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]
|
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program
– Milton Friedman
I dislike windmills because they are inefficient, destabilise the grid and put up my electricity bills. That I think, should be enough to stop building the things. That they kill bats and birds is not something that we should making too much of a fuss about. Buses, aircraft, and just about everything that moves does too. If we ban windmills because of the threat they pose to wildlife then logically there is an equal case to do the same to really important things. Remember, the Green lobby don’t actually love animals, they hate humans and anything they can do to screw up our society they will do.
– Bishop Hill commenter “AndyS”
(David Cameron is) a communitarian, he is not clever, but he is fashionable.
– Delectably named commenter ‘New Boiled Potato Peeler’
I’m single and have no children and I would love to meet someone – but looking like Kim Jong-il doesn’t help.
– William Cheong, 43, a plumber who lives in Acton, West London.
The current U K problem seems to be that despite the growing conflicts there of principles with interests, there is no “grass roots” movement nor electorate concerns that no election party is strong enough to represent principles.
– Redoubtable commenter RRS
Amazingly, @SteveBakerMP is a Tory. But when it comes to preventing bank abuses, he’s the man: http://bit.ly/yVwuXT
– George Monbiot
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero.
– Matt Ridley hails The Beginning Of The End Of Wind. Let’s hope he’s right. The piece is quoted from at greater length by Bishop Hill and at WUWT.
See, or rather, hear also: Matt Ridley’s eloquent recorded talk a while back, on the general subject of environmental scaremongering, of the sort that has been used to excuse the wind farm disaster, also linked to by Bishop Hill.
“When egalitarian redistributors make an effort to justify the assumption that the state has the legitimate right to rearrange entitlements to achieve equality, it’s usually in the form of an invocation of the theory that all production is inextricably joint, that is, that all that you have (at least above the barest and meanest possible kind of brute existence) would be impossible without the farmers in the fields growing the crops that nourish you, the cop on the beat protecting you from thieves, and so on, and that none of the inputs into that process could be added or withdrawn. It’s the cop on the beat, i.e., the state, however, that gets the attention, since it’s assumed that the enforcement of claims to wealth and income is what accounts for the fact of your having wealth and income at all, and thus the state, as the sine qua non of that wealth and income, is entitled to dispose of all of it.”
– Tom Palmer
“I think it’s an interesting reflection on politics today when the choice in a major election is between a drunken, possibly alcoholic, philanderer and a philanderer. I’ve nothing at all against booze, excessive consumption of such, extra-marital legovers nor even illegitimate children. All add enormously to the gaiety and variety of life and no society with even the slightest claim to being liberal or free would say different. But it is an interesting insight into the characters of those who rise to the top in politics, isn’t it?”
– Tim Worstall.
Well, if you explore the history of the 18th Century and 19th, for example, you will find political figures who were drunks, wife-beaters, adulterers, duellists (Andrew Jackson, the US president, fought several, as did British political figures such as Fox, Castlereagh and Canning); indolent fools, frauds and con-artists. Plus ca change……
“But is not the consternation these classes feel a just punishment? Have they themselves not set the baneful example of the attitude of mind of which they now complain? Have they not always had their eyes fixed on favors from the state? Have they ever failed to bestow any privilege, great or small, on industry, banking, mining, landed property, the arts, and even their means of relaxation and amusement, like dancing and music – everything, indeed, except on the toil of the people and the work of their hands? Have they not endlessly multiplied public services in order to increase, at the people’s expense, their means of livelihood: and is there today the father of a family among them who is not taking steps to assure his son a government job? Have they ever voluntarily taken a single step to correct the admitted inequities of taxation? Have they not for a long time exploited their electoral privileges? And now they are amazed and distressed that the people follow in the same direction! But when the spirit of mendicancy has prevailed for so long among the rich, how can we expect it not to have penetrated to the less privileged classes?”
Frederic Bastiat, quoted over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. I also liked this following paragraph:
It’s is a terrific substantive and rhetorical point that I think has largely been overlooked in the contemporary libertarian commentary on Occupy Wall Street, yet Bastiat had it 160 years ago, and with style and panache. Bastiat may not have made any real contributions to economic theory, but no one in the history of economics has been a better economic rhetorician than he was. He knew how to take ideas and put them in a form that was persuasive and memorable. It is a skill more economists could use as we continue to try to push back during a time when bad ideas we thought were dead are reappearing, zombie-like, across the landscape.
Bastiat is also described in this piece as a “Ninja”. Nice!
“Penn takes the direct opposite side from his government and country”
That’s not a problem. I do it all the time. ALL the time.
Penn’s problem is he’s an idiot. (Fine actors are frequently just a splurge of emotion and empathy. You want superhot steam in a calliope. You don’t want it under your desk with the PC and the genitalia.) ‘His’ government happens to be equivocal on the point currently. But if it agreed with him, it wouldn’t make his view any less idiotic.
– Guy Herbert
Your teeth belong to the collective.
– From a Planet Money piece quoted by Alex Tabarrok (who was linked to today by David Thompson), about how China went from the bad old days of the Great Leap Forward to the better days that followed. The above words, which Thompson also singled out for attention in his link, were an answer to a property rights query to those in authority, in the bad old days. Do we even own our teeth? No you do not.
The switch from collective “property” to actual property, as Tabarrok makes clear, was initiated by the people of China, rather than by their rulers. It began in the village of Xiaogang, whose farmers decided to go back to actual property for each individual farmer and his family, with immediate beneficial effects. And then it became a movement. The rulers of China didn’t decide to make this change. They merely decided not to stamp it out.
|
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.
|
