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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Batten down the hatches, stock up on vital supplies, head for the hills and stay there – IT’S COMING!!!! According to the British press we’re all doomed, DOOMED by a huge lump of rock hurtling at us from outer space at unstoppable speeds and due to impact at just about the same time as the British Conservative Party is finally showing signs of a revival.
Meanwhile, Antoine Clarke thinks that the very existence of the thing could constitute an Islamic Heresy (presumably not if lands on Tel Aviv though).
Now I know that none of us are likely to be losing any sleep tonight but, nonetheless, isn’t this recent bout of angst about apocolyptic death from the skies a bit, well, medieval?
“Rejoice, brothers, it’s heading for Brussels”
Gibbering Dark Ages peasants pointed at manifestations in the sky and took them for portents of impending doom. Were they merely prescient? Or are us humans prey to pre-programmed primordial collective fears regardless of our technological advances?
I was just wondering if the asteroid – currently projected to hit Earth in 2019 and destroy a continent – happened to land on Mecca…
Is this thought heresy to to a Moslem? Would scientific efforts by Christians or worse, atheists, to deflect the asteroid be an interference in God’s purpose?
I think we should be told.
Newly-installed Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, about whom I made a brief mention on the blog yesterday seems an opinionated fellow, but I don’t want to discuss his particular insights on the possible invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Afghanistan or other foreign points. What really piqued my interest was his broad condemnation of consumerism, particularly the use by young children of video games, such as those which feature violence.
By happy coincidence, I have started to read a fascinating new book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by American comic book author and child psychologist Gerard Jones, who has written about how violent video games like Doom or Tomb Raider can in reality help children to master insecurities and fears of all kinds.
Jones explores the many fantasy games now on the market, the importance of superheroes in comics and television, ending with the broad conclusion that this stuff is essentially good for children rather than harmful. He points to the fact that during the 1990s, when such games became wildly popular in the United States, teenage violence decreased. Of course, some horrific school shootings prompted commentators to wonder whether video games were making youngsters more violent, but Jones’ book tends to weaken that argument quite strongly.
He even shows how comics, action hero films starring the likes of James Bond or Spiderman can in reality help children suffering from low self confidence become stronger, more assertive (in a good way), and better suited to coping with the inevitable difficulties of adulthood. In many ways the book is a re-working of the need for fantasy and make-believe in childhood development.
His analysis is light-years away from that of Archbishop Williams, and I would guess, from that of many mainstream commentators for whom video games are just another dread feature of global capitalism. For me, the profusion of amazing games and top-notch films are one its great glories.
This was posted today by Alan Forrester on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but is perhaps better suited to a blog such as this. It deals with one of the great issues of our time: Which one is better, Salma or Friedrich?
I once met Friedrich Hayek. Some time in the early to mid nineteen eighties he tottered into the Alternative Bookshop (where all his books were on sale and were among our least-worst sellers), at the age of about ninety five. I got him a chair. (It was a very wobbly chair, one of our worst, and terrible headlines flashed through my mind: “Free market bookshop kills world’s greatest free market economist.” Luckily the chair did not collapse.) “How are you?” seemed like the proper thing for me to say, so that’s what I did say.
Being Friedrich Hayek he took this question very seriously. He apparently took all questions seriously, from everybody, no matter how seemingly insignificant. One of his life principles, deeply embedded both in his personal behaviour and in his theoretical ideas and writings, was that the opinions of non-academics (“tacit economic knowledge” and all that) are just as important as academic opinions like his, and often more so for some important purposes, quite possibly even those of an insignificant assistant bookseller like me. (Leon Louw once told me about a South African expedition with Hayek during which Hayek cross-examined game wardens and park keepers for hours on end about the mysteries of their various trades.) So: here was this young person, perhaps a young person who was deeply knowledgeable in new and surprising ways that he, Hayek, had not yet heard about, asking him, Hayek, how he was. So: how was he? He gave it some thought.
Eventually he answered roughly as follows. Well, he said. I get up in the morning, and I do some work on my book, and then I write a letter to The Times and then I write an article and then I have breakfast, and then I work some more on my book and then I go to see some politicians, and then I prepare my talk for the next Mont Pelerin Conference, and then I have lunch and give a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and then I write another letter to the newspapers and talk with some more politicians and do some more work on my book and then I talk to a journalist … It went on like this for several more minutes. What did this have to do with how he was?
