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 have a number of times mentioned that some members of the Democratic Party have been dishonestly spreading rumours about a pending draft. They imply it is being planned behind the scenes in the current administration and will be unveiled after the election if Bush wins. In fact, the only activity behind the noise is a Bill backed by a handful of extremist Democrats and introduced by Democratic Party slavery advocate Charles Rangel.
I have been reading quotes from DOD briefings for almost four years now. Every time the issue comes up, DOD officials diplomatically state it is a bad idea and they do not want it. I believe the continuing appearance of this outright lie all across America is beginning to wear bureaucratic diplomacy thin. Here is a portion of the transcript of Donald Rumsfeld with Albuquerque’s KKOB-AM Radio host Jim Villanucci:
Q: We’re talking with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the
Pentagon. Secretary, there’s been a lot of discussion, I know, and this is a very
political question, but I’ll ask you anyway, because it will become your decision,
ultimately. Will there be a draft? Do you see any present situation where we
might reinstitute a draft in the United States?
SEC. RUMSFELD: There isn’t a chance in the world. It is clearly mischievous. Somebody is going around spreading that nonsense. There’s a couple of congressmen and maybe a senator or two who’ve put in bills to reinstitute the draft. I am dead set against it. President Bush is dead set against it. It simply is not going to happen. And the perpetrating of that myth I think is unfortunate. We don’t need a draft. My goodness, we’ve got, what, 295 million people in this country and we’ve got a 1.4 million on active duty. We can certainly attract and retain the people we need and we are attracting and retaining the people we need. And if we can’t, all we have to do is change the incentives, so that we are a more attractive place for people to come.
The next time someone tells you the current administration is going to re-instate the draft… tell them their source is an intentional, blatant and provable liar.
Legal experts, property developers and lovers of liberty ought to be eagerly waiting for the outcome of a key US court ruling on what is known as the law of eminent domain. The ruling could kill off the practice in which property developers, in alliance with local politicians and bureaucrats, can push property owners from their possessions, seize the land and re-develop it, usually in the hope of grabbing higher tax revenues than was the case before.
I am not an expert on the fine print of this law as it applies in the United States, and readers ought to look at works such as the excellent book by Richard Epstein on the subject. What is clear, however, is that for years Americans, like Britons, Frenchmen, Germans and others, have been living in a world increasingly resembling the law of the jungle rather that of a liberal civil order when it comes to the treatment of property.
I honestly do not know how the ruling will turn out. Essentially, contestants in the case are arguing against the idea that eminent domain can be exercised on commercial grounds. Hard-line defenders of property will, of course, argue that eminent domain does not exist even if the supposed use of property is for something required for ‘public use’, such as a port, military airfield or highway.
Here is a thought – this ought to be a classic ‘left-wing’ sort of issue. It is actually a good issue for libertarians to try to use to convince socialist types that property rights, understood in their fullest sense, are a protection for the weak and vulnerable, not the other way round. The old man in his shabby cottage who refuses to sell up to Big Gleaming Corp. is as much a hero of the free market order as any Ayn Rand character or 19th Century industrialist in a frock coat.
Side observation: I would be interested to know if the hugely loss-making Channel Tunnel link could have been built without compulsory purchase. Somehow I very much doubt it.
Thanks to the excellent Anger Management blog for the pointer.
Catching up with Croziervision, the other day, as you do, I came across this posting, which contained a kind reference to something I had said, which on further investigation proved to be an essay by me, attached as a comment to something Patrick himself had written earlier. There is nothing like the blogosphere for prodding you into writing, roughly and readily but as best you can, That Thing You Are Always Talking About.
Patrick did this to me by himself sketching out the Hockey Stick Theory thus:
What the hockey-stick model says is that often when the state intervenes whether by nationalisation, subsidy, taxation or regulation it will, every now and then, for a short time, improve matters. Then things start to deteriorate and eventually they end up even worse than they were in the first place. And the hockey stick? Imagine an (ice) hockey stick standing on a level surface. The blade represents the short up swing of state intervention and the handle the long subsequent down swing. I suppose to get the model just right you have to imagine the handle burying itself into the ground.
Or to put it another way, the state does this:
And, thus prodded, I then amplified, in the manner that follows. At the end, I even said that I ought to copy and paste this stuff into a Samizdata posting, but then I forgot about that. Now here it is. What follows is basically what I originally put in that comment, but I have changed a few things and added another hockey stick, so no italics. → Continue reading: How hockey sticks explain the relative attractions of statism and of free markets
So who’s the Girlie Man now?
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law a bill that will ban foie gras in California by 2012, unless a “girlie man” alternative to forcefeeding can be found to produce the delicacy.
I shall open my pot of inhumanely produced goose foie gras this weekend and savour it twice as much with a fine Sauternes. Next time I go to France I shall make a point of stocking up.
CNet.com has a round up of articles about RFID:
Privacy questions arise as RFID hits stores
Companies brace for privacy debate, as potentially intrusive applications arrive faster than expected.
European supermarket chain extends RFID push
Tesco will use the technology in more stores, focusing this time on tracking cases and pallets, rather than individual items.
Tracking technology gets a reality check
At Baltimore pow-wow, hype over new RFID technology is tempered by concerns about cost, privacy and quality.
With RFID, corporate might makes right
Retail powerhouses such as Wal-Mart gather in Baltimore to push development of controversial tagging technology.
