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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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?
Part 1 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.
I have often pondered what principles are shared by all real libertarians, and have periodically tried to produce a set of ‘distilled axioms’ that we all share. This has always proved harder than one might think. Minarchism, Objectivism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Agorism, Dynamism, capital ‘L’ Political Party Libertarianism, Hoppeism, cultural conservative libertarianism, classical liberalism, Whigs, etc. etc. all more or less fall within the nebulous taxonomy of ‘libertarians’ whilst at the same time often vilifying each other’s ‘-isms’.
I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not the ‘non-initiation of force principle’ which is frequently offered up as the core axiom that characterises us all (I regard that as emergent default behaviour, which is to say a consequence, not an underlying axiom). What I offer up is:
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.
Now the reason I think this is the case is that whilst we objectively derive our rights as individuals, we nevertheless exist within a social setting. We are not isolated atomic entities living in fortified towers, we are social individuals. Misrepresenting this self-evident fact results in people thinking that ‘libertarians’ are in fact nihilists and therefore treating libertarian theories on ‘anarchy’ (the rule of no-one) as synonym for ‘disorder’. Now part of the reason for this is that libertarian revulsion for the statist force based collective in all its modern forms (socialism, the overt end of the collectivist continuum… and statist conservatism, the covert end of the continuum), makes them condemn any function of the modern state because that what is being done is currently being carried out by the state, rather than because the function is inherently antithetical to liberty: the military immediately springs to mind.
This has blinded many to the fact collectivist and collective are not the same thing at all. We can come together to create wealth (for example, getting a job and working for someone else) or band together to deal with an emergency when one or all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come calling, i.e. act collectively without without becoming collectivists, because a collectivist does not accept that you, an individual, actually owns anything… and so how can you voluntarily elect for collective action what is not yours to loan or dispose of. To them is was never your land, your capital, your labour to begin with because several property does not exist.
And therein also lies the difference between the covert form of collectivism, statist conservativism, and actual libertarians. A conservative will accept the concept of several property, but only sort of. This also has misleading echoes of the difference between the libertarian propertarian/anarcho-capitalist view of absolute personal sovereignty over several property and the libertarian minarchist views to which folks like me subscribe to, which sees property rights as contextual: within the context of a forest fire or war, your property rights are subordinated to the reality of non-civil society, without being alienated once civil society is restored. Conservatives on the other hand will sing paeans to private property whilst supporting compulsory purchase (US: eminent domain) for ‘important’ yet non-emergency reasons, such as roads, parks, urban redevelopments or whatever seems ‘sensible’ for the ‘common good’. Yes, you can own property but not if Donald Trump really wants to build on it.
Statist conservatives generally see societies as having separate ‘rights’ too, as it they were somehow more than shorthand for an aggregated expression of individual decisions, blurring the boundary between society and state in the process and masking the reality that they really agree with the socialists that the collective trumps the individual when push comes to shove. Socialists take that a giant step further, seeing state and society as one just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau always argued, the individual as no more independent from the society-as-state than a blood cell from a human body. So a libertarian is someone who thinks rights are something only individuals have but opinions vary greatly how we actually interact socially within the context of our objectively (or naturally or divinely or even subjectively…pick one depending on your -ism) derived rights.
I really must take issue with the vilification of Hollywood, and warn against assuming that Mr Blair is just a fool.
The last four films I’ve been to see in the cinema are:
1) Spiderman
2) Bad Company
3) Sur mes levres
4) Minority Report
The idea that any of these movies merely panders to minorities is rubbish.
We all know that Spiderman had to be re-shot because of 9-11 and to be frank, the final confrontation with the Green Goblin is a little weak. However, the storyline of the teenager growing up in an unexpected way was engaging and the effects of the New York streets was simply stunning.
The most philosophically impressive movie on this list was Minority Report (despite being directed by Stephen Spielberg). It would have been very easy to lower the depth of Minority Report: the Christian federal agent has two possible motives – is he sceptical of the Pre-Crime idea, or does he merely wish to rule it himself? The doubts he expresses about Pre-Crime are essentially conservative (in the sense of believing in the fallibility of human schemes). I don’t know what kind of movies Friedrich Hayek enjoyed, but I’m sure he would have nodded approval at the script of Minority Report.
Bad Company had a simple gag of having a black comedian playing two roles, one a suave, cultured, CIA agent using the cover of an antiques dealer, the other a street hustling ticket-tout who had to replace the CIA agent for a fortnight. It had the idea of Trading Places except that instead of impersonating a banker, the street kid had to impersonate James Bond. For those who say this is unoriginal, The Prince and the Pauper was probably the plagiarism of a oriental folk-tale.
Sur mes levres, which was made in France was good, but it was a cross between Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain, both films as exploitative in their own way as anything produced by a Tinseltown accountant.
I enjoyed all of these movies and found them a lot better than most of the television I’ve watched recently.
