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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If you don’t believe me, read the comments to this, this, this, or this or… do your own search of the archives for more. Note which comments get hundreds of recommendations, and which few or none.
OK, online comments are susceptible to being gamed in various ways. Do not look for statistically representative samples there. Still, if that is what the Guardian is like, just imagine what the Mail is like. (Upon inspection, slightly less angry, although it is difficult to judge.)
It did not used to be like this.
Within a few weeks of moving to my present home seventeen years ago someone mentioned that gypsies – or travellers, people made no distinction then and I will not now delve into the distinctions between Roma, Sinti, or English and Irish travellers – were camped on a nearby field. My neighbours then were a little dubious but not that bothered. I, being new, was more interested in hearing about the gypsies than the people telling me were in telling me. Nowadays? Instant, intense suspicion.
A decade back I hardly ever read about travellers or gypsies in the papers. Nowadays – well, looking at the links above, the Guardian mentioned them on February 5th, January 30th and January 21st.
Was the change in the gypsies themselves? Partly. “Welfare” has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
But I really don’t think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs. The scapegoat of the Bible was symbolically loaded with the sins of the people and driven out to starve in the wilderness. The anti-scapegoat of our times is symbolically bedecked with the conspicuous virtue and tolerance of the elite. Someone is set to feed it scraps so that it stays near to the common people, that their lack of virtue and tolerance may be made clear to them.
Some years ago a group of gypsies or travellers broke in and spent some time on land belonging to some people I know. They did damage, most as an accidental side effect of having broken in and lived there, and some for the hell of it, as far as anyone could tell. When hearing about this from several speakers, I noticed an interesting thing. The voices telling of the damage done and what it would cost to repair were annoyed but resigned. The real venom came into their voices when they described the police response, or rather the lack of it. The cops had hummed and hawed and then intimated that ejecting the trespassers was all too much of a political hot potato. If you want to poison a human soul with racial hatred, just do that. Tell him that the laws that burden him do not apply to them. The author of the first Guardian article to which I linked pretends in hope that we still romanticise gypsies; he cites modern authors of gypsy memoirs and George Borrow’s Lavengro and other works (here’s a fascinating snippet from Borrow on gypsy names). The commenters are not interested. What they want to talk about is planning permission: how come they need it and travellers do not. And what enemy of the gypsies could have done them as much harm as whoever thought up this?
I wanted to pass this on to those who might be interested because the Libertarian Alliance, founded by the late Chris R Tame three decades ago, is an organisation through which I got to meet many people, some of whom are now involved in the Samizdata blog, such as Brian Micklethwait, Perry de Havilland and others. This is an interesting development involving Tim Evans, the LA president since Chris’ death five years ago:
After twenty-five enjoyable years of working with the Libertarian Alliance and five as its President Dr. Tim Evans said today that it is now the right time for him to move on from the organisation.”
“I leave the organisation knowing that the Libertarian Alliance has achieved amazing things. Today, the LA is in financial rude health as never before. Its conferences, lectures and seminars are second to none and it freely makes available online 1,000 diverse and scholarly classical liberal and libertarian publications. Moreover, it provides a focal point and network for hundreds of libertarians both in this country and further afield who seek radical free market ideas and debate.”
“As Chief Executive of The Cobden Centre, a Consultant Director at the Adam Smith Institute, Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd – not to mention concluding my studies for an MBA – I have decided to refocus my workload. Wanting in particular to spend more time with my family, I wish the LA and its supporters well for the future. For me, libertarianism has always been at its best when it is positive in outlook, methodologically individualist and it seeks to engage and persuade people from many different backgrounds and outlooks. I wish Dr. Sean Gabb, the Committee, and everyone else associated with the organisation the very best for the future.”
“Just before the organisation’s founder and director Dr. Chris Tame died five years ago Sean and I promised him that we would strive to strengthen and grow the organisation. Today, I leave the Presidency knowing that this objective has been fulfilled. I am reassured that the LA now has the potential to further build upon its record of success.”
