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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In the United States, as elsewhere, groups plotted to better themselves without consideration for others or the nation as a whole. They were encouraged by an aggregation of incongruous theories called the New Deal, which put the nation $40,000,000into debt and in some departments degenerated into a money-oiled machine for keeping politicians in power. Chiselling public funds, once the prerogative of politicians, became the aim of millions. The formula that citizens must not starve in a land of plenty became for many a means of living off the government rather than by the sweat of the brow.
– Upton Close (Josef Washington Hall): “1930-40: Decade of Deceit”
All you have to do, is to see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong. We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime. Repeal such a law without delay… If you do not take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system.
– Frederic Bastiat
Britain’s energy reforms are billed as a key part of the Cameron government’s growth strategy. To understand why the U.K. economy is flat-lining, look to a government that believes a policy to raise energy prices and squeeze living standards is good for growth. Unless Mr. Cameron wants to share Jimmy Carter’s electoral fate, he’d better push the reset button on his energy policy – fast
– Rupert Derwal
“Capitalism is based on capital, and capital is generated through saving and not money-printing, contrary to what many economists and central bankers want us to believe. Prosperous societies have always been built on hard money, which encourages saving and the expansion of the capital stock, and in turn increases the productivity of human labour. Greek savers are no different from American savers or German savers, and the role of money, saving and capital is no different in Greece from that in any other country. The laws of economics change as little from one place to another as the laws of physics. And sacrificing the interests of your savers for some short-term boost to growth will have the same adverse long-run effects in Greece as it has anywhere else.”
– Detlev Schlichter
I understand there’s a new sheriff in town. Who wants to kill him?
– said by the boss cowboy with the mustache (Slim Pickens?) in Blazing Saddles, to an enthusiastic response.
Blazing Saddles, what with Sheriff Obama and all, is now downright prophetic, in the sense that there must be Democrats who think they are living in this movie right now.
It’s showing on Brit TV right now. Earlier I set my TV hard disc to record this, and I just switched on my telly to catch that line.
Instead of the Government directing energy policy from the centre, let the people choose.
This would involve the scrapping of ALL subsidies for power generation, direct or indirect. So all ROCs, FiTs, payments for nuclear decommissioning, tax breaks for gas extraction, and so on, would go. The real whole-life cost of each technology would be apparent. Each consumer could then choose the source, or mix of sources, for their electricity, in much the same was as at present one can choose energy supplier, or even a ‘green’ tariff, and pay accordingly.
– Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Conservative Party in Scotland, “breaks ranks”, as Bishop Hill puts it.
Fat chance, but good to hear such a highly ranked Conservative saying such a thing.
“All the available Keynesian levers for achieving economic growth have been pulled, yet the recovery is one of the weakest since World War II. The problem lies with the way the “stimulus” was carried out, the uncertainty of looming higher taxes, and the antibusiness rhetoric and regulatory strong-arming of this administration.”
– Harvey Golub, Wall Street Journal.
The problem is not that the BBC is on the wrong wavelength, it is that it is on any wavelength at all. That in this day and age a supposedly first world country has a tax funded state broadcast institution is simply absurd.
– Perry de Havilland
Poverty is a solved problem – all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.
– L. Neil Smith
So why do voters hope to solve the crisis by accelerating the policies which led to it? Much of the blame must attach to the Centre-Right parties currently in office in most national capitals. Though they talk of fiscal prudence, many of them are in reality locked into Euro-corporatism. With a handful of honourable exceptions, they have presided over crony capitalism, more spending, more taxes and more debt.
– Daniel Hannan, the best Prime Minister that Britain will never have.
This is pretty much my view… that having ‘conservatives’ and ‘capitalists’ in power who are neither conservative nor capitalists (other than in the statist ‘crony capitalism’ sense) is not ‘better than the alternative’… no, in the long run is it actually worse than leaving the ruination to the other side for the sake of ever so slightly slowing the rate at which the First World circles the drain. The problem is not the left, the problem is the statist right who use the language of markets, choice and liberty whilst working tirelessly to abridge all three, just ever so slightly slower than the left-statists would.
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority
– Edmund Burke
“Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.”
– David Hume, in a letter to his friend and fellow Scot, Adam Smith. (H/T, Stephen Hicks).
Hume was writing about JJ Rousseau, whom Hicks has mentioned as one of the most destructive and evil thinkers in recorded history. His other choice for that slot is Martin Heidegger.
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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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