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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Security is the one area minarchist libertarians like me are willing to countenance at least some role for the state… but yet again private security measures, whilst not infallible given that no work of mere man is foolproof, prove no less effective than those heavy handed defenders of order on governments payroll.
Egyptian Hesham Mohamed Hadayet shot two people dead at the El Al desk in LAX yesterday before being shot dead by a private security man. The airport had armed US soldiers wandering around and yet on July 4th, the EL AL desk was defended by private security. 
Is it any wonder the Israeli airline takes responsibility for its own security whenever possible rather than leave it up to the local buffoons to protect them?
Spotted in the Daily Telegraph report of the air disaster in southern Germany on Monday night, caused by the air collision of a cargo plane and a charter jet carrying Russian youths on a cultural exchange visit:
Khalyaf Ishmuratov, the Bashkirian deputy prime minister, said: “We lost wonderful children who could have become artists, scientists, entrepreneurs. Their disappearance is a huge loss.”
Would any Western leader have mentioned “entrepreneurs” in this context? In England the answer is probably “Never”. Mr Ishmuratov sounds like Ayn Rand’s idea of a statesman.
A problem for the UK: the Swiss air traffic control is a private contractor, so we can expect this tragedy to be exploited by opponents of the British government’s scheme to privatise air traffic control over here.
I love this, from the “in fact” section of the July 2002 issue of Prospect (quoted in its turn from The Guardian World Cup guide):
In Paraguay, duelling is legal if both participants are registered blood donors.
This sublime example of the art of contriving to practice a politically incorrect past-time by attaching it to something politically very correct is an inspiration to all. What next? Feminists Against Income Tax? (Nice Acronym, that on.) Gays For Globalisation? Guardian-readers for the Right to Hunt? (We already have Feminists Against Censorship and those gay gun guys in America called, if I recall it right, the Pink Pistols.)
And this is the first sentence of an excellent review article in the same issue of Prospect by Malise Ruthven, called “Radical Islam’s failure”.
The attacks of 11th September were the last gasps of a moribund Islamist movement. Terror is a sign of failure, deployed when political mobilisation has failed.
With each passing day, the number of intelligent people focussing their intelligence on 9/11 and all that grows. If this article is anything to go by, the whole mess may get settled sooner than pessimists like me now fear. I do like Prospect.
A Muslim woman in Florida who demanded the right to wear her veil for her drivers license photo has won her case. At first blush this seems silly. But think of the consequences for liberty! She has set a precedent. If you are a Florida resident you now have a way around State mandated identity photos. All you need to do is establish a religion which forbids it… and have a good lawyer ready to ram the precedent back down the Court’s throat when they try to play by a double standard.
Thinking about the applications of this to Northern Ireland is enough to put me on the floor laughing. Wouldn’t it be fair enough to let the lads wear their ski masks for their NI driver license photo’s? If they have a culture of violence shouldn’t we be culturally sensitive about their cultural needs? Just because they only blew other people up is no reason to think they don’t deserve the same respect!
Paul Marks responds to David Carr’s article Boiling Mad
I accept that some politicians have evil motives and are statist out of envy and/or power lust. However, I think most politicians are fairly normal people (not particularly evil).
The trouble is that that most people go in to politics to ‘help people’. If one does not have a good understanding of political economy one will ‘do something’ when confronted with a problem – for example, if people need better health care (‘look there are people dying over there’) the least difficult thing to do is to increase government spending on health. It is the same with all other human wants (so government spending tends to rise). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that increasing government spending is a bad thing.
It is the same with regulations. There is a problem – for example rents are high, so one imposes rent control. One wishes to help improve the environment – so one imposes more environmental regulation (and so on, and so on). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that government regulations are a bad thing.
As centuries of free market folk have pointed out, the seemingly good effects of government spending and regulations are obvious – but seeing the real effects of such things takes thought.
Many free market people put their faith in education to enable people to understand the effects of statism. Now here we have the real problem – the vast majority of education (in Britain or any other country) is statist. Whether one goes to a private school or a state school. whether one goes to a private university or a state university the concepts one will be taught (as regards political economy) will most likely be wrong.
