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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Ahn Jung Hwan, take a bow. He misses a penalty in the early minutes of the game, and then he scores the golden goal that ends it in extra time. What a story. South Korea 2 Italy 1. France, Argentina, Portugal, and now Italy. Who’s next in the cull of the Great Soccer Nations? Brazil? We wish. (Brazil play England in the next round, early in the morning on Friday.)
As for doing something about poverty, Antoine, maybe regular folks are better off giving the World Cup their undivided attention, but I think that we libertarians ought to be able to do better than that. In pursuit of such positivity I will tonight be attending a lecture organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs to be given by the great Hernando de Soto. Expect a report here, and hope also for a picture, of one of the truly great men of our time.
I did my best on the radio the other day, that is to say I tried to do my best. I pointed out that the Trade Justice campaigners were only fighting symptoms, and ignoring the “underlying causes” of why this nation (South Korea being a fine example) does well economically, while others do badly. (For a country that has done badly look no further than North Korea, who played with distinction in the 1966 World Cup Finals in England but who have since faded away football-wise, and done a hell – and I do mean hell – of a lot worse than that economically.) However I wasn’t persuaded by what I said. These trade justice campaigners are at least fighting some symptoms, even if not all or exactly the ones I would have liked.
I remember how Amnesty International used to be accused of the same thing. They too used to fight individual cases with individual faces, while carefully ignoring the ideologically divisive matter of what makes nasty governments nasty in the first place, and well done them. Amnesty went into decline, at any rate in my eyes, not because it “fought symptoms” and ignored the “causes” of tyranny, but because its literature switched from featuring photos of unjustly imprisoned poets and tortured opposition politicians from far away places to having photos of already much celebrated celebrity supporters from the world of showbiz, and because it branched out into the perhaps correct but in my opinion utterly unrelated matter of campaigning against the death penalty. Also, since the end of the Cold War, the enemy went from being Tyranny to being Chaos, and writing begging letters to Chaos asking it to be nicer doesn’t work so well.
Oh well, live and learn.
Also, British TV today is full of the video of a firefighting airplane in Colorado crashing after its wings had exploded and fallen off, killing all three on board. So no more jokes from me about people starting fires.
In a posting earlier today, Paul Marks said some nice things about South Dakota. It’s an interesting place — wide open spaces, low taxes and few people. You might wonder why in this place of rugged individualists Democrats consistently win public office. Perhaps the South Dakota website didn’t mention the large number of Indians (Native-Americans as they are now called) who vote a solid bloc for Democrats who continue to keep them in the bondage of federal handouts. This population has opted out of assimilation encouraged by the federal agency whose existence relies on maintaining this population literally ‘on the reservation.’
Driving through these reservations is a mind altering experience. Vast tracts of featureless landscape dotted with tiny habitations looking like a National Geographic documentary on public television depicting the deperate poverty of equatorial Africa. It’s a disgrace and the natural result of what happens when people are encouraged to believe that they are victims and can’t be expected to be responsble for themselves.
Evelyn Palmeri
England is at now a standstill watching the wretched Danish football team collapse in the face of England’s team, and thus allow England through to the last eight of the little soccer tournament in the Far East that we keep referring to. Watching and now celebrating. The Danes were never in it, poor fellows, and I really feel for their goalie, who had a “mare”, as one of our TV pundits rather charmingly describes unsatisfactory dreams. So some bloggage from me is in order, to keep the blog rolling.
Last night (Friday June 14) Mark Littlewood of Liberty spoke at the June Putney Debate, and confirmed how useful it was for the likes of Tom Burroughes and David Carr to show up at that Liberty Conference. Mark stressed how just a couple of questions from the floor can change the whole atmosphere of a day. So Tom was right about how it’s worth our team attending these things, and David probably did far better then he realised.
I committed a hideous social blunder. My socialising skills are excellent, with just four deviations from total perfection: (1) I have a shocking memory for names, (2) I have a shocking memory for faces, (3) I am shockingly bad at putting together any names and faces that I do sort of remember, and (4) I am, in general, often quite rude to people. So when I arrived I saw lots of familiar faces, and one that I knew I knew, but didn’t actually know. I know you, I said, but, please tell me who you are. It turned out to be Mark Littlewood. The last time I met Mark, he was a speaker at a libertarian conference and I was chairing the session. He’s a long time Libertarian Alliance supporter and we’re supposed to be well acquainted. We are well acquainted. What a mare. Oh well. Sorry Mark.