IBM readies large RFID push
Big Blue plans to invest $250 million in a new business unit to support products and services related to sensor networks.
I get paid to write the occasional article about environment issues. One story which intrigues me is the often repeated claim that “Half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years”. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the source of much of this garbage.
Because half of all the world’s mammal species are supposedly in Australia, this equates to five species of mammal becoming extinct every year, or one mammal extinction every 2.4 months.
Not only can I find no reports of five mammals becoming extinct each year in Australia, but in 2003 a previously extinct species of wallaby was re-introduced to Australia from New Zealand. The UNEP media releases site contains no references to species becoming extinct, concentrating on announcements about hiring bureaucrats and how they spend money on studies. At least UNEP is honest about its priorities.
Are there really no mammals becoming extinct in Australia these days?
Libertarian types are all over the blogosphere, but you never actually meet any in real life, of course. So claim many people who have felt the need to inform me that the blog to which I occasionally contribute does not conform to mainstream thinking. I am not sure whether these people expect me to weep softly, wail loudly, or recoil in shock and horror when they share this revelation with me, but if they do, no doubt they walk away from our exchanges disappointed.
To me, the fact that individualists are thick on the ground in the blogosphere is no bad thing. I am not totally surprised that people whose views are not represented in mainstream media would take to their own media in droves, be it to connect to those like them or to communicate their ideas and beliefs to those who may not be familiar with such thinking. Usually, such blog-based conversations involve both of those objectives. For example, I would not liken Samizdata to a recruitment drive, but neither is it mere preaching to the choir. At the same time, Samizdata is not a love-in for those who share the same metacontext. When I read people writing about “what Samizdatistas believe,” I have to laugh: Some of the most fierce, raucous debates I have ever witnessed have taken part between Samizdatistas.
But a conversation I had this week got me thinking – and no, I am sure it is not an original thought – that the reason individualists may seem so hard to detect in day to day life is because many of them have decided to assign politics and related discussions to the circular file of their lives. To them, the system is broken and they do not wish to spend their lives talking about how it got that way, figuring out how to put it back together, or contemplating how much worse things are going to get. Beyond jaded, they just do not get involved in any way. These people may never have heard the terms individualist or libertarian, but they may well qualify for either of those classifications. And because they do not go around wearing any party’s badge on their lapel, or touting any party line that comes down the pike, it is easy to imagine that they do not exist.
And imagining as much is probably quite comforting to those who strictly adhere to party politics. As long as they are certain that their thinking is in line with some large consensus of public sentiment, then they have some hope and some delusion of accuracy and relevance to hold on to. Forced to choose between that and shunning political matters altogether, how much of a dilemma would any of us actually face?
Wal-Mart Stores, Procter & Gamble and other big companies pushing the electronic tracking tags said they’d use them only in warehouses to more easily locate and account for stock arriving in cases and palettes. By the time the merchandise hit store shelves, they’d have removed the tags. The placement of tags on items consumers actually take home was projected to be at least 10 years away, last year’s argument went. Some said it may never happen if costs remained prohibitive.
Though relatively rare today, RFID tags are marching toward stores and shopping baskets across the country–raising questions about the implications for consumers. Also experimenting with RFID are Albertsons, Best Buy, Target, as well as European chains Metro and Tesco. Elizabeth Board, executive director of the public policy steering committee for EPCglobal said during a panel discussion:
There is a concern that EPC (tags) can be tracked everywhere and that retailers want to track you at all times of the day. It’s not realistic, but it has caused a lot of confusion.
She expects that fears about privacy invasion will continue to be a public relations problem for the technology. RFID supporters must do more to dispel the myths and misconceptions surrounding it.
Retailers and consumer-goods companies are hesitant to agree to removing tags from items at the time of purchase for several reasons. One reason is that RFID tags could help with returns by exposing people trying to get a refund for a product they never really bought, or one they purchased from another store.
One of the valid concerns about RFID is what companies plan to do with all the detailed data they’ll be able to collect about consumers, said Daniel Engles, director of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Auto-ID Lab, an RFID research group.
There are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
– James Madison
The reports I am reading elsewhere indicate they have made it, although things got a bit dicey. From the sounds of it, they had RCS problems when they left the atmosphere. I do not know if Melvill regained orientation during the exoatmospheric flight or had to wait until the shuttlecock re-entry.
Early reports are that they made the altitude necessary for the X-Prize flight; now they have to do it again within the next two weeks. Hopefully the controls problem can be worked out.
It is a tribute to the design that the craft could tumble going out of the atmosphere and yet return intact. It is also a tribute to the pilot and an answer to those who think robots are the answer. Robots make craters. Pilots usually bring the ship back in one piece.
Now we wait for more detailed reports on the flight.
More It looks like the problem was not RCS. Melvill shut down the main engines 11 seconds early to stop the roll rate buildup. That sounds like some sort of main engine burn asymmetry. Again, we will just have to wait. But they do appear to have made the necessary altitude.
Update Melvill put the blame for the roll on himself. It was not a fault with the ship. Perhaps Melvill has just invented the space age equivalent of PIO (pilots will know what I’m talking about).
I just had a very short chat with ‘a trusted source’ 😉 out at the Mojave test facility. The weather is beautiful and the flight is expected to go. I welcome any of our honoured readers who work out there on the runway’s edge to report to us as events unfold.
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.
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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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