It is even possible that someone may be better off not going in for say “higher education” at all. If a person sees that his line of policy seems to be have bad effects the person may change their policy. But if this person has been educated into believing that bad policy is good policy a change of mind is much less likely.
One must also remember that ‘education’ does not just cover school and university, such things as television and radio (at least the ‘serious’ programs) are also part of education – and the ideas of political economy that the television and radio spread are also mostly false. So even a person who is not formally educated is still more likely than not to be filled with false ideas – but it is not as bad as if this person had gone through the formal education process as well.
Of course there are such things as free market books in the world and one can encounter them in such places as university libraries. However, I believe that the vast majority of people who read these works were LOOKING FOR THEM (or at least had their minds open to this sort of work).
Take my own case. I often present myself as a conformist, however the objective evidence shows that I am in fact a pathological rebel.
Even in junior school (i.e. before I was 11 years old) I was already in revolt. The teachers asked us to bring food for a party to ‘share with out friends’, so I strongly objected when they stole the food I brought (they had tried to make me share the food with my enemies).
Nor was this an isolated incident. I disliked the way that lies and brutality were encouraged by people of power – they played lip service to being against bullying, but did nothing to fight it and did their best to work against people who did try and fight it (such as myself). Many (perhaps all) of the teachers where nice people – but they did not do their duty, the system did not work.
Nor was this just a matter of school. I remember going through reference works as a young child looking for countries that did not have Welfare State programs (and feeling great pain when I found out that nations that appeared not to have such programs really did have them). I also went through history books about various nations with almost the sole intention of finding out when and how various “reforms” (i.e. crimes) had happened.
To take one example. I was not convinced by E.G. West‘s book Education and the State (1965) that the idea that without government action most people would not be able to read and write was a false idea. No, I thought that already – and spent ages trying to find a book that would agree with me.
To take another example. When I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980) it did not convince me that such things as rent control were wrong (I already thought that), no it just upset me that even this proclaimed “free market” book seemed to be in favour of such things as government fiat money (such a concept being clearly evil, you see).
I do not claim that all libertarians are as mad as I am. However, I told hold that (in the present intellectual environment) to reject statism someone must have a mind with something odd about it. To be told (endlessly) by nice well read people that (for example) ‘anti monopoly’ laws are a good thing and to think “this is all nonsense, everyone is a fool – apart from me” indicates an odd personality type. It is not to be expected that most politicians (who I repeat tend to by rather ordinary people) would have this personality type – and it might not be a good thing if they did (as not everyone with this personality type is likely to be a libertarian – they might be the very power mad types that people are concerned politicians are).
Of course libertarians will not tend to like the above. I think that is why (for example) one gets so many silly ‘libertarian tests’ – you know the sort I mean, they have questions like ‘are you against a police state?’ or ‘do you think freedom is a good idea?’ and if you say ‘yes’ to such question (or ‘no’ to certain other questions) you ‘must be a libertarian’. I believe that such tests are created so that libertarians can think that there are more of us than there really are.
If the questions were things like ‘are you in favour of the abolition of Old Age Pensions [or ‘Social Security’ if it was an American test]?’ without loading the question by talking about Cato Institute style ‘Individual Retirement Accounts’ (or other such attempts to have free market reform, whilst pretending that no one will lose), then our true numbers would be revealed. It is not to be expected that politicians would think in the same way as a small minority of the population.
There really are no clever ways one can have reform. There are no painless options when statism is as advanced as it is in the world today. I would recommend Lew Rockwell’s recent article Freedom is not “public policy”, which explains this better than any other work I know of.
Paul Marks
I received this email from Sean Gabb today. It deserves a wider readership:
I did the Mike Parr show this morning – BBC Radio Newcastle – about ID cards. I was very polite to the local police boss who was on against me. He ended by agreeing that he’d rather have more officers than a scheme that he though might easily be abused.
Sean Gabb does lots of this kind of thing.
