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 believe it was the Victorians that set the tone. It was during the age of the ‘Great Philanthropist’ that charities first established their status in the public mind as selfless doers of great good in the world. Understandable really that, in an era before welfare benefits, they were the pious prickers of the public conscience; the saviours of last resort for the needy and woebegone, the kindly benefactors of the benighted poor.
Over the years they have glacially established their reputations as the standard-bearers of humanity and decency to the point where, today, membership of or subscription to charitable organisations is quite the highest badge of virtue. Contributing to their coffers, especially publicly, has come to be seen as the ultimate act of redemption for sins real or imagined.
Perhaps because of this, nobody seems to have noticed that some of these organisations (many world famous) have gradually shifted the focus of their energies to the point where they now energetically pursue policies that are diametrically opposite from those stated.
Take, for example, the British charity Oxfam, set up some 50 years ago by a group of young, idealistic Oxford intellectuals with a brief to help ‘feed the starving’. How very odd then to hear of this kind of thing:
The scientists complained that humanitarian groups such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save The Children, backed by EU funds, had frightened African governments into rejecting food aid. They said the groups had also alarmed starving populations. “Some groups have told people that genetically modified products are dangerous and could cause cancer,” said the executive director of industry body Africabio, Prof Jocelyn Webster. Webster and Prof James Ochanda, head of biochemistry at the University of Kenya, led the African delegation.
The scientific delegation said that genetically modified crops boosted yields and could make Africa less dependent on foreign food aid.
Seems that Oxfam’s mission to aleviate starvation has mysteriously morphed into an assidious campaign to cause starvation. → Continue reading: Not great and not very good
I took the quizilla test and the results were hardly unexpected:
 Libertarian – You believe that the main use for government is for some people to lord it over others at their expense. You maintain that the government should be as small as possible, and that civil liberties, “victimless crimes”, and gun ownership should be basic rights. You probably are OK with capitalism. Your historical role model is Thomas Jefferson.
Which political sterotype are you?
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For an anarchist libertarian, things are easy. Of course government folk find ways round every effort to limit the powers of the state – government is a malignant cancer and limited state people and minimal state people are just fools.
For those people (such as myself) who have doubt about anarchism things are difficult. We tend to fall back on ideas about Constitutions to limit the power of government – and the record of such things is not good.
Firstly few Constitutions even try to limit what things government can spend money on, and even those Constitutions that do try and do this by listing what government can spend on do not tend to hold back the state.
In the case of Australian Constitution there were amendments to the Constitution to allow the government to spend money on various welfare state programs (it is, of course, the welfare state or ‘entitlement’ programs that constitute the vast majority of government spending in all Western nations). In the American case the Constitution was simply ignored.
Some Classical Liberals and libertarians regard the fact that United States Constitution was not amended to allow for the growth of the government as a sign of hope (“the Constitution still exists, all we need to do is enforce it”), but I tend to agree with the anarchists that the fact that the United States Constitution has been used for toilet paper (without any real resistance) is deeply scary.
And make no mistake the U.S. Constitution has been smashed. Take the example of paper money. The Founders all opposed the concept of making unbacked notes money simply by government order (they had the example of the ‘Continental’ to remind them of some of the problems with the idea). And the Constitution seems clear enough. → Continue reading: Limited Government and Constitutions
Jeremy Sapienza wrote in his article called Only Terrorists Kill Innocents on Anti-State.com:
There seem to be many people, even in libertarian circles, who think that America was attacked because of abstract principles like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy.” And I didn’t want to say it, but so far it has been overwhelmingly true: the libertarians who would otherwise agree with the rest of us on most things but have done complete 180s here are Jewish. They support Israel blindly and fanatically, out of some allegiance to, as one writer put it, his “creed.”
[…]
It is a very easy concept to understand: the US government bombs innocent civilians all over the world, with hundreds of thousands dead in Arab parts, and so they hate us. They hate us because our government exterminates them like mosquitoes. So, in response to our government killing civilians, they kill OUR civilians. It is not right, but it is the only logical sustaining impetus for this utter hatred of Americans and our country.
[…]
Don’t worry, if we carpet-bomb Kabul there will still be Afghanis. I mean, they can still make more, right?
[…]
What the hell is the matter with you people!? Why are you so thirsty for innocent blood!? There has not been any arguments thus far that have convinced me that Muslims or Arabs are innately evil, or innately hate America because it is a prosperous, capitalist country. These are the ravings of people who are either lunatics or are too lazy to apply otherwise-heeded libertarian principles to their knee-jerk emotional reactions. Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it.
Well I am a so-called ‘pro-war’ libertarian, though 100% Goy, so I assume at least some of what is being written on anti-state.com is being directed at me and those of my ilk. However I do not support Israel 100%… in fact probably rather less that 50% if the truth be known.
