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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I’m reading a law paper by Eben Moglen whilst sitting on a bed with sunlight pouring in the windows… [oops, I spoke too soon. Here come the rain. This is Ireland.] In short, he explains why Copyright is dead meat. Although written in 1999 it is still relevant. The death throws of Copyright will require a few more decades to play to their final denouement, but there is little doubt of that end.
To say I agree is an understatement. I’ve expressed my thoughts on this many times over the years, for example in this 1995 article. As I said then and in more depth in 1999, Copyright depends on the embodiment of ideas in physical form. It is a creature of Gutenberg’s invention. In the 21st Century we are moving on towards something else. I’m about as likely to project correctly what that “something else” is as would a writer in the first decades of the printed word so I won’t even try.
And here comes the sun again…
By the end of today I will have been on BBC radio of various sorts twice. I just did a little spot on a Radio 2 talk show about taxes for or against. Guess which I was. I played the consumer electronics card. This is the one that says that since quality in things like computers and music boxes has in recent years skyrocketed and prices have sunk like so many stones dropping out of the sky, but that in the public sector this great stuff hasn’t happened, private sector hurrah public sector bah. Governments are catastrophically bad at spending money. The rapacity of governments in collecting money and the damage that does had already been covered, by George Trefgarne.
As usual in this sort of radio, I could have done better and I could have done worse. You land a few punches, give a few tried and tested memes a bit of a dust-over and maybe give some less familiar ones an outing. In among that you do some unnecessary um-ing and aah-ing and waffling. Then you put the phone down and get on with your life, which in my case now means boasting about having done this on Samizdata.
And then, tonight at 8pm, I will be contributing to a Radio 4 programme called “The Commission”. → Continue reading: A BBC radio day
Brian Micklethwait did a posting a blog age ago (on Saturday) about higher education, and commenters have been gouging occasional lumps out of each other ever since. Normally such comment wars can be left to the consenting adults (or not-so-adults) directly involved. However, the latest comment (number 47) in this particular ruckus is such a choice one that it deserves a separate posting here. Brian not sure if it is entirely fair to its victim, but he loves it anyway.
Guessedworker,
I am very far from being an idealist, I am however an ideologue in that I am a consistent advocate of the doctrine of pure anarcho-libertarianism.
You are quite right that the dogmas of the liberal left are a menace and they need to be refuted, I spend much time doing that whenever I encounter such people, especially the marxoid greens who abound. However also a threat to liberty are the equally pernicious dogmas of the social conservatives, of which you are an advocate. I do not think that the state should be supporting or oppressing any groups at others expense. You may not want to sort out the laudable traits in people but I certainly do and the only way to do this meaningfully is to allow the market to work.
There has been nothing like a free market in personal behaviour and self expression for the last forty years. There has been instead a mixture of on the one hand repression and on the other hand state subsidy of fecklesness. This looks to you like a free market because you haven’t the first idea of what a free market actually is. It may well be that we have an ‘eternal nature’ as you say but your narrow and clumsy understanding of it is a useless guide to policy, it is the dumb interplay between the fools on the left and you fools on the socially conservative right over the last forty years that have brought forth the ‘rivers of pain’.
For my own lifestyle I seek no subsidy but I certainly will not tolerate any repression. I want not equality but freedom.
Paul Coulam
Just over a decade ago, the US and the EU conspired to conduct what has proved to be a very successful war against low-tax jurisdictions and banking secrecy. Under a fig-leaf of a campaign to eradicate ‘drug-dealing’ and ‘terrorism’ (but truthfully to maintain the integrity of their various state-welfare arranagements) they employed a combination of legislation, diplomacy and outright bullying to effectively hobble (and, in some cases, shut down) the Western offshore-investment industry.
As expected, the EU went further in this war than the US where the ‘anti-money laundering’ regime metastasised into a ludicrous campaign against what they called ‘unfair tax competition’.
Well, now the chicks are coming home to roost. Or, more accurately, they are flying the nest:
The world’s major private banks are beefing up operations in Singapore, anticipating that up to a trillion US dollars worth of offshore assets in Europe may be looking for a new home in the next couple of years.
Changes in banking secrecy and tax laws due to take effect in the European Union from 2005 are expected to encourage offshore investors in traditional havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg to start moving their money to other centres.
Singapore, with its stable political system and excellent infrastructure, is seen getting a big share of this money.
“We have estimated that from Europe about a trillion plus could be highly movable without too much difficulty,” said Roman Scott, vice-president at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “Some of those guys are going to say; ‘I need an offshore centre that’s not going to be squeezed down’.
