We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations are free, the European ‘continentals’ have no concept of individual freedom. As gross generalisations go, this one is approximately believed by many libertarians both in the Anglosphere and outside it.
Yet I hear that “Spain is a nation of anarchists”. Or about France: “How can one govern a country with over 300 kinds of cheese?”
I can only offer a tentative answer, but maybe there is an uncomfortable grain of truth in it.
The Anglosphere is actually a lot less free than its propagandists would have us believe. For a start welfare and taxation is not noticeably lower in Canada, Australia and New Zealand than in some European continental states. In fact healthcare is more Sovietized in Canada and the UK than in any continental European country I can think of. Maybe the Ukraine is worse. Parts of the US are as heavily taxed as the UK (New York City for example), and the UK is far from the best in the European Union, let alone in comparison with the little tax havens of Monaco, Liechstenstein, Luxembourg.
One reason that the French state is so overbearing could be precisely that French people are generally NOT inclined to obey authority. You need millions of bureaucrats to a) have enough supporters for government and b) harrass the rest of the the public. Whereas the lighter touch of British rule (until recently) was a reflection on the bovine docility of the British people with such weird notions as ‘rule of law’.
Certainly my experience of British and French libertarians suggests that the British ones are far more inclined to support a minimal state, whereas the French ones tend to trust no government at all.
“The government which governs best, governs least. And the government which governs least, governs not at all.”
I was going to write about Les 4 Vérités a French free-market libertarian/liberal weekly magazine. However I came across a survey on pornography on the magazine’s site which produced the following results:
- 32.52 per cent – “The State must take strong restrictive measures”
- 23.40 per cent – “I’m against it, I try to persuade others, but it’s none of the State’s business”
- 2.13 per cent – “I’m a consumer and I would like politicians to stop me”
- 41.95 per cent – “It’s a pleasant past-time which should not be prohibited”
From these figures I assume that the number of British immigrants in France connected to the Internet is small.
Many people (including myself) comfort themselves with illusions.
Some people misread F.A. Hayek and think of corporations as examples of spontaneous order where people ‘just get on with things’ – rather than accepting the grim truth that whereas the interaction of various corporations and their customers may produce a spontaneous order, what goes on inside a corporation is (in part) a matter of plans and orders – what Hayek called Taxis rather than Cosmos (indeed Hayek greatly feared that most of the employees of a corporation had little direct contact with the market place).
Other people believe that poverty or unemployment can be dealt with by supporting credit-money expansion – a fallacy refuted so many times, but which refuses to die (for it is such an attractive fallacy).
Very many people believe in democracy. If the majority vote for good people things will get better. And if the majority make a mistake – why then they can ‘throw the rascals out’ and vote for different people.
At least (so the pleasing illusion goes on) this will work if most people are basically good.
In the United States the great critic of democracy is seen as H.L. Mencken (he is even honoured by the predictable attempts to smear him as a racist bigot – which would have come as a surprise to all the black and Jewish writers he helped in the interwar period).
However, I believe that the greatest critic of democracy in the United States was not Mencken. The great journalist often failed to use measured language (his attacks on President Roosevelt failed, in part, because people remembered the wild abuse Mencken had flung at such men as President Coolidge -“Stonehead” and all the rest of it). → Continue reading: Irving Babbitt
Many of the anti-war protesters has been carrying placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’. Well if you voted in the UK, regardless of whether it was for Labour or Conservative or LibDem, then you gave your consent to the system which taxes me without my consent, so I suppose I am robbed in ‘your’ name. I was disarmed (by a Tory government) and forbidden to effectively defend myself in ‘your’ name. My rights to own property and control my own labour and capital are abridged into meaninglessness in ‘your’ name.
So when you say say about a war against the Ba’athist socialists of Iraq “Not In My Name”, please forgive me if I really do not give a damn if something gets done by the state that you do not like.
I do not think George Bush and Tony Blair want to topple Saddam Hussain due to an abiding concern for the Iraqi people, but frankly I really do not care why the statists who tax me are going to do it, just that they do it. Provided there is a net gain in liberty in Iraq, and it is hard to see how that could not be the case post-Saddam, then I am in favour of the violent and hopefully fatal removal of the Ba’athist thugs.
Do it for ‘Freedom for Iraq’, do it ‘because Saddam is a threat’, do it ‘because of links to Al-Qaeda’, do it ‘because the voices in my head told me to’… I do not care. Just do it!
You can even do it in my name if you like.
David Goldstone has written in with Why Libertarians should be for the liberation of Iraq but against the war. I have replied to his thoughts afterwards
Dear Perry,
I have every sympathy with those on Samizdata who support the forthcoming war. The thought of Tony Benn telling an Iraqi women why it is wrong for her people to be freed from tyranny is skin-crawlingly repellent. And as for the marchers yesterday, well if they against the war that is almost reason enough for me to be for it.
