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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If anyone doubted that the libertarian ‘vibe’ is seen by many as powerful and attractive, then the fact so many people who represent its antithesis keep trying to hijack the term to mean ‘someone opposed to liberty’ should make it clear that the word ‘libertarian’ is hot, hot, hot (i.e. much as the term ‘liberal’ within the Anglosphere was hijacked when it was hot and which has now come to mean ‘illiberal’, which is to say, socialist).
I have argued before that Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron… well the same applies to Libertarian National Socialism. But then given that National Socialism and Socialism are just tactical variants within the same old statist collectivist class of political philosophy, it is hardly surprising the arguments as to why one is absurd to call itself libertarian applies equally well to the other.
The only real difference is that the Nazi variety of socialist collectivists just have better tailors and a worse press. The use of the term by overt Nazis is really no more bizarre than its use by Noam Chomsky, that socialist apologist for Pol Pot and several other of the world’s collectivist mass murderers.
All governments love boasting about their achievements and HMG is no exception. A particular favourite boast for the current lot is how many jobs they have created since they came to power. Sounds good, doesn’t it.
But there is a whole world of difference between job creation and wealth creation. In fact, the two things can be mutually exclusive:
Labour has hired 344,000 extra people to work for the Government since it took office, with the state now employing 5.3m people, or one in five of the workforce, according to figures released yesterday.
Until Labour was elected, the government payroll had fallen for 15 years, mostly thanks to the privatisations of the 1980s, but that is now being reversed by a massive public spending spree funded from tax rises.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are overseeing a hiring bonanza. Hundreds of thousands are joining the public sector, especially in the National Health Service, where 160,000 more staff have been taken on. The NHS now employs about 1.3m people, reputed to be more than any other civilian organisation in the world apart from the Indian railway.
If those people working in the shrinking private sector want to know exactly why they have to hand over more of their income and savings every year to their government, I suggest that they look here for an answer.
Here’s another for the Samizdata Wonders of Capitalism collection.
In her intro at the top of her blog, Natalie Solent says:
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
Me too. Not to do it mind, but when I go to Natalie, I hope to be reading about it every so often. But it’s mostly about politics, news, libertarianism, etc.
However, yesterday there was a sewing item.
Enough of politics …
Good, good.
… I have got me an overlocker.
What’s that?
It cost more than my last car but two.
No, not what did it cost? What is it?
These beasties are to proper sewing machines what the microwave oven is to a proper oven – the quote comes from Jan Saunders of Sewing for Dummies fame, and it’s true. An overlocker can’t do some things that a proper sewing machine can but it does its more limited range of tasks much faster and, once you have one, the change in the relative cost in effort of each action inevitably changes the whole style of cuisine, sorry, sewing. For benighted readers who do not know what an overlocker is, take off your T-shirts. Yes, very nice. Now turn the T inside out and look at the seams. They were sewn, bound and cut in one operation by an overlocker. The fluffy, softer thread used is distinctive, and overlockers are better at not distorting stretchy fabrics than an ordinary sewing machine is. In the opposite direction, they are also better at not puckering up thin, fray-prone “brittle” fabrics. I have already had the guts to make a child’s dressing-up cloak from some ridiculous shiny stuff that I had kept for years waiting for the day when I got my Black Belt.
This is the …
… Janome MyLock 644D for the hordes of sewing-geeks who infest this blog like swarming locusts.
Yes, we have swarms of those too, because we have swarms of everything. But for the benefit of the more typical Samizdata reader, Mr Natalie helps out:
My husband has kindly translated sewing geek language into Engineering: the overlocker is to the ordinary sewing machine what the vertical mill is to the lathe; you can do almost anything on a lathe including vertical milling – but a mill does the job so much better.
Serious point about capitalism, excellence of, to end with: Some of you may not have understood all of what Natalie, or even Mr Natalie, says about her new Janome MyLock 644D overlocker. I think it is clear that she likes it, but I for one can’t claim to be entirely sure about all the detail of exactly why. But with capitalism, this doesn’t matter. All that is required in a free market is that the people involved directly in a deal understand what they are doing.