Eventually this was revealed. After he had finished describing all his activities for one entire day, a look of extreme resentment came over his face. “…and in the evening”, he said plaintively, “I feel tired!” This was evidently a new experience for him and he didn’t like it one bit.
I felt tired just listening to him. Moral: great men are not just great for doing great things. They are great because they do a lot of great things.
There is a general election in New Zealand this weekend. The present Labour party government has done its best to reverse much of the half hearted reform that it inherited – and it looks like the Labour party will be re-elected (and continue to increase the size and scope of the state).
I found myself thinking (as I often do) “good, if people vote for statism they deserve to get it – good and hard”. However, the divine right of the 51% (democracy) is (as all libertarians know) quite immoral. There is no reason why those who vote against statism should suffer because of the people who vote for it.
Take the example of California. When I rub my hands with glee (which I do) at the latest example of California statism (“jolly good, the reckoning is brought forword and the collapse of California will be a warning to the rest of the nation to repent…”) I am overlooking a few important points.
Firstly the innocent (those who vote against the increase in government spending and regulations) suffer at least as much (most likely rather more) than the guilty. And secondly there is no reason to suppose that people in other areas will understand that the suffering is caused by the statism.
Take the example of retail price controls on the sale of electricity (in California this is known as ‘deregulation’). Such price controls created a shortage of power (no surprise there) and rather than letting the lights go out the Bush administration demanded that companies outside California sell power (at the government price) to California.
I have argued that the lights should have been allowed to go out until the Californians worked out “if we pay more money people will sell us power”.
However, (of course) people who opposed the price controls would have suffered along with the people who supported them. Also there is no guarantee that people would understand that the suffering was caused by the statism.
After all the famous “economist” Paul Krugman has explained that the Californian energy crisis was created by a plot by Enron and other wicked corps. Nothing is so absurd that it will not be argued for by the media and academia. It does not matter whether most academics and media people are liars or whether they believe their own nonsense, the effect is the same – millions of people are mislead.
When I argue that the bankruptcy of California would act as a warning to the rest of the United States, or that the bankruptcy of one of the European Welfare States would warn the other nations of Europe to reform themselves whilst there is still time I must come up with a reply to the above. And I have no great reply.
I suppose all we can do is to endlessly try and explain to as many people as we can the consequences of statism – sadly we have little access to such things as the mass media, but we must do the best we can.
Things are not formally inevitable and we must help when we can. For example in California if the people voted for Bill Simon to be Governor (the election is in November) there is a good chance that collapse could be avoided (almost needless to say – the Bush administration strongly opposed Mr Simon getting the Republican nomination for Governor). And even if Gray Davis is reelected (as he most likely will be) there may still be an election in 2006 (I do not think people will be eating each other by then) and something might be saved.
Yes democracy is immoral and it is inefficient (the innocent minority are punished for the votes of the majority and the majority are endlessly mislead by academics and media people anyway), but this does not mean we should ignore democracy.
Perhaps the world will collapse and isolated groups of libertarians (or semi libertarians) will have to try and rebuild civilization via a grim struggle to survive – but we should not just give up. To give up (or to treat each example of statism with perverted joy – as I often do) is immoral.
Paul Marks
When I was a young articled clerk with firm of London solicitors, I was involved, at some length in what turned out to be fruitless legal action against a notorious slum landlord called Nicholas Hoogstraten. Fruitless, because every time I went to Court to enforce against him, he simply disappeared behind a kaleidoscope of dummy front companies and aliases. He was as elusive as the morning mist.
Still, what I learned about him from the file notes left an indelible impression on me that was stirred again today when I heard that Hoogstraten has been convicted of manslaughter and now faces the possibility of a life sentence. In 1999 he ordered two of his henchmen to attack a former business associate who was threatening to sue him. They killed him. The jury accepted Hoogstraten’s plea that he never ordered the man’s death, he merely wanted them to rough him up and frighten him. The two hit-men were convicted of murder.
Hoogstraten is the nearest thing to a Bond villain that I have ever actually encountered. He could have sprung, fully-formed, from the fevered mind of a Hollywood script-writer; arrogant, sneering, dapper, ruggedly handsome, enormously rich, wickedly cunning and mind-bogglingly ruthless. He built his property empire on the back of intimidation, violence and outright theft. Every plausible account I have read of him paints a picture of a swaggering ego that was not just prepared to use violence to get what he wanted but actually enjoyed using the violence. The fear he engendered seemed to actually turn him on.
