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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Apparently, somebody claiming to represent the Scottish National Liberation Army has admitted responsibility for sending packages of ‘caustic substances’ through the post to Tony Blair and several other MPs.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call this an attempt on the life of Our Glorious Leader (especially as he is in Australia at the moment) or, if it was, then it is a pathetically ham-fisted one.
No, if reports are accurate, then it is obviously some sort of pointed message. But what message?
Things are getting a bit racey over here.
Someone terribly raffish and clever (it was probably Oscar Wilde or Samuel Johnson) once said that a man should be judged not on the quality of his friends but on the quality of his enemies.
I cannot recall having heard any previous exposition on the Internet from the Vatican before, so this must be of some significance. For me, the following quote of Page 2 stands out:
“But the church also finds fault with the Internet’s embrace of libertarianism. “The ideology of radical libertarianism is both mistaken and harmful,” the Vatican said. “The error lies in exalting freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values…. In this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear.”
A few years ago, I had a discussion with another Libertarian the result of which was that we agreed that the Internet was the new Printing Press. I don’t imagine anybody is going to be burning at the stake but the parallel is looking more prescient every day.
[My thanks to Samizdata reader Boris Kuperschmidt for the link.]
I have only a fuzzy and rather amateurish understanding of Chaos Theory but I do believe that it attempts to explain the process whereby a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and, some time later, as a direct result, a hurricane lays waste to Poland. Or something. In other words, it is an exposition on how tiny, insignificant events can, through a cumulative series of knock-on effects, eventually become really big, major, world-changing events.
On the assumption that I am right (or, at least, not too hilariously wrong) then I think we are witnessing something in reverse by the UK governments sudden resurrection of the proposed ban on fox-hunting.
Now it is fair to say, that fox-hunting has been under the cosh for some time now. It has been priority No.1 for animal rights groups for years but, since Labour came to power in 1997, it has also been the target of the Labour left who see it as a decadent hobby for the cruel and arrogant rich; a totem of class privilege. This is a charge which is neither true nor fair but it has played well within the context of the Politics of Envy and, even if it were true, it deserves to be protected from state bullying.
But, faced with some determined opposition, the government has shied away for forcing through a ban of the sport in England and, until the last few days, the issue appeared, if not dead, then dormant.
All of a sudden, though, it is back on the agenda and with indecent haste, the government announcing a House of Commons Free Vote on March 18. Not through any sense of principle, mind. Tony Blair is known to be, at best, agnostic on the issue. No, it has everything to do with the War on Terror.
Blair has committed himself to supporting a US attack on Iraq but knows full well the unholy ruckus that support is likely to cause within his own party. This is a trade-off. Blair is telling the left that, if they keep quiet over the fate of Saddam, he will throw them some red meat in the form of the ban on fox-hunting they have always lusted for. In other words, give me Baghdad or the fox gets it.
It may not work. First, cynical ploys are the life-blood of the left and this may simply not be enough to buy their silence. Secondly, the principled opposition that rallied before is already rallying again and dark mutterings of civil disobediance fill the air.
But is this not an example of Chaos Theory only in reverse? Crazed terrorists kill thousands of people in America and, as a result, an old English tradition faces state-mandated oblivion.
Money can’t buy you friends, but it can buy you a better class of enemy
– Spike Milligan
Lists of wisdom culled from half a lifetime of banging around doing this and that are all the rage on the Internet just now, and why not? They can be a good laugh, and coming from libertarians they can even smuggle bits of the libertarian meta-context into the mainstream of polite society. So here are some of my bits of attempted wisdom of this sort, in no particular order:
(a) The importance of a country is inversely proportional to the splendour of its postage stamps.
(b) Nothing ever happens in rooms with matching chairs.
(c) Nothing guarantees the ruin of a large institution more certainly than the construction for it and by it of an architecturally magnificent custom-built headquarters. (I got this many years ago from a book by the famous Professor C. Northcote “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” Parkinson. But two questions: What was the Enron HQ like? And: How come Microsoft is still staggering onwards?)
