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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The always interesting Brendan O’Neill has written an article called Why I hate slackers. As is often the case, I see things rather differently:
As always the 1960s has a lot to answer for. The hippies of the anti-Vietnam War brigade were the original slacker generation. There were no doubt some positive elements in the opposition to the Vietnam War – there were some anti-imperialists in there, who were keen to kick interfering America in the teeth and to defend independence and democracy in Vietnam.
I am anti-imperialist because I do not think it is right to impose non-consensual force backed rule on other people at bayonet point. That is also why I am anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-statist conservative, anti-democratic (at least in the sense Brendan uses the word) and above all, anti-political. All these things are based on intermediation-by-force.
Today, such slackerdom is writ large across society. Today’s privileged youth don’t seem to believe in anything very much. Among the young, membership of political parties is breathtakingly low
The very essence of modern democratic politics is that it is okay to collectively use the state to by-pass normal contractual relationships between individuals and redistribute wealth in certain ways, which is a euphemism for forcibly stealing private property. That so few people should join political parties is a sign of the incremental de-legitimisation of this entire process. Splendid!
very few teenagers and twentysomethings, in both America and Britain, are signing up for the military; even in the private sphere, young people are staying at the parental home for longer and are putting off getting married and having children until much later in life, if not altogether.
In reality, this is just a return to the historical norm: prior to World War II, except during major wars themselves, both Britain and the USA maintained small non-conscript professional militaries. The large peacetime militaries of the cold war era were aberrations. As for living at home, this is largely a function of caring statists ‘helping’ the housing market with rent controls that are a dis-incentivization to rent out properties in the first place, planning regulations that discourage new building, high levels of taxation etc.
As for not having children, exactly what is so bad about that? Women are not baby factories and actually want more from life than just to reproduce. Having children is a choice, not an obligation.
Some might see these as positive developments – as signs that young people are not prepared to go along with the mainstream and are refusing to do what the authorities expect of them. But when such opting out seems to be driven more by insecurity and uncertainty than by a determination to do things differently, how positive is that? So to slackers everywhere: get a life. And a job. And a home of your own. And some conviction. And…
The world is an insecure place and if people are acting accordingly, that suggests to me an outbreak of realism. The statist world view of the left and right within which Brendan seems to be operating is the meta-context of stasis, in which the certainty and predictability of the collective replaces the messy dynamism and uncertainty of an increasingly apolitical world in which people are more concerned for their own interests.
By looking at ‘slackerdom’, Brendan has actually touched on one of the societal manifestations of two important opposing forces at work: as the state imposes itself (i.e. intermediates politics) into private life in ever more pervasive ways, non-state based apolitical spontaneous network effects are pulling hard in the opposite direction by allowing people to manage information in ways previously only available to the top of the pyramid.
There are very good reasons more and more people are not dutifully tramping down the treadmill of life in the manner those whose views rely on planning want them to. Slackers have conviction, Brendan: they have the conviction that what they want as individuals actually matters regardless of what other people think they should do.
There’s another of Patrick Crozier’s “world in a grain of sand” pieces (the sand this time being the use of a portable phone while driving a car) over at UKTransport today, this time about the assumptions, all of them mistaken, underlying the epidemic of legislation that is now sweeping the hitherto civilised world. These assumptions are:
· That if something nasty is happening then the government should do something about it
· That that something is new legislation
· That legislation will be enforced
· That enforcement will be effective
· That legislation will have no adverse side effects.
I realise this is not exactly original stuff. But some things must be said again and again. And when someone else says them well, I’ll link to them, and then say them again for good measure. Copy and paste at will.
In Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley wrote an article called The Tories have room for liberals of both persuasions.
Now I really have no quarrel with the thrust of her contention:
The cruellest and saddest irony of all is that the self-styled new model army, with its social liberalism ticket, need have no dispute with the old faith. Social liberalism and Thatcherite economic liberalism are consistent with one another.
Nothing is more likely to give people the confidence and the wherewithal to live their lives as they choose than personal prosperity and the freedom that it brings. Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination. Together, they could make a coherent, radical and very modern party programme.
Well as our confreres in the United States so lyrically say: no shit, Sherlock.
