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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Two decades ago I used to love arguing about the rights and wrongs of capitalism, socialism, social democracy, collectivism, communism, etc. Now, I don’t have the adrenalin for it. Now I prefer to offer observations, big or small, and let others fight about them while I cook up my next observations. Thank God (by which I of course mean Perry de Havilland and his editorial confreres – thank goodness might be a better way of putting it) for Samizdata.net, because here I can do just that.
But if you want a good old libertarians-versus-collectivists row to join in on, this Chris Bertram post together with all the comments it has provoked could be just your ticket.
Chris Bertram says this about the Morecambe tragedy in which nineteen Chinese cockle pickers perished:
But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.
Bertram’s piece is a classic example of what one might term Implied Collectivism. Capitalism, says Bertram, regularly causes violent deaths. The clear implication is that therefore “capitalism” needs in some way to be severely hobbled, if not done away with altogether, and that if that happened, poverty would likewise be diminished or even done away with too. But he doesn’t dare come out flat with the claim that capitalism ought to be cut back, still less got rid of, on poverty relief grounds, because that would be too daft. He doesn’t even think this, because he does have more than a trace of intellectual efficacy and moral sanity in that befuddled head of his. Nevertheless he allows the implication to float in the air, because he wants it to be true, or seems to. Not admirable. He ends his piece thus:
But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.
There is as much truth in that bit of writing as in any where the words “root” and “cause” are to be found next to each other and in that order, but so what? Why blame “capitalism” for that? This is like blaming oxygen for forest fires.
And if poor people are to cease to be poor, what they need is more capitalism, different bits of capitalism to choose between, not less of it. If those wretched cockle pickers had had more and consequently better choices, they might not have chosen the risk of drowning for the sake of £1 a day. And … oh, but I’ve said all this, argued all that. → Continue reading: An argument about the root cause of poverty
One of the most appealing aspects of a libertarian outlook is simplicity. It is often the case that when one examines, in greater depth, what initially appears to be a libertarian conundrum, it proves not to be. One such faux-dilemma, suggested to me by Alan K. Henderson’s comments to Andy’s post below, is the extent to which liberty can be threatened by non-state interests.
This can be the basis for populist political crusades against “Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, even “Big Food”. The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of “real competition”: to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced “tolerance” of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.
A similar dilemma is suggested by considering the plight of those in Northern Ireland who have fallen foul of paramilitaries. It matters little to a person tortured or exiled on threat of death whether his tormentors are acting for the state or a paramilitary group, Yet so-called human rights bodies such as Amnesty International, pay little attention to the human rights of such individuals, reserving their comments for infringements by state forces. Glenn Reynolds struck a chord when he cheered David Trimble for pointing this out. Needless to say this did not go down too well with some of the socialists and nationalists who comment at Slugger O’Toole. The conundrum is that surely a libertarian can agree with Amnesty’s justification: It is proper to be more concerned by state abuses than actions by private agents.
In examining this “conundrum” it also evaporates but leads to a surprising, counter-intuitive insight. In the segregated, working class urban ‘bantustans’ of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries are in a position to exert punishment and enforce exiles because they have been ceded a monopoly of violence. By the state. Local hostility to police forces means they are reluctant to carry out normal policing and individuals are prevented from defending themselves. This gives the paramilitaries a free run. Though they are nominal antagonists, the IRA effectively operates a monopoly of violence backed by the British state. The plight of its victims should be the proper concern of any agency which professes to uphold human rights.
Perhaps the ‘idiotarian’ opposition to the US is over the top, a bit like suggesting that Pol Pot was better than Richard Nixon because Nixon taxed more people. But I offer three honest reasons (well, one is cowardly) for opposing British military intervention and occupation of Iraq:
- The British armed forces are not properly equipped. I did say so beforehand. Let me be clear: if the cause is just, but the equipment is not ready, kit up first, then go to war.
N.B. This is not an argument against US intervention in Iraq. I note approvingly that in the Second World War, the US federal government starting arming before launching assaults on Axis-occupied territories.
- This one will really not be popular on Samizdata.net… Suppose that it is not possible to defeat Islamic fundamentalism by force of arms – at least as far as the UK is concerned. A final ‘victory’ worldwide that follows half a dozen nuclear terrorist outrages in the UK and a racial war in most of the UK’s towns is not worth it. As far as the UK is concerned, it might be safer to appease and let others do the fighting. I think of Switzerland not declaring war with Germany over the treament of the Jews in 1941.
