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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Inspired by the posting below about soundbites, Patrick Crozier has lashed up a list of attempted transport policy soundbites. Not all of them have quite the zip and zing that you are looking for in a soundbite. For example, I don’t see this catching on:
Transport is not an unalloyed good.
“Unalloyed”?
Or this:
The chaos on Britain’s railways is to a large extent the fault of the EU.
“To a large extent”? That sounds like John Major as enacted by a TV puppet.
But, as I said in a comment there, never mind. As soundbites they are mostly unfinished, but they’re a definite start. Others can maybe get polishing.
And, as I have also already commented at Transport Blog, before realising that the thought might also be worth airing here, one of Patrick’s suggestions may actually be ready to spread around. Here it is:
Safety is dangerous.
This little phrase may have been arrived at many times before (comments about that are of course very welcome), but I’ve not heard this exact combination of words before. I think it might be a winner.
First, it is short. Three familiar, easy-to-remember, easy-to-say words. Very important.
Second, it asserts an important truth, which is that an overzealous pursuit of safety, by (for instance) shutting down a pretty safe transport system in a vain and very expensive attempt to make it ever more safe can actually cost lives. The costs incurred (but hidden because spread around) can make everyone’s lives a tiny bit more unsafe, and the alternative transport they use in the meantime might be a lot less safe. Shutting down railway systems after crashes, or grounding huge airplane fleets ditto, can kill, on the roads. And of course “safety is dangerous” has numerous applications besides and beyond transport.
But third, just as important, “safety is dangerous” has just the right degree of counter-intuitive outrageousness, such as will arouse interest and stir up debate. Because this soundbite is, literally speaking, untrue, it could cause opponents of the truth it flags up to get drawn into a stupid argument about its truth, and its unfairness. “It’s not true!” “Ah but you’re missing the point, what it says is true.” Etc. etc., blah blah. The sense of outraged logic of the victims of the soundbite could be all part of the fun, and will cause TV interlocutors to keep on throwing this soundbite in their faces, simply because they hate it so. Like all good soundbites, it could supply a cushion for the lazy TV compere to fall back on.
Well, maybe. Most attempted soundbites are like newborn fish, doomed to die immediately. But maybe this one will prove to be a fish with legs, if you’ll pardon the expression.
It could be that “safety is dangerous” needs more work done on it. Maybe it should read: “Safety is unsafe.” Or maybe the even shorter: “Safety isn’t.” Personally I think that “Safety isn’t” is too brutal towards the banal truth that safety, properly understood, is indeed safety. Also, the claim is too absolute. It isn’t being claimed that “safety” is always unsafe. Just sometimes. You might have to change “safety is unsafe” to “safety can be unsafe” and then the word count starts to rise. (“Safety is to a definite extent unsafe.”) “Safety is dangerous” is the best, I reckon.
These simple truisms go a long way to explaining MP & blogger Tom Watson‘s support for passing laws regarding the use of fireworks. On his blog, and on this blog in our comments section, the Honourable Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East calls for more regulation and makes it clear that fireworks will simply be banned if that does not produce the desired effects. And yet when talking about an incident in which a woman was injured by some idiot throwing a firework he himself notes:
Granted the little thug that conducted this assault was breaking existing laws
�and then proceeds to ignore that fact from then on. I do not know Tom Watson personally but I heard him speak in Houses of Parliament and he seems both affable and reasonable for a politician. But as Brian Micklethwait’s article today says regarding the ‘problem’ of obesity, it is only to be expected that a person whose salary depends on passing more laws to, well, always insist on passing more laws.
The United States, for all the many, varied and egregious flaws in that constitutional republic, has at least managed to some degree to place whole sections of civil society off-limits to the law making Tom Watson’s of the world. For example free speech is largely protected against erosion in ways that have not proved to be the case in Britain with the advent of so called ‘hate speech’ laws.