I won’t presume to speak for Tim, or for Sean Gabb, whom I have known and regarded as friends for a quarter of a century, but this is clearly sad news, even though Tim’s reasons make plenty of sense. I would add one thing that has concerned me about the LA in recent years, which is that much of its public pronouncements, especially by Sean, have tended to focus on a lot of what I would call the “isolationist/nationalist” side of the street, whereas I know that Tim Evans is not really cut from the same ideological cloth. Tim, for example, radiates optimism and enjoyment of the modern world; Sean, as he’d be the first to tell you, is almost blackly pessimistic (although he seems to enjoy it!), and is also a fierce cultural conservative.
Then again, the LA is an organisation that deliberately stresses that it is a broad church and does not insist on any kind of hard “line” on certain issues. I hope that remains the case.
For my part, I really hope that the LA gets less fixated with what I would call “nation-state” issues, which are not always congruent with issues of liberty, or tilting at absurd historical windmills.
“Will the courts protect charities?” wails the Guardian.
Good heavens, thought I, what is this villainous threat to the Cats’ Protection League and the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association that requires the courts to protect them? And how can it be that the ability or desire of the courts to protect charities, repositories of all that is best and sweetest in this land of Albion, is even in doubt?
Trembling, I read on…
Will the courts protect charities
Yes, we already had that bit in the headline –
against cuts?
Huh? What difference do government cuts make to the cats and the gentlefolk?
Late last Friday afternoon a judge quashed a drastic programme of local authority grant reductions. This would have lopped a £10m slice from a budget which funds around 400 London-based charities and community groups.
Aaah, I see. By charities, the Guardian means “charities”. By “protect” it means “stop the elected government from doing what it was elected to do, namely cut the deficit.”
You can read the rest of the article by clicking the link at the top of the page. For those strapped for time here is a summary:
… process of consultation was flawed and unlawful … failed to meet its legal equalities duties … entire process would have to be re-run. … one of the threatened charities, Roma Support Group … current economic climate … properly assessed for their gender, disability and race equality impacts … hundreds of voluntary sector groups and tens of thousands of members of the public who would be affected … wibble … Labour-led, Tory-supported London Councils has already scaled down its cuts package … wibble wibble … proceeding with even greater cuts… Framework Housing Association … judicial review … Supporting People funding programme wibble … without proper consultation … wibble wibble … co-ordinated response to the identified needs of the poorest Londoners. Wibble! Charities funded under the scheme include homelessness groups, wibble legal and wibble centres, crime prevention charities, and cultural access wibble such as theatre companies.
Strange to see an article like this in what is still sometimes called the Torygraph:
Mortgage lenders penalising couples with children
Mortgage lenders are penalising home owners with children by reducing the amount they can borrow. The crackdown could potentially prevent them from switching to cheaper deals when interest rates rise.
Many banks and building societies have tightened their affordability criteria in light of the Financial Services Authority’s post-credit-crunch review of the mortgage market. But it has emerged that families with children are being hit hard.
Emphasis added by me. All the terms emphasised relate to a metaphor of punishment. But it is not meant to depict just punishment; the author, Teresa Hunter, apparently feels that parents who are lent less money than non-parents are having something unfair done to them. This is reinforced by having the first person quoted in the piece as saying:
“It is absolutely unfair to penalise people with children by reducing their capacity to borrow compared with a single person or a childless couple.”
The whole story is presented as being one of discrimination akin to racial discrimination. Did the author notice that there was a little financial unpleasantness in 2008 that had something to do with indiscriminate lending? Does she feel that encouraging people to to borrow more than they can afford is doing them any favours? Has she not noticed that children cost money?
A rat has been photographed outside 10 Downing Street. Presumably the only thing that makes this news worthy is it was not exiting the building and getting into an official chauffeured government vehicle on its way to Parliament.