Almost reason enough, but not quite. In the final analysis, I still believe (and I say this with all respect to those who disagree), that the pro-war libertarians are wrong.
Let me say clearly that this posting is not addressed to those who believe that the war is justified on the grounds of pre-emptive self defence. I disagree with them but the debate between us is not a debate of principle, merely one as to the weight of the evidence. Rather, this posting is directed at those who would justify the war on the grounds that it will bring liberty to millions of Iraqi’s.
Let me also say clearly that I fully endorse the goal of bringing liberty to Iraq and I would willingly contribute some of my own money to pay for a military effort to bring about that end.
But others would not. And therein lies the contradiction for libertarians. How can we justify using force (viz tax revenues) to make others pay for a war that they oppose? If the U.S. or U.K. governments were to conscript people to fight to free Iraq, I am sure we would be loud in our condemnation. Yet taxation is at only one remove from conscription. Whether we like it or not, millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. disagree with the war. We may disagree with them, but how can we as libertarians justify forcing them to pay for it? The implications are obvious and run counter to everything that libertarians stand for.
I would dearly love to see a compelling answer to this question because I would dearly love to be able to support the war. But so far, I have yet to see any answer to this question on Samizdata, let alone a compelling one.
David Goldstone
Well David, I actually agree with you more than you might suppose! Although I am less convinced than you seem to be that Saddam Hussain poses no actual threat to me, my primary reason for wanting to see the overthrow of Ba’athist socialism in Iraq is that I wish to see an end to tyranny, the death or imprisonment of its perpetrators and an increase in liberty for Iraq’s hapless people.
For me the only argument against this being done by the militaries of the USA and UK is that this requires the theft of tax money from US and UK taxpayers.
However…
What is done is done. I have been robbed by the US and UK states (the two places I have been paying taxes) for a great many year and the lavishly equipped volunteer militaries capable of overthrowing Ba’athism are already in existence.
As selling off the military equipment and returning a huge pot of my stolen tax money to me is going to happen when pigs fly, I am left with either watching the proceeds of my robbery slowly depreciate as they sit in military bases scattered across the world, or instead demanding that I at least get some value for my stolen money!
Just as I would rather have privately own roads, private police forces and private healthcare, in the here-and-now I at least what the state owned roads to have no potholes, the state owned police to prevent me being mugged and the National Health Service to fix me up when I am injured. I am after all being forced to pay for all these things!
And so… please take this volunteer military I was forced to pay for and go and kill Saddam Hussain. The state made me pay for the weapons and salaries, so bloody well give me some value for my money!
This was posted today to the Libertarian Alliance Forum by Nigel Meek.
“Although generally always pro-War – I accept the case that Islamic Jihadists and bandit states such as Iraq and North Korea might ultimately have to be confronted and put down by relatively large, well-equipped armed forces, and it’s one of the reasons that *in practice* I’m a minarchist rather than an anarchist – like any libertarian with a right to be called by that name I’ve nevertheless always been somewhat hesitant about fully committing my meagre support to the whole thing. Whether it’s the prospect civilian casualties, of increased taxation to pay for it all, or a lasting diminution in domestic civil liberties – in short, a growth of the State’s reach and power – it is not good news for our way of thinking.
And yet the marches in London and elsewhere yesterday have as near as it’s possible so to do obliged me now to side with Bush and Blair effectively unequivocally. I peeked at the TV screen every now and then on Saturday – and thanks, too, to Perry de Havilland and David Carr for their reporting on the event in Samizdata -and even if one knew absolutely nothing about Saddam Hussein, his family, his supporters, the Ba’athist regime, and the actions of all of the forces under their control nationally and internationally over a great many years, simply looking at those who attended ought to be enough to make any sane person opt for Bush and Blair and to support a military invasion of Iraq, not just in the absence of any formal support from the UN but in complete indifference to what the UN says.
For what did we see on Saturday in London and elsewhere? Warmed-over Cold War moral equivalencers and Communist fellow-travellers; various latter-day Marxoid sectarians; geriatric Aldermaston veterans and other one-sided nuclear
disarmers; ‘smash Anglo-Saxon civilisation’ multiculturalists; assorted celebrity egotists; outright pro-Saddamites; anti-globalisation nihilists; re-invigorated public-sector trades unionists; UN-supporting single-world-governancers; full-time protesters-without-a-cause; liars and fantasists; pan-Arab socialists; Green nature worshippers; anti-Semites; ‘nice’ middle-class people who are “worried about their children’s future” and who voted for the Greens in the 1980s and latterly and ironically for Blair and New Labour; insolent purveyors of an alien and wicked Islamic creed; immigrant welfare-spongers; those who simply think that evil is good and vice-versa; and Lord alone knows who else. Saddest of all – however small in number -capitalist-libertarians whose hatred of Statism is so great that they would apparently look with more favour upon a ‘private’ mugger the a State-employed policeman coming to the victim’s aid.
