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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Whilst I am far from a reflexive fan of Victor Davis Hanson, who seems to me to alternate between astute commentary and tedious conservative cranio-rectal insertions, it must be said that when he is on target, he is very on target. In his latest article on NRO The End of An Era: The bankruptcy of the anti-Americanists, Hanson is spot on this time.
Face it: Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein — not the ghosts of the thousands of their innocent dead — all prefer Ramsey Clark to George Bush. We are seeing nothing less than quite literally the end of an era — witnessed by the intellectual suicide of an entire generation, who in their last gasps are proving they have been not very moral people all along.
Absolutely!
Whig interventionist is a term one could use to describe a partisan of limited government who supports war against tyranny. The problem is deciding on the right target.
UK versus USA
The unilateral decision to impose tariffs on steel by the US president in 2002 was an action which in the nineteenth century might have triggered a war. In this case the UK would unquestionably be the forces of enlightenment and the US the agent of darkness. As far as I have been able to establish, Iraq has no import tariffs.
France versus UK
I recently called for a British War on Chirac. Yet I would have to support a French war of liberation if the causus belli was alcohol prohibition. When taking a ferry to France, the bars and cheap alcohol shops are closed for the first 20 minutes, as long as the ferry is notionally in British territorial waters. Yet they stay open for the rest of the trip until the ship docks in a French port.
Coming back, the scenario is reversed. The shops open at once leaving France and close 20 minutes before landing in the UK. Considering that both countries supposedly operate identical European Union regulations on tax-free trade, this looks like the sort of provocation that China caused to trigger the Opium Wars.
Better still the French authorities do not care how much discounted alcohol and tobacco people carry, the British Gestapo consider 2,000 cigarettes to be organised crime.
In the UK it is illegal to sell alcohol after 11pm without a meal. In France it is illegal to sell a meal after 9pm unless alcohol is available.
French visitors to London now play spot the police camera.
I rest my case.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is a popular one with libertarians seeking to highlight how government rules and actions have perverse consequences. So it was interesting to watch British parliamentarians being reminded about the perverse side-effects of government rules at a committee hearing at the House of Commons this afternoon.
A government-appointed adviser, Alan Pickering, was pointing out to MPs that legislation such as the 1995 Pensions Act, introduced after the Robert Maxwell scandal in the early 1990s, has in fact simply encouraged many firms to shut down pension schemes for their workers. “This is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences,” he told MPs. Quite.
Interesting to watch as MPs listened to this point with expressions of blank incomprehension. You could imagine this thought going through their heads: “You mean that our desire to better Mankind might backfire? Who would have thought it?”
One of the many ways to spark a bickering row between conservatives and libertarians is to bring up the subject of Gay Rights. More particularly the idea of Gay Union or ‘Gay Marriage’ ( a term which, for reasons I shall explain below, is an oxymoron).
The proposition that same-sex unions be publicly recognised as legal and binding raises all sorts of hackles for all sorts of reasons. At the risk of generalisation, most conservatives (and a surprising number of socialists) regard such a move as potentially damaging to the accepted social convention of the nuclear family.
This line of argument is not entirely without merit, for customs and conventions often exist for good reason. Unfortunately, they very often become codified under state law thereby attracting the antipathy of libertarians who go on to chuck the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem lies is approaching the subject from an ‘all or nothing’ viewpoint which invariably boils down to one party or another badgering politicians to extend a government seal of approval to a particular version of marriage as a form of official validation.
State benedictions (with complimentary tax classification) are not required and I suggest that clarity can be brought to the debate not by warping and extending existing definitions to breaking point but by recognising and dealing with differences.
Marriage is a heterosexual institution arising from the need of a woman to secure a reliable provider for her babies and the need of a man for a trustworthy vehicle for the onward transmission of his genes. I realise that men and women get married for other reasons too but that does not alter or diminish the basic driver behind the custom.
When I hear of Gay Rights groups demanding the right for same-sex couples to marry my response is not one of discomfort but one of puzzlement. Why? Why do gay men or lesbian women feel the need to dress up as heterosexuals when, in all other respects, they have made it abundantly clear to the world that they are not? → Continue reading: Vegetables can never be meat
Alex Singleton has got the Liberty Log cranked up and running again, after a spell of very thin posting. (It’s not as if they had nothing to blog about up there, what with the Germaine Greer for University Vice Minister, or whatever it is, row.) Something to do with student lodgings, he said in a phone call to me just now – no internet connection, blah blah.
Anyway Alex has been thinking about coffee, and in particular “fair trade” coffee.
Several hours of research later, I found what I suspected: fair trade isn’t as fair as it seems. Most of the extra money charged fills the pockets of big business, not the coffee growers. Fair trade coffee is roughly 2.5p more expensive per cup. However, Costa charges 10p per cup extra. In other words 7.5p simply goes to Costa, or its first world suppliers, as profit.
World coffee prices have declined rapidly over the past ten years, and the reason is simple: since 1990, supply has increased by 15%. Much of the blame can be laid at organisations supposedly aiming to reduce poverty. The World Bank gave loans to Vietnam to set up coffee plantations. In Brazil and Columbia, producers were encouraged to switch from coca, used to make cocaine, to coffee. Oxfam and other charities have consistently encouraged existing farmers to increase production of coffee.
So there. My real reason for linking to Liberty Log is not coffee, nor even LL’s recent springing back to life. No, my main message is simply how good it is now starting to look. I particularly like the headings, but thank god also that the text (as here at Samizdata) is big enough to read. What is it with all the tiny lettering that lots of blogs use? Am I getting old? Is my screen too small and blurry? Anway, I can read Liberty Log.
More to the point, I still want to. As do others, or so Alex tells me. During the recent dry spell, LL was still getting plenty of hits, presumably from folks like me who were hoping that normal service – or what passes for normal service at a university – would soon be resumed.
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.
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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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