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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Last Tuesday night I had supper at the recently established Tim and Helen Evans home, the occasion being one of the trips to London made by the guys from the University of St. Andrews (in Scotland) Liberty Club, this time represented by Alex Singleton (who is English), Conyers Davis (Yank), and Marian Tupy (from Slovakia – unnervingly perfect English – reminded me of the actor Oscar Werner (Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Fahrenheit 451)). Great night. The combination of a real kitchen table in a real kitchen and bought-in food worked perfectly, what with Tim and Helen being very hardworking people themselves.
St. Andrews Liberty Club has, of course, a fine website (www.libertyclub.org.uk), and before doing this I took a look at their “quotes” section for the first time.
My favourite one, I think, because I hadn’t heard it before and because it’s quick, is: “An economy breathes through its tax loopholes.” – Dr. Barry Bracewell-Milnes. Dr. BBM is everything someone with a name like that should be. Elderly. Often bow tie. Posh voice. Knows everything to be known about the British tax system and the harm it does. (His latest publication, Euthanasia for Death Duties, is published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and is about the case for abolishing the British version of inheritance tax.) My favourite other Dr. BBM quote was said by him to me some years ago, about a piece called “Taxation is theft” (now Libertarian Alliance Political Notes No 44) by Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame. Said BBM, after a judicious pause: “This is one of the best pieces entitled ‘Taxation is Theft’ that I have ever read.”
Tim and I showed the St. Andrews trio how blogging works, of course using this as an example. They were impressed, and started to talk about maybe doing something similar themselves. With luck then, the world may soon be able to eavesdrop on all their rowing with their Vice Chancellor and with their local feminists, on their profound thoughts, their lives, their universe and their everything, even more easily than it can already via their website.
St. Andrews University is a big deal for the cause of liberty, because this is where the founders of the Adam Smith Institute met up and first got thinking around the late 1960s. (Alex Singleton has himself worked for the Adam Smith Institute.) Could something as big as that be emerging from the same place, again?
Something will surely come of it. One effect of blogging, the Internet, etc., seems to be to enable social networks, which got established and firmed up when the members of them were in daily physical contact, to remain in creative touch when their members disperse – a solution to the “How can we carry on doing this without stunting the rest of our lives?” problem common to all good times at University.
To recycle another Liberty Club Quote, this time from Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”
Harry Browne has a new item online at Worldnet Daily. It’s an interesting take on why the loss of Enron’s employee pension money can be laid at the IRS’s door. The income tax laws are the reason employee pensions are handled inside companies rather than by the employees themselves.
I’d never looked at it this way before, but he’s right.
I’ll take up Dodgson’s gauntlet. Let’s look at the young girl in the article. What are her choices in life and what do various systems of thought say about which are preferable? She may face a starving future versus being the well treated slave of a rich man. Given the culture, she might eventually become an influential member of the harem.
How does this differ from what socialism offers all of us? Instead of a rich, dirty old man, we get the State. It takes care of us, feeds us, gives us our medicine, tells us what we may do and when we may do it, and punishes us for disobedience or for showing it insufficient love and respect. Slaves, whether State or private are usually treated well because they are valuable property.
As for myself and other Libertarians, we prefer the Patrick Henry route; “Give me Liberty, or give me Death.”
I have no more problem with “private” slaves revolting and killing their masters than I did with the fall of Communism… when the slaves revolted and killed their masters.
…goes to Matthew Yglesias, who can rest happily between ‘Adbusters’ and ‘David Duke’. Natalija’s first language is not English and judging from his recent reply to Natalija’s articles, perhaps neither is Yglesias’… so here is a link he might find useful.
I am supposed to be going to Milano tomorrow for a long delayed business meeting, but maybe I will instead sneak off to Budapest to spy on Brian Linse and see what he is up to. Perhaps he will cast me as a femme fatale in his movie.
Steven Dorff seem rather cute so that might be fun, hehehehe! Keep checking his Internet entry to see if under trivia someone has added ‘Dated actress Natalija Radic’. Then again, I am not sure I want to be regarded as ‘trivia’, so maybe you will have to look under the trivia entry for famous blogger Natalija Radic and see if it says ‘Dated actor Steven Dorff’. Yes, much better 
Christopher Caldwell has written an endearingly daft article that demonstrates why the libertarian vibe cannot fail in the long run to carry all before it.
Today, the Swimsuit Issue is as fat as Vogue and as dirty as Playboy: 300 pages of wall-to-wall near-nudity. Only the most determined adolescent could work his way through it single-handedly. And now that it’s outright pornography, of course, it’s become a respectable American institution.
