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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Britain’s worst-kept secret is now out in the very public domain. Chancellor Gordon Brown announced his annual budget today and, as widely-expected, has hiked up National Insurance (a type of payroll tax) in order to increase funding of the National Health Service.
This was called the ‘Budget For Health’ by the government. Whose health? Certainly not the health of the economy. The business sector will have to stump up a whopping £3.9 billion a year more in taxes in a desperate attempt by the government to placate its public sector supporters and defer the dark day when the NHS simply collapses.
And it probably will collapse in due course. The NHS is Britain’s version of Yasser Arafat; an odious, Soviet-inspired monstrosity that has caused countless deaths and yet is mysteriously exempt from anything even approaching a critical word. Its status among the British is that of Sacred Cow, nay Red Heiffer. It is the Holy of Holies, the state of which is the barometer by which every government is finally judged. It is hardly a surprise that the press roundly trumpets opinion poll results which overwhelmingly endorse tax rises to improve the NHS when an answer in the negative is probably more outrageous than supporting legalised child-prostitution. The left never miss an opportunity to hector the British public with the admonition that, if they want improved health care, they have to pay for it. I agree, of course. I just think they should cut out the middle-man.
But the cracks have been showing of late. Too many people have been travelling abroad for their health care treatment, forking out for private insurance or watching their elderly relatives expire on trolleys in dank state hospital corridors and you can’t keep that kind of disquiet from spreading. Everybody seems to know or sense that the NHS is crocked and beyond redemption but they are prepared to shut their eyes and wish very, very hard that the government will hose enough money at it to make it all wonderful, gleaming, efficient and keep it free.
It won’t work in the long-term or even the medium-term but the government is gambling that the massive cash boost will tide them over to the next election when they will be able to annouce that they have ‘saved’ the NHS and ensured its future as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. On the face of it, it is a dangerous gamble. The Labour government was elected on the promise that they had put behind them, for ever, their old ‘tax and spend’ policies and it is at least pragmatic to assume that they will be judged harshly for breaking their promise without delivering.
On the other hand, it might just fool ’em by providing a glimmer of ersatz hope. It is almost impossible to underestimate the sacred status of the NHS. The faith it is has traditionally inspired may prove a strong enough medicine to anaesthetise the public’s critical faculties and enable them to go on believing in the Easter Bunny.
In the meantime, we’re all going to get poorer. Poverty is bad for your health.
I can’t go to work today. The voices told me to stay home and clean the guns.
– Seen on a bumper stocker in Colorado last week by a certain nefarious Doctor
In today’s Times, war correspondent Anthony Loyd reports on the current counter-insurgency sweep through an ‘undisclosed’ valley in Afghanistan by British Royal Marines of the 45 Commando battlegroup, called Operation Ptarmigan.
He also moans at some length that [emphasis added]:
Whilst promising greater detail on the operation after it has finished, the coalition’s information policy has been a mixture of assumption and contempt. Morning press briefings at Bagram begin with a US officer stating how many days have passed since the September 11 attacks. He then gives the name and family details of one attack victim. A short statement follows and relevant questions by journalists are quashed as glibly as they are by Pentagon spokesmen in Washington with the words: “I won’t answer that.”
The justification for this silence is “operational security concerns”. In reality it appears that the US and Britain are using the ferocity of the September 11 attacks as carte blanche to be all but unaccountable to press and public.
[…]
This policy will probably work admirably until official silence is revealed to have hidden an unpleasant truth.
So he thinks the US and British military are accountable to the press? Interesting concept. Now Tony Loyd is actually a reasonable reporter (he is certainly a million miles from the ludicrous Bob Fisk and his ilk), but such petulant foot stamping on his part is unbecoming. The newspapers have been roasting the US for allowing Al Qaeda and ex-Taliban forces to slip away, and for failing to achieve operational surprise during Operation Anaconda… and now they are going to roast the coalition military for taking operational security seriously?
Dr. Tim Evans welcomes ‘Red Ken’ to the world of capitalist rationality… sort of
I have long been an advocate of private roads and road pricing. State ownership of public space and its attendant services such as police beat patrols is madness. Indeed, I have long believed that London and all other geographic areas will only get decent integrated roads and transport systems through genuine private ownership and good old free market price signaling.
What I did not expect was that that doyen of the British left and now Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, would be the man to instigate the transition to such an approach. Let me be clear, Livingstone is planning to introduce road pricing into the capital city early next year. However imperfect his plans will be (and my God, they have some glaring holes at present) and however he seeks to dress this move up with all the usual environmental waffle, the long term affect of his policy of “congestion charging” is going to lead to the commodification of public space. By pricing roads, encouraging an income stream down them and therefore deriving revenue, Livingstone will slowly become addicted to the money.
