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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It is rare for the Prime Minister to provide an insight into his intellectual worldview. Writing in the Observer today, Blair details his views on civil liberties and his differences with the liberal tradition.
These [summary] powers have a strong philosophical justification, from within the Labour tradition. Social democratic thought was always the application of morality to political philosophy. One of the basic insights of the left, one of its distinguishing features, is to caution against too excessive an individualism. People must live together and one of the basic tasks of government is to facilitate this living together, to ensure that the many can live without fear of the few.
That was why it was important that rights were coupled once again with responsibilities. As Tawney once put it: ‘what we have been witnessing … is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations’.
Blair argues that the tradition of social democracy applies “morality to political philosophy”, with the unspoken implication that other traditions are unable to do so. This is accompanied by an attack on individualism with a phrase of much potential: that government ensures “the many can live without the fear of the few”.
Recent history has appeared to demonstrate that it is the few who should live in fear of the many. It is not surprising that the Left views the majority as a moral virtue.
At about 6 am this morning I woke up startled by the sound of a distant thud. It turns out that the noise was caused by a huge explosion at a fuel depot in Hertfordshire to the north of London. A massive plume of smoke is pouring into the sky and traces of it can be seen above the skyline in central London, dulling what would otherwise be a magnificently blue, bright sky.
So far, no-one has been killed in the blast, which happened in an industrial estate rather than in the midst of a densely packed area of housing. Thank goodness. The police are so far treating the blast as an accident. We shall see. The M1 motorway leading north has been closed. If anyone reading this has any travel plans, I’d give the Hemel Hempstead area a miss.
James Bartholomew, author of ‘The Welfare State We’re In’, agreed to face a panel of unsympathetic critics in a debate held at the London School of Economics and arranged by BBC Radio 4. Whether the structure of this debate met the guidelines for impartiality laid down by the BBC is a moot point, but James Bartholomew conveyed the major points of his argument, despite interruptions from the panel and the chair that truncated the majority of his argument.
Nicholas Barr is Professor of Public Economics at the European Institute, LSE and author of The Economics of the Welfare State. Edward Davey MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Education, MP for Kingston and Surbiton and a contributor to the recent Orange Book – Reclaiming Liberalism. Niall Dickson, formerly Social Affairs Editor for the BBC, is now Chief Executive of the King’s Fund. Professor Pat Thane is director of the Centre for Contemporary British History, and author of The Foundations of the Welfare State.
None of the panel disagreed strongly with the facts presented by James Bartholomew. It was clear that disagreement stemmed from two fundamentally different worldviews rather than disputing the contemporary effects of the welfare state. Whereas some consider functional illiteracy of 20% to be an indictment of state education and a sufficient reason for its abolition, the panel viewed this failure as room for improvement. Without making the trite comparison of managerialism versus morality, the effect of politics as the art of the possible on individual lives was made very clear.
The poor may have suffered from insecurity concerning health care before the welfare state came into existence. However, if they felt fear over paying for their treatment, this has been replaced by the fear that they may not be treated at all due to healthcare rationing or professional triage. During his talk, James Bartholomew echoed Perry de Havilland and told the audience that the state is not your friend. He showed the blight that the welfare state has wrought on the lives of many individuals and stated that there were no panaceas which could reverse the social and cultural damage.
More thoughts from the speaker can be found here.
So the Boy Wonder (same age as yours truly, gulp) has been elected leader of the Conservatives. We have been fairly rough on David Cameron these past few weeks, concerned that Cameron does not seem to stand for anything much other than a desire to be jolly nice, moderate and sensible (ie. to maintain the status quo with a blue tinge). Well, I am at least prepared to repress my concerns for a while and see how he does. With the economy showing signs of cracking under the increasingly oppressive Chancellorship of Gordon Brown, and with Blair seemingly unable to push through his reforms, the time is ripe. Luck has a huge bearing on politics and as Bonaparte said of his generals, luck is as important as ability. The media has certainly been gushing about him, which again gives me the jitters. If the Tories are to win, they must regain some of their lost territory in places like the West Midlands, not just the salons of Islington.