Of course the issue here, from a libertarian perspective is… well… that there is no issue. The fact it is indeed a ‘respectable American institution’ only goes to show how far the libertarian meme has infiltrated into civil society. Conservatives and socialists alike can sneer that libertarians are an irrelevant fringe because we do not have self-described libertarian governments, yet the signs of our influence are on newsstands everywhere and at the same time less people by the year can be bothered to legitimise the democratic bean counts statists think are so important.
‘Dirty’ does not register on the libertarian aesthetic radar except when looking at pictures of wallowing hippos. Playboy is not ‘dirty’, it is just a somewhat tedious magazine which features pictures of enhanced young women, a curious artifact that once featured astonishing beauties like India Allen, Saskia Linssen and Teri Peterson, but is now just another wildebeeste amidst the herd on the news rack. Porn is one of those non-issues, along with feminism, gay rights and racism, that makes libertarians yawn. As issues these things just make no sense within a meta-context that sees the world in terms of choices and natural rights. There are no gay rights or women’s rights, just rights and the choices that spring from them.
People like sex. People pay for what they like. Add sex to your product and people will like it. Stand in the way of that particular economic/ideological steamroller at your peril. So when people like Chris Caldwell ruminate about the ‘dirty’ swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated, he is writing his article on the front of the aforementioned steamroller whilst moving backwards with unseemly haste. It is rather like expecting a description of a woman as ‘immodest’ to have any cultural relevancy. That might work in Iran but in the Western World? Nah. Not even in Peoria and Milton Keynes any more. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but don’t expect all too many other people to give a damn. If you want to stick to reading Inside The Vatican then be my guest. To each their own.
Of course I have indeed purchased the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and so should you if you like looking at beautiful women. If you have a problem with that then that is exactly what it is… your problem.
Someone terribly raffish and clever (it was probably Oscar Wilde or Samuel Johnson) once said that a man should be judged not on the quality of his friends but on the quality of his enemies.
I cannot recall having heard any previous exposition on the Internet from the Vatican before, so this must be of some significance. For me, the following quote of Page 2 stands out:
“But the church also finds fault with the Internet’s embrace of libertarianism. “The ideology of radical libertarianism is both mistaken and harmful,” the Vatican said. “The error lies in exalting freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values…. In this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear.”
A few years ago, I had a discussion with another Libertarian the result of which was that we agreed that the Internet was the new Printing Press. I don’t imagine anybody is going to be burning at the stake but the parallel is looking more prescient every day.
[My thanks to Samizdata reader Boris Kuperschmidt for the link.]
Beauty of Grey criticizes a couple of our recent offerings:
This sort of shrill extremism is a big reason why most people view libertarians as a third party wacko fringe group, just on this side of the Larouchies on the respectability scale. The sneering condescension Perry displays probably won’t help their poll numbers any, either.
Firstly it was Brian Micklethwait, not me, who wrote the first piece ‘Beauty of Grey’ mentions. Also the fact is that the majority of libertarians in the USA who deign to vote actually vote Republican, not Libertarian. Ever heard of Ron Paul? That should be obvious and as a ‘small l’ libertarian that is of no concern to me.
I would have thought the jocular tone would have made it apparent that Brian was not seriously supporting the idea of people being mugged. He is just saying that if people advocate and legitimise political actions that result in a more violent society, he is not going to be too concerned if they reap the harvest they have sown and I certainly agree. That ‘Beauty of Grey’ should decry our lack of moral relativism and therefore our sentiment that people are responsible for the consequences of their actions in the ballot booth, is certainly rather revealing. But that is not the same as Brian actually advocating mugging. Victim disarmament supporters “deserve” being mugged because they are responsible for people being helpless when confronted by an emboldened mugger, not because Brian is going to organize bands of libertarian muggers to roam the streets looking for ‘liberals’. To read his remarks any other way strikes me as bizarre.
Secondly, ‘Beauty of Grey’ clearly has no idea what modern self-described socialist parties who are in power in various western European countries actually advocate and do. He can delude himself that the pervasive incrementalist approach to regulating economic activity that pretty much defines the Democratic Party (and elements of the Republican Party) in the USA is materially different to that of the French or British or German or Swedish government’s ‘democratic socialist’ model but it is not. The only difference is that there is more effective political opposition to it in the USA.