What I find so saddening is that perhaps Daley has indeed set the level and tenor of this article to what is appropriate for the current state of sophistication and received wisdom of the typical Daily Telegraphy reader, i.e. acting as if ‘all the elements of truth and measure’ were to be found within the essentially bipolar world of parochial Westminster party politics. But frankly what Ms. Daley is saying is nothing more that what libertarians in Britain have been saying for a great many years. When she says:
Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination.
This phrase practically defines the libertarian meme and yet you will search the article in vain for the word ‘libertarian’.
Chris Bertram has taken Steven Den Beste to task for his ruggedly anti-tranzi views. Chris has pointed out that Steve’s attack on the tranzis for their promotion of ‘group’ rights over individual rights is flawed by the resultant support for the Nation State which, in itself, is an exercise in ‘group’ rights over individual ones.
I am not jumping to Steve’s defence here because I am sure that he is more than capable of fighting his own corner, but I think the real grist of the complaint about tranzi ideology lies not so much in its collectivism but its basis in Gramscian Deconstruction i.e. true equality cannot be achieved until people have been stripped of their internalised bourgeois values and reconstructed as ‘new’ citizens. A philosophy which later heavily influenced Pol Pot among others. This is what Steve may have been driving at and, if so, he is quite right.
But Chris’s counterpunch is not without merit. As a libertarian, I have mistrust of national governments hard-wired into every single one of my response mechanisms but even the likes of me is not so warped by disappointments and frustrations that I am prepared to leap from the frying pan and into the fire.
The fire I speak of is World Government and that is precisely the tranzi agenda (‘Global Governance’ is already on the curriculum of every UK law school); the replacement of sovereign countries with mere districts universally bound by one set of laws, one set of standards, one set of morals and (as sure as night follows day) harmonised taxes. Elected leaders would become nothing more than the Gauleiters of the Third Reich; equipped with some degree of autonomy but finally answerable to Berlin.
This is quite the worst idea ever devised by man, not just because that World Government is likely to govern on deeply unhealthy principles but because it will render extinct the one thing that keeps stupid and rapacious politicians (and are there any other kind?) in check: a means of escape.
I have lost count of the number of men and women I have met who were born behind the Iron Curtain and in every single case they recounted the stories of how they were dazzled and inspired by the increasing preponderance of images seeping in from the prosperous West and convincing them there was a better world out there that was being denied to them. A few years of that and bang went the Soviet Union.
Just like bad ideas need to be pushed out by good ideas, so bad regimes will eventually fall because of the existence of good (or better regimes). There is nothing more sobering for political classes drunk with power than the ability of their wealth-producing and ambitious citizens to up sticks and bugger off somewhere more conducive to their aspirations, leaving said political classes without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Global governance will have no such impediments, having, in effect, a captive citizenry with nowhere to escape to improve their lives. One standardised world bereft of all diversity (and , ironically, diversity is one of the cornerstone principles the tranzis obsessively purport to promote). Yes, it will a borderless world in which you can roam freely but there will be no point in doing so. Different landscape, same old shit.
Besides, there is the no small matter of elections in nation states. David Blunkett may be a son of a bitch but at least he’s our son of a bitch and if he presses too many buttons on too many Britons he will rapidly become an ex-son of a bitch. Would that a similar facility existed for dealing with the likes of Kofi Annan. It doesn’t and it never will.
Free from any disincentives, it is only a matter of time before Global Governance becomes Global Tyranny. There will simply be no reason for it not to do so.
So Chris and Steve may have been having an eloquent argument but it was the wrong argument. Rather like a market in goods and services means choice and prosperity for consumers, so a market in governments, a diversity of different jurisdictions with radically different ways of doing things, gives choice and freedom to us all. For sure it means that some regimes will be rotten and vile but, equally, others will not and the latter will prevail over the former by sheer dint of their existence.
Until such time as our species has conquered the far reaches of the cosmos (an exciting prospect, but I ain’t holding my breath) then a world of sovereign, independent nations is our means of escape in case of fire. It is a universal slave railroad and an insurance policy for mankind that should be defended at any cost.
[My thanks to Patrick Crozier for the heads-up]
Patrick Crozier, over at his occasional “when he’s not thinking about trains” blog, asks: Why are modern houses so bad? Like him I don’t want to blame capitalism at all and do want to blame it all on socialism, but find the matter to be somewhat more complicated than that.
