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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Last night I found myself watching the BBC2 rerun of Pride and Prejudice, and was held. It was better than I remember it as having been the first time around, I suspect because this time I actually watched it instead of merely taping it and reading the reviews. It’s about a family with five daughters, and the agonies suffered while the daughters set about trying to find husbands.
In those pre-industrial days, the marital desirability of a woman seemed to involve singing and piano playing a lot. There’s a cruelly memorable moment when paterfamilias, a man fonder of being witty than of being kind, even to his own daughters, tells one of the less musically sparkling ones that she has “delighted us enough” with her music-making.
This emphasis on music as a man-getting asset used to puzzle me. Wasn’t looking good and cooking good sufficient? (Or at least supervising the people who did do the cooking.) But if you think of women as hi-fi sets for their husbands, before hi-fi sets actually existed, it all makes sense.
The idea that big white machines have replaced many of the domestic duties of women is a familiar one. That smaller blacker machines may also have had the same kind of effect only occurred to me more recently.
It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.
-William Connor Magee (1821-1891), clergyman, speech on the Intoxicating Liquor Bill, House of Lords, May 2, 1872
The French Libertarian forums are already trashing the new government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. “They’re only cutting income tax by five percent!” Scandalous. They haven’t announced the immediate abolition of the protected status of civil servants. Imagine! Michel de Poncins – a speaker at the Libertarian International meeting in Paris, April this year – sums up the mood writing in French that “Rien n’a changé, tout est pareil” (Nothing’s changed, everything is the same).
It all reminds me of the arrival of Mrs Thatcher in the UK in 1979. Not only was the basic rate of income tax only cut by 3 percent, but VAT (sales tax) went up by almost double to 15 percent. There was no privatisation for years. Trade union reforms took five years to introduce. There were corporatists in the Cabinet!
There are three possible explanations for the new government programme:
1) Raffarin has an agenda which is more tactically cunning than the last botched effort at reform (Alain Madelin announced pension and state employee pay reforms and was removed after a week of street demonstrations in 1995).
2) Raffarin is a willing or unwilling stooge for the old corporatist clique who will block any meaningful reform.
3) Both of the above.
The joke is that whatever the conspiracy, events have a habit of running out of hand. M de Poncins latest book is appropriately enough called “Thatcher à l’Elysée”.
Jean-Marc Messier, the chief executive of Vivendi Universal, is facing the chop after running up huge debts in his sewage to film studio empire.
He’s a product of the French administrative elite that slips from running Edouard Balladur’s political office (former prime minister), to running a public utility, that somehow winds up privately owned with him in charge. This is not a unique story.
What is different is that Compagnie Generale des Eaux (as it was called) is one of the pioneers of private contracting of waste services, and road sweeping in the UK (operating as Onyx). The company also owns Connex, a private train operator in southern England and Southern Water. The group was renamed Vivendi after buying Canal Plus, the main pay-TV cable company in France. So far, J2M (as he likes to be known) was performing as a French business tycoon: the darling of the conservatives and left alike for being a model for French competition with the world.
However, J2M had the temerity to buy Seagram (the Canadian group which owned Universal studios) in 1998. In response to raised eyebrows among the French intelligentsia about French cultural protectionism, J2M said that the French cultural exception is dead. Now he is assailed by both US players (for his financial affairs) and left to hang by his French associates (who regard him as an Anglo-Saxon traitor).
I’m torn between sympathy for a French pro-free-trade businessman (!) and glee at the likely collapse of a political entrepreneur.
I cringe when Philosophers begin arguing Ethical Systems from First Principles. Codes of behavior built from argument based on mathematical rigour have a place in academia but are extremely dangerous when applied to the real world. People are not logical programs built from a rational base. They are a collection of hundreds of millions of years of gene based behavioral evolution and some thousands of years of mind based cultural evolution. Only the later of these is “perfectable”. One who thinks otherwise carries the shadow of Gulags Yet To Come in their eyes.
More so than the practitioners of many disciplines I’ve delved into, philosophers seem to place Humanity on a high pedestal of Rationality. I don’t. I see people as one more data point on a continuum of data points; a vector of traits which exist elsewhere but reach their highest expression (so far, and in our own biased eyes) in our species.
