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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Despite all the evidence to the contrary, far too many people still believe that their elected officials exist to look after the interests of the ordinary person. Yes, of course they make mistakes. Doesn’t everybody? Still, their hearts are in the right place and that’s what counts.
For those who may still harbour these lingering, absurd delusions, I recommend this article by Sean Gabb.
As always, Sean’s language is both florid and forthright. But so it should be because it explains, in detail, how wealth-producing, hard-working Britons have been robbed of their future by a government that they, inexplicably, still trust above all other institutions.
“But the tax changes are enough. People of my generation may now be looking at a far less comfortable retirement than we expected. Some of us may find ourselves in very straitened circumstances. Those of us lucky enough to stay reasonably healthy may find ourselves having to delay or even give up on retirement.”
And it may get worse. We have a desperate administration that has plundered everything in sight and the temptation to help themselves to the juicy, low-hanging fruit of private pension funds, may be more than they can resist.
The government is not your friend.
The main differences between a British libertarian gathering and an American one is the attitude towards foreign affairs and their own governments. During the Cold War many American libertarians, Murray Rothbard especially, denounced the US federal government’s attempts to “encircle” Communism, build alliances, station troops in Europe etc.
Most British libertarians, being somewhat closer to the Iron Curtain, and feeling that the English Channel might not be a huge obstacle to the Asiatic hordes of the Red Army, were rather happier with the presence of large, well equipped armies. We also took a more relaxed view of state violations of individual rights when the persons concerned were Communists, pro-Soviet peace protesters or “useful idiots” who acted spontaneously in a manner which would have delighted Stalin, Hitler or Napoleon.
We tended to admire the antics of the security services as they “bugged and burgled their way across London”. Some of us cheered when police officers on horseback smashed their way through ranks of protesting miners in 1984. I know no one in British libertarian circles who wondered if it might not be our turn some day, although Sean Gabb came closest.
The gloom among British libertarians today is partly the result of the realisation that now the apparatus of state oppression is randomly destroying people’s lives like in the final chapters of “Atlas Shrugged”.
But there is something particularly awful about the gloom engulfing British libertarians. No one born in the mainland of the United Kingdom and alive today has ever seen a group of police officers march up a residential street, knocking at selected doors and leading families away to some awful fate. Yet in every other member state of the European Union except Finland and Sweden, the are people who remember watching their neighbours being taken away. In the case of recent refugees from the former Yugoslavia, such memories may be very recent indeed.
The problem for British libertarians is that they aren’t really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don’t think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy.
Paul Marks reminds us that the motivation to do good does not ensure good is actually done
Today I read the obituary of John Rawls (who died on Sunday) in the Daily Telegraph. Dr Rawls was a brave soldier, a loving husband and a good father to four children – he was also kind and polite to all who encountered him.
However, Dr Rawls was also the author of “A Theory of Justice” (1971) the main modern justification for the ever increasing burden of the welfare state.
According to Dr Rawls no one had any right to increase their income or wealth unless they could prove that by so doing they improved the economic life of the “least favoured”. Just not harming the least favoured would not do – as inequality harmed the “self esteem” of the poor.
Interestingly I also read in today’s Daily Telegraph a little example of how Rawlsian type thinking works out in practice. In the Spanish region of Valencia the government is working in a public-private partnership to improve the lot of the least favoured. Private developers produce a plan for the creation of urban zones (flats, shops, places of business and so on) in sparsely populated coastal areas, the government judges the plan and then levies a tax on land owners in the area to provide such things as roads and drainage.
What a wonderful thing – from either a Rawlsian or a utilitarian point of view.
However, the plan means that retired people who have bought properties by the coast have to pay the government lots of money (or have their property taken away) for roads and drainage (and so on) that do not benefit them.
Why do I think that Rawls (kind and decent man that he was) would have been disgusted by this sort of thing?
before you say “but that is the corruption of the idea” – maybe so, but that is statism in practice.
Paul Marks
Matthew O’Keeffe warns libertarians to be mindful of the company they keep
Antoine Clarke wrote a piece last week called Against Paranoia which got me thinking. In it he lamented:
“the tendency among Libertarians to worry obsessively about every infringement by the state, to link up instances of state oppression, and to deduce from this either that there is a vast campaign to destroy freedom, or that we’re powerless to combat the tide of enslavement. This makes us seem obsessive, paranoid and miserable company, except to others of a similar emotional condition”.
I had similar misgivings about the attendance of a leading conspiracy theorist at the recent Libertarian Alliance conference. Why do we keep such company?
Consider some of the good things in life: the English language, the Common Law, money, the market economy, etc. As libertarians, we appreciate all too well that none of these things were invented by any one well-meaning academic, lawyer, banker or economist. On the contrary, all of these things have arisen by way of a spontaneous order.
