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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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.
Having spent half-a-lifetime confronting, facing down and baiting my left-wing compatriots, I have the benefit of knowing exactly what words, names and phrases to use in order to elicit a dramatic response.
For example, the very name of George Bush has become the etymological equivalent of a nerve agent. One only has to drop it into a conversation and then watch the lefties convulsing themselves in spasms of bug-eyed hatred-cum-delirium. At the moment there is no antidote.
Robust political partisanship of this kind is nothing new nor is it confined to the left; the name of Tony Blair will turn the face of most Conservatives into a rictus of horror. For most of the time, this kind of mutual baiting is fun and, in many ways, indicative of a healthy society.
However, I have found evidence of something a little darker in this quite awful cartoon in the Guardian.
The two figures are supposed to be those of Messrs Bush and Blair but it is the image of George Bush, portrayed as a sort of cross between a pointy-eared alien and an ape, which I find just a little disturbing. Presumably the cartoonist is trying to convince his audience that George Bush is less than human.
The art of caricature is a time-honoured British tradition which I particularly enjoy and it is right that all political figures should be regarded as fair game. But this is not just caricature, it is deliberate dehumanisation; a process with a very unfortunate provenance.
Nor can this be simply dismissed as the work of an ‘unrepresentative fringe’ as the Guardian is undoubtedly the most important organ of the British left. Given their alleged commitment to ‘humanitarian’ policies, depictions of human beings as apes is the kind of thing I though they would go to any lengths to avoid. As it is, they have provided us with a window into the kind of psychosis which lies at the heart of at least some portions of the ideological left.
When George Orwell wanted to warn us all of the horrors of communism he did so by portraying animals as human beings. My feeling is that those who portray human beings as animals have a far less worthy agenda.
Natalie Solent (“brain like a planet” – Alice Bachini) has this to say today about farm regulation:
Note the vague and subjective nature of the criteria by which the officials make these decisions – “Is the farmhouse character-appropriate?” “Is the residential aspect in balance with the farm?” If one has high taxation one needs a complicated regime of rules to allow wealth to be created at all. Once the regime of rules becomes sufficiently complicated it collapses under its own weight and becomes a regime of the personal judgement of officials. And personal judgement must frequently mean personal whim, personal caprice. We are edging back to the lord administering justice as he pleases in his own demesne.
Apart from the word “edging”, which I would probably have done as “moving”, I agree.
But now here’s a thought. If it is true that any year now the public sector will be carved up again into slices of property which the ruling official can rule as he pleases, might this perhaps be a way that classical liberal ideas could smuggle themselves back into society again? Might not some of these local lords of the manor decide to preside over a genuinely free market, and if they do, would they not attract lots of business? And might it not then start to spread?
If the very laws themselves are now more and more being enacted upon the whims of individuals, and they are, might not laws in due course find themselves being abolished by the same mechanism?
A further relevant thought, which I often find myself repeating because it has so many applications and resonances. When I worked in that free market bookshop in Covent Garden in the eighties that I’m always going on about, we found that some of our most loyal, knowledgeable and ideologically simpatico customers were people in the upper reaches of the civil service. Why? Because, whereas outsiders still tended to hope for the best from the government, these people all knew the worst. They knew that government screws up almost everything it touches, because time after time, they’d been right there when it was being done. Often these people start out very statist in their thinking, which is why they started out working for the state. But if they are well educated (and they mostly are) and intellectually scrupulous (which some certainly are) they find themselves compelled to revise their statist opinions.
So it is not so very fanciful that at least some of these high state officials who mutate into lords of the manor might well be our kind of people, and want to do our kinds of things.
It must have been about a year ago when a gentleman describing himself as a ‘real socialist’ fetched up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum and threw himself headlong into stinging denunciations of the state and its coercive methods. He was delighted to be amongst those of what he believed to be a like mind. But he wasn’t just against government coercion, no. He was against all coercion which included the ‘tyranny’ of capitalism, commerce, money and property (which he regarded as theft).
Upon further prompting (and it didn’t take much) he advised that his goal was a pure society where all government, money, trade, property and personal gain had been abolished. Intrigued (and heartily amused by this stage) we asked him how he intended to prevent people from creating currencies, establishing property rights and trading as they please without coercion.
In response he was both affronted and bemused. Why couldn’t we understand that when all the above-mentioned iniquities had been abolished, a spontaneous order of cooperation would arise, self-interest would be dispensed with, and there will be no need for coercion because nobody will want things like property and money.
