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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Anyone who regularly peruses the left-wing press in this country (and I congratulate them on their intestinal fortitude) would be left with the impression that Britain is rapidly turning into Galt’s Gulch, a rugged, darwinian, freewheeling gold-rush society where tax collectors have been beaten into plough-shares and the shrivelled remnants of the government have been consigned to a mildew-ridden basement room beneath Whitehall with a second-hand computer and a solitary, naked lightbulb.
You can hardly flick through the pages of any centre-left journal without being assailed by some chest-beating, polemical op-ed excoriating New Labour for abandoning socialist principles in favour of ‘market forces’ and ‘Thatcherism’. They bewail the alleged unstoppable growth of ‘free market mania’ and demand that the government return to the old agenda of wealth redistribution and public ownership immediately if not sooner.
Those of us living on Planet Earth don’t quite see it that way. Like the insensitive dolts we doubtless are, we have noticed the extra chunks of GDP that have been grabbed by the government every year since 1997. Nor has it escaped our attention that the ‘Careers Section’ of the Guardian has grown as thick as a telephone directory, replete with advertisements for government sinecures.
Well, boorish we may be but it appears that us Earthlings are right:
Chancellor Gordon Brown’s tax increases are threatening the competitiveness of the UK economy by increasing the burden on entrepreneurs, according to Forbes Global.
Although France maintains its position at the top of the misery index, Forbes detects “an important change in the Misery Index for the UK. For the first time, and surprisingly, it is rising by more than France’s Misery Index is decreasing.” The magazine blames increased social security taxes for this development, but says it will still take many years for the UK to “catch up” with France.
I cannot think of a more appropriate term than ‘Misery Index’ and, believe me, I have tried.
But back to the nitty-gritty. Why this disconnect between perception and reality? Well, it is because Blair and New Labour have pulled off a pretty audacious trick (and it’s a good trick, I’ll grant you) by constructing a convincing and polished patina of ‘Thatherite’ rhetoric full of phrases like ‘modernisation’ and ‘reform’ and ‘consumer choice’ which they have used to mask a stealthy but relentless old socialist agenda.
The inescapable truth (for Earthlings that is) is that, over the last six years, the wealth-creating private sector has been subjected to a ferocious blood-letting in order to feed the voracious appetites of the public sector triffids who, in turn, (and by complete coincidence, of course) vote en bloc for New Labour. Combine this with the gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of our regulatory and legal regime and the result is that a once thriving economy has been plunged into misery of near-Gallic proportions.
There isn’t a single state in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the only area where comparisons can usefully be made, that is taking less tax from its citizens in 2001 than it was in 1965.
I take no comfort from that fact that we are not alone. If everybody is on the same path of slow-suicide this only serves to convince the looters in Whitehall that they are doing the right thing after all.
Forbes asks: “Are we really living in an era of smaller government?”
No. Nor is that era close at hand. But we’re working on it, Mr.Forbes, we’re working on it.
I am not sure that there’s any libertarian principle that objects to planned failure in DVDs, or that there’s any logical distinction in the comparative consumer rights between DVD rental and DVD self-destruction. For that matter I’m not sure that there’s a logical distinction between (the much maligned) software rental contracts and leasehold on real estate, not while there is Copyright protection, anyway.
I am sure, however, that a great many people of all stripes, including the most avowedly propertarian libertarians, hate the tendency in the entertainment and consumer software industries to enforce their intellectual property rights and create new, lesser rights in their products in which to sell licenses. I am also sure that Copyright is simply losing the minimal respect that is required for a law to be effective. That libertarians should be part of this too should tell us something. After all, we seem quite happy to take un-PC views on the side of big-oil, big-pharmacy, big-tobacco, big-corportate-bogeyman-of-the-week – and revel in how contrarian we seem, how opposed to the “idiotarian” received wisdom. Why not do we not support big-Hollywood too? → Continue reading: The death of copyright
While I am on the subject of Mugabe, it is worth illustrating what he and his warped, psychotic ideology have actually done to the former Rhodesia.
