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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Beware the wrath of a patient adversary.
– John C. Calhoun
Kay Pirello from the Carla Howell team has asked for assistance from all and sundry:
NECN informed us that, although WPI invited Carla Howell to be in the gubernatorial debate on October 1st, and although she accepted their invitation, the media consortium covering the debate is now waffling and claiming the decision is up in the air.
Please contact the below people at the bottom of this email ASAP and urge them to stand by WPI’s ecision to include Carla Howell.
Below is a copy of the letter Carla Howell faxed to each of them earlier today.
If they exclude Carla Howell from this debate it will cause Carla Howell for Governor and Carla owell’s Ballot Question 1 grave damages.
Please CALL RIGHT NOW to URGE them to include Carla Howell!
Then any you can’t reach, please email your own personal message to them.
Thank you!
You might want to tell them you read it on a weblog based in Belfast, Northern Ireland – the following being Boston media and all!
→ Continue reading: Urgent! Carla Howell needs you to Phone and Email Right Now!
We have had a few e-mails (plus a couple comment entries) asking how is it that whilst numerous articles on Samizdata.net have bitterly decried farm subsidies of any sort, we are also writing articles in support of tomorrows Countryside Alliance March in London.
The answer is to be found in the slogan of the Countryside Alliance March itself: for Liberty & Livelihood.
Supporting ‘Liberty’ is not exactly unusual for us: we are libertarians! The liberty in question is the right of country people to hunt in Britain as they have done for centuries, without bigoted class warriors using the violence of law to criminalise their way of life. Hunting is an activity not of ‘state’ but of civil society… and the state simply has no business intruding into what goes on across privately owned land (and of course as libertarians, we believe that the only ownership of land that is legitimate is private ownership). That is why we support the Countryside Alliance’s March.
As for ‘Livelihood’… Hunting is also a significant source of jobs in many areas and in that respect we are all in favour of the state not putting those people on the dole queue. The most vexed issue however is that of farm subsidies. It must be clear to all who regularly read Samizdata.net that all of our contributing writers are in favour of true laissez-faire capitalism and therefore resolutely opposed to subsidising any businesses (i.e. farm subsidies or industrial subsidies)… and the great granddaddy of all market distorting, theft based systems of redistribution-by-subsidy is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What CAP means is that efficient farms (and by European standards, British farms are indeed efficient) are made to subsidise inefficient farms, and other sectors of the economy are forced to prop up agriculture generally. Moreover, even the way efficient farms are run is distorted by subsidies and directives that have the effect of addicting even the stoutest souls to state handouts like so many heroin addicts. One major result of this being massive overproduction of food and agricultural overcapacity on a truly epic scale.
So for a farmer to remain in business when competing within the massively subsidised and mind-bogglingly regulated British and European agricultural market, clearly just cutting all subsidies to the UK would mean capital intensive UK agriculture more or less drops dead over night.
Thus clearly the most rational solution is a complete Europe-wide ban on all farm subsidies in any form… with no exceptions whatsoever. No doubt many farms would indeed go bust as there is simply no rational economic reason for their existence when detached from the fantasy world of state planning… and that is just too damn bad. Yet business go bust all the time, so why should farms be any different? Food is a colossal interlinked global market and so there is no reason at all for the great trading nations of the world to protect indigenous food production on non-economic grounds.
The fact is socialist and paleo-conservative farm policies are the reason food is so damn expensive in the developed world. The so called ‘friends to the poor’ in the Labour Party in Britain and their friends in the dominant statist wing of the Conservative Party are the self same people who are responsible for poor working men and women in Britain paying vastly more for food, the very stuff of life, than would be the case if free markets decided what things would cost. Not only that, these are the self same people who claim to care about poverty in the Third World whilst at the same time denying the First World consumer access to their cheap agricultural products whose sale would actually improve the economic situation in the Third World.
Of course the situation in the United States is only slightly less subsidy distorted than the EU, so one would hope that eventually taxpayers over there will also decide it is time for some ‘tough love’.
Therefore when we go to the march tomorrow, we will be supporting the liberty of entire communities to not be beggared and persecuted by state sponsored bigots regardless of the sanctification of such tyrannous acts by democratic politics… and we will also be reminding the country folk that if they want to insist the state stop interfering in countryside pursuits, that should logically also mean an end to interference by subsidy and regulation. British agriculture is more than capable of looking after itself, if only it is allowed to play on a level playing, field rather than a CAP distorted one.
Carla Howell seems to have made a major breakthrough. She will be in the Massachusetts Governor’s Debate. It’s going to be awfully hard to ignore her after this (from her press release):
“Carla Howell is in the October 1 Governor’s Debate. ABC, CBS, NBC, and New England Cable News TV. The Boston Globe. The Boston Herald. The Worcester Telegram & Gazette. It will be simulcast on the internet. Moderated by CNN’s Judy Woodruff. Shannon O’Brien, the Democratic nominee for Governor, and Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for Governor, will both debate Carla Howell face-to-face.”
After she’s done with Boston Tea Party II, could we talk her into throwing one over here too?
How very odd that Perry should decide to add a category called ‘How Very Odd’ on exactly the same day when I uncover something that I can only describe as very odd.
Or, to be precise, it was uncovered by a colleague at work when seeking the website of the The Law Society. The Law Society is the professional governing body for solicitors in England and Wales and, as one would expect, it does have a very comprehensive website which is located at www.lawsoc.org.
