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.
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Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany with an excellent perspective on the ‘war’ on drugs.
It was refreshing to hear on Radio 4 last night that Mo Mowlam taps my e-mails to Libertarian Samizdata as I had written this on Saturday (she has called for drug legalisation). Perhaps Samizdata should invite her to submit a webwaffle blog of her own.
Raising the tax burden is about the redistribution of wealth – making drugs illegal has been about the redistribution of misery as a Bristol police report on crack cocaine crime-wave demonstrates. The process of criminalisation has not reduced demand but merely shifted the social cost from the addicts (in illness and premature deaths) to the law-abiding masses whose assets are appropriated, often violently and in public, by such users to pay for the inflated cost of their cravings. Such inflation of cost is directly proportional to the efforts of state law enforcement agencies. Freeing and legalising all drugs would shift the bulk of the misery burden back to its ‘beneficiaries’ and originators – the drug users.
Also, imposing a tax on the ‘product’ according to the true cost of the care of addicts would have two benefits – it would bring the distribution and quality control in from the shadows and deal a death blow to the underground drug economy with the terrorism and horror it fuels. (Guess what paid for the funding of September 11th!). Legalisation would be tempered with strictly enforced (and enforceable) rules relating to where the products can be taken and where they cannot. Whether we like it or not, this is informally already the case in England, Lambeth in South London being a case in point. Such measures would provide a relief for the majority, a safer, harassment-free environment for the minority, and a sweeping reduction in crime generally just in time for Mr Blair’s self-imposed September deadline. Over to you Tony.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
Sometimes, you can gain amazing insight into a person’s whole mentality from merely a simple phrase, a snatch of conversation or a casual comment. A little crack in the curtain can allow you to peer through and shudder at the desolation that lies beyond.
I have had such an experience while perusing the website belonging to those purveyors of fine aluminium millinery antiwar.com. The thing that caught my eye was a headline which reads: “Latest US Menace to Okinawa: Falling Jet Parts”
For a moment I did a double-take. Was I reading that correctly? Yes, I was. I clicked on the link to find this prosaic bit of reportage concerning some bits which fell off a US military jet whilst it flew over Okinawa. This monstrous ‘war crime’ resulted in:
“…no injuries or damage and said the incidents posed no threat to the local community.”
Oh the inhumanity! Oh the oppression! How long can the poor Okinawans be expected to put up with being ‘menaced’ in this way? Weep, WEEP, for Okinawa!!
On the other hand, don’t bother. I may be no expert on aviation but even I know that bits periodically fall from all flying aircraft and I think it is safe to say that it is one of the less worrisome perils of modernity for most normal people. Not so the antiwarriors. No, for them it is a heinous act of US imperialist aggression. I suppose that it easy to do provided you have already settled in your own mind that the USA cannot but be wrongful (despite all the demonstrable evidence to the contrary).
Much of the thrust and complaint of the antiwarriors is directed at the extent to which traditional civil liberties in the USA have been traduced. In this, their complaint is meritorious and noble but I cannot help wondering if they are actually a part of the problem and not the solution. In order to win arguments about civil liberties (or anything else for that matter) the first requirement is to be taken seriously by serious people. But when your outlook is so jaundiced that you brazenly attempt to construe some minor workaday incident as murderous conspiracy then you can only be taken for a crank. Cranks do not help good causes; they pollute them by sheer dint of their crankiness.
Small wonder then that the antiwarriors are left to plough the lonely furrow of providing intellectual succour to vile thugocracies and tinpot demagogues. Like them, the antiwarriors have trapped themselves in a straightjacket of hate and crippled their own faculties with delusions of persecution.
Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor, has written a remarkable article in the Sunday Telegraph called A world where no one is to blame:
Replying to the suggestion that he and his brother were gangsters who terrified people, he said: “Gang culture is nothing like that. It’s just youths. A group of youths growing up on the estate.” The implication here is not only that no one has a right to criticise gang “culture”, because all cultures are equal and he had done only what every other person in his circumstances had done. Of personal responsibility, not so much as a squeak: he was Pavlov’s dog, responding not so much to a bell as to a Peckham housing estate.
I can only speculate why local people do not start simply banding together and applying polycentric law of their own to deal with such problems, given that the state has not only failed to apply its law but is in fact the root cause of the problem in the first place.
On Constable Potter’s face was that hard, keen look which comes into the faces of policemen when they intend to do their duty pitilessly and crush a criminal like a snake beneath the heel. It was the look which Constable Potter’s face wore when he was waiting beneath a tree to apprehend a small boy who was up in its branches stealing apples, the merciless expression that turned to flint when he called at a house to serve a summons on somebody for moving pigs without a permit.