- To be a libertarian must include at least some reservations about using other people as ends for one’s own purpose. I do not have the right to force one person (A) to do something to another (B) that I think is moral, but that (A) did not wish to do, even though (B) may deserve it. This means among other things that I do not have the right to levy money by compulsory taxes in Yorkshire, to pay for my pet social-engineering experiments in Basra. I should add that the argument against compulsory aid for the disabled is the same.
In effect a libertarian who says it is fine to use tax-funded resources to liberate Bagdad from tyranny and economic ruin, and argue that it is not alright to use a fraction of the money to liberate a paraplegic from economic disadvantage, could be said to be inconsistent.
Failing to recognise the points I list above could lead to the following sorts of problems:
- A British soldier killed because he lent his body armour to a colleague. This sort of thing happened in the Crimean War with coats, right boots, blankets etc. In Kuwait the British troops got the nickname ‘the Borrowers’ from the US troops. I imagine that the French troops in the Crimean saw their British colleagues in much the same way.
- Consider this scenario: by the end of the ‘war on terrorism’ in 2015, France has not had a single nuclear terrorist strike, the US has had 20, the UK has had six and Spain, Italy and Poland one apiece. Who’s the idiot?
- In 2010 President of the EU Blair announces a “libertarian” programme of the Peace Corps: all 18 year olds will serve in a peace-keeping unit to promote the values of freedom around the world. The move is popular as it cuts youth unemployment in the EU from 45% to 40% and crime.
I repeat: removing Saddam Hussein is great. So why worry about all the lies or mistaken intelligence? It matters because we may be asked to believe another set of pretexts. It would be nice if the next lot were a bit more coherent and plausible. Of course it will be harder to persuade many people who swallowed the “45 minute” threat line of Tony Blair’s. Refusing to support a war just because Tony Blair says it is right does not make someone an idiot.
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frédéric Bastiat
RyanAir has just lost a legal dispute with Bob Ross, a customer of the airline who suffers from cerebral palsy, due to the fact the airline did not supply him with a wheelchair for use within the airport at RyanAir’s own expense. The low cost air carrier was ordered to stop charging disabled passengers £18 ($33) for the use of wheelchairs the airline provided at Stansted airport as this was deemed to be in violation of the Disability Discrimination Act.
[The Judge ruled] the airline should pay £1,000 compensation for injured feelings to Bob Ross, a cerebral palsy sufferer, who brought the case after having to pay for a wheelchair to take him the half-mile from Stansted check-in to the aircraft two years ago.
[…]
The Disability Rights Commission, which supported Mr Ross’s case, praised the judgment for recognising that Ryanair’s policy was a “slap in the face” for disabled people wanting to take advantage of low-cost flights. Bert Massie, the commission chairman, added: “It beggars belief that a company that made £165 million profit last year should quibble over the cost of a wheelchair.”
So what we are being told here is that because the unfortunate Mr. Ross has a terrible affliction, he can forcibly impose his costs on others who do not wish to bear them. In a civilized society, a civil society, people should feel that it is right and appropriate to assist those who are disabled. Enlightened businesses should seeks to cater to those with special mobility or other needs and it is right that social opprobrium be heaped on those who decline to do so. Yet Mr. Ross did not seek social opprobrium for RyanAir but rather the forcible appropriation of its resources.
Yet why does a disability give anyone, no matter what unfair cards fate has dealt them, even a terrible affliction such as cerebral palsy, the right to legitimately help themselves to other people’s money by force? Whilst I think RyanAir’s policy of applying these charges was perhaps unenlightened (and certainly bad P.R.) to ‘quibble’ over the costs of a wheelchair, I fail to see by what right Mr. Ross is owed by force backed obligation a special charge on the resources of a company he elects to do business with.
As the regulatory state, and those who make their living from it, work to replace more and more social exchange between people with mandated politically derived behavioural formulae, less and less people (and the companies run by people) will seek to do ‘the right thing’ from any sense what is reasonable and decent, and instead will merely do what is mandated by political processes. When people like George Monbiot and Peter Hain describe their visions of a total political ‘society’ (which is to say the replacement of social interaction by political interaction… the replacement of society with state), Mr. Ross is an exemplary product of that world view.
Of course to some it would seem any criticism of a wheelchair bound person suffering with cerebral palsy is beyond the pale. But I prefer to think of Mr. Ross as a human with the same rights as myself, but not more just because he has less mobility. Yet it seems this man has not just the right to impose his needs on others but to say otherwise means the state will force you to compensate him to the tune of £1000 for hurting his feelings. I wonder when the Disability Rights Commission will take this to its logical conclusion and start going after people such as myself for airing such heretical views if they hurt the feelings of those who want to impose their needs on others?