I can’t say too often how much I like the way that Patrick Crozier writes what he really thinks, rather than merely booming forth with arguments that he personally doesn’t quite accept, but which other people, being inferior idiots, might. He is, in short, honest. It’s only when you read someone like him that you realise how much pro-free-market rhetoric is of the other kind. And because Patrick isn’t merely trying to persuade, but to tell the truth as he truly thinks it, he is actually far more persuasive, because when he has a definite opinion (like his UKTransport mantra: Accidents Are Bad For Business) you know that he means it.
Patrick hints with deliberate lack of confidence at a few possible answers to his question. He mentions our obsession with home ownership (tax induced, although he doesn’t mention that), which is something I touched on here, long ago, saying pretty much the following:
Perhaps it’s our obsession with home ownership. As I understand it, in 1914, the vast majority of people rented. So, you had a cadre of experienced landlords who knew what to look for. In such an environment contractors had to be very careful to do a good job or else they would miss out on repeat business.
Patrick also mentions the problem of planning permission. I’m losing count of the number of libertarians who’ve told me that they consider this to be one of the great unchallenged unfreedoms of Britain now, and who promise that they’ll write something about it, generally something about abolishing it, Real Soon Now. Presumably they’ll all be elaborating on sentiments like these:
For instance that major housebuilders are firstly machines for obtaining planning permission and only secondly builders of houses. I also toy with the idea that because of planning controls, the market for property is so tight that people are prepared to buy almost anything.
Those points both sound right to me, and here are a couple more thoughts.
First, might part of the decline of the average house be a statistical matter? What I have in mind is that before about 1910 (the date from which Patrick dates the decline) very few people actually lived in this house. Quite a few lived in nicer houses. And many, many more lived in much nastier ones. And the ones living in the nastier old houses were cheap to hire, hour after hour, to slave away at making the materials for and doing the building of those nice old houses, hence all that nice brickwork and carpentry in the nice old houses.
To put it another way, what Patrick may really be doing is to point out that the really nice houses of yesteryear are nicer than the average ones of now, which must be built with much more expensive labour, earning average-or-above wages instead of low wages. That the average house now is pretty poor compared to what it might be is still a great pity, I do agree, and by capitalism’s standards this is a big disappointment. Could do better. But maybe it’s not quite so scandalous and puzzling as Patrick makes out.
How often does Patrick canvass in really posh but newly built suburbs, in places like Weybridge and in counties like Surrey, where I grew up? There you will surely find thousands upon thousands of really very fine new places, surely a lot better built than those “average” new houses he’s complaining about.
Also, bear in mind that older, very nice houses were big because they needed to include servants’ quarters. Now, the average house also has servants, but being mechanical these need far less space. There, capitalism has definitely done the business.
And the other general point I’d make is that the impact of the “Modern Movement” in architecture, which Patrick hints at via his complaints about the high rise, state inflicted housing horrors of the sixties and seventies, is a huge, huge subject, and central to all this. Our country is still littered with the failed solutions imposed by this huge folly, comparable in its damage to our country (and to many others) with the impact of the Second World War, not just in the form of idiotic and hideous buildings, but in the form of institutional and political follies, which persist despite the assumptions behind them having been long revealed as absurd, like … planning permission.
When I’ve got my fixed price adsl connected, and when I’ve got Brian’s education blog up and running, and if I still have a life left after all that what with carrying on writing stuff for this, then I’ll also start another blog called (something like – suggestions please) Brian’s art, architecture and design blog. Then we can all take the Modern Movement to the cleaners. Although I suppose Perry would say: why wait? Do it here.
Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings is in exceptional form! Read Administration split on European invasion, Washington, April 3, 1944 (Routers).
Fissures are starting to appear in the formerly united front within the Roosevelt administration on the upcoming decision of whether, where and how to invade Europe. Some influential voices within both the Democrat and Republican parties are starting to question the wisdom of toppling Adolf Hitler’s regime, and potentially destabilizing much of the region.
“It’s one thing to liberate France and northwestern Europe, and teach the Germans a lesson, but invading a sovereign country and overthrowing its democratically-elected ruler would require a great deal more justification,” said one well-connected former State Department official. “The President just hasn’t made the case to the American people.”
This is his best article since his much lauded Media casualties mount (which was for my money far and away the best blog article of 2001).
Run, do not walk, to Transterrestrial Musings.
