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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“As someone known for writing defenses of chain stores and explaining Plano, Texas, to puzzled pundits, I agree that way too many smart people, particularly on the coasts, are quick to condemn middle-American culture without understanding why people value one or another aspect of it. But they were even worse in 1963.”
– Virginia Postrel, writing a review of Charles Murray’s latest book. In a nutshell, she skewers his central thesis that America is so much more fractured than in the past. That rather depends on what the chronological starting point is.
Murray is most famous, or depending on your point of view, infamous, for his role as co-author of The Bell Curve. More recently, I waded through his tome, Human Accomplishment, which uses various metrics to measure the fecundity of Western civilisation in particular. He’s certainly not afraid of the gods of political correctness.
“The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code – but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.”
“They believe it,” the Constable said, “because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.”
“Yes. Some of them never challenge it – they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel – as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.”
“Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?”
“Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded – they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.”
– Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age (his best book, in my opinion).
A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years
– Lysander Spooner
“How fashionable to wear clothes that are distressed. The young on the Westside of Los Angeles dress themselves in jeans worn, sanded, and razored to resemble something a six-month castaway might crawl ashore in. Why? They are trying to purchase a charade of victimisation, as the ethos of the Liberal West holds that these victims are the only ones of worth. but how to go about it? For the jeans can cost over one thousand dollars (one might buy them at Goodwill for two bucks, but, I am informed, they would be “seen through” and, though a closer approximation to true poverty, they are ineffective as a concomitant display of wealth.) It beats me hollow. Look at those Old Rich Guys in their Porsche, the young might say, but the Porsche is perhaps not an attempt to display wealth, neither to recapture youth, but to enjoy that which some years of labor have permitted as an indulgence.”
– David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge, page 63.
I don’t think earning about the same as Kenwyne Jones of Stoke City is cause for apoplectic outrage.
– Mark Littlewood of the IEA on the UK political storm about the head of the world’s sixth largest bank getting a bonus of something under one… meelion… pounds. (US readers may wish to read that again. A million, not a billion.)
Stoke City is currently the 8th best soccer team in England. It has 44 players in its squad.
[W]hile SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too…That’s right, slowly but surely, Congress is sucking the tech industry into their world, making us play by their rules. We have to pay them off, literally with cash, or we get slaughtered.
…Well, we’re now playing by big government rules. Congress can set up a fight pit with Hollywood in one corner and Silicon Valley in the other. Who cares what happens. The money will just roll right in.
This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets. Congress is doing just that, only it’s completely legal.
– TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington on the spanner thrown into the works of SOPA/PIPA (for now)
“More people have heard of Tom Cruise than Ben Bernanke, but that doesn’t mean that Bernanke hasn’t had a bigger impact on their life.”
– Matt Zwolinski, a blogger at the recently expanded “Bleeding Heart Libertarian” group blog. He’s writing about the benefits and costs of intellectual versus political activism, as relating to Ron Paul.
The failure of Tom Cruise to influence my life is, I guess, something I can live with, although I did rather enjoy the latest Mission Impossible flick.
Katharine Birbalsingh is an heroic, principled woman who, against hideous odds, is trying desperately to open a free school – the Michaela Community School – in a part of South London woefully ill-served by state secondary schools. It will provide academic rigour, discipline, a liberal arts curriculum including Latin, uniforms, sporting facilities and extended school hours to children in one of the most deprived parts of London, regardless of race or social class or ability to pay. For those children whose parents can’t afford to go private, the school will be a godsend – possibly the single thing that makes all the difference in their life between success and failure.
Does it constitute a strong, persuasive argument against this project that Katharine Birbalsingh has a name which you can twist with an unfunny pun? Or that she’s disliked by some of her colleagues? Or that, in the eyes of her accuser, she speaks “BS.”?
No, it doesn’t. Indeed I’d suggest that these comments are actually counterproductive. They draw attention to the fact that criticism of Katharine Birbalsingh’s noble project is based not on reasoned argument but on prejudice and incoherent rage. This is why they’re so well worth quoting: because they let the enemy do our work for us.
– Delingpole comments on a comment.
“On the basis of economic theory and historical experience, the life expectancy of a societal model with 50 percent or more government control over the economy does therefore not look promising. The taxing, resources-consuming state-parasite must constantly weaken and sooner or later kill the productive and wealth-creating market-host. When does this happen? Well, we are about to find out, as we are now all part of some gigantic real-life experiment, bravely conducted by the current policy establishment in Europe and elsewhere at our own expense and that of our children. Across the EU, the share of government spending in the economy is already around 50 percent, depending whose numbers you believe. If we could account for regulation and interventionist legislation, the state’s grip on economic decision-making is certainly larger. To call such an economy capitalist is a joke, albeit perhaps not as cruel a joke as the one the economy itself, with its persistently anaemic performance, is playing on the Keynesian economists and their ridiculous clamour for ever more government spending to boost ‘aggregate demand’.”
– Detlev Schlichter, making a point that needs hammering home. What we have in the West, right now, is a million miles from laissez faire capitalism.
“In retrospect, there are some obvious questions an Icelander living through the past five years might have asked himself. For example: Why should Iceland suddenly be so seemingly essential to global finance? Or: Why do giant countries that invented modern banking suddenly need Icelandic banks to stand between their depositors and their borrowers – to decide who gets capital and who does not? And if Icelanders have this incredible natural gift for finance, how did they keep it so well hidden for 1,100 years?”
Michael Lewis, Boomerang, page 36.
And I liked this line (page 37): “Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.”
Mr. Sachs here performs the equivalent of, say, accusing someone who advocates sobriety of thereby being indifferent to other values such parental responsibility, financial prudence, and neighborliness. But just as being sober in no way precludes – and likely promotes – other values such as parental responsibility, being a libertarian in no way precludes any of the values and causes that Mr. Sachs lists. Indeed, libertarians argue that these other values and causes are best promoted by individual liberty, and that too many people who insist that achieving these other values requires the suppression of liberty are cynically seeking convenient cover for their own self-aggrandizement.
Of course, libertarians might be mistaken about liberty’s merits. But that Mr. Sachs presumes that libertarians hold cheap such values as compassion, civic responsibility, and honesty proves that what Lord Acton wrote about Robert Kemp Philp’s description of history applies perfectly to Mr. Sachs’s description of libertarianism: “It were well if he knew his subject as well as he knows his own mind about it.”
– Two quotes there from Donald J. Boudreaux (responding to this). There is his own own eloquence, and there is the Acton quote at the end of what he himself says.
They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe’s political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying point in an uncertain and worrying world.
Imagine that the recent turbulence on the continent had occurred when Europe still traded in pre-euro currencies. What would have happened to the French franc when neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen forced the Prime Minister to quit? The franc would have plunged. What would have happened to the Dutch guilder when an anti-immigration party with a dead leader impelled itself into government? The guilder would have plunged too. Before a German election too close to call, even the stolid old mark would be gyrating. And instability in currency markets would be fuelling even more political chaos: a vicious, downward cycle.
That this has not happened is thanks to the euro. The single currency has taken all this political upheaval in its calm stride.
– From an anonymous editorial in the Observer headed “A tolerant euro”.
From 2002, in case you were wondering.
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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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