-P.G.Wodehouse (Uncle Dynamite, 1948, quoted in Wodehouse Nuggets, selected by Richard Usborne, 1983)
Which is to say, best taken in moderation. Racism is always poison because it is completely irrational, based on either stupidity or (even worse) pseudo-science. ‘Culturalism’ of the sort David Carr talks about however is just saying ‘the values of my culture are better than the values of that culture’… and it may well be true.
Provided one realised that what matters is the liberty actualising aspects of a culture and not all the other clutter over which people periodically feel the need to kill each other, then a degree of ‘culturalism’ is not just ok, it is vital.
Just don’t over do it as in the minds of some, it is not about which culture enables liberty and prosperity best but which culture ‘stinks up our streets with curry’ or ‘builds hideous Mosques in our Christian towns’. Discerning ‘culturalism’ is just fine but ignorant cultural chauvinism is not. I realise it is the former not the latter which David Carr is advocating, but it is a distinction worth making again and again. Like Slivovica or Whiskey, a little is a wonderful thing but too much dwelling on culture seems to send some people completely bonkers.
There has been a widespread outbreak of harumphing, moaning and hand wringing by the forces of statism across Europe over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s National Front Party in France.
Yet when Le Pen declares he is “socially to the left, economically to the right”, his remarks go reported but largely unchallenged. However somehow regardless of his being bitterly opposed to market driven mechanisms, free trade, ‘Americanization’ and globalization, the newspapers demonstrate yet again that the term “right wing” is largely meaningless.
John Lichfield of the Irish Independent tells us “Let us not exaggerate. Let us shut our eyes and think of France, the real France” after himself pointing out that when you add the neo-fascist vote in France for Le Pen to the extreme Troskyist vote for the far left, it is a whopping 35% of the French electorate. Sorry John, you cannot write off one third of a country as ‘not the real France’. Violent collectivist statism is as French as camembert cheese, Laetitia Casta, the Eiffel Tower… and the Guillotine.
It is the long process of erosion that French civil society itself has been undergoing for over 150 years that provides such welcoming ground for the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s of this world. Jaques Chirac is not part of the solution but is rather part of the problem. ‘National Greatness’ conservatives like him are no less statist than socialist Lionel Jospin or neo-fascist Jean Le Pen. There simply is no significant political constituency in France that does not see the state as being the very centre of society, rather than just its boundary keeper. Almost all significant interaction is touched on by the state and thus reduces society to a series of competing political, rather than social, factions, all clamouring for the violence backed recourse of the state to champion their interests. These people who are aghast at the rise of Le Pen are the self same people who tilled the soil in which he grows.
Statist political interests of ‘left’ and ‘right’ appropriate a vast swathe of the national wealth, encouraging people to simply vote themselves other people’s money, and then wonder why folks have no time for tiresome and time consuming social integration or a dynamist assimilative culture. Why bother when it is clear that the normal way for solving all problems is the hammer of the state? You don’t like American products competing with French ones in the shops regardless of the fact other people want to buy them? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that. You don’t like the sound of all those English language pop songs on the radio and TV? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that too. If all these other unjust things are democratically sanctified, then if you don’t like Africans or Moroccans, well, I guess there ought to be a law against them as well if that is the way everything works. If everything is up for grabs by the ‘democratic’ state, well, don’t be surprised if everything really does mean everything.
Here’s a poser for Samizdata readers – does the institution of constitutional monarchy help to domesticate feelings of patriotism into something more civilized?
Michael Gove, in a splendid column for the UK’s Times newspaper today, makes the point that the monarchy, precisely because it is composed of fallible human beings above the political fray, acts as a far healthier focus of national loyalty than often afforded by more “modern” republics, like, say, France. As our society becomes more individualised, multi-ethnic and diverse, it is surely more, not less, important to have institutions that can provide some kind of common bond. Think, for example, how the breakup of the Hapsburg empire after the First World War led, in short order, to an upswelling of often unpleasant nationalism in the states composed out of its demise.
If the electoral travails of the French tell us anything, it is that, even after five republics and the Empire of Bonaparte, they still haven’t figured out the value of constitutional monarchy as part of a truly liberal order.
Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany in Italy to express his views on Le Pen, multi-culturalism and over-enthusiastic well-diggers
I am now a regular reader of the Samizdata (or the Lib Sam as I like to call it) and enjoy most of the articles. What I find depressing at the moment is that as I raise my gun to shoot a topical bunny I see hundreds more all around me – Le Pen, the UK Budget, Italian politics, NHS, multi-clutch-and-graspism, blah blah. It has taken a while to start shooting them down as I currently have a well-digger on my farm here in Tuscany. Charming chap, though he has a habit of trying to reach magma in order to enhance revenues (they are paid by the foot) so I’m keeping an eye, as they say.
