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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Paul Staines thinks Iraq should give Russia and France exactly what they are owed…
Bringing Democracy to Iraq may prove difficult if the Americans are wary of the potential result; namely Iraq voting to become Iran-lite. But bringing prosperity should prove easier. The dispatch of a corrupt gangster-regime of looters can only assist. David Plotz writing over at Slate makes some good market orientated points.
But why do I have the suspicion that a Washington written program devised by the likes of the World Bank and IMF might be less than turbo-charged. If we go from warfare to welfare for Iraq, the outcome will be a burden on Coalition nation taxpayers as well as Iraqi proto-capitalists.
Privatisation of the oil fields is being painted by those who marched against a ‘war for oil’ as if its Bush’s personal peace dividend. But it seems to me eminently sensible and appropriate. Split the oil fields up by region, privatise ’em and give ’em to the people.
If it can not be done by direct mass privatisation via a Thatcherite give-away, with every Iraqi citizen/stock holder receiving an annual dividend check, then set up trust funds chartered to pay dividends for infra-structure capital projects that directly benefit the people. Maybe they can securitise the trust’s future earnings to get up front capital to finance urgently needed projects immediately: Iraqi owned and inviting to badly needed foreign capital, a win-win for everyone. Just make sure that the oil trusts are transparent, with contracts public knowledge so that corruption can be thwarted. George Soros’ Publish What You Pay NGO is one of his best ideas.
As for Iraq’s debts, its obviously a matter for the future government of Iraq whether they honour them or not. But I suggest they repay Russian debts with easily and cheaply sourced Czarist bonds. Chirac’s contracts will of course be subject to some ‘re-negotiation’ by the newly democratically elected government of Iraq. Payback can take many forms, monsieur.
Paul Staines
Paul Staines wants to shine a light into the closet and see who is in there… no, not that one!
There are a lot of libertarians who are modest and in the closet. Often they just find it awkward to explain there views on politics, philosophy or economics if, for example, they work for the Inland Revenue. I can sympathise. Its hard for a libertarian to justify working as a civil servant of any kind, but such are the compromises of real life.
It can embarrassing to questioned as to your attitude to a number of issues in many situations, drugs, gun ownership, and the abolition of the National Health Service may not assist your job application to become the over-paid Chief Executive of the local Health Trust.
I disapproved of Tatchell’s ‘outing’ of closet gays so it would be hypocritical to advocate outing closet libertarians. It strikes me that it still might be beneficial to point out those people who have publicly identified themselves as libertarians. It would highlight that there are more of us about, that we are not all obsessed with arguments about lunar property rights and may even assist in networking.
So I’ll kick off with the first of what I suspect will be a huge number of self-identified but unrecognised right-wing libertarians with Tony Parsons, ex-husband of Julie Burchill and author of “Man and Boy”… and Hans Snook, Orange Telecom’s visionary CEO who is a Randian… and Microsoft bashing Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems is one of us.
Any more?
Paul Staines
And if you read through this Programme Complaints: appeals to the Governors (pdf file: go to page 8 for the best bits), you can find exactly how they do see it. I love this little gem:
- [E]ven if the two men were involved in terrorist acts, it did not follow that the BBC should necessarily have referred to them as “terrorists” rather than “militants” […]
Read that again… slowly. And again. Once more. Okay? 
Now substitute the words ‘rape’ and ‘rapists’ for ‘terrorist acts’ and ‘terrorists’, and then replace ‘militants’ with ‘sexually forceful’. Read the whole document to get the context of the actual remarks, but do you see where I am going with this?
I would care a whole lot less if these ‘gentlemen’ were not being funded with my appropriated money.
Tony Martin will not be released from jail. He will remain inside for the crime of defending his property for the full five year period of his sentance (he was initially sentanced to life).
The people who make up the parole board which has just decided that he poses an unacceptable threat to people who may in the future break into his home are wonderful examples of what Sean Gabb describes as The Enemy Class.
