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I am glad that Brian has invited readers of his article below to veer off into unrelated realms because I intend to do exactly that. Of course, I would have done so anyway but I feel better for having had Brian’s blessing.
Though this post has been sparked off by Brian’s musings, it has nothing to do with Islam. Rather I have homed in on one particular phrase which Brian has used in his post and which has been repeated ad nauseum by others. Namely:
War is the health of the state
If free-market axioms were trees then that one would be a mighty oak. Among libertarians it is an unquestioned and proven truism. An article of faith. The nearest thing we have to a party line.
However, it is a line from which I dissent. Not because I regard the process of war with any favour but rather because, like Brian, I dislike untruth and while the declaration that war is the health of the state may be comfortingly self-righteous and gallery-friendly, it is not true. → Continue reading: War is not the health of the state
I have no time to expand, because I’m about to go out and about for the rest of the day, but just to say that this, by Julia Magnet for City Journal, is a terrific piece, about the great American movie maker (and about to be novelist, I read somewhere on my googlings for this) Whit Stillman. I adore his movies, especially Metropolitan, but the other two also. (Too bad they are still not yet available on DVD.)
Incidentally, my tastes in Stillman are shared in my corner of the blogosphere. See Patrick Crozier, and Stephen Pollard, who also links admiringly to the Magnet piece.
I won’t comment at length about Stillman, but I will just rattle off a few thoughts about why a devout libertarian like me adores the work of a deeply conservative critic of recent non-judgemental, post-modern, sexually liberated trends in bourgeois behaviour and thinking.
I am conservative in my tastes, in art, etiquette, manners (at least in aspiration), morals (ditto), drug use (for real – I never inhaled because I never touched it – too scary – the case for legalising drugs cannot be that they are harmless). It is merely that I am profoundly anti-conservative in politics, if by this is meant the imposition of my – superior and judgemental – tastes and opinions upon others. Political compulsion corrupts, and should always be regarded with suspicion, especially when what is being compelled is – to start with – genuinely virtuous and admirable. Why? Because then that which is genuinely virtuous and admirable will be corrupted, which is clearly far worse then when something silly and meretricious and wrong-headed is imposed, and corrupted. (That imposing something silly will probably do more immediate harm is true, but that is a different kind of argument to the one I just made.)
I believe that a Stillmanian attitude to social life will eventually win through in the free market of ideas and of institutions. I don’t believe that it has any chance in a world of politically imposed good manners.
That is the kind of conservative I am and the kind of libertarian I am. If libertarianism means assembling a panty collection from one’s sexual conquests and boasting about it, or in saying the first thoughtless thing that comes into your head no matter how hurtful, or in abandoning one’s children for the sake of personal liberation and pretending that one is doing them a favour, then to hell with libertarianism – that is to say with “libertinism”. It is just that the way to spread ideas like mine is to spread them by following one of them, which is not to force people to do things or think things against their will. It won’t work. Be eloquent. Don’t hit people. Argue with them, politely. Take a stand, but try not to be hurtful. Use words.
To put it another way: freedom creates civil society. Political compulsion destroys it.
Commenters please be kind, this was written in rather a hurry. Postings here have been a little thin lately, and I judged that something hasty, about and provoked by the thoughts and movies of Whit Stillman, would be better than nothing. I hope that at least some of you agree. For the kind of thing I would like to have managed, read the Julia Magnet piece.
My thanks to Tim Evans for drawing it to my attention with an email.
Madsen Pirie has been having bother from his local planning officer:
The house designs were ready for approval, but the planning officer had one last point. Where I had red pantiles there had to be blue slates. I didn’t like blue slates, and felt red clay tiles fitted the design better. No, I was told. Blue slate gives a much better vista with the next house. The next house was some way away, and only from half-way up a tree 500 yards away could one see ‘a vista’ through the obscuring foliage. Furthermore, I added, most of the houses in the village had red pantiles. No, came the reply, blue slate was called for.