Yes, I’m ba-ack. Hard disk problems, and then as soon as this was semi-sorted to the point where I was able to start reading Samizdata again, and to think about writing for Samizdata again, I was commanded by the Sunday Times (to whom our editor-in-chief forbids links because they require subscriptions) to write an article about, and I love this, Ayn Rand.
I told them I wasn’t really the person to be doing this, since, how can I put this, I don’t agree with her about, you know, her philosophy. But they were adamant, and my efforts – somewhat shortened and rewritten and re-arranged and with some tiny factual errors added and opinions that I don’t quite hold stirred in, and some anti-Rand insults kept in but with the small but perfectly crafted prior justifications of them cut out, but nothing drastic enough to matter what with it only being the newspapers – did appear in the day before yesterday’s Sunday Times (August 18 2002), and I may even be getting some money.
All those who really, really want to read the full article as printed should email me, and I’ll send it in full. For the rest of you, be happy that some worthwhile points were made, and some ideas approximating to libertarianism were plugged.
For most people, acting on behalf of others is good and acting selfishly is bad. Rand turned such talk on its head and glorified what she called “the virtue of selfishness”, thus providing a moral justification of capitalism; not because of what may be done with its proceeds, but because of the very nature of capitalism itself.
The story told in Atlas Shrugged is of the sovietisation of America, of the New Deal taken to its logical conclusion of outright state centralist socialism. In this world the capitalists, dispossessed of their fortunes by the new regime and yet still utterly depended upon by all to keep the world ticking over, go on strike. They choose to stop carrying the world on their shoulders in order that the world may realise what a responsibility it is that they bear. Atlas, in other words, shrugs and the country feels the consequences.
In my original version there was then a bit about how Howard Roark, the architect hero of The Fountainhead, is an impossible character who had swallowed the nostrums of the Modern Movement in architecture whole. He is presented by Rand as omniscient, which is impossible. In other words, the following assertion was not merely asserted; it had been explained and justified.
There is something adolescent about the defiantly bad-mannered intellectual self-sufficiency of Rand’s heroes. So although we pro-capitalists often start by getting excited about Rand, we usually move on to other and better explanations of the superiority of capitalism, supplied by the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and David (son of Milton) Friedman.
I should have included Murray Rothbard there. Sorry Murray Rothbard. However I didn’t want to say that Rand is total rubbish, so thank god they also kept this next bit.
But we do hold fast to Rand’s proclamation of the moral excellence of capitalism and of the wrongness of those who would destroy it.
But …
… capitalism is indeed moral, but not because it is “selfish”. It is moral because it’s based on consent. Consent is good because when it rules, the only things that happen are things that everyone directly involved likes better than any available alternatives.
The piece then continues that “for the Tories”:
… Rand confirms rather than contests anti-capitalist prejudices about how “selfish” and hence how unhelpful capitalism is to everyone other than capitalists.
Actually that was me stating my own opinion, not reporting on any Tory opinion.
Does the consent principle, as the “libertarian” Tories believe …
No they bloody don’t! That last bit was, again, added to make the piece about Tories rather than about merely hardcore libertarians like me, who don’t count, and whose opinions won’t stir up any rows.
… also justify drug taking, bare-knuckle boxing, prostitution, polygamy, lowering the school leaving age to zero, euthanasia, gay marriage? They would argue that it does; people who take the consent principle as seriously as this are called libertarians.
Quite so. Not “libertarian Tories”.
Their fundamental belief is that providing people consent, they should be allowed to do what they like without state interference – a sentiment Rand would heartily approve of.
That last extremely dubious qualification was also added. Accept through gritted teeth more like. For as I was allowed to go on to say:
… she never called herself a libertarian.
Nevertheless,
… libertarians, and in general any political activists looking for arguments in favour of capitalism, tend to have heard of her and are anything from impressed at arm’s length to wildly enthusiastic.
Why? Because she offers a fiercely intellectual defence of economic freedom, free markets and of the institutions that result.
… Above all, she was right about the need for the “intellectual struggle”. She may not have got all the details right but she completely understood that an intellectual counter-offensive against the forces of anti-capitalist collectivism was necessary.
That simple idea may be her most enduring legacy. The enemies of capitalism are now more cunning, more inclined towards debilitation by regulation than straightforward murder by outright politicised theft -at any rate here in Britain, for the time being.
All the more reason, then, for pro-capitalists such as the Tories to think, and to read, not just books by Rand but also books generally. Ideas matter. There is more to politics than just getting and holding office.
