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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All those people who greeted the inane steel tariffs with a yawn (“No one is interested in steel tariffs”, “it is just a bit of politics”) will be no doubt equally uninterested that the European Union, you know, the USA’s largest trading partner, is now planning fast track retaliation against the USA that will specifically target US states that benefit from the US protectionist measures.
They join Russia, Australia and Brazil looking into setting up a splendid little self-reinforcing destructive anti-international trade harmonic that will hurt everyone.
If there is anyone out there who did NOT think that international retaliation against US goods and services was the guaranteed response to the new US steel tariff, can they please e-mail me to explain why they did not think that was going to happen?
Now what were you guys saying about it not being any big deal and just being about internal US politics? So what’s next George? “Read my lips: No New Tariffs” perhaps?
Russell Leslie wrote in to disagree with David Carr‘s article Buddy, can you spare a lime?
“Even a child knows that nobody ever died from eating vitamins or herbal supplements.”
To which Russell writes:
Actually – people (specifically asthmatic children) die from the common alternative remedy “royal jelly” on a regular basis. People think of royal jelly as being a wonderful natural remedy but it does kill people.
Vitamin A, a fat soluble vitamin, will kill in excessive concentrations. Though generally the people that have died have been people that have eaten the livers of sharks, seals and (ooh! gross) dogs – rather than store bought vitamin supplements.
Comfrey can lead to internal bleeding in excessive doses (there are some reports that Calendula can do this as well, though I am not clear on how reliable these reports are).
Herbal remedies are fine when intelligently used – unfortunately some people do not have the mental wattage to do anything intelligently. It is not to protect the intelligent that some form of controls may be needed – only the truly stupid need protection – but no one wants to admit that they are stupid. It is difficult to devise a system of controls protects the stupid but that doesn’t get in the way of the skilled or intelligent.
However whilst Russell makes some good technical points, I think he asks a very leading question: how do we protect the ‘stupid’ from the consequences of their own actions?
This seems to accept as axiomatic that, firstly, people who take ‘excessive’ doses of vitamins or herbal supplements are necessarily stupid… and secondly that anyone has the right to ‘protect’ said ‘stupid’ people from their own actions. The first point is highly conjectural and the second is morally dubious to put it mildly. Surely the best way to induce sensible decision making to not to insulate people from the consequences of their actions, be they the people who take alternative remedies or the people who market them.
I love Economics classes that tell the ‘truth’ about environmentalism. The worst part of it is that the way they paint the two sides of the issue. On the one side are the conservatives who “think that money-grubbing companies will somehow fix the environmental problems”. On the other hand are the “progressives who who view government as capable of promoting an activist agenda to serve the general interest of the public”.
These quotes come from my economics teacher, who by the by I found out (through a campus Deep Throat) worked for Ralph Nader a while back. The textbook has similar viewpoints: the conservatives versus the progressives. Which one do you think most students support: those conservatives that want to go back to the old way or the progressives that want to move us to the future. Is it any wonder that environmental regulations constantly grow given the way it is taught? Is it any wonder why people my age do vote for Nader?
Neel Krishnaswami points out that we all hate it… or do we?
It’s true. Everybody hates utilitarianism. The Left hates it(1), The Right hates it(2), Libertarians hate it(3), and Adriana Cronin(4) hates it.
And we all hate it for good reason, too. It sounds so reasonable –“maximize the total happiness of society”. But it leads to such stupid conclusions. That small-town America is justified in banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because it offends more Baptists than turns on smut-addicted book-lovers.(5). Oops; there goes freedom of speech. That proper social policy involves enslaving 5% of the population to grow opium to keep the other 95% in a drug-induced delirium. Utility must be maximized. And finally, in a mathematical coup de grace, economists armed with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference have shown that individual utility functions are not commensurable. This means we can’t even define “total happiness” in a sensible fashion, because one individual’s utility function is not on the same scale as anyone else’s.
But. (You knew that a “but” was coming, didn’t you?)
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries. No libertarian rights-based argument I have ever constructed has ever convinced my social democrat (and outright socialist) friends of anything at all. Nor have I ever seen a libertarian react to a plea for social justice with anything other than tired sighs. But start wonking out with per-capita GDPs, life expectancies, crime rates, and accident figures, and suddenly bystanders start paying attention.
A concrete example. A couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about third world poverty. He complained that the government should do something about it. I pointed out that indeed the government did do something about poverty: mainly, it caused it. He regarded my objections to large-scale government intervention as the usual quixotic libertarianism until I offered the example of microcredit programs as an example of how to bootstrap a market and improve the lot of the poor(6). At this point my friend got really excited, because now he had a concrete charity to try and send money to.
It wasn’t a rights-based argument about why government intervention is harmful that energized him: it was a concrete, utilitarian example (and an avenue for positive action). What he cared about was people not going hungry. He also knew that in political debate, people tend to use abstractions to paper over the difficulties in their program(7). Most notorious are various leftists’ use of euphemism to justify things like the Cultural Revolution, but it’s a universal sin. He, like anyone with healthy political antibodies, narrows his eyes when vague slogans — whether “worker’s paradise”, “but it’s for the children” or even “spontaneous order” — enter the discussion. So any attempt to convince my friend had to get past his suspicion that the political jargon was just bafflegab aimed at preserving the status quo.
This is why utilitarian arguments are so useful. Focusing single-mindedly on making actual individuals better off enables one to avoid getting (correctly) killed by the “that’s ideological bullshit” reaction. A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
(1)= Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. The best attempt ever to offer a solid theoretical grounding for the social democratic program. Amartya Sen smashed it with a brief, elegant article that identified a critical algebra error in the setup. Oops.
