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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Australian Libertarian blogger Tex waxes lyrical on free markets:
For me, nothing – nothing – in recent years has confirmed my faith in the wonders of markets and competition more than one humble little sector of our economy: the pizza industry.
I’m a pizza addict. Ten years ago, I would have to part with the best part of twenty bucks to get one large pizza delivered. Suppliers in my area were limited and it sometimes arrived cold. When in Sydney a few years ago – in an area not well serviced by the Pizza men – I shelled out nearly fifty bucks for two delivered pizzas + a drink. Nowdays, I can get two large pizzas – easily enough to feed three people – for less than $15. It arrives quickly, is great quality, and there are a far greater variety of pizzas to choose from.
So in ten years, pizza prices have more than halved, the quality has gone up, the delivery times are quicker, and there’s a greater menu to choose from. And it’s 100% the result of competition. As a couple more suppliers moved into the area, the “coupon wars” began. Maybe a couple of coupons per month would arrive in the mail, offering a few bucks off per pizza. Then other companies started to price-match. Nowdays, my letterbox is flooded with pizza coupons, each subsequent one outmatching the last.
As another example of the benefits of free markets, I was in Melbourne on the weekend. Melbourne is justifiably proud of it’s food- I’m not a well travelled man by any means but it does seem to be one of the world’s leading cities for fine dining.
In the restaurant strip in Lygon Street, for example, you will find that the establishments there actually have hired people to stand outside and make offers to passers-by, to entice them in, and in this way you can get yourself, for example, a free bottle of wine. Australians don’t haggle much, but the visitor who has this skill can make good use of it there.
In Melbourne’s Chinatown on Little Bourke Street, the same practice has come into vogue.
This hot-house atmosphere of competition isn’t just a boon from the point of view of the diner’s wallet either. Restaurants don’t just compete on price- they compete on quality as well, and reputation is as important as price in these markets. For they are dealing with a clientele that is, on the whole, very well educated in dining.
And this also encourages risk-taking, to provide new and innovative ways of presenting and preparing food. Bon apetite!
Glenn Reynolds pointed me to this story which should warm the cockles of a libertarian anarchist’s heart. It seems ‘hundreds’ of what I presume were members of the Mahdi’s ‘army’ were held off for hours by eight employees of Blackwater Security Consulting (apparently all ex-Special Forces), four MP’s and a Marine. Company helicopters flew in under fire to pick up the wounded Marine and drop off ammunition supplies.
The DOD Press briefing for the day neglected to mention the government building was privately held.
My friend Bernie emailed me with the link to this short Radio Times film review of The Godfather, shown last night on Channel 5. Spot the anti-capitalist bit.
This crime drama and its 1974 sequel are among American cinema’s finest achievements since the Second World War.
The production problems are well documented — how Paramount wanted a quickie, how Francis Ford Coppola came cheap and how he turned the picture into an epic success, a box-office hit that was also an artistic triumph.
His first masterstroke was casting Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, four relative unknowns and one known risk; his next masterstroke was to keep cool under fire, like Michael Corleone himself, turning Mario Puzo’s pulp novel into art and showing how capitalism and crime go hand in hand.
It’s thrilling, romantic, tense and scary – a five-course meal that leaves you hungry for more.
“… capitalism and crime go hand in hand.” Another of those implied solutions that dare not spell itself out clearly. Wanna get rid of crime? Rub out capitalism. But if thus challenged, the anti-capitalist replies: “but I never said that”. If unchallenged (which is how most readers will get the message), he did say it.
This is why we need our own publications, to edit out sneaky little innuendoes like that, and to insert our own.
It would be truer to say that the legal creation of victimless crimes goes hand in hand with crime, and that the state (a) claiming a universal monopoly in the supply of law and order but then (b) not supplying it anything like universallly goes hand in hand with crime.
Will this get a link from Biased BBC?
Recently a commenter here on Samizdata.net used a term that I think sums up modern regulatory statism in the Western World rather well.
Populist Authoritarianism
Whilst Google shows that the term is not exactly new, it does seem both little used and particularly apt. The banning of smoking on private commercial property seems a classic example of this in action. Let’s start calling a spade a spade and stop letting the statists of all stripes hide behind euphemisms.
Spread the word.
The government talks a lot about ‘investing’ in hospitals and schools. That is why we have to pay extra taxes. We all know that New Labour’s experiment with spending has been a flop, with the improvements to services tiny compared with the increased spending.
One problem is that the cash we think is going to be spent on operations and classrooms gets diverted. Sometimes this is because of excessive bureaucratic layers, like Local Education Authorities. But sometimes it is rather more blatantly wasted.
Like with government attempts to encourage ‘e-society’.
The private sector worldwide has done a really good job at providing opportunities for e-society. Just look at AOL Instant Messenger, webcams, blogs, web site forums, Friendster and Orkut.