I found that the planning officer did not have the power to require blue slate. I wrote back indicating this, and saying that this was a question of taste. Since it was my house and my money, it was going to be my taste. Back came a letter. True, she did not have the power to insist, but she ‘strongly recommended’ blue slate. I wonder how many people even question the powers which government has conferred upon these pocket Hitlers to interfere in such detail in our lives. Had it not been for a chance remark by my builder, I doubt if I would have checked up.
The pernicious aspect of this planning officer’s behaviour was not just that she had the power to insist on all manner of things which she should have had no power to even influence, but that she also used her actual powers to suggest that she possessed other powers as well, which means that in a sense she really does possess these other powers too. Not many people would have been as cussed about his legal rights as Madsen Pirie was. And as Madsen himself asks, how many others even question where the legal line really does lie?
It would be interesting to know if, and if so, just at what stage in all this to-ing-and fro-ing, this lady planner found out who, as it were, she was dealing with.
The point is that having fights with people like this planning officer count twice if you are someone like Madsen Pirie, once for the advantage gained by winning, and then again for the experience that can be talked about, written about, ideologised about, and of course now that there is an Adam Smith Institute Blog, blogged about. Nothing like a good juicy fight with a real live state bureaucrat to enliven a blog devoted to denouncing state bureaucracy, is there? So, you square up to a person like Madsen Pirie, in a matter like this, at your peril.
Lesser personages, on the other hand, are far easier to subject to “recommendations”.
And that’s hardly to mention the powers that this lady does now legally possess, even over the likes of Madsen Pirie, and over anybody else begging for permission to build something on what is supposedly their own property, within her domain.
So, even though Madsen won his particular little pantile battle, this is still a very nasty war and not one that our side is anywhere near to winning.
From Dodgeblogium, to Harry’s Place, to this, from today’s Observer:
Not the least of the casualties of the Iraq war is the death of anti-fascism. Patriots could oppose Bush and Blair by saying that it wasn’t in Britain’s interests to follow America. Liberals could put the UN first and insist that the United States proved its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the court of world opinion. Adherents to both perspectives were free to tell fascism’s victims, ‘We’re sorry to leave you under a tyranny and realise that many more of you will die, but that’s your problem.’
The Left, which has been formally committed to the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom for two centuries, couldn’t bring itself to be as honest. Instead millions abandoned their comrades in Iraq and engaged in mass evasion. If you think that it was asking too much to expect it to listen to people in Iraq when they said there was no other way of ending 35 years of oppression, consider the sequel. Years after the war, the Kurdish survivors of genocide and groups from communists through to conventional democrats had the right to expect fraternal support against the insurgency by the remnants of the Baath Party. They are being met with indifference or active hostility because they have committed the unforgivable sin of cooperating with the Americans. For the first time in its history the Left has nothing to say to the victims of fascism.
Or, as I recall Mark Steyn putting it in a recent piece, the left now echoes Cold War anti-Communist and pro-any-other-anti-Communist USA in saying: “Saddam Hussein may be a son-of-a-bitch but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”
“Good evening, this is the news from the BBC, 25th December 2010. Several arrests were made today after a dawn raid on an illegal Christmas celebration in Hertfordshire. Acting on a tip-off, armed officers swooped on the residential premises where they found a secret grotto, a fully-decorated Christmas Tree and up to two dozen suspects unwrapping gifts and singing carols. The police also recovered large quantities of contraband including a plate of mince pies, a string of fairy lights, a whole stuffed turkey and a sackful of toys.
The raid came as a part of ‘Operation Tolerance’ which is designed to curb the alarming spread of Christmas-crimes in the community.”
That’s a joke, right? Ridiculous? Alarmist? Wildly over-the-top? Gross exaggeration? Undue pessimism? Perhaps.
A church has been told that it cannot publicise its Christmas services on a community notice board to avoid offending other religions.
The Church of England may be the established faith of the United Kingdom. But Buckinghamshire county council regards it as a “religious preference group” and the ban was upheld yesterday.
A spokesman for the Tory-controlled council confirmed the distinction, explaining that because the service contained Christian prayers it was against policy.