If you have decided by this point I am a follower of Richard Dawkins, then you are an astute observer and commendably well read. Dawkins changed our way of looking at evolution from one based on populations of individuals to one of populations of genes. Genes do not care about individuals (or anything else for that matter, so excuse my anthropomorphics). If a behavioral pattern kills 10% of a population but causes the other 90% to be fruitful and multiply, there will be more copies of the gene or genes (or memes if we are dealing with culture-based behavior) responsible for that behavior. Genes are the individuals which compete with each other and evolve. Not cells. Not tissues. Not wombats. Genes.
Altruism may be emphasized or de-emphasized by cultural traits and training but it can never be eliminated. It is a part of our hardwired animal program. Species with altruistic behavioral patterns will thrive at the expense of those which do not have them. It may be rather hard on an individual to throw themselves on a handgrenade or charge a machine gun nest, but by their action a larger number of the genes and memes expressed in them will survive and propagate than would otherwise have done so. It’s purely a numbers game.
I chose altruism as an example because it is currently under discussion, but the point I wish to make is a much more encompassing one. Human beings are not empty general purpose computers to be programmed at will to whatever happens to be the Perfect Ethics of the day. They come with a very large baggage of hardwired behavioral preferences which will make a mockery of the Perfectionist’s attempts to create the perfect “Your-favorite-ism” Man.
The attempt may be akin to bean-bag punching but this has never stopped Perfectionists from trying as we can see from Cambodia, Siberia, Dachau and Srbenica and Paris in the Ideological Centuries and the long line of religious pogroms stretching back into the mists of pre-history.
“Hey, Yutz! Guns aren’t toys! They’re for family protection, hunting dangerous or delicious animals and keeping the king of England outta your face!”
– Krusty the Clown from ‘The Simpsons’
A theatre company has dropped the word hunchback from its stage adaptation of the classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame and has renamed its touring production The Bellringer of Notre Dame after discussions with a disability adviser who raised the possibility of offending people with spina bifida or the disfiguring scoliosis of the spine. These are the moments when one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. 
As a result, the world is surely a better place. Well, at least for Libby Biberian of the Scoliosis Association who was pleased with the change. She said she would be embarrassed and offended by the original title. Victor Hugo’s classic novel, set in 15th century Paris around the cathedral of Notre Dame, tells the tragic story of Quasimodo (the un-PC hunchback bellringer) and his love for a beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda (who is probably next on to-do list of the PC busy-bodies).
But David Baguley, professor of French at Durham University, said:
“It is a concession to political correctness.”
No shit, Sherlock.
A new publication by the free market think tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, “The Representatives of Business in English Literature,” Readings 53, takes a look at how businessmen have received a bad deal in fiction. In a nice review in the Financial Times (registration necessary for the article, via www.ft.com), writer Stephen Overell notes that Ayn Rand’s classic, Atlas Shrugged, was a ‘freak’ in that it celebrated business and the trader ethic.
And I had to laugh. For Overell starts his analysis by quoting the ‘sacred text’, as Adriana Cronin would describe it, of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the bit where Francisco D’Ancona praises the idea of ‘making money’. Overell goes on to show how Rand’s view of wealth creation stands in total contrast to 99 percent of literature’s portrayal of capitalism and businessfolk. Just so.
I like to think that this review, by a FT journalist not necessarily well disposed towards libertarianism, puts the recent jousting on Samizdata about Rand into some kind of perspective. It seems some of the biggest haters of Rand are libertarians, while non-libertarians seem quite intrigued by her writings, so much so that they could even turn people on to capitalist ideas. To quote Margaret Thatcher, it is a funny old world.
Over on the Liberty Log there’s a recent reference to one of those reports, which says that Britain’s economy is fourth freest in the world. The implication is: hurrah! But this means that only three economies in the world are less gummed up with governmental and other bullshit than this one. What the hell must the others be like?
Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and editor of the weekly British magazine, The Spectator, delivers a furious serve down the baseline to the neo-mercantilists at the Guardian newspaper. He says that organ is getting all worked up about how tennis balls are produced by downtrodden workers in the Third World and made out of precious materials. (I cannot find a link to the story). What do the Guardianistas imagine workers making such things would be doing otherwise? Studying for MBAs? Writing software? Suffice to say that Boris subjects the Guardian’s flat-earth analysis to a superb take-down. Strikes me that the Member for Henley should get his own blog. Boris, come and join the party. We need more British bloggers.