Whilst undoubtedly possessed of high intelligence and great business acumen he was flawed by an arching contempt for his fellow men and almost insatiable desire to hold power over them. A man of such single-minded malevolence that he appears to have scarred all who ever came into contact with him.
And, now, it’s all over.
But why is this a Libertarian view? Because there is apparently no end of people, mostly (but not exclusively) on the left who are convinced that we Libertarians admire and wish to emulate characters like Hoogstraten. That when we call for an end to state intervention and regulation it is because we want the Hoogstratens of the world unshackled and free to wreak whatever havoc they choose; that when we speak of free markets, what we really mean is freedom for Hoogstraten and his ilk to use their wealth and power to stomp on anyone who gets in their way. For socialists of all stripes, Hoogstraten is capitalism made flesh.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Libertarianism is not, and never has been, about money or its pursuit. Money is incidental. It is about empowering ordinary people to take control of their own lives and arrange them in ways that best suit them. It is about the sanctity of contract, the endless possibilities of voluntary arrangement and real wealth to be found in reputation, decency, civility and honour. All these things are a anathema to men like Hoogstraten.
It is also well worth pointing out that Hoogstraten built his empire and wreaked his worst havoc at a time when there was far greater state intervention in the property market than we have now and where the laws and regulations protecting tenants in rented property were far more draconian. Yet none of this stopped Hoogstraten or even slowed him down. He simply possessed the insatiable will to drive under, over and through them.
Ultimately, there is no surefire way to stop the Hoogstratens of this world. They are like a malevolent force that nature throws up at us every now and then. But a far surer method of cutting them down to size is to build a strong civil society where people actually care about what happens to their neighbours and have a stake in their neighbourhoods and where toxic bullies like Hoogstraten are kept in check or run out of town on the end of a pitchfork.
Yes, here’s the latest crop of Libertarian Alliance publications. They were posted out some weeks ago on paper but getting them up at the LA website has been delayed by LA Webmaster Sean Gabb having recently had to upgrade his computer while simultaneously being engaged in moving house, a vexing combination of circumstances. Since the LA’s stuff is for Posterity, not to cause a stir next week (although we don’t object if that happens), I let Sean take his time and didn’t nag him unduly after I’d given him the files. But now, here they are.
They’re only in Acrobat format, I’m afraid. Sean told me the other day that HTML is a format of diminishing importance, and that Acrobat files can now be searched by the best search engines. Or something. The gist of it being that maybe Acrobat will suffice. But can you cut and paste stuff, the way you can with another blog? Surely not, but what do I know. Please feel free to quote from these pieces at will, at whatever length you like, unless doing that is too laborious.
Since there’s so many of them, I’ll keep this blurb very brief and let the titles speak for themselves, which I hope they do. Suffice it to say that the pieces by Perry all appeared first here on Samizdata, and that almost as soon as my piece about blogging (Personal Perspectives No. 17) was published, either my opinion of the Libertarian Alliance Forum changed for the better, or the LA-F changed for the better. A bit of both, I suspect. Unfortunately all references in these publications to Samizdata are to the old, pre-Movable-Type version of it, which I hope in due course to correct.
Political Notes No. 177. Neil Lock, State Your Terms! On The Mis-Use of Language to Convey Subtle Collectivist Messages, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 178. Paul Anderton, The Real Nature of and the Abuse of the Drugs Problem text here, 10pp.
Political Notes No. 179. Perry de Havilland, I Do Not Fear The Immigrant: A Critical Response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Ilana Mercer, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 180. Perry de Havilland, Citizenship: The State’s Way of Saying It Owns You text, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 181. Brian Micklethwait, I Am A Libertarian Because …, 2pp.
Economic Notes No. 94. Kevin McFarlane, Why “Trader Sovereignty” Makes More Sense Than Consumer Sovereignty, 2pp.
Philosophical Notes No. 63. Peter Richards, In Defence of the Freedom to Fish, Shoot and Hunt, 4pp.
Legal Notes No. 38. Peter Tachell, Why The Age of Consent in Britain Should Be Lowered to Fourteen, 2pp.
Cultural Notes No. 47. Perry de Havilland, Tolkein’s Ring: An Allegory for the Modern State, 2pp.
Historical Notes No. 41. Gerard Radnitzky, The EU: The European Miracle in Reverse, 6pp.
Historical Notes No. 42, Roderick Moore, The History of Civilisation and the Influence of the Environment, 4pp.
Educational Notes No. 33. Brian Micklethwait, The Failure of Politics and the Pull of Freedom: Reflections on the Work of the Reading Reform Foundation, 4pp.