In particular, no politicians need get involved, or feel that they have to understand what is going on, before matters can proceed satisfactorily. Imagine how much more primitive and miserable life would be if politicians did have to understand everything and supervise everything.
Well, you don’t have to. Samizdata is full of reports about just such circumstances.
Take Cuba, a classic “The Boss has to understand everything” kind of place. Paul Marks and David Carr weren’t agreeing yesterday about what will happen next, but between them they describe what a grim and ghastly and easily understood place Cuba now is very well.
And for an example nearer to home of circumstances ever more directly supervised by the politicians and consequently ever more shambolic, look no further than this posting which I also did here only yesterday, about Britain’s ever more state controlled examination system.
Today I received the following email:
Brian,
Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.
Brian
What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends…, I’m personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?
In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)
Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O’Driscoll.
Given its intimate association with brutal and murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ it is entirely understandable that the term ‘population transfer’ raises more than a few hackles.
But it need not necessarily be something to fear. Provided it is thought of in terms of free trade, then I can see a peaceful and voluntary process of population transfer as a beneficial thing.
Indeed, the process already appears to be underway:
A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.
“For me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Mollie Ingebrand, a puppeteer from Minneapolis who plans to go to Vancouver with her lawyer husband and 2-year-old son.
Nor are these itchy feet to be found exclusively in the USA. There are people in Britain too, like this correspondent to the Guardian (concerning the death of Dr.David Kelly), who see Canada as the ‘Golden Medina’:
I think he HAD TO BE RUBBED OUT. He knew too much, where the bodies were buried, so his had to be buried as well. Maybe you’re more honest than we are: the media and the government are co=conspirators here. So good luck. I”m moving to Canada, land of the free.
Some may see this as a tragedy but I see it as an indirect means of slashing public spending. Surely it is preferable for all these guardianistas and tax-consumers to converge upon one country where they can stew in each other’s misery rather than staying where they are, demanding entitlements and whining interminably about the unfairness of it all. Together, they can truly build the kind of society they want to live in.
Of course this process need not, and should not, be a one-way street. Canada has no shortage of ambitious, hard-working people who might see their futures as somewhat sullen in the Land of the Puppeteers. The easiest solution is for them to pack their bags and head off to less stultifying climes where their talent and energy will be both appreciated and rewarded.
In fact, that is what loads of Canadians have been doing:
But every year since 1977, more Canadians have emigrated to the United States than vice versa — the 2001 figures were 5,894 Americans moving north, 30,203 Canadians moving south.
Quite what this means for Canada in the long run I dare not even imagine but for the rest of us it can only be good news. Carry on, I say.
[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link and to Peter Cuthbertson for the Guardian letter.]
As an aspiring student of liberty, I’ve read some books, such as Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which sorted out complex conceptions I’d previously struggled with, and read other books, such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which just blew my mind straight out of the water. But in my quest for classical liberal enlightenment, over the past five years, I’ve had the occasional good fortune to stumble across a few rare gems which have cracked open both nuts.
These rare and concise works of genius have crystallized my ragged thoughts and exploded them into a dagger-sharpened clarity, to achieve, for me, a double-whammy Wow effect.
You may have enjoyed some of these masterpieces, yourself, such as Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Von Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. I see the world through a far clearer lens, after having read these paradigm shakers, than I ever did before, through an unformed fog of Platonic statism.