A French libertarian arguing about infidelity in relationships said that unless a contract is written, it isn’t valid. In the torrent of refutations (to which I contributed my ha’penny worth) Stefan Metzeler included the following anecdote:
Here’s another example which demonstrates the advantage of a good reputation, even “collective”. About ten years ago, I was in Martinique (a very, very beautiful place). On my last day, I chanced upon a boutique with jewels and I thought that this would be a nice present for my girlfriend. So I chose some for a little more than $100 and I want to pay by VISA. No luck, she [the shop-keeper] couldn’t take it and I didn’t have any cash. But then the saleswoman says to me looking at my card: “Are you Swiss? Do you have your passport?” I reply “Yes, of course.”
“Then no problem, I’ll give you credit and you just wire me the money when you get home. I’ve never had a problem with the Swiss.”
I must admit that I was gob-smacked… a reputation like that is worth more than gold in the bank. Of course, I settled up the day after I returned to Switzerland.
I wonder what it is that motivates politicians and bureaucrats to dream up new schemes to strangle free enterprise? That they are wrong goes without saying but are they driven by a genuine (if misguided) belief that they are helping to make the world a better place or are they spiteful and envious ghouls who pursue power so they they can wreak their vengeance on those who are manifestly better then them?
Increasingly, I take the latter view, reinforced by these kind of reports from the Spectator on the new European Pressure Equipment Directive:
“Under the directive, all companies which manufacture boilers will be obliged to nominate a ‘notified body’ —in practice, one of several insurance companies which have been licensed for the task — which will then have the power to conduct an initial inspection costing several thousand pounds, and unlimited follow-up inspections costing the company £700 per day.
Take that, you wealth-creating bastards!! And, for the little guys, a double-whammy. In fact, a death-whammy:
“Large engineering firms will be able to absorb the costs, but for the likes of Ian Stock, whose Carmarthen-based company Dragon Boilers Ltd makes copper boilers for model railway enthusiasts, it could spell ruin. ‘There is no limit to how often the notified body could come and inspect me,’ he says. ‘Any time it can say to itself, “We’re short of money, let’s make a trip to Dragon Boilers.”
Poor Mr.Stock. Still, at least he’s got the message in no uncertain terms. Let us hope he sees fit to spread it.
A new publication by the free market think tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, “The Representatives of Business in English Literature,” Readings 53, takes a look at how businessmen have received a bad deal in fiction. In a nice review in the Financial Times (registration necessary for the article, via www.ft.com), writer Stephen Overell notes that Ayn Rand’s classic, Atlas Shrugged, was a ‘freak’ in that it celebrated business and the trader ethic.
And I had to laugh. For Overell starts his analysis by quoting the ‘sacred text’, as Adriana Cronin would describe it, of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the bit where Francisco D’Ancona praises the idea of ‘making money’. Overell goes on to show how Rand’s view of wealth creation stands in total contrast to 99 percent of literature’s portrayal of capitalism and businessfolk. Just so.
I like to think that this review, by a FT journalist not necessarily well disposed towards libertarianism, puts the recent jousting on Samizdata about Rand into some kind of perspective. It seems some of the biggest haters of Rand are libertarians, while non-libertarians seem quite intrigued by her writings, so much so that they could even turn people on to capitalist ideas. To quote Margaret Thatcher, it is a funny old world.
Over on the Liberty Log there’s a recent reference to one of those reports, which says that Britain’s economy is fourth freest in the world. The implication is: hurrah! But this means that only three economies in the world are less gummed up with governmental and other bullshit than this one. What the hell must the others be like?
…that make many of them so damn credulous? As we have mentioned in many previous articles on Samizdata, just because a person is deeply distrustful about modern states (as we are here on this blog), that should not make us regularly fall prey to the sort of garbage being peddled as ‘fact’ by pretty much anyone with an anti-US/anti-UK axe to grind.
We constantly warn about the growing Panopticon surveillance state rapidly developing in Britain and marvel at how Americans tolerate the state not just ignoring their own precious constitution on a massive scale with its forfeiture laws and victim disarmament laws, plus its egregious ‘citizenship’ laws… yet just because we do not regard the US and British states as ‘the good guys’ that does not make us fall prey to apologists for mass murderers like Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosevic on the theory that as the states in which we live are demonstrably anti-liberty in so many ways, then if those states says terrible things about Hussain or Milosevic then those guys, and their apologists/revisionists, must therefore be okay. Q.E.D…
And so when I read the ‘those poor old Serbian cetnics may have been a bit naughty but they were not really so terrible compared to the Bosnians and Americans’ remarks over on Strike the root, I can only sympathize with the hapless Jews who have had to endure this sort of ‘big lie’ crap that transcends ‘mere fact’ for generations. If only people had just trusted Slobodan it would have worked out okay eh? Yeah, right. The notion that Milosevic seriously wanted to just break Bosnia Herzegovina into cantons ‘to ‘protect the Serbs’, after they had violently ethnically cleansed the parts of Croatia they had occupied, is hilarious.
