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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One of the many joys of blogging is that you don’t have to say everything, you can be content to say something, and the something I want to say here is that I want to add my little voice to the chorus now saying that Brink Lindsey’s recent book Against The Dead Hand – The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism is very good.
I’ve not read all of the book yet, but Lindsey’s description (see for example chapter 2: “The Industrial Counterrevolution”) of the wider public policy atmosphere around 1900 is as good as I’ve ever encountered. You can read detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of the “Economic Calculation Debate” which are as good, and far more detailed of course, but a persuasive sense of how it all fitted into the big wide world out there, then and since, is harder to come by.
I’m now dipping into the more current stuff, which is much enriched by the fact that Lindsey works at the formidable Cato Institute. Here’s a typically good quote (on page 192):
… if – as is perfectly obvious – the world today is a jumble of market-oriented and anti-market elements, and if markets are recognized as efficient and useful while full-blown-collectivism is counted a failure, why blame markets and not the remnants of discredited collectivism for the fact that the current jumble is sometimes volatile?
By way of a personal footnote, I’ve also recently dug up an old piece of propaganda I did for a libertarian-conservative gang of stirrers at the University of Exeter, circa 1992, written by my wise and wonderful self. It’s a list of 37 reasons Why I am a Libertarian (Libertarian Alliance, forthcoming Real Soon Now), each starting with “Because”. Here’s Because Number 24:
Because if total state control is a mess, and a “balance” between state control and liberty is half reasonable, then total liberty would be totally reasonable.
Which is pretty much the same meme. And good memes can’t be bounced about too much and too often.
But I digress. My basic message here is, if you’ve any time at all to do it: Read Brink’s Book.
A group of Harvard and MIT professors, spearheaded of course by MIT’s Noam Chomsky, is calling for the Harvard endowment to sell its investments in a variety of companies which “benefit from or support the Israeli military.” (If the Harvard-MIT Divestment Campaign has its own website, I cannot find it; but this story in The Harvard Crimson cites IBM, General Electric and McDonald’s as examples of such firms targeted by the Campaign.)
What exactly does the Campaign hope to accomplish? Even if they got their way, this action would not cause the slightest bit of economic harm to Israel. This would be the case even if we were talking about an institution with vastly greater holdings than the Harvard Endowment trust. The only way for Harvard to sell its shares of IBM or McDonald’s is for some other investor to purchase them (duh!) Perhaps they spend too much time listening to the empty suits on MSNBC and other “instant analysts” on the tube, who attribute every dip in the stock market to a “sell-off,” never considering that every share traded on the floor of the NYSE is both purchased and sold at the same time.
Maybe you can chalk this up to delusions of grandeur, or the mistaken notion that Harvard holds as much sway in the financial world as it does in the intellectual realm. One of the most important (and under-reported) trends in the economics in the last 20 years has been the rise of “institutional capitalism” — financial institutions such as pension funds and mutual funds now own an outright majority of all corporate equities, rendering bit players such as the Harvard endowment largely irrelevant. In any case, this represents an awfully strange way to try to pressure the Israeli government.
So why are they doing it? I can think of two reasons … essentially they must believe that the Campaign serves some political or propagandistic purpose, because it is difficult for me to believe that they think their actions will directly punish Israel in any way.
Symbolism — elevating the cause to the level of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1980s, there were a variety of disinvestment campaigns leveled against South Africa, and the Campaign wants their own cause elevated to the level of the global struggle against apartheid. I don’t think that I need to explain why such a comparison is preposterous, but they are trying to create that linkage in people’s minds. (This makes even more sense in light of the protestor I met in Washington a few weeks ago, who told me that the Palestinians were ‘the N
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist, wrote in regarding Brian Micklethwait‘s article “Give me a definition of racist”:
I had been busy trying to get an interview appointment with Pim Fortuyn, the recently assassinated controversial Dutch politician whom I formerly recommended as a new type of Liberal to listen to for Samizdata readers. I am also working on a paper which shall analyse his political manifesto, which has a shortened version available in English.