On the issue of commercialism: Ice Cold in Alex (British – 1958) was “probably the longest lager commercial in the world”. French movies of thirties always plugged Dubonnet or milk. On the other hand United Artists studio, founded by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others ensured that they would have editorial control and a greater share of their movies’ profits. No film maker I’ve ever heard of refused to collect…
As for Mr Blair. The recent splurge of public spending in the UK marks the end of New Labour’s attempts to portray itself as the human face of Thatcherism. The reason for this is that the political threat to the government doesn’t come from the Conservative Party (apparently some people think “Alan Duncan Smith” the Tory leader “came out” as gay last week). The pressure comes from the Left, which doesn’t believe the Tories can win the next election and therefore see no reason to restrain their lunacy.
This policy is wrong for two reasons: first we know that the extra money cannot produce effective returns without the dismantling of the state command structure, especially in the National Health Service. Second, the extra spending relies on what seem to be over-optimistic assessments of tax receipts for the next two years.
The policy is wrong for economic reasons, but the assumption by Mr Blair that he his greatest political threat comes from the Left is correct. It would not surprise me if the Conservatives failed to make any significant headway in the opinion polls, not because they are rigged, but because the Opposition parties might as well not exist.
There is method in what Blair does: until this year he was set on destroying the Tory party. Now he is set on winning the hearts of his party’s left wing.
The opposition to Blair now comes from us, the libertarians.
Jonathan Hanson takes an elemental look at liberty and culture
My best friend Steve Bodio (yes, the ‘spook‘ who was referenced here some time ago) and I are both freelance natural history writers who live in the rural southwest U.S. We are both strongly pro-environment, pro-gun, hunting-and-fishing libertarians who love watching birds as much as shooting them, drive, respectively, a 20-year old Ford truck and a 30-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, and live in houses that wouldn’t qualify as closet space to some of the new, liberal enviros who are flocking to our overburdened area of the country. Both of us despair that the battle to save the last open spaces in the American West will be lost, thanks to these self-satisfied ex-urbanites who want to mandate to those of us already here how they think it should be saved.
In Steve’s splendid 1998 book of outdoor essays, On the Edge of the Wild (which everyone here should buy), he wrote two paragraphs comparing the “old” residents of our rural landscape to the “new” ones, to sum up these meddlesome invaders. But on a re-read yesterday, it struck me how well the passage buttonholes a much wider spectrum of the close-minded liberal sheep who are laying waste to freedom and individuality in both the old world and the new. Pay particular attention to the last line.
What the old ones really knew in their bones was that death exists, that all life eats and kills to eat, that all lives end, that energy goes on. They knew that humans are participants, not spectators. Their work and play and rituals affirmed and reinforced this knowledge.
The new ones want to evade death and deny it, legislate against it, transcend it. They run, bicycle, network, and pray. They stare into their screens and buy their vitamins. Here, they want the street drunks locked up, cigarettes banned, drunken driving met with more severe penalties than armed assault. They fear guns, cowboys, Muslims, pit bulls, whiskey, homosexuals (though they’ll deny it), and freedom. Strong smells offend them.
“Strong smells offend them.” Couldn’t those four words describe concisely all those who are determined to homogenize our entire society?
Strong smells offend them.
Jonathan Hanson
Adriana, who knows a thing or two about the reality of living in a repressive regime, points out that doing business in a place in China is not a morally unambiguous matter and asked
[D]id anyone call for a boycott of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies during the Cold War? I remember the drinks in their distinctive bottles that put some fizz into my rather gloomy childhood under communism.
I guess my answer is that I have no problem with selling Coca Cola to communist states, after all it is communism’s hapless victim for the most part who will be drinking it. Also trade itself can be wonderfully subversive… but what Yahoo is doing is analogous to Coca Cola agreeing to embed a recording device in each bottle so that the state can hear what each person is talking about whilst they sip their drink…ie, not just trading with tyrants but actually collaborating with the repression of their subject peoples. That is what Yahoo (and Cisco, Oracle and their ilk) are indeed doing.
And that I rather do have a problem with.
However please do not think I want just Yahoo singled out. As Adriana said, Cisco thought nothing of installing the telecom architecture to enable the Chinese Panopticon approach to the Internet. Whenever companies do business with those who would abridge our liberties, they rarely do so for reasons of sheer malevolence but rather due to the cost-benefit to shareholders of working in such regions of the world (though Oracle chief Larry Elison does like to hold up pro-fascist Napoleon as a paragon of virtue so in his case who knows).
My view is that not just Yahoo but Cisco, Oracle and anyone else who wants to get rich selling the apparatus of repression should be given to understand when they make their utilitarian business decisions that part of the cost will be people who see the world in more moral terms taking their business elsewhere. Do not underestimate the value to a company of its corporate image:
‘Cisco and Yahoo, Big Satan and Little Satan: international partners in repression’
…is not the sort of meme these guys want in circulation as it is just not good for business, and that is why I support noisy boycotts which involve saying things that people in boardrooms do not want to hear.
Far left statist Christian peace campaigners Pax Christi have issued a declaration on the impending war to depose Iraqi despot Saddam Hussain. It makes for a fascinating insight into the meta-context of the organization’s members, which include former KGB favourite cleric, Bruce Kent:
The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is an act of political rhetoric that must be distinguished from a military campaign against a sovereign state. It cannot be used to justify an attack on Iraq, and any offensive planned to counteract the perceived threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should not be represented as a war against terrorists.