Nevertheless I think it is clear that America was indeed attacked for abstract principles, just not ones like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy”. It was attacked for the abstract principles upon which the Islamic fundamentalism is based, which is to say ‘anti-secularism’ and as a corollary, anti-capitalism. You see Islam is indeed under attack in ways that really terrify fundamentalists the world over. However it should be obvious that the people who brought us the latest in Kamikaze tactics that bombing, and violent death generally, is not what frightens and engenders hatred from Islamists… it is an aggressive, global, unbounded secularism, whose carrier wave is a global and God-neutral capitalism which they fear. Not B-52s or F-16s or Tornados or Cruise missiles, but Playboy and Nintendo and banks-which-charge-interests and cheap DVD’s and satellite TV which mullahs cannot effectively control and so on and so on…
The likes of Al Qaeda want ‘us’ to leave ‘them’ alone… and by ‘them’ they mean the world’s Muslim population. But ‘we’ will never ever do that, because ‘we’ not really controlled by any authority who can make us stop making and selling whatever nominal Muslims the world over want to buy. And so out of desperation, the people to whom the very reason for their existance on earth is an imposed morality centred on certain abstract conceptions of God and Man which the secular world cares nothing about, attack us.
But Jeremy Sapienza does not see that, just the fact Iraq has been bombed since the ‘end’ of the last Gulf War, ergo that is the reason ‘they’ attacked ‘us’. And yet on September 11th the USA was not attacked by Iraqis angry at their treatment by the USAF, so I cannot see the relevance of Mr. Sapienza’s remarks about that being why ‘they’ kill ‘our’ civilians … neither was the USA attacked by members of the PLO or Hamas, who regularly get bombed by Israel, so I am not sure what relevance that has either… and just for completeness, neither were the hijackers that day Serbians who were pissed off about losing Kosova due to US and NATO actions, or German smarting over the end of the Third Reich or Japanese lamenting the loss of the South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
For the most part they were Saudis… and I cannot off-hand recall the last time the USAF bombed Saudi Arabia.
But then I think the article about which I am commenting is just a litany of misunderstandings and outright fallacies…leaving aside the patently false and positively libelous notion that the USAF/USN intentionally targeted civilians in Afghanistan (or anywhere else in the last decade). I wonder if Mr. Sapienza realises ‘carpet bombing’ is a technical military term which actually has a specific meaning. If Kabul had been carpet bombed, it would look rather like Dresden or Hamburg circa 1945, with tens of thousands killed in each air attack.
So what is the matter with us? Well for a start, we are not ‘pro-war’… we are pro-liberation. If Jeremy Sapienza can come up with a way to end mass murderous Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq by using harsh language and grimaces and singing Kumbayah, then I will quickly become a generous benefactor of anti-war.com. Until that is the case, I do wish he would stop his knee jerk emotional reactions and realise that yes, death is horrible… and the best way to stop the epidemic of state sponsored death in Iraq is to engineer the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism so that Saddam and Uday, and their coterie of thugs, end up hanging on meathooks in a public square in Baghdad.
You see, some libertarians see the world the way it really is and want to actually see tyranny overthrown with the tools at hand now and replaced with liberty and justice for all. Quaint but there you have it.
Yes we all know that what will follow Ba’athist Socialism will not be some libertarian nirvana, but it will be better that what is there now… if you are an isolationist, then call yourself an isolationist, I have no problem with that. Just don’t think you are taking a moral libertarian position. You ain’t. The article quotes the anti-war.com crowd, who are very willing to contemplate the cost of war and the benefits of peace… but that rather misses the obvious fact that the alternative to war in Iraq, right now, is not ‘peace’ but continued tyranny. So what is the cost of tyranny in Iraq, Mr. Sapienza… year after year after year?
So when he writes “Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it”… why is he so keen to see Saddam Hussain, the principle cause of unnatural death in Iraq, perpetuated? That may not be his desire, for I have no reason to think Jeremy Sapienza is an evil man, but that is the reality of an anti-war position.
A fable by Kevin Connors
Imagine a world not too much different from what we live in today…
Let’s say you have this neighbour who’s never grown up from his teen-age bully days. You know he beats his wife; you can hear the screaming at night and you see the bruises during the day. But she’s too terrorized by the guy to do anything about it.
But it gets worse: This guy has a bad habit of trying to move his fence over on to his neighbour’s property. You don’t live right next door, so he’s never bothered you. But once he tried to move the fence over your friend’s tomato garden. That fellow has quite a green thumb and you buy all the tomatoes you can from him at every harvest.
But further, this guys a gun-lovin’ irresponsible bastard, in fact, before you really got to know the guy, you went with him to a couple of gun shows and taught him how to reload. But he has this penchant for going out in yard every now and then and randomly blowing off a few rounds. Not a direct threat to you; you’re a few houses down the block, unless you go out on the street.
So, what do you do? Wait for his next door neighbours to act? Well, they’re kind of timid folks, deathly afraid of what he might do to retaliate. Build a high wall around your house, avoid the street, and give up on those nice fresh tomatoes? Why should you let this punk inconvenience you at all? Besides, there’s still a chance of one of those bullets going over the fence and you have it on good authority he’s shopping for hand grenades.
“Call the cops” is the obvious answer. But I forgot to mention this isn’t quite like the social system we live in; this is anarchy. Each household is truly sovereign onto themselves. Of course, being very wise in this sort of environment, you’re the baddest son-of-a-bitch on the street, an Nth degree black belt, armed to the teeth, with two ninjas for sons and a wife that can cook up bombs able to vaporize any other neighbour’s house in an instant.
Back when he pulled the tomato garden stunt, you went over and slapped him around a few times, made him move the fence back (which didn’t stop him from ripping up all the tomato plants in the process), took most of his guns away and told him to be nice to his wife. Well, he hasn’t tried to move the fence any more, but he still beats his wife, gets drunk and blows off a few rounds out in the yard.
What would you do?
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.
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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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