All the European places are being squeezed. You can’t go into the US, so you suddenly start to look at Asia as attractive,” he said.
Western political elites are rather like heroin-addicts. No amount of argument, persuasion or reason will do anything to deter them from their narcotic fix.
Lessons generally have to be learned the hard way.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Blogging is unpredictable. It began as innocent posting by me about the Segway, which is a sort of mobile Zimmer frame, on Transport Blog.
Then Patrick Crozier, presiding boss of Transport Blog, made this rather more profound comment.
I have no idea whether the Segway is a good idea or not. But it strikes me as one in a long list of good ideas eg. bikes, roller skates, the C5, which might have been the answer to all sorts of our problems had it only been possible to give them the right sort of road space.
Take roller skates. Small, fast, relatively easy to learn. They should be fantastic. Lots of people should be using them. Why aren’t they? Because if you skate on the pavement you are constantly bumping into people and if you skate on the road you get run over (if not arrested).
But what if you had dedicated roller skate lanes or even dedicated roller skate highways? Different story – perhaps.
Incidentally, this is one of the most compelling reasons (I think) to want a free market in transport – because if entrepreneurs could do their own thing we might actually find out what forms of transport were actually (given all the factors) the best. We certainly aren’t going to find out so long as the state runs the show.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. → Continue reading: David Sucher on the necessity of states to contrive and maintain “infrastructure”
Tax greed is running rampant in California these days. The Statists have managed to, if not quite kill, make the golden goose quite ill. Revenues are falling and they have no way to fund more welfare for politicians and bureaucrats. They need a new victim – one that has not yet been bled to within an inch of its’ life.
The American Indians are in their sights once again. Over the last decade or so many tribes have gone from rags to riches. They’ve done it the old fashioned American way: capitalism. Some of this may be due to the leadership of people like American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, although I cannot state that as proven fact.
Russell’s imposing warrior’s frame is well known in the Libertarian community: he ran against Ron Paul for the 1988 LP Presidential slot. He lost the nomination but gave a memorable concession speech, spiced with his signature line, “Individual liberty; Individual Responsibility”. His after-the-vote party was also much more fun than Ron’s… almost as much fun as a Kansas Caucus.
Reservations are far from libertarian. They’ve been inundated by socialist activists for many decades. Even so, Marxism has not displaced the traditional culture. As Russell wrote in a paper long ago in his more radical youth, socialism is just another alien European philosophy. It has nothing to say to Indians.
It’s time again for the American Indian’s to string their lawyers and sharpen their lobbyists. The Great White Liars in State Houses across the continent are once again on the march to expropriate Indian wealth.
Here’s an interesting titbit of news, which I just got from following a trackback to something else to this guy (and his blog).
The Guardian is starting a blog devoted to the single issue of abolishing agricultural subsidies.
Today (Monday, August 18, 2003) with only a few weeks to go before the World Trade Organisation meets in Cancun the Guardian is launching a new website with a single aim:
Help the poorest countries by kicking into oblivion All Agricultural Subsidies
(kickAAS)
This is, you might say, lefties giving leftism a libertarian hook, to refashion one of Perry de Havilland’s most favoured memes. I say, good for them.
I’ve always felt that in the long run (okay, the very long run), if libertarianism (okay, the Samizdata meta-context) were ever to triumph in the UK, it would be via the Guardian and by outflanking the traditional right, which has always had a lively sense of the revolutionary and hence to them regrettable nature of the free market. Guardianistas are trouble-makers first and only socialist centralists second and because this makes trouble for smug establishmentarians. If there’s libertarian (Samizdata meta … etc.) trouble to be made, they’ll make that too.
The message is bound to get spread around in some very unlikely places, many of them very angry and hostile places for such a message, that state spending doesn’t work at achieving its publicly stated goals and most especially doesn’t work at making poor people richer.
I expect a lot of regular Guardian readers to be angry about this. Good.
Virginia Postrel’s latest NY Times column highlights what may become a growing weakness in the regulatory state.
Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” To many people, that sounds like an economist or an executive.
But Wilde’s witticism ignores what prices do. They convey information about how people value different goods, including the intangibles an aesthete like Wilde would care about most.
. . .
Public policy often regards aesthetic value as illegitimate or nonexistent. This oversight comes less from ideological conviction than from technocratic practice. Unlike prices, regulatory policy requires articulated justifications and objective standards. So policy makers emphasize measurable factors and ignore subjective pleasures.