(d) Speculative booms spike and begin their plunge downwards at the exact moment that the rule which all the suckers were following (“being a Lloyds name is a license to print money” (see (c) above), “you’ll never lose if you buy bricks and mortar”, “get your money into dotcoms, mate”, etc.) gets to me.
(e) Movies advertised with quotes in big letters from movie critics, rather than the names in big letters of movie stars, are best avoided.
(f) Any movie described by a movie critic as containing no ideas is packed with ideas, but of a kind that the movie critic disapproves of.
(g) “Courageux” is the French for stupid.
(h) Anything described as “the new rock and roll” is not now very big, and is about to get smaller.
(i) “Interesting” is English for stupid. (Well maybe not always, but it is when my mother says it.)
(j) Bad food is bad for you. Good food is good for you. To avoid doing bad to yourself when you eat bad food, eat an equal amount of good food, thus cancelling out the badness of the bad food. (This one is untrue. Sorry about that (see (m) below).)
(j) Whenever an “alternative” view is promised, it will be the same damn view as the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that …
(k) Whenever anyone says “there is no question of ” whatever it is, it means that there is and someone has just asked it.
(l) Actually following your dream is fine, but avoid using these words out loud. “Following your dream” is American for stupid.
(m) “Sorry” is the English for, well, pretty much anything an English person happens to be thinking. It seldom means that he’s sorry (see (j) above), although it does sometimes.
Splendid blogger Ben Sheriff from Layman’s Logic has produced a wonderful page called Slobogoogling for Profit and Pleasure that is a menu of juicy morsels for all self respecting anti-idiotarian bloggers to use as prey. Each of the signatories of the petition to free ethnic clenser and mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic is listed in easily Google-able form. By their own words they shall be revealed.
I have myself written that I do not think the Hague is the correct place for the Vile One to be tried (in fact I favoured his summary execution in Republic Square in Belgrade), but the people who signed this document actually think Slobo is the good guy… they are the modern Mitfords, no different from the apologists for Hitler and Stalin from the 1920’s to the 1960’s.
Ben is a splendid blogger and I am reliably informed that he is still agreeable company even when exceedingly drunk, which surely makes him an indispensable asset to the blogosphere! 
Ben roars at Slobo at the Brit Blogger Bash
 Our usual e-mail address is temporarily down, so in the meantime we can be contacted at samizdata-at-cloister.dircon.co.uk
Beauty of Grey criticizes a couple of our recent offerings:
This sort of shrill extremism is a big reason why most people view libertarians as a third party wacko fringe group, just on this side of the Larouchies on the respectability scale. The sneering condescension Perry displays probably won’t help their poll numbers any, either.
Firstly it was Brian Micklethwait, not me, who wrote the first piece ‘Beauty of Grey’ mentions. Also the fact is that the majority of libertarians in the USA who deign to vote actually vote Republican, not Libertarian. Ever heard of Ron Paul? That should be obvious and as a ‘small l’ libertarian that is of no concern to me.
I would have thought the jocular tone would have made it apparent that Brian was not seriously supporting the idea of people being mugged. He is just saying that if people advocate and legitimise political actions that result in a more violent society, he is not going to be too concerned if they reap the harvest they have sown and I certainly agree. That ‘Beauty of Grey’ should decry our lack of moral relativism and therefore our sentiment that people are responsible for the consequences of their actions in the ballot booth, is certainly rather revealing. But that is not the same as Brian actually advocating mugging. Victim disarmament supporters “deserve” being mugged because they are responsible for people being helpless when confronted by an emboldened mugger, not because Brian is going to organize bands of libertarian muggers to roam the streets looking for ‘liberals’. To read his remarks any other way strikes me as bizarre.
Secondly, ‘Beauty of Grey’ clearly has no idea what modern self-described socialist parties who are in power in various western European countries actually advocate and do. He can delude himself that the pervasive incrementalist approach to regulating economic activity that pretty much defines the Democratic Party (and elements of the Republican Party) in the USA is materially different to that of the French or British or German or Swedish government’s ‘democratic socialist’ model but it is not. The only difference is that there is more effective political opposition to it in the USA.
