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 a sad reality that racism and xenophobia have not yet been totally eradicated from our planet. To that end, Ofcom – the regulator for the UK communications industries, which claims that it “exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age” – has admonished a sports commentator for daring to suggest that a non-native English speaker might not speak English perfectly. According to a nameless Ofcom spokesperson:
We believe the experienced presenter should have been more alert to the implications of his comment.
The implications being that some ridiculous government super-regulator will inevitably smear you with the intimation that you are a racist, and your employer will be forced to impress upon you the importance of “the careful use of language”. And gosh, isn’t our country and our planet all the better for this speech monitoring service our government provides at our expense?
On this day when the prize for private space flight was finally won I tuned in to the Conservative Party Conference – the Conservative Party is (at least since the Liberal party was taken over by radicals like Harcourt in the 1890’s) the closest thing we have to a party of private property and free enterprise in Britain.
Dr Fox (the Chairman of the Conservative Party) made the first speech. “We must reclaim the colours of the national flag from the extremists [I believe that Dr Fox meant the BNP], we must reclaim the Red, White and Blue” said Dr Fox whilst pointing to the great board behind him.
Unlike some people, I rather like this patriotic stuff (indeed I type this in sight of my own little Union flag). However the great board to which Dr Fox pointed was not Red, White and Blue – it was a blue board with black writing on it.
Now I have nothing against blue and black, they are the colours of the Estonian flag (a nation I much admire) and, in heraldry, blue and black are the colours of loyality and constancy (steadfastness) – things that the Conservative party lost in 1989 and is now (I hope) trying to get back to.
However, to the television viewers, Dr Fox and the people who cheered him in the conference hall seemed to be either colour blind or insane. I can only assume that what was seen by the people in the conference hall was different from what was seen by the people at home.
Perhaps the great board was a screen and at a key moment the Union flag appeared on it, and the television cameras did not capture the key moment… a plot by the BBC?. But it was all very odd.
BBC Radio Four (indeed any part of the B.B.C.) is not where one would expect to find support for liberty, but a few a days ago I heard, on the Radio 4 Today Program, a report on medical care.
According to the report private hospitals in India (including in Calcutta) offer British people medical care at least as good as that provided by the NHS, and in wonderful conditions (marble floors, everything clean rather than the dirt, and decay one finds in British government hospitals – thousands of people die every year in Britain from infections they pick up whilst in government hospitals) and at a small fraction of the cost of the (highly regulated) British private hospitals.
The Labour MP Frank Field (a man known for his honesty – hard to believe in a politician, but it is true in his case) came on to the program and claimed that a constituent of his was being left to go blind by the NHS, people are normally left to rot for long periods of time by the government medical service, but his sight was saved by sending him to an Indian hospital.
The price of his medical care (not including the cost of flying to India, I admit) was £50 – in Britain the medical care would have cost (according to Mr Field) £3000.
So the choices were – go to a highly regulated British private hospital (if you happen to have £3000), rely on government medical care (and go blind), or go overseas.
Being a Labour MP Mr Field wanted the NHS to pay to send people to private hospitals in India (they put administrative barriers in the way of this [“it is too far”] – although they are willing to spend far more money sending people to European hospitals), but this was the closest I have ever come to hearing both the BBC and a Labour MP condemn statism in health care.
Conservative Party main financial spokesman, Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, is a bright man, as I can attest – as well as being a very pleasant fellow – so he presumably has a valid reason for not spelling out what taxes he would like to cut or scrap, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. But a Tory administration must surely want to cut taxes at some point. Why else vote for them?
I trust and hope that Letwin’s coyness on the issue is not caused by the daft idea that any discussion of tax cuts is supposed to conjour up images of little old grannies left to sleep in the snow, no “schoolsanhospitals” and suchlike. Letwin needs to remember the old rule of not allowing political opponents dictate the terms of the debate. The Tories must break the false idea that tax cuts = End of Civilisation As We Know It. A little boldness can win dividends.
As the British Conservative Party starts its annual conference today, I am sure a lot of party activists and Members of Parliament will wonder how they can deal with the threat posed by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
The UKIP pushed the Tories into a miserable fourth place in last week’s parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, a seat vacated after disgraced former Cabinet Minister, Peter Mandelson, went off to Brussels for a cushy job in the EU (no doubt a place well suited to his talents).
UKIP has reversed its policy of not standing in election contests against euro-sceptic Tories. This looks like quite a calculated gamble to me. It means they have gone from being a bunch of slightly eccentric nuisances, as far as the chattering classes are concerned, to something a bit more serious.