And so on. Not too ghastly. And particularly good was that they tailed it with me being the editorial director of the Libertarian Alliance and then printed the address of the LA website. This has caused what by LA website standards has been a definite hit-surge.
In general, I don’t know whether to be pathetically grateful that my opinions were aired – with almost complete accuracy – in one of our great national organs, or irritated that they took it upon themselves to make tiny but annoying alterations. I don’t query their right to edit their own newspaper, and I realise I didn’t make it easy for them. I just wish they’d done it a bit better.
These slight alterations are not completely insignificant. They turn me, from someone who is accurately describing his own opinions, into someone who is trying to stir up trouble in the Conservative Party by attributing opinions to members of it that they almost certainly don’t hold.
What kind of world is it when, in sheer self-defence, you have to Fisk your own newspaper articles?
I prefer Samizdata. My stuff here may sometimes be rubbish, but at least it’s all my own rubbish.
It’s good to be back.
One of the issues we Samizdatistas come up against a lot is how to sell the libertarian product in an often hostile climate. Chatting to some pleasant and mildly leftist characters recently, it struck me that one of the biggest hurdles we face is simply this – fear.
How many times have you tried to make the sales pitch only to get a reply on lines like this – “Yes, but what about if poor people starve if there is no Welfare State?” or “What happens if every adult can have a gun?” or “What happens if we let anyone buy hard drugs?”
Very soon it becomes apparent that a lot of decent, pretty smart people are put off the libertarian credo because it seems, well, downright scary. There are several reasons for this. Decades of socialism in the West have, I think, left people deeply ingrained with the idea that the only thing preventing the world from going to utter hell is those nice folk in the government. Our state-run education system plays a part in this, as does much of our popular culture: watch any soap opera or hospital drama and see what I mean.
There are several ways we can get over the ‘fear hurdle’. Notwithstanding the recent stock market rout after the dotcom bubble went pop, I am certain that the rise of a shareholding culture and the growing wealth of the middle class is helping to foster a less fearful, more individualistic culture. I also reckon that things like home schooling can have the same effect in encouraging kids to grow up as independent-minded adults. And the sheer bloody awfulness of much of our state-run services, such as the British National Health Services, must surely reach a point where people no longer grip on to the state like a Nanny but appreciate things can be run differently away from the State.
Maybe I am a naive optimist, but if there is any point to being a libertarian activist, then breaking the fear barrier is surely a worthwhile goal.
 Tom knows no fear… as witnessed by his close proximity to the saturnine Andrew Dodge
It appears the story that a number of Conservative MPs are thinking of breaking off from the main Tory party and are part inspired by the views of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand has triggered some comment. In the right-leaning weekly journal the Spectator, writer Michael Harrington attacks the late Miss Rand and all she stood for in an article so full of bile that he succeeds in raising her in my estimation, even though I have problems with bits of her philosophy.
Let’s take a look:
She is still a hero on the Libertarian Right in the United States but it is rare to hear her name in English Conservative circles.
True (heroine actually). But the libertarian meme is spreading in the UK, and Michael, be very afraid.
Margaret Thatcher never really meant to say that there was no such thing as society, but Ayn Rand would have said it and meant it.
And your point is?
Though few people noticed it, Atlas Shrugged is a long, inverted and malevolent parody of the New Testament. (John) Galt convinces his followers, without much difficulty, that they have been working too hard on behalf of others instead of spending all their time on their own interests. They are being exploited by a corrupt semi-socialist polticial system. And by allowing themselves to be used they are enabling the system to continue.
Eh? I am not aware Rand thought of the novel’s essential structure as being an inversion of the Bible. What exactly is malevolent about her doctrine of Man’s right to live for his own sake rather than sacrifice it to others? Come on Mr Harrington, don’t be shy. Give us some reasons why you think Miss Rand’s brand of ethical egoism is wrong. After all, an egoist could justly claim that benevolence towards others is in fact often very ‘selfish’ since it still means doing something of value to the actor as well as the beneficiary. Ultimately, the rational (as opposed to non-rational) egoist believes life is not zero-sum, either in a material or non material sense.
I fear that Harrington has missed the essential point of what Rand is about and why she continues to motivate libertarians, and Conservatives, to this day despite any criticisms we may have of her views. The essential point is that she made it clear that the case for liberty cannot just be won showing that it produces X more GDP than socialism or some other ‘overall good’. Ultimately, the case needs a moral foundation, and Rand provided a pretty powerful one.