Margaret Dewar, who is responsible for the council libraries, said: “The aim of the policy is to be inclusive and to respect the religious diversity of Buckinghamshire.”
Peter Mussett, the council’s community development librarian, said his member of staff was right not to display the poster.
“We have a multi-faith community and passions can be inflamed by religious issues,” he said. “We don’t want to cause offence to anyone.”
Well, they managed to offend me.
As Brian Micklethwait recently observed:
When a government starts to slide seriously into the dustbin of history, the very things which it tries to do to halt the slide become part of the slide.
He was referring to Her Majesty’s Government’s rather comical attempt to shore up its plummeting popularity by launching a ‘Big Conversation’ and, for it is worth, I think he is right.
But does this formula have wider applications? If the answer to that question is ‘yes’ then perhaps it can be applied to the democratic process itself:
A public debate on lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 has been called for by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer.
A lower voting age would encourage more young people to become involved in politics, he told the Observer paper.
The Electoral Commission, which advises ministers on how elections can be modernised, began consulting on the voting age in the summer following concern over falling turnouts among young voters.
I can entirely understand why the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 (at present it is 18) should have a certain appeal among the political classes. By every standard that can actually be measured, democratic politics is in steady decline. The membership roles of all main political parties are now so low that corporate donations are the only thing saving them from bankruptcy and voter turnout in elections is dropping year on year.
It is probably to early to pronounce that democracy is in crisis. It is not. Well, not yet. But there is now a sufficiently large block of public indifference to send a shudder down the spines of not just politicians but also the professional classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on state activism.
The threat of a creeping but inexorable loss of legitimacy has prompted calls for ‘something to be done’. In the past few years there has been much chundering about making voting complusory. But the trouble with that is that it may, overnight, turn a large block of public indifference into a large block of civil disobedience and that will only make things worse. So, extending the franchise is probably their safest bet.
I am against it, of course. People of all ages tend to vote for three things: more government, more entitlements and more laws. There is no reason to suppose that younger voters will somehow buck this trend. Nor is this merely my customarily gloomy nature at work, it is an analysis borne out by history. From the 19th Century onwards the growth of the welfare/regulatory state has steadily tacked upwards on the same line that marks the growth of enfranchisement. Since governments must respond to the wishes and aspirations of those that elect them, the former will tend to follow the latter.
But if the voting age is going to be lowered then it will be lowered regardless of whether I approve or not. The real question is whether is will achieve its stated aims. Supporters of the lower voting age are hoping that giving 16 year-olds ther right to vote will enable them to express themselves, ignite their imaginations and re-quicken the democratic process.
Well, who knows? Maybe that will be the case. But it seems to me that the opposite effect is just as likely. Namely, that the steps taken to reverse the slide of democratic legitimacy just become a part of that slide as the teenyvoters stay away in droves, thus converting a nagging concern into a slough of despond.
And where do we go from there? Good question.
Why are governments so deeply concerned to protect us all from pornography? Simple. To protect us from it properly, they have to watch it. Protecting us from savage debt collectors is not nearly so entertaining, so they don’t bother with that, even though the kind of savagery that can involve is much closer to being their real business.
Canadian civil servants have been condemned for inspecting sex shops and adult cinemas while apparently ignoring a flood of consumer complaints.
Ontario’s provincial auditor says the Ministry of Consumer and Business Services officials have carried out almost 1,600 inspections of adult video retail stores after claiming to have received eight complaints – none in writing.
Those inspections involved checking whether the stores had valid licences “and were selling adult videos only with proper stickers indicating their ratings,” the report states.
In the same time there were about 4,000 complaints and inquiries related to debt collectors last year, including 800 written, formal complaints.
Despite the avalanche, it’s claimed the ministry carried out only 10 inspections. Similarly, almost 2,000 complaints about motor vehicle repairs prompted just six inspections.