As the info-industrial economy advances, the regulatory state will look increasingly out of step and, one hopes, irrelevant and undesirable. Regulation is all about conformity, and while top down conformity might appear to be tolerable in a society that is struggling to make ends meet, one hopes that it will become increasingly intolerable as it becomes more of a barrier to the kinds of pleasure-seeking and self-realization that people are willing to go to great lengths to achieve when they have the means to do so. As Ms. Postrel points out, the pricing mechanism of the market lets people pursue these essentially aesthetic ends as far as they want (or can afford), while top-down policy-driven efficiencies all too often preclude these pursuits.
Future debates over the regulatory state may play out as a struggle between the competing values of risk-aversion and efficiency on the one hand, and self-individuation and aesthetics on the other.
Those liberty-loving cyber-guerillas over at Bureaucrash have cooked up a wry little animation the subject of which is a Canadian (I presume) politician caught red-handed (and gold-wristed) in the act of selling snake-oil.
Well worth a look.
[My thanks to reader Ernest Young for the link.]
David Sucher asks: “why are libertarians so much wittier than liberals?”
The answer is that the sense of humour comes from a libertarian understanding of the world. Statists see a world of oppression and pain, and get depressed because of global warming and evil multinationals. Libertarians see the world in a different way, seeing the bad in the world, but also seeing the great advances that humankind has experienced over the past few hundred years. They have greater confidence in humanity, progress and the future. So they can afford to not take life completely seriously. The sense of humour is profoundly libertarian. (Thanks to Madsen Pirie for giving me the idea for this post.)
My first reaction to this story was “Aha! Another reason to despise the UN and its tranzi fellow travellers! As if I needed one.” And indeed, there is plenty to despise in this story. It turns out that a thriving market in endangered animal skins has sprung up in Afghanistan to serve the demands of the UN and NGO personnel assigned there.
When I asked him if he had any coats made of snow leopard skin, he said no. But the reason was far from reassuring – he had sold out.
They have become so expensive for us – $500. Too expensive for Afghans but foreigners can buy them,” he said.
We have asked most of the foreigners not to buy these things and if there is not a market from the foreigners the Afghan people probably don’t need it,” [Afghan Environment Minister Yousef Nouristani] says.
“It’s the market created by the foreigners – particularly those who are working with the UN or other NGOs.”
The tooth-grinding hypocrisy of UN and NGO personnel flouting international law banning the trade in these skins is bad enough. The fact that most tranzis are also pious “movement” environmentalists is merely salt in the wound.
However, for dedicated libertarians, it raises one of the perennial dilemmas: what to do with wild animals? Laws restricting the harvesting and sale of wild animal skins, organs, meat, and whatnot would appear to run afoul of libertarian principles espousing free trade and free markets, and indeed the Afghan government is trying to reach the benchmark for protection of these animals set by, gulp, the Taliban.
The dilemma is sharpened in Afghanistan because the dire poverty of many people there puts their interests in direct conflict with protection of endangered species.
Snow leopards are most commonly found in north-eastern Afghanistan in an area known as the Wakhan.
I spoke to Ali Azimi, the author of a report on Afghanistan’s environmental problems, who has just returned from a 10-day trip to the area.
“I was struck by the abject poverty of the people,” he said. “Most can barely afford to have one meal a day.
“And the meal usually consists of a type of grass that grows in the Wakhan six months of the year. Six months it is snowbound.
“What they eat is what has been collected over the summer months – and it is a desperate situation for them. So they’re facing poverty and starvation in the Wakhan.”
This poverty and starvation is forcing people to hunt animals that would normally be the prey of the snow leopards – and the thousands of dollars that some people are prepared to pay for their skins is encouraging poachers to hunt these rare and beautiful creatures.
The long-term solution to these environmental issues is, of course, to raise the level of income and wealth in Afghanistan so that no one is forced to compete with wild animals for survival, and so that the “luxury good” of protected lands and species becomes affordable. In the shorter run (and in the long run as well) it is difficult to see how wild lands and, especially, wild animals can be protected from the tragedy of the commons without some form of state intervention, whether it is via market regulation outlawing the trade in animal products, the purchase and “protection” of lands, the regulation of hunting activity, or some variant or combination of all three.
Thanks to the inevitable and ubiquitous Instapundit for the first link to this story. Thanks also to (this hurts, folks) the BBC for originating the story.
The American Liberty Foundation has an hilarious advert in progress called “Suzie and the Senator” which you can listen to here. They have previously produced some of the best Second Amendment adverts that have ever aired and are now targetting Washington DC with intent to Down Size.
If you like what you hear, you may make a donation via the website. It is up to you to ensure “Suzie and the Senator” and ALF’s other marvelous adverts go on the air.
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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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