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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One of the very few benefits of Tony Blair being Prime Minister is that he and his supporters are hollowing out the Labour Party :
Labour was in disarray about how to deal with its “serial rebels” after splits emerged among ministers last night over high risk plans to bar dissident MPs from standing at the next election.
Miss Armstrong – furious at mass rebellions over top-up fees, foundation hospitals and curbs on asylum seekers – wanted rebels to know they could be deselected by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee unless they pledged loyalty to Tony Blair.
To watch a time-honoured institution like the British Labour Party rip itself asunder is tragic. Just tragic.
One of the most potent anti-liberty memes has been that simple phrase, the “Wild West”. Wild as in lawless, violent, murderous. And one of the most potent pro-liberty memes is therefore, if only because it negates the first meme, the fact that the Wild West was, in the words of a famous Journal of Libertarian Studies article by Terry Anderson, the Not So Wild Wild West.
Here is another article, The American West: A Heritage of Peace by Ryan McMaken, dealing with the history of the West, and with the history of its history, in the form of Western novels and of course “westerns”, that is to say movies set in that Wild Wild West. This makes similar points to those made by Terry Anderson, and the one link in McMaken’s article is to Anderson’s.
McMaken ends his article thus:
Unfortunately for novelists and filmmakers, the American West was far less exciting than we have long been led to believe. The frontiersmen knew this themselves. In his old age, Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the most flamboyant architects of our perceptions of the West, openly admitted to lying about his violent exploits to sell more dime novels. He was, after all, wounded in battle with Indians exactly once, not 137 times as he claimed. And such tales are no doubt popular with many Americans today who seem increasingly open to believing almost anything about the West as long as it is simultaneously exciting and violent and bleak.
As with so many success stories, however, the story of the West is primarily a story of hard work, trade, tedium, and peace. The original mythmakers would have us believe that the settlement of the West was some kind of crusade. A war of righteous American legions against everybody else. In reality, there were no legions, and there was certainly very little righteousness.
There were men and women trying to make a better life for themselves, acting under their own will, and pursuing their own ends. On the other end of the spectrum, the purveyors of the new Western victimology would have us believe that these individuals brought with them messiah complexes and violent tendencies which would never be brought under control until “civilization” caught up with them. Yet, the messiah complexes, the “Manifest Destiny,” and the raging violence have always mostly resided in the minds of politicians, pundits, novelists, and movie directors; none of whom ever tamed any land harsher then their own back yards.
As I say, this is a familiar theme among libertarians. I thank my fellow London libertarian Patrick Crozier for alerting me to this piece, and I also checked through the archives here just to make sure that no Samizdatistas had already commented on it. This is familiar stuff – but familiar because so persuasive and important, and for that reason, worth any amount of supportive comment.
I occasionally buy a magazine called The Week, which contains, or so it claims on its front, “the best of the British and foreign media”. How pleasing to see Britain counting unapologetically for about as much as the rest of the world put together, and as the first of these two equals. Quite right.
Joking aside, on page 26 of the Feb 28 issue, there is this letter:
To: The Guardian
As a scientist of no fixed political position, but deeply involved in climate science and sea-level changes, I agree with Diana Liverman that we must exercise caution with the Earth. Likewise, we must not confuse facts and fiction, nor justify wishes with falsification.
As president of an international commission on sea-level changes and coastal evolution, I launched a Maldives research project. Observational data obtained by our international team of experts shows conclusively that the sea level is not rising, unlike fictions propagated by many who are not specialists.
Nils-Axel Morner, Stockholm University
I have read more grammatically perfect written English than this. I mean, what exactly does it mean to “justify wishes with falsification”? And although the attempted meaning of that final sentence is clear enough, its actual wording is something of a muddle. One expects better English from Scandinavians. Nevertheless, the most important bit, where it says that “the sea level is not rising”, is clear as clear can be.
That international commission would presumably be these people.
Interesting, I think. And good on The Guardian for printing the letter.
The raison d’etre for being a politician, or to use that wonderfully explicit Americanism, a ‘lawmaker’, is to pass laws. This is a topic I have often pondered before. Without that ability, a politician’s power of patronage completely disappears and with it, the funds given by people who want laws enacted that tilts the table in favour their personal or factional interests. To be a politician is to see the world as something to be legislated.
Thus when I hear that there is another push in the US to pass laws that will ‘control the availability of pornography to minors’, I feel the urge to nod sagely and marvel at yet another example of the triumph of image over substance. Now I know you expect the usual rant from me regarding how such legislation is a violation of both freedom of expression and freedom of association, but as any regular reader of Samizdata.net already knows my views on that, let me just point out that what really interests me is that ‘lawmakers’ are so happy to pass laws that have no chance whatsoever of making the slightest difference to the perceived problem at hand. This is nothing new of course, but it is sometimes worth reminding oneself why this happens so often.