Well, should be clear, Fortuyn was a nationalist. Fortuyn had similar views on Islam as Rushdie or Naipaul, although he expressed them in populist political language. This was mistaken for racism by some journalists. You have cited the Simpson interview, which terminated on BBC when Fortuyn asked Simpson about his definition on racism. Later Fortuyn sent Simpson away for “showing disrespect to him” and did not allow the interview to be finished. However, today’s Independent have revealed the last sentence of the interview, clearly cut a couple of seconds on BBC before the end. It goes:
“Give me a definition of racism. You don’t know what a racist [is] because you have Negroes who are Muslims , you have yellow men who are Muslims, you have white men who are Muslims, so how can you connect the Muslim religion and culture with race? Then you are very stupid, Mr. Simpson.”
Of course regarding this example that Daniel Antal mentions, one can speculate why the interview was cropped where it was. To me it seems obvious that it suited certain people to have Pim Fortuyn dismissed as an incoherent fascist who is immune to rational discourse, rather than someone who asked inconvenient questions that the great and good in the media do not have answers for.
For another example of this, Sean Gabb‘s recent exchange on Radio 4 with Charles Moore, Editor of The Daily Telegraph was edited to the point of altering it beyond recognition. Much in the way Stalin would have former Bolsheviks airbrushed out of photographs when they did not continue to represent The Party Line, it seems that British national state media simply edits unwelcome dissent out before broadcasting. It would seem that when the true ‘loyal opposition’ actually dares to oppose, that cannot be allowed to sully the airwaves. They would rather give voice to Charles Moore, that way there is less risk of any real and intellectually rigorous dissent being heard.
At least Brian Micklethwait seems to have the contacts to actually get his voice live and unedited on talk radio shows to put his unalloyed, full fat, non-diet libertarian perspectives out on the statist clogged airwaves.
…to disagree with two of his first three posts, but I can’t help that. Here on Libertarian Samizdata I samizdate in a Libertarian way, and that involves criticizing what I see as ideas opposed to Liberty. You were kidding about the proposed sixfold increase in petrol prices, right? That’s called a tax. Taxes take people’s money by force and spend it on projects that meet with the approval of the taxers. Wrong in itself, and anyway the taxing powers always dribble the money away or spend it on rubbish, as is likely to happen to anyone who gets a pile of money they didn’t work for. Switching around different taxes as you propose would not affect that in the slightest.
I don’t know if there is anything artificially low about the price of red diesel. If it’s low because of subsidy, sure, junk the subsidy. But I suspect what you mean is that it is at is natural price and only looks odd compared to the absurdly hiked price of non-farm diesel. The natural price of a commodity is a package of information telling us all sorts of useful facts about its availability and usefulness. Censoring that information is like censoring speech. For a little while it seems to work, but under the surface all sorts of resentments will build up at pressure points, and now the censors themselves cannot judge where the pressures are. Your proposal, which I hope was facetious, would have effects quite different from your list. I don’t claim to know in any detail what they would be (although the idea that it would augment the status of the musclebound is absurd: when ten men come in to do badly the work of the cool machine you used to have, you aren’t going to love those men), but I don’t have to know. I just have to look at how rich and successful India became from its determined attempted to protect hand-loom weaving. Not.
As for Britain versus New Zealand, the problem for us is not that we have a large population but that we have an ageing population. Eventually the ratio of bedpans to nurses is going to get out of hand. Immigration is one possible solution, although it strikes me that it does not so much solve the problem as put it off for thirty years. As an alternative I’ll bang on once more about one of my favourite themes, namely what a good thing all round it would be if welfare would stop killing all the humble jobs. In this case, servants.
The Pim Fortuyn quote hit the button, though.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit takes a swipe at the awarders of the Nobel Peace Prize (May 7, 10:21:39 am), but I suspect him of misunderstanding the problem.
The basic problem of the Nobel Peace Prize is that it is awarded for effort rather than for achievement, and often not even for effort, merely for general niceness, and not infrequently for the kind of niceness that might well stir up a war.
My guess is that Glenn Reynolds disagrees with the Nobel Peace Prize awarders about the mere meaning of niceness, and that this is the basis of his disdain for them. I probably share his view of what niceness is, more than I do that of the Nobel awarders. But niceness is one thing; peace is quite another.