In so many ways it is where the USA has managed to constrain regulatory democracy from intruding wherever vox populi wishes it to, and the resulting politicizations of social interactions that entails, that its vast economic power and admirable civil virtues spring. Similarly it is where the United States has departed from those principles (RICO, civil forfeiture, IRS reversal of burden of proof, etc.) that things have gone very badly wrong.
And therein lays the problem at the heart of modern democratic states: so much of society has been made amenable to literal force (i.e. political action) that it makes little difference in the long run who is in control of the democratic means of coercion, the end result for civil liberties and several ownership (including self-ownership) will be the same. Face it, in Britain there is little to choose between Tory Michael Howard and NuLabour David Blunkett when it comes to which of them has abridged more civil liberties whilst serving as Home Secretary. Likewise, Janet Reno may have presided over the mass murder of a bunch of wackos in Waco, Texas, but is anyone really going to claim John Ashcroft is not continuing the process of shredding the much vaunted Bill of Rights?
The problem is the whole meta-context of seeing as axiomatic that politics is always acceptable just so long as it gets the imprimatur from a plurality of the politically engaged. Until enough people are willing to look to the moral basis of a law and simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of laws just because they are laws, we will always have politicians singing their siren song for your votes to empower not you, but themselves, by offering to solve your every problem with more laws. It is not enough to just not vote for them, you must find innovative ways to not cooperate with them.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force.
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-George Washington
Like some undead creature from a B-movie, the festering Political Compass refuses to lie down and die.
I have not changed my views of this daft test one jot. Hand me another sharpened stake.
I do believe that Tom Watson was the first serving Member of Parliament to set up a blog. If that is the case then he deserves to be congratulated for his initiative and originality.
However, his latest project, of which he appears most proud, is rather less praiseworthy for it appears that Mr.Watson has been instrumental in passing new laws on the sale and use of fireworks:
West Bromwich East MP Tom Watson, who helped push the new law through the House of Commons, said today: “While these new powers will not be in force for this year’s fireworks season, I’m delighted and also relieved that the Government is so determined to come down hard on the misuse of fireworks.
My worry when the Fireworks Act became law was that it could take years for the Government to put the powers into practice. The fact that the zero tolerance approach will come into force as early as next month is a great victory for the thousands of people in Sandwell who have sent in letters and signed petitions calling for a crackdown.
They are sick and tired of the misery and disturbance caused by fireworks going off late at night in the early hours. They are sick and tired of fireworks being used as toys and even weapons by teenagers. And they are sick and tired of fireworks so loud that their neighbourhood often resembles a warzone.
The time has come for this to stop. We will now have the powers to deal with the problem and I hope that the police and local authorities will make full use of them.”
As best as I can tell, the thrust of the new regulations is to prohibit sales of fireworks to people under the age of 18 and to make it a criminal offence to set off fireworks late at night. On the face of it, they are not wildly unreasonable measures. There are already all manner of restrictions on the retail capacity of minors and setting off fireworks in the wee small hours is a genuine nuisance for people who are trying to get a decent night’s sleep.
But the question here is not so much ‘what’ as ‘why’? → Continue reading: A damp squib
Increasingly, in my discussions about public policy matters, I find myself advancing the apparently novel notion that:
You tend to get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish.
When discussing my views with devotees of various social welfare schemes, this idea is met with reactions ranging from blank incomprehension to spitting rage at my cold-heartedness. Yet, to me, it seems the most self-evident common sense.
Most social welfare schemes reward certain behaviors, and almost invariably result in an increase in those behaviors.
Two examples (more can doubtless be supplied by the commentariat):
- One of the centerpieces of the expansion of the welfare state was payments to single mothers, often on a piecework basis (the more babies, the more bucks). Lo and behold, an enormous increase in single motherhood ensued.
- Wisconsin recently adopted a new health insurance scheme for the uninsured working poor. As a result, many employers have dropped their insurance benefits, reasoning that their employees can get coverage from the state, so why should they pay for it? Effectively, the new scheme removes the competitive disadvantage of employers who did not offer insurance, thus rewarding such employers and increasing their number.
