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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…about The Daily Telegraph.
In an article called Bags of Sense apparently the ‘right wing’ Telegraph’ thinks it is okay for the state to tax us 10 pence per plastic carrier bag at supermarkets because:
Taxes are generally disagreeable. But this case is different. For one thing, the charge was not introduced as a surreptitious way of raising revenue. Nor has it had unintended consequences. Whereas the increase in tobacco taxes has led to smuggling, and rising fuel duties have encouraged hauliers to fill up across the Channel, the bag levy has altered consumer behaviour precisely as envisaged.
And so the Telegraph, which on one hand claims to be at the crusading vanguard of defending our civil liberties against the state with their ‘A Free Country’ campaign, is nevertheless happy with the concept that it is perfectly okay for the state to impose “changes to consumer behaviour” provided the objective is not really to raise revenue.
Sorry, but most taxes are not ‘disagreeable’, they are actually immoral theft backed by the threat of violence and this one is no different. I do not want the state having any say whatsoever in my private ‘consumer behaviour’. Of course one must keep in mind that The Daily Telegraph is a Tory newspaper, and thus actually has nothing against vast acts of statism per se, just so long as ‘The Right People’ are in control of them.
Bags of Sense? Bags of Bullshit actually.
I am referring to Harold Pinter, that well known playwright and signatory to the ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ campaign.
It seems he has avoided dying from cancer for a while, which I am sure will gladden the hearts of socialist mass murderers the length and breadth of Yugoslavia and Republica Serbska. I am sure his friends at the Tatler will be thrilled.
Vermin one and all.
A useful pointer for those of you determined to stem the spread of Tranzi ideology: it seems to rush in to fill a vacuum. The vacuum in question here is the British medical establishment in the form of The Lancet, its leading publication.
According to the Sawbones Union, what the world needs is a global body to direct economic development. Thus proving that just because someone is a doctor doesn’t mean they’ve actually got any brains.
The article includes this thigh-slappingly hilarious assertion:
“It says there is no consensus on the best policies for development, as there has been no scientific analysis of what works and what does not.”
Hmm, I diagnose an advanced case of Economic Illiteracy. I recommend that they be locked in a room with Paul Marks three times a day before meals. If symptoms persist, then I’m afraid that the condition is probably terminal.
If you like shooting guns for sport then it follows, as a matter of unalterable logic in today’s world, that you must be a nutter, a psycho, clearly not the kind of person to invite to dinner parties and definitely not in tune with today’s world. Well, that at least is the message given out by our ‘splendidly objective’ state-owned broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
In an excellent article in this week’s edition of the Spectator, Michael Yardley shows how Britons’ recent success in shooting competitions at the Commonwealth Games were blanked by the BBC.
I particularly liked this paragraph:
“Shooting by law-abiding individuals remains an icon of liberty and thus a target for destruction by the apparatichiks of the nanny state. Shooters understand what political correctness is about: the empowerment of the central state by means of the disempowerment of the individual. Accept the idea that the individual is not to be trusted, that there is a need for wardens of thought in a world without sharp edges or real risk, and the battle for freedom is lost. You might, meanwhile, like to take up shooting just because it is fun.”
Well, on the latter point, I am doing just that. I am off to Las Vegas in September to attend a Front Sight course, in what promises to be three days of excellent handgun shooting practice. It is such a shame that this noble sport cannot be practised in the UK.
It may have caught the eye of readers in the UK the other day that the Inland Revenue has redesigned its logo. Samizdata.net brings you a special preview!
In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really.
Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea).
Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards.
Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.
How else does one explain this?
Paul Marks is very ambivalent about what a previous Samizdata.net contributor called the Start Again Party, referring to a possible ‘libertarian’ breakaway faction within the British Conservative Party
I should be interested in this idea. I have been a member of the Conservative Party since 1980, and even when I went to join the party at the offices of the Kettering Association, I stated that I was a libertarian and have stated so often since then (oddly enough it is the older members of the association, some of whom have since died, who tended to know what a ‘libertarian’ actually was).
However, nothing I have heard so far attracts me. I would be interested in a party that wanted to cut taxes, government spending and regulations (I do not expect them to understand to monetary policy, the only people I have met in the Conservative party who understood monetary policy were very old indeed and are now almost all dead). People who call themselves ‘centre left’ and declare that the “debate is not about economics” do not interest me at all.