On June 18th I attended an IEA lecture addressed by the Peruvian property rights advocate and analyst Hernando de Soto, author of The Other Path and more recently The Mystery of Capital, and I promised a report. I apologise that this is a belated report, but this has also given me time to think. (I also said I hoped to get a picture of the great man, but he rushed away as soon as he’d given his talk and I didn’t manage this.)
De Soto understands that property is a social fact. Property rights are triggered by ownership documents and written records and de Soto makes much of these triggers, often to the point of saying that they are the property. No, the property is the property. But the bits of paper make it clear to the world that this is what it is and who owns it.
De Soto’s key insight is that poor countries are poor not because they don’t contain enough potential property, but because the abundance of informal property that they do contain has mostly not yet been nailed down in writing. It therefore can’t be traded, or used as collateral. There can’t be a modern economy. De Soto’s life’s work is to try to set in motion the political and legal processes necessary to correct this. He lobbies politicians, he speechifies, he writes books. He gives lectures like the one I attended.
Most of what de Soto said at the lecture echoed things I’d already read in The Mystery of Capital. But the question and answer session contained what for me were novelties.
He said that the reason so many of the world’s poor like growing “drugs” is that drugs offer a quick return, in a world of insecure property rights. Contrive more secure property rights, and the poor of, e.g., Columbia would have an incentive to go into more respectable businesses which take longer to yield a profit. Interesting.
How, someone asked do you persuade the existing powers-that-be that clearer property rights are good? How about the police? You have to look at things from their point of view, he said. It is easier to catch criminals if you have a property rights paper trail to follow. Property in other words, doesn’t just attach my home to me, it attaches me to my home. It tells the police where to go if they want to talk to me. Interesting, and somewhat creepy.
He said that that if he wants to get the right things done, he has to let the politicians take the credit. Accordingly he no longer boasts about what “he” has been doing, which is why the website of his Institute for Liberty and Democracy has gone so quiet lately. (I’d wondered about why that was.) So, how much notice are governments actually taking of this man? That he was in a great rush after giving his IEA lecture suggested that he has vital business constantly on the go, but who knows? Not me.
I hope that powerful people are paying attention to this man, because what he says still sounds convincing. Indeed it is the best big idea about ending world poverty that I know of. But although I still think de Soto is a great man, under his influence I find myself seeing property – indeed the entire modern world – in a different and rather gloomier light, almost as a pact with the devil. We must have it, but we all know where “paper trails” can lead.
The Labour’s government’s Extradition Bill is a legal obscenity and a dire threat to the liberty of everyone, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman Dr. Sean Gabb and Libertarian Alliance Director Dr. Chris R. Tame, say:
“This bill formally applies the EU wide arrest warrant proposals to the UK. What it means, simply and crudely, is that British citizens can be carted off to other European countries on the say so of a foreign judge without the slightest benefit of any legal due process in this country. Moreover, they could be arrested for an array of so-called offences that are not – and never should be – crimes in this country.
In addition to such vague nonsense as “environmental crime” and “computer related” crime the Bill explicitly
allows for the extradition of UK citizens for PC-thought-crimes of “racism and xenophobia”. It is clear that the EU, and this government, is using this phrase in an obscene attempt to smear critics of the EU as “racist” and any advocacy of the virtues of hard-won British liberties as “xenophobia”. Other “crimes” for which British citizens could be deported to Europe include advocating “holocaust denial”, selling Nazi memorabilia and advocating a wide range of unpopular (and sometimes silly, offensive or nasty) opinions – and, of course, plane-spotting. The legal system of Britain, whilst far from perfect, seems a paradise in comparison to the politically corrupt and ruthlessly illiberal Code Napoleon systems of Europe – where you are deemed guilty until proven innocent and can be incarcerated without trial for absurd periods of time.”
Drs. Gabb and Tame conclude:
“If the British government succeeds in passing this tyrannical and obscene legislation it is clear that the social contract has been abrogated in an unprecedented act of treason by our own government. Nothing less than mass civil disobedience and physical resistance by any means necessary is justified by this attempt to allow the abduction and incarceration of British citizens by foreign powers.”
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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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