Conversely, consider some of the bad things: poverty, for example. I believe that the welfare state manufactures poverty for a variety of reasons to do with incentives, moral hazard, taxation, misallocation of resources, the general inefficiency of the state machinery etc. etc.. What I do not believe is that there is a group of sinister statists somewhere conspiring on how best to impoverish our inner cities.
The point is that, as libertarians, we should appreciate the law of unintended consequences. Where our enemies see a world full of evil capitalists, Zionists, or whoever, we should have a view of the world which is more adult than is. And, because we appreciate unintended consequences, we should see a world full of irony – leaving us with a world view which is also humorous rather than sour. Let’s leave the paranoia and misery to the statists.
Matthew O’Keeffe
There may be a suit against the Feds over the use of Federal funds for electioneering purposes at the State level.
Wouldn’t it be lovely (cough) to see those Statist turkeys behind bars? (pass that over to me again would you?….)
There is a new film called 28 Days Later, which to summarize extremely briefly, involves Britain in the very near future laid waste by a bio-engineered plague released by animal ‘rights’ activists. This plague, called The Rage, turns people into feral zombie-like killers.
Although the film has gained some rather good reviews, why bother shelling out your hard earned and heavily taxed money to see zombies up on the big screen?
Britain is already full of zombies tramping somnambulantly under the CCTV cameras, past the voting booths in which they can meaninglessly vote for ‘worst choice one’ or ‘worst choice two’ and only moving at all due to the sensory stimuli provided by the carcinogenic stench of greasy fast food dispensaries and the flickering light cast by sub-moronic Pavlovian response inducing game shows.
So why bother going to see a film about them when all you have to do to see zombies is look out your well barred and burglar alarmed window?
I am not usually this bleak-of-view, but to see the protections of both habeas corpus and double jeopardy doomed by a currently unassailable government… and yet to then see this greeted not with rioting on the streets but for the most part with a collective ovine shrug, does rather lead anyone who values liberty to dark sentiments.
This meme hack was brought to you by Alan K. Henderson. See here for the inspiration.
Last night I attended a discussion evening in an upstairs room of the King George IV pub in Portugal Street, hosted by the London School of Economics Hayek Society. Very good. Very high quality talk, very smart group of people, from many different countries, Americans, Scandinavians, an Italian, and enough Brits for it not to be a completely non-local event, about twenty people in all. There was no set speaker, we just took it in turns, but as Mr Visiting Libertarian I was given extra pontificating rights, which I trust I did not abuse too annoyingly. They asked me to come again so I must have behaved reasonably well.
The topic was along the lines of “Does libertarianism imply an optimistic view of human nature?” I voted no, but not with any huge confidence and with less after the discussion than I had before. It made me think, in other words, as all good meetings do. For what it may signify, the vote went about two-to-one for no. But that was just a fun way to wind up the discussion, it wasn’t the point of the thing. This wasn’t one of those ghastly Oxford Union type debates where everyone is training to be or pretending already to be a cabinet minister. We just sat around in a circle and talked, gently but firmly chaired by one of the Americans.
The Hayek Society has been chugging along for some years, and in general it is fascinating how university groups, once founded, often seem to stick around, even after two or three complete personnel recycles. The significance of the Hayek Society is thus hard to overstate. I don’t know exactly where in the British university pecking order the LSE comes but it’s not far from the top. In the past, it has made a lot of mischief all around the world, and was I think started to spread collectivist economics. Like France, it is often deeply annoying but it remains a great institution and is a great intellectual prize, a great meme machine. So for us to be getting our memes into it in a big and quality way is, well, big.
The person who invited me to this meeting was Nick Spurrell, and last night he mentioned something about “setting up a website” for the Hayek Society. Either I misheard him (in which case grovelling apologies) or he doesn’t know that there already is one, which was last updated on April 3rd 2001. He must know this. I must have got that wrong. Anyway, I’ll clarify all that soonest, and link to whatever new operation gets going as and when, giving any new material they produce the push here which I’m sure it will deserve.
Meanwhile, email Nick Spurrell to signify that you’re interested in meetings like this, if you are. There doesn’t seem to be any problem about non-LSE folks joining in but sort that out with him. At the moment the meetings happen every Thursday evening, and there’s also a bigger set-piece meeting happening next Wednesday afternoon (1pm – 3pm), which I may also go to.
I got to know Nick Spurrell through him coming to a couple of my last-Friday-of-the-month meetings. As usual, meatspace continues to matter.
For the last few days various people have been asking me what I thought of the big LA/LI conference last weekend that several of us have been going on about, here and in other Britblogs. How good was it? (Lowered voice: What was wrong that should be better next time?)