Assistant provincial auditor Jim McCarter has described the situation as “pretty weird”, saying he wasn’t sure whether inspectors were in fact screening porn. “My understanding is that is not a primary part of their job,” said McCarter
As usual, Dave Barry gets to the stories that matter, and I pick out some of the ones that are serious as well as funny for Samizdata. And he has quite a few of those, let me tell you.
Last night I attended the Adam Smith Institute Christmas Party, and I was once again struck by what seems to me to be a major fact of modern social life, and a major difference between the times we now live in and the times in which people lived in earlier times, say two or three hundred years ago.
Present at the party were some hundred or more people, ranging from posh and clever schoolgirls enticed only a few hours earlier with the promise of free food and a rest from schoolwork, to opposition front benchers, and assorted policy wonks, friends of the ASI of extremely variable wealth, and of course a decent sprinkling of bloggers, ditto. And what I noticed, again, was that when you are in a gathering like this, it is impossible to tell at a glance how grand the person you are talking to is, unless you happen already to know.
Take the nice chap I found myself talking to. Fifty-ish, matching jacket and trousers (that’s pants if you’re American), educated somewhere, you know, good. Pleasant, a job being Something in the City which I didn’t quite hear properly because the din was a bit loud and nuances got lost. And as I said to the man himself in my bonharmonious liven-up-the-party way, I simply had no idea how important a chap he might be. Dressed like that, I said, you could by anything from a wage slave to a billionaire, from a failing journalist to a major media player, from a pathetic wannabe politician to a Bilderberg Commissioner. I wasn’t that eloquent, but that was my point, and he got it well enough and with no offence meant or taken. Indeed, he amplified the point, by saying that me being dressed as I was (vomit coloured corduroy jacket, red cardigan, no tie, black corduroy trousers with safety pins to keep the improvised turn-ups turned up), I too could be anyone or anything. He reminisced about the various ultra-grand personages he had met in his time who dressed in a similarly down-market way.
The big immediately visible social gulf, now, it seems to me, is the one at the lower end of society, between those who are just about clinging on, and those who have fallen off the social edge into the untermenchen class. Dressing as I do, in a socially concerned manner (i.e. badly), I get a lot of attention from the street begging variant of these people, and I can tell at once what sort of person I’m dealing with. I don’t know this person. Certainly not. But I do know exactly which side of the great divide he or she is on, and he or she is on the wrong side of it. Sorry. No. → Continue reading: Where the social gulf is now – thoughts after a Christmas Party – and on long-distance bus travel
To me it is not a new idea, but it is a good idea, the one that says that the rich splash out now for what they think of as luxuries, but that some of these luxuries are actually emerging necessities, which will in due course be available to all at a fraction of the first prices paid by the rich. Sandra Tsing Loh is reviewing a couple of books for The Atlantic on line on these kinds of themes:
To consider “luxury” always a bad thing, Twitchell argues, is simply to ignore history.
“Almost without fail, one generation’s indulgence becomes the next generation’s necessity. Think buttons, window glass, rugs, fermented juice, the color purple, door handles, lace, enamel, candles, pillows, mirrors, combs, umbrellas.”
Well said, Twitchell. Why, yesterday I even bought a comb myself. For 40p. It was a rather ugly brown colour. I would have preferred purple.
Nail clippers and shorts and socks were once a luxury, and don’t forget the least frivolous “indulgence” of all: indoor plumbing. In a way, the rich provide society with a valuable service, because they pay the “high first costs” of emerging technology. “Sure, the ‘upfronters’ get HDTV, digital cameras, laser eye surgery, Palm Pilots … They also get first crack at Edsels, the Betamax, eight-track stereo, and Corfam shoes.”
I’m not sure about Palm Pilots. Aren’t they becoming rather passé, unless you think of them as part of the ongoing attempt to perfect the portable phone? And what are Corfam shoes?
Also: into which box will history put blogging? Is blogging window glass or Betamax, nail clippers or … Corfam shoes?
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the link. For me Arts & Letters Daily used to be a luxury, but it has become a necessity.