In 1998 the Human Rights Act swept in on a bow wave of heady expectation. It was the dawn of a new era and the end of the dark ages. Britain was, at long last, a properly civilised country where everyone was going to have tons and oodles of rights for everything they could possibly want and anything they could possibly imagine and the whole thing was to be busily administered by an army of publicly-funded lawyers and functionaries. The Human Rights Act was heralded was the modern Social Democrat version of the Magna Carta.
This was the pot of gold at the end of the Entitlements Rainbow; the sweet reward for decades of interminable squawking, marching, banner-waving and shouting the word ‘fascist’.
Courtrooms would now become shopping malls where anyone can just swan in, pick up some rights (in size and colour to suit) and leave with bags full of them, gift-wrapped.
I took a rather different view. My appraisal of the Human Rights Act was that it was a pernicious harbinger of Swiftian stupidities and a cornerstone of a permanent nanny-state. Nothing since has given me the slightest cause to review my initial opinion, indeed, it has only been reinforced. But, interestingly, it appears to be dawning on some of the dewey-eyed believers that this is not the New Jerusalem they were expecting:
I am not the only one who worried that the introduction of the Human Rights Act might backfire on those of us who worry about little things like rape, murder, child abuse and prostitution. Certainly some of the fears many feminists had about fancy lawyers defending all sorts of scum in the name of “rights” proved well founded. HRA cases have included the right of a man accused of rape to hear details of a complainant’s sexual history for the benefit of his defence and – turned down only after serious deliberation – serial killer Dennis Nielsen to be allowed gay pornography in prison, based on the argument that heterosexual serial killers are allowed theirs.
In countries in which real human rights violations blight the lives of millions, there is confusion about why we westerners are using the act to argue, for example, that a man has the right to sunbathe naked in his own garden. Is that really the best we can do?
Cry me a river.
If I had my way, the wretched Human Rights Act would be repealed and every copy in the land would be fed into an industrial shredder.
I took this photograph of a street in North London earlier this evening (with a camera-phone, hence the poor resolution).
The snow that the weather forecasters have been threatening us with for the past week or so has finally swooped down with a vengeance (well, by London standards anyway).
But as I gazed out of window at the swirling storm, I was struck by an interesting idea. You see, due to my meticulous and detailed observations over many years, I have concluded that snow seems to occur during periods of very cold weather. And, by coincidence, these periods of very cold weather are also marked by a dramatic decline in the number of lurid ‘global warming’ stories appearing in the British press.
Conversely, during periods of very hot weather said ‘global warming’ stories make a sudden and almost miraculous re-appearance.
Are these two phenomena linked in some way? Is this a clue to the existence of as yet unseen and mysterious forces that science has, hitherto, been wholly unaware of? I shall continue with my research in the hope that more will be revealed.
One of the most welcome commenters in my part of the blogosphere, including here of course, is Mark Holland. So it was a great pleasure to learn, some few weeks ago, that he now has his own blog, called Blognor Regis, which is the name of a famous English seaside town plus an L. Take a look. What can you lose?
It definitely is a libertarian blog, let there be no doubt about that. When he mentions car tax, for instance, he says there ought not to be any. But when I went looking for further items of libertarian holy writ that has not yet sunk into the archives I found almost nothing else that was really hard core. He does not hit you over the head every day with his libertarianism, in other words.
Nor does Richard Garner’s new blog, which I heard about by reading Blognor Regis, but that is because Richard seems to post less frequently than Mark Holland does. Otherwise, Richard Garner’s Thoroughly Enthralling Weblog could hardly be more different. This is a blog with long quotes (scroll down to “EDUCATION (HEALTH CARE, FOOD, ADEQUATE HOUSING… ADD GOOD OR SERVICE AS YOU FEEL APPROPRIATE – IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT” – January 25 – blogger archiving …) from hard core libertarian luminaries, world famous and not so world famous. Hairs are split. Doctrinal purities are distilled still more. Libertarian colours are nailed to the mast and carried into battle. Peace movement people (“PEACE AND THE STATE” – also Jan 25), for instance, are politely and patiently told why, if they believe some of their more benign slogans, they ought to follow the logic of them a little further and be libertarians rather than statists.
This is the kind of thing I used to do but – and I intend no disrespect here – have now lost the taste for. Like playing international rugby or going out on all night drinking sprees, debating the ins and outs of libertarianism and libertarian doctrine, against anti-libertarians and with fellow libertarians is, I feel, a young man’s game, and yes I think I do mean man. And as I enter my old woman phase of life, I find myself less inclined towards it, in writing at any rate. (I just did a spot on Radio Humberside about the merits of privately owned public space, and I suddenly sounded to myself about a quarter of a century younger. I sounded, that is to say, like Richard Garner.)