But the fact that e-society is so abundantly provided by the private sector has not stopped the UK government thinking it should get involved. Back in the autumn, I got an e-mail from James Crabtree of VoxPolitix asking if I would blog about a new project called MySociety.org, run by his friend Tom Steinberg, a former No. 10 adviser. I have met Crabtree a couple of times and like him, so I thought I should do my bit. I tried for an hour or so to write a blog about this new project, but I just could not. The project was utter crap. And I just could not write anything nice about it with a clear conscience.
Well, that project which I thought was ‘utter crap’ is now being funded by the government. It has just been awarded £250,000 as “part of something called the e-innovations fund, a pot of government cash set aside to stimulate useful and innovative new online projects”.
When I edited pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, our problem was that we could not expect much in the way of immediate distribution. There was no internet in those days, or not that we knew about or could have used. Nor did we have the resources to print our publications and then to market them, and in the meantime store them. So it was that we relied on (a) the photocopier, and on (b) time. If what we said did not instantaneously find a readership, then it would have to get itself around nevertheless, one pamphlet at a time, by its sheer eloquence.
The time angle meant that we needed a different style of writing, a more timeless style, a style that would not date. We had to write in what I now recognise as a French style – more abstract, more theoretical (but free of any technical jargon), not heavy on detailed evidence (because evidence is liable to date) and heavy instead on generalisations with universal (and therefore timeless) appeal.
We were accused of preaching to the converted, and this was true. We were doing that. But preaching to the converted is an important part of any propaganda enterprise. The eloquent statement of that which is good and true, everywhere and at all times, is something to which supporters can rally and declare their agreement. By saying what we believed, we helped to turn what had merely been a silent army of isolated dissenters into an interconnected network of potential activists and organisers and movementeers. And writers, of course.
In short, we wanted people to write more like this:
Law is justice. And it is under the law of justice – under the reign of right; under the influence of liberty, safety, stability, and responsibility – that every person will attain his real worth and the true dignity of his being. It is only under this law of justice that mankind will achieve – slowly, no doubt, but certainly – God’s design for the orderly and peaceful progress of humanity.
→ Continue reading: Frédéric Bastiat looks at the entire world
Brace yourselves for a truly shocking prediction:
Tax rises are inevitable if Labour wins the next election, according to an influential group of economists.
Just think, if it were not for this ‘influential group of economists’ none of us would have had even the merest inkling that increased taxes were even remotely possible.
David produced a useful guide to Tranzian for beginners. I thought it apt to follow with a guide to Cultural Luddism – the language of those who reject modern cosmopolitan capitalism – for those who might otherwise be perplexed at the offerings of this group of pseudo-libertarians. → Continue reading: Cultural Luddism for beginners
Have you thought about learning to speak a foreign language? If so, then why not learn to speak Tranzian? A good grasp of Tranzian will enable you to rub shoulders with bureaucrats, lawyers and Outreach Co-ordinators the world over and conversational fluency is easier than you might think. Tranzian is widely used in travel, business, culture and nagging.
Not only will the ability to speak Tranzian broaden your horizons and help you to make new friends but it will also give you an air of supreme self-righteousness that opens doors and, more importantly, state purse-strings.
So, come on, let us learn to speak Tranzian. Here is Lesson 1:
Violence against women is a “cancer” in every society affecting at least one in three women, human rights body Amnesty International has said.
One in three, two out of every four, over half, the majority. The statistics are hardly worth quibbling about. This is purely an academic exercise and should not be confused with actual facts.
Amnesty’s secretary general Irene Khan urged governments to enforce laws to stop attacks on women and girls.
So, class, we see in this example that there are laws against attacking women but governments cannot be bothered to enforce them. Okay so far?
Female genital mutilation is one of the abuses being targeted by Amnesty.
The organisation says it affects 135 million globally, and these cases, along with so-called honour killings, should be treated as human rights crimes by governments.
So we have ‘female genital mutilation’ which, in English, is called ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ and ‘honour killings’ which, again in English, are pronounced ‘murder’. However both of these English phrases translate into Tranzian as ‘human rights crimes’.
Thus we learn what a useful language is Tranzian. In circumstances where using the plain English terms will cause embarrassment or discomfort, you simply reach for the anodyne Tranzian lexicon of faux-rights to make yourself sound terribly important and caring without actually offending anybody.
Now for Lesson 2 and since you have all been such good and responsive students, I am going to give the answers in advance:
Q: Why is it that governments are not enforcing crimes like murder and rape?
A: Because they are far too busy farting around trying to enforce bogus ‘human rights’.
In just over a week’s time I am to give a talk in Brussels, courtesy of the Centre for the New Europe, on the subject of Why Libertarians Don’t Talk About Culture – And Why They Should.
When you are extremely grand, you let things like this come and go with no comment from you other than the occasional “oh yes, that, yes, I think it’s on the fifteenth, I’m not sure” (it is on the fifteenth), or “oh that, yes, I’d forgotten all about it”. But if you are me, you make the most of these sort of invites. If I don’t tell everyone I am doing this talk, who else will?