Yet proponents of these social welfare schemes never cease to be amazed that their schemes do not seem to be alleviating the “problem” they are supposed to address, and indeed the problem often grows worse! Leading to a demand for more of the subsidies that feed the problem, of course.
On the flip side, I recently saw how the punishment meted out by the regulatory state gives predictable results. The regulatory state, of course, punishes economic activity by adding to its cost and by adding the risk of enforcement action.
The repair and service department at the Subaru dealership in downtown Madison is incredibly decrepit and run down, even though Subarus sell like hotcakes in Madison and the place is always busy. I mentioned this to the manager, and he told me that they had not done any work on the place in many years, even though it cost them business and made it hard to keep good workers. Reason was, any renovation would trigger a raft of regulations that would require environmental testing, remediation, handicap access, sound reduction, etc. ad nauseum, which would cost more than the dealership is worth.
Taxation, of course, is another punishment meted out by the state, again with predictable results. It is not unusual to hear young people say that one of the reasons they don’t get married is because, under the US tax code, their tax burden will go up if they do. Examples, I am sure, can be multiplied ad infinitum.
The odd thing is, through the regulatory and welfare states, we seem to be subsidizing the behaviors that we don’t want, and punishing the behaviors we do want. The increase in (subsidized) irresponsibility, and the decrease in (penalized) productivity, may be unintended, but are hardly unforeseeable, and indeed are inevitable.
Philip Chaston is a regular contributor to the Airstrip One blog. He believes that the current political climate in Britain presents an exciting and unique opportunity.
Last Monday I went to the University of London Union to watch a concert given by the band British Sea Power. With me were a couple of friends, a carpenter and a handyman from South London. Just prior to the gig, I had been assailed by their voluble and bitter complaints while we downed some pre-concert alocohol in the Toucan Bar which is just around the corner from Soho Square in Central London.
The level of dissatisfaction with the government and the public services in London and the South East has risen over the last few years as people have seen their taxes rise without any perceived improvement in public services. This has been linked to increasing concern over levels of immigration. As my friend said, “I’m going to vote BNP in protest. Who else can I vote for?” → Continue reading: The Protest Vote
This is from an email Glenn Reynolds received concerning his post on the Afghan beauty contestant:
I have greatly enjoyed your blog and read it daily, but at times such entries are rather telling. I am neither a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, but sometimes your lack of any semblance of discernment about anything other than pragmatic economics or foreign policy is appalling.
Mr. Reynolds, is there anything other than a particular brand of conservative politics that informs your world view? What is it that informs your understanding of what it good, true, and beautiful? Are goodness, truth, and beauty even a part of your world view? From whence comes your sense of ethics or morality? Have you ever asked yourself these questions?
[emphasis mine :K.]
One would think that any ‘daily’ InstaPundit reader would know not only that Glenn is a libertarian, but that his ‘particular brand of libertarian politics’ is approached from the left. But that is not the case here. Nor, experience tells me, is it in many, many others.
This is why it is important, not only that we keep discussion of such arcane matters as n-dimensional Nolan Charts strictly ‘in house’, but we endeavor to create an even simpler model than the original to annunciate our distinct perspective. As most people, even those who consider themselves ‘intelligent’, see a cartesian grid and mumble “oh, math,” as their eyes glaze over like Homer Simpson, and in their mind’s eye, the chart we are showing them turns into a freshly-cut 9″x9″ tray of fudge brownies.
More on this later.
Many of you know me already. As I have been haunting the blogosphere for the last three years through comments, emails, and guest articles. Those of you that do not will in due time, so I will skip the typical bio/Curriculum Vitae stuff. I was going to post a Micklethwaitian tale of my 50 mile journey of Southern California’s quite righteously maligned public transit system to Brian Linse’s blogger bash, where I met Perry & Adriana face-to-face for the first time. But that got a bit longish for a forum such as this, so I guess I will have to save it for a chapter in my memoirs.