Socialists, particularly, hate these books. Because to read them, and to understand them, is to reject socialism’s own evil hate-filled religion. And if we were to let these red Borg force their nauseous European super state upon us, these books would soon get jettisoned onto their mass tribal bonfire. But which one would get tossed on first, in a square, in Berlin? There can only be one. And I think I’ve just read it. → Continue reading: The late late book review
An earlier article by Gabriel Syme which was about the observations of a British Army Officer known to us, in which he relates his experiences in and around Basra, in Iraq, attracted a comment from one of our most thoughtful regular commenters. This gentleman argued that it was unreasonable for this officer to be able to enter and search houses of Iraqis without a search warrant. Now as this particular commenter is clearly a thoughtful fellow traveller with whom all the writers of Samizdata.net would find little room for ideological disagreement on most issues which vex us and whose past remarks were so interesting we used them as a ‘guest writer’ article on Samizdata.net, I thought his views deserved addressing with an article rather than just a comment. I think the core of my problem with the notion being suggested here is one of the most lethal aspects of libertarian thought and why it is so markedly unsuccessful in breaking into the mainstream, at least overtly… this error of which I speak is in fact the flip side of what makes socialism so monstrous… the complete inability to see the difference between normal civil society and society in an emergency situation.
For the socialists, they see how collective action in war works (in effect tribalising society) and try to apply the same logic to peacetime… a Labour Party slogan in post-war 1945 was “If we can achieve so much together in war, think what we can do in peacetime!”… which of course presumes there is no qualitative and material difference between a society at war and one at peace. For them, all economic decisions are subordinated to the collective, which makes some sense if you have to produce more aircraft than Nazi Germany in order to avoid mass annihilation or enslavement but none whatsoever if you just want more people to have more and better washing machines, a wider selection of flavoured coffee beans and responsive dynamic economy… not to mention such bagatelles as personal liberty. Statist conservatives are little better, declaring ‘war on drugs/poverty/illiteracy/whatever’ and trying to deal with the distortions of civil society they themselves are largely responsible for as issues justifying not just the language but the very underlying collectivising logic of war.
Alas so many libertarians make the same error in reverse. They cannot see the difference between when the network of social interactions we call markets and private free associations that characterise normal civil society are functioning… and situations in which large collections of people are trying to kill other groups of people that characterize wars and major civil disorder or serious crisis. Sorry guys, but at times like those, normal rules of civil interaction simply do not apply. Thermobaric explosions, plagues, rioting mobs and forest fires are not known for their propensity to respect even the most pukka of property boundaries.
For a more ‘local’ example… if a house is burning down and the only way for some fire-fighters to put it out is to run their hoses across the lawns of someone who does not wish them to do so, the extremist propertarian strand of libertarian thought would argue that as the lawn is private property, tough luck on the guy whose house is burning down. Well that is lunacy (and why I call myself a social individualist rather than a libertarian most of the time). Without a common law right to go where you must when faced with a clear and present danger, a “libertarian” social order will simply fall apart the first time it faces a collective threat (be it a war, forest fire or plague). People will not sit and watch their families burn because someone else has interpreted what Murray Rothbard or Hans Herman Hoppe wrote about the right to defend private property. I am all for private property and the right not to have people kicking down your doors in the middle of the night, but the reality is that much of the world does not look like the relatively tranquil civil societies of the First World. To see the peaceful and mundane logic that does and indeed should pertain in Islington, Peoria and Calgary as applying to Basra, Baghdad and Mosul in the violent aftermath of a war is not just wrong, it is perverse.
In the real world, a few weeks after a war in which a dictatorship that has been in power for over 25 years was overthrown, normal rules of civil interaction do NOT apply. It does not mean all notions of civilised behaviour goes out the window, but search warrants? Oh please. The mafia-like homicidal Ba’athist are deeply entrenched in Iraq and will only be completely destroyed if the occupying powers are willing to do whatever it takes, which means kicking down peoples doors in the middle of the night on little more than hunches and searching for weapons at bayonet point. The only legitimate use of force is when force can be used effectively… and tying up soldiers in such notions as search warrants during a counterinsurgency action means you would be better off just abandoning any pretence that you are using force to suppress Ba’athist remnants in Iraq and just replace the squadies with an equal number of unarmed American lawyers.
Hmmm… considering the likely outcome of doing that and the vastly excessive number of lawyers in the USA, maybe it is not such a bad idea after all.
