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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States love a few Big Businesses but hate lots of small ones… in essence, if there are more people who actually matter in an industry than can fit around a dinner table with the appropriate Government Minister, then clearly that is a sector that cannot be controlled by the state. And that is intolerable.
And of course many Big Businesses also rather like those sort of relationships as a few large competitors with a similar size-to-brain ratio as themselves are much preferred to a whole bunch of innovative small folk who names they don’t even know and who might actually start doing things they did not expect to have to deal with.
– Perry de Havilland
If asked which groups posed the greatest threat to individual liberty in modern Britain, I would unhesitatingly cite two groups. These groups are, broadly, the medical profession and those who are generally called ‘celebrities’ – pop stars, film stars and so on.
– “Whig”, at the Adam Smith Institute blog.
Sheldon Cooper is a typical very smart guy who thinks that because he is an expert in one field, he therefore knows everything about all other subjects as well. I suspect that he would be quite a fan of a centrally planned society, provided he was the one doing the planning.
– George Mulberry
“If we want a more sustainable world, achieved through and driven by popularised digital technologies, we need to reframe the conversation and make it less about depriving ourselves of the things we like.”
Liat Clark, Wired magazine.
Indeed. It is easier to persuade people of your point of view if it can be shown in a positive, life-affirming sense rather than a gloomy one. Even where I find myself agreeing with environmentalists on certain issues, I find the coercive, “let’s ban it and tax it” stance taken to be a turnoff.
If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.
– Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, quoted in a recent posting at the Cobden Centre blog by Sean Corrigan entitled Masterly inactivity.
According to this blog posting, these words were spoken by Cowperthwaite to, and recalled by, Milton Friedman (who had asked about the paucity of statistics), in 1963.
“We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over.” With these words, a typical leftish US historian, Ellen Schrecker, recommends that a whole sector of an historical era should be ignored and work on it effectively closed down. “It is time to move on,” remarks another academic, using the modern terminology that neither denies nor accepts responsibility, but leaves a mess behind for someone else to clear up. Now historians are, by definition, paddlers up backwaters, investigators of things that are “over” and move in, not move on when invited to examine data never before available. When World War Two ended historians started, not stopped, writing about it, just as an unending stream of books about Napoleon has continued in the nearly two centuries since he was bundled off to St Helena. The idea that, just as enormous quantities of material from Soviet and other archives are being released, work on them should be called off is so ludicrous that it could only have been suggested by those who feel the foundations of their beliefs and attitudes crumbling beneath their feet.
– Findlay Dunachie, reviewing a book called In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage for Samizdata, in 2004. I came across that while trying to find something else, and was immediately hooked. Findlay Dunachie is sorely missed, now, still.
The good news is that, following the recent Samizdata makeover, we can now peruse the entire Samizdata Findlay Dunachie author archive.
From Michael Huemer’s brief summary (right near the end of “Analytical Contents” – p. xxv) of Chapter 13 (“From Democracy to Anarchy”) Part 4 (“The Influence of Ideas”), of his newly published book The Problem of Political Authority:
The eventual arrival of anarchy is plausible due to the long-run tendency of human knowledge to progress and to the influence of ideas on the structure of society.
I originally had that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but there already is one. Apologies for the muddle. However, I didn’t want either to scrub this posting or just leave it hanging about, so instead I am elaborating a little.
I think the word “plausible” in the above quote is apt. We can’t assume this kind of thing. But that doesn’t mean there is no reason to hope for such a thing. Why else would we be bothering?
I now have my copy of this book, and a brief glance through it suggests that there is plenty more SQotD material in it. Indeed, it seems to be the kind of book where you could pretty much pick an SQotD out with a pin.