The public appearance of a politico ‘doing something’ is far more valuable to that politico than actually addressing the problems they are called on to fix. Thus the actual efficacy of a measure, or even the prospect of the law passing, is often largely incidental to the decision to try and enact a law. Thus if the ACLU, EFF, FOREST or whoever get a bill strangled at birth, the politico can shake his head sadly at his enraged backers and say “Hey, I tried, but those slimy [civil rights/capitalist/pinko/faggot] S.O.Bs got in the way”.
And thus a sublimely fungible business like Internet pornography, much of which already runs off servers in Romania, Bangladesh and Brazil (places not known for giving a flying whatever what laws get enacted in the USA), is going to be effectively regulated by some American law how exactly?
Do the majority of legislators actually care? Probably not, other that a small semi-demented cadre of folks from the less well travelled American hinterlands who probably cannot conceive that the world is filled with people who regard the antics of American Lawmakers with mild bemusement or utter indifference.
The way to tell what is really happening by reading newspapers – which is not always very easy, is it? – is to look for what both sides in arguments agree about. And in Africa the reports which I read from time to time all seem to agree that educational standards are falling. The only argument is about whose fault that is.
Take this report, which I found on a google hit list from typing in, as is my occasional wont, “education”:
Principals in secondary schools in Ebonyi State have been identified as responsible for the falling standard of education in Post-Primary schools as they contribute significantly to examination malpractices in the state.
This was the view of members of State House of Assembly who spoke when the planning committee on the forthcoming Ebonyi State educational summit paid advocacy visit to the House in Abakaliki on Monday.
The House members frowned at the prevailing situation where many principals allegedly collect money from students and aid them during NECO and WASC examinations and even negotiate deals between the students and examination supervisors.
Sounds like Nigerian business as usual is proceeding as usual. I do not know anyone with direct experience of Nigeria who does not regard the place as the world capital of anarcho-capitalism, in a bad way. In London – which is now, like the Internet itself, infested with dishonest Nigerians – our default attitude is: crooks the lot of them, until an individual can prove himself an exception to the rule. Anyone not totally prejudiced against Nigerians, from the trust point of view, is totally ignorant.
At first the link to this report didn’t work, and my immediate inclination was to blame a Nigerian somewhere for taking a bribe instead of doing his job, but that may have been somewhat unfair. (And when I checked the link again before posting this, it was back to not working again. Bloody Nigerians!)
Not that those “House members” who “frowned” at all this are going to do anything about it. They are just higher up in the bribery chain.
My solution: make Nigeria anarcho-capitalist in a good way. Stop trying to have a government that does anything, because whatever government there is will be totally corrupt. Make the system that everything is for sale and everything negotiable official, including law and order. Then the place might work semi-reasonably.
But then again it still might not.
George Monbiot is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. Narcolepsy-inducing speeches, plaintive whining and bogus statistics are no longer enough to bring about revolution. And George should know because he has tried all three.
The time for mere words has passed and the time for action has begun:
The formula for making things happen is simple and has never changed. If you wish to alter a policy or depose a prime minister between elections, you must take to the streets.
I think George is making yet another big mistake if he thinks that sleeping in shop doorways and begging strangers for money is going to change the world. But who am I to argue?
Iraq’s US appointed ‘governing council’ has produced a deal on a new national constitution which was described by a Kurdish delegate as one of the most liberal and progressive documents of its kind to have been produced in the Middle East
A coalition official said the charter sets a goal, not a quota, to have at least 25% of the national assembly made up of women. It also includes protections for free speech, religious expression, freedom of assembly and due process.
Free speech and religious expression? Due process? No quotas? At this rate Iraq may end up with a more (classically) liberal constitution that several quota addicted regulatory western nations I would mention. No, not really, as the whole ‘Islamic dimension’ rather precludes that.
There is a long way to go and the devil is not just in the details but the implementation. Nevertheless, this is a very big step in the right direction.
Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (Ohlin Lectures)
Deepak Lal
MIT Press, 1998
I felt I had to read this book twice to fully appreciate its message, yet it is not difficult to read, indeed to do so is easy and a pleasure. It must have been equally a pleasure to attend the lectures on which it is based. But a large accumulation of facts, each one of which can be seen to be relevant to the thrust of the book, are difficult for the reader (or anyway, by me) to hold ready to slot into a logical structure to be reproduced in a satisfying synthesis in the memory when the book is finished.
As for the “unintended consequences” of the title, these are the results of social structures, political motives and individual actions which often have quite different aims: “We have known since Adam Smith that an unplanned but coherent and seemingly planned social system can emerge from the independent actions of many individuals and in which the final outcomes can be very different from those intended. All this, I hope, is uncontroversial,” writes the author (p. 7). Well, I hope so too – but “we” needed Hayek and the collapse of Communism to convince a lot of other people.
Lal seeks to find an answer to the question why the explosive development that characterised the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe, though he merely mentions Great Britain as its origin, without further analysis (p. 20). Why not in the other great areas of civilization – India, China or Islam? He proceeds to examine the civilizations that arose after the development of agriculture from about 10,000 BC; pastoralism as a parallel development is mentioned but left undiscussed, presumably because it is basically predatory on and if successful, assimilated into neighbouring agricultural civilizations.