We shall see.
UPDATE: I seem to have hit the post button almost at the same time as our sainted Perry. Great minds think alike!
David Cameron is the new Tory leader. So we have a ‘choice’ between two Blairites.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this development 
The British Government can solve its pensions crisis. But it doesn’t want to. Having spent all their lives trying to persuade everybody that they can offer something for nothing because somebody else is paying, all policians find themselves unable to break the habit. Having quietly seized exorbitant benefits at the general taxpayer’s expense (on the excuse that they are poorly paid, which isn’t true now, if it ever was), public sector employees are not letting go.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
– R.Kipling
An unfunded national pension scheme avaialable to the majority of the population is much like a Ponzi scheme: a pyramid ‘investment’ trick that is illegal everywhere–except when operated by governments. It depends on ever more suckers paying over ever more money (in this case, compelled by taxation) to finance the unfeasible returns promised to those entering earlier. The trimming of the Turner Commission just beds the con in deeper. We can expect a trivial postponement to distract attention from more pensions, more taxation, and a bigger future squeeze.
The simple (and only) solution is to follow the example of Bismarck when he invented the national pension. Convert an unsustainable Ponzi into a Tontine: a survivor benefit scheme. The pensionable age must be raised above the expectation of life, so that most people do not live to receive it. How much above depends on the benefits one wants to grant.
The corollary is even more unpalatable to politicans. The much more generous unfunded pensions for public sector workers, including themselves–unless they are to take an ever greater and ever more resented share of national income–must begin at *older* ages than the open national scheme. Until civil servants retire at 80+, and unfunded pensions for the general public start at 75, we will know the government (with both sizes of G) only cares about looking after its own, and that the vapourings about “crisis” are a just a smokescreen for more control over private income and savings.
MP Andrew Dismore has blocked attempts to clarify the law on self defence in Britain being proposed by MP Anne McIntosh, because he thinks it would be ‘vigilante law’.
Well I have thought for some time now that non-state use of force in defence of life, limb and private property is exactly what is needed in this country and to make no apology for robustly defending what is yours. Take the law into your own hands because it is indeed yours to take, not Andrew Dismore’s to deny. I realise that if you are old, infirm or a small woman living alone, the fact the state has disarmed you means you have no option whatsoever but to surrender your property and just pray the criminal(s) will not harm you, but those of us still physically able should be encouraged to use whatever weapons they can find at hand to assert some self ownership. Just do not make the mistake of calling the Police in Britain after the fact if you can possibly avoid it as they work for the likes of Andrew Dismore and are not there to serve you.
You may not have the legal right to fight back effectively, but you will always have the moral right to defend yourself and what is yours. Look at it this way, if you are the only one left alive after some son of a bitch breaks into your house, well, that means it is going to be hard for him to sue you or contradict your version of events, doesn’t it. If they do make it out, then just clean up the mess and deny everything.
Vigilante law? As so many members of the political class in Britain leave us with little alternative, I am all for it. When the state fails in its most fundamental duty, it is time for society to remember whose law it really is. If you are able to, fight back, just keep in mind you will be fighting back against the state as well and act accordingly when the plod turns up a few hours or days later to ‘protect’ you.
I receive many emails from something called UK Conservatism, but fear that if I try to stop them I will then receive further emails about sex toys, Asian ladyboy brides and such. So they keep coming.
The latest from UKC contains this easily misunderstood question, from the probably quite soon to be late Lord Tebbit:
The party recently fought its worst campaign ever. It offered cleaner hospitals, better schools, safer streets, limits on immigration and almost imperceptible tax cuts. But who campaigned for dirtier hospitals, worse schools, less safe streets or unlimited migration?
Yes. That is what the Conservative Party should have been saying!