In pre-Internet days, both of these gentlemen would either would have become regular contributors to the Libertarian Alliance or to something like it, or they would have been frustrated at not being able to do that because it was too much of a bother, what with them having to worry about whether someone like me would like their stuff enough to publish it. Now they can just blog. Beautiful. For both, I am sure that this is a huge liberation.
Such blogs as these may or may not immediately set the world alight, but they, and other blogs like them, are part of an immensely important process, and a huge step forward for the libertarian movement.
There are two important things about libertarian publishing, one of which is very widely understood by libertarians, and the other of which often has to be explained to libertarians in tortuous detail. → Continue reading: Two new libertarian blogs
Earlier this evening the launch was held at the Institute of Economic Affairs of Dennis O’Keeffe’s translation of Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, which is published by Liberty Fund Inc. Dennis is to be congratulated for this mighty undertaking, which is bound to reverberate through the Anglosphere in the months and years to come.
At the IEA, Dennis spoke only briefly. Rather than regale us at length with his own views of Benjamin Constant, he let the man speak to us for himself. We were offered the following few Constant quotations. Dennis commented hardly at all other than to note how much sense they still made of the people and events of our own time:
How bizarre that those who called themselves ardent friends of freedom have worked so relentlessly to destroy the natural basis of patriotism, to replace it with a false passion for an abstract being, for a general idea deprived of everything which strikes the imagination or speaks to memory. (p.326)
People always take mediocrity as peaceful. It is peaceful only when it is locked up. When chance invests it with power, it is a thousand times more incalculable in its motion, more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive than talent,… (pp. 329-40)
This next one, said Dennis, could – its extreme eloquence aside – have as easily been said by the most committed twenty first century libertarian:
… society has no right to be unjust to a single one of its members, … the whole society minus one, is not authorised to obstruct the latter in his opinions, nor in those actions which are not harmful, in the use of his property or the exercise of his labour, save in those cases where that use or that exercise would obstruct another individual possessing the same rights. (p. 384)
The final one, said Dennis, he could not supply a page number for, despite a lot of searching. It had just stuck in his mind.
If human nature is a good argument against freedom, it is an even better one against despotism.
I am ashamed to admit that until now, for me, Benjamin Constant has only been a name. Not any more. I bought the book, and I recommend you do too if you are at all interested in the history of liberty and of the idea of liberty.
UPDATE: Here is what Benjamin Constant looked like.
Ron Crickenberger, a well known libertarian activist of several decades standing, passed away overnight.
He is survived by his partner Noelle Stettner, two children, and one grandchild.
The movement will miss him.
If you knew Ron, please add your remembrance to our comments section.
Peter Briffa catches Polly Toynbee talking sense:
The middle classes, who benefit most, might have preferred an earmarked income tax rise to extra university fees.
The government replies that 80% of taxpayers never went to university, so why should they pay too? Besides, if taxes rose, there are better spending priorities. Why should the 50% with too few opportunities fork out for the lucky ones? That’s very nearly a good enough answer – but it raises key questions, too.
For that is not social democratic thinking: on that basis, why should those without children pay for schools? Or those without cars pay for roads? Or the great majority who never use trains pay for the 4% who commute by rail? Or those outside London contribute �1bn a year to the tube? Or southerners pay for the Angel of the North, while ballet-haters pay for Covent Garden? And why should the majority pay for social housing or tax credits they will never use?
Once you start to question who should pay for what, the idea of national collective provision crumbles. Where is the line in the sand? Where does it stop? Is there really something about universities that is clearly, qualitatively different to any of the above? You might just argue that there is a stronger personal financial gain to be had from a degree which justifies a personal contribution. But the same case might be made for why the suburban commuter should pay the full cost of his train, paying for his pleasure at living somewhere salubrious. �
Very good! PT of course intends that all these very good questions should be answered with:yes. Yes, southerners should pay for the northern angel, yes ballet-haters should pay for ballet, etc. And yes, higher education despisers should pay for other people’s higher education. But for once, I like the cut of her jib. Asks Briffa mischievously: Is the penny finally dropping for La Toynbee? No of course not. She is incorrigible. But might not some of her readers find their brain cells being prodded into unfamiliar directions by all this flagrant logic.
This spasm of Toybee sanity reminds me of when people say that I should oppose some little government tyranny not for being tyrannical (that being perhaps too difficult or unpopular to do effectively), but for being inconsistent with some other not-so-tyrannical arrangement. Beware of asking for consistency in such circumstances, I reply, you just might get it, in the form of consistent tyranny. Toynbee starts by arguing for consistency and immediately finds herself sounding for the duration of her point like the purest sort of libertarian.
