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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Liberals often talk about the incremental implementation of their creed, envisaging liberal ideals slowly seeping into the mainstream to eventually supplant the will to plan and the will to coerce. I disagree with this prediction of events. The model of the modern developed state will only decline when a popular perception that it is simply unaffordable exists. I contend that such a notion will only be wholly planted in the popular imagination by a sudden, catastrophic failure of the state, of which I believe we will sooner or later experience. This is not an unrealistic prediction; the state-initiated welfare programmes in all their myriad contortions are by nature self-perpetuating and ever-expanding, and thus the parasite will eventually consume so much of the creative juices of its host that the host will starve. This will result in massive social and economic upheaval for an enormous bulk of individuals who had made provisions for the future assuming the existence of government-controlled and distributed social welfare.
Consequently, the modern first world welfare state is in the process of clogging its own arteries. I am envisaging a scenario whereby a critical mass of nonproductive citizens and inadequately funded retirees overwhelm the social security systems of the developed world, causing most (if not all) of these governments to respond in a manner befitting a state hell-bent on survival – namely, progressively increasing taxes. Of course, the majority of future retirees are likely to be underfunded to such an extent that the welfare state, supported by relatively few, could never hope to provide for so many people. However, the period in which this is being realised will see taxes increase, in the vain hope of closing the funding gap, to a level whereby the aforementioned taxes start killing the economic activity that enables taxation revenue to be collected in the first place. Desperately, governments will make increasingly onerous tax imposts on the productive, which will result in collapse – not fiscal equilibrium. I think that the trend towards increasing individual responsibility will find its genesis in a widespread and deeply painful economic catastrophe as severe as any that has gone before; something equal to or greater than the magnitude of the Great Depression, which profoundly and permanently altered the values of so many of those who lived through it. I believe that liberalism’s best chance of popular acceptance will rapidly rise out of fateful ashes like these. → Continue reading: Liberty’s revolution
The Catholic church wants people to boycott “The Da Vinci Code”. From the sounds of it, they are rather jealous of Islamic violence over the Danish cartoons:
“I hope all of you boycott this film,” the Italian agency quoted Amato as saying. He said the film, based on the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, was full of “offences, slander, historical and theological errors concerning Jesus, the gospel and the church.”
“Slander, offenses and errors that if they were directed toward the Quran or the Shoah would have justifiably provoked a worldwide revolt,” he said, referring to Islam’s holy book and the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
“Yet because they were directed toward the Catholic Church, they remain ‘unpunished,”‘ he said.
This is exactly the kind of slippery slope I worried about with the reactions to the Danish Cartoons. One wonders if the company with yellow borders will continue to stock the book version? Or perhaps Catholics have not yet learned the lesson that threats of violence are a successful tactic when dealing with cowards.
I will be on the road for the next month but I will make a point of seeing the movie.
The world is becoming a very disturbing place. I never thought to find myself in full agreement with the lefty journalist John Pilger – whose name was turned into a verb by the late Auberon Waugh: to pilger, to utter whining, systematically-slanted, effusions blaming western capitalism for all the trouble in the world. Yet here he is in The New Statesman this week:
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has already passed its second parliamentary reading without interest to most Labour MPs and court journalists; yet it is utterly totalitarian in scope.
It is presented by the government as a simple measure for streamlining deregulation, or “getting rid of red tape”, yet the only red tape it will actually remove is that of parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation, including this remarkable bill. […]
Those who fail to hear these steps on the road to dictatorship should look at the government’s plans for ID cards, described in its manifesto as “voluntary”. They will be compulsory and worse. An ID card will be different from a driving licence or passport. It will be connected to a database called the NIR (National Identity Register), where your personal details will be stored. […]
The ID card will not be your property and the Home Secretary will have the right to revoke or suspend it at any time without explanation. This would prevent you drawing money from a bank. […]
A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq. That is the news. “The kaleidoscope has been shaken,” said Blair at the 2001 Labour party conference. “The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.”
Meanwhile Michael Moorcock writes in The Spectator on becoming American, of his unexpected admiration for the “constitutional fundamentalism” of Ron Paul and how:
I have a feeling that Americans will be putting their house in order rather sooner than the British, because once the People realise there is a problem, We are usually surprisingly quick to fix it.
Given the passivity of our own rather less sovereign people, and the sanguinary noises from all quarters, I do not find myself as hopeful.