Modern ‘democratic socialism’ is a strange hybrid between paleo-socialist aims of outright national ownership of the means of production and the national socialist approach of allowing nominal ownership of the means of production but regulating the ways in which they can be used to require the support of National Objectives: control by overt ownership vs. control by regulation… but the end result is still control by the state, it is only how you get there that varies. How does this differ from the ‘liberalism’ of the Gore/Kennedy/Schumer way? These are people who constantly advocate ‘National’ solutions driven by regulations rather than free markets. The only difference is the language they use to describe what they want.
That Gore’s plank does not explicitly lay out the pervasive role of the state, and that ‘Beauty of Grey’ therefore thinks that there is a huge difference between the ‘liberal’ and the modern democratic socialist, says more about ‘Beauty of Grey’s’ credulity than the political process he describes. Vast areas of economic (and private) life are subject to regulation and thus the owners of the means of production find their control ever more circumscribed by the state as it tells you who you may or may not trade with, who you may hire or fire, how you educate and interact with your children, how (and if) you protect yourself from harm, the manner in which you may marry, how you must clear the snow from property you do not even own in front of your house, how you install plumbing and electrical wiring in your own home etc. etc. Yet we are to believe that the sanctity of private property is alive and well and living in ‘liberal’ constituencies in the USA.
Or maybe I just missed the plank in Gore’s platform that called for a state seizure of the means of production and an abolition of private property? They do try to sneak things by you in the fine print, those scoundrels.
I could not have put it better myself. Beauty of Grey’s remarks demonstrate exactly how effective the incrementalist approach is. Al Gore wants exactly what Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin want. And what do Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Lional Jospin all call themselves? Socialists.
If Beauty of Grey is going to talk about ‘the fine print’ it would behoove him to read it first. Perhaps he should start by getting the author right on things he criticizes.
SFOR seem rather good at raiding Croatian banks and overturning democratic election results it dislikes but it seems the NATO troops in Bosnia i Herzegovina are rather less good at capturing war criminals.
If there were any French forces involved, no doubt Karadzic was tipped off. What a disappointing waste of time.
The best of humanity often emerges amidst the very worst
Michael Wells writes in with a fascinating story from Korea.
They have their own Arc de Triomphe, which is just like the one in Paris, only taller. They have a brewery that they bought in Britain and meticulously reassembled. A dead man is their eternal president. The EU sends them footballs. And every February, under threat of imprisonment, they celebrate the birthday of a small pudgy man in a jumpsuit. Natural wonders inevitably follow.
North Korea‘s psychedelic Stalinism has proved extremely durable, surviving even mass starvation and the country’s well-deserved status as planetary pariah. But there are signs that the regime may finally be losing its grip.
President Bush’s recent visit has overshadowed an amazing story. A man called Yoo Tae Jun escaped from North Korea in 1998 with his 3-year-old son. In 2000 he went back in for his wife! He was captured and imprisoned, but escaped again, turning up in South Korea on February 9. The Korea Times reported that he rode on top of trains and disguised himself as a soldier in order to escape. Think of it. Consider what it would take to escape from a place like North Korea, then imagine going back in and doing it all over again. Now contrast this amazing level of courage and resourcefulness with Robert Fisk’s thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another response to barbarism. Fisk would take his few morsels of food and thank the Dear Leader for his mercy. Yoo Tae Jun is the Anti-Fisk.
But Yoo Tae Jun is by no means the only defector. According to a recent AP story, defections from North Korea have nearly doubled every year since 1998, and there may be thousands more defectors in China. 74 defectors have arrived in the south so far this year. Pyongyang has increased the military presence along the northern border, but trying to feed them will be a major strain. The situation is beginning to look like Eastern Europe in 1989, when a trickle of defectors quickly became a flood. If China isn’t stopping them, North Korea could crumble pretty quickly.
The residue from that regime will be a sickening mess, but if there are more people like Yoo Tae Jun north of the DMZ, they’ll come through it.
Unlike most of the psychotic telephone bullies who hang yelling and screaming from the tits of our current British Government, my friend Tim really is a Spin Doctor. He spends his day using media messages actually to change (without being in any way a member of it) British government policy, health policy being his stamping ground. And the other sign that he’s a real Spin Doctor is that if I told you the rest of his name you probably wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, he emailed me today to tell me that Liberty Fund have launched a superb web site for libertarians/classical liberals. Check it out, he said. I did. It looks good.