Here is the blurb I sent to my hosts about it:
Libertarians don’t believe in either subsidising or censoring cultural activity, so for libertarians it often doesn’t matter what they personally think about any particular cultural object or enterprise. Good or bad, it should neither be encouraged nor prohibited by the political process. So long as you don’t infringe against the rights of others, you can enjoy “culture” any way you like, or in no way at all.
For collectivists on the other hand, the goodness or badness of a particular cultural enterprise is a burning issue, because the collective must decide what sort of culture to encourage or discourage. So, they talk about culture a lot.
The result is that libertarians often appear philistine, shallow and one-dimensional, while collectivists can seem far more cultured and attractive. So, we libertarians ignore culture at our peril.
I have already ruminated on this topic here, in this posting, and the blurb above owes much to those ruminations.
Maybe another reason why libertarians are a little reluctant to talk about culture is that we fear that quarrels about inessentials, like how good the Lord of the Rings really is, are liable to undermine team spirit amongst us to no purpose. That is a mistake, I think, but maybe some libertarians feel that.
I think that the claim in part one of my talk’s title, that libertarians do not talk about culture, may now be becoming obsolete. With the Internet, blogging etc., we libertarians now have a means of chatting away about movies and literature and stuff, in a very congenial and magazine-like setting, yet without all the bother of anyone having to put together an actual magazine – which is a total nightmare compared to running a blog. The reason we used not to talk about culture was simply that it was too difficult. It was all we could manage to bang away with our core agenda. Now, simply, we can do culture talk, and we do.
Well, those are my thoughts so far. Does anyone here have anything else to say about all this? I would really welcome the input.
UPDATE: This very recent comment on this posting might have something to do with why libertarians don’t discuss cultural themes. When they do, they get denounced by people saying things like this:
What does this have to do with libertarianism? I come to this blog to read libertarian views and issues, not artistic commentary.
This, to me, is a perfect example of a libertarian (if that is what Telemachus is) being boring and philistine.
Amidst all the partying I did in Brussels last weekend, I somehow managed to find the time to actually learn a thing or two.
The first thing I learned was not everyone takes the Euro terribly seriously (while fiddling around for correct change to pay for a taxi, I let the words ‘Mickey Mouse money’ slip from my mouth whereupon the taxi driver began laughing and said “oui, Monsieur, oui”).
Secondly, and rather less anecdotally, I also learned of something called the Stockholm Network. Before last weekend I had no idea that this organisation even existed and, in this case, ignorance was not bliss.
I think it fair to say that there is a widespread impression in the Anglosphere (especially the American bit) that the continent of Europe has fallen under the unbreakable spell of the Grand Wizards of Schtoopidity. Sadly, this is mostly true. But it is not completely true and the difference between ‘mostly’ and ‘completely’ can be found at the website of the Stockholm Network.
Billing themselves as ‘Europe’s only dedicated service organisation for market-oriented think tanks and thinkers’, the website is contains a treasure trove of links to well-organised, well-funded and highly active free-market and libertarian think-tanks and organisation in Britain, Ireland, Albania, Finland, Turkey, Macedonia, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Serbia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Spain, Russia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Rumania, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere.
The idiots and the kleptocrats may be running the show for now but, pleasingly, there are pockets of determined guerilla resistance. Even more pleasingly, these pockets seem to be growing in number.
And that is all I am going to say on the matter. Otherwise there is a danger that I might start sounding optimistic and, as everybody knows, that is strictly against my religion.
I have lately been reading a book of essays and review articles by Richard Dawkins, and mostly I agree with him, about most things. However, in his Foreward to a book called Pyramids of Life, which he here entitles “Ecology of Genes”, he indulges in an aside on the subject of the free market (p. 266 of my Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003 paperback edition):
As Adam Smith understood long ago, an illusion of harmony and real efficiency will emerge in an economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level.
Dawkins is not here making a point about the free market. He is merely seeking to punch home a point about how ecological systems are not designed, but instead merely present the illusion of having been designed, in rather the same way that individual species also appear to be designed, but also are not. In truth, species evolve blindly, with no designing intelligence determining their shape, and ecologies are but aggregates of species. It gets a bit more complicated by the end of the piece, because actually species do somewhat resemble ecologies, in that they too are coexisting aggregates of mutually sustaining genes. I may have explained that slightly wrongly, but in any case, my point here is not what Dawkins says about what he is really writing about and really knows about.
No. I am interested in what Dawkins says in that little dig at the free market (the “economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level”). Illusion of harmony? Adam Smith said a great deal more than that. The free market does not just look harmonious and efficient, Smith said. It is harmonious and efficient. This is no mere illusion. → Continue reading: A surprising aside by Richard Dawkins about the free market
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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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