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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A rare treat for me yesterday evening, albeit at the cost of an arduous three and a half hour drive down to the East Kent coast.
The treat was a dinner party at the home of fellow Libertarian Sean Gabb, his lovely wife Andrea and capitalist-buccaneer radical Rebecca Baty.
Sean and his wife live in the old garrison town of Deal, from where, on a sufficiently clear day, you can just see the coast of France; a fact which must have concentrated 18th Century English minds wonderfully.
The place reeks of history. Aside from the smattering of satellite dishes, the winding alleyways (too narrow to drive a car down) and huddled regency houses impress one that neither the topography nor fabric of the place has much changed since Napoleon glowered malevolently across the Channel.
It was a splendid and rousing evening. Stimulated for the most part by the sheer clarity of Sean’s thought processes, I drove home with a mind wrought giddy with ideas, the fresh blood of which has now begun to coagulate into something like A Manifesto for a Pragmatic British Libertarian. Presumptuous I know, but that won’t stop me working on it. Though a snappier title would not come amiss.
noun. A person who leaves remarks in the ‘comments’ section which many blogs offer.
Alex Singleton has got the Liberty Log cranked up and running again, after a spell of very thin posting. (It’s not as if they had nothing to blog about up there, what with the Germaine Greer for University Vice Minister, or whatever it is, row.) Something to do with student lodgings, he said in a phone call to me just now – no internet connection, blah blah.
Anyway Alex has been thinking about coffee, and in particular “fair trade” coffee.
Several hours of research later, I found what I suspected: fair trade isn’t as fair as it seems. Most of the extra money charged fills the pockets of big business, not the coffee growers. Fair trade coffee is roughly 2.5p more expensive per cup. However, Costa charges 10p per cup extra. In other words 7.5p simply goes to Costa, or its first world suppliers, as profit.
World coffee prices have declined rapidly over the past ten years, and the reason is simple: since 1990, supply has increased by 15%. Much of the blame can be laid at organisations supposedly aiming to reduce poverty. The World Bank gave loans to Vietnam to set up coffee plantations. In Brazil and Columbia, producers were encouraged to switch from coca, used to make cocaine, to coffee. Oxfam and other charities have consistently encouraged existing farmers to increase production of coffee.
So there. My real reason for linking to Liberty Log is not coffee, nor even LL’s recent springing back to life. No, my main message is simply how good it is now starting to look. I particularly like the headings, but thank god also that the text (as here at Samizdata) is big enough to read. What is it with all the tiny lettering that lots of blogs use? Am I getting old? Is my screen too small and blurry? Anway, I can read Liberty Log.
More to the point, I still want to. As do others, or so Alex tells me. During the recent dry spell, LL was still getting plenty of hits, presumably from folks like me who were hoping that normal service – or what passes for normal service at a university – would soon be resumed.
I have come across a useful list of terms that I post herewith for the benefit of our US readers. For more insults regarding the common language which divides us, please click on the link. 
British
biscuit
scone
lump of dough
fag
homo
gay
socialist
whig
tory
right-wing tory
green
bloke<
sod
oops
oh
jolly
very
really
quite
guy
bloody
darn
,
.
!
nude
nudity
flat
lift
chemists
loo
complain
chips
maize
corn
coffee
tepid water
cold water
tipsy
drunk
pissed
annoyed
irate
nice
cool
cold
snow
drizzle
rain
light breeze
windy
foreign weather
brolly
telly
umpire
bowler
football
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American
cookie
biscuit
scone
cigarette
fag
happy
communist
socialist
democrat
republican
tree-hugging
buddy
fuck
fuck
fuck
fucking
fucking
fucking
fucking
motherfucker
motherfucking
motherfucking
, you know
, know what I mean
, man!
pornographic
porn
apartment
elevator
drug store
rest room
sue
fries
corn
grain
espresso
coffee
beer
drunk
plastered
dead drunk
pissed
postal
cool
cold
freezing
snow storm
rain storm
flood warning
wind storm
hurricane
sunshine
umbrella
TV
referee
pitcher
soccer
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Via Monkeyfarts.
One year ago today, we first started blighting the Internet with a pixilated stream of opinions, rants, pictures, invective and sundry insightful pontifications.
Like most bloggers, we started out using www.blogger.com to publish, using the vexed blogspot servers to host our site… and also like so many we migrated to the ever more powerful Movable Type. Nevertheless, credit where credit is due to Evan Williams of Blogger.com for making it possible for blogs to explode onto the Internet scene with such vigour.
