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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“The core problem over the past few decades was not bankers’ greed or the complex financial instruments that enabled them to satisfy it. It was the immense pyramids of debt built up by the Anglo-Saxon half of the world, and the equally massive mountains of savings created in the other. Almost everything that occurred in the past couple of years was, directly or indirectly, a consequence of this.”
– Ed Conway, Daily Telegraph. He has not bought the whole free market line on what is wrong with finance today, but this is pretty good.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
– Groucho Marx
History and ordinary prudence dictated that the union might be broad and shallow (a free-trade area, with embellishments, capable of taking in all-comers) or else narrow and deep (an evolving political union, confined to countries willing to be led there). Of the two, I always believed that the first was better. But the architects did not even have the brains to choose the second. They recognized no limits to their ambitions. They set about creating a union that was both broad and deep. A federal constitution, a parliament, a powerful central executive, one central bank, one currency – all with no binding sense of European identity. As for scale, well, the bigger the better. Today Greece, tomorrow Turkey. And why stop there? Madness.
– Clive Crook ponders the excessive ambitions behind the EUropean project.
“Yes, we might all think that sending a virtual red rose over Facebook is silly but those sending them (and presumably to some extent those receiving them) do value them. And that value is what we measure when we talk about GDP and it is the creation of that value that allows people to make profits. There is absolutely nothing at all in the capitalist system, the free market one (these are two different things please note), the pursuit of profits or even continued economic growth that requires either the use of more limited physical resources or even the use of any non-renewable resource.”
Tim Worstall, nicely skewering the idea that economic growth is the same as ever rising consumption of finite resources. Not the same thing at all.
The election has dealt a major blow to the political class, though it hasn’t been a catharsis; we still hate them.
– Raedwald
… the Greens won an MP in the enclave of Brighton, but their share of the vote fell. I find this quite amazing, really. After five years of relentless environmental yakkery in the mass media, bombarding us on all channels at once, the Greens received a lower share of votes than the BNP. All that most Greens can now look forward to is to return to their yurts, and prepare for recycling.
– Andrew Orlowski, writing in the Register, and reaching the fairly sensible conclusion that the reason every political party did badly was because they are all intellectually bankrupt, and the public is starting to get this. Read the whole thing.
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect.
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So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like.
– The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout
“After trying to watch the first debate Maggie said, ‘they irritate me’. She is particularly angered by the way all three do their utmost not to answer questions.”
– Margaret Thatcher’s apparent view of the recent election debate. Attributed to her by Katie Hind
“Amazing isn’t it? Not that Labour slimed an ordinary member of the public who disagreed with them. They’ve been doing that since before they were elected in 1997. The lucky ones only found their reputations traduced in the press. The not so lucky ones found themselves dead in a field. No, what’s amazing is that is was caught live and bang to rights.”
– Blognor Regis
If I were this Mrs Duffy person who was slimed by Brown, I’d be thinking of watching my back for a few months. One thing we have learned over the past 13 years is that NewLabour are vindictive bastards.
Update: Janet Daley draws a certain parallel – as well as noting a key difference – in another famous example of a leftist politician blurting out certain comments during an encounter with an ordinary member of the public, the famous Obama/Joe The Plumber exchange.
As this Joe character found, Obama’s attack dogs tried to make life hard for him and as I said above, it may already be happening to the lady who was slagged off by Mr Brown.
Gordon is cyanide on the doorstep.
– Rachel Sylvester gets lucky quoting a Labour candidate in what used to be a safe Labour seat, just before Gordon Brown calls a core Labour voter a bigot. I reckon he’s cyanide everywhere.
Getting the institutions right matters. Many people simply don’t understand that issue. They don’t understand it because they still believe in magic. Few people believe that the chanting of magic words or incantations exercises power over the world. Most of us believe in cause and effect – in tracing out the effects to their causes. The scientific approach has been triumphant in such fields of enquiry as physics, chemistry, biology and geology. Unfortunately, when it comes to the science of human behaviour, many people – possibly most – still believe in magic, because they believe that a special class of wizards and magicians are called legislators, rulers, governors and presidents, and so most people believe, when they say such words as `It shall be the law that all shall have the right to good health care, or a good education, or a higher living standard,’ that those words carry the power to bring about the intentions behind them.”
– Tom G Palmer, Realising Freedom, page 207.
I strongly recommend this gem of a book.
When David Cameron spoke to activists on the Embankment yesterday morning, one was at once splashed in the face by the cold water of the obsession with image: almost everyone in sight was young, several of them (including a man Mr Cameron ostentatiously embraced with that warm insincerity that is his trademark) from ethnic minorities, a correct proportion of them women. His approach has always been about ticking the boxes of militant superficiality. His main argument is that he is not the Labour Party. Well, not in name, at any rate.
– Simon Heffer
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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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