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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I was going to write a piece with that title (assuming the allusion would spare me from discipline for scattering the star-field with apostrophes) but it seems Richard Tomkins in the FT has done it first, and, almost certainly, better.
However, that’s a subscription-required piece, so I will rehash my main thoughts for those who do not subscribe, and do not still have a venial physical paper habit like mine.
I was dumbstruck by the general soft welcome among free-market types for Alastair Darling’s hints at individual travel charges by satellite. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the only word that springs to mind is – “suckers”.
Just because a minister says something is “road pricing” does not mean it is a real live example of a market mechanism. In fact, when a minister in the current UK government says something, one would have thought that by now most people would be looking for the misrepresentation. If the minister seems to be saying something, then the truth is likely incompatible with the impression. → Continue reading: Do not ask the price, it is a tax
I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator).
So where did the reference to the “Dick Durbin slanders our boys” come from? Seriously, I’d like to know.
I posted similar thoughts over here.
It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn’t overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech.
Let us not blame Gordon Brown for everything. He has learnt the lessons of his predecessors. The wrong lessons.
Compare:
Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day:
[…]
And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt.
And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.
And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. (Genesis, Ch.41)
And,
I announced that I had no proposals to touch on the ‘anomalous but much-loved tax-free lump sum’
[…]
The side offensive began with the imposition in 1986 of a statutory limit on the size of pension-fund surpluses. This was much more difficult for the pension lobby to fight, and as a result I was able to get it on to the statute book. The dramatic improvement in the financial climate of the previous three or four years meant that many occupational funds had accumulated assets far in excess of those needed to honour their liabilities to their pensioners – in other words, and even on the highly conservative basis used by pension fund actuaries, the funds were heavily in surplus. This was not simply due to inadvertence. For these excess funds enabled companies to accumulate income, free of liability to Corporation Tax, in a gross fund
[…]
The 1986 reform put an end to this: no undue surpluses could be created, and existing surpluses would have to be run down over a period to a maximum of 5 per cent of total liabilities.
[…]
The course taken by most companies was the employer’s contribution holiday, whose economic effects were a rise in company profits (and cash flow) and thus in Corporation Tax receipts, coupled with a fall in recorded personal saving, since employers’ pension contributions are officially classified as personal savings. (Nigel Lawson, “The View from No.11”, Bantam 1992)
And saith the chief butler to Pharaoh, pay unto Joseph no mind. For the tax-gatherers counsel that ye take any fat kine that ye find among the people and slaughter them. The meat of the unjust surplus shall feed the priests of your temple. If there be famine the people will gnaw on old bones. And they will be weak and not rise up. But the tax-gatherers will be fat and glorify Pharaoh’s name.
Attention all petty, vindictive snitches everywhere, your country needs you:
New powers effectively criminalising smoking in public were announced by the Government yesterday, with the minister in charge promising an “intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law”.
Informers will be encouraged to report breaches of sweeping bans on the habit, in which company smoking rooms will be outlawed and places such as bus shelters and the outsides of office blocks made no-smoking areas.
Very little encouragement will be required as there will be no shortage of willing and zealous ‘informers’.
What a horrible place this country is becoming.
Jack Whitham of the University of York offers the code for rather a snazzy self updating banner. (Be warned, you may have to edit out some carriage returns if you cut and paste. I did.) It looks like this:
Hospital patients here in the UK are occasionally known to get rather tetchy about the waiting times and the bureaucracy. But, thus far at least, none of them has seen fit to take their complaints this far:
Israel says a Palestinian woman arrested carrying explosives at a Gaza checkpoint planned to blow herself up in an Israeli hospital.
Wafa al-Bis, 21, was stopped on her way to receive treatment for burns at the Beersheba hospital which Israel says was her intended target…
In an interview shown on Israeli television, Ms Bis said her “dream was to be a martyr”.
Call me old-fashioned but I reckon that even in this crazy, mixed-up world most people making a trip to the hospital dream about leaving it alive.
Still, I am sure things will return to normal the very moment the Palestinians get their own state.
This story raised a dry smile.
I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo.
The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had “achieved neither”, she admitted.
“Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she said.
The BBC’s Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were “immensely risky”.
Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.)
As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which “hate America”. As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever.
Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see.
President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month.
I had all kinds of plans of Things To Do over the weekend, but instead I spent my time following the news, with growing disbelief, of Australia losing two cricket matches, yesterday against England which was a bit of a surprise, and on Saturday against Bangladesh which was a cricket earthquake. The Aussies will probably pull themselves together by the time the test matches come around, because they are, after all, the Aussies, the best cricket team in the world. But they have now lost four games in a row, which is quite a hiccup by their standards. They lost the twenty over thrash against England last Monday, heavily, and then they lost to Somerset in a fifty-over warm-up game. And now they have lost these two games. As you can imagine, the British media are having a fine old wallow. → Continue reading: Are the Aussies at last becoming fallible?
“Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to lead the World Bank could turn out to be the right and inspired choice, following on the heels of John Bolton’s nomination as US ambassador to the UN. Both are political realists who appreciate the power of the USA to provide the global Pax and promote a liberal international economic order. Both are sceptics of international organisations and have no time for global-governance chatter. Now Mr Wolfowitz should marry his political realism with economic liberalism. The World Bank should promote markets and economic freedom in the developing world, but with more modest, pared-down means and ends. It should emphasise information-sharing, the exchange of ideas, policy surveillance and technical assistance. But its power of the purse through project and programme lending should be overhauled and kept within strict limits. And global-governance fantasists should be told where to get off.”
– Dr Razeen Sally of the London School of Economics in the report 2005 and Beyond: The Future of Trade, Development & International Institutions (PDF)
Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:
Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?
Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir…
Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?
Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being ‘culturally inclusive’ by choosing a non-European name!
“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.”
– The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is.
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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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