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’ve decided to reply to the responses on my previous article “in-line”. Issues of personal choice and personal liberty are at the very heart of libertarianism. It is not a matter of whether you agree with a behavior or not. A libertarian society removes from you the “right” to use force and coercion, whether by self or by state proxy, against acts you do not like. You may either mind your own business or you may spend your own time and money to advertise and campaign to change people’s minds one at a time. If you are Bill Gates or Ted Turner and spend every last pence you have to make people stop being part of Group X and all but one person does – that one person may still freely go about their business as before and there is nothing you can do about it.
You could be an Imam convincing everyone to accept Shari’a, and if one person doesn’t you are stuffed1. Tough. They can shoot back if you annoy them too much, and likely large numbers of others who agreed with your initial ideas will turn on you for breaking the Meta-rule of non-coercion.
There is no libertarian argument which could support the status quo of the Drug War. Drug usage – THC, Ethanol, Nicotine or stronger – are issues of personal choice. The results of those personal choices are personal responsibilities. If someone drinks themselves into a gutter, it is not the State’s responsibility to pull them out. If someone injects heroin into their veins and kills themself it is likewise not a public issue.
The minimal libertarian position is the Minarchist state. One which is responsible for Defense, Police and the Courts – killing terrorists, shooting down nuclear missiles, rescuing hostages where possible… and finding, trying and locking up snipers.
There is no room in that description for “outlawing a behavior of Group X that Group Y does not like or that Group Z thinks is unhealthy”.
In a free society, you do what you want so long as you don’t directly harm others… and the consequences of those actions are fully your own to deal with, whether it be getting laid and having a great time or morphine addiction, lung cancer and liver cirrhosis.
T’ain’t nobodies business but your own.
1 = For some Imams in certain Medieval nations, the very ideas expressed here are a heresy. That’s why we leave the Minimal State with Defense. So we can get them first if they try to “Kill Infidels in the Name of Allah”. A liberal society assumes everyone accepts a very minimal social pact of non-coercion.
The Reuters News Agency is in trouble:
“Shares in Reuters have fallen 23% after the financial information giant reported a drop in sales and warned of continuing problems.”
In order to avoid sounding judgmental and offensive, I shall refrain from using the term ‘bankruptcy’ and instead employ more neutral and appropriate term ‘market readjustment’.
[My thanks to The Professor for the link]
Whilst surfing the Internet I came upon a site purporting to show
What’s wrong with libertarianism. As I like to think I am always looking for a challenge, I though a little bit of fisking was in order given that most of what the site is critiquing is in fact libertarian influenced neo-conservatism, not actually ‘libertarianism’ at all. Also Zompist claims to argue on the basis of morality but in fact goes on to make an entirely utilitarian series of propositions.
When asked why not deregulate the economy, Zompist replied ‘We tried that and failed’… He then proceeds to actually make the libertarian case for us by arguing that in the supposedly unregulated past, the state would carry out ‘gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests’.
Of course one must have a significant interventionist state that owns gunboats and is structured in such a way to allow it to be manipulated by business in the first place… hardly an example of a ‘minimal state’ or perhaps Zompist thinks the Rockefeller family actually owned its own corporate logo’ed gunboats rather than the United States Navy.
Even more bizarrely Augusto Pinochet is held up as an example of an advocate of a minimal state! How does increasing the size of the security apparatus to impose the power of the state make a person an advocate of a minimal state? Duh. → Continue reading: How not to argue against libertarianism
What with the England – Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait’s visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours – the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian’s perception of himself up-side down:
For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world’s true sophisticates.
Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday1. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.
“We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn’t in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground… To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now.”
Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn’t yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day – Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.
→ Continue reading: Slovakia in the spotlight
Since they are vehicles by which ideas are spread, it stands to reason that definitions are important. Very important. There is nothing controversial in this view but I often feel that it is a principle more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
So I was delighted to read this article by Michael of 2 Blowhards wherein he demonstrates the flagrant absurdity of American left-wingers being referred to (and declaring themselves to be) ‘liberal’.
This is a point that we at the Samizdata have made previously and with good reason because American ‘liberals’ are not liberal at all, they are socialists. It sticks heavily in my craw to have to refer to these people as ‘liberals’ when the policies they favour and the ideas to which they subscribe (state interventions and pre-planned outcomes) are diametrically the opposite from anything even resembling classical liberal theory.
This is not just word-play, it is important. As Michael points out:
“One of the tricky things about “liberal” is that it’s just such a damned attractive word. It’s nice to think of yourself as being a liberal person. “I don’t care if my neighbor’s gay” equals “Thus I’m a liberal.” Sure, why not?”
This rings true. The word ‘liberal’ being associated with the qualities of being decent, humane and fair, provides a perfect cover for advancing an agenda which turns out to be largely indecent, horribly unfair and often inhumane.
American socialists are guilty of Definition-rustling. They have stolen a term that belongs to us and used it as camouflage behind which they have surrepticiously advanced their forward lines. I think it is time that we venture forth to take back that which belongs to us. Michael agrees:
“I also find it helpful to refuse to let the American left get away with calling itself liberal. I insist on referring to them as leftists, and to their views as leftism. Why let that crowd of sentimentalists, thought-police and socialists maintain exclusive ownership of a word as beautiful as “liberal”?
Why indeed, Michael. Far better to strip them naked and force them out into the open where the whole world can laugh at their grotesqueness.
Alice Bachini has posted an interesting reply to my recent article called The world is a messy place. Alice writes in When is violence OK?:
Bashing people for the purpose of communicating something moral might sound like an oxymoron, but I don’t think it is. I think the idea “No to badness!” is expressed usefully, and anyway, sometimes the only alternative is between that or “Yes to violence!” in the non-bashing alternative. It might seem generous to absorb the other person’s nastiness by taking it on the chin and walking off in silence, but unless they interpret this in the right spirit, it’s worse than useless.
