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]
The downfall of Eliot Spitzer has recently been celebrated on this blog, and rightly so. However, I believe the major casualty of the affair will prove to be Hillary Clinton, rather than Spitzer. This juicy scandal will deliver the Democratic nomination to Obama. You could almost – almost – feel sorry for Clinton; the press was only just starting to crack the shiny Obama veneer, when this had to go and happen. Who will pay any attention to Rezko and co. with this circus unfolding over the next few weeks? It will suck the oxygen right out of Hillary’s campaign at the critical juncture – just when it was catching fire.
Not that Obama as the Democratic candidate will necessarily be a bad thing for the Republicans; the more I see and read of him, his views and his actions, the more I am convinced that Obama08 is John McCain’s smoothest path to the White House.
I’m not generally proud to be British. It strikes me as absurd either to claim some sort of credit for an accident of birth, or to assume that the culture one is brought up in is ipso facto the best available to anyone. Nation is usually alien. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when someone says “we”, I feel like a “them”.
However, I must say I get great pleasure from the fact that nobody does self-parody like ‘we’ do. There is a great British tradition of highly competent people doing extremely serious things unencumbered by wild eccentricity or a very silly-sounding name. It is therefore a matter of considerable joy to me that ‘our’ defence forces are led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup GCB AFC ADC DSc FRAeS FCMI RAF.
I have written before of the nationalisation of politics in Great Britain. In short, I think Peter Oborne’s thesis in the the Political Class is almost right, but back to front. We are much closer to the authoritarian “no-party state” advocated by Brian Crozier, realised, however by Djilas’ New Class sucking up consumerism and the New Left rather than through caudillo-corporatism. But I did not realise it had gone so far: how much the constitution has changed in that particular respect the last decade; how much in public discourse the government and the governing party are now identified.
Peter Hain MP is in trouble. His inexplicably luxuriantly financed campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, turns out not to have counted over £100,000 in donations. It is all over the newspaper and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Electoral Commission are both investigating. I’m sorry? Apparently the failure to account is a criminal offence. It what?
Now maybe it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, Mr Hain (an African by birth) having moved from being the leader of the Anti-Apartheid Campaign in the UK in his twenties to one of the leading advocates of a new pass-law system for his adopted country. But I am outraged on his behalf in this case.
Someone has to be. All Mr Hain has done is to say he was too busy to notice the alleged offences being carried out in his name, not challenge, as the younger man would have done, the ludicrousness of the context. All the media has done is have vapours about the wickedness of using money to send leaflets and not reporting it to officials, and ridicule the poor man’s “orange” complexion in a way they would think disgusting and itself borderline criminal if he were an ethnically darker African.
I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase “The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation”.
It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of ‘environmentally friendly’ customers that would have approved of the bank’s effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot.
But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394.
I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome.
I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, “Why is the government doing this? ‘Terrorism’ doesn’t seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it.” It’s hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing “Transformational Government”. I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.
I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth’s (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:
My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains “they” don’t know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that’s what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there’s slightly more.
The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class (“class” in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally – and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn – holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough “best practice” followed.
It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.
It’s not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in “new technology” and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.
The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek’s explanation of why 5-year plans can’t work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill I will choose a path that’s clear I will choose free will.
– Rush.
It is my birthday, so a little personal reminiscence is in order. The man who introduced me to Rush, 29 years ago, subsequently turned down physics fellowships at both Oxford and Cambridge to become a Baptist missionary. I guess he took his instructions from the first part of the verse.
I am a hawk, no doubt about it. If I am going to be taxed by the state, I would much rather my hard earned money be spent dropping bombs on the lackeys of Slobodan Milosevic (Bill Clinton’s finest hour, without a doubt) and Saddam Hussain, than on corrosive domestic ‘entitlements’ and ever more kleptocratic regulatory statism.
So then along comes Ron Paul, the first US presidential candidate since Ronald Regan with any notion whatsoever that the state is way way way too big. Moreover here comes a person who thinks the only way liberty can be preserved is to take a radical axe to Leviathan’s tentacles and re-establish constitutional limited government. Cool. Very cool, in fact. So do I really really like Ron Paul? Well I like him but less than you might think as some of his remarks are borderline delusional ‘troofer‘ stuff and that does him no credit at all. Is he actually going to win? Probably not but that is not what this article is about (commenters please note). Do I even want him to win? Well that is what this article is about.
