing it. My problem is that this merely treats the symptoms, not the disease. It leads to a kind of arms race, dictators and geeks locked in a battle to bypass each others’ technological resources and cleverness. True, geeks may be winning on that front. But the dictators are still oppressing and the losers (apart from the victims), in more ways than one, are the companies that have made the pact with the devil. → Continue reading: Complicity in a crime is also a crime
In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.
The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.
and…
Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.
and…
… and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?
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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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