Samizdata

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.

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.

…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.

Ah, no… sorry, wrong century. Cast your mind back to the 20^th Century: many times we heard Nazi propaganda describing how Jewish bankers (who being bankers were presumably capitalists unlikely to prosper under communism) and Bolsheviks (who, being Bolsheviks, were presumably communists unlikely to be well disposed towards bankers) were nefariously working together against the interests of the German Volk.

Well, according to the utterly enthralling and dependably surreal Justin Raymondo, those rascally Jews are at it again in the 21^st Century, this time allying themselves with radical Islam for reasons which rather elude me, against the interests of the United States… i.e. the people who sell Israel a large chunk of the weapons they use to do various things Justin disapproves of (like survive).

Go figure.

Although I am personally a ‘Hakeyian Popperoid’, unlike Adriana and Brian I am not particularly ill disposed to Objectivism per se, seeing the minarchist libertarianism of its advocates as clearly fellow travellers. Of course I realise some capital ‘O’ Objectivists reject the term ‘libertarian’ as applying to them but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and has feathers, I tend to call it a duck… the Libertarian Alliance has many objectivist members who are not uncomfortable with being associated with the term.

My view is that we live in such a ‘target rich’ world replete with statist, socialists, fascists, racists and various other toxic ‘-ists’, thus attacking people who are largely in sympathy with the cause of liberty because we don’t like the way they got to that conclusion is not particularly productive.

That said, Samizdata will continue to publish critiques of Objectivism, if that is what is on its contributors minds… and we will also publish Objectivist perspectives. Rand is not the enemy.

I’m glad that one of us is having a philosophically serious go at that bizarre Randian diatribe of some days ago

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.

But if Randians boom forth with their nonsense while the rest of us just suffer in silence, observers of the libertarian scene are liable to get the idea that Randian philosophy is a far more important part of the libertarian movement in general than it really is.

My take on the Randians is that, like the Marxists (“exploitation”, “labour”), they are definition hoppers. By “altruism” they don’t mean what the rest of us mean. If you explain to a Randian that you are an altruistic sort of a person from time to time, that you don’t always behave selfishly, etc. etc., he’ll tie himself into knots explaining that you are really being totally anti-altruistic and completely selfish, all the time, even if you have just rescued a complete stranger from drowning in a freezing cold lake at definite risk to your own life. Something to do with selfishly choosing to live by your own values, blah blah blah.

Meanwhile back in normal-land, altruism means what Adriana says it means, and capitalism is relentlessly altruistic. Tradesmen spend their entire working lives obsessing not just about what they would like to be doing all day long, but also about what their customers would most appreciate them doing, the trick for happy capitalist life being to find things to do that satisfy on both counts.

Which leads to the other great folly that I see embedded in Randianism, namely fixed sum economics. The world is now, as it always has been, full of the foolishness that you can only get rich and happy if other people are made to sacrifice their riches and happiness for your benefit. It’s not that Randians believe explicitly and self-consciously in fixed-sum economics, any more than most other people do. It’s merely that everything else they say is said as if they believed in fixed sum economics.

The proper way to deal with this falsehood is to deal with it. (See my Libertarian Alliance piece called The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy: How To Make Yourself Miserable About the Past, The Present and The Future of Mankind.)

Fail to deal with it and there are two characteristic ways in which the fixed quantity of happiness/wealth fallacy will deal with you.

People who are nice, and who don’t like the idea of making other people miserable, restrain themselves from getting rich and happy. We see that syndrome all around us, and especially at political demonstrations of the concerned variety.

But then there is the screw-you-Jack response, which consists of saying that I want to be happy and goddammit I’ve a right to be happy! And that if that means others have be unhappy, then to hell with them!! And we see that all around us also, in the form of exuberantly busy capitalists who just want to get rich, and if that means they have to think of themselves as quasi-criminals, then so be it. They can live with it. With friends like these, capitalism doesn’t need enemies. (Screw-you-Jack capitalism is especially rampant in the financial world, where it takes a little bit of imagination to realise just how much good you are doing for the world by, e.g., placing a bet on the price of next year’s corn crop. It’s obvious that you do a bit of good for other people if you sell them newspapers and sweeties, but perhaps not quite so clear that you and your confreres are actually making modern agriculture possible if you trade in agricultural futures.)

These two characteristic social types, the self-sacrificing conscience-ridden misery and the selfish capitalist bastard, dance a sort of self-reinforcing dance with each other, each reacting in horror to the other’s existence, but neither realising how much, intellectually speaking, they have in common. The unifying error is that in living your life you are condemned to choose between your own happiness and the happiness of others, between selfishness and altruism.

Randians don’t fit exactly into either of these boxes, because they actually come in both forms! Randians are anything but straightforward advocates of selfishness, even though they insist hysterically that they are. Atlas, the ultimate miserably self-sacrificial altruist who eventually can take it no longer and who shrugs, is one of their biggest heroes! And when Atlas does shrug, that also turns out to be partly a selfish act of self-liberation, but also partly a contribution to an altruistic movement of general social redemption.

But back in normal-land again (where “selfishness” is assumed to mean selfishness), the Randians, with their bellowings forth about the virtues of capitalism and of selfishness, are heard to be supporting screw-you-Jack capitalism, that is, they reinforce rather than challenge the idea that capitalism is rooted in an active hostility to – in an active determination to destroy – the happiness of the non-capitalist masses.

Which is just one of the reasons why the Randians must be regularly denounced by the rest of us.