Tactical Notes No. 29. Perry de Havilland, Giving Libertarianism a Left Hook: How To Make The Traditions of The Left Our Own, 2pp.
(This link doesn’t work yet. Please be patient. Should be okay in a day or two.)
Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 38. Roderick Moore, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, 4pp.
Personal Perspectives No. 17. Brian Micklethwait, Losing, Blogging and Winning, 4pp.
Pamphlet No. 27, Miranda Matthews, Why “Sex Work” Can’t Be Unionised and Shouldn’t Be “Legalised”, 4pp.
Tiger Woods (who had a nightmare round at The Open yesterday but who was back to his usual form today with a final round of 65) has recently said some interesting things about freedom of association. He has been defending the right of a men-only club to keep women out. (My thanks to Al Baron of the LA-F for the link to this story.)
Tiger’s line was that this was unfortunate, but that it was their prerogative. The right of people to do something unfortunate, on the grounds of “prerogative”. Impressive.
In this particular matter I’d go further. The right of men, and women, to spend some of their time only with other men, and other women, is something that should be permanently insisted upon, not just as something that is “unfortunate” but which ought to be legally tolerated on freedom of association grounds, but as something that for many can be positively liberating – essential for their peace of mind even. Human females and males are not the same, and at times (or at some times), they (or some of them) need a rest from each other and from all the stresses and strains of competing with their own gender for the attentions of the other one. (Gender and race are very different matters from this point of view, as Tiger Woods gets but as most of his interlocutors seem not to.)
Happily most people realise this, and gender segregation is a relentless feature of everyday life. Most people know that there are some occasions and institutions which are for the other gender only, and that their only contribution is to stay away and leave the boys, or the girls, to do their thing. But it now tends to be only the women whose right to keep the men out on some (or, if they want this, all) occasions is explicitly asserted in everyday “political” conversation.
This is not a blanket assertion that it is always wise for men to exclude women from everything they now control. In particular, it is surely most unwise to exclude the other gender from the administration of an activity, such as a sport, which the other gender has started to play in serious numbers. Here, it is the fact of male and female differentness which says that both points of view should be attended to in administrative decisions. I am glad, for example, that the Marylebone Cricket Club has recently decided to allow women to become members. And I dare say that Tiger Woods was right about the unfortunateness of the particular matter he was being asked to comment on.
But this only made his assertion of the principle of freedom of association all the more impressive. No way should the right to exclude particular people from your company ever be confused with an argument about whether exclusion in this or that case is wise, or necessary, or nice, or logical, or anything at all except the right of those doing the excluding.
For reasons I won’t bore readers with, I could really use a nice fat housing bubble burst in London. Having turned down a chance to buy a house in 1996 on the grounds that it was overpriced and the downturn imminent (one recently sold in that street for five times the then asking price), my judgement on timing the crash is not terribly good.
However, I just came across a comment on a newsgroup about whether the author of a TV series was a millionaire (in US dollars). One respondent mentioned in passing that there’s been a sharp fall in Silicon Valley property prices for the past year. Despite the claims of estate agents and mortgage lenders – both have an interest in inflating reported prices which makes a “House price index” produced by a lender suspect in my eyes – there seems to be a drop in the number of really expensive houses for sale in London (a subjective impression of mine) but rents are clearly crashing (only three times equivalent Paris prices, from four times last summer).
This will no doubt be reported as terrible news for homeowners and the leftist class-hate merchants on Channel 4 news will have a field day. The bigger problem is that the correction in the housing market looks set to occur just when the government gets round to intervening. So there will be subsidies paid to public sector workers, planning controls will protect derelict industrial slums as “monuments to working-class culture” whilst hideous boxes with tiny (eco-friendly) windows will be built on water meadows (to be flooded each spring). Council officers will be sent on “search and destroy” missions to eliminate greedy landlords by regulation, just in time to prevent home-hunters from benefiting from a buyers’ market. And the accursed Housing Benefit, a bigger creator of crime and fraud in Britain than drugs,will be raised, thereby distorting the lower end of the housing market even more.
Isolationist libertarianism is a particularly American brand and trusting elections to prevent civil wars seems to be a British one. Both have their strong points but there are occasions where both are plain wrong.
I wrote (and deleted) a few hundred words on the history of Algerian massacres which go back to the mid-nineteenth century, and have a strong (under-reported) underpinning of ethnic hatred. That and the fact that the Iranian revolution didn’t have the option of elections is part of the reason I don’t think that the comparison is fair on the Algerian Army.
