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]
|
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.
In a previous Samizdata.net article by Brian Micklethwait, he quotes an article by fellow Samizdata contributor Natalie Solent written on her own blog:
Natalie says that it would have been better for the Algerian fundamentalists to have kept their election win and taken Algeria down the Iran trail, which eventually, if Iran itself is anything to go by, gets better. I think I agree.”
Great. “Algeria” is better off for the next twenty years under Islamic fundamentalist rule. Yet again Brian sees people as an amorphous mass. 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.
It’s one thing to take a libertarian isolationist view (it is a better one since the end of the Cold War, in my opinion). Liberal interventionism on the nineteenth century scale can be ineffective (Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban springs to mind) and is arguably a misuse of British taxpayers’ money. But on what possible grounds can a libertarian support the imposition of a theocratic dictatorship by a rigged ballot only a week after attacking Christian creationists for wanting to keep Darwin out of the classroom in some U.S. southern state?
As for Natalie, I wonder what future she thinks her Algerian contemporaries see for their families. I don’t suppose many of them blog under their real names either. I thought a libertarian position would be that if consenting Islamic fundamentalists wished to purchase land and build a shining model of the good society for us all to learn from; then so long as they didn’t use force to get people in, or to prevent them from leaving, that would be fine. Unlike Iran, the Algerian Islamists are quite open about scrapping elections, something even Adolf Hitler was vague about.
To the extent that the armed forces see their job as protecting the constitution or the population from external invasion or tyranny, I reckon they’ve got a point in opposing Theocratic despotism. This is also true in Turkey where a similar problem exists albeit in a less bloody form. I’m not saying “send in the Marines”. But every Algerian soldier who shoots a fundamentalist terrorist is making the world a better place in my books.
Natalie’s remarks about “two-sided” cruelty is another fine one. The Algerian equivalent of Guardian readers think the Islamists will let them live, just like their late and un-lamented predecessors in Iran did (atheists die too). The Guardian and the Independent have played a very dirty game indeed. The standard line they put out is to attribute every other massacre to the army first, then reluctantly admit that maybe, this time the fundamentalists did it. Imagine if every time the IRA planted a bomb, the American press claimed the British police did it? I can just hear the conspiracy theorists reply “They’re the ones that don’t go off, because the British army’s detonators don’t work”.
There are only two things to do about terrorist organisations, either destroy them by any means, or surrender (if they’ll let you). I don’t think the fundamentalists will let their opponents surrender.
As for those who think that a temporary dictatorship far away would be fine, I suggest this simple exercise, imagine that you are being told to submit to it for the rest of your lives, by someone sitting in New Zealand (who may even object to your escaping to his country).
This is just to get the hang of the new blogging procedures, which Perry is demonstrating to me right here, right now.
But this is a great story, from yesterday’s Times (T2 – Monday July 15 – sorry, The Times is unlinkable these days). It turns out that all the medical advice we’ve all been deluged with over the last half century about not eating fatty foods could be the reason why so many people have recently become so very, very fat. It works like this. Fat doesn’t make you all that fat, but it does make you feel full. As a result, if you don’t eat any fat, you don’t feel full, and you do eat more of the stuff (carbohydrates etc.) that do make you fat. Ergo … Classic.
I met up with Tim and Helen Evans yesterday. After several years at the Independent Healthcare Association, Tim is now the President of the Centre for the New Europe, which is pro-free-market but neutral about whether the EU as such is a good thing, which, when Britain is finally and irrevocably swallowed up by what Freedom and Whisky calls the Holy Belgian Empire, is what I will probably end up being. Tim is now connecting with lots of excellent European libertarians, including a lot of well placed academics. How come continental Europe’s libertarians are so excellent? Simple. They have to be.
Tim also reminded me of an email I received a few weeks back from his CNE colleague Richard Miniter, following a plug I put here for two forthcoming books by him. Apparently a long lost friend of Richard’s saw my mention of him and got back in touch, much to Richard’s delight. I asked Richard if I could mention this also – Samizdata brings people together again, etc., etc. – and he said yes fine. After all, if you’re someone like Richard, getting your books plugged is easy enough. Keeping in touch with all your cool friends is harder, and he was genuinely grateful. But then I forgot about this. Meeting Tim again is my excuse to mention this touching reunion now. Said Rich:
The friend, Steve Bodio, wrote a excellent piece for the Atlantic Monthly last year entitled “the eagle hunters of Mongolia.” He spent some time with those fiercely independent steppe riders and watched them bring home dinner with their trained eagles. He is also a gun expert and genuine authority on birds. And, of course, he loves freedom and despises “priggish authority” in all its forms.