After the delivery of a few well aimed logic incendiaries, he disappeared taking his one-man crusade for utopia with him. He simply could not understand why people would want money or property in a world where everything was free. I daresay that he still has the hoots of our derisive laughter ringing in his head.
I am reminded of this gentleman and his utopian vision because of something posted by one of our commentators recently:
“As I’ve mentioned before, the US Libertarian Party has a concept called the non-aggression principle which states that you will not initiate force, or advocate its initiation. Anyone who joins the LP signs a statement saying that they will abide by that.”
On the face of it, the non-aggression principle (NAP) sounds like a very noble and enlightened thing. Indeed, it is a principle to which I once subscribed myself. However, further reflection (and not just recent events or by way of any reference to the possible impending assault on Iraq) has led me to quite a different opinion. → Continue reading: The best form of defence
Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government.
A recent reminder of this in the British context:
A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences.
It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid – but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for).
They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government’s power to regulate (although the very institution of a ‘licence’ should have reminded them of this power).
Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls.
In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away.
The “close working relationship” they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their “support for British high tech business” (like the late Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” back in the 1960’s) was quite mistaken.
Now the companies are screaming and going to court – but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place.
As the potential military conflict with Iraq draws near, all sorts of weird things come out of woodwork. For example, some of them are planning a D-Day for the ‘peace’ movement in Europe and United States on 15th February. Andrew Burgin, spokesman for Britain’s Stop the War Coalition expects record numbers on the day at the biggest anti-war demonstration London has ever seen, all marching under a “Don’t attack Iraq” banner.
“The message is a simple one: no war against Iraq for any reason, whether the United Nations supports an attack or not.”
I am aware that the public opinion in Europe is at best divided over an attack on Iraq and in most countries – Britain and France included – is against by a wide margin if an invasion is not supported by the United Nations. However illogical that position might be, I have grown used to fighting it and nowadays it leaves me cold, merely a reminder of human stupidity. But “no war, for any reason”?! Who are these people?
The aim of the Coalition should be very simple: to stop the war currently declared by the United States and its allies against ‘terrorism’.
When I looked at the list of supporters of the Stop the War Coalition, I found many of our old ‘friends’ from CND, assorted Marxist trade unions, and other institutions where ‘idiotarians’ like to congregate. Just a few rich pickings:
George Galloway MP, Harold Pinter (playwright), Lindsey German (Editor, Socialist Review), Paul Foot (journalist), George Monbiot (journalist), Tariq Ali (broadcaster), Liz Davies (Socialist Alliance), Dave Nellist (Socialist Party), John Rees (Editor, International Socialism), Will Self (writer), Germaine Greer (writer)…
These are just a few whose names have either been pilloried on this blog or the names of institution they belong to speak for themselves. What really gets me going is that these people confidently claim and occupy the moral highground in protesting against war with Iraq (notice how even the phrase ‘war on Iraq’ suggests aggression from our side; as far as I am concerned Iraq is at war with us and has been for some time, thanks to its megalomaniac leader).
They will satisfy their flaccid social consciences by making themselves ‘feel good’ about having the courage to stand up for things that everyone else is against like peace and justice and brotherhood… [hums the tune to Tom Lehrer’s song: We are the Folk Song Army, Everyone of us cares, We all hate poverty, war and injustice, Unlike the rest of you squares…] It’s an old communist, leftist, tranzi…etc technique. Grab them by their emotions and you are sure to be followed by those without reason.
What would these people say about fighting Hitler and the Nazi Germany or indeed about any aggressor attacking its neighbours and posing threat to the world? How do they square history with their idiotic demand to oppose war against Iraq for any reason? I fear that security and defence are meaningless concepts to such ideologues, what matters is that they get to call demonstrations against the US and be anti-American with a ‘noble’ message to boot. What joy!
On the other end of the table, we have the likes of Major Peter Ratcliffe, who won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his role in the Scud base attack leading the crack Alpha One Zero squad behind enemy lines. He believes Britain should support any American military action in Iraq and describes anti-war critics in Tony Blair’s government as traitors:
“Tony Blair vowed to support America in the war on terrorism. He said: ‘Whatever it takes’. I see no reason why he should go back on that. Those who now say otherwise – old Labour lefties like Clare Short and Tam Dalyell, the pacifists, those now turning on Blair – they’re traitors.