What the hell is morally enabling about a sovereign state as opposed to a bunch of trans-national terrorists? How does an act by a state or against a state somehow take on a different moral quality simply by virtue of the fact it is carried out by or against a collective? Are there no objective moral qualities? Because Saddam Hussain presides over a sovereign nation and Osama bin Laden did not, what is the difference morally how they may be attacked? Surely an attacks is objectively just (or not) regardless of the fact a nation state is (is not) involved.
We are pleased to note that Prime Minister Tony Blair has assured Parliament that Britain will not support any military action against Iraq without the authority of the United Nations.
As I mentioned yesterday when I attacked the next Archbishop of Canterbury, what possible moral authority can spring from a ghastly cabal of benighted states like the UN? To get approval from the UN for something is not a moral matter but rather a political matter… the calculus is ‘We’ll vote to lift restrictions on ivory sales if The Peoples Republic of Kleptostan votes for x in the general assembly’. Why the hell do these people hold up UN authority as having any validating moral quality whatsoever? As our resident Reuters wonk Tom Burroughes said yesterday, people like the excellent Jim Henley have made all manner of rational arguments against going to war with Saddam Hussain, but people like Pax Christi are incoherence incarnate and with a sense of their own moral superiority to boot which is insufferable and laughable equal measure.
Appropriately given that we have been mentioning the subject of optimism and pessimism, Paul Marks says why he sees the cup as half full.
People who read my blogs (such as the latest one Ignorance has never been an impediment to journalism) may regard the idea that ‘Paul Marks is an optimist’ as a sick joke. However, I do not regard telling the truth (whether about, New Labour, the Telegraph papers, the financial system, or anything else) as giving in to despair – on the contrary understanding reality is the first step to genuine hope (rather than fantasy).
I do believe that “things will turn out all right” (not for me – but for world generally), and I want to briefly say why I think this.
My belief is based on two points. Firstly that the mainstream left are not savages and secondly that most people are capable of learning.
Take the example of California. By all accounts the present Governor (Gray Davis) will be reelected in November. Mr Davis is a bad Governor. He endlessly increases taxes and spending (he has an “F” grade from the Cato Institute), in what was a big government State even before he was elected. Mr Davis and his friends in the State Legislature also love regulations and blame all of California’s problems on greedy business people (even the power shortage was not caused by price controls – it was all a plot by Enron).
When Mr Davis is reelected there is very little chance of him reforming. He will carry on in his statist way and California will continue to slide – especially as the economic problems of the United States (which will get worse next year) will prevent much expansion of federal aid.
So why am I optimistic about California? Because Mr Davis (and most of his followers) is not a beast – he will not set up a police state, he will not kill or lock up his political foes. Some leftists in California would indeed do these things (indeed I suspect that they desire the taste of human flesh in their mouths and the feeling of human blood flowing down their throats). However, such leftists in California are a tiny minority and I believe that they will not come to power (especially as so many of them choose to be active in fringe groups rather than the Democratic party).
Millions of people in California will vote for Bill Simon this November. He will lose, but he will have told them the truth – that the path of statism is a bad path. At the next election (2006) the people who see that statism does not work will not be minority – they will be the majority. Must people can learn IF they have evidence and IF people are prepared to tell them the truth (even at the cost of losing elections in the short term).
What will be true for California in 2006 will eventually be true for the world. The mainstream left (in Britain, France, Germany etc as well as the United States) is not interested in eating people. When their policies fail they will not set up a police state to try and cling to power. IF politicians are prepared to tell people the truth (or even part of the truth) eventually this message will get through to people (as they see the evidence with their own eyes) and reform will take place.
It takes only ONE major nation to reform for this to spread. There are (for example) many free market politicians in the United States (although not the man who sits in the White House). After Mr Bush loses in 2004 the left will come to power. But the Democrats will not feast on human flesh, they will simply flap about as the economy continues to fall apart – and in 2008 free market Republicans will be elected. The example of the United States will influence the rest of the world (where people will be desperate for a way out of economic decline).
Reform may even start before this. In New Zealand the left has just be reelected – but it was not the landslide they were predicting and many of the opposition groups had people within them who told the voters some of the truth. As the economy declines this will be remembered – and in the next election (2005) Labour may well be kicked out and reform take place.
What lessons for Britain? Simple enough – politicians should tell people the truth (that the path of taxes, spending, regulations and funny money) will not work. As the economy collapses these politicians will eventually come to power with a mandate to clear away statism – so that people can start to rebuild civil society.
It will not be easy or quick (and I will not live to see it), but statism will be driven back and civil society will be rebuilt.
Paul Marks
I came across this small quote on the BBC website today and wondered if they had thought about what they had written.
The amount of data currently downloaded from the site every month, the centre says, would fill seven 12-metre (40-foot) articulated trucks.
I would love to know how they measure amounts of data by volume, in fact I would love to know how many trucks of data are moved around the internet every day, and the savings made by not having to pay for the fuel.
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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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