(2)= Kass, Leon R. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Yes, this Luddite idiot is the chair of the US Bioethics Commission. It is to weep.
(3)= Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Of course you know about this.
(4)= Cronin, Adriana.“EU and e-commerce, or does Bad plus Good equal a greater Good?”, Samizdata.net March 14, 2002
(5)= Sen, Amartya. “On the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal”. This man is depressingly smart.
(6)= see http://www.villagebanking.org/home.php3
(7)= Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language“. Yeah, he’s every conservative’s favorite socialist and every socialist’s favorite conservative, but what can you do?
I’ve finally finished wading through a paper in the field of gravitational physics that leaves me near ready for a double dose of aspirin. I’ll be the first to admit my Physics and Calculus have large flecks of rust flaking off them when I attempt a mountain of arcanity such as this.
I can only say I followed enough of it to say it’s real science and if true we’ve finally moved from physics grad student’s pub time what-if to verifiable laboratory manipulation of gravity. Yes, go back re-read what I just said. You didn’t imagine it.
The gist of the paper, and gist is about all I can give you, is that with high voltage discharges from a superconducting ceramic electrode in a strong externally generated magnetic field a gravity pulse occurs in the direction of the electric discharge. The pulse detection was carried out with an instrumented pendulum up to 150 meters from the generator. The impulse effect, while not huge, is measurable to the unaided eye.
What is important is not the size of the laboratory effect. It is that a coupling between gravity and manipulatable forces exists at all. If his theoretical work is correct, I think there may be a practical engineering field just a decade or so beyond the science.
Bear in mind that none of this is proven yet. Someone might come along and explain away Podkletnov’s results by experimental error, or it might be some new physics with nothing to do with gravity.
But it does look very interesting.
“Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged YBa2Cu3O(7-y) Superconductor with Composite Crystal Structure” by Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese is available for download from Cornell University’s archive of research papers.
If you can’t see through the absinthe, don’t drink it
-Adriana Cronin
I do not often post about specific bits of government legislation as it makes for awfully dry subject matter but I am unable to resist publishing this example of incandescent lunacy.
A year ago or so I wrote an extensive piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the nature, scope and effects of the UK Money Laundering laws (soon to be codified in the Proceeds of Crime Act).
One of the offences specified is that of ‘Tipping-Off’. If a banker/lawyer/ financial adviser suspects a client of money laundering then he is obliged to report the matter to a responsible officer within the firm who must then decide whether or not to make a report to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. All this must be done in secret because the client must not be told that he is under suspicion (in case he flees the jurisdiction). To spill the beans is to commit the offence of ‘Tipping-Off’ (maximum sentence 2 years in prison).
Well, as if destroying the principle of client confidentiality and trust is not bad enough we all now have to contend with Section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998 which requires all companies to disclose all internal memoranda to their clients upon demand, even those voicing suspicions of money laundering and, hence, tipping them off!!
One law now forces lawyers/bankers/accountants to break another law!! How long can it be before one is liable for prosecution just for turning up at work in the morning?
Do we have a Government or do we just have a Random Regulation Generating Machine up there?
Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.
A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren’t so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being “fuzzily mystical” about “Asian values” in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength – consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical “weakness” – unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick’s point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.
Have fun and experience a sense of premonition reading an article titled Microsoft launches ‘seek and destroy’ XBox by the The Brains Trust (Trust Us / We Know), a satirical on-line netpaper.
That’s why Internet Explorer 6 can automatically send us error reports containing a list of every piece of non Microsoft software installed on your machine, your name, address and credit card details and the 100 porn sites you last visited. It’s our way of being more responsive to our users.
The author takes on many issues, namely Microsoft, Bill Gates and privacy using the kind of journalistic and marketing speak that just begs to be sent up the way The Brains Trust contributors has been doing for the last year or so.
[Editor: Adriana is being naive: there is nothing satirical about this, it is serious reporting!  ]
Take a look at a fine article defending the ancient British sport of foxhunting by former Labour MP Brian Walden in today’s Daily Telegraph titled Ban on foxhunting would be a triumph for the mob. I cannot do better than Walden in laying out the case as to why a proposed ban on hunting with hounds is a monstrous attack on liberty, which libertarians, be they meat-eaters or hard-core vegans, should reject.
We have been deluged with interesting e-mails for publication in the last week, so please do not take it personally if we do not always publish yours. Sometimes we do not publish submissions for editorial reasons or due to excessive length but more usually it is simply because we do not always have the time. Samizdata is a loose but more or less functioning anarchy, so having someone to edit and publish a submission is a rather hit-and-miss affair depending on who does or does not have the time to do it. At the moment the main limiting factor is the sheer amount of incoming e-mail and our available time to digest them all!
And for all who have asked: Natalija Radic is currently off skiing in Austria and so I do not expect to see her posting again for several days yet.
By the way, a few links may have vanished off the side bar due to a minor mishap during template surgery, followed by doing the daily back up the wrong way. Doh!
A followup posting by Michael Wells:
Two weeks after my previous post on North Korean defections, 25 defectors have stormed the Spanish embassy in Beijing and demanded asylum, threatening to commit suicide if they were sent back. China still doesn’t want to acknowledge defectors as refugees, but that position’s becoming harder to maintain as the situation becomes more visible. Pressure from South Korea and (one hopes) the US should help a lot.
I’ll be watching for soldiers defecting along the Chinese and Russian borders. The military is all that keeps Kim Jong Il’s regime in power. If they start going, it’s all over for the DPRK.
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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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