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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In the song Rule Britannia, it is said that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’: Paul Marks wonders exactly when that was most true.
When was liberty in Britain at its height?
First of all I discount the talk of either Celtic liberty or Anglo Saxon liberty being the peak of liberty on this island. We have little information of how much lords took in tribute/taxes so it is not possible to know whether the ancients paid less of their incomes in tax than, say, people in the mid 19th century.
What we do know about the Celtic age is that it was time of war and plunder (as various lords struggled for power) – so even if we choose to ignore such things as human sacrifice the Celtic age does not seem very libertarian.
It is true that in some periods the Anglo Saxons managed to set up a fairly orderly society in those parts of this island known as England – however (to give just one example of un-libertarian practice) the Domesday Book records that about one in ten people in the newly conquered England was a slave.
So when was liberty at its height in this island? Well the ‘official’ reply to this (the reply I have given to children studying history) is “the early 1870’s”. The figures we have indicate that central taxes reached their low point (as a proportion of total income) in 1874 – also in 1875 we have a orgy of statism. Many functions which had been optional for local councils become compulsory by a Act of 1875, the trade unions are put above the law of contract by an Act of the same year and (finally) taxes begin to rise.
True, the Education Act of 1870 (the Forster Act) meant that in some parts of the country there were boards of education demanding education rates before 1875 and there was a decline in agriculture (putting pressure on the poor rates in some places) after 1873. However, if we are basically interested in government spending, taxes and regulations the peak of freedom seems to be 1874 – and then everything goes down hill.
However – is the above all that matters? In my ‘gut’ I would not say the early 1870’s were the ‘great age of liberty’ – I would say that this sounds more like the 1820s. → Continue reading: British Liberty
More on the environ-mental note… (David, do you put the hyphen in to emphasise the ‘mental’ in the word? Nothing gets past me!) 
The Gauteng provincial government set up a scheme, encouraging delegates to the Earth Summit (governments and environmental groups alike) to pay into a novel fund to compensate for the pollution caused by flying to South Africa, using electricity and driving around. A remarkably free-market approach – a delegate travelling from the United States, for example, would pay about $100 to offset the 10 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by flying to and staying in Johannesburg.
The fund will put the money raised into environmentally friendly schemes ranging from solar water heating to tree planting and improving energy efficiency in buildings. The contributions to the fund were voluntary and only 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been offset.
What the environ-mentalists forgot, perhaps, that such voluntary contributions will also act as a signal about how credible, popular or appropriately priced such fund is. For who should know better than the environ-mentalists themselves just how deranged and pointless is their way of approaching the environment and its problems.
Amazing image by www.scrofula.com (click image)
I passionately believe in freedom of speech and not just for my friends but also for my enemies. Not just for people who are right but also for people who are wrong and even for people who are vile and obnoxious.
One of the many reasons for my view is that freedom of speech enables us to identify the bad guys among us. Unfettered by laws or conventions they will, in the fullness of time, display their true colours. Freedom of speech is not just desirable, it is an essential tool of survival.
I am very glad the enviro-mentalists are able to speak their minds because that enables the sane among us to learn the extent of their psychosis. Let us ponder, for a moment, on this little gem:
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
Enviro-mentalism is not just a ‘different viewpoint’; it is a deranged, homicidal death cult and should be treated as such.
Since these people have expressed a clear (and gleeful) desire to exterminate us all, I believe it to be of the utmost importance to ensure that they never acquire the means to do so.
In the meantime, I nominate this question for debate: Is shooting an enviro-mentalist a legitimate act of self-defence?
Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit already pointed out this post on Indepundit. It deserves to be widely read so I am reiterating it.
If anyone tells you Saddam isn’t really trying to acquire nuclear weapons and isn’t really a threat… tell them to read the above.
Jeff Jarvis is quite right, it makes no sense to turn the whole of the site of the WTC into a memorial. Croatia has not turned all of Vukovar into a memorial to what was done to the people there. Rebuild and move on. It is a sign of strength not heartlessness.
