Samizdatista Paul Marks lets rip in the comment section of the new Tory leadership blog at Conservative Home on the topic of that Orwellian doublespeak term ‘social justice’. Check it out.
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Only a wilful fool would dispute that racism moved from being the unremarkable default mainstream view in the western world to being a prejudice which scarcely dare speak its name. I would argue that this did not come about just because a few anti-discrimination laws got passed. A great many things are illegal and yet doing them does not put you ‘beyond the pale’ in polite society. In most circles lighting up a spliff or speeding or paying your builder/nanny/housekeeper in cash are matters of little or no account and few people would think less of you if they discovered you were doing so. Overt racism on the other hand has precisely that effect because regarding that there has been a cultural shift. To be a racist is not just wrong, it makes you a jackass in the eyes of others. Most racists are now more prone to keep their views to themselves, not because someone will call the cops and have them hauled off to a re-education camp, but because they can no longer safely assume others will share their meta-context. And so with that in mind, it may seem trivial to rail against people who display or wear images of Che Guevara but what is at stake is far more than a battle for mere tee-shirt space. The fact that a person wearing a Himmler or Hitler tee-shirt would attract scorn is quite appropriate, and so it is really quite intolerable that fans of the mass murderers of the left get to think images of their favoured mass murdering thug makes them look cool. Why just let that slide? Groups like the ‘animal rights’ activists PETA provide a fairly good example of ‘going to the culture’ with some success at portraying people who wear fur coats as wicked and getting that meme into the zeitgeist fairly effectively at least in the USA and UK (though rather less successfully elsewhere). So do not shrug off efforts to portray people who wear images of communist mass murderers as jackasses rather than ‘cool’ as wasted effort over something something of no account. Little things like this add up and if you believe, as I do, that the single biggest factor determining the triumph or defeat of liberty is a cultural expectation of liberty, then fighting for the cultural issues really does matter. And if the lumpen wearing the Che Guevara tee-shirt does not even know who he was, as will often be the case, then tell him in no uncertain terms so that next time he looks at his pile of shirts, perhaps he will think twice before putting it on and maybe, just maybe, look at other people wearing those vile tee-shirts a bit differently. 
April 20th, 2005 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Get into a discussion with any self-described anarcho-capitalist and it is only a matter of time before you are directed to David Friedman for an answer to the conundrum posed. I have generally considered such appeals to authority as tacit admissions of defeat – if an argument is any good, it ought to be easy to summarise and explain. Conversely, it is often the least defensible arguments which require complex exposition (and by a third party to boot!). I was recently referred to Friedman by Scott Scheule during a discussion at my own blog and promised that Friedman would deal with the thorny question of what differentiates the “Free market protection agencies” predicted by anarcho-capitalists under anarchy from the real world “protection agencies” we observe in conditions approximating anarchy such as mafias and warlords. Friedman sketched out this scenario: → Continue reading: Free market protection agencies and the tragedy of the commons March 29th, 2005 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting article in The American Conservative by Robert Locke called Marxism of the Right, by which he is referring to libertarianism. The ‘money quote’ being:
Like most right-statist (conservative) criticisms of libertarianism, this one fails on several levels. In this article’s mitigation, libertarianism (like conservatism) means different things to different people and so no doubt some self-described or de facto libertarians believe that ‘pure’ selfishness and individualism are all a society needs to function (that said, I reject the implied semantics suggesting that selfishness and altruism are mutually exclusive as I do not accept the Randian definition of altruism that Locke rather amusingly seems to use). Yet most well considered libertarians do not really take such a simple view of things as Locke suggests. He asks libertarians many questions:
Then is it in fact a ‘free society’ to start with? Or is it just ‘less un-free’ that some alternative? More correctly however ‘society’ does not draft its ‘citizens’ (and I prefer the more honest term ‘subjects’), only states do that… and the two are not the same thing at all.
But whose ‘economic freedom’ is really being talked about here? I find it bizarre that in 2005 this argument is still being made about a fungible globally traded commodity.
I would be curious to know if Locke feels that society in the United States was hugely less free before the introduction of educational conscription. I also wonder if he feels that the low quality state education imposed on children in the blearier parts of many large US cities has made those people more free and if so, why?