I don’t know why I yesterday took a random dip into Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I did, and I came across the following striking passage about the psychologist Victor Frankl. I think it was just coincidence that Frankl got a mention in one of the comments on this, although having chanced upon this passage, maybe that made me really notice it.
Anyway, here it is:
Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.
Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.
His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the “saved” who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.
One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind’s eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.
Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.
In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Franki used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
My emboldenings are Covey’s italics.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I consider those paragraphs to be worthy of the attention of Samizdata readers.
But I have a question, relating to one particular matter raised by Covey, which is the very definite way he uses the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. ‘Liberty’ he uses to denote external circumstances, while ‘freedom’ is more like an inner mental experience. Liberty is political and perhaps also economic. Freedom is psychological, even existential. So, are these regular usages that I have been unaware of all these years? (I confess – for I’m not proud of this and have always meant to sort it out in my mind some day – that I have tended to use these two words interchangeably.) Or is Covey unusual in knowing when to say freedom and when liberty? Or are others equally definite about the different meanings of these words, but in different ways to Covey?
As often with me here, comments are not merely welcome; they are positively invited, not to say solicited.
There was a semi-interesting semi-comical article yesterday in the Guardian on the subject of happiness.
Propose a movement whose aim is to bottle happiness so it can be dispensed to one and all, saving humanity from a future of chronic misery, and you might expect at least a few people to roll their eyes. But, starting tomorrow, Britain’s most prestigious scientific institution, the Royal Society, will host a meeting for some of the world’s top psychologists who have done just that. Over two days, they will discuss “the science of wellbeing”. Their aim is to find out why it is that some people’s lives go so right. What is it that makes them happy and fulfilled, while others seem doomed to founder in misery, dissatisfaction and dejection?
Psychologists have immersed themselves in the study of misery, but have studied happiness a lot less. That was the message of a speech by Martin Seligman to the American Psychological Association in 1998, which set this happiness research bandwagon rolling. Simply: What makes people happy? Quick: find some happy people. Study them. How do they do it?
Optimism is one of the answers, and optimism, says Nick Baylis of Cambridge University, one of the organisers of this Royal Society meeting, can be learned. You can focus deliberately on the positive. Bad stuff? Put it out of your mind. Make a list of all your reasons to be cheerful!
So, the academic psychologists are finally admitting that all those tacky American pop psychology books about how to get ahead selling life insurance, with their positive mental attitudes and winning friends by influencing people (by, e.g. smiling, and listening to them and being cheerful), have been right for about the last hundred years and the academic psychologists wrong. The way to avoid misery is not to wallow in it, but to put it behind you. Surprise surprise.
Okay, but why do I write about this here? What has this to do with the Samizdata meta-context? My title will have already told you. → Continue reading: The happiness argument for capitalism and the misery argument against the state
In the midst of a vast, arid desert of small-minded envy and zero-sum culture, there emerges a little oasis of cool, clear refreshing sanity:
The Swiss economy has faced hard times in the past few years. One canton, Schaffhausen, is doing something about it by changing its tax law to attract wealthy people. Beginning in January 2004, Schaffhausen will replace its system of increasing marginal tax rates on income with a system of degressive marginal rates. The cantonal tax rate will be set at just under 8 percent for income of SFr 100,000. It will rise to a peak of 11.5 percent for income between SFr 600,000 and SFr 800,000. Thereafter, the marginal rate declines with each incremental chunk of income: 10 percent at SFr 1,300,000; 8 percent at SFr 3,000,000; and just over 6 percent for income more than SFr 10,000,000. This is a true incentive-based tax system—the larger one’s income, the lower one’s marginal rate.
Seems that the penny (or the Franc) has dropped in one small corner of one small country. They have realised that penalising success is a pretty good way of guaranteeing failure.
Schaffhausen has its own legislative parliament, which contains eighty deputies representing all regions within the canton. Eight political parties compete for these seats. Evidently Schaffhausen’s voters support a tax cut that gives the greatest benefits to the richest people. They believe that attracting wealthy individuals to reside in their midst is good for everyone.
And they are right.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the link.]
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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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