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]
|
Is that the headline you saw all over the US media the other day when the US government imposed import tariffs on Canadian lumber? No? I wonder why that was?
A question to all those people who sent me e-mails following my claims after Bush’s imposition of the steel quotas that his economic views were ludicrous. Many of you said he was just playing an inconsequential domestic political card and said George Bush was still a committed free trader. Given that:
1. A large number of US manufactured products involving steel and wood are about to become more expensive both domestically in the USA and compared to similar overseas products.
2. Other US produced goods and services are about to be made more expensive overseas due to retaliatory tariffs by the USA’s major trading partners (i.e. the people who actually have the money to buy most of the huge quantity of goods America exports).
Are you still unconcerned about the economic and political damage being done to the US economy (not to mention the rest of the world’s economy)?
Yes, I think that’s what they call it: being ‘ahead of the curve’. In this case, the ‘curve’ that I am ahead of is The Times in an article warning of the dangers of the Proceeds of Crime Bill, the UK government’s grand apparatus in the already-discredited war against ‘money-laundering’.
The writer adopts a more conservative (some might say measured) tone than I did. The piece reeks of unctious solicitude much in the manner of a senior Civil Servant advising a Minister that his decision is ‘courageous’ but it does taper to a fine point:
“The legislation needs to be framed in such a way that it does not deter honest businesses from consulting their professional advisers on grey areas, where they may need clarification of their position in order to be able to rectify it. Otherwise the very professional confidentiality that has created a healthy climate of compliance in the UK will be undermined. This is likely to lead to more criminality, not less.”
Precisely the point I made (among others) nearly a year ago(1).
Still, my natural desire to gloat must be tempered by my satisfaction that some serious people in serious places are starting to get the message and, more importantly, are broadcasting it.
(1)= (link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded for free)
All round gentleman-about-town, raconteur, degenerate smoker of communist cigars and worthy blogger Brian Linse also moonlights as a film producer when he is not doing his proper job of blogging.
The production of his very interesting looking film called Den of Lions is well underway, shooting on location in Budapest, Hungary.
Progress reports and numerous pictures can be found at the film’s own blog site! Check it out. 
American Express Co. agreed on Monday to turn over to U.S. tax authorities information on offshore accounts held by Americans suspected of evading taxes, the second major card company to do so after MasterCard International Inc. A settlement agreement between the government and American Express, filed in federal court in Miami, allows the tax agency to collect identifying information, such as passport and driver’s license numbers, of customers with accounts in Antigua, Barbuda, Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking for records showing charges greater than $2,500 for purchases of cars, boats, hotels or travel services in the U.S. In trying to detect unreported income and prosecute people who are failing to file tax returns, the IRS is pursuing a form of tax evasion that uses credit cards issued by offshore banks.
I find it hard to comment on such news as there is nothing I could add to fire up the appropriate sentiments concerning this topic among us, libertarian bloggers. The warning is contained within the words of Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rossotti:
“Simply put, the guarantee of secrecy associated with offshore banking is evaporating…”
although I am sure he was swelled with pride as he said them and not fear for liberty and property rights….
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
I was quite overjoyed to see the BBC news report that two thirds of the entire population of Gibraltar turned out in a demonstration, led by the mayor (or whatever the head of government there is called) in defense of their right to decide their own fate.
That the United Kingdom could even consider negotiating with Spain over the transfer of Gibraltar to them is appalling. Not because of anything they are doing in the negotiation specifically, but because of the entire concept that underlies their talks.
It is like Feudalism.
In Feudalism, the peasants and their land are traded about between rulers like poker chips in Las Vegas. The thought people who live in a place might actually prefer one situation over another is foreign, or at least not as important as Raison’s d’Etat to the Feudal Lord.
This is not a UK party issue. The Conservaties sold the Hong Kong peasants to China; now Labour wishes to sell the Gibraltar peasants to Spain. At least in Northern Ireland we’ll get to vote about it. Repeatedly if we want.
I would imagine the Falklands peasantry will be the next to be sold off. After all, it’s bloody expensive defending them. Then perhaps we can sell the Channel Islands slave… er peasants… er subjects… to France! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I would suggest to Gibraltarians they begin to arm and prepare defensive positions. The government of the United Kingdom wants to sell them, so perhaps a slave revolt is in order.
At the very least they could make it very messy for Spain. I’ll bet there are loads and loads of hardened tunnels and caves in those rocks.
I have kept a copy of this program on my disk from the time I first ran across it back in October or thereabouts. I play it every once in awhile. Not too often as I’m not one to wallow in emotions, but now and then. It has been my way to clear the media muddied waters of my memory, a way to bring back the clarity of purpose that 9/11 gave to all of us.