Sorry guys, but the atrocities in Bosnia were not publicity stunts by the Bosnian government. The depopulated villages are proof enough of that, as were the eye witnesses to horror after horror. Most of the murder happened well and truly off-camera and away from the media spotlight in Sarajevo. To blame the Americans for how bad things got in Bosnia, whose foreign policy in the Balkans was largely incoherent for the first three years of the war, is rather like blaming America for how nasty things got in Poland for the Jews after 1942.
Why otherwise rational commentators buy into these ludicrous revisionist conspiracy theories and sundry ‘black helicopter’ shite, making common cause with mass murdering tyrants in countries whose names they can barely spell, is just one of the great marvels of our time.
I don’t know what Brian Micklethwait has been reading lately, but I looked up some Brian’s claims:
1) fixed-quantity of wealth merchant:
Rand explicitly points out that an entrepreneur creates value. See Francisco D’Anconia speech about the morality of making money, (published by Ayn Rand Foundation as a pamphlet), also in Atlas Shrugged pp 387-391 Signet paperback edition especially the passage:
“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money’. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favour. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”
Brian declares “My problem is that I so utterly despise Randian philosophy that I cannot make myself take it seriously. I am also put off by the vicious religiosity of so many Randian responses to any criticisms of their sacred texts.”
I don’t think the Randian objection to Brian is his “criticism of their sacred texts”: he doesn’t quote any!
Perhaps their criticism is that Brian probably hasn’t read the “sacred texts” for some twenty years or so.
2) “Altruism”: Brian complains that Randians get all uppity when a libertarian claims to act altruistically. To the extent that this is true, he is right to object to objectively bad manners 
However, my recollection was that there was a distinction between Howard Roark (the take-it-or-leave-it architect in the Fountainhead) and Hank Rearden (the brilliant industrialist in Atlas Shrugged).
When D’Anconia questions Rearden about his motives for creating and putting Rearden Metal on the market see (pp 426-427). No one can read this passage and credibly conclude that Rand thinks entrepreneurs are wrong to think about the general benefit of their actions.
What Rand attacks as “altruism” is the ethical proposition that an action cannot be moral and self-serving at the same time. Rand claims that “altruism” was coined by Auguste Comte. This is confirmed by my French dictionary which also dates the word from 1830. In philosophy, “altruism is defined as the doctrine which considers the devotion to other people’s interests as the ideal rule of morality”. [My translation]
Note that “ideal” in philosophy is not the same as “utopian”: “precise” is a better approximation.
So Rand’s philosophical attack on “altruism” is based on the actual writngs of Auguste Comte, Immanuel Kant and others. (See “For the New Intellectual” p36 New American Library paperback ed.) She attacks among other applications of altruism, the claim that an action is moral if the intentions are good REGARDLESS of outcomes (Kant) [I cheated: I looked at C D Broad’s “Five types of Ethical Theory” p116-139 (ch. on Kant)].
The most delightful description of an altruist comes in the form of Eugene Lawson who at one point claims with pride:
“I can honestly say that I have never made a profit in my life!”
What Rand worshippers do is take the criticism of a system of thought which claims that only selfless actions can be moral, and apply it to every instance of individuals choosing to show compassion, or material generosity, for others.
However, Brian doesn’t frequent the sort of people who actually believe that because a company made a profit, its owners committed a crime against humanity. There is a type of socialist who wishes to replace the word “banker!” as an insult for another word which rhymes with it.
When Rand wrote, these views were more widely held than they are today. Many of those of us who campaigned against such evil nonsense gained the moral confidence to do so from Rand.
So there.
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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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