I reacted rather badly the other day to Baroness Warsi’s weird rant about ‘bigotry‘ towards Muslims but it is gratifying to see I was not the only one who her remarks rubbed the wrong way.
Warsi seems to be of the view that unless you have a positive view of Islam, it is not really acceptable for you to express your opinions in polite society even in private ‘around the dinner table’. That someone who is a member of the establishment in the UK could think that notion was going to fly is a measure of the disconnect between some people ‘at the top’ and us oiks out in the real world.
There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom – no longer.
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.
I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.
A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you “liberals”. But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.
Guido Fawkes, along with several others, is giving the deep Green, and also deeply red, Mr George Monbiot, a thoroughly deserved going over for this idea that “wealthy householders” – however defined – should be forced to give over some of their rooms to let to those deemed to be deserving. As several of Guido’s splendidly rude commenters point out, this brings up images of how the Russian Bolsheviks forced the “rich” to accomodate the proletariat in the homes of the former. I remember reading about such a scene in Ayn Rand’s “We The Living”, one of her first pieces of fiction (and a book that I thoroughly enjoyed, BTW).
At root of the issue here is that Monbiot, while he himself is happy to avail himself of the benefits of a society that allows private property – he has a nice home himself – he has no real, rooted respect for private property as such. He believes that all the property that currently exists is a “common resource” to which “we” – whoever happens to be living in a defined geographical space – are entitled to use. His view of property rights is not a bundle of rights that contain the important right to exclude, which is all of a piece of the idea, as traditionally expressed, that an “Englishman’s home is his castle”. No: for him, he regards a home as what PJ O’Rourke has called a “gimme right”. As far as Mr Monbiot is concerned, if the “needs” of X are what they are, then so much the worse for whoever happens to be owning a particular piece of property deemed to be “too big”. And why stop at seizing property in stuff like buildings? After all, the skills and abilities we bring are, according to his view, also a “common resource” that everyone has a claim on.
Another problem here, which leads to my point about Monbiot’s fanatical Greenery, is his zero-sum approach to life generally that this sort of comment exhibits. Rather than think of say, freeing up planning laws and the like to encourage more home-building – a perfectly sensible idea in my view – he argues for more control. And like a lot of Greens, he presumably does not favour laissez faire solutions to shortages of things like housing because he fears there are just too many damn people in the world, and in this small island of the UK, anyway.
One a point of detail, forcing owners of homes to let out one or more rooms to whoever demands them would require a monstrous government bureaucracy of some kind. I can only shudder at the sort of issues that would get thrown up by administering such a scheme.
Mr Monbiot is an enemy of liberty, that’s for damn sure. He may be a clown in the eyes of many here, but remember that this guy is taken seriously in certain quarters. Such nonsense can never be attacked often enough.
As an aside, this book by Richard Pipes, looking at the very different traditions of Russia and the UK concerning property, is well worth reading.
Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
Where Tony Blair had no reverse gear, and Lady T was not for turning, Mr Cameron has a full gearbox and power steering that allow him to execute swerves and three point turns.
– Benedict Brogan
… yet again I find myself pondering adding a “No shit Sherlock” category… maybe more decorously listed as “I told you so” or some such.
George Osborne was recently in New York, soaking up plaudits for boldly leading Britain into fiscal austerity at a time when, apparently in contrast, America’s feckless political elite has allowed the national debt to balloon. The problem is that UK austerity, so far at least, is a myth.
November’s national accounts, released last week, were shocking. Government spending last month was sharply up on the same month in 2009 – yes, up! British state borrowing is still escalating, with the national debt rising very quickly.
– Liam Halligan.
However I do rather roll my eyes at the word ‘shocking’ as it has been screamingly obvious what was happening for quite some time. Sometimes I think Samizdata needs a category called ‘No shit, Sherlock’. How anyone could have thought Cameron’s dismal followers were ever serious about actually cutting back the state is hard to fathom.
I’m against the rise in student fees… ‘cos it ain’t fuckin’ high enough
– Thaddeus Tremayne
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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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