I strongly suspect their treatment of Tony Martin, found guilty of shooting dead a serial burglar in August 1999, has more to do with the fact he refuses to apologise or acknowledge any wrong doing in his act of defending his property from predators. That a group of parole board members whose salaries are paid by the state predating taxpayers should think that way is perhaps not such a surprise.
As I said before, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. As the political process in Britain has decayed to the point that there appears to be no political cost to the established power elite for the de facto criminalisation of self-defence (never mind that the state can gun you down in the street with scarcely a murmur), and de jure criminalisation of defending your own property, be it from the state or criminals (and the difference between them narrows daily), I wonder if people may simply start going out of their way to avoid involving the state in the aftermath of any act of self-defence.
As people seem to be unclear who to blame for the state deciding it is easier to prosecute law abiding homeowners than to go after housebreakers, and thus most seem unclear who are the correct people in need of having bricks thrown through their windows given that voting seems to make no difference, I expect sales of shovels, bin-bags, deep freezers, hacksaws and baseball bats to start increasing in high crime areas. There may even be a business opportunity for specialised discreet garbage disposal companies to assist this possible future trend.
The core of that problem is rooted in the contempt for private property found amongst the statists who make up the majority of the political class in Britain. Never forget that defending yourself is the ultimate expression of self-ownership and that is something the British state cannot tolerate, particularly the overt socialist parts: these people support ‘democratic’, which is to say political, control of the means of production and that includes your body. Just ask Tony Martin… the state is not your friend.
Somehow I missed this item yesterday… Now we have never been all that timid about slamming George Dubya when he makes a dumb move, but to be honest, if he delivers what may prove to be the coup de grace to the UN as a source of so-called ‘moral authority’, then I will start collecting memberships for the George W. Bush Fan Club!
A hilarious outburst of flat-earth rhetoric from self-fisking socialist dinosaur Polly Toynbee:
Bang the drum for social democratic values. Give up pandering to the language of Thatcherism, of markets, individualism, consumerism. Stop trying to do good by stealth, stop running against public services. Spell out what good the state does and how much more it can do. The NHS is the most efficient health system in the world: now it is well financed, it can be the best. Education is already sweeping up the OECD tables: improving at this rate, we shall reach top ratings. Tell it like it is: only the state can buy the things that make people happiest. Eighties selfishness turned out to be self-defeating. Don’t blur the social democratic message, brand it on the national soul.
I invite you to read the rest of the article. Believe it or not, it gets even funnier.
[My thanks to reader Ian Brunton for the link.]
Salam Pax has posted again. Well, not quite. Someone has posted in his name. Interesting observations, insider story, basically a gripping read straight from Baghdad. Go and raed…
In the short term, foundation hospitals will worsen inequalities, as they would have easier access to capital than other hospitals, enabling investment in better facilities and more advanced services.
– Labour MP David Taylor explains “Why I’ll defy party line over reforms” and vote against foundation hospitals, in today’s Evening Standard (print edition only)
The Anglosphere is divided over the metric system… sure, it makes vastly more sense but, damn it, it is just too damn French!
But do not despair! That scholar and wit, the inimitable Diamond Geezer, has come up with a new and vastly superior system of measures suitable for the 21st Century. For example:
Length – the freedom
Definition: the distance one tank can advance in one minute
- the distance from Basra to Baghdad = 1 megafreedom
And who says genius is dead in Britain? Oh, yeah, that was me. Sorry.
Update: As usual, blogspot’s archives are phuked up, so just go here and scroll down.
So… megacorporate musicland wants to attack people’s computers, with state sanction, to stop them doing things they dislike. This could be interpreted by the vast army of hackers and script kiddies out there as a declaration of war that is tantamount to painting a bullseye on the side of the RIAA servers.
Of course I would hate for anyone to construe these remarks as actually encouraging people to do to the RIAA what they are planning to do to millions of other people. No, that would be….bad.
Michael Totten has written an interesting article about the difference between ‘liberal’ (in the US sense of the word) and ‘conservative’ views of the world, called Builders and Defenders.