Aping the ‘New Left’ by trying to construct a politics based on an obsession with “race, gender and sexual orientation” (the Herbert Marcuse idea of building a new alliance to make up for the poor revolutionary showing of the old working class) is not sensible – although it may be profitable (there are lots of central and local government grants available for such activity).
When I pointed some of the above out to the Conservative group Connect (in reply to unsolicited e-mails) they did not reply. Had they replied I would have asked them the following question:
If you are people interested in ‘civil liberties’ particularly in the area of “race, sex and sexuality”, do you support the repeal of the various anti-discrimination laws, the closing down of the various government race and sex agencies, and ending the restrictions on free speech?
If people are interested in liberty in this area they should (logically) support freedom of speech and of association and non association. No one must be compelled to trade with or employ someone he does not wish to trade with or employ, and no person should be punished for expressing a negative opinion of a group of people.
If the reply to the above is “no we do not support the repeal of the anti discrimination laws, the closing down of the various government race and sex agencies… [and so on]” then please spare us all the rubbish about being in favour of ‘civil liberties’.
Paul Marks
Anyone following British news of late cannot helped but have notice that the main story gripping the folk of these islands at present is the deeply distressing disappearance of two little girls from their home village in rural Cambridgeshire.
After nearly two weeks, there is still no trace of them and nobody seems to have the first idea of where they are of what may have befallen them. I think it is fair to say that everyone is hoping and praying for the best but fearing the worst.
But some are just hoping and praying for pork:
“Senior detectives and politicians want to see the creation of a dedicated FBI-style task force to take responsibility for high-profile criminal investigations away from local police forces”.
Will the establishment of yet another state agency lead to the discovery of the whereabouts of these two children? Will it deliver them unharmed back to their respective homes? Will it stop this kind of thing happening again? The answer in all cases is ‘no’ but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that no trial or tragedy is missed as an opportunity by fans of big government to propose even bigger government as a solution.
If it transpires that some unspeakable ghoul has harmed these children, they have also harmed the civil society of which we are all a part. Those who seek to exploit this as an opportunity for a bit of bureaucratic empire-building are the ghoul’s fellow travellers.
As David Carr pointed out on these pages earlier, Britain’s state-subsidised British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is increasingly indistinguishable from a ward of the state. It is not a free standing commercial organisation which has to persuade folk to watch or listen to it out of their free will, but rather has a license fee which is essentially a tax on owning a television. Broadcasting peers around the world are therefore getting annoyed that the BBC seems bent on grabbing a share of their audiences despite it having the unfair advantage of a guaranteed income. An article in the Financial Times (sorry, link requires registration) indicated:
“In the past two years, that output has largely transformed the BBC from a largely domestic news service oriented around two analogue channels – BBC1 and BBC2 – to an international competitor among commercial satellite and cable broadcasters including CNN and Fox News of the U.S.”
One question which is begged by the FT article – if the BBC is posing such a threat and is not a fair commercial competitor, but one with coercive funding, how come domestic or international competition authorities like Mario Monti of the EU Commission are not kicking up a stink? Maybe they should do so. As a reporter for one of the oldest and greatest news services in the world (creep!), I feel I have a small stake in the matter!
Seven years ago I left the Conservative Party and have opposed it’s claim to be a vehicle for libertarian reform. I have contested two local elections as an Independent Libertarian candidate, and would do so again.
Now it seems that “libertarian” Conservative candidates and members of parliament believe that they may have to leave and set up their own party. I agree.
If the libertarians in the Conservative Party really take inspiration from John Galt, they should look at the closing passage of my alternative budget, published in 1995:
“There are many who will hope that the day never comes when a Libertarian Party is founded, to compete in the present electoral system. Whether or not we descend into the pit of party politics, I can see no reason for refusing to challenge those libertarians who remain in the Conservative Party. They are despised and feared by their supposed allies, and only suffered for their money and election time support.
Those libertarians who campaign for the Conservatives, without believing half of the bland collectivist verbiage they are told to support should ask themselves how far they are prepared to go, in the words of Francisco d’Anconia in “Atlas Shrugged”:
“[…] if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”
“I… don’t know. What… could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”
Paul Staines is skeptical but interested regarding stories of a break away faction in the Tory party
Two stories in yesterday’s Telegraph caught my eye and made me smile, the first hinting that disgruntled young Conservatives (young means they are all over 30, but below pensionable age) are organising to split the party.
The second, more interesting article, seemed to me to
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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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