He wants a return to constitutional limited government. What’s not to like about that? But then my eye falls on that picture of Murray Rothbard in Ron Paul’s office. I am not a fan of Rothbard even though there is indeed much good stuff in The Ethics of Liberty. Although I think he was correct about a great many things, I also think he was often as intellectually dishonest as Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky and perfectly fits Adriana Lukas’ definition of a barking moonbat: “someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency”. For Rothbard to have argued that the cold war was a delusion and that the Soviet Union was not really a clear and present danger is so preposterous on so many levels that I am not even going to elaborate why. If you can not figure out that one yourself then this article is not addressed to you. In fact, please stop reading and get lost.
John Louis Swaine wrote in with an interesting piece about his own ‘road to Damascus’. “It took approximately 8 years to move from being a Labourite teenager to a Libertarian at the age of 23. I used to blog quite a lot so I felt the urge to write something about it. Since the Samizdata weblog has been one of the most important contributing factors for this change, I thought I would submit it to you.”
Most people have a “Summer of ’69” they can relate to; a magic period of youthful exuberance, tempered by important life experiences and left to bake softly in the warmth of the July sun. Mine was in 2001, I was 16 and beginning to ask the bigger questions about society and life.
I had opinions, I suddenly cared about issues. Like virtually every young person I came to the conclusion that equality was of paramount importance and that the only means by which to achieve it was through the prescription of schemes and initiatives by Government. After all, is that not what my generation had been taught? The importance of civil duty, of taking part in the organs of governance and through them making life better for your fellow man?
I dutifully signed up to the Observer brigade. Things could change, things could be fixed and crucially, the fix was always within the grasp of Government.
I did have the benefit of a decent grounding in knowledge of markets. I rather suspect you cannot have spent a significant amount of time growing up in Hong Kong without absorbing it – capitalism and free markets are in the air there, mixed in amongst the toxic levels of pollutants and exhaust fumes. Your chances of developing lung cancer or respiratory disorders may be high but you will also assimilate at least some understanding of how a financial system works.
Tony Blair’s governing ideology therefore seemed intoxicating – using the state to care for one’s fellow man whilst reforming the public sector and embracing free markets. Everything fitted nicely into place.
Today is 17th November, the day when the Velvet Revolution began 18 years ago. Since then there have been years when I did not ‘commemorate’ the event and there were years when I did. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting Eastern Europe and despite the trickle of bandwidth available where I was staying, I found myself watching old clips from the communist era on YouTube. The most surreal was not the absurdity of their content, the ridiculous gravitas of the communist propaganda but the memory of this rubbish being taken seriously and accepted as the norm.
I have written about 17th November 1989 already and what it meant to me. This year I prefer to share some images, which as usual, speak a thousand words. To those, let me add music and words of Karel Kryl whose songs used to be a constant companion in the years before the revolution. I was old enough to understand his bitter humour and lyrical cynicism. There is nothing soft or simple about Kryl’s songs, they are hard hitting, harsh and without hope.
When armies of Warsaw Pact occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 to suppress the democratization movement of Prague Spring, Karel Kryl released album BratŠ™íÄku zavírej vrátka (Close the Gate, Little Brother), full of songs describing his disgust over the occupation, life under the communist rule, and rude inhumanity and stupidity of the regime. The album was released in early 1969 and was banned and removed from shelves shortly thereafter. This work became an icon of the anti-communist movement for years to come — when he returned from exile in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, almost every little child in Czechoslovakia knew the lyrics of these songs by heart.
One of his most famous songs has been superimposed on video clips of the two historical events in Czechoslovakia – August 1968 and November 1989.
1968
1989
[Quick and dirty translation] Little brother, don’t sob, it is not a banshee
Don’t be frightened, it is only soldiers,
Who arrived in sharp-edged metal caravans
Through tears caught on eyelashes we look at each other
Come with me little brother, I fear for you
On the uneven roads, little brother, in children’s shoes
It rains and it is getting dark
This night will not be short
The wolf has a yen for the lamb
Little brother, have you closed the gate?
Little brother, please do not sob
Do not waste your tears
Hold back the curses and save your strength
You mustn’t blame me if we do not make it
Learn the song, it is not so hard
Lean on me, little brother, the road is rough
We will stumble forth, we cannot turn back
It rains and it is getting dark
This night will not be short
The wolf has a yen for the lamb
Little brother, do close the gate!
Please close the gate!
Good luck, Mr Dodge. Andrew’s recent diagnosis has reminded me – I am 41 – to get a health check done once a year and catch these gremlins early (I have been remarkably lucky with my health, but no point in taking it for granted).
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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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