People who habitually watch birds in countries other than their own are as likely as not spooks of some kind, in my opinion. After all, what better way is there to spy on metal birds and their habitats, and such like, than to pretend to be looking only at regular ones? And this bird man is also a gun man. Add the fact that one of Richard’s forthcoming books is about Bill Clinton’s (mis)handling of al-Qaeda and is apparently full of juicy revelations, and you get the picture. These guys may not have spook ranks and spook serial numbers, but they definitely have good friends who do.
Some libertarians say that we should never make any friends among the spooks, even the part-time ones, all of whom are the statist spawn of Satan. What tripe. For starters, not all of these people advertise themselves as flamboyantly as some of them do, so how can we know who to avoid? And more seriously, they (or their for-real friends and contacts) work at the darkest heart of the state and spy on the rest of it, and they know how it really works, and doesn’t work. They know that the state is an anarchy, and they are mostly individualist anarchists themselves, in their everyday working lives if not in their beliefs. So if we’re right about what the state is really like – and we are right, right? – then the spooks should be moving our way. The question the spooks mostly ask me is not: Are you sure that the state is really that crazy? It’s: How could a totally free market in spookery actually be made to work, given that it’s such a nice idea? (I’m working on it.)
Think what would happen to the course of history if all the spooks and semi-spooks (or even a decent percentage of them) did become hard-core libertarians.
On Brendan O’Neill‘s self-titled blog, he replies to my article The long and winding road on Tuesday in which I praised him for rejecting the economic equivalent of ‘flat earth theory’, namely the infamous ‘fixed wealth fallacy’.
However whilst he agrees that he indeed rejects the sort of corporatist statist capitalism that we at Samizdata despise, he does not much care for our economic objectives: non-state centred laissez-faire capitalism. It is interesting that I was struck by the same paragraph in Brendan’s response as Adriana in her article (see below).
So Brendan does not want corporatist statist capitalism in which existing companies get subsidies from the state or use the state’s raft of regulations to make it hard for competitors to enter their market… but he also does not seem to like unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, which is based on market forces and voluntary contract free from the dead hand of the state.
Okay, as he states that he is not an ‘anti-capitalist’ because those ‘anti-capitalist’ guys are anti-growth, so he is obviously pro-growth. However he does not like ‘capitalists’ because for some reason he feels they can’t deliver “more development, more production and bigger and loftier ambitions”… the lofty ambitions however are left unstated. So it seems he does not want regulated hand-in-hand-with-the-state capitalism (i.e. ‘third way’ nonsense) and he does not want unregulated capitalism. I cannot help but see that the similarity between these two different ‘capitalisms’ Brendan rejects is that they both leave the means of production in private hands (though in reality only laissez-faire truly does). When presented with these two contrasting forms of ‘capitalism’, he asks if these are the only two ballgames in town? No, of course not, Brendan. We also have Marxist economics as an option.
So let me speculate as to what Brendan actually wants as he is not exactly spelling it out… he has often stated that he is a great fan of democracy, and in fact when I wrote an article scorning modern democracy, he seemed almost unwilling to believe I really intended to gore that particular sacred cow. However ‘democracy’ is one of those weasel words in that it does not always mean the same to different people. To some, like Brendan I suspect (and I am sure he will say otherwise if I am misrepresenting him), democracy means allowing ‘The People’ (whatever that means) to have democratic input into what any business actually does with its accumulated means of production. In short, ‘The People’ will act as a super-owner of land, labour and capital rather than leaving it to some capitalist ‘owners’: private property itself ceases to really be private anymore. The important thing here is not the economy but making everything democratic. In other words, ‘democratic socialism’.
On a purely historical basis, socialism is very big on “bigger and loftier ambitions”, but truly dire at producing “more development, more production”. Capitalism is demonstrably the best system for increasing development and production, and the less regulated it is, the better it works.
Yet the fact is, even if it was not the best economic system for achieving Brendan’s utilitarian aims of “more development, more production” (which it is), I would still support capitalism for what can only be described as my own “bigger and loftier ambitions”… sure I want more economic goodies but much more than that, I want liberty and that is not something the state can give me.