In short: a march-past of Those Who Are Wrong. This is not a black and white issue. No libertarian could think so. But I believe that it’s fair to say that it’s a black and rather-grimy-off-white-grey issue. The very real faults of Bush
and Blair personally, their political views overall, the parties that they lead, and the only semi-free countries that they run simply must not blind us to the demonstrable truths not only of the nature of Saddam Hussain et al but that those who oppose them here in the UK and elsewhere are (at best) mistaken and (at worst) a fairly representative cross-section of every wicked creed to have recently assailed the world, certainly since the end of the Second World War.
What we witnessed was a March for Evil.”
I think that was worth re-printing.
My recent posting Can we agree? appears to have proved a point. No, we cannot. Consider this extract from Elliot Temple’s contributions to the discussion that flowed from my piece:
Also, I think it’s Perry’s position that government is a threat to our liberties. Whereas, I disagree again.
I think Mr Temple will find that the view that government is a threat to our liberties is more widely held than by Perry de Havilland. Every form of anarchist would agree. So, presumably would the 55,000,000 people killed in the Second World War. The 1,000,000 murdered by the Soviet occupiers in “liberated” Eastern Europe. The Jews (3,000,000? 6,000,000? 10,000,000?) murdered by the Nazi German government. In Communist China is it “only one hundred million”? I remember one government official once claiming that “only one per cent” of his country’s population died in labour camps.
Even where states are not deliberately violating freedom, governments are a threat simply by the scale of their power and the unintended consequences thereof. The US government in the 1960s did not set out to create a crime epidemic by offering welfare to single mothers, reducing prison sentences for juveniles, criminalizing drugs and introducing wage controls. Yet if the policy had been to force-feed children with crack cocaine, to napalm-bomb certain districts of major cities, to introduce the death penalty against men with low-incomes for staying with their pregnant girdfriends and to make it illegal for a shop-keeper to hire a student, the effect would have been pretty much the same by the mid-1970s.
If there is a reason why some states are less horrendous than others, it may just be that the better places are where more people are wary of the state as a vehicle for creating goodness, and in the worst, the state is busy “doing good”.
To be a libertarian does not necessarily imply that one favours anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism or anarcho-communism. But it does imply a generally sceptical attitude towards any claim that the state is an institution to be entrusted with ever greater power.
On that point at least, we should all agree. On this basis, some libertarians can support a U.S. attack on Iraq – for a variety of reasons. But if they are not letting their emotions cloud their judgement (especially fear and the desire for revenge) they should look beyond the war and ask themselves how much damage to freedom in the US, and elsewhere, the war will cause.
To give but one example: the US has rejoined UNESCO in an attempt to buy votes from other states for their support in a war against Iraq. If this process doesn’t frighten you, ask yourself what governments wouldn’t trade. The US is also paying subscriptions back-dated to UNESCO. This means that an organisation which is dedicated to the destruction of free-market education worldwide is about to receive a massive financial windfall, plus the official blessing of the US government. Goodbye private education in India. Hello global permanently subsidized illiteracy.
Bianca Jagger addressed the Anti-War protesters assembled in London this evening thus:
No matter how terrible a nation is, the UN charter forbids just overthrowing the regime. The war against Iraq is unjustified.
In other words, if the National Socialist regime has confined its programme of genocide against the Jews to Germany and had not invaded other countries, war against Nazi Germany would have been unjustified.
And there you have it… THIS is where collectivist thought takes you. To hell with an individual’s right not to be murdered by the state, because the state, the NATION, the collective, is what matters more.
Evil. Truly evil.
In response to a contention that I made in the comments section of an earlier Samizdata.net article that ‘wealth redistribution’ was intrinsically immoral, a commenter replied:
Have you considered that many people consider wealth redistribution morally right, and consider it morally right to use violence to achieve it?
Well I happen to believe in objective (albeit conjectural) truth, and hence objective (and yes, conjectural) morality, so the subjective views of other matter little to me when deciding what is and is not a moral use of violence. I understand that statist people think it is ‘moral’ to take my money under threat of violence. I also know that some people think it ‘moral’ to prevent mixed marriages, ‘moral’ to kill Jews, ‘moral’ to treat women as chattels, ‘moral’ to jail people for sodomy. So what?
To say my property is there for others to help themselves to is to negate the very existence of several (i.e. ‘private’) property, which is of course what paleo-socialists are quite up front about wanting to do and modern socialists want to do in the fascist manner (i.e. allow ‘private’ property whilst regulating its use to the point ownership becomes a meaningless notion).