The most serious thoughts provoked in my mind by last night’s proceedings need to be thought about and written about separately, which I will do, hopefully today but if not then Real Soon Now. The most intriguing other titbit I picked up came courtesy of Christian Michel, who will be the speaker at my next Brian’s Friday (June 28). Christian said that, concerning the subject he will be addressing (what libertarianism should do about crime) he has now changed his mind. He did a piece a year or two ago about Restitution, which he has now removed from his Liberalia website, because it’s wrong, he now says. (Wrong? What kind of a reason is that to take something down from a website?) But aha! The Libertarian Alliance still has Christian’s now abandoned intellectual child (as Legal Notes No. 33: Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society), and always will have it. Anyway, my point is, it should be an amusing little gathering on June 28, and we all know what to read by way of preparation, to find out exactly which misguided fool it is that Christian Michel now disagrees with. Himself. Seriously, I believe that the willingness to reject what you later decide are your own errors is one of the key indicators of a superior mind.
Final titbit of news. Tim Evans has now moved to his new job with the Centre for the New Europe. He said that he was already agreeably surprised by the number, quality and academic grandeur of Continental Europe’s libertarians. You will definitely be hearing more from Samizdata about these people and their various writings, sayings and doings.
Bring on the Brazilians.
I often claim that the United States is just as bad (in its own way) as Britain (this fits in well with my “we are all doomed” view of the universe). However a couple of things over the last 24 hours have produced doubts in my mind.
Yesterday I was playing with my computer and looked up the website for South Dakota. It was not a very impressive site and it did not seem to have been created by very bright people, but I did say some things of interest. The Governor of the State casually announced the State’s balanced budget (the State has had a balanced budget every year for the last 113 years), he also mentioned (in passing) that the voters (not the politicians) had voted to get rid of the death tax (the state inheritance tax).
South Dakota does not seem to have much in the way of taxes – no income tax, no business profits tax, a sales tax that is a fraction of ours. It also seems to have little trade union power and the Governor has finished selling off all the state enterprises that were created in the early 1900’s.
The leader of the Democrats in the Senate represents South Dakota – perhaps he should look at his own State sometime. It is not just a bunch of subsidized farmers anymore.
Meanwhile back in Britain. I went to pick up an inhaler today (interesting contradiction – I claim I want to die and yet I go to absurd lengths to stay alive). I presented my prescription to the lady at the chemist shop and she said “you have not ticked any of the exemption boxes”. I explained that I was exempt – that I paid for my prescription. “No, you must tick one of the exception boxes” (said the lady). I pointed out the old saying that “someone, somewhere must pay” – “you have met him” I said “it is me”. “You have not ticked any of the exemption boxes” (said the lady).
Eventually I was able to pay for my prescription. However, I think this type of conversation is the death rattle of the Welfare State (and not in the nice sense that we are about to see free market reform). I do not think I would have this sort of conversation in South Dakota.
Paul Marks
Is this “Paul Foot” who condemns “corporate greed” and “boardroom fraud” the very same “Paul Foot” who – as a lap-dog of the late Mr Robert Maxwell M.C. at the Mirror Group – took money from a crook who was robbing his colleagues’ pension fund, ignored the accumulated evidence of investigations into his masters frauds, and to my knowledge has never shown the slightest remorse for covering up – by his silence – the biggest corporate crime in British history?
I trust that I am completely mistaken, otherwise I could never look at Private Eye or the Guardian again without worrying about the editorial integrity of these fearless organs.
Several comments stuck in my mind that were made by speakers at the Liberty Conference on Saturday in central London at which I was present along with David Carr and some other Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance members. The following will not be forgotten easily:
“Er, Mr Chairman, we live in a managed society. We all manage each other. We cannot have a world where we just have freedoms and certain rules”.
This was uttered by a man who claimed to be a member of Liberty, the civil liberties lobby. Perhaps he should lobby to have that organisation’s name changed to something more appropriate to what he thinks should be its true values, such as ‘Nanny’.
As David said, it was not a particularly encouraging event, although a few half-decent contacts were made and a lot of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets were taken away.
As with many such events, the best course of action is to behave like a decent human being. However, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, most of the people there did not have the intellectual equipment to figure out the exit route from a damp paper bag.