One of the subjects which has piqued my fancy recently is the concept of N-dimensional variants on the classic Nolan chart. This was initiated a few weeks ago when I read this TCS article by Eugene Miller, on a link from Virginia Postrel. In it Miller attempts, quite successfully, to typify political philosophies on a Nolanesce grid – embrace of change forming one axis, and the need for control over change forming the other.
click for larger image
It occurred to me that one could map this function on top of the typical Nolan chart by equating ‘liberty’ with ‘change’. Further analysis led me to sumise that this conjunction of the two concepts was better expressed in differentials. But, for the purposes of both brevity and accessibility, we will spare that dissertation for another day.
Further indulgence of my curiosity led me to this article by Kelley L. Ross. Therein, Ross expands upon the basic Nolan chart with another dimension of what form of government safeguards what liberties (or not). It’s an interesting read. But the average Samizdata.net reader would likely find the first ten pages review, and should skip right to Liberties in Three Dimensions. Although, this little graphic, concerning the US Supreme Court is rather interesting:
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The final seven or so pages constitute the meat of the article, where he makes the point that democracy is no guarantor of liberty. In it, he makes an interesting and rather open-ended point with this:
A Republican form was envisioned by people like James Madison, who wished to impose practical, and not just theoretical limits on government by the use of the Separation of Powers and a system of Checks and Balances. This worked well enough but was ultimately undermined by one grave oversight: The United States Constitution provided no mechanism for its own enforcement. That task was soon taken up by the Supreme Court, but Thomas Jefferson realized that the Supreme Court, as a part of the federal government, could not be trusted to faithfully maintain the limits to the power of the federal government itself: “How can we expect impartial decision between the General government, of which they are themselves so eminent a part, and an individual State, from which they have nothing to hope or fear?”
[Autobiography]
In the end, especially during the Civil War, World War I, the New Deal, and the Sixties, the Supreme Court began to concede extra-Constitutional powers to the federal government simply on the principle that it wanted them. The only mechanism that existed to check the failures of the Court was the torturous avenue of Constitutional Amendment, politically impossible when so many people had begun to believe that unlimited power for the federal government was actually a good thing. And then again, it is hard to know how a newer version of the 10th Amendment could be more plainly worded than the old one. A new Amendment would have to descend to the ignoble level of contradicting specific Supreme Court pronouncements that the original Amendment was simply a “tautology” or “truism” that wasn’t really meant to limit federal power. (See Two Logical Errors in Constitutional Jurisprudence.) An effectively updated Constitution would have to address all the sophistry and dishonesty that was used to undermine the original one, besides providing for such additional checks and balances as would abolish the dictatorial powers of the Court.
Indeed, how does one establish practical limitations on power within a republic? Jefferson’s answer was to have an armed revolution every twenty years or so. Serious talk of that today will get you twenty years or so behind bars.
Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at his other blog about breaking the law, and the simultaneous growth and loss of legitimacy of the regulatory state.
There are too many laws — many of them contradictory or obscure — for any person to actually avoid breaking the law completely. (My Criminal Law professor, when I was a law student, announced to us that we were all felons on the first day of class. There were too many felonies on the books for us not to be: Oral sex in Georgia? Oops!) And given that many laws are dumb, actually following all of them would probably bring society to a standstill, just as Air Traffic Controllers and pilots can make air travel grind to a halt by meticulously following every safety rule without exception.
Stop and think about that for a minute. What does it say about a society, when strict adherence to its laws would be an unmitigated disaster?
The other problem is that law is like anything else: when the supply outstrips the demand, its value falls. If law were restricted to things like rape, robbery, and murder, its prestige would be higher. When we make felonies out of trivial crimes, though, the law loses prestige. As the old bumper stickers about the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit used to say: “It’s not a good idea. It’s just the law.”