I read Brendan O’Neill’s response to Perry’s challenge to take his spot-on rejection of ‘fixed wealth fallacy’ to its logical conclusion, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, with mounting – wait for it – agreement.
For I agree with Brendan’s disappointment with ‘capitalism’ – I am also unimpressed by blundering inefficiency of large corporations and big businesses, by short-term horizons and inconsistency of their management. And I too am depressed by the effect ‘the limited mindset of capitalist bosses’ has on entrepreneurship, innovation and progress (even without the recent headlines about fraud and criminal accounting). What I see in the corporate world of today though is not laissez-faire capitalism but statist corporatist capitalism. Which by any other name would stink as much…
I do not understand though what Brendan means when he complains that capitalism cannot provide enough for everyone and can’t deliver what the world needs:
Of course, the truth is that neither side has a solution. It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. The capitalists can’t deliver that, and the trendy anti-capitalists don’t even aspire to it. To that end, I would say I am neither a capitalist, nor a so-called ‘anti-capitalist’.
I admit, Brendan, I do not have a solution, but then, I am not on either ‘side’ since my ambitions are bigger and loftier. The difference is I do not expect anyone, state or institution, to provide for me. I want the freedom to provide for myself and my nearest and dearest without interference from anyone. And I want free markets to be the mechanism for communicating my needs and for meeting other peoples’ needs. Because that is what capitalism is – the most efficient mechanism known to man for pursuing individual rights and freedom. It may not eliminate inequality but offers means to generate wealth to redress it.
Most importantly, it is freedom not capitalism that encourages creativity and motivates individuals to develop and progress. Laissez-faire capitalism ‘merely’ maximises that freedom and enables those individuals to pursue their ambitions. So let’s not complain that capitalism does not supply the big and lofty ambitions that Brendan needs – for me, that would be a depressing choice.
There’s been a discussion going on between Kausfiles and detractors on whether the Left or the Right has been more violent over the last thirty years. I’d have to say it’s neither one nor the other. There are nuts at the far extremes of every political ideology. Perhaps it’s one of those funny properties of infinity… no matter which direction you go you end up in the same loony bin if you go far enough.
I disagree with Mickey’s statement the left doesn’t have the guns. I’d have to point out the Simbianese Liberation Army (SLA) and its last ditch firefight from a burning house; the various armed bank robberies and such carried out by it during that period; the Black Panthers; the Weather Underground bomb that blew out an upper floor of the Gulf Building in Pittsburgh in the early 70’s; not to mention former Manson Family member Lynette “Squeeky” Fromm’s attempt to shoot President Ford. So who says the Left is unarmed?
In the last decade we’ve had nearly an affirmative action of violence. You’ve got PETA and other eco-maniacs causing destruction and putting lives at risk; you’ve got the equally mad Anti-Choice types on the Right targetting clinics and doctors; you’ve got a few mad bombers… and then you’ve got Unabomber. God only knows where you’d classify him. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Pol Pot I’d say…
I have no doubts we (libertarians) will someday produce a few of our own extreme nuts. Actually we already have, they just haven’t caused any damage yet and those who appeared dangerous have been actively pushed away and shunned by the Party at all levels. The sort of individuals who might one day harm others in our name are persona non-gratis in our ranks. It doesn’t matter how well they walk the walk and talk the talk, they are not welcome.
The extremes of the Left and the Right are more likely to promote violence to accomplish their agenda than even the most far edge Libertarians. The difference in attitude of the Left and Right towards “active measures” shifts in time with the dictats of RealPolitic. When violence moves one’s agenda forward, it is condoned; when violence advances the other side’s agenda it is condemned.
Brian, I thought your “this is how holocausts begin” article was meant to be a deadly secret, its very existence hidden from all those who have not rolled up their trouser legs and passed the hideous initiation tests* necessary to join Libertarian Alliance Forum. I quite understood the secrecy. Although it was clear to me that you spoke of your fears not your desires, of course such an article is going to be misunderstood and misquoted by those too uneducated or too wilfully blind to make the distinction. But if you are going to hint about it to the whole world, why not publish it?
*The candidate must write the holy word “subscribe” and send it to a shaman of the cult of Yahoo. My life is in danger now I have said this.
|
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.
|