Part 2 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.
If as libertarians we believe that we may live in something called ‘society’ but that ‘rights’ are something for individuals, not some corporatised community, then it pretty much follows we are going to be ambivalent at best about nation states, taking either the minarchist/classical liberal position that states should not exist to ‘do stuff’ (such as build roads, educate people, put men on the moon, restrict smoking, discourage single motherhood, prevent discordant architecture etc.) but rather should exist exclusively to guarantee individual rights and thereby reducing it to nothing more than a ‘night watchman state’… or, beyond that, a libertarian takes the anarchist position that states are completely superfluous.
What both ends of the libertarian continuum agree on however is that ‘society’ is essentially a self ordering mechanism in which order rather than chaos, results from the absence of the state’s guiding claws. Spontaneous order does not require a blithe belief in the ‘goodness of man’ or some Rousseau-esque drivel about noble savage, just the observation that order in one form or other is in fact man’s ‘natural’ state and that chaos, not order, is the inherently unstable and unsupportable state of human affairs. Chaotic societies in fact are not produced by the absence of invasive governments but by them. The implosion of the Soviet Union is a splendid example of this in action. This is of course a complex subject that could fill a library by itself.
Markets occur within the context of sets of rules that enable interaction, but throughout human history, the majority of ‘market rules’ were not imposed by the state but evolved naturally to facilitate wealth creating commerce. In much the same way, the customs of a society are not created by the state’s fiat (customs are not laws), they evolve for complex and often poorly understood reasons. Yet it is social customs, the shared meta-context of assumptions, which really enable the extended social and commercial order that is modern society. Of course societies with liberty enabling customs develop better economically and indeed socially than societies with more restrictive customs.
So then what is the role of ‘laws’ if evolved social custom is really the glue that holds everything together? Well I would say ‘law’ is legitimately the choice-less aspect of custom, which is clarified for the avoidance of misunderstanding, and backed by force. For example you have no right to take my property without my consent. You may not legitimately ‘choose’ to do that because your right to acquire my property is rationally and objectively trumped by my right to maintain my pre-existing ownership. To a minarchist like me, backing up that fact is why some sort of ‘night watchman’ state is required, but to a libertarian anarchist, protection agencies and mutated insurance companies take on that sort of role.
Coming in Part 3: So what are we to do about tyranny?
Patrick Crozier Sees signs of mental infirmity in a great many places other than just Charlton Heston
The news that Charlton Heston has Alzheimer’s will sadden all decent people. The news that the authorities will be able to take his gun from his hands long before they are either cold or dead pisses me off like hell.
But if it is the case that individuals with Alzheimer’s should be disarmed shouldn’t the same apply to governments? Take the British state – it’s showing definite signs.
It is definitely getting forgetful. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t keep putting out the same press release time after time or announcing an old spending increase as a new one.
It’s cognitive functions are not what they were. How else could one explain its obsession with prosecuting a War on Drugs which it can’t possibly win or continued membership of the European Union – the answer to a question no one asked?
There is a definite tendency to nostalgia. Why else would it still cling on to a Stalinist model of healthcare long since rejected by the rest of the world?
It suffers from mood swings. One moment it is counting every last penny, the next splurging cash in the general direction of the NHS and railways.
And it seems to be incapable of carrying out even the most basic tasks, like supplying the armed forces with a rifle that works or putting guilty people in jail or teaching its citizens to read or cleaning air conditioning systems or dealing with foot and mouth.
I wonder if we could do a swap?
Patrick Crozier
How many people have indulged in that fantasy at some point in their lives? I know I have. Of course, the fantasy has been no more than a fleeting moment, usually upon hearing of the latest piece of idiotarian nonsense being peddled as fact on the BBC or passed into law by HM Government. Yes, those are the moments when I wish that I simply had the power to slap it down with a stroke of my pen or a contemptuous pronouncement.
I do not believe I am alone. After all, isn’t the phenomenon of blogging the very manifestation of that itch; the compounded fury at all that’s wrong with the world and the irresistable urge to put it right. But what if you really had the power to put it right not merely complain about it.
So let’s play a game. I am the genie released from the bottle and my first act is to make you Ruler of the World. You now have three wishes. What would they be?
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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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