I checked out in particular a piece by one of my favourite libertarian gurus, David Friedman, on the economics of crime. Here’s how it starts. It sounds familiar doesn’t it? But he didn’t get it from us any more than (until now) we got it from him. This particular truth is simply out there to be got, by anyone.
Economists approach the analysis of crime with one simple assumption—that criminals are rational people. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist—because it is the most attractive alternative available to me. The decision to commit a crime, like any other economic decision, can be analyzed as a choice among alternative combinations of costs and benefits.
Consider, as a simple example, a point that sometimes comes up in discussions of gun control. Opponents of private ownership of handguns argue that in violent contests between criminals and victims, the criminals usually win. A professional criminal, after all, has far more reason to learn how to use a gun than a random potential victim.
The argument is probably true, but the conclusion—that permitting both criminals and victims to have guns will help the criminals—does not follow. To see why, imagine that the result of legal handgun ownership is that one little old lady in ten chooses to carry a pistol in her purse. Further suppose that, of those who do, only one in ten, if mugged, succeeds in killing the mugger—the other nine miss, or drop the gun, or shoot themselves in the foot.
On average, the muggers are winning. But also on average, each one hundred muggings of little old ladies produce one dead mugger. Very few little old ladies carry enough money to be worth one chance in a hundred of being killed. Economic theory suggests that the number of muggings will decrease—not because the muggers have all been killed, but because some of them have chosen to switch to safer professions.
If the idea that muggers are rational profit-maximizers seems implausible, consider who gets mugged. If a mugger’s objective is to express machismo, to prove what a he-man he is, there is very little point in mugging little old ladies. If the objective is to get money at as low a cost as possible, there is much to be said for picking the most defenseless victims you can find. In the real world little old ladies get mugged a lot more often than football players.
This is one example of a very general implication of the economic analysis of conflict. In order to stop someone from doing something that injures you, whether robbing your house or polluting your air, it is not necessary to make it impossible for him to do it—merely unprofitable.
As you can see, if you need a quick high quality ‘fix’ of dispassionate rationality, it is well worth checking out the Liberty Fund website.
Several readers have written in on the subject of the term ‘liberal’ and the following e-mails from Evan McElravy and Joe Clibbens also make good points
Evan McElravy writes:
It’s worth noting that the positive connotations of our ideology are so overwhelming that not only have the left stolen “liberal” from us, they are now working on “libertarian” too. Noam Chomsky, notoriously, refers to himself as a “libertarian socialist” and I was just the other day reading an article claiming much the same ground for Rosa Luxembourg, on the basis that she opposed Bolshevik centralism. The independent bookstore Book People in Austin, TX, where I just returned from, has their political books organized roughly by orientation. In the conservative shelf is Pat Buchanan along with David Boaz’s The Libertarian Reader, and a few other books of theirs and ours muddled together, while the “Liberal/Libertarian” shelf is home to Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader, as well as those more mainstream liberal writers you’d expect. On the other hand, the magazine section had more copies of Reason than anywhere I’d ever been, prominently displayed, and outnumbering widely The Nation and the National Review. So I’ll give them some credit, even if their history section was decidedly pedestrian.
Joe Clibbens writes:
I could not agree with you more in this campaign, and I myself have for years used the ‘liberal’ label, albeit with the necessary addition of ‘classical’ in certain company, whenever possible and never use it to refer to social democrats, but I am writing to suggest you expand it to other hijacked terminology.
The term progressive has its roots firmly in liberalism, while socialism has always been reactionary and luddite. Every time I hear a socialist referred to as ‘progressive’ I go all bug-eyed, they are in fact the very antithesis of its true meaning.
Of course ‘leftist’, traditionally speaking, would also denote minimal government, and the socialist bludgeoning of the left-right paradigm is the very reason it no longer makes any sense.
Still, all’s fair in love and propaganda, but it’s time we started fighting back.
Up the Revolution!
[Ed: I have always preferred ‘Up the Evolution!’ myself, for rational libertarians are nothing if not radical evolutionaries]
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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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