The Economist magazine, about which James Waterton wrote a few days ago (it is getting a new editor), has an interesting cover article ‘Soft Paternalism’, chronicling the growing trend of governments to devise ways to make people behave in certain ways, usually in order to meet some supposedly desirable objective, such as losing weight, saving for a pension and so forth. I do not think the Economist hits the issue nearly hard enough but I absolutely love the picture associated with the article.
I rather like this quotation in the final paragraph:
Private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them. And life would be duller if every reckless spirit could outsource self-discipline to the state.
Some people, including libertarians, are a bit hard on the Economist, which often veers away from its historical attachment to free markets, liberty and limited government. I occasionally find its tone condescending but on the whole that magazine is a force for good. Let us hope that under its new editor, the Economist continues to beat the drum for classical liberalism in an era when liberty is all too often on the back foot.
I have often marvelled at how people in government and business are even willing to give muslim activists with profoundly illiberal views the time of day, particularly when you consider that such activists are a minority within a minority in the western world. Yet I suppose the reason is not too hard to figure out: it all comes down to violence.
The great majority of muslim activists do not engage in violence. They may say vile things and take monstrous positions on issues at the top of their voices but they never actually put the boot in literally, let alone throw a Molotov or strap on a bomb. However they are all too quick to say things like “well I would never do something terrible like blow myself up on a bus but there are others who feel so strongly about this…”
And so people start kowtowing to the ‘spokesmen’ and ‘activists’ because a deniable lunatic fringe within a larger community which tolerates them threatens (and indeed engages in) violence.
It does make me wonder what might happen if people who oppose the intolerance and gross disregard for civil liberties that seems so deeply rooted in modern Muslim cultures started adopting the same approach. Just asking.
Sean Gabb has penned an obituary of Chris Tame in the Independent.
Chris Tame, founder and president of the Libertarian Alliance has just passed away in a London clinic.
I enclose the final email I sent him last week.
Dear Comrade,
I just wanted to tell you that I am very grateful for the help you’ve
given me and the opportunities you’ve put my way over the years,
especially as I have not always met your hopes. You put opportunities
my way when many would not have done, and I shall always remember
that.
At FOREST, I remember you asking me to do filing for you, a task for
which I was very unsuited (especially as you are the most organized
person I’ve ever met).
At Lambeth, I really enjoyed working with you, and in particular I
recall the Monday after you’d cleared out the stock room and all our
desks. It was refreshing to find a draw full of the supplies I needed.
I thought then that you could definitiely have been a British Julie
Morgernstern!
I also enjoyed the fun of coming up with headlines for press releases
in Lambeth: as libertarians we were of course completely unfazed by
evidence of the ineptitude of local government.
I bumped into Ivor Fishburne last week and told him about your
illness. He asked me to pass on his best wishes and concern.
Your achievements will be remembered, with the web and new
technologies your influences will I’m sure be ever greater. The
cataloguing and writings will never perish.
One of my proudest moments was in the Mozart House in Bratislava in
August 1991, in the actual room where Mozart gave a performance aged
5. I read out your “Taxation is Theft” LA pamphlet to a room full of
politicians…. and years later, the Slovak government brought in a
flat tax. Some of the people who did this heard my speech and your arguments.
Yours in the struggle for freedom.
Antoine
Perhaps it is the little things that gradually turn people against the priggish, curtain twitching statists who cannot bare the idea of people doing as they please.
People generally shrug wearily at the annoying impositions and regulations that grow by the year but that is why it is important that folks like us and journalists like Tom Utley let it be known that it is not alright that these things happen. We also need to convince people that those who enforce and apologise for the endless regulations are not alright either, they are psychologically twisted by compulsions to impose their will on others. Perhaps it will be when enough of society see the idea of prohibiting people from doing peaceably doing consensual things as the psychologically disordered behaviour that it is will real progress be possible.
In a land where Mormons, Muslims, and masochists walk side by side, and none is specially positioned to certify the correct concept of value, the role of government is not to pick a philosophy and shove it down our throats. It is to provide a reasonably neutral framework that allows each of us to pursue our ends peacefully in the light of our own convictions about the good. There’s a reason liberal democracies get top marks in happiness
– The always highly readable Will Wilkinson, of the CATO thinktank and blogger, dissecting UK economist Richard Layard’s argument in favour of more state intervention and higher taxes to make us all happier (yes, really).