Modern ‘democratic socialism’ is a strange hybrid between paleo-socialist aims of outright national ownership of the means of production and the national socialist approach of allowing nominal ownership of the means of production but regulating the ways in which they can be used to require the support of National Objectives: control by overt ownership vs. control by regulation… but the end result is still control by the state, it is only how you get there that varies. How does this differ from the ‘liberalism’ of the Gore/Kennedy/Schumer way? These are people who constantly advocate ‘National’ solutions driven by regulations rather than free markets. The only difference is the language they use to describe what they want.
That Gore’s plank does not explicitly lay out the pervasive role of the state, and that ‘Beauty of Grey’ therefore thinks that there is a huge difference between the ‘liberal’ and the modern democratic socialist, says more about ‘Beauty of Grey’s’ credulity than the political process he describes. Vast areas of economic (and private) life are subject to regulation and thus the owners of the means of production find their control ever more circumscribed by the state as it tells you who you may or may not trade with, who you may hire or fire, how you educate and interact with your children, how (and if) you protect yourself from harm, the manner in which you may marry, how you must clear the snow from property you do not even own in front of your house, how you install plumbing and electrical wiring in your own home etc. etc. Yet we are to believe that the sanctity of private property is alive and well and living in ‘liberal’ constituencies in the USA.
Or maybe I just missed the plank in Gore’s platform that called for a state seizure of the means of production and an abolition of private property? They do try to sneak things by you in the fine print, those scoundrels.
I could not have put it better myself. Beauty of Grey’s remarks demonstrate exactly how effective the incrementalist approach is. Al Gore wants exactly what Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin want. And what do Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin all call themselves? Socialists.
If Beauty of Grey is going to talk about ‘the fine print’ it would behoove him to read it first. Perhaps he should start by getting the author right on things he criticizes.
Unlike most of the psychotic telephone bullies who hang yelling and screaming from the tits of our current British Government, my friend Tim really is a Spin Doctor. He spends his day using media messages actually to change (without being in any way a member of it) British government policy, health policy being his stamping ground. And the other sign that he’s a real Spin Doctor is that if I told you the rest of his name you probably wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, he emailed me today to tell me that Liberty Fund have launched a superb web site for libertarians/classical liberals. Check it out, he said. I did. It looks good.
I checked out in particular a piece by one of my favourite libertarian gurus, David Friedman, on the economics of crime. Here’s how it starts. It sounds familiar doesn’t it? But he didn’t get it from us any more than (until now) we got it from him. This particular truth is simply out there to be got, by anyone.
Economists approach the analysis of crime with one simple assumption—that criminals are rational people. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist—because it is the most attractive alternative available to me. The decision to commit a crime, like any other economic decision, can be analyzed as a choice among alternative combinations of costs and benefits.
Consider, as a simple example, a point that sometimes comes up in discussions of gun control. Opponents of private ownership of handguns argue that in violent contests between criminals and victims, the criminals usually win. A professional criminal, after all, has far more reason to learn how to use a gun than a random potential victim.
The argument is probably true, but the conclusion—that permitting both criminals and victims to have guns will help the criminals—does not follow. To see why, imagine that the result of legal handgun ownership is that one little old lady in ten chooses to carry a pistol in her purse. Further suppose that, of those who do, only one in ten, if mugged, succeeds in killing the mugger—the other nine miss, or drop the gun, or shoot themselves in the foot.
On average, the muggers are winning. But also on average, each one hundred muggings of little old ladies produce one dead mugger. Very few little old ladies carry enough money to be worth one chance in a hundred of being killed. Economic theory suggests that the number of muggings will decrease—not because the muggers have all been killed, but because some of them have chosen to switch to safer professions.
If the idea that muggers are rational profit-maximizers seems implausible, consider who gets mugged. If a mugger’s objective is to express machismo, to prove what a he-man he is, there is very little point in mugging little old ladies. If the objective is to get money at as low a cost as possible, there is much to be said for picking the most defenseless victims you can find. In the real world little old ladies get mugged a lot more often than football players.
This is one example of a very general implication of the economic analysis of conflict. In order to stop someone from doing something that injures you, whether robbing your house or polluting your air, it is not necessary to make it impossible for him to do it—merely unprofitable.
As you can see, if you need a quick high quality ‘fix’ of dispassionate rationality, it is well worth checking out the Liberty Fund website.