What I think is that these things are hard to organise, and especially so if you also have a life you’re fighting with full time. Since I have little in the way of a life to fight but did little to help, I’m not entitled to criticise. LA Director Chris Tame (who has a very aggressive life to contend with but who nevertheless did the bulk of the organising) deserves all the credit going for what went well, and none of the blame for any defects.
Nevertheless in this posting, I want to focus first on my one big regret about this event. Things happen the way they happen and all that. Some speakers let you down and others have to be juggled, and so on. But, I wish that Richard Miniter‘s speech at the final dinner, so well described here by David Carr, had instead been one of the conference talks that it was originally intended to be. First, if it had been there would have been a chance for questions. And second, if there had been questions I believe it would have become clear that although this man undoubtedly spoke very eloquently and interestingly, he did not really speak for the libertarian movement as a whole, and in particular, not for the European libertarian movement, which is just as split about US policy towards Iraq as libertarians are in the USA.
→ Continue reading: That conference – I salute Our Great Leader Tame
I have been of the opinion that Saddam Hussein will say ‘yes’ to the latest UN resolution, based on his opportunity to simply buy time and to exploit the rifts in Western opinion and short-and-shallow attention span of the Western public. I was not surprised by the Iraqi parliament’s ‘defiance’ since Saddam is the top man anyway. But Salam has more to say about it all: Nobody inside Iraq even bothered to tune in to hear what the parliamentarians had to say, while Al-Jazeera thought it was worth live coverage. But the Iraqi government did make it worth while for them. Who would have thought that they would reject the resolution? My money was on the Iraqi Parliament accepting the resolution and Saddam reluctantly giving the OK because that was the “will of his people”. Now I am very interested in the speech he will make to “justify” the acceptance of the UN resolution despite the recommendation of the Iraqi Parliament. (not that he has to justify anything or listen to recommendations, but since the whole thing was public he will make his views known, he likes to give speeches).
I may share Salam’s opinion but I can only imagine what it is like to be there:
As much as I find the resolution unfair, provocative, unrealistic in it’s demands and timeline, vague enough to allow for all sorts of traps I hope saddam does accept the resolution. Only to buy us time. It is a lose-lose situation for the Iraqi people no matter how you look at it. The USA is still talking of regime change, I think Iraq will not go past the first 30 days before the USA shouts “foul”. And in a case of war I do believe that if saddam has any biological or chemical weapons he is very likely to use them on his own people to give the CNN and Jazeera the bloody images everyone doesn’t want to see.
It’s not just a question of whether it is right or wrong to fight war with Saddam. The blogosphere has been throbbing with arguments for and against. On this blog we know which course of action to defend. So far the Big Picture, that we are used to seeing both in current affairs and history, rarely includes the individual (usually he is the one driving it, often by means of oppression and violence). Salam’s lone voice reminds me of millions of human tragedies that do not get played out on the world stage.
The blogosphere may be one way of redressing the balance. Reading Salam’s interpretation of events has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of reality of the war on Iraq. I cannot conceive of such information originating from the traditional media. Not only because I do not have faith in their abilities and motivation, but simply because they have not been designed to fulfil such role. They correspond to the Big Picture view of the world, together with historical analyses, diplomatic discourse and political decisions. The media claims of unbiased reporting and enlightenment through controversy ring hollow as there is a mismatch between their explicit role and understanding of their own limitations.
So Salam’s blog is important, not only in the context of the current international events. For now, I just hope that individual voices will become audible more and more.
Brian Micklethwait once engaged me with an interesting, pet theory of his. It goes something like this: you can always tell when an organisation or institution is about to die because, just before they expire, they spend gargantuan sums of money on a big, swanky, impressive, dedicated headquarters.
Brian has a bagful of interesting theories which may or may not hold water but it is the one above which flagged up for me when I read this:
“On September 30, the U.N. unveiled plans for a billion-dollar, top-to-bottom renovation of its New York headquarters. The plan also includes the construction of a new 30-story office tower, which will displace a public playground next door.
Brian, you’d better be right.
I spent yesterday (this is the small hours of Sunday morning) at day one of the conference referred to below, and for my money the star of the show so far has been Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University and author of this. Kealey’s performance was terrific, both in terms of content and because the man is blessed with such a clear and mellifluous speaking voice – which was a great asset in what proved to be a tricky accoustic given that no microphones were in use.
Having forced myself up at such a vile hour in the morning to get there in time for the start, I’m too knackered to say more now. I hope to report further and less superficially after tomorrow’s proceedings, and there’s a good chance that one or some of David Carr, Patrick Crozier, Alice Bachini, David Farrer, Paul Marks and Antoine Clarke, also all present, will also have things to say, here and/or elsewhere.
For more of my first thoughts about this conference, I have posted some reactions to another of the speakers, Professor Christie Davies (author of a book called The Mirth of Nations) over on my recently started Education Blog.
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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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