Heh.
Natalie Solent links to this posting at Thought Mesh, about the realities of regulation. Thought Mesh seems to be US based, but the message is universal:
As you may know, I work in network security management. I’ve been off at a summit discussing the future of the product. While listening to our chief marketing guy talk about future requirements, he said something I found astounding. Paraphrasing, the gist was that our corporate customers cannot comply with their reporting and auditing requirements. There are so many and they are so detailed that compliance is apparently no longer possible. The point for us is that any auditing done by our software should be designed with this fact in mind and so, rather than verifying compliance should be able to document the level of failure to comply.
Further, it seems that this situation is known to the regulating agencies and the requirement is now not actual compliance, but “improvement” over time (which is where our reports can contribute). It’s the “no child left behind” theory of corporate regulation. One is left to wonder if we shouldn’t be trying for a set of regulations that is actually possible to obey. The answer, of course, is that it’s best for the regulators if everyone is guilty of something. Then when bad things happen, there is a nice selection of the usual suspects to pin the blame on, all of them disarmed because they are in violation of some regulation.
In another sense, it’s cargo cult regulation. Some good company is observed to perform some action. Therefore if every company is required to do that, they will be good companies. In fact, this kind of regulatory environment, with endless obscure rules and universal compliance failure, is perfect for the sophisticated con men. Not only does it provide a thicket of procedures to hide in, but it distracts everyone into watching the forms without time to worry about the results. All that good corporate governance in Europe let Parmalat get by with shady accounting longer than any American company. It seems like there’s a lesson there somewhere.
And here are the first two comments about this at Thought Mesh. This from “anon” (no wonder!):
“our corporate customers cannot comply with their reporting and auditing requirements.”
This is so true.
I work in networks too, and every year I get sent a questionnaire by central auditing. It always contains a question like “Do you regularly monitor your audit logs to search for [some bad event or other]?”
If you answer No (being truthful) and go on to explain why it is impossible – like for instance, the log is a squillion pages long, unsearchable free-form text, and doesn’t log [super-bad event] anyway – then they nag you to death demanding to know when you are going to start, never mind that it’s impossible etc etc.
Whereas if you answer Yes (lying) you never hear any more about it.
So guess which answer they get?
What purpose is served by this? The one you mention, I imagine – if anything goes wrong I can be screwed. Well, I will be anyway, so who cares.
And this from vbc:
You say that it seems like there is a lesson in there somewhere. There is, and it was formulated nicely by the ancient Roman, Cicero:
Excessive law is no law.
Indeed. But not “heh”.
While channel hopping in the early hours of this morning through the unwatched digital end of the British TV spectrum (no doubt that is a technologically impossible thing to do literally but I’m sure you understand), I encountered the beginnings of or an advertisement for (I switched off and am only now remembering it) one of those Kilroy-Silk type programmes in which a sleek self-important talk-leader wanders around among various people desperate to be on television talking about something too interesting and lowbrow to be of interest to the kind of people who watch analogue TV with a number like 1 or 2, such as what it is like to sleep with your nephew or why you want your grandmother to stop getting any more tattoos. This sleek Kilroy-man was called Walsh, I think. (Yes.) And, this time the subject was going to be … and here I confess to forgetting the technical term which the unwatched TV industry has coined for this phenomenon … but it was video/digital/TV cameras for looking up girls’ skirts in public places. Apparently some unfortunate girl had become the victim of one of these freelance soft porn Spielbergs and video of her bottom and underwear was even now circulating on the internet.
I don’t know exactly how the cameras are organised. Perhaps they are placed in the shoes of the filmer. Perhaps they are operated from the basements of sleazy restaurants. A particular unfortunate girl had become more unfortunate in that she had sued her voyeur-tormentors in an American court, and the court had found that although disgusting, the behaviour of the electro-digital-voyeurs was not illegal. So now the unfortunate girl was taking her case to a higher court: unwatched television.
And that was when I switched off, which I now regret. It was the most memorable and interesting thing I saw on the telly yesterday, but I only realised this today.
As I say, I don’t know how the argument then proceeded, although I do know that they had managed to entice or fake up some sleazoids willing to argue in favour of the rights of people to make movies by pointing cheap cameras up girl’s skirts. So presumably there was an argument.
What might I have said if I had found myself in the middle of such an argument? I have no idea, but here are some guesses. → Continue reading: Invisible cameras in the pavement? What is to be done?
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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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