The Tories to my mind have lost their bearings in the last six months. The decision by leader Michael Howard to flirt with Bush-bashing anti-Americanism, even to the point of letting colleagues work for the wretched John Kerry, looks like an act of supreme folly. But closer to home, the European issue remains the one the Tories have to get right if they want to survive as a serious political force.
It is going to be an interesting week for the Tories. And I am also looking forward to how the conference is covered by the blogs.
Last week I stated my hope that the UK Conservative Party was showing possible signs of courage, as well as smart political opportunism in voicing support for slashing, if not completely abolishing, inheritance tax. The posting triggered a lot of comments, most of them nice and supportive of my view, and only a few in support of the tax.
One commenter claimed that inheritance taxes were a good thing because they broke up rich dynasties which the commenter thought acted as a brake on economic dynamism.
Is this actually true? In the 19th Century, for instance, Britain was indeed a class-bound society in many ways and the richest families enjoyed a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of the humblest farm labourer. But Britain was in many respects an astonishingly vibrant and upwardly-mobile society too, often in certain respects even more so than today. Sir Robert Peel, the great Tory Prime Minister of the 1840s, was the grandson of a humble cotton weaver. Richard Cobden, one of the great advocates of free trade, a Member of Parliament and hero of classical liberalism, rose from conditions of great poverty. The list of rags to riches folk in Victorian history is long and makes for wonderful reading (it also puts my generation to shame, frankly.) Rich families, either deriving their wealth from the land or from elsewhere, were simply incapable of hogging the whole economic pie and denying any entry points to others.
As the writer Jenny Uglow pointed out in her marvellous book, The Lunar Men, the brightest and best entrepreneurs circumvented the old ‘Anglican establishment’ entirely on their way to creating the world’s first true industrial nation.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that those who inherit wealth may gain a temporary advantage which appears ‘unfair’, but in an expanding economy with new ideas, opportunities and ventures springing up all the time, it is hard to see how a person who has not inherited such wealth can say he has been denied a chance to make a good life for himself. (This, by the way, is not the same as privileges created by the State to favour select groups over others. That is a different argument).
And of course in reality rich businessmen over the centuries have realised that it was in their own interests to encourage and widen opportunities for the less well off, which is precisely why they endowed so many schools, libraries, musical orchestras, art galleries and the like, as well as political and cultural causes of all kinds. The ‘rich dynasties’ of Britain certainly did not, as far as I can see, act as a serious drag on the country’s economy. If there was a drag factor, it was more to do with the slow rise of collectivist economic doctrine towards the latter stages of the 19th Century, and the rise of State power and influence, which did much of the damage.
A final thought: some folk may imagine that inheritance taxes are okay because the persons affected are dead, so they would not care. Well, quite apart from the contempt this shows for the wealth a person has sought to acquire during a lifetime, it also rather ignores a simple point, which is that many people view their life goals as not simply to make themselves rich and happy, but also to build a better and fuller life for their children and grandchildren. That desire is itself a powerful incentive to work hard and create wealth, and is a spur to growth and the transmission of socially beneficial values.
The unfortunate but wholly predictable result of British government meddling in the affairs of the countryside:
Militant pro-hunt groups are targeting Labour MPs and government ministers in a growing campaign of abuse, threats and intimidation over the decision to ban hunting.
An MP had a large lump of concrete thrown through his constituency office window while the private homes of three MPs have also been targeted.
What about the root causes of the hunter’s anger and frustration?
The British Conservative Party is contemplating making a pledge to sharply cut inheritance tax as part of their election manifesto commitment, as reported here. That is fine as far as it goes and does at least hold out a glimmer of hope that the Tories are willing to name the sort of taxes they want to cut, if not scrap entirely.
But of course, inheritance tax needs to be abolished in toto. All taxes are bad -some libertarians regard them as forms of licensed theft – but this is a particulary bad one. It taxes a person twice on the income already earned or the profits made, and hits the laudable desire of parents to bequeath wealth to their offspring to help in later life. If the Tories have the conjones to get rid of this tax, they should make it part of a broader policy of cutting, and drastically simplifying taxes on savings in particular.
Inheritance tax is borne out of a mindset that holds that wealth and opportunity is essentially fixed, so that if person X inherits a million pounds, that person in some way gets an ‘undeserved’ headstart in life against person Y. But in a world when opportunities are changing and expanding, no such ‘headstart’ exists. As the late libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out, to hold this view is to regard human life like an athletics race around a fixed circuit towards a pre-determined finish line. Clearly, if life were like that, then an athlete given a headstart or has an unfair advantage (this explains why drug use is such a heated issue in the Olympics). But real life is not at all like that. It is, as Nozick pointed out, about different people pursuing different ends.