Over on Liberty Log there’s a long but good piece by William Cooke in praise of skycrapers and critical of the Prince of Wales for being critical of skyscrapers. Some while ago William Cooke asked me if the Libertarian Alliance might like to publish this piece. My problem was the way it ended:
If we resurrect the Twin Towers and make them better and stronger they will be living memorials and signs of hope for the resurrection to come on the great day of the Lord. Every family member who lost a loved one, when they look at the new Towers, will not only be able to see that we refused to surrender to the terrorists, but that we have hope and trust that in the end God Himself will set all things right and see that justice and peace are brought about on the earth.
Well they may be able to say such a thing, but what if they think that everything after “but that” is gibberish and don’t want to say it? And what if many more, who didn’t lose any loved ones in the outrage but who likewise don’t want terrorism surrendered to, feel similarly? This paragraph is a pointless exercise in coalition breaking, an attempt by a Christian to take posthumous possession of some classic symbols of don’t-care-what-religion-you-are-so-long-as-you-want-to-do-business secular materialism for his team.
But although Cooke’s piece ends very religiously, the thing as a whole is insufficiently religious. The religion is merely bolted onto the end. This means that it can’t really be a Libertarian Alliance Religious Note but would be a bit odd as anything else.
But the fact that I was unable to classify this piece of writing to suit my own editorial categories, and instead put it to one side (the side you never get back to unless prodded), shouldn’t put anyone else off reading a mostly very good piece.
Just before Cooke’s piece gets religion, it goes like this, agreeing with the Anne Coulter piece that I linked to on Friday 7th:
But, the best memorial may be two giant towers, like the ones that stood there before. Atta and his gang hated the Towers for their architecture and for what those buildings stood for – namely freedom, capitalism, western power, and modernity. To rebuild would send the message that they didn’t win and that our society and our culture will prevail. Those people who died there would want us to go forward in the world with that message.
Which is how and where the thing should have ended.
I would like to apologise to any visiting Argentinians or Argentophiles for yesterday’s rather visceral outburst.
My temporary use of such inflammatory and pugnacious language, whilst regrettable, was purely the product of a temporary bout of fog-inducing euphoria following Englands Word Cup win. Let me assure you that I bear no ill-will towards the Argentinian people. Indeed, they have my every sympathy given the chaos into which their venal and corrupt political class has plunged them. I hope, pray, nay expect them to rise like a phoenix from the flames.
Contrast, however, the mode of celebrations in Croatia from whence Natalija reports on the sounds of gunfire filling the air following the unexpected victory over Italy today. How spontaneously joyous.
I long for the day that I, too, can rejoice in Englands victories by firing my carbine into the air. But, due to the UK’s ridiculous prohibition on the private ownership of firearms, such healthy and safe expressions of national enthusiasm are forbidden to me and I am forced to resort, instead, to malevolent jingoistic slurs.
I apologise for any offence caused but I must lay the ultimate blame squarely at the feet of HM Government. Thank you for your kind attention.
In the 1990s, Paul Krugman was one of the most respected economists in America. He wrote for a popular audience as well as for the scholarly community, and although I didn’t always agree with the contents of his books, he at least pursued his subjects with rigor, and occasionally turned out a real gem (1995’s Pop Internationalism is a great book). He was seen by many on the left as their Great White Hope, the one cutting-edge liberal economist who was raising objections to the more conservative University of Chicago crowd that was dominating the debate (and the Nobel Prizes) at the time.
Like those before him, though (Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky) Krugman has done irreparable damage to his academic credibility by choosing to become a political hack — that’s what I mean by the title. Krugman’s latest NY Times op-ed (link requires registration) serves up one howler after another. He offers precious little support for his thesis — that the Bush administration has given “energy companies” carte blanche to dictate environmental policy because the energy companies bankrolled the Bush campaign — because, well, that claim just won’t stand up to scrutiny, no matter how good a sound bite it makes. So in that great Blogosphere tradition, let us now fact-check Krugman’s ass and see where he comes up short.
Whopper #1: In the case of energy policy, the administration still won’t release information about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. But it’s clear that energy companies, and only energy companies, had access to top officials. The result was that during the California power crisis — which, it is increasingly apparent, was largely engineered by Enron and other companies that had the administration’s ear — the administration did nothing.
Enron did some sinister things. They lied to the investment community, covered up their lies and committed securities fraud on a grand scale. This does not mean, however, that Enron is responsible for every crisis that comes down the pike. Enron engineered the California power crisis? This simply strains credulity. The electricity that Enron did sell to the California ISO (the power-sourcing agency for the state) came at a lower price than the market average in California, and at a lower price than the LA Dept. of Power and Water was charging the state for its electricity. Moreover, Enron accepted credit from electric power distributors and from the state of California during the worst part of the crisis, and the state of California ended up reneging on millions of dollars of obligations to Enron. If anything, Enron helped relieve the California electricity shortages of 2001.