Whilst overseeing the keen well-digger, I heard a number of things on Radio 4 yesterday that disturbed me, to say the least. Most of the afternoon’s bulletins were taken up with a slanted condemnation of Le Pen by an almost constant referral to the “thousands” or, in extremis, “tens of thousands” of protesters on the street. Not one single reference was made to the fact that he did after all garner the votes to oust Jospin from the fight. Odder still was my recollection that by comparison last year’s Countryside Alliance pro-hunting march in London was supposed to have produced in excess of half a million people on the streets. However, the general reporting slant was decidedly unfavourable. Hmm.
I am not exactly sure of Monsieur Le Pen’s precise political destination and would probably find it on the crude side. I am not a supporter by any stretch of the imagination, so no skin off my nose, if he doesn’t win the presidential seat. What I do find shocking though is the childishly obvious suppression of any voice that dissents from the European melting pot theory, and the assumption that any anti-immigration stance implies a shaved head and a tattooed forearm.
The problem does not reside in the shape (or lack) of a haircut or the pattern of a tattoo. We are wasting time arguing about the mode of travelling when the real need is to decide on the destination. What happens if we ‘prove’ that the mass immigration of 40 years ago to date was ‘wrong’? The argument is sterile (and therefore futile) as the situation is with us and cannot be humanely reversed. We might as well argue and debate a meritocracy based on the colour of people’s eyes. On the basis that someone born in Europe is an honorary Caucasian, most of the population is on a level. What we must therefore focus on is the evils of the tiered language and cultural gap currently opening and prompted by the left. Le Pen is gaining support from the Franco-Jewish population (courtesy of Radio 4 news) and why? Buried at around 3.30pm in the yesterday’s programme was a possible answer – they are apparently regular victims of Muslim violence in the Parisian suburbs and have had enough. Allowing a separate ‘nation’ to grow within the EU is societal suicide. I am, in accordance perhaps with the previous Lib Sam articles (see related article links below), a fervent supporter of anti-multiculturalism in its accepted sense – that is I believe it’s a load of rubbish and smacks of left wing appeasement and head-buried-in-the-sand denial of reality.
Realpolitik is that we like our neighbours to be like us and we all, whatever our racial origin, need to face up to this reality. Incidentally, my oldest friend is from Sri Lanka. Unless you saw him, you would not know. He is an Englishman, like Nathan Rothschild aspired to be and in the end considered himself to be. Perhaps, more needs to be done to foster the true concept of Englishness or Frenchness or whatever, and less time should be spent on muddled searches a là: Mr Blair for a sort of crypto-Britishness that is designed to please and appease rather than make sense of cultural and racial diversity.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
And, what’s more, he’s a talentless, pretentious wanker. For those who have never heard of him (consider yourselves fortunate), he is a former stand-up ‘comic’ now-turned novelist who rose to fame in the 1980’s with his fiery brand of allegedly funny invective. In reality, his routine was a barely-concealed vehicle for his bone-headed left-wing polemic which he played out in front of adoring and similarly-minded audiences at a time when comedy cabaret was the spearhead of the left-wing resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain. All young Ben had to do was to call Mrs.T a ‘mad old cow’ to have his monolithic audience shrieking with delight and appreciation. Hardly the mark of comic genius. What made it even more galling was his cynical adoption of a painfully fake working-class cockney accent just to ensure that his ‘cred’ with the comrades wasn’t sullied by any admission of his rather comfortable middle-class origins and first-rate education.
He coupled his ‘comedy’ career with a full-blown activist agenda, shouldering his way to prominence in every trendy lefty/green campaign imaginable from benefit gigs for striking miners to marches against cruise missiles, you name the cause, Elton was there and sounding off. He is every inch a bedsit-Che Gueverra who got lucky.
Still, it worked for him and he ended up with his own series on the BBC (natch!) but when the current Labour government was elected, Elton mysteriously left our TV screens. Job accomplished I suppose and, with that, he more or less retired from life as Doyen of Anti-Establishment Radicalism to marry, sire and settle down as a sort of ‘grand old man’ of the British left whose opinion is still canvassed by a new generation of ‘meeja dahlings’ who seem to regard the wretch as some sort of Oracle.
An example is this interview in the Al-Independent where readers are treated to an opportunity to submit their fawning questions and, in response, get drivel like this:
“Incidentally, if you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about, last I heard, he was doing voiceovers for bank ads. I’m not criticising. I use banks. We all do. I just wouldn’t do an ad for one. It’s a question of where you draw your own personal line.”