I also read this recent article by Jonah Goldberg. He castigated the US TV networks for rarely playing the images of the murderous events of 9/11 after the first few weeks. His article struck a particular chord with me because I had only recently played my own reminder, my secret weapon for staying, as Perry de Havilland put it, “sound of mind and sharp of sabre”.
It is difficult to describe the powerful and varied emotions it brings forth. Possible… if one were a Shakespeare perhaps. For the likes of me it is far easier to say “Just go watch it.”
I wanted to put up a link for it myself, but although I have a copy sitting here, I did not remember where I had gotten it… other than it was done by someone from New York. Fortunately for the world, PejmanPundit included it in a recent posting.
To the author of that multimedia program I say: Thank You.
And to those who died in New York… We will never forget.
If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.
– Benjamin Franklin
Although we have reduced the amount of blogs to which we link on the Samizdata main page, we have added a separate links and photographs page. We will occasionally add new photographs there every now and then if we can catch a member of the Samizdata Team in a compromising situation.
We added the links page as the sidebar was becoming unmanagable and the links list was in danger of melting down… a sort of blogger China Syndrome.
Update, July 2002: since our transmogification to Samizdata.net, this has all changed
The regular Samizdata e-mail address is back up and running after our domain host finally clubbed the misbehaving server into submission like a baby seal.
Feedback should go to: [address removed]
If you have them, the various other samizdata.net e-mail addresses are now functional again.
The blogging phenomenon is such that I am making new American friends by the hour, friends I’ve never met but who are getting to know me fast. It’s the same for David, Tom, Adriana and the rest of us. And maybe some of these new American friends can confirm or deny a feeling I’ve had ever since September 11th of last year. I get the feeling that black America has finally united with white America. The Oscars awarded last night for Best Actor to Denzel Washington, for Best Actress to Halle Berry, and for being Sidney Poitier to Sidney Poitier, nudged me into writing this, but the thought has been with me for some time.
There’s nothing like a common enemy and a common ordeal to bring people together. September 11 supplied this. The differences and gaps between black and white Americans are still big, still a problem. But these differences and gaps shrivel down into very little indeed when set beside those between both and their common Islamic fundamentalist enemy.
Not so long ago, black Americans were queuing up to change their names to something Islamic, to piss off whitey presumably. I’m guessing that there’s a lot less of this going on now, and that maybe some of these name-changes are even being reversed.
This is short posting because it’s a simple question about something rather than a complicated answer to something. Simply: Is all or any of this true? Or am I indulging in speculative sentimentality, or more plainly, in wishful thinking?
The thing about the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) is that it has just kept on keeping on.
I remember how, during the eighties, Chris Tame and I used to hammer away at ISIL conferences and gatherings about the overwhelming importance of publications, publications, publications. Typical ISIL types, especially the Europeans, preferred their endless schemes to “popularise” libertarianism by, basically, just talking about it to this or that “interest group”, which would then topple or else totally libertarianise this or that government, but which somehow never quite did. They said: why don’t you do that? To hell with that, we said, we’re already doing what we’re doing. And I remember being badgered by Americans about the “internet”, which, they said, would “cut out the middle man” and make the Libertarian Alliance publications-based strategy obsolete. You can just talk to people! Millions of people! Why don’t you do that? To hell with that also, we said. But what good, they said, are two hundred mere publications compared to immediate libertarian political triumphs and millions of new computer connected recruits? Because we actually have the two hundred publications, we said. You can buy them in the foyer. If you’re so keen on this other stuff, why don’t you …?
None of us were all wrong. None of us had it quite right. And now it’s all coming together. ISIL has an excellent new website, which contains, among other things, a small (by Libertarian Alliance standards) but growing list of, yes, publications. Two individuals, according to the latest ISIL communication that I received on Sunday, deserve special credit (two middle men, you might say): Chris Whitten, who designed the ISIL site, and Alberto Mansueti, who is translating ISIL stuff into Spanish. And I’d also like to mention Jim Elwood, for (see above) just hanging on and keeping going, like a dog who won’t let go of a bone. He was isiling away back in the early eighties, and he’s been isiling ever since.
We of the Libertarian Alliance have yet to get ourselves a website designer as good as Chris Whitten, but all the bits of an LA website as good as www.isil.org promises to be are slowly being assembled. We too have just kept on keeping on. The most interesting recent change to the LA website is the hit counter, which had been underestimating the number of hits, and has now done a guess-jump from 13,000 to 20,000 which I also reckon is about right. There’ll be more publications Real Soon Now. And we’ll also start having most of them instead of only a few of them available in html, also Real Soon Now.
And, of course, we London libbos do have ourselves a nice little blogging operation, where we, you know, kind of talk about libertarianism. Does ISIL have one of those? Jim, you’re not doing anything. Why don’t you..?
|
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.
|
Recent Comments