We bandy around words like ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’ and ‘undemocratic’ but there comes a point when these words, in isolation, no longer have the power to move in the way they should. Altogether more moving, nay profoundly upsetting, is this graphic description from the UK Times of what African marxism is actually doing to this particular corner of Africa:
Zimbabwe is a country rich in resources and with great potential. It used to have a well-oiled infrastructure that even South Africa, with its far bigger economy, envied. It was robust enough to withstand the first two decades of President Mugabe’s rule but it has now reached the point of collapse. An advanced society is returning to the primitive.
It may be too late to reverse or even halt this process now. The damage has been done and, once again, the world is going to be assailed with a stark object lesson in the consequences of state kleptocracy and forced collectivisation. And, once again, those lessons will be rudely ignored, I’ll wager.
In fact, I’ll go further. I’m willing to bet that, even with the pictures of starving Zimbabweans rooting around in the dirt for a few berries are beamed into our homes, our own political leaders will continue to devote their energies to ever-more creative and unscrupulous ways of traducing our property rights and confiscating our earnings. Under the mendacious rubric of ‘social democracy’ Western ‘intellectuals’ will kid themselves that there is a world of difference between their economic philosophies and those of Mugabe. But the difference lies only in degree and the end result differs only in terms of timescale.
But we must neither forget nor forgive. Even while Mugabe is being glad-handed and back-slapped in Paris, we can exact vengeance on behalf of the society he has destroyed. We can do that by committing ourselves single-mindedly to a ferocious and relentless war against the people who would do to us by increment what Mugabe has done to Zimbabweans in swathes.
I detect a distinct air of despondency in the ranks of the libertarian camp in ever seeing any point in voting for, or co-opting with, right-of-centre parties such as the Conservatives in Britain (see David Carr’s remarks) or the Republican Party in the U.S. (see Jim Henley in similar vein).
I see no reason for being surprised. Even if you support Bush on the war, as I do, albeit while detesting the Patriot act and the Dept. of Homeland Security, what is there to like? The vast increase in the budget deficit is a real worry – and I say that as a supply sider, not as a ‘deficit hawk’ – we have had the steel tariffs, the Farm bill, etc. Okay, the first tax cut was better than nothing, but not as good as a cut to marginal tax rates across the board. Oh, Dubya did at least stiff the Kyoto Treaty. But while he is probably a tad better than the likely alternatives, his GOP makes an unlikely suitor for libertarians.
As for the Tories, I despair utterly of them being in a fit state for any outreach to us. With the sole and erratic exception of shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, there is not a single top-ranking Tory MP I come across who seems to have a thorough grasp of the extent to which our civil as well as economic liberties have been crushed.
Which leaves us with the usual cul-de-sac of a possible new party. And I cannot see how that is going to work.
I believe I am guilty of taking the latest Conservative proposals on education out of their context. As a result, I made the mistake of regarding them as an aberration; a singular folly.
However, I should have examined these proposals in the round of their ‘Fair Deal for Britain’:
“The Conservative Party’s fair deal for everyone is built on a unifying commitment to ensure that no-one is held back and no-one is left behind…”
Seen in that context, a return to old socialist education policies makes perfect sense. After all, in a society where you won’t be able to turn round without running smack dab into the dead hand of the state, shoving you along a line of pre-determined ‘fairness’, you cannot expect higher education to be the exception, can you.
Just who is advising the Conservative Party these days? Who was it that convinced Iain Duncan Smith that Clintonesque pain-feeling was the wave of the future? What premium do they think they will derive out of being Labour-lite? What, precisely, is the unique selling point of socialism with a Tory twist?
If I thought it likely that I would get any answers I would put those questions on the back of a postcard and send it off to Tory HQ. As it is, I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m too busy adjusting myself to the next 20 years of New Labour.
Paul Staines wants to shine a light into the closet and see who is in there… no, not that one!
