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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Taxing already acquired property drastically alters the relationship between citizen and state: we become leaseholders, rather than freeholders, with accumulated taxes over long periods of time eventually “returning” our wealth to the state. It breaches a key principle that has made this country great: the gradual expansion of property ownership and the democratisation of wealth. We need more of this, not less. A wealth tax – like the old window taxes, levied because it was too hard to assess people’s income – is a sign of failure: we can’t raise enough by taxing current economic activity, so we tax again the already taxed fruits of past activity. It is a pre-modern, obsolete concept. Wealth taxes also violate a state’s original mission, to protect the life, liberty and property of citizens.
– Allister Heath
Although it is an excellent article, I strongly disagree with Heath’s use of the term ‘democratisation of wealth’ rather than, perhaps, ‘widening’ or even ‘diffusion’.
‘Democracy’ is entirely about a state legitimising its use of the means of collective coercion. It is only about ‘wealth’ to the extent that the primary use of the means of collective coercion are to confiscate wealth at gunpoint for assorted pretexts, under the legitimising notion that there is a democratic mandate to do demand-money-with-menaces in any particular instance.
If they figure at all, it is as a group to be derided, reduced to a caricature framed by Boden, Waitrose tempered by Lidl, holidays in France, and a fondness for television box sets. Their dinner-party concerns about finding a good school, a decent house or a good hospital qualify for jokes, little else. The tributes paid to Richard Briers remind us that, at best, the middle classes are an object of gentle ribbing, but seldom to be admired as the shock troops of economic recovery. Instead, politics has been reduced to an argument over how best to clobber the wealthy in order to help the poor, two small groups who attract a disproportionate amount of attention from politicians.
– Ben Brogan
Of course, it would be refreshing if we could just talk about people as individuals rather than as members of classes at all.
In Los Angeles, as the hunt for another registered Democrat on a killing spree continues, police opened fire on two innocent ladies delivering newspapers from the same kind of truck as the suspect. They seem to have done so without any attempt at identification. They didn’t even shout a warning first.
It seems that those drawn to jobs as the state’s armed enforcers are also among those not to be trusted with weapons. I suggest it’s for the same psychological reasons. As the validated agents of what they see as a superior moral force, they feel justified in their appalling actions, but also sure that if they get it wrong the state will defend them. Reckless and panicky they may be, but having injured two innocents they “protect and serve” they are safe. At least as safe, say, as an NHS mandarin who presided over the deaths of thousands.
I conclude, then, that it is not good long-term libertarian propaganda to argue for various alternative systems of politics, or incremental political changes, on the basis that they are somewhat better than what we have now and they are more easily achievable than radical libertarianism. For such a strategy can only waste endless time in endless compromise, while failing to explain properly the libertarian alternative and thereby making converts. It is far better to argue immediately and always for the radical libertarian option.
– Jan C Lester puts the case for libertarianism and against compromise in a talk, entitled “Democracies, Republics and other unnecessary evils”, which he gave to Libertarian Home at the Rose and Crown in August of last year.
I first heard Lester speak these words while watching this video of the event, but I was later able to copy and paste them to here from this full text of the talk, also made available by Libertarian Home.
Why does Barack Obama hate black people?
Don’t get me wrong…I love the minimum wage, because I’m white. My daughter is white, and also has established plenty of work experience. She was offered jobs at more than 40K per year at the age of 20. Minimum wage legislation will ensure that we’re the last to be laid off. We got skills!!!
But does Barack Obama really hate black people? Or is he just not very smart?
– The Whited Sepulchre
You may be a staunch supporter of the welfare state, socialized medicine, gay marriage, preferential treatment of women and 75 percent taxation of all private income. It won’t help you if you have distanced yourself from the teachings of the prophet.
Thus, in the Netherlands, Islam’s critics are also “extreme right-wing racists” – if by “extreme”, “right-wing” and “racist’ you mean gay hedonists (Pim Fortuyn), anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilists (Theo van Gogh) and liberal black feminists (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Whichever of these novel permutations of “right-wing” you fall into, you wind up either on trial (Nekschot, Geert Wilders), forced into exile (Miss Ali) or pushing up tulips (Fortuyn, van Gogh). Likewise, the artists and comedians I met through Lars in Copenhagen had been variously arrested, subjected to death threats, had homes firebombed and a family restaurant shot up. And in the final indignity they’d wound up sharing a stage with a right-wing loon like me because their leftie pals weren’t there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty International fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – they all stayed utterly silent. C’mon, nobody’s asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled Tweet would do. A tepidly supportive fax.
– Mark Steyn
“But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.”
– John Horgan, giving Sam Harris a bit of a kicking.
Read the whole piece. Food for thought.
It is officially calculated that, between 2005 and 2009, up to 1,200 patients at Stafford Hospital died needlessly. Let us imagine that a comparable disaster occurred in any other institution or enterprise in this country. Suppose that hundreds of customers of the cold food counter at Sainsbury’s or Tesco died of food poisoning. Suppose that, at an army barracks, large comprehensive, steelworks, bank, hotel, university campus or holiday theme park, people died, and went on dying for years, at rates that hugely exceeded anything that could be attributed to the normal course of nature.
What would happen? In all cases – though more quickly in the private sector than in the public – the relevant management would be sacked. Indeed, the very idea of unnecessary deaths taking years to notice is almost inconceivable. Criminal charges would be brought. In many cases, the offending institution would close down.
But this is the National Health Service, and so we approach it with superstitious reverence, as if the fact that Stafford Hospital performed so many human sacrifices is so awe-inspiring that little can be done about it. For all its rhetoric of condemnation, this week’s report of the Mid Staffs inquiry by Robert Francis QC argues, in effect, that those in charge should stay in charge.
– Charles Moore
“In the past few decades there has been a movement sometimes described as the “postmodern movement.” There’s no single word that’s really adequate to describe it, but that’s one that the people [involved] typically accept. In many respects, they see themselves as challenging the Enlightenment vision that there is an independently existing reality, that we can have a language that refers in some clear and intelligible way to elements of that reality, and that we can obtain objective truth about that reality. They advance the view that what we think of as reality is largely a social construct, or that it’s a device designed to oppress the marginalized peoples of the world–the colonial peoples, women, racial minorities. They see the attempt to attain rationality and truth and knowledge as some kind of power play, and what they want instead is what they take to be more liberating–a rejection of the rationalist view.”
– John Searle.
A philosopher who believes in reality, that humans have volition and can reason about things. Obviously some sort of dangerous maniac who is a menace to society.
Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of he 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.
The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.
The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.
And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?
Yeah, that will work out just fine…
– Samizdata commenter ‘veryretired’
An independent Ireland – an interesting idea, so when are they leaving the E.U. then?
Surely rule from Brussels is no more “independence” than rule from London.
– Paul Marks
I can appreciate that it is important to attract visitors, for the economy and all that. But there is always a balance to be struck between encouragement and grovelling. If Johnny Foreigner wants friendly he should go to America. There the natives are capable of wishing you a nice day without even a hint of irony. Here if someone approaches you with a wide smile and an outstretched hand you feel not warmth but deep suspicion.
– Nigel Farndale
I remember reading Kate Fox’s “Watching the English” a few years ago and laughed out loud at some of her sharp insights about how we natives behave on this small, damp island.
Last October, I went shopping with my wife around San Francisco during a business/recreation trip to the Bay Area. With one exception – where I got treated rather rudely by a shop assistant – I was blown away by the friendliness and helpfulness of people and how it was done without being patronising or somehow false. Yes, California has its problems these days, but I wish I could import some of the attitude there to the UK.
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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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