I know what Tebbit meant, and he has a point. But meanwhile, seriously, if we did have a government committed to supplying “dirtier hospitals, worse schools, less safe streets” and “unlimited migration”, we would almost certainly end up with cleaer hospitals, better schools, safer streets, and the ideal immigration policy consisting of lots of the right people and far fewer of the wrong ones. Why? Because when we all know that the government is not handling a problem, there is a decent chance that the right things will then get done. By mere people.
It is always fascinating to watch one’s enemies twisting and turning on the spiky contradictions of their own ideology. It is also rather interesting to see your enemies turning on each other.
As Lord May of Oxford put the boot in to environmental activists during his speech to the Royal Society:
[He] said that environmental campaigners risked holding back the fight against climate change with an absolutist approach that refused to consider nuclear power.
“I recognise there are huge problems with nuclear, but these have to be weighed against other problems,” Lord May said. “This has to be recognised as a problem by what you might call a fundamentalist belief system.
And we also get to see Tony Blair’s speech to the Confederation of British Industry being disrupted by Green activists.
The Greens say we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and yet when the government tries to adopt nuclear power to do exactly that, the Greens are up in arms.
Face it, unless the world agrees to regress to a pre-industrial level of technology with commensurate mass death of ‘surplus’ modern levels of population, the Greens will never be satisfied. Never mind that most climate change is probably caused by natural processes.
At least these guys are honest about what they really want.
It is not hard to understand why the government does not regard mugging as so serious a crime that it should always lead to a jail sentence, provided “minimal force” is used.
As the government have long made it clear that people should not defend their property with force against people who try to take it by force, they regard just handing your money and goods over as sensible and responsible behaviour. In short, they think the way to prevent violent crime is to stop people resisting and therefore remove the need for muggers to use actual violence rather than just the threat of it.
In other words, they want to make muggers more like tax collectors. Is that really so surprising?
It has been a sad few days in British sport, which has lost arguably the most talented football player these islands have produced in George Best. He died, as many people will know, a few years after having a liver transplant necessitated by a long history of alcohol abuse. For those unfamiliar with his story, he was born in Belfast and played at Manchester United in one of its most successful periods in the mid- to late 60s but left top-class football aged only 27.
I am glad that in most of the coverage about him, the focus has been on the football rather than the messy personal life. And what a fantastic player he was! If even Brazilian maestro Pele called him the greatest player in the world, then who are we to demur? I was born in the year – 1966 – that Best gave what aficionados and team-mates reckon was Best’s finest display, demolishing Portugese side Benfica with two goals, the second involving a mazy run past several defenders before sticking the ball into the back of the net.
Best was an alcoholic, which some people regard as a disease that one is born with rather than a condition over which people, possessed of free will, have control. Interestingly, I get the impression, by reading some of Best’s own remarks, that he was a man in control of his own destiny and did not, as far as I am aware, choose to play the victim card. There is no doubt, though, that some people have found it hard to conquer the bottle, although others, such as Tottenham soccer ace Jimmy Greaves, managed to give up on booze and preserve their health and live into a ripe old age.
Anyway, I expect DVDs of Best’s football brilliance to be hot sellers this Christmas. May he rest in peace.
Via Stephen Pollard, I read this:
The cost of staging the London Olympic Games in 2012 is set to double. Senior officials organising the Games say construction costs have been seriously underestimated by Tessa Jowell’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Being a council tax paying Londoner I read on, with a tensed-up face, and I did not have far to go for the bad news. Here is the next damn sentence:
A rise in costs could spell financial disaster for Londoners.
And is this really going to help?
The Observer has learnt that the government has in recent days appointed consultancy KPMG to begin a reappraisal of its Olympic costs.
Which reminds me of that committee that Lenin set up to look into the problem of bureaucracy.
Building the Olympic Park in east London was projected to cost £2.37bn. The city’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, assured Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that any overruns would be met by Londoners. On these figures that amounts to an extra £1,000 per household. This means a steep rise in council tax is on the cards in London, as the Chancellor is unlikely to meet any shortfall.
The price of that priceless look on Chirac’s face is starting to become a bit clearer, and a lot higher.
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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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