Even with the benefit of hindsight I find it difficult to see how the armed forces of Algeria could have calculated that the FIS wouldn’t be worse than their Iranian counterparts (I recall that Ayatollah Khomeni had only recently died at the time). The Army had no way of knowing what we know of Iran today.
Sorry, can’t locate the Milton Friedman quote, however, for a model example of the justified military coup, see the later stages of series two of Babylon 5. I believe it’s available on DVD. If I buy one of those machines soon, the whole series will be on my first round of shopping.
Antoine Clarke is a ferociously well-informed man, so perhaps he can nail down a quotation from Milton Friedman for me. Somewhere in his discussion of market failure, Friedman points out that when someone says, “but if there were no government intervention, this or that bad thing might happen,” it’s a perfectly valid defence to answer, “And with government intervention this horrendously bad thing definitely is happening.” You compare the real option with the other real option, not the real with the ideal.
In his post “If they must die: then let them do so quickly” Antoine makes the same error. He writes,
“Great. “Algeria” is better off for the next twenty years under Islamic fundamentalist rule … Several thousand individual women have had their throats cut in the past decade for not wearing ‘modest dress’. Several hundred children have been slaughtered by similar means. But that’s OK ‘cos in twenty years someone else’s kids might not be shot for demonstrating against the ban on “The Simpsons” or Pepsi adverts.”
No, it’s not OK. It will never be OK. My point and Brian’s was not that either Algeria or Iran are OK but that Iran is less bad than Algeria, and that the main reason for that is that the Iranian army let their fundamentalists keep their genuine election victory, dreadful though the fundamentalists were. The Iranian corpse-pile is lower by a factor of around ten, I believe. How much clearer can it get that the Iranian path is the better one to follow? Of course it would be a million times better yet if
“…consenting Islamic fundamentalists wished to purchase land and build a shining model of the good society for us all to learn from.”
But this was never on the table. It was on the table for the Iranian army, not known for its fundamentalism, to mount a coup at the time of the first Iranian election. It was on the table for the Algerian army not to. And I bloody well wish they hadn’t.
There’s another libertarian point to be made in this case. Don’t initiate agression. Antoine correctly observes that:
“Unlike Iran, the Algerian Islamists are quite open about scrapping elections.”
Now I am relying on memory here, but I seem to recall that the FIS gave the opposite impression at the time of their original election victory. Having their genuine election victory stolen from them gave them support, put fire in their bellies, made them more savage. War made them worse, so that now, yes, they have to be shot like dogs (and I am willing to defer to Antoine’s superior knowledge about the relative evil of the two sides.) Judging from the Iranian experience, it would have been better not to have had the war.
So would everything have been hunky-dory then? No. Quite possibly the FIS were always lying and always intended to scrap the holding of elections. It still would have been better, militarily, practically better, to have let the guilt fall on them. That was the real alternative.
There is an interesting article with links on Brothers Judd in which Orrin Judd muses on the question of the fading of Jewish identity, referring to articles by Richard Just in American Prospect and Gary Rosen’s review of the dismal Alan Dershowitz’s interesting book ‘The Vanishing Jew’. That this diminution of Jewish identity is in fact a problem seems to have been accepted as axiomatic by Orrin.
But maybe it is just that Jews in America (and Britain for that matter) have just grown up and evolved away from a narrow tribal collective mindset. They realise that their identity is not primarily I am a Jew, but rather I am David Cohen. In fact, perhaps the reason for this Jewish ‘problem’ is that due to hundreds of generations of being free from the limiting delusion of ‘blood and soil’ has made Jews uniquely suited to embrace individualistic notions of identity. Jews have a Jewish nation state in Israel now if they want it… and it is just another messy nation state like any other, better than some and worse than others. Few people are better placed psychologically than the world’s Jews at this point in time to see the world for what it really is: the ‘Promised Land’ is Jewish again and the world still sucks.
Perhaps the only thing that made the Jews a collective ‘tribe’ at all was being forced together by the hostility of host societies who despised them for not being part of their ‘Volk’. The Jewish ‘problem’ of a loss of identity in the larger cosmopolitan society is not a problem at all… it is a blessing! Just as ‘everyone can be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day’, there is nothing wrong with letting Jewish identity (and every other limiting ghetto-of-the-mind) become little more than a bit of cultural spice of only passing significance. As other people have stopped regarding Jews as a people apart, it is not surprising that Jews have started to do the same.
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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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