With the much more widely respected Nobel Prizes for various sorts of science, the awarders do the vital thing they don’t do with their Peace Prizes. They wait, to see if something of lasting value has actually been achieved. With science they often don’t have to wait that long, because with science the fact of significant progress is often clear for all to see.
But peace, by definition, has to go on for a decent length of time before it can reasonably be called peace. It is idiotic to award Peace Prizes to the signatories of a “peace treaty” before the ink is even dry. What if peace breaks down? Only time will tell if the lasting peace supposedly being attempted was in fact lasting.
Giving the Peace Prize to Shimon Peres for doing some “peace” deal or other in the Middle East a few months previously is idiotic, not because Perez is a bad man hell-bent on war (I don’t know what sort of man he is), but because he was so plainly still in the thick of the struggle and it wasn’t at all plain that peace would result. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it hasn’t.
A decent Nobel Peace Prize ceremony would drag obscure old diplomats and forgotten statesmen out of retirement for well deserved pats on the back, for things they did thirty years ago, which, we can now see, caused a prolonged outbreak of peace in some hitherto intractable and now – because so peaceful for the last thirty years – utterly forgotten circumstance.
Examples? Can’t think of any off hand, what with peace being so unmemorable. Maybe readers of this can suggest some genuinely worthy Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
But I foresee further problems. One is that diplomats in their active phase tend to be older than star scientists. By the time you realise that a diplomat did a good job he’s liable to be dead. (Perhaps Nobel Peace Prizes should be awardable posthumously.)
And another even deeper problem is that the means of achieving peace can often be so not nice. Victory can be hideous in the manner of its achievement yet impeccably peaceful in its consequences, and hence in the total amounts of war and of peace that it gives rise to. Abject surrender can likewise do wonders for peace.
I recall witnessing a “peace” demonstration during the Falklands War, in Trafalgar Square. Said a plaintive placard: “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” (i.e. “Britain stop fighting”). Also saying “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” was a nearby news placard advertising the Evening Standard. For once, the instant prophecy proved correct. The British army, ignoring the “peace” protesters, had carried right on fighting and had on that very day won (as it turned out) the Falklands War, thereby establishing (as it also turned out) a period of peace which has lasted to this day.
The Opinion Journal’s email newsletter has pointed out a real gem. It seems a group of rather uneducated people have decided the famous second book in the Tolkien series, “The Two Towers” was actually named by director Peter Jackson for the World Trade Center:
“Peter Jackson has decided to tastelessly name the sequel “The Two Towers”. The title is clearly meant to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this post-September 11 world, it is unforgivable that this should be allowed to happen. The idea is both offensive and morally repugnant. Hopefully, when Peter Jackson and, more importantly, New Line Cinema see the number of signatures on this petition, the title will be changed to something a little more sensitive.”
So we are left with only two equally astounding possibilities:
(1) Tolkien was more prescient than even Nostrodamus. Some Forty-seven years ago he foresaw the Twin Towers attack and that his second book would be made into a blockbuster movie in the following year.
(2) Jackson has invented time travel. He wanted to use a title relating to the World Trade Center attack but did not want anyone to blame him, so he travelled 47 years into the past, joined J.R.R and his friends in the Oxford local and suggested “The Two Towers” would be an excellent title.
If you want a laugh, check out the petition where over a thousand of the mentally challenged have recorded their intellectual incapacity for posterity.
Some good news today. The USA has renounced its membership of the International Criminal Court.
“…When you sign you have an obligation not to take actions that would defeat the object or purpose of the treaty,”
says US diplomat Pierre-Richard Prosper.
He actually, and rather diplomatically I suppose, understates the case. The effect of signing up to the ICC is to wrap a straightjacket around any effective means of self-defence. And that’s only the start of the problems which I go into in greater depth in one of my previous post on the ICC.
Whilst I am delighted, the usual suspects are already moaning about American ‘unilateralism and isolation’. I say we put a stop to that by following America’s example and making it ‘bi-lateral’.
Proving that what goes around, comes around, Scottish socialist MP George Galloway is reportedly seeking legal advice following a comment from charismatic American actor John Malkovitch to the effect that both he and Robert Fisk were “the two people he would most like to kill”
“The source of Malkovich’s anger appears to be Mr Galloway’s condemnation of Israel’s action against Palestinians and his criticism of the west’s policies on Iraq.