And yet Japan, a nation of extraordinarily high land prices, manages to create a rail system vastly superior to that in the USA without legal powers of compulsory purchase. There are always alternatives.
But surely here the problem is not the origin of voters but rather unconstrained democracy. This is not an argument for controlling immigration but rather for sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics. → Continue reading: Marxism of the Right? March 8th, 2005 | 248 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here are a couple of recent stories, both recently linked to by Instapundit, that I think deserve to be put next to each other. First, here is a quote I found while rootling about in the McCain/Feingold story, which Dale Amon has already posted about here. Here is the bit that interested me:
This denial is, of course, the result of the exact opposite having been alleged. I read it because one Winfield Myers of the Democracy Project quotes it, and notes that the quotee, a hot shot lawyer, makes very little of his past legal relationship with McCain. Bloggers prefer it when they know where people are coming from. And the second quote, is from a review of a book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
Okay, so what do the tribulations of a seafood importer have to do with the right of bloggers to blog what they damn well please? Well, what interests me is the political process involved in both matters. How the hell do the laws and the processes that got poor Mr McNab nabbed get put in place in the first place? The phrase “not aimed at” is the point of this posting. → Continue reading: “Not aimed at who?”: how distributed governmental stupidity McNabs the innocent March 5th, 2005 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
A week ago I hosted a meeting at my home, and took photos, a couple of which are, I now think on looking through them again, rather good. This one, of Samizdatista Philip Chaston, shows him in full put-that-bloody-camera-away mode:  But I carried on snapping, and also got this rather nice pic, of the speaker that night, Patrick Crozier (left as we look) and of occasional Samizdata commenter on behalf of the Total Libertarian Correctness tendency, Paul Coulam (right – as always):  This photograph is my response to this, which, alas, was then getting into its evil stride. Although, I recently, in a moment of disgusted introspection, found myself understanding where the mania to ban smoking comes from. A friend had asked, yet again, if I minded him smoking in my home. In truth I do mind, but tolerate it from friends. (Non-friends who smoke in my home disgust me.) So the answer is usually, as it was last Friday, okay go ahead. After all, if they want to smoke, I can either cross them off my friend list, or put up with it and stop moaning. Easy. Well, no. What I would like would be some magic procedure which would stop them smoking, so that they could remain on my friend list without any reservations or difficulties or embarrassments or resentments. The thing about laws is that they have little impact on criminals, but they can change the habits of the law abiding. So, if you want some of your friends to behave differently, the law can magically achieve what you alone cannot. I cannot make my smoking friends stop smoking. But the law can! To which my answer, to myself, is: Get thee behind me Satan. I will not support legal coercion merely because it will solve a tricky little problem in my personal life. But to which, alas, the answer of many others is: We want our friends to stop smoking, but we cannot merely say that, and pass the law. So instead we must dress our tastes up in the language of care and concern, and jabber on about health hazards, and best of all about passive smoking. The simple truth is that lots of non-smokers simply do not like it when smokers smoke in their vicinity, or worse, in their homes and workplaces. They do not like it. They want it stopped. Health, for many people is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a mere smokescreen. Personally, I do not give a damn what my friends are doing to their health. That really is their business and not mine at all. The smell of smoking in my flat, for several days afterwards, that is what I wish would go away. No doubt there is some kind of spray on stuff that would help me, but you know how it is. That is just one more stupid thing to have to worry about. How much easier would it be if the law could just put a stop to it! (No! Satan! Go away I say.) The serious point is: if I were to get my smoking ban, what would be next? Digital photography perhaps? Such a ban would surely attract widespread support. March 4th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata has been a bit quiet for the last few months, by its early standards. Partly, this has been because a lot of us have become busier, doing our various versions of real life. But partly, I suspect, it is because the big story out there during the last few months, the onward march of democracy in the Middle East, first in the form of the Iraq election, and then in the form of the demands for more democracy stirred up by the example of the Iraq election, has been somewhat of an embarrassment to us Samizdatistas. While Instapundit and his many linkees have exulted, only the occasional grudging posting here, to the effect that democracy is a step in roughly the right direction, has broken our silence on this subject. The Samizdata view of democracy, most eloquently expressed by Perry de Havilland, is that democracy is one thing, and freedom is quite another. Freedom