Several readers have written in on the subject of the term ‘liberal’ and the following e-mails from Evan McElravy and Joe Clibbens also make good points
Evan McElravy writes:
It’s worth noting that the positive connotations of our ideology are so overwhelming that not only have the left stolen “liberal” from us, they are now working on “libertarian” too. Noam Chomsky, notoriously, refers to himself as a “libertarian socialist” and I was just the other day reading an article claiming much the same ground for Rosa Luxembourg, on the basis that she opposed Bolshevik centralism. The independent bookstore Book People in Austin, TX, where I just returned from, has their political books organized roughly by orientation. In the conservative shelf is Pat Buchanan along with David Boaz’s The Libertarian Reader, and a few other books of theirs and ours muddled together, while the “Liberal/Libertarian” shelf is home to Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader, as well as those more mainstream liberal writers you’d expect. On the other hand, the magazine section had more copies of Reason than anywhere I’d ever been, prominently displayed, and outnumbering widely The Nation and the National Review. So I’ll give them some credit, even if their history section was decidedly pedestrian.
Joe Clibbens writes:
I could not agree with you more in this campaign, and I myself have for years used the ‘liberal’ label, albeit with the necessary addition of ‘classical’ in certain company, whenever possible and never use it to refer to social democrats, but I am writing to suggest you expand it to other hijacked terminology.
The term progressive has its roots firmly in liberalism, while socialism has always been reactionary and luddite. Every time I hear a socialist referred to as ‘progressive’ I go all bug-eyed, they are in fact the very antithesis of its true meaning.
Of course ‘leftist’, traditionally speaking, would also denote minimal government, and the socialist bludgeoning of the left-right paradigm is the very reason it no longer makes any sense.
Still, all’s fair in love and propaganda, but it’s time we started fighting back.
Up the Revolution!
[Ed: I have always preferred ‘Up the Evolution!’ myself, for rational libertarians are nothing if not radical evolutionaries]
My friend Adriana Cronin has already been indirectly responsible for an interesting posting here a few weeks back (about that computer game which is having “real world” economic impact), which Perry de Havilland actually did the posting of. Adriana is ‘Something in the City’, as we in London say of mysteriously rich and powerful or heading-that-way financial folks, and was also one of the normal women featured in the blog bash photos. (Her attendance fee is, I understand, in the post.) She will be joining Team Samizdata officially Real Soon Now.
Meanwhile, Adriana has emailed me about two items of libertarian interest. One is about Reagan and can keep a day or two until she is blog-connected. The other is more topical, and concerns the fact that the Libertarian Party of Illinois have, it would appear, been spamming little old ladies with anti-gun-control propaganda.
You can take this complaint from a British media source two ways. One: the Libertarian Party of Illinois are making enemies needlessly among the normals with their bad netiquette. (This is Adriana’s take on it.) Or two: the normals are by definition idiots about gun control who deserve (a) to be mugged every day and twice on Sunday, and (b) all the anti-gun-control propaganda our side can spam at them, and that these Illinois guys are damn good! (Adriana says I am wrong even to suggest that. Spam is evil evil evil, even if you are God spamming Satan. What can I say? She knows all this 21st century stuff a lot better than I ever will.)
We received an e-mail from Kevin Connors on the issue of the term ‘liberal’
I believe David’s piece on the label “liberal” is quite ill-advised. I have a hard enough time trying to explain libertarianism to people and differentiate it from conservatism without swimming against the tide on an issue of semantics.
However I must disagree with Kevin. I think this is a useful point to raise for several reasons.
It is useful to put the evolution of the term into historical perspective, as Tom Burroughes has done, in order to understand the evolutionary process by which a term can come to mean the opposite of its original meaning, at least in the USA and to an extent the UK.
It is also useful to note that in the process of defining a word, it forces people to contrast it against opposing concepts and thus discover synonyms and antonyms. It is very helpful indeed to be able to point out that liberal is just a synonym for socialist and that it is mostly because ‘socialist’ has such negative connotations in the USA that members of the Democratic party use the term liberal. Thus a little discursive musing on the term ‘liberal’ makes that point rather hard to avoid. There is little daylight between modern ‘democratic socialists’ in Europe, Liberal Democrats in the UK and Democrats in the USA: they are just the modern faces of socialism.
Pointing this out is far from ill-advised. Many in the UK who vote for the ‘Liberal Democrats’ do so because of quaint ideas that they are the ‘middle way’, whereas the truth is that they are further to the socialist left than the Labour Party. In the USA many who would sooner use the star-spangled banner as a doormat than vote ‘Socialist’ nevertheless vote ‘Democrat’.
All we are doing is trying to introduce a little coherence into the political taxonomy!
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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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