If you want to find a person who knows the history of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Middle East during the Cold War, or the partition of India and Pakistan, you’re better off looking to the right than to the left.
I am astonished and dismayed to discover this. I’m a life-long liberal and I devour history like food. Not until after September 11 did I learn I’m a minority on the left.
But clearly as someone very well read in genuinely foreign history and affairs, Michael is a member of a pretty tiny minority everywhere, not just on the left. Perhaps he would be less of a minority amongst a certain species of neo-conservatives in the USA, but he would still be one. In my experience, Michael would also find the situation amongst American capital-L Libertarians more akin the one he finds on the left.
Which brings me to another point… Michael is certainly a thoughtful commentator but he suffers from that exasperating bipolar disorder common to those on both the statist left and statist right: there is a great deal more to the world than just ‘liberal’ (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-socialist) and ‘conservative’ (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-capitalist). That someone with a blog should fall into this meta-contextual trap is all the more grating for a libertarian such as myself, given the sheer number of neither ‘liberal’ nor conservative blogs there are within the ever expanding blogosphere. Even the mightily Sir Glenn of Instant Punditry describes himself as a ‘Whig’ rather than a ‘liberal’ or conservative.
The truth is that what Michael is describing is more of an American phenomenon than a left or right one, and even then it is only slightly less applicable to us ‘more cosmopolitan’ British and Europeans.
There is an old joke, which like so many is all the more amusing because it is essentially true…
The French think the world revolves around Eiffel Tower, the British think they own the world and the Americans think they are the world
You may think the Belgians are a bit presumptuous by granting themselves jurisdiction over the entire planet in the matter of alleged war-crimes, but they have nothing on our Home Secretary David Blunkett who is trying to turn everyone in the developed world into lab rats:
Even before the Government has decided how to proceed with its identity card scheme, the Home Secretary David Blunkett claims to have persuaded his G8 colleagues to take a look at “smart” passports.
No firm commitment was made by Mr Blunkett’s G8 counter-parts at Monday’s meeting, and most of them were probably just being polite in expressing support in principle. But Mr Blunkett is seemingly determined to press ahead with a plan to require all British passports to contain chips capable of storing unique biometric information about the bearer, including fingerprints and iris scans.
I realise how much this sounds like wishful thinking but it does sound to me as if Mr.Blunkett’s G8 counter-parts were humouring him. As indeed they should. Not only is the technology referred to unlikely to work in the way that Mr.Blunkett has suggested or at all, but it is also to be hoped that his counter-parts have recognised this scheme as merely the latest manifestation of New Labour’s neurosis.
As per usual, the British Home Office has its portentious-sounding reasons. They have shuffled through their pack of disposable justifications and come up with stopping ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘terrorists’ as the raisons du jour and I can only assume that they are blissfully immune to the hollow ring which has now grown resonant enough to shatter glass.
If such technology could indeed prevent some terrible terrorist atrocity then it would, at least, be worthy of consideration (if not necessarily implementation) but surely everybody knows that it will do no such thing. Mr.Blunkett may as well claim that his biometric passports will reduce sun-spot activity, prevent child abuse and turn base metal into gold without being any less plausible.
Overwhelmingly, illegal immigrants and potential terrorists originate from Third World countries where no databases exist and few people have genuine passports let alone biometric ones. So they will continue to swan in to collect their welfare cheques in South London and plan bomb attacks in Manchester without so much as let or hindrance while the law-abiding, tax-paying British holidaymakers and business travellers get turned into day-release prisoners; watched, tracked and monitored feverishly to no end whatsoever.
But this is all a part of the game we play in Britain. Our political masters work night-and-day to come up with frightfully impressive techno-whizzbangs while we all turn away and pretend not to notice the godawful, augean mess they have made out of every single thing they have laid their hands on.
New Labour politicians are like the idiot children of wealthy tycoons, skilled only in lavishing around vast sums of other people’s money in a squalid attempt to purchase popularity and self-esteem. Scratch the surface and what you find is stupid, loathsome and incompetent. They are deserving of nothing except our unalloyed contempt.
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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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