Well, it’s reassuring to know that Elton’s ‘personal line’ stops short of doing adverts for banks but is far enough advanced to enable him to utilise those same banks as repositories for the considerable personal fortune he has amassed from his showbiz career.
I wish I had known about this question-and-answer session a little sooner, then I could have logged on and posed my own burning question: ‘Ben Elton, why are you such a wanker?’
[Update. How very rude of me to fail to acknowledge that the above-mentioned link comes courtesy of excellent fellow British blogger Peter Briffa]
There has been a big demonstration in Washington D.C. which was referred to by Dale Amon in a previous post. Radley Balko of The Agitator followed the going on in person and reported:
Unfortunately, the two demonstrations met, turning the entire uptown area into a activist stew of random causes, screams and protests. Palestinian flags flew next to signs excoriating Citibank and Monsanto. The crowd was anti-wealth, anti-racism, anti-terrorism, anti-war on terrorism, anti-poverty, anti-drug war, anti-Israel. All the messages blurred together.
Now this is wonderful news. The sight of groups holding up signs saying ‘a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16’ standing next to an anti-globalization protestor is just about the most sublime sight I can imagine. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This public conflation of toxic idiocies is providing people who are pro-capitalist or pro-Israel or pro-war-on-terrorism, or any combination thereof, with what can only be described as a ‘target rich environment’. Juicy.
The great American satirist P.J. O’Rourke uses his usual combination of deadly-sharp wit and smart understanding of economics to launch a salvo at government regulations in his article How to Stuff a Wild Enron. In this case, he argues that the collapse of U.S. energy titan Enron, far from proving that we need more regulations, proved that regulations can make such catastrophic problems more likely and more dangerous.
Here is a killer paragraph: Regulation creates moral hazard. We don’t understand finance, but it is regulated, so we’re safe. “Regulation,” Jerry Taylor (a friend) says, “dulls the sense that you would take into an unregulated situation. If you hear screaming in the middle of the night, you assume it’s hot sex, not murder.”
The line about sex is brilliant. If only all discussions about market economics and the perils of big government were so racy.
I have gone straight from the buzz of London to the grey nostalgia of Prague and am now sitting in an internet cafe named appropriately Globe. I can hear English being spoken as this is a favourite place for the English-speaking ex-pats and my inner Anglospherometer is telling me that it’s time to blog. I have been in Prague for two days now and given that this place is in a different world in terms of mentality and time, please take the following comments as potentially confused ramblings of a travelling blogger…
In the short time I have been here I have managed to cover a multitude of activities – checked out (no pun intended) what is new in Prague since my last visit two years ago, visited a monstrous museum of modern art (previously communist archives, the building, not the pictures, obviously…), had a blazing row about nationalism and political discourse in the Mittel Europa and managed to send two Jehovah’s witnesses on their way amicably and within twenty seconds! I am particularly proud of the last one…
I have been thinking about the best way of debating in a place like Central Europe where a Western style of discourse does not create the expected responses. Roll on the popularisation of shared meta-contextual discourse…! The usual evolution of an argument from a thesis through antithesis to a synthesis, does certaintly not apply here. A statement is made, often categorically, so a thesis is born. However, presenting an anti-thesis is dangerous as the aforementioned blazing rows are certain to ensue….What is needed is some kind of validation of the grains of truths carefully exctracted from the original statement. This is interesting (and frustrating) but I think it springs from the need of the Central Europeans to assert their intellectual identity by having it first recognised by their debating opponents. Then, perhaps, room for sneaking an anti-thesis in is created, en route to a wonderful and all encompassing synthesis, providing ample justification for gallons of lovely alcohol to be consumed. As a second thought, who needs shared meta-context when you have alcohol?
On my wanderings through Prague I have been walking along Wenceslas Square, the main square where the 1989 demonstrations of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ took place. I noticed that some shops are hiring people to walk around holding large placards to advertise their wares. This is a familiar sight in the West, especially in Oxford street, the main shopping street in London and I have often looked upon these as another sign of ‘unbridled’ capitalism. Here the locals tell me in a voice dripping with moral satisfaction that such advertising is going to be banned soon as it insults the human dignity. Mindful of my debating experience in this place, I meekly pointed out that perhaps these people may be quite content to earn some money by an activity that does not involve much effort and that by banning it, they will be deprived of the opportunity to have their human dignity offended at a price they are prepared to be paid… As expected I did not get far but I have acted as the lone voice of free market and capitalism. Today, I have seen a girl reading a book whilst at the same time holding a large sign advertising an Irish Pub… So much for insulted human dignity!
I have another three days to go and depending on my ability to access the internet and my mental stability, I may blog again. If not, once in London I will no doubt find plenty to write about privacy and security, computers, markets and other far less nostalgic topics.
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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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