Guy Herber’s excellent article The public mood (while the public moo-ed) got me thinking about the nature of the ‘Radical Centre’.
The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had but unlike them, it is control for control’s sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology: there is no Blairite or Clintonite (or even ‘Bushite’) ‘The Communist Manifesto’ or ‘Mein Kampf’. They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that does not organise mass rallies or collectivise farms, it just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera.
Perhaps this also explains the radical centre’s transcendent hatred of the USA’s system of checks and balances: the US Bill of Rights takes whole sections of civil society and tries to place them outside politics (free speech, the right to have the means to defend yourself etc.). Sure, it fails miserably as often as it succeeds but at least the notion that not absolutely everything is subject to politics is part of the American cultural DNA and that, rather than the US government’s policy towards, well, anything, is what makes the US anathema to the Radical Centre (including the US Radical Centre).
The Radical Centre has also been called ‘Authoritarian Populism’ because it seeks to impose the popular will by force and it does not much care what that will is. Just as liberty for liberty’s own sake is the objective of the Classical Liberal/Libertarian rather than some ‘overarching narrative’ as was the case with the radical statist left and statist right in the corpse filled 20th century, the Radical Centre seek control for control’s own sake with no particular grand reason in mind other than to perpetuate a political class whose reason for existence is to make decisions about other people’s lives.
The reason they dislike us so much is that to attack regulatory statism is to attack these people’s very reason to exist and we challange them on a profound psychological level. They need to control other people just as we need to control our own lives.
The Radical Centre is our demonic reflection.
I am feeling less of a lone loony than I did. After a decade of my saying the key thing wrong with the demon eyes campaign was that the slogan ought to have been: ‘New Labour: Old Danger’ because the electorate should not have the purported newness reinforced, more and more people in the chattering classes seem to be accepting that there is a danger. Even such fringe lefty agitators as Clifford Chance LLP have offered severe warnings about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Too late?
The War on Liberty may never end, but it became a general action only in the 90s – just about the time, the Wall being down, and the net routing round borders and censorship, we free-lifers had begun to feel we were winning. Now I find I am doing my bit with NO2ID and we are gearing up for a ten-year campaign. Grand constitutionalist coalitions are being proposed left, right, and centre (which I’m sure are meritorious). The differences between Peter Hitchens and Mark Thomas begin to be indistinguishable when the establishment is of the extreme centre…
What worries me is that this ferment is still superficial, a speck of mould on Mr Blair’s Horlicks. It concerns the tiny minority of the population that reads the serious press, say 10% – and of those only the avid followers of politics, maybe a quarter of that. The readers and writers of blogs are fewer still, and more introrse.
The mass of the population of Britain is nescient, complacent, and has no interest in the abstractions of liberty, or the threats from power assumed only to be threats to others, to bad people. Many people are happy to claim the status of an ‘ordinary’ person, with “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” from officialdom, while being paradoxically susceptible to fears of everything else. Passively concerned with material welfare, security against virtual risks, and gossip, they graze and are milked as the livestock of the state.
This is Foucault’s concept of governmentality in action. Not, pace his fans on the left, a neo-liberal order, but a post-liberal order in which the foundational institutions of liberalism – liberty and individuality, rule of law, the separation of private and public life, a civil society and a political sphere distinct from one another – have ceased to have a meaning for even the bulk of the middle-classes.
Where is the cattle-prod that will change the public mood?
I am just as keen on universal civil liberties as the next Samizdatista, however I must concede that the case of India vis-à-vis the Danish cartoons made me briefly question my blanket commitment to the freedom of the press. I yearn for a major Australian newspaper to have the stones to print these cartoons in self defence and defiance, however I would argue that any editor of an Indian publication who allows them to be published is astonishingly irresponsible, given India’s history and continuing record of bloody communal violence. If these cartoons found their way into a publication with a moderate degree of circulation, the question would not be “will there be deaths?”, but “how many?” Upon reflection, I certainly do not believe that government censorship is the answer, however it is marginally more justifiable there than in any other nation I can think of. Because of this, it is crucial that Indian editors exercise their judgement wisely – and not publish the cartoons. Hopefully there will come a time when India is not the exception (regarding this issue) amongst countries governed by the rule of law.
I should mention that I have huge faith in the wisdom of Indians.
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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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