Whopper #2: When scientists discovered that industrial chemicals were depleting the earth’s protective ozone layer, [Reagan-era Interior Secretary James] Watt suggested that people wear hats, sunscreen and dark glasses. Luckily for the planet, he was overruled; the United States joined other countries in curbing production of ozone-depleting chemicals. The ozone hole is still growing, but disaster has at least been postponed.
The US banned CFC’s (the principal group of industrial chemicals linked to ozone depletion) from use as an aerosol propellant in 1979. The treaty Krugman referred to, the Montreal Protocol, was signed by the US delegation in 1987, and was ratified in the spring of 1988. All of this was going on during the Reagan administration.
Krugman then resorts to damnation by faint praise, congratulating the Republicans for “at least postponing” ultraviolet disaster. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) 1999 publication on the Montreal Protocol, global CFC production is presently lower than in 1960, and the bureaucracy predicts that the ozone layer will stage a recovery over the next 50 years, even if no further action is taken. As Bjørn Lomborg points out in The Skeptical Environmentalist, the additional exposure to ultraviolet light from the ozone depletion we have already experienced is roughly what would be experienced in moving 100 to 200 miles closer to the equator, say from Manchester to London.
Whopper #3: … the E.P.A.’s Christie Whitman assured the public that Mr. Bush would honor his pledge to control carbon dioxide emissions — only to be betrayed when the coal and oil industries weighed in on the subject. So the administration learned nothing from the California crisis; it still takes its advice from the energy companies that financed its campaign (and made many administration officials, including Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, rich).
Big corporations financed the Bush campaign! This assertion is totally preposterous on its face. The last US election in which corporations of any kind were permitted to make any contribution to a presidential candidate was the hotly contested Theodore Roosevelt vs. Alton Parker race of 1904. Direct corporate contributions have been illegal in federal elections for nearly 100 years. Of course, corporations can set up Political Action Committees and have the PAC make a donation to a candidate, but this is limited to $5,000 per PAC per candidate per election. GWB raised a total of $193.1 million for his 2000 presidential bid (including a federal subsidy of $67.6 million.) Just over $2 million, or 1.2% of Bush’s campaign funds, came from all PACs. Maybe that $2 million came from 400 energy company PACs that donated $5,000 each … or maybe not. (Rather than muddling through the FEC’s website for data, check out this handy thumbnail of the Bush Campaign’s sources and uses of funds at OpenSecrets.org).
Whopper #4: And it’s one thing to reward your friends with subsidies and lax regulation. It’s something quite different to let them dictate policy on climate change.
First, Krugman says that the administration is bound to energy companies such as Enron. Then he says that the energy companies are dictating policy on climate change. So it stands to reason that Enron opposed action on the climate change front, right? Wrong. Enron lobbied heavily for greenhouse emissions caps a la Kyoto, and also for subsidies for renewable electric energy, the exact opposite of what the administration wants.
All in all, this was a thoroughly disappointing effort by Krugman, a man whom I used to have a great deal of respect for. Paul Krugman is a brilliant man, and he is capable of much better work than this. Come on, Dr. Krugman, stick to economics, and leave this sort of political sloganeering to the Carvilles and the Begalas of the world.
One of the elements of Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” I enjoyed was the casual references to anarcho-capitalist mechanisms for dealing with services that are currently provided by the state. In answer to a question about social security, the narrator said that a bookmaker will agree odds and take a stake for any eventualities covered by insurance schemes.
Certainly the evolution of spread betting and online betting has brought such a vision closer to reality. What struck me about the recent soccer match involving two beef-eating nations was the speed with which the price mechanism adjusted: England went from a 16 to 1 chance to win the FIFA World Cup to 7 to 1 in the space of a couple of hours. Meanwhile, Argentina went from 3 to 1 favourites to 8 to 1. One could claim that this shift is merely a symptom of nationalist delusion by the English.
Planning freaks would say that if the government set the odds they wouldn’t shift, because they would be based on a rational assessment of the various teams merits. I beg to differ.
First, it’s a lot more fun for the outcomes to be unexpected. Visiting market-places is generally more entertaining than visiting a planning office.
Second, the planners can’t put every factor into their equations (as the state price fixers in Argentina have recently discovered, to the distress of millions).