Yet without several property, there is no modern western civilisation, let alone liberty, so taking my money is not just theft, it is an assault on civilisation itself, and I have no objection to using violence to defend it. I am all in favour of shooting burglars that a home owner finds in their house, so my views on tax collectors and the people who sent them (i.e. anyone who legitimises what they do) should not be hard to figure out. The only reason I am not out shooting people and putting bombs in cars is a purely utilitarian cost/benefit analysis that it is not the most effective way to secure my liberty and the liberty of others. Those who love liberty can (mostly) play a waiting whilst economic reality has its way with the nations just as it did with the Soviet Union, but that does not mean fighting figuratively and literally for liberty is not moral. In fact, it is really one of the most moral reason for fighting there is.
The French libertarian movement is split over war with Iraq, though needless to say, not for the purely venal reasons of Chirac, the bespoke purveyor of nuclear technology to national-socialist dictators.
Most of the French libertarians I have been in touch with seem torn between a quasi-Randian view: “exterminate all practitioners of violent irrational beliefs” and the absolutist horror of any state violence. With a president like Jacques Chirac (imagine a cross between Richard Nixon, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and George Bush senior: with NONE of their redeeming features), such scepticism about the morality of one’s own government seems reasonable. My fear about America is that unlike most Americans, I assume that the next US president could be almost as bad. But that’s another issue.
A distinctive voice in France right now is Jacques Garello – a French Catholic economist of the Austrian school. Professor Garello has hosted the summer university of the “nouvelle économie” at Aix for twenty five years, probably the most significant event of it’s kind in Europe. Here M. Garello considers the case for a “just” war:
The error consists in talking of a war against Iraq, when it really is a war against terrorism, and a legitimate case of self-defense of universal civilisation against barbaric forces which happen to find support and encouragement in Iraq.
He goes on to suggest that the real purpose of French diplomacy in refusing to side publicly with the US is the fear of the millions of potential Islamic militants in France: they would rather ignore the problem than fight it.
*= The Other France
I’m listening to Radio 3, and I’ve just heard a rather celebrated lady novelist (Elizabeth Jane Howard) and a slightly celebrated composer and broadcaster (Michael Berkeley), in between reminiscing about other celebrities (such as the late Kingsley Amis, to whom Ms. Howard was married) and introducing a very nice Scarlatti recording by a somewhat celebrated lady pianist (Nina Milkina), denounce the “Cult of Celebrity”. If I heard right in among embarking on this, the two of them are plugging Ms. Howard’s newly published autobiography.
I’m getting very sick of this. I’d love to be a celeb, and am doing the best I can to be one within the limits set about me by the indolence of my personality. My view of those who already are celebs is what many others (but not me) feel about those ex-officio hereditary celebs, the Royal Family. They earn their money! → Continue reading: Celebrating celebrity
So if, for the time being, we can’t conquer space, maybe we can conquer Delaware. According to Brian Doherty at Reason Online Hit and Run (I hope I’ve got that roughly right), there’s a plan for libertarians to descend en masse on Delaware and take the place over and generally let utopia erupt.
According to the Delaware News-Journal:
If successful, by 2010 an army of 20,000 will move in, ascend to power and eliminate virtually all taxes – along with nearly all government programs and regulations. No public schools, no health, welfare or social services, no liquor laws, no gun control or land use laws. Smoking would be allowed nearly everywhere, as would almost all forms of gambling and prostitution.
The free market would run riot.
Doherty reports all this without really saying whether he thinks it makes much sense.
For me, this scheme is almost the definition of how not to try to do things. The right way to do things is to combine long-term background education with short-term opportunism. You read and write and propagandise. And, you grab that job on the local paper that someone offers you, or grab control of that local committee that suddenly seems grabbable and do what you can with that. You see the chance to become President of Portugal, and you take it. Nigeria comes up for sale and you can afford it. What you do not do is make big, public, medium-term “plans” like this one, which depend on 20,000 libertarians all agreeing about what plan they’re all supposed to be following, before anything of any value can be achieved.
This is not to say that something like this won’t happen. But if it does happen, it will happen naturally, with each step making sense for its own sake. A few libertarians will gather in some little spot for some particular reason or other, and then they’ll make a nice place and attract more libertarians (perhaps because they’ve set up an attractive propaganda operation which can use and will appreciate more talent), and suddenly, without any big shared plans that anyone has been stressing and straining over, they find that they can have a lot of local influence without any great fuss, so they duly have it.
But don’t plan it. Just let it happen. And in the meantime try to increase the odds of things like this happening everywhere, somewhere, but nowhere in particular.
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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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