Instawisdom, in my book.
Almost anything you say about how ideas spread and eventually get accepted and acted upon is liable to be (a) true, but (b) over-simplified, because the whole truth about how ideas spread and get acted upon is far, far too complicated ever to keep complete track of. Where the definite falsehood creeps in is when people say, or more commonly imply through the other things that they say, that ideas can only spread in this way or that way, and that all the other ways they can spread don’t count for anything.
There is one such implied falsehood which we at Samizdata, for humiliatingly obvious reasons, are likely to be particularly interested in and cheered up by contesting. This is the idea that what matters when it comes to spreading ideas is sheer weight of numbers. It’s the idea that getting some other idea to catch on and be acted upon is a question of assembling a sufficiently huge number of people who believe this idea to be true or good or appealing, and then for this vast throng of supporting people to prevail against the other almost equally vast (but not quite) throng of people who believe the opposite.
Clearly, as a partial description about how some ideas spread, at some times and in some places, this kind of thing can definitely happen. Political elections are often just like this. This vast throng of humanity votes for this idea, that throng votes for that idea, and the winners are the ones who appeal to the biggest throng.
But as a complete description of how ideas spread this picture is false. Most things, after all, are not decided by political elections. For example, I would say that when historians look back on our era, they will say that the development of the Internet was a huge historical event, up there with the first printed bibles in local languages, or with the development of the railways or of the motor car. Yet neither the internet, nor printing, nor railways, nor motor cars were any of them set in motion merely by political electorates, and nor, once they had got underway, were any political electorates ever invited to vote against them.
The weight-of-numbers model is even seriously false when it comes to understanding the full story of most political elections. Yes, elections decide who will occupy various political offices, and what will be written about in newspaper editorials for the next few years. But these elections seldom decide very much about what actually gets done from these offices. Instead, democratic true believers (the ones who really do believe that absolutely everything should be decided with a head count) constantly rage at how “undemocratic” democracy typically turns out to be. They have a point.
I will now offer you a thought experiment, the point of which is to explain how unimportant mere numbers of believers in an idea can be, and how much more interesting and complicated the spread of and adoption of ideas can sometimes be. → Continue reading: How ideas spread and get acted on – the weight of numbers fallacy
Another day, another public enemy.
The campaign to add so-called ‘junk food’ to the tobacco-alcohol ‘axis of evil’ has been fulminating for quite a while. There is nothing on the Statute books yet but I think we all know that it is only a matter of time.
In the not-too-distant future, the Samizdata will be reporting the police raids on clandestine onion-ring factories and publishing underground recipes for ‘academic and research purposes only’. By that time, I sincerely hope that there will be a wider understading of the social-working class mentality that has led to that woeful state of affairs. Nothing could illustrate that mentality more starkly than this article from the UK Times:
People are incapable of saying no to junk food and other health risks, and it is the duty of the State to influence them, according to a senior public health official.
In defence of the “nanny state”, Professor Dr John Ashton, regional director of public health in the North West, said yesterday that government intervention was needed to protect those incapable of protecting themselves. “Individuals cannot protect themselves from bioterrorism, epidemics of Sars, the concerted efforts of the junk food industry, drug dealers and promoters of tobacco and alcohol,” he said.
Thus lumping together consumer choice, forces of nature and murderous aggression into one misleading and grossly stupid soundbite.
He said that it was the job of the State, not of the individual alone, to resist health problems brought about by drink, food or drugs. The State had a duty to protect and influence young people, many of whom were building up problems by adopting sedentary lifestyles and eating junk food.
“It is in no one’s interest to have an obese generation, riddled with diabetes and degenerative heart disease and a burden on the taxpayer,” he said. “The Government has a duty to take action about it.
It is in no-one’s interest to have a power-obsessed generation, riddled with this kind of contemptuous paternalism.