R K Jones eschews the crudity of opening a can of whoop ass and prefers to see rebellion served up in shot glasses
Those obsessed with fine whiskeys are perhaps already familiar with Malt Advocate magazine. Those with functioning livers may think of it as the Guns & Ammo for the discerning tippler. Each issue contains detailed looks at the international trade in liquor, almost always with an anti-regulatory bent. People expect to see reasoned support for free trade in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, or (sometimes) The Economist, but a drinks trade magazine? One doesn’t expect to buy a glossy, high-end specialty liquor magazine for the political commentary, but the current quarter’s issue (sadly, only teasers are available on-line) is worth a look. Any forum where a prominent American distiller opens his portion of a panel discussion (concerning regulation and taxation of the industry) with the words…
We need another Whiskey Rebellion
…is worthy of support.
Given the international, and free trading character of the liquor industry, I suppose the only real surprise should be that the paper mache puppet head brigade hasn’t yet begun picketing distilleries. Does the tone of the magazine mean anything about a change in attitude in the world? Or am I deceiving myself? I don’t know, but writers of a libertarian bent going back as far as Ayn Rand (and further) have been criticizing businessmen for a lack of ideology. Thus it is nice to see an industry niche publication that ‘gets it’.
Self-deception may be central to the human condition, and not exclusively confined to libertarians. However we often seem to have a particularly wide streak of it when it comes to looking at the world around us for signs that others may some day come round to sensible views. Just the same, it is always pleasant to see indications precisely that may indeed be happening.
RK Jones
For years I’ve been jabbering away on radio jabber-ins, in favour of the right of people to discriminate in the use of their property, and in particular of minorities to discriminate against majorities, and in particular of the right of gays to discriminate against straights. Are you in favour of such a right? Question mark, question mark. Because I am. And so on. Property rights. The right to fire people because you’ve taken a dislike to the colour of their eyes. It’s their property, it’s their money, etc. etc.
So this story gave me particular pleasure, even though it’s about something that shouldn’t be happening.
A manager of a gay bar was told to discriminate against heterosexuals and ordered to throw out a straight couple for kissing, an employment tribunal was told yesterday.
Nothing wrong with a gay bar discriminating, but they shouldn’t be hauled up in front of any tribunal.
Angelo Vigil, the assistant manager of G-A-Y bar in Soho, London, said the venue’s co-director and licensee, Jeremy Joseph, ordered him to deny entry to heterosexual couples as well as mixed groups of gay and straight revellers.
The nerve. Who does this Jeremy Joseph think he is? He’s behaving like he owns the place. Doesn’t he realise that he owns nothing? He is the delegate of the community, in the person of the employment tribunal. The G-A-Y bar in Soho is the property of All Of Us, and if All Of Us, as interpreted by the employment tribunal, say heteros can enter it, enter it they can.
Mr Vigil, of Barons Court, west London, started working at the club, which is owned by the Mean Fiddler Music Group, in September 2002. He resigned three months later and is claiming victimisation and harassment. He told the tribunal in Woburn Place that he understood the importance of preventing homophobia in the bar, but he believed the policy amounted to discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation.
Yes, that’s exactly what it amounted to. And if the law forbids this, the law is an ass. Chucking out all non-homos is a nice simple way of chucking out not just the reality of homophobia, but even the mistaken fear of it. Makes very good business sense.
He said when he raised concerns over the policy, he was told by Mr Joseph that he would “face the sack” if he “did not change his attitude”.
So. Angelo Vigil, “assistant manager”, didn’t want to assist the manager in enforcing the manager’s preferred policy of who comes in and who doesn’t, and how they behave when they’re there. So he got the boot. Sounds fair to me.
And even if it wasn’t fair, it is their property they wanted Angelo Vigil to help them administer, and it was their money they were paying him to do it.
Even if it wasn’t fair, it was still fair, and the employment tribunal should also get the boot.
The Bush administration may be in the process of revolutionising America’s foreign policy but, on the domestic front, it seems like business as usual:
The Bush administration, pressing its campaign against state medical marijuana laws, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let federal authorities punish California doctors who recommend pot to their patients.