is freedom. And democracy means the mob doing whatever the hell it likes, which may be freedom but which is just as likely to be tyranny. Few now talk this way. Nowadays, the tendency is to regard freedom and democracy as so closely related to one another as to amount to a new noun and a single thing: freedomandemocracy. Freedomandemocracy has been the great ideological winner of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, conservatives and old-school liberals were still to be heard denouncing freedomandemocracy as mob rule, Perry de Havilland style. Then, other isms arose, full of the certainty that their preferred revolutionary and/or national (mix to taste) elite knew best and that freedomandemocracy was doomed, by its incoherence, moral mediocrity, lack of national team spirit, and general shabbiness, feebleness and decadence. But as the twentieth century rolled onwards, freedomandemocracy proved surprisingly resilient, and it was the isms that proved shabby and decadent, and morally far worse than mediocre. And freedomandemocracy now marches onwards into the new century, ready to chalk up yet more triumphs, leaving the old isms behind … … to face new isms, in the Middle East. So now, freedomandemocracy, under the canny leadership of President George W. Bush, is busy threatening to knock over more dominoes. Why does democracy work so well? And why do people insist on lumping it together with freedom? In this posting, I will try to expand on ideas which I have already touched upon in a previous posting here. I am not, in this posting – together with any on freedomandemoracy that may follow (I promise nothing), aiming at most people, because most people do not need to be sold on democracy, or on why it feels so much like freedom. This posting is aimed at people who, like me, have embraced libertarian political axioms, to the point where we have become so acutely aware of the differences between freedom and democracy that we prefer to speak of freedom versus democracy. We need to know why and how democracy is proving to be such a formidable enemy of our ideas, and in what way it is also a formidable ally. Because my point here is: those most people have a point, in fact lots of points. Freedom and democracy do overlap in lots of ways, which I will now try to start itemising. The first and greatest argument in favour of the connection between freedom and democracy is that democracy is preferable to civil war, and that civil war is extremely bad for freedom. → Continue reading: Freedomandemocracy: on how democracy is better than civil war and on why the next election must not be cancelled March 3rd, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even if we take only two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, this question is complex. If we take the old John Dewey definition of liberty (at least the definition of liberty that John Dewey tended to use in his youth – as he got older he became a more interesting man), the answer is ‘right now’. Never before have average incomes been higher, most people can buy more things (and so on) than people could in the past. However, for those of us who reject the Pragmatist soft-left FDR ‘freedom from want’ definition of liberty or freedom (no, I am not going to go into possible differences between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’) more thinking is required. First the United States. Slavery may be against natural law (if there is such a thing) as even the Romans accepted (although slavery was not against ‘the law of all nations’ or Roman law itself), and it may be (as authorities for centuries have claimed – for an American example see Salmon P. Chase) against the principles of the English Common Law, but it certainly was not against the statute law of many States. So if we define (as libertarians do) liberty as the non-violation of a person or their goods by another person or group of persons (‘the nonaggression principle’) then the United States was more of a free country after the slaves were freed than before. So the United States after 1865 (not in the first years of the Republic) is at its most free. Government taxes and regulations actually decline after the Civil War (or War between the States, or War of Northern Aggression – or whatever you want to call it), and statism does not seem to rise again till after the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1887 (it is pity that a good free market man like Grover Cleveland was responsible for that – but he thought of himself as using federal regulation to ward off worse regulation by individual States, a rather Madison style move that did not work out well in the end). Oddly enough the Jim Crow laws in the South were not fully underway by the mid 1880’s either (although they were on the cards – it depends which State one is talking about). So the early 1880’s would seem (for all their faults) were about the peak of liberty for the nation as a whole. The trade tax (or ‘tariff’ if you prefer) was increased in 1890 and ‘antitrust’ came in the same year, and Jim Crow got worse and worse. → Continue reading: When was liberty at its peak? January 16th, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Maybe I am making too much of this, but see what you think. This is the blurb, from a leaflet that fell out of the latest edition of the Radio Times (so no link), for a movie that has just come out on DVD about the musician Ray Charles:
The bit I object to is where it says that Ray Charles was “dogged by drug problems”. I do not know the exact circumstance in which Ray Charles turned to drugs and do not know to what degree he is to be blamed for his drug problems, but one thing is surely true, namely that these problems were set in motion by things which he himself did, and by choices which he himself made. Yet the blurb writer (who I do think is blameworthy) makes these “problems” read like entirely separate creatures who sneaked up behind Ray Charles and mugged him, without him doing anything to provoke them at all. To use the phrase “dogged by drug problems” to describe Charles’ drug misfortunes is to imply that these misfortunes were not in any way self-inflicted. It is to switch from the active to the passive, from responsibility for action, to excuse. At least those “complications” that arose from his affairs are described as arising from his affairs, rather than just from thin air. And of course Ray Charles gets all the credit that he surely deserves for forging (in a good way) his career, for fusing this music with that (ditto), and for overcoming early (and horrendous) setbacks. So why the “dogged by drug problems” stuff? Why not “problems caused by his drug-taking”? You hear this kind of language – the passive evasive tense, and the relabeling of forces actually set in motion by the victim of them, into external life forces with minds of their own – a lot. (I recall this man referring to such language a lot – link anyone?) And this matters, because if individuals are not going to be described as at all to blame for what are actually their – at least partly – self-inflicted misfortunes, it is all too likely that someone else – someone who at worst only contributed somewhat to these problems – will be held entirely responsible for them. Which is unjust. When things are said badly, they are liable to be done badly. January 5th, 2005 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was listening to Frou Frou‘s cover of ‘Holding out for a hero’, I could not but help think of British politics. Here’s part of the song, and the sentiment is what I think many Samizdata readers will feel, especially following of the Tory leadership’s shameful and unprincipled support of identity cards:
December 21st, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
It was a peculiar juxtaposition of programmes. First I watched the latest episode of Spooks, on BBC1 TV, and then I watched the BBC Ten O’Clock News, without pushing any buttons on the TV because that was on BBC1 TV also. The News was dominated by David Blunkett‘s difficulties, largely self-inflicted, it would appear. There will be an independent inquiry into whether Blunkett fast-tracked a visa application for his ex-lover’s nanny, and the Prime Minister announced that he was confident of the outcome, which was an odd combination of circumstances. If the Prime Minister is so sure, why the independent inquiry? Why can he simply not say why he is so sure of the impeccability of his Home Secretary? And as another talking head opined, it would now take a brave independent inquirer to fly so completely in the face of Blair’s clear statement of what he wants the answer to be. Which means that if the independent inquiry does endorse the Prime Minister’s view, the suspicion will remain that this was because of the Prime Minister publicly demanding that answer instead of because the answer is true. So whichever way the independent inquiry goes, the stink will either be strong, or strong. Spooks (a programme I have had cause to mention here before) was a even more lurid soap opera than usual – of junior Ministerial wrongdoing (he murders a girl, then resigns to spend more time with his family (sound familiar?)), of a famed rock and roll couple (she has her baby kidnapped to keep them in the news, but it goes wrong, the baby dies, and he finally murders her in a rage and then shoots himself). Downing Street was presented throughout as relentlessly manipulating a deranged state of public sentimentality (not least in calling in the Spooks to sort the matter in the first place, instead of leaving it to the Police), as in the grip of electoral desperation, as total hypocritical, and generally as a huge cover-up machine. If this show is any clue as to the state of public opinion, out there in Middle England, we have our answer to that question about why the Prime Minister does not want to explain why he believes his Home Secretary to be innocent of all wrongdoing. Middle England would not trust such pronouncements further than it could spit them. The Prime Minister is not trusted. → Continue reading: Public life, private life and public trust – reflections on two consecutive TV programmes November 29th, 2004 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In this posting earlier today, Jonathan mentions how The Incredibles includes some “clever and sly digs at America’s litigation culture”. So here is another clever and sly dig at Britain’s fast expanding litigation culture:  With thanks to b3ta.com. Did you join an army, and then get hurt in a battle? Sue your commanding officers for forgetting to warn you that war is sometimes violent. Did you fall over, because of running too fast? Sue the owner of the floor you fell on, the person who employed the person who spilt some water on it and made it slippery, the maker of your shoes for not making them with more grip, the maker of the floor tiles, but: on no account blame yourself, for being careless. Your life is not your fault. It is the fault of somebody else, somebody rich. And if you were engaged in robbing the place at the time, never mind: this makes no difference! November 28th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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