What I find most striking about this is the uncanny counter-echo of Oxford-based Irish poet Tom Paulin who recently denounced Israeli West Bank settlers as ‘Nazis’ and called for them to be shot. Is there any difference? Well, as a matter of fact, yes there is. Mr.Malkovitch is highly unlikely to turn his words into action; if he did he would be guilty of murder and neither I nor anybody else could possibly even begin to excuse or rationalise it. Contrast to Mr.Paulin’s threats which were quite explicity acted out a few days later when a Hamas Death Squad shot dead four Israeli settlers in their beds, including a five year-old girl. There’s the difference. Regardless of the utterances made by John Malkovitch, Mr.Galloway will be sleeping safely in his bed. The gravest threat he faces is one of running up a large legal bill.
Oh, and by the way, at least Mr.Malkovitch had the guts to say that he’d be prepared to do the job himself.
[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link to this story]
One of my favorite movies is The Hunt for Red October. Lovely. You sit back and watch Cold Warriors get not just very cold, but very wet, very scared, and in a few cases very dead. In among it all an American Admiral played by Fred Dalton Thompson says, in a way that for some reason I find hard to forget (I guess that’s movie acting for you):
“This thing is going to get out of control.”
I know just how that Admiral felt. Charlie Banks of Nyack, NY USA, emails thus:
It’s an even more complicated situation than that (this is the kind of thing I learned early on back in my bartender days).
The Scots aren’t the only folks that make “whisky”… Canadian whisky is spelled the same way. Pick up a bottle of Canadian Club or Seagram’s VO and you’ll see that little “y” all by its lonesome on the end.
We Yanks, on the other hand, are of a mind with the sons of Erin in our “whiskey” habits. Woe betide the poor mixologist who would dare mix a julep or old-fashioned without something ending in an “ey.”
Congratulations. You’re now familiar with all four nationally-categorized varieties of whisk(e)y.
No Charlie. You think we all now have closure, but you don’t understand these things. Further e-mails can be expected from feuding Pacific Islands, different states in the purportedly “United” States, dissenting fragments of Northern Ireland, places in Africa we’ve none of us heard of until we learn that they have their own way of spelling “wiskee”. And can we assume that this alcoholic debate will be confined to the Anglosphere? What’s the betting the Czechs and Slovaks are already disagreeing about this? As Trevor Howard (playing Air Vice Marshal Park in another movie favourite of mine, The Battle of Britain) says, with equally mysterious memorability:
“They won’t stop now.”
I should have just e-mailed Liberty Log. I should have let David Farrer fight his own spelling battles. “This thing” has already sparked one international incident. Expect more.
I was going just to email the guys at Liberty Log, but then I thought, no, it’s an interesting item of dirty washing, worth doing in (approximately speaking) public. There’s nothing like a little unpleasantness between comrades to keep us all honest and any passing non-comrades entertained.
And the bit of dirt is: when alluding to and linking to Freedom and Whisky for the first time, they spelt it “Freedom and Whiskey“. (Or they did when I looked. Maybe by the time you get to bother with this they will have been e-heckled by F&W‘s David Farrer into correcting the matter.)
Scotch whisky is whisky. Whiskey with an e is Irish Whisky. That’s what my extremely Little Oxford Dictionary says, and how it says it: whiskey n. Irish whisky.
I guess that’s what happens when some English guys, an American and a Slovakian are running a club based at a Scottish University. They try to be Scottish, but every so often their alien underwear shows through.
Maybe I’m being all superior about this whisky/whiskey thing because I’ve only just learned it myself. When I first set eyes on the words “Freedom and Whisky” at the top of Freedom and Whisky, my immediate, instant reaction was: Holy Christ on a Buffalo he’s mis-spelt the title of his own blog!
I have been mentioned, nay singled out, in despatches over at Warbloggerwatch
In case you are wondering precisely what the measured and temperate Justin Raimondo is responding to, it is this
I am particularly fond of this zappy piece of analysis:
“And what a statist mentality it is — influenced, perhaps, by a bit of the typical British “cane-the-wogs” and long-live-the-Empire arrogance.
Anyway, must dash. I have to go and teach the damned fuzzy-wuzzys a thing or two.
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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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