Why don’t I try that? Let me open the book at random, and pick a paragraph at random, and see if it works as a disembodied quote. There are 365 pages in the entire book. Here is a paragraph from page 234:
But war is, putting it mildly, expensive. If a pair of agencies go to war with one another, both agencies, including the one that ultimately emerges the victor, will most likely suffer enormous damage to their property and their employees. It is highly improbable that a dispute between two clients would be worth this kind of expense. If at the same time there are other agencies in the region that have not been involved in any wars, the latter agencies will have a powerful economic advantage. In a competitive marketplace, agencies that find peaceful methods of resolving disputes will outperform those that fight unnecessary battles. Because this is easily predictable, each agency should be willing to resolve any dispute peacefully, provided that the other party is likewise willing.
Not original, but not bad. And again, plausible.
I share Michael Huemer’s optimism about the influence of (good) ideas on society. If I did not, I would occupy far less than I actually do occupy of my life arriving at and stating my own ideas, and publicising the ideas of others, such as Michael Huemer.
For the first time in recorded history, we have nearly every central bank printing money and trying to debase their currency. This has never happened before. How it’s going to work out, I don’t know. It just depends on which one goes down the most and first, and they take turns. When one says a currency is going down, the question is against what? Because they are all trying to debase themselves. It’s a peculiar time in world history.
– Jim Rogers, the investor, adventurer and commentator, as quoted at the splendid Zero Hedge website.
(I like the site’s motto: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”)
On a related theme of currency debasement and government tactics, this book, Currency Wars, looks a gruesomely entertaining read.
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that “people make a lot of mistakes.” Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging. What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left. Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
– Thomas Sowell, quoted earlier today by David Thompson
“If you want to revisit the 1970s, you no longer need a history book or a time machine. All that’s required is a collection of today’s newspapers – Right- or Left-leaning, it matters little – together with a regular infusion of BBC agitprop. With a few notable exceptions, all seem to gravitate around a tediously predictable banker-bashing, anti-profit, bonus-hating, anti-big-business agenda which spins us 40 years back in time to one of the lowest points in British history. What goes around comes around, I suppose, so with inflation perking up again, it can surely only be a matter of time before the Government brings back a fully blown Prices Commission. I exaggerate, of course, but only to make the point.”
– Jeremy Warner
He is broadly right, of course. Some of the “banker bashing”, though, has even come from the free market side of the fence, such as from the likes of Professor Kevin Dowd – who is known around these parts – making the point that banks operating with the implicit guarantee from the state and cheap money have been able to let their normally healthy instincts run amok. Alas, most of the attacks have focused on their allegedly big bonuses, which while it does not miss the mark entirely, is not really central to why we got into our current mess.
And Warner is interesting on how an energy sector, which has its problems, will not be in good shape if we keep hitting bank finance. There is another issue, meanwhile. What we might be seeing is a mixture of “junk science” (the notions that are leading us to turn our backs on cheap or at least reliable energy) and “junk money” (Quantitative Easing, etc).
It is interesting that he argues that there is a 1970s feel about the UK at the moment. He is right, although the private sector does not have the union militancy of back then, and the Cold War is over, and globalisation, for all its ups and downs, has taken more hold to the immense benefit of countries such as India and China. I see little sign of a move back to the 1970s in Asia.
We are in danger of replacing one brand of narrow-mindedness with another. Increasingly, the courts are being dragged into disputes between people who hold different opinions in what is really an attempt to close down debate on particular subjects. This is the very antithesis of free speech and unless there is an attempt to stir up hatred and violence, the fact that some people may dislike or object to what others say should not be a matter for the law, or for official censorship.
– Philip Johnston
Where I differ is that “an attempt to stir up hatred and violence” are two very different things. One can hate a person without also wishing to see violence done to them. There are people in this world towards whom feeling hatred is entirely reasonable. Can someone give me a good reason for not publicly suggesting that any reasonable person should hate Kim Jong-un?
“I had spent most of my life in a world where the Soviet Union had been destroyed. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we felt that we had finally defeated global Marxism. Ronald Reagan and the United States had taken down the single largest depository of communism on the planet, and we’d done it without firing a direct shot. The whole world could see that communism didn’t work – its failure was on display for the entire globe to look at and say, So much for that. At least that was what we thought.”
– Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World, page 105.
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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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