However, acting largely on instinct, he initially typed www.lawsociety.org into his browser and found something altogether different not to mention wholly unrelated.
Just a coincidence that they chose a similar name for their website? Well, possibly I suppose. On the other hand, is it a deliberate marketing ploy? In either event, one must conclude that it is a very effective, if not altogether transparent, way of getting their messages across to a lot of British lawyers.
Labour takes money from Sun readers and gives it to Guardian readers, who then decide how best it should be spent.
– Richard Littlejohn
The Labour government is dropping heavy hints about further tax increases in order to fund what it euphamistically refers to as ‘redistribution of wealth, power and opportunity’. Pure, coal-filtered, organic bullshit with no artificial additives or flavourings. What they really want to do is loot more money from productive wealth-creating people and hand it over to their parasitical, wealth-destroying supporters in the public sector.
Of all the high-falutin’ media responses to this, none hits the nail so squarely on the head as Richard Littlejohn in The Sun:
“Like the Lottery, Labour takes money from Sun readers and gives it to Guardian readers, who then decide how best it should be spent.
This Government has presided over a massive explosion of unproductive, worthless public sector appointments.
How many times have I written about the hundreds of millions of pounds showered every year on the Guardian-reading classes?
Each week thousands of irrelevant, unnecessary jobs in Town Halls and Government departments are advertised in that newspaper.
Some days, the Guardian’s jobs supplement is three times the size of The Sun.
The Guardian is the last great nationalised industry. Without its massive subsidy from taxpayers it would fold.”
You call it exactly the way you see it, Richard. And you see it the way it is.
Because I expect it to get negligible coverage in the mainstream media, I feel obliged to remind everyone that grassroots Britain goes on the march this Sunday.
The Samizdata Team will be duly represented and, if you wish to join us we will be meeting with several others of a like mind at Hyde Park Corner at 09.45am Sunday morning.
Insights come in varied and peculiar forms, such as those decanted from the lips of such British sages as Rab C. Nesbit to the north and the Macc Lads from a tad further south.
To be honest I think the Macc Lads are at least as reliable as DEBKA when it comes to military analysis and probably rather better… well certainly more forthright. Read the article and make up your own mind.
If there is war, it will be a clash of experts as well as armies. If Saddam’s forces collapse, and the American-led action has a quick outcome, the Macc Lads will have disproved Field marshal Lord Bramall and most of academe.
Before you read the linked Spectator article, let me proffer some linguistic assistance to our non-British readers… ‘Boddingtons’ is an inexpensive but far from ineffective beer in considerable favour with the broader end of Britain’s socioeconomic pyramid.
I can’t comment on whether or how guilty or dangerous the alleged terrorist ring is, but some statements, such as the following from Fox News just make me laugh:
Hochul said other evidence found at al-Bakri’s home in Lackawanna included a rifle, a telescopic sight, and a cassette tape that “asks Allah to give Jews and their enablers (U.S.) a black day.”
Now please tell me why finding a rifle and a sight in a house in Pennsylvania is unusual? I grew up in a small town in Western PA, and it would have been closer to news if they entered a random house and didn’t find an entire cabinet full of rifles, shotguns, ammunition and assorted sights and accessories.
It just makes you cringe to read this kind of idiocy.
Erratum: Lackawanna is across the border in New York state, not in Pennsylvania.
The attempt by statist corporations to allow their Big Media interests to hack your computer with the US government’s blessing is moving into high gear with the Berman bill.
Critics say Berman and Hollings have no choice but to respond to the wealthy lobby of the entertainment industry, which has dumped generous campaign donations into their laps. But supporters of the legislation suggest the lawmakers are just doing the right thing.
“The essence of capitalism is for people to profit from the fruits of their labors,” said James Miller, a professor of economics at Smith College and proponent of government intervention. “I don’t think the Berman bill goes far enough.”
Ah yes, blesséd democracy… in fact the finest democracy money can buy. Of course what idiots like Professor Miller do not seem to grasp is that it is not “the essence of capitalism” at all: the essence of capitalism is allowing market forces (i.e. capital) to determine what is or is not a viable business model. By arguing that the state should prop up what is clearly becoming a non-viable business model (the existing music business), Miller is describing not capitalism but statist stasis based economic systems like socialism and fascism. Miller is free to propose what he likes for the benefit of th existing structure of Big Music but to describe propping it up with restrictive, innovation destroying, market mechanism deadening laws as “The essence of capitalism” suggests to me that perhaps the article has a typo and he is in fact a Professor of Ergonomics.
And that is without even considering the civil liberties aspects to this.
“It gives me pause that the only entities trying to block Internet access is the communist government of China and the entertainment industry,” said Phil Corwin, a technology attorney who represents music file-sharing service Kaza.
Also does anyone seriously think that if this law makes it onto the books in the USA that Big Music will restrict its Denial of Service Attacks and direct hacks to computers and networks in the USA? You must be joking. Of course two can play at that game, fellahs. Hackers are a moving target… which cannot be said for the corporations now threatening to hack personal computers by the million.
I wonder if the next ‘shot heard around the world’ will be fired at the state backed corporates from ten thousand keyboards of people who have finally seen an intrusion too far. We will just have to wait and see.
There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:
…alchemy, soapmaking, Hermetics […] laughing.
Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com!
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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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