Third, bookmakers aren’t sentimental or swayed by public opinion, only committed cash. If Her Majesty the Queen were to stake £10 million on a Commonwealth team to win the World Cup, it would shift the price the same as if one million punters did the same with £10 each. The same isn’t true of such political decisions as working if, when, and at what rate at which the pound should join the Euro. The planners will decide with other people’s money, trusting to public opinion (or lack of it), and hoping to freeze the price mechanism if not to ignore it altogether.
So here’s my tip. 1) Ignore the opinion polls, check the bookies for the results of the next elections, dates of Euro referendum, future market prices. 2) Don’t stake too much on a single event.
Antoine Clarke
Josh Chafetz over on OxBlog has an interesting post about the nature of order, touching on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith but mostly about Fred Hayek. He also brings up a useful point about a Pejman Pundit post ridiculing the idea of an anarchy club. In a later posting Pejman insists he does understand the definition of the word ‘anarchy’ and points out his first posting was mostly in jest.
There is indeed a useful point being made here and one I have made to several Libertarian Alliance members before: we understand what we mean when we say ‘anarchy’ but when the term is used in common parlance, it is generally a synonym for ‘nihilism’. For example when a bunch of scruffy self-described anti-globalisation protestors set fire to a MacDonalds in Paris and smash up a Mercedes parked near by, those so-called ‘anarchists’ are not doing those things because they want more kosmos (spontaneous or natural order) and less taxis (imposed order), leading to a morality based anarcho-capitalist golden age… no, they are mostly just nihilists whose vision of the future is little different from that of the bikers from hell in the movie ‘Mad Max’. The few of them who actually do have a semi-coherent idea of what the future should look like are Spanish style (circa 1938) ‘anarcho-syndicalists’… which is to say they are rather like meat eating vegetarians (see the ‘related article’ link below).
It is for this reason I usually urge libertarians to stay away from the ‘A’ word because it is so widely misused. Josh Chafetz also expresses his views about anarchy as an objective that shows he more or less does understand the true nature of what real anarchists are arguing for:
That is to say, there is nothing absurd about people organizing in favor of anarchy. What they are doing is stating a preference for absolute kosmos with no taxis. Again, I think this preference is folly. I think that it is neither possible nor desirable to do away with all taxis. I am not an anarchist.
I said more or less understand because taxis does not necessarily mean state imposed order: for example most of the rules within a stock exchange are ‘taxis’ rather than ‘kosmos’ and are analogous to the rules of a private club.. a few are imposed by the state but most are imposed by the exchange itself. No one is forced to trade in a stock exchange and thus in some hypothetical anarchist future, there may well still be ‘taxis’ intensive stock exchanges.
However like Josh, I too am not an anarchist. I am a minarchist but where I depart from Josh is that whilst I agree it is probably not possible to depart from a system in which there is a state, I do think it is desirable. In essence I believe in systems involving the one word conspicuous by its absence in this interesting but utilitarian discussion: morality. I believe in objective morality, albeit imperfectly understood and conjecturally proposed. That, rather than the force of state or vox pop, is the one and only source of legitimacy in any system.
 Probably not what you had in mind
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…
This precious stone set in the silver sea…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
– William Shakespeare
My views on the state of The State (not just Britain, any state) are well known: I am a libertarian up towards the radical end of the minarchist spectrum.
Yet whilst going out for lunch today, I walked past The Trafalgar, a popular pub on King’s Road in Chelsea, and ended up watching the match between England and Argentina which resulted in a gripping and hard won 1-Nil victory by England. The roar and fierce chants of the English supporters in the pub was utterly magnetic and I found myself pulled in almost against my will, swept up in an irresistible atavistic fervour as if the blood of my ancestors on both sides of the line on Senlac Hill was calling to me to join the shield wall, to add my strength to theirs… now does this sound like the rationalist libertarian who writes anti-state polemics on the Samizdata?
Well, a society is not a state and a nation is not a government. Some libertarians may think that a libertarian future will have evolved beyond tribal yearning as we all live in rational individually determined free associations, but they are quite incorrect… because it is those very yearnings which will lead to many of our free associations.
Many hear echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg mass rallies in the football terraces and pubs of England but they are wrong because coming together to act collectively is not the same as collectivism. Only the state could have caused the Nazi mass rallies, but only the state could prevent such freely associated mass rallies we call football matches, because they are the expression of a deep seated need that will never ever disappear, no matter how rationally centred a society is. The need to wave the tribal banner and roar the latter day war cry can be turned to evil, but what great collective assemblies like football matches show that there is indeed another way to express those feelings which do not involve invading Poland or conquering India.
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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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