Also, consider this – if I do not ‘deserve’ to inherit any money from my father, then neither do you deserve my father’s wealth, either. So socialists who insist on seizing that wealth are in fact seizing something they do not ‘deserve’ in any meaningful sense. The logical thing for such egalitarians to do would be to destroy the wealth.
Finally, there are many incidental, utilitarian reasons for opposing inheritance tax, including the fact that if the law was scrapped, it would force thousands of people to do something more productive with their time and brains than negotiate the shoals and reefs of the tax code. It also encourage a long-term point of view in that it opens up the goal of not just getting rich, but enjoying the idea of making one’s children and descendants rich as well.
In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley refers to a major opinion survey. When asked the question of how they would help poor people with £200 pounds (about $360) only one per cent of the survey went for the option of giving the money to local government (even though this option said that that local government would have to spend the money on trying to help the poor) and ZERO per cent went for the option of giving the money to national government (even though, again, this option said that the government would have to use the money to try and help the poor).
The British public overwhelmingly opted for directly helping the poor themselves, or for giving the money to a private charity.
I know one can not trust opinion surveys, but it is possible that most British people are not really as collectivist as they sometimes seem.
At long last, the Liberal Democrats have promised to do something that will genuinely benefit the wider community:
The Liberal Democrats today vowed to deal with the “real” weapon of mass destruction, climate change, and put their environmental principles into action by making all future party conferences “carbon neutral”.
Yes, we can all look forward to a better world for our children if Liberal Democrats stop breathing.
When capital punishment was abolished in Britain in the 1960’s, the resulting public disquiet was mollified by assurances that convicted murderers would spend the rest of their lives in prison.
That assurance proved worthless. Over subsequent years, and by gradual degree, the span of ‘life sentences’ was whittled down to the point where a convicted murderer is now confined, on average, for between 10-12 years.
Apparently, even that is now far too draconian:
Some murderers could serve less than 10 years in prison under guidelines unveiled by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Woolf.
But it would only be in extraordinary circumstances – for example, if they had given themselves up before their crime had even been detected, he said.
The caveat of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ is a promise which will prove to be as valueless as the last one. Step-by-step and case-by-case, the defintion of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ will be widened to the point where convicted killers are routinely sentenced to spend a few hours exploring their inner child with a Court-appointed Outreach Counsellor.
Towards the end of the 19th Century the British State made a contract with its citizens the material terms of which required the individual citizen to surrender up their right to self-defence in return for the protection of the state which, by its agents, would both defend the citizen from harm and pursue and prosecute those who did (or attempted to do) the harm.
Gradually, but inexorably, the state has walked away from its side of that bargain. However, this would be no bad thing were the citizen likewise released from his or her obligations. If the entire contract was simply put in the shredder, it would, at least, leave us free to make our own arrangements for our self-defence and security. But this is not so. The citizen’s promises to relinquish the right and means of self-defence remain not only extant but zealoulsy enforced by the state which has decided that it does, indeed, take only one to tango.
The poor, willing, plodding, dutifully contracting citizen has now been placed in the worst possible situation: forbidden from defending their own life and limb and unable to call on anyone else to do so for them.
The perfect scenario for the perfectly predatory society.
One of the more shameful aspects of the British civil service is the contempt and indifference that it often shows towards former servicemen and women, often viewing their demands as an anachronistic embarrassment. This partially explains the lack of action given the foreseeable plight that over one thousand Commonwealth veterans now face in Zimbabwe.
This article in the Sunday Telegraph detailed the sad plight of veterans whose savings have been wiped out by Mugabe’s hyperinflation, whose lands have been confiscated by the war veterans and whose very lives are subjected to intimidation by ZANU-PF’S thugs. Their cause has been taken up by Col. Brian Nicholson of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League, who has observed the impoverishment of the middle classes under the Mugabe regime.
Mr Mugabe has already closed many of the best schools and forced most of the white farmers out of the country. Now Col Nicholson fears Zanu-PF supporters will turn on the British war veterans, ransacking their homes, intimidating and possibly killing them.
Some may argue that many of the veterans were supporters of Ian Smith’s regime and UDI in the 1960s. As such, they deserve no further support or succour from HMG. These arguments have no bearing on the current vulnerability of this group who are now being targeted because of their origins.
Col Nicholson is circulating his report to senior military figures and other “influential people” and wants them to press the Government to offer immediate financial help and to implement an evacuation plan.
He said: “We are doing our best but we can’t do it alone. If nothing is done these brave, elderly people who fought for the Crown in the Second World War, defending the freedoms we enjoy today, will die an ignominious death.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said there were “no plans” to evacuate British war veterans in Zimbabwe. He added: “If people are impoverished we would offer the appropriate consular assistance on an individual basis.”
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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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