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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“…when things go wrong, we seek bogeymen rather than face up to our own shortcomings. We expect instant, painless solutions to self-inflicted problems. Britain’s booze culture is blamed on the slick advertisements of drinks companies and the cut-price tactics of supermarkets. Our obesity epidemic is the fault of junk-food outlets and confectionery suppliers. And our personal indebtedness, the highest it has ever been, is the result of a pernicious campaign by greedy banks to enslave their customers. Oh yes, and the crash was caused by beastly Americans.”
Jeff Randall, economics columnist and broadcaster.
Look, I don’t blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do.
In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health – and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.
– Andrew Stuttaford, referring to this.
… the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy.
Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
– Jacob Burckhardt, from lectures on the history of the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries given at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, later included in Judgments on History and Historians.
We saved the world. I say we party!
– Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Is it just me, or is the thought of Gordon Brown attempting to party even more frightening than the thought of Gordon Brown trying to ‘save the world’.
“There is as much or more reason to be afraid of bigotry, narrow-mindedness and capricious censure in a village than in a large and complex society. It is worth noting that those who complained of a present or impending “age of cant” never thought that their minds would become less independent – it was always directed at opponents and, principally, down the social scale.”
– Ben Wilson, Decency & Disorder, 1789-1837, page 444. One of the most arresting and entertaining works of social and cultural history I have read for some time. This quote is particularly relevant in our own time when one occasionally hears people bemoaning the loss of “small, tight-knit communities” and the supposed soullessness of urban life. In fact the ability to choose one’s networks of friends rather than get lumbered with whatever is on offer in a small community is one of the unacknowedged joys of modern life.
“The folly and immorality of the “stimulus” plan passed today can be attacked on many fronts. For one thing there’s the awe-inspiring irony of a Democrat-dominated Congress and a Democrat president spending taking nearly a trillion dollars from the hardworking middle class people of this country and giving it to corporations and businesses—and precisely as a result of the apparent improprieties in which those same businesses were engaged! Honest liberals who resent corporate welfare must really have a headache at this point.”
– Timothy Sandefur.
It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively.
– Fraser Nelson, The Spectator.
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
– ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak
In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.
– Brian Micklethwait
“Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”
– Bryan Appleyard. Those squirrels cannot catch a break.
“Politics is all very well in its place, that place being very much on the periphery of life.”
– Tim Worstall, who has had an impressive year on his own blog, and seems to have quite marvellously upset one of the main figures of the Guardian’s columnists.
Excellent.
“The forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.”
William Graham Sumner, from his essay, The Forgotten Man. Its relevance for our own time is unmistakable.
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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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