There are a lot of libertarians who are modest and in the closet. Often they just find it awkward to explain there views on politics, philosophy or economics if, for example, they work for the Inland Revenue. I can sympathise. Its hard for a libertarian to justify working as a civil servant of any kind, but such are the compromises of real life.
It can embarrassing to questioned as to your attitude to a number of issues in many situations, drugs, gun ownership, and the abolition of the National Health Service may not assist your job application to become the over-paid Chief Executive of the local Health Trust.
I disapproved of Tatchell’s ‘outing’ of closet gays so it would be hypocritical to advocate outing closet libertarians. It strikes me that it still might be beneficial to point out those people who have publicly identified themselves as libertarians. It would highlight that there are more of us about, that we are not all obsessed with arguments about lunar property rights and may even assist in networking.
So I’ll kick off with the first of what I suspect will be a huge number of self-identified but unrecognised right-wing libertarians with Tony Parsons, ex-husband of Julie Burchill and author of “Man and Boy”… and Hans Snook, Orange Telecom’s visionary CEO who is a Randian… and Microsoft bashing Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems is one of us.
Any more?
Paul Staines
A hilarious outburst of flat-earth rhetoric from self-fisking socialist dinosaur Polly Toynbee:
Bang the drum for social democratic values. Give up pandering to the language of Thatcherism, of markets, individualism, consumerism. Stop trying to do good by stealth, stop running against public services. Spell out what good the state does and how much more it can do. The NHS is the most efficient health system in the world: now it is well financed, it can be the best. Education is already sweeping up the OECD tables: improving at this rate, we shall reach top ratings. Tell it like it is: only the state can buy the things that make people happiest. Eighties selfishness turned out to be self-defeating. Don’t blur the social democratic message, brand it on the national soul.
I invite you to read the rest of the article. Believe it or not, it gets even funnier.
[My thanks to reader Ian Brunton for the link.]
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students separately last month for running services that searched computers connected to their college networks for MP3 song files. It may not be headline news material, but to me this is as scary as any other infringment on freedom of the individual. ZDNet reports that the students have agreed to pay around £10,000 each to settle online music piracy charges from the recording industry.
The service that one of the students run at Princeton university was more like Google than Napster, since it had simply searched computers that were hooked up to the campus network, whether or not they contained his software. The students also shared copyrighted music from their own machines. This case is important in that it is the first time the RIAA directly sued individuals, as opposed to companies, associated with what is called peer-to-peer piracy.
The settlement was reached without defendants admitting guilt. Each of them will be paying RIAA an amount totalling between $12,000 and $17,000 (£7,456 and £10,563), split into annual instalments between 2003 and 2006. The lawsuits as filed could have entailed damages (in theory) of up to $100m.
Matt Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president issued a statement:
We believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to come to a quick resolution, and that these four defendants now clearly understand the seriousness with which we view this type of illegal behaviour. We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal.
According to the RIAA said that any future similar enforcement actions could lead to “stiffer settlement obligations”.
Now, I am not against copyright and intellectual property rights. I am, however, against a large entity using desperate measures to halt its falling profit margins. The music industry sales are falling not because people are copying music they ‘should be paying for’ but because the industry’s business models are no longer viable. For the RIAA to sue companies or individuals is like for an elephant to swat a few flies in the swarm. It can and will obliterate the few it hits but it can’t squash them all…
I submit that it is a therapeutic, every so often, to remind ourselves about the horrors of communism.
A living testament to that horror can still be found today in Siberia. It is the road that runs from Magadan to Yakutsk, otherwise known as the ‘Road of Bones’.
It was built by political prisoners and slaves, countless numbers of whom were worked, frozen and starved to death in the process. Because the perma-frost makes the ground too hard to effect any burials, the bones of the cadavers were broken up and used as ballast upon which to build the road.
We will never know for sure how many lives were sacrificed to this ‘glorious people’s project’, but by repute, every metre of the road cost one human life. The road is 2000 kilometres long.