Several blogs have also picked up on Janet Daly’s article that Brian Micklethwait mentioned at length earlier on Samizdata.net. However the section of Daly’s piece which attracted my attention was not the section that Brian quoted:
Collectivism involves giving up your autonomy and your moral responsibility to the group. In practice, in modern political economy, that means giving them up to the state. There is nothing inherently good or ethical about this. But that is a wildly unfashionable thing to say – just like saying “No” to the euro used to be.
The way I see it, writing “there is nothing inherently good or ethical about this”, whilst most certainly true, really misses the point as it looks at the question from the wrong direction. There is something inherently bad and unethical about giving up your autonomy and your moral responsibility to the group. In fact it is completely impossible to transfer moral responsibility: that is why a soldier can be tried for any war crime that they carry out regardless of the fact they were only ‘following orders’ from their duly constituted superiors. The entire concept of ‘group morality’ is an absurdity. Individual morality is the only morality.
It does not matter what anyone else does or what ‘permissions’ you are given by family, religion or state, you are morally responsible for your actions. For it to be otherwise you must be quite literally insane.
There is a splendid reference to Samizdata.net on NewsMax.com, quoting sections of a short article by David Carr in which he introduced the term ‘Tranzi’ for ‘Transnational Progressives’.
Dale’s posts certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons on the issue of racism. In the comments section, the delighfully named ‘Godless Capitalist’ from the blog Gene Expression has put forward several views that I must take issue with.
Intermarriage amongst races requires no ‘campaign’, it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a ‘campaign’ to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.
Many years living in the USA (about 1/3rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.
I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem? The historical legacy of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by decades of American socialist 1 and right-statist distortion of American society, all in ways that could not have been better crafted to produce an unassimilated underclass if they had actually set out to ruin as many people as possible, does not ‘prove’ anything at all about African or Afro-European genes.
I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.
Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything. A ‘white’ ruling class clinging to the top of a social pyramid, presiding over societies structured to maximize class differences proves… that the people at the top like to stay on the top. This is not exactly a stunning revelation. That attitudes towards race, a visible characteristic, would conflate with the socioeconomic ‘markers’ of a power elite who have a vested interest in differentiation tell us even less about some imagined genetic predisposition of the have-nots.
1= I refuse to use the term ‘liberal’ regardless of its popularity in the United States, when the actual meaning of the word indicates ‘illiberal’.
It’s time to take the gloves off. Libertarians do not give a damn about “groups” in whatever guise they come or for whatever reason they are posited. I will later join the academic debate on races as defined by clusters of genetic features and the drift of those clusters over time… but not right now. I think it is more important to establish the political and philosophical stand which we as libertarians take.
Individuals matter. Groups do not. Group politics in whatever form it appears is the Tranzi philosophy. If you could absolutely and scientifically prove one group genetically inferior to another you would accomplish nothing except establish that group for eternal victimhood under their philosophy. You succeed in making entire “racial” groups into “the genetically challenged” who then “obviously” must be protected and helped by – you guessed it – government!
The libertarian sees a person, not a member of a group, however scientific that grouping is purported to be. If that individual is a good person and successful at life and acts morally and ethically, then they are praiseworthy. If they do evil things and throw their life away, we don’t excuse them for their past, their origin, race, religion, sex or genetic makeup. Perhaps genetic feature clustering gives an individual a propensity for some particular behavior. Genes are not destiny however, as I’m sure Dr. Richard Dawkins would say.
Personally I find “genetic feature cluster” a much better term than the ill-defined “race”. Race in modern usage is synonymous with skin-colour, which is quite an inaccurate biological definition. Skin colour is merely an outward sign of the expression – or suppression – of one particular set of genes. The classical definition is probably truer to reality. I live amidst the Celtic Race for example. Celts have a unique history and certainly have identifiable genetic differences from the Rus for example. I personally am somewhat mixed but predominately Celt. Not a white (a rather useless term): a Celt.