As he becomes addicted and the approach spreads – already Durham, Cheshire, Milton Keynes, Surrey, Warwickshire, Isle of Wight, Cumbria, South Gloucestershire, Leeds, Hampshire, Derby and at least twenty other areas are already talking to the Department of Transport about introducing road pricing – the incentive for a supply side revolution in roads and public space will mount. For as money pours into the coffers and drivers slip into the psychology of becoming consumers of road space, so there will be ever more pressure to find new ways of generating more income and therefore getting the supply side of public space to meet people’s demands: that is – some semblance of a market approach.
It is with this in mind that the utopian ideas so long espoused by the Libertarian Alliance in such glorious pamphlets as:
LA Economic Notes No. 49, Brian Micklethwait, The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use, 1993 *
LA Economic Notes No. 57, Martin Ball, Liberate the Roads! The Benefits that will come from road privatisation, 1994 *
LA Political Notes No. 17, Max More, Private Police and the Free Rider Problem, 1983 *
LA Political Notes No. 40 Chris R. Tame, On the Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing, 1989 *
LA Political Notes No. 58, Sean Gabb, The Case for Privatising the Police, 1991 *
…will begin to become relevant to everyday experience and discourse. And that in turn could well mean fantastic new private roads and even maintenance work being undertaken with the customer in mind and not the producer interest.
Sure, these new roads might be built underground by private sector companies who put in the latest air purification technology. And yes, the owners of X road might well want to contract with a private security company to breath test one in every 10,000 drivers for excessive alcohol. But hell, that is capitalism. The owners of X road will want to tell customers that this road is the cleanest and safest way to travel.
None of this will happen in the short term. But slowly, step by step, the incentives to engage a market in road provision are mounting. Sod the Queen’s nationalised highway. I want it owned by capitalists. As a driver, I want roads to be appropriately priced and to be served as a customer.
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why those most hard-line privatisers at the Adam Smith Institute had Ken Livingstone visit their offices three times over the last year on the subject of roads?
Come on comrade Ken, scatter those libertarian seeds and take us to the supply side!
Dr. Tim Evans
*= (links requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar pdf reader) which can be downloaded for free)
Who would have thought it? Oxfam, the charity normally associated with a fairly leftist view of overseas poverty, has released a big document charting how the best hope for the world’s poor lies in more free trade, not less. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation to Samizdata writers or most of its readers, I am sure. Nonetheless, for such a well-known and prestigious body to have set its face against the anti-globalisation crowd is good news. It looks like this liberal (in the true sense of the word) meme of ours just keeps on spreading.
I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.
Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.
For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN ‘Safe Havens’ to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.
Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O’Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure.
There is also an interesting article (also by O’Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to ‘nation build’ other than en passant… they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan’s domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago.
When the Mafia offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in dark suits around to pay you a visit.
When the State offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in blue uniforms around to pay you a visit.
– Samizdata Illuminatus
There was a young woman named Plunnery
Who rejoiced in the practice of gunnery.
Till one day unobservant,
She blew up a servant,
And was forced to retire to a nunnery.
– Edward Gorey
I received the following short notice from Jim Babka this morning:
‘Intruder’ to air on Fox News Channel this weekend
‘Intruder’, our ad making the case that people using firearms prevent 2 million criminal acts each year, will air on Fox News Channel this Saturday and/or Sunday. I wish I could give you more details, but we won’t have the “flight times” for the ads (from the network) until Friday.
So if you are in the USA, please keep your eye out for Friday’s LibertyWire!
It feels crude, offensive even, to refer to events on the West Bank as a sideshow, yet that is exactly what they might have been. Shortly after September 11th, I predicted that Israel and Syria would come to blows. The tension had been brewing for some time and while homicide-bombers were wreaking havoc in Israel and the Israelis wreaking havoc on the West Bank, rockets were being fired into Northern Israel from Lebanon. Lebanon is Syria’s wholly-owned subsidiary.
Well, it looks like the Syrians are expecting trouble and my money says that they are going to get it. The ‘accidental’ explosion at the Syrian missile factory at Homs ten days ago was no accident. It removed Syria’s ability to replace or refuel its existing missile stock. With Syria’s forces concentrated around the Bekaa Valley (deja vous?) they are the only thing standing between the Israelis and Damascus.
How was your appetizer, ladies and gentlemen? Ready for the main course?
You might want to take some time today, of all days, to check out The Centre for Freedom and Prosperity. If you need to know why you should look into the idea of organising your life around off-shore banking and business, then might I suggest you need look no further than what today means for your personal wealth… or at least the part of it you are permitted to keep.
Avoiding tax all together can be difficult for most people but you owe it to yourself to try and minimise the extent to which you are financing your own repression (and mine too). It is quite possible to do it by using the law against itself, though frankly whatever means you have to use when dealing with the state is fine by me. Any oath or declaration extracted under the threat of force has no moral basis whatsoever and breaking it is just a matter of deciding based on risk/benefit analysis, not morality.
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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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