There are still many people in the world today who subscribe to this terrible, anti-human, homicidal psychosis.
Never forget. Never forgive. Remain vigilant and, above all, never ever, ever apologise for fighting back.
And that is no longer just my pejorative opinion. It is a view that is being enthusiastically endorsed by its proponents:
During the May Day protests, we are going to be in the City of London vacuuming up after capitalism.
We’ll be there with our vacuum cleaners and warning people to watch out for the dirty capitalism all around them.
With our cleaners, we never let dirty capitalism settle.
I hope they intend to clean up after themselves. Last year’s ‘May Day’ marches left central London looking like an industrial tip.
So a lot of work is about humour because that really works. If people see a group of us vacuuming or praying, I think it’s more likely to get them to question things.
You’re right, the humour does work. I am already doubled up with laughter.
All the messages that are put about by advertisers are basically saying that shopping is the new religion. We were just taking it that little bit further.
Shopping as a religion? Damn, that’s a good idea. Anyone else fancy the idea of forming a Church of Conspicuous Consumption?
We had quite an interesting reaction. A lot of the shoppers were quite startled. Some of them laughed. Others looked at us as if we were idiots.
Conspicuous consumers are generally a perceptive and sensible lot.
Eventually the security guards threw us out. We’re not aggressive and we know that what we do and film takes place on private property so if they ask us to leave, we do.
Yet more ‘crushing of dissent’! Oh the humanity!!
The group goes into a store, all wearing the same shirts. Then, in a line, each member pushes around empty shopping trolleys [carts in America] in a quiet meditation.
Just silently contemplating all those seductive bargains.
I’ve got no illusions that what we do is going to stop people shopping. But the person who sees us praying or vacuuming may go home and have a question in their mind about the society we’ve created.
I’ll wager that the question in their mind is, how did you manage to fall from the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down?
Whenever I get despondent about the state of the world, up pop the Children of the Revolution to remind me just how debased, banal and self-parodying they have become.
On April 23rd, the Daily Kos had an article called Bringing libertarians into the Dem fold. In it, the author proposes:
I have argued for the past year that libertarians (with a small “L”) have a more natural home in the modern Democratic Party than with the GOP.
He goes on to describe how the Democratic party can leverage Republican abridgements of civil liberties to show libertarians that the Democratic party is their natural home, and that it is in fact ‘The party of personal liberty’.
Demonstrating at least a partial grasp of the difficulties of selling this notion to libertarians, he concedes that for this to have any chance whatsoever to work, the party of Charles Schumer and Joseph Lieberman is going to have to abandon its position of progressively abridging the right to keep and bear arms.
Although I left a long comment about the article on the Daily Kos, and mentioned that the idea of trying to appeal to ‘the other side’ was something I also had views on, there are a few interesting things about this that make it clear to me why Daily Kos does not understand the nature of the pool they are fishing in. Whilst the author understands the right to bear arms issue as being directly related to the issue of personal liberty, he also clearly sees the great majority of other things the Democratic Party does as being either neutral or unrelated to maters of personal liberty and thus not being ‘deal breakers’ in his proposed hand of friendship to libertarians.
For example, when he wrote about how the Republicans have consistently opposed business regulation, admiringly quoting an article elsewhere decrying GOP attempts to deregulate economic matters, presumably Daily Kos thinks that having the state regulating the control of several means of production is unrelated to issues of personal liberty. Perhaps in his eyes anyone who runs a business is not a person-who-has-liberty but rather some sort of collective entity and creature of the polis to whom issues of liberty are simply not germane. Perhaps this is a product of the ‘them and us’ class warrior view of the world found amongst the statist mainstream on both left and right.
And when he writes about how backs Wesley Clark as a Democratic candidate for President to run against Bush:
As everyone here already knows, he’s my favorite in this race. He’s solid on national security, well-spoken, presidential, pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-affirmative action, anti-PATRIOT Act, and believes strongly that the government should provide for the less fortunate amongst us.