Few doubted at the time of the Gulf War that Saddam’s true goal was to become a ruler of the Muslim world in the Middle East. There is no reason to believe that goal has changed. He is a megalomaniac. Saddam wants to dominate the Middle East, he wants to terrorise the world. His own people revile him.
Hussein has always vowed to avenge himself on America. His people suffer more, not less, because Saddam Hussein is allowed to remain in power. And they will continue to do so until he is removed. And no amount of hand-wringing, no amount of international aid, no amount of windy wobbling will change that fact.
Nobody likes war. Nobody enters a war recklessly, without deadly serious consideration of all the facts. Everyone would prefer to stay at home and hope for a political solution. But the fact is that there isn’t one.
Soldier’s words, honest and direct. They also carry far more weight as they are uttered by someone who fought to protect us and the society we live in.
Whilst Samizdata.net is not trying to start a flame war with LewRockwell.com, it would be fair to say that once we stray out of the area of economics, we disagree with them fairly consistantly on issues of war and peace. Alan Forrester adds his views on the subject.
One of my favourite ways of thinking about libertarianism is that we ought to have libertarian institutions because people are ignorant. I’m not misanthropic, it’s just that outside a very narrow range of expertise people tend to know nothing and this ignorance means that we should strive to have a world in which people can offer advice to each other without making it compulsory. Interestingly enough there is a brilliant illustration of this within the libertarian community itself at Lew Rockwell.com, those Lew Rockwell fellows know everything there is to know about free market economics and I take my hat off to them in that respect. But when it comes to moral and political philosophy and in particular the morality and politics of war they don’t have a clue.
Take, for example, this bizarre piece: Bloodthirsty ‘Libertarians’ by Walter Block
“The libertarian non-aggression axiom is the essence of libertarianism. Take away this axiom, and libertarianism might as well be libraryism, or vegetarianism. Thus, if a person is to be a libertarian, he must, he absolutely must, in my opinion, be able to distinguish aggression from defense.”
How exactly one is supposed to derive all political wisdom from a single catchphrase rather than look at real problems and try to figure out how one could deal with them in away that is conducive to problem-solving I’m not sure. However, even on the basis of the non-aggression rule, the comments below are complete tosh.
“You don’t have to wait until I actually punch you in the nose to take violent action against me. You don’t even have to wait until my fist is within a yard of you, moving in your direction. However, if you haul off and punch me in the nose in a preemptive strike, on the ground that I might punch you in the future, then you are an aggressor.”
So let me get this straight. You’re standing atop a pile of dismembered corpses, laughing like a madman and brandishing a chainsaw covered in blood. You haven’t noticed me yet, but I’m a few hundred metres away with a telescopic rifle. Am I allowed to blow your head clean off your
shoulders or not? → Continue reading: Libertarianism is not about nonaggression, it is about liberty
One of the advantages of giving up smoking (10 days now, folks) is that you can defend the rights of other smokers from a higher strategic ground; nobody can accuse you of having a personal axe to grind.
But not having an axe leaves me with a free hand with which to take up cudgels against busybodies and their campaigns for increased state bullying:
“The survey was carried out on behalf of Cancer Research UK, Marie Curie Cancer Care, QUIT, ASH and No Smoking Day.
Officials said they hoped the survey would encourage ministers to take steps to ban smoking at work.”
My own view is that it is up to the owners of the business to decide upon the issue of smoking on the premises and what I find grating is not that these organisations disagree with me or even that they publicise their views on the matter. No, what I find questionable if whether ‘charities’ should be engaging in these kinds of campaigns.
Incidences of charities behaving as political lobbyists are far too frequent to be dismissed as symptoms of altruistic exuberance. In fact, whilst this is probably not true in the case of organisations like Cancer Research UK or Marie Curie, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the label ‘charity’ is, in some cases, used as a fig-leaf to mask a wholly political ambition. It provides an automatic authentication for the views they express and an insulation against criticism of either their opinions or motives.
I wish to make it clear that I am not against charities. In fact, I am very much in favour of charities as voluntary organisations which can and do provide real help to the distressed and the weak with far greater efficiency and humanity that any number of indifferent state bureaucracies. But I do think that the parameters of ‘charitable status’ are overdue for some scrutiny. Organisations that confine their activities to distributing hot soup to the destitute or arranging day-trips for orphans deserve the title and the advantages it brings. Organisations which exist merey to egg on Big Brother and advance an ideological agenda are lobbyists and should be treated as such.
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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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