Such civilizations typically reach an optimum through what Lal labels Smithian growth, where greater efficiency is generated by division of labour and by trade, capitalism being the result (according to the precepts of Adam Smith). They are, however, limited by having only human and animal power and organic, rather than mineral sources of fuel. The breakthrough to Industrial Civilization, technologically based with mechanical power and virtually unlimited energy from mineral resources, Lal calls Promethean growth and this was evolved only in Western Europe. The question is: why? → Continue reading: How did Europe reach Promethean growth?
Political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises.
– Teresa Heinz, aka Mrs John Kerry, on why she refused to run for office after her first husband’s death. Definitely First Lady material.
I have lately been reading a book of essays and review articles by Richard Dawkins, and mostly I agree with him, about most things. However, in his Foreward to a book called Pyramids of Life, which he here entitles “Ecology of Genes”, he indulges in an aside on the subject of the free market (p. 266 of my Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003 paperback edition):
As Adam Smith understood long ago, an illusion of harmony and real efficiency will emerge in an economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level.
Dawkins is not here making a point about the free market. He is merely seeking to punch home a point about how ecological systems are not designed, but instead merely present the illusion of having been designed, in rather the same way that individual species also appear to be designed, but also are not. In truth, species evolve blindly, with no designing intelligence determining their shape, and ecologies are but aggregates of species. It gets a bit more complicated by the end of the piece, because actually species do somewhat resemble ecologies, in that they too are coexisting aggregates of mutually sustaining genes. I may have explained that slightly wrongly, but in any case, my point here is not what Dawkins says about what he is really writing about and really knows about.
No. I am interested in what Dawkins says in that little dig at the free market (the “economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level”). Illusion of harmony? Adam Smith said a great deal more than that. The free market does not just look harmonious and efficient, Smith said. It is harmonious and efficient. This is no mere illusion. → Continue reading: A surprising aside by Richard Dawkins about the free market
The Office of Fair Trading (the name being a splendid example of British irony in action) has ordered 60 private schools in the UK to hand over documents for an inquiry into alleged fee-fixing in violation of the 1998 Competition Act.
The OFT’s move provoked protests from the Independent Schools Council, which said it had “serious concerns about the protracted nature of this investigation and the effect it may have on schools”.
However, the ISC appeared to acknowledge that some schools may have fallen foul of a change in the law, but blamed the Government for failing to keep them informed.
Yet again we see that the scope and burden of state regulation is such that it is almost impossible for businesses to avoid breaking some laws unless they employ a ruinously huge staff of lawyers and ‘compliance officers’. Of course the very notion that the state, which imposes vast distorting pressures throughout the economy, can be an arbiter of ‘Fair Trading’ is almost beyond parody. As the Angry Economist said the other day:
Now, I would be the last person to claim that markets always produce good results. Some problems are hard for markets to solve simply because they are hard problems. Pointing to a problem which is hard for markets to solve doesn’t automatically mean that solution-by-government will be better. It may turn out to be that government interference will produce a better result (pareto optimal) than peaceful cooperation. I allow that as a possibility at the same time that I doubt it will ever happen, once all costs are accounted for.
The trouble is, as economies are complex networked systems, that it is not always obvious how this law over here buggers up that market over there. The distortions are often not a single causal step away and thus might as well be completely unrelated unless you are willing to take the time to really look at why things happen the way they do… and in most political systems, it is usually easier to just pass another law.
Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism
Peter Schweizer
Doubleday, 2002
“It’s surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit.” This lettered sign stood on Reagan’s desk during his presidency and since it reflected his attitude, he cannot have worried much that his own part in the downfall of Communism has been seriously underestimated, a judgement which Peter Schweizer labours to correct in this book. For its theme, Reagan’s War, was the war against communism. By leaving out other aspects and events which did not touch on it – Israel, the Palestinians, the Lebanon, the Falklands, or the home economy – an exaggerated impression may have been given of Reagan’s singlemindedness. Even the inclusion of the assassination attempt, so nearly successful, is with an emphasis on Reagan’s belief that he had been preserved by God to conduct this war.
Reagan began political life as a Roosevelt-admiring Democrat. He had been aware of the attempt by communists to dominate and subvert the American film industry as early as 1946 and become involved in countering it, almost certainly sidetracking his career as a film star. The Korean War (1950-3) reinforced his attitude and, while still a Democrat he campaigned for Eisenhower, though disappointed later by his lukewarm anti-communism, and even less impressed by Nixon. This was also the time when anti-anti-communism became intellectually fashionable, Reagan encountering it when he was hired by General Electric to host and act in GE Theatre on television. Travelling round the country as the company’s roving ambassador to its plants and business contacts he was able to give speeches entirely based on his own views, unhampered by any kind of censorship. Schweizer distances Reagan from Senator McCarthy, who, he mentions, was initially supported by John F. Kennedy and never censured by him (p. 37). Reagan met Nancy Davis, who became his second wife (after his first wife Jane Wyman left and divorced him) through being asked to exonerate her of communist connections, apparently a case of mistaken identity. → Continue reading: “Reagan was the main author of the victory …”
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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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