I read that and when I hit the bit about ‘pro-affirmative action’ I hear the sound of screeching brakes. Now whilst I may think ‘affirmative action’ (I prefer to use the term ‘anti-white and anti-asian male state mandated discrimination’) is not materially different morally to apartheid, the fascinating thing here is that Daily Kos obviously does not even see this as an individual liberty issue! So when a specific individual white or asian man does not get a job because of a force backed state law that requires a quota of women and certain favoured ethnic groups to be hired, presumably his personal liberty, and the liberty of the owner of the company offering the job, is simply not an issue of ‘personal liberty’ at all.
Then of course we have the ‘government should provide for the less fortunate amongst us’ remark, which to most libertarians is tantamount to an apologia for proxy mugging at gunpoint. Also implicit in this is the hilarious notion (to a libertarian) that the Republicans do not take money at gunpoint from various ‘fortunate’ sections of society to give to the ‘less fortunate’… and that would be, bad, presumably. Would anyone care to list the number of violence backed redistributive ‘welfare’ acts signed into law by Republican law makers in, say, the last 30 years? Please use no more than 100,000 words.
What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to ‘do stuff’ beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline “No child left behind”… media control legislation described as “Fairness”… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.
Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of ‘personal liberty issues’ by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named ‘Patriot Act’ is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.
Of course, ‘libertarian’ is a broad term, as divisions on the war against the Ba’athist regime in Iraq have demonstrated, and many libertarians in the USA do indeed vote GOP on the grounds they would rather be ruled by the lesser evil (which is to say they vote against the Democrats rather than for the Republicans). But the fact so many people do not vote at all suggests to me that a large proportion say “a plague on both your houses”, and will continue to do so. If folks like Daily Kos realised the sort of disdain libertarians have for matters most in the statist ‘main stream’ would consider beyond debate, I suspect the hand of friendship from the Daily Kos would be withdrawn very quickly indeed for fear it might get cut off with an axe.
Democratic Party talent scout looking for libertarians
Well what would a dyslexic swine like me know about education? I can not even spell and my knowledge of grammar is revoltingly poor. As for my knowledge of languages (ancient or modern) this is confined to my (somewhat limited) knowledge of English. Oh, by the way, my knowledge both of mathematics and the natural sciences is rather limited as well.
However, I am going to comment about one recent incident which I believe shows (yet again) the decline of the classical vision of education (education in moral principles and general good conduct).
Last Thursday evening the Cambridge University Union held a debate on the motion:
“This House would gag the bad”.
By ‘House’ they (of course) did not mean someone’s home, they meant the Union (acting like a legislature) would, if it could, use the threat of violence to prevent people it regarded as bad expressing opinions by voice or in print.
As a publicity stunt the Union invited the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to be one of the speakers against the motion. Various young people then expressed their ‘antifascism’ by smashing up Mr Le Pen’s car.
In the debate itself over 200 students voted in favour of the motion and 12 voted against the motion.
In short in the whole of the University of Cambridge only 12 students exist who have the decency and courage to come and vote against even such an obscene violation of liberty. The rest of “the House” did not even have the wit to understand that the power they wished to have to gag those with whom they not agree could also be used against themselves (some future government could regard them as bad).
As for the 12 just students, will they be part of the ‘saving remnant’ once written about by such writers as Irvine Babbitt and Paul Elmer More? It would be nice to think so, but it is more likely that these students (because of their unfashionable decency and courage) will be forced out of the intellectual and cultural world into dead end jobs where their impact (short or long term) on life will be close to nil.
“Oh well, we are just talking about a mob of students – they will change their opinions when they leave university”. It is true that many people become more ‘moderate’ when they leave university (i.e. they make compromises between their abstract principles and the situations they find themselves in), but it is not true that most people adopt new basic principles once they leave university.
If someone has not learnt decent moral principles by his early 20’s it is quite likely (although not inevitable) that he never will.
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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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