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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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?
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.
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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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