The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector
– Henry Hazlitt, author of books including the superb Economics in One Lesson.
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Democratic Undergrounder 1: “Dude, Bush is a god-damn fascist. I asked everyone I know and like no one voted for him! Patriot Act, wiretaps made easier, locking up people in Guantanamo Bay without a trial… he’s like some whacked out Christian dictator!” Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Yeah man! It’s so good to see Chavez in Venezuela sticking it to Bush’s buddies in the oil business! He’s gonna make Venezuela totally free now! Democratic Undergrounder 1: “That’s right! Did you hear? He’s been given powers to rule by decree and now he can close down opposition newspapers, silence non-socialist radio stations and throw his political enemy’s asses in jail if they don’t do whatever his decree says.” Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Woah, cool! One day I hope we’re as free as that in the USA!” Of course, I am just imagining that discussion. I am sure nothing like that ever happened. January 20th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered. January 19th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, fancy giving money to the Government! – A.P. Herbert (no relation) Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert. January 7th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Will Hutton has an article in the Guardian called 2006: a vintage year for ideas that will change our world that is right on the money about the importance of that triumph of free expression, ‘Web 2.0’. Or as I would put it, the web is the tool that will break the old meta-contextual basis of old thinking… and then the rest of Hutton’s article then piles on wave after wave of ‘old think’ completely locked into the orthodoxy of a statist meta-context.
Hutton quotes Richard Layard as if his conclusions and support for some very creepy totalitarian policies are self-evident and widely accepted outside the Benthamite circles in the two main UK political party HQs, which is not the case (although perhaps his use of ‘we’ means ‘Guardian & Independent readers like me’). Moreover it has probably not occurred to Hutton (i.e. he is locked onto meta-contextual assumptions that society must rotate around the state) as it is clearly an axiom for him that ‘well-being’ is something within the government’s power to dispense, that perhaps it is the decay of civil society and growth of the state, rather than a lack of ‘correct’ state policies at imposing happiness, that might be the problem. My view is that the likes of Dave Cameron can only be a solution to the purported ‘crisis of unhappiness’ if they all start acting like lemmings and go jump off a high cliff. Seeing that would certainly make me very happy. But the web is indeed the future, not the Tory or Labour parties, nor the Guardian or Telegraph or BBC. Why? Because there are inherent dis-economies of scale when it comes to the web. By this I mean I can set up Samizdata and the Guardian can set up their own blogs (and fine worthwhile blogs they are… the Guardian is really one of the few newspapers in the world which really ‘gets’ the Internet), but in spite of their brand and wealth, it costs me a tiny fraction ‘per eyeball’ to get hundreds of thousands of readers per month compared to them. Sure, more people read their website than read Samizdata but in terms of bang-for-buck, I win hands down and a lot of people do read us… and there are a lot more blogs than newspapers. Likewise a worthy outfit like 18 Doughty Street can put together excellent podcasts and do top class vlogging, but a significant cost and investment in infrastructure and salaries… and Brian Micklethwait can put up very effective podcasts for more or less nothing. The implication of this ‘dis-economy of scale’ is something that will have little effect in the short run but will change everything in the long run. It means that although the Internet can be used by huge corporations and even huger governments, individuals motivated by something other than accountants have intrinsic advantages. Most importantly I think this points the way to how civil society will eventually redress the balance of power vis a vis the state and those who feed off the state, and abruptly reverse the trends of last century of moving towards Rousseau’s goal of suppressing the free and several interactions of civil society and replacing them with politically mediated regulatory formulae. Now that is future-think. December 25th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apologies for not flagging up sooner that I recently had a recorded conversation about Samizdata with Perry de Havilland. It took me over a week to edit the thing, by which I mean over a week to get around to stitching the two chunks it happened in together (I find everything involving computers to be hard until I know how to do it). And after posting about it on my blog, it has taken me another two days to mention it here. I had a busy weekend. But the mills of Samizdata grind small, and slowly. A week and a half’s delay will make no huge difference to the big picture, or to the meta-context as Perry likes to call it. Anyway, click here to have a listen. It lasts about forty minutes. Our conversation reminded me of something I first heard myself say to Madsen Pirie a long time ago, in the old Alternative Bookshop. What will this achieve? – said Madsen, waving some pamphlet I had just done in my face. I replied: “In the short run, nothing. In the long run, everything.” Samizdata is like that. Jackie D liked it too. Today, assuming the plan goes according to plan, I will be doing another of these things, with Alex Singleton, about… Gilbert and Sullivan. There is more to life than what governments do. December 18th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Where coercive institutions are strong a fanatical minority is well placed to capture them and turn them to its own purposes. – Natalie Solent, in this discussion, which is a an interesting touchstone of liberalism. November 21st, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the danger of tidy-minded people… – Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC’s radio talk-show Start the Week. I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don’t seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything. November 20th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
On the other hand there are countries where the law is changed in order to prosecute the ordinary activities of those whom the government chooses to classify as criminals because it is politically convenient to do so. Should there be no evidence on which a jury will convict, the law can be changed till the public enemy is punished, you can punish them anyway even if they are acquitted, or you can always keep juries, burden of proof and testing of evidence out of it altogether in selected cases. The traditional test in designing the criminal law in western legal systems – common law or civil law – was to ask, “What mischief does the law address?” or “What harm to persons, property, or society as a whole, does it seek to prevent or punish?” Libertarians might be troubled by the unlimited scope of “society as a whole”, but universalism – the treatment of all persons the same in the same circumstances, and framing the law on general principle rather than special cases – was once deemed fundamental to the rule of law. Indeed there is a common law maxim: hard cases make bad law, that warns that attempts to extract jurisprudence from the merits of the parties involved result in dangerous incoherence and uncertainty (the career of the late Lord Denning is replete with example) . What should we call a jurisdiction where criminal liability is determined principally by the identity of ‘the criminal’ which is to say, whoever it is the authorities determine should be punished? Not lawless, because all these things are done under the colours of law, most legalistically. I think Tony Blair would call it ‘modern’. I think I would call it a ‘pyramid of bullies’. November 11th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Dutch town of Drachten, they have removed nearly all the traffic lights in a bold experiment that seems to be paying off. There was typically one road death every three years in Drachten but there have been none whatsoever since the traffic light removal began seven years ago.:
It is also nice to see the correct message from such examples starting to sink into a few brains in the mainstream media. Meanwhile back in Britain… November 4th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds posted this link to an almost forgotten but pivotal story of the early civil rights movement. A group of young men opened an entire chain of stores to black americans by patience and nonviolence, and more notably without disrespect of private property or sobbing to mama government to kiss and make better. They broke no laws. They neither committed nor threatened to initiate any violence. They just sat at a counter day after day, waiting to be served until:
The owner then gave the same orders to all of his other stores. These people deserve to be better known than they are. We should also remember the owner of the chain for being a businessman and a reasonable human being who did the right thing in a time and a place where ideologic racists abounded. October 30th, 2006 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:
That’s from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:
But things have moved on. “Don’t like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out… let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive,” was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be “voluntary” for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,
The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit. Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them. Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge. They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. “A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “What is that?” GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all. October 24th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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