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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“To some extent the problem is too much rather than too little imagination. With fiat money, and a discretionary central bank, it’s always theoretically possible to have the money stock (or some other nominal variable) behave just like it ought to, according to whichever macroeconomic theory or model one prefers. In other words, a modern central bank is always technically capable of doing the right thing, just as a chimpanzee jumping on a keyboard is technically capable of typing-out War and Peace.”
– George Selgin, as quoted at the excellent Cafe Hayek blog.
For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.
– The Onion adds an update to its story of November 14th. Mick Hartley explains.
There are two phrases that we rarely hear these days: “it’s a free country” and “there ought to be a law against it”. We do not hear these any more for the simple reason that we are no longer a free country, and more often than not there is a law about it.
– Nigel Farage
(link is to the Daily Telegraph so some overseas readers may issues accessing it)
Last year, for the first time, sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies.
– Here. I found it here.
Any statutory regulations/provisions against the press in the UK will most gleefully be lapped up here for use against the local media. The one argument we have had; that the modern liberal democracies around the world have self-regulation rather than statutory laws for the media will fall down should the UK opt to embrace statutory legislation as well to police the press. Such moves will only strengthen the hand of oppressive, regressive governments around the English-speaking world.
– Sinha Ratnatunga, Editor, Sunday Times, Sri Lanka
German asparagus in season. Heaven.
– Michael Portillo samples the cuisine of Germany in his latest European Railway Journey.
I am greatly enjoying this show, and am recording it. I am finding it to be a wonderfully relaxing and entertaining way to soak up a mass of historic trivia, such as (this week – just as one for-instance) how Eau de Cologne got started. I also learned about that upside down railway that I have seen so many pictures of but have never pinned down to a particular place.
And not so trivia, because Portillo is focussing particularly on the period just before World War 1. Europe’s last golden age, in other words. Railways were not just for tourists, they were for canon cannon fodder.
This week, Portillo was wearing a rather spectacular pink jacket, of a sort that he would never have risked when being a politician.
I never argue. It’s other people who argue with me.
– Roger Hewland, proprietor of Gramex, Lower Marsh, London. Overheard by me, this afternoon.
Many people are ignorant of many things. This is not surprising and entirely forgivable, given how much knowledge there is to be had, and how much of it is highly specialized. What is less forgivable is how people feel free to spout off and propose things without the slightest idea of the complexities they are dealing with. The French revolutionaries blithely imagined they could create a whole new society with its own rules, just by thinking it up. They ended with a bloodbath in a pigsty.
– Madsen Pirie
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.
– via Bernard Goldberg
“Nobody pretends that hiking these taxes means “ordinary people” will have less tax to pay. But most folk still believe that companies can be made to pay taxes, shifting the burden away from the rest of us. I have news for you: they can’t. Corporations are artificial legal constructs: only people can ever pay taxes. The burden of taxes supposedly levied on companies is borne either by investors (through reduced returns on their capital), workers (via lower wages) or consumers (as a result of higher prices). Targeting firms is just a way of stealthily taxing these people, ensuring nobody really understands who is picking up the bill. It is because we’ve forgotten about these basic principles that we’ve ended up with a dysfunctional and incomprehensible tax system, as exemplified by the row over the practices of Starbucks, Amazon, Google and others.”
Allister Heath. (Non-UK residents who don’t subscribe may not be able to see the full Telegraph article, but it seems that quite a lot can, so I am putting this up with a disclaimer.)
“If you think that Westminster exists in a bubble, you should try Brussels. For the 18th successive year, the auditors have failed to approve the EU’s accounts. Meanwhile, the EU wants much more money.”
– Roger Bootle. He is writing in the Daily Telegraph, but given that the DT now imposes a paywall on non-UK readers, I am not going to bother with the link.
A Guardian blog commentator attacks the free-market right thus:
[A] criminally insane coterie of maladjusted right wingers – whose regular Pooteresque diatribes against the poor and craven support of neo-liberalism are beyond parody – that infests every political thread on the Guardian blog. Just listen as they condemn themselves out of their own incoherent foaming mouths. Their comments on the poor/disabled/unemployed, exposes the pathology of their neo liberal right wing extremism. Their attack on the NHS is no surprise – how could they not? The NHS stands as a symbol in opposition to everything these disturbed, juvenile, Ayn Rand fantasists and free market barbarians hold dear in their perverse belief system. These people are incapable or unwilling to understand a beloved institution that represents altruism, egalitarianism, self sacrifice and the humanistic collective will of an unselfish inclusive society.
This verminous, parasitic , parvenu, lickspittle, non empathetic sociopathic trash. These reductive whores of unfettered market driven, voodoo Social Darwinism, that wishes to reduce every aspect of humanity to mere units of production, who despise ordinary people, who see their only value, as an entry in a of profit and loss account – to be exploited by the human garbage that this sub-strata of humanity are, and the corporate fascism they serve. To read their comments is to see the true face of their malignant, cancerous moral degeneracy, and in that, they at least serve a purpose. Much like the gargoyles on a church spire, they represent a grotesque warning of how deformed ones humanity can become. These end of pier, amateur hour economists, these workhouse barbarians, these neo liberal whores are, “nothing more than errand boys sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill,” that we’ve already paid for in full. Long may they continue as a reminder of supreme idiocy and malevolence .
It won’t fit on a T-shirt, but maybe “verminous, parasitic , parvenu, lickspittle, non empathetic sociopathic trash” would.
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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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