I could not agree more!
Imagine you want to set up a business. Let’s say it’s a software consultancy. And let’s also assume that you require some capital funding to get you started. You decide to approach a variety of sources from wealthy private investors to banks to venture capitalists and in order to impress them you draw up a Business Plan.
Only, there is no Business Plan because you are forbidden from charging your customers. Yes, that’s right, you are obliged to give away your valuable time and expertise for free. Which means you are not a business, you are a charity. No business, no Business Plan.
Insane? Bizarre? Economically illiterate? Intellectually retarded? Yes, yes, yes and yes.
And that probably explains why it has been adopted by the British Conservative Party as their big, bold, brand new idea for the National Health Service:
“During the health debate, Dr Fox will say that hospitals would be able to raise cash however they wanted and from whoever they wanted.
They will, however, be barred from charging patients for treatment”.
I am so resigned to this kind of stupidity that I can no longer bring myself to be outraged about it.
How marvelous that state hospitals will be able to go to anyone for their investment; only wihtout being able to offer a return, no investor will touch them and they will be forced to go back, cap-in-hand, to HM Government (and that means us) and we’re right back where we started. In other words, the Conservatives are opting for ‘no-change’.
Despite endless tampering, tinkering, revamps, updates, initiatives, policy changes, shifts in emphasis, new approaches, fresh ideas, radical thinking, more funding, down-to-earth measures, sensible guidelines, new directions, even more funding and more wishful thinking than you can point a stick at, Britain’s unworkable Soviet-model health care system still won’t work.
But coming to terms with that is a pain barrier that nobody is willing to cross.
Now at some risk of provoking an adverse response, I am going to have to raise a point regarding what is and is not a reasonable view regarding violence.
Although we have written many articles about the subject on Samizdata, I am not talking about self defence this time, which to most libertarians is a ‘no brainer’… if you are threatened with violence, you may defend yourself. Nor was I talking about the legitimacy of war against Iraq, which though more contentious is, I think, also a legitimate use of violence.
No, I am discussing the use of violence in everyday life. Now this is still a subject many have written about on this blog, usually with regard to violence and coercion directed at children as one of our contributors is the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence of Taking Children Seriously fame, and two of our frequent guest writers are supporters of TCS.
But I am not really talking about whether or not a child should be hit by their parents specifically but rather whether it is ever justified to use force outside the context of self-defense. When discussing the use of coercion against children, I was once asked if I would ever use force against an adult just because I disapproved of their behaviour in non-self defense situations. My answer was that whilst I would agree that as a general principle I am indeed against the use of force, there are indeed situations in the real world in which violence in the only way to communicate meaningfully.
About 18 months ago, I was crossing a street in Battersea with my 81 year old grandmother. A driver recklessly rounded a corner and only just managed to slam on the brakes in time to avoid running my grandmother down. Far from apologising for his reckless driving and the fact he nearly killed her, he blew his horn and abused her.
There were no witnesses to hand, meaning a formal complaint would just be our word against his, and as he was clearly about to drive off, I was faced with either doing nothing or expressing my displeasure forcefully. I reached in the open window, dragged him out of his car by his collar and punched him in the face. Although we did not discourse at great length, I can say with some confidence that I am sure he understood the causal links which had lead to his face and my fist coming into close proximity.
Do I recommend this as method of communication? Generally no, but the choice I had was simply to allow him to drive away after having nearly killed my grandmother or use force to demonstrate that such behaviour in entirely unacceptable. If there had been witnesses to hand I suspect I would have noted his licence plate and called the police but that was not so… I chose to react forcefully and would do so again in similar circumstances. It may not have been the legal thing to do but I would contend it was the correct thing to do.
The point I am trying to make is that in the real world, sometimes people act entirely unreasonably and thus to try and reason with them is unlikely to achieve much more or less by definition: they are unreasonable. 99 times out of 100 violence is not the answer. On that 100th time however, some level of violence is the only meaningful reaction. The world is a messy place.
Then you clearly have not been exposed to the Daily Mirror.
They call it an editorial. I call it a vomit-inducing hagiography, the final paragraph of which has the capacity to keep you awake at nights like the trauma of a mugging:
“It was a magnificent speech from a man who is rapidly becoming the greatest figure in world politics, second only, perhaps, to Nelson Mandela.”
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to who is number 3 on their list? Personally, I shudder to think.
USA: HIGH
UK: SEVERE
This meme hack is brought to you by the voice of critically rational libertarianism, www.samizdata.net. We now return you to your regularly scheduled torpor.
There is a splendid little article in the NY Post about well known Tranzi, Idiotarian and British national embarrassment Anita Roddick, of Body Shop fame. That she sees herself as being martyred by the ‘right wing’ along with a veritable ‘who’s who’ list idiotarians like Noam Chomsky, is particularly entertaining. We are not ‘right wing’ Anita, and we think you are a buffoon too.
Think what fun it would be to see the results of half a ton of Body Shop bubble bath being dumped in Boston Harbour! 
Today I came across this on my wanderings, a US Libertarian Party candidate called Ken Krawchuk who seems to be making some kind of impact, in particular by wiping the studio floor in a TV debate with his Republicrat opponents. A huge haul of votes, forget it, but the serious spreading of some of our memes, definitely. Such as:
We’re letting murderers and rapists out of prison to make room for pot-smoking Grateful Dead fans. That’s insane!
That got a cheer from a mostly college audience. And there was another good one about a handgun being a girl’s best friend. Thanks to Heretical Ideas for the link.
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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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