The State is the guardian of the weak and underprivileged. It should intervene to encourage people to eat healthily and take exercise.
“Furthermore, it has a duty to ensure that those less well-off in society have safe, warm, low-cost housing, convenient transport links to shops and amenities, and the protection of police on the streets. The State is our protector and we must defend its right to fulfil that function.”
There are no citizens, only ‘clients’.
He has three grown-up sons, but recently became a father again with his partner Maggi Morris, 47, a director of public health in Preston. Their baby has been named Fabian Che Jed, after the Fabian Society, Che Guevara and the Old Testament prophet Jedediah.
And doesn’t that say it all.
There are lots of dark forces at play here but the oft-overlooked one is the element of kulturkampf. What these people mean by ‘junk food’ is hamburgers, hot-dogs and milk-shakes. For people like Dr.Ashton the hamburger has become a symbol of what they consider to be American cultural imperialism and that is the real basis of their animus.
Quite aside from the fact that the fashionable demonisation of ‘fatty food’ is ill-founded (which it is), an Indian or Chinese meal contains more fat and calories than McDonalds could ever dish up. As does the homegrown popular delicacy of ‘Fish and Chips’ (all deep fried). Nonetheless when these people speak it is ‘burgers’ that they invariably identify as the alleged enemies of public health.
The ‘War against Junk Food’ has been carefully crafted to fulfil both the practical and ideological needs of the social-working class. Not only will its successful prosecution provide them with more wealth and status but it also opens another front in the cultural and political war against America.
[My thanks to Nigel Meek who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
It took a while but the truth is no longer ‘out there’, it has landed smack dab onto the pages of the Guardian. Yes, the Guardian.
This long-overdue confirmation of the real centre-left agenda comes courtesy of David Walker who is gleeful about the viral growth of tax-consumers:
Tony – reform is my middle name – Blair isn’t obviously the public sector’s friend. Nor, for all his protestations of affection, is Gordon Brown, the man who insisted on putting the safety of London’s tube travellers in the hands of profit-maximising companies.
Yet under them the public sector prospers. Since 1999 it has just kept growing as a source of jobs; the UK’s approximation to full employment owes a lot to council, NHS and government recruitment. Paranoid rightwingers, for whom the Guardian’s thick advertising sections are a weekly torment, don’t know the half of it. Under Labour, “indirect” employment has also boomed. Yesterday John Prescott published an evaluation of his new deal for communities, a set of participative projects in run-down areas. Between the lines it noted that a sort of reserve army of tenants and activists has been recruited, subsisting of government grants.
Imagine how ‘paranoid’ those ‘rightwingers’ would get if they suspected the truth about how many people are suckling at the state teat? Why, it would be enough to drive them round the twist.
Now here come new figures for direct government employment. Whitehall is booming. During the past year, the Inland Revenue took on 8,500 extra people, at a time when total civil service numbers increased by nearly 4%. Even the tiny Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 450 strong in April last year, added 30 people to its roster.
Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!!! Roll on the glorious day when everyone works for the state!
In theory, that ought to mean up to 6 million households -perhaps 15 million people – with a direct interest in buoyant public expenditure, and hence in having a government likely to keep it that way. Labour’s formula for permanent re-election, you might think. But turkeys will vote for Christmas.
And to think it is capitalists like me who are generally regarded as ‘self-serving’.
Not once does Mr.Walker even attempt to invoke the mendacious tropes about ‘social justice’ and ‘caring’ and while his candour cannot be regarded as admirable it is, nonetheless, refreshing. His is as bold an admission as I can imagine that the motivation behind voting Labour is to increase one’s chances of joining or staying on the government payroll. Of course, libertarians have been saying this for years and I suppose I must extend some muted thanks to Mr.Walker for publicly admitting that we were right.
But being right is one thing and prevailing is something else. In order to prevail this message must filter down to the remaining 45 million or so other British people who struggle to support themselves and carry the burden of this parasite class on their backs.
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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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