Also special thanks to Glenn at Instapundit for providing the inspiration for starting this blog, not to mention a few early links that well and truly got the show on the road for us.
Above all, thanks to Dale Amon for bringing the whole concept of blogging to my attention. If you really love (or hate) us, he is the one you should thank (blame) for getting me started!
Tonight we are having the inevitable party (we never need much of an excuse for a party) at the Black Widow Pub to toast our continuing diatribes.
Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the ride as we lionise all that is right with the world and rail against everything that irks us.
We have only just begun to fight!
Anyone who has had the misfortune to have seen many examples of Modern ‘Art’ recently can only concur with the British politician who described this year’s Turner Prize exhibits as “bullshit”.
Ok, not terribly polite, but a wonderfully lucid and accurate description of what is on display. Can we hope for similarly salty descriptions of the EU as a “crooked empire”, the British education system as a “Soviet disaster zone” from the UK’s political masters?
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder
– Frédéric Bastiat
Paul Marks points out that there is no imposed structure can achieve what a real market can
Last Sunday there was a big storm in Britain, power was been cut off for a lot of people and some of these households are only now being reconnected.
There have been a lot of attacks on the power companies, but (as far as I know) no one in the media has pointed out that the present set up is not free enterprise at all – it is a government effort to create ‘perfect competition’.
Now ‘perfect competition’ is something that exists in neoclassical economics textbooks – here lots of similar companies (similar assets, similar knowledge, similar just-about-everything) compete in a sort of mathematical game.
In real life enterprises build things and own them. For example a railway is built, or a gas line, or a telephone line, or an electricity line.
Complexity may evolve (with different people owning the track and the trains on a railway, or there being ‘producers’ and ‘providers’ in electricity supply), but any attempt to impose a complex scheme is likely to turn out to be a mess.
In transport the natural competitors for a railway are roads, canals and airlines. The endlessly complicated spiders web of regulations in Britain (to make sure that different people owned the track and ran the trains and that the train operators only ran the trains for a certain period of time, and so on and so on), just caused a mess.
Against electricity the main competitors are gas and (to a much lesser extent) home generation (by solar cells, open coal fires or whatever). Again complexity may evolve (with different companies producing the electricity and supplying it and, perhaps, even different suppliers offering to supply the same household), but any attempt to impose a complex scheme (via endless regulations and administrators) is bound to cause problems – and it has.
In the end what matters is not ‘perfect competition’ but ownership – having a company that owns assets and is responsible if it fails to provide the power that people have paid for.
Paul Marks
It’s that time of the week when most of Samizdata’s readers and most of its writers like to creep away from their terminals and live a little. Time for another Brian screed with MORE in it.
But how can I reconcile my refined tastes with Samizdata’s preferred subject matter just now of monsters and war and mayhem. I’ve been making no secret lately of my liking for the blog written by The Two Blowhards, and for their sustained determination to talk about “culture” and not just about such things as politicians, Islamofascists and the exact guns and bullets and training manuals being used by the USA’s latest mass murderer. So what can this screed be about?
Well here’s a question that may connect these two camps: Why do so many of the villains of popular entertainment like classical music?
Not all fictional villains love classical music. But if a character in a TV adventure show does love classical music, then the chances are, overwhelmingly, that he’s the bad guy. One need only hear the tinkling of a classically played harpsichord or the smooth sound of a classically played violin to know at once Who Did It. → Continue reading: Classical villainy
noun. Derived from anarchist. An advocate of minimal government, often described as the night watchman state, in which the state exist legitimately only to enable appropriate law and order and to deal with collective territorial defense.
Such as state can exist to reinforce the liberty of individuals but not to ‘do things’ and is therefore a largely ‘apolitical polity’ guarding the boundaries of civil society.
Some minarchists view this as a transitional state leading inevitably to completely stateless anarcho-capitalism, whilst others see minarchy as a stable end point.
Whilst this is not a blog specific term, it is often used on ‘pundit blogs’, many of which are libertarian, hence its inclusion here.
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul
– George Bernard Shaw
But what is the name of a group of jack-o’-lanterns? I think two names might be needed: On a crisp, cold and clear Halloween, they are perhaps a cackle… or maybe a coven, or a leering or even a haunting of jack-o’-lanterns.
But the day after the night before, in rainy grey London, they are just a sorry sight to behold: they are jack-o’-lanterns no more, misshapen and decaying …alas, nothing more than a woefulness of pumpkins.
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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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