Someday there will be enough genetic data from sequencing to calculate the true clusterings in gene space. We may at that time find humanity is broken into separate point clouds (races) or is a continuum in which there is no particular boundary, merely a space filling random fuzz. The fact that some features such as skin colour are apparent to our visual apparatus is not of great utility in actually defining the reality of human subspecies.
I believe we will one day find there are indeed definable feature clusters, but in an intermediate between the two extremes; they will be denser knots which either interconnect at their fuzzy outer boundaries or are bridged by weak cluster lines. If we were to find a cluster that is completely isolated, I would consider that strong evidence for a lineage on the way to speciating. Since all humans are mobile and interfertile, I do not believe we will find such a case.
Feature clusters (“races”) are not fixed. They drift, mix, merge and mutate over time. They are not necessarily tied to external features such as skin colour. One cannot possibly declare an Australian Aborigine and a Masai to be of the same race. They are possibly more genetically distant from each other than the Masai is from the Celt. If one wishes to look at genetic diversity within the human gene pool, the largest part of it is in Africa, so it stands to reason a scientific measure of race will find more races on that continent than on all the others put together.
The rates of interracial marriage in America, if extended over a reasonable time frame, say a thousand years, will lead to a unique “American race”. It will not sit at any of the current points in gene space of any of the current “races” It will reside at a unique new spot in that genetic n-space. All now living americans will find some of their genes in that future American gene pool; however some alleles will have outcompeted others and will be dominant. Due to climate, one would expect light skin to have a competitive advantage; other genes from other races will win the top spot for other features.
Of course if we do get a severe climate change, then the dark skin adaptation will win and a completely different set of winning alleles will define the new race.
Please recognize this is a thought experiment. It assumes a stable population more or less cut off from the outside. I believe there will be more, not less, movement of individuals over the next thousand years. I am a technological optimist. I expect us to continue the upwards trend in knowledge and the consequent upward trend in human welfare, income and mobility.
If I were to bet on any long term trend, it is that in ten thousand years the ease of travel will have made earth’s gene pool rather homogeneous and the far colonies in the Oort Cloud will be not only racially different but well down the road to full speciation.
Gene Expression takes exception to my earlier posting:
Of course, I beg to disagree. Let me give you an example of how race does matter, ripped off from Steve Sailer: “You’re a 5’0″ tall female walking down the street. Coming down the street on your side are four black men loudly talking to each other. On the other side of the street you see four Chinese men, again, talking loudly to each other. What do you do?”
To which I answer: “In which year?” Just to have a bit of fun with this, I’ll posit the thoughts running through our midget blonde’s matrilineal side heads:
1930: “Don’t they know their place? If one of them touches me daddy’ll have them all lynched!”
1950: “What is this world coming to? I’ll have to tell daddy so the police can arrest them.”
1970: “They’re probably angry over white hegemony. I’d better cross the street for safety.”
1990: “The one in the middle is kind of cute.”
2010: “Didn’t I go out with him once?”
2030: “I’d swear that was cousin Lonnie!”
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log links to a Sunday Telegraph piece by Leon Louw of the South African Free Market Foundation. Louw is an actual live delegate at the Johannesburg eco-imperialist fest (eco-imperialism being Louw’s verbal coinage, not mine), and supplies first hand reportage from that deeply dangerous event. Recommended. (By the way, the above link to the FMF will now get you to another Johannesburg piece by Roger Bate.)
Louw has been one of my favourite libertarians every since he spoke at the 1984 Libertarian International gathering held here in London (far outskirts of). I loved the talk he gave then, which the Libertarian Alliance published.
I especially treasure his insight that all legal principles without exception have potential grey areas associated with them in certain cases. Property rights are often hard to clarify in particular cases, “reasonable” self defence can often be hard to agree about, when is pollution pollution?, and so on. Hence the ubiquitous need for law courts to settle hard cases.
So, never disagree with your opponent’s principles merely because it can sometimes be hard to apply them, for that will be true of your principles also. Disagree with them because they are bad principles, all the more dangerous when easily applied.
David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.
As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.
First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.
And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.
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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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