The administration would revoke the federal prescription licenses of doctors who tell their patients marijuana would help them, a prerequisite for obtaining the drug under the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law.
And, of course, his predecessor was no better:
Contending that the drug has no medical value, the Clinton administration announced in January 1997 that doctors who recommended marijuana would lose their licenses to prescribe federally regulated narcotics. Doctors in many fields need federal licenses to remain in practice.
Proof that, regardless of who is sitting in the hot-seat, the absurd and insane ‘war on drugs’ just has to go on and on and on.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Q: What is the difference between a social democrat and a socialist?
A: A social democrat is a socialist who has realised the socialism doesn’t actually work.
A perfect illustration is provided by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, the very model of a modern social democrat, who has announced that things must change:
If we want to generate growth and jobs, we must lower those costs that eat into take-home pay.
Financial constraints are not the only driving force behind our reform programme. The reform of the welfare state is also a precondition for the success of future generations. In the past, the main topic of welfare politics was the redistribution of wealth. First, we must remember that wealth can only be redistributed once it has been generated. Second, we should note that redistribution has limits, beyond which mere monetary transfers encourage dependence. Third, elaborate systems of redistribution tend to produce “side-effects” in opposition to the desired results.
Do my eyes deceive me or is this doyen of the ‘Third Way’ demanding tax cuts and warning of the dangers of a dependence culture and unintended consequences? No, I think I am reading it right and if Herr Schroder keeps this up he might find himself being invited to write for the Samizdata one of these days.
And neither is this manful attempt to grapple with common sense a breaking of the ranks or a solo frolic in the fields of sanity because I could not help but notice that it follows hot on the heels of this rather more nebulous and ill-defined attempt from Peter Mandelson to say something along similar lines.
Coincidence? No, I don’t think so. Nor is it due to mere fickle fate that both of these portentious editorials appear in the pages of the Daily Social Worker where messages like this are about as common as gay bars in Riyadh. Now, I’m taking a calculated guess here but I’d say this is all part of a cunning plan to prepare the ground ahead of a big summit on ‘Progressive Governance’ (subtitled: ‘Oh Christ, we’ve been rumbled. What do we do now?) to be held here in London this coming weekend.
Could all these ominous warnings and pleas for an open-mind from the likes of Herr Schroder and Mr.Mandelson be a means of softening the ground for heavy blows ahead? Because to the extent that anything at all emerges from this gathering of professional pick-pockets and incurable busybodies, it is bound to be triumphal, shiny ‘reform’ and ‘new deal’ initiatives of the kind that pretty much herald an end to the welfare-state settlement.
If I am right (and that remains to be seen) then it is obvious that some of the brighter stars in the left-wing firmament have seen the writing on the wall and they know only too well that carrying the 20th Century state-socialist models into the 21st Century is a guaranteed one-way ticket to palookaville.
Wouldn’t it be fun to watch them emerge from their smoke-free rooms next week and jointly announce to their tax-consuming constituents that the booze has all run out, the snacks have all been eaten, the guests are all tapped out and that the party is definitely over.
I think they have been having a day of broody reflection over at the Daily Social Worker.
Peter Mandelson says:
Political projects that fail to renew themselves are soon swept away and deserve to be. That won’t be allowed to happen with New Labour. It is one reason why the progressive governance conference, which starts on Friday, comes at a crucial time for the international centre-left.
Meanwhile, Jeanette Winterson says:
How could we double spending on schools? We could start by abandoning the fetish of higher education, where armies of illiterate, innumerate kids are signed on to courses that are as useless as they are. Why are the kids useless? They haven’t been taught properly in school. Why haven’t they been taught properly in school? No money. So why do we insist on university targets when we aren’t able to educate all children at a basic level?
A far cry from all the smug triumphalism of the late 90’s, isn’t it. And is it just me or do I detect that these people are gripped by a mounting sense of panic? Perhaps even they have have realised that they have run out of ideas and that they need to clutch at something, anything before their entire project unravels.
Or maybe I am reading too much into it.
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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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