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]
Well, maybe this is a sign of the times. A Communist dictatorship, which has gone after pesky entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma and many smaller firms, realises that this is bad for business. Who would have imagined that? It is a bit like Lenin realising, in around 1921, that shooting and jailing entrepreneurial people was not smart, so we had the New Economic Policy for a few years until Stalin turned the repression back on to full power.
The question I have, however, is whether this is a temporary change, and bad habits will resume:
China is cracking down on behaviours from law enforcement seen as detrimental to the ordinary function of private businesses, a crucial step in restoring confidence as the country embarks on a whole-of-government effort to ensure a steady, sustainable economic recovery.
Price gouging during disasters is good. It saves lives.
Think of it this way. When the hurricane is on its way do you want people to panic-buy double what they need “just in case”, causing the shops to run out? Why wouldn’t they do that if prices are artificially stopped from rising? Wouldn’t it be better if people limited the amount they bought because “it’s so expensive right now”, leaving more available for others?
When the disaster strikes, would you like businesses and individuals from hundreds of miles away to drop whatever they were doing previously and start transporting emergency supplies into the area affected – and keep doing it until there are no more shortages? Would you like factories hundreds of miles away to shift production to whatever the people in the afflicted area need most? You would? Then let them sell their stuff at a higher price than usual.
Six candidates stood for the leadership: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat. They will be eliminated in a series of votes, until two remain to stand in November. On 4 September, Patel was eliminated in the first round of voting, with Jenrick outperforming expectations by coming first. On 10 September, Stride was eliminated in the second round and went on to endorse Cleverly.
Following a strong performance at the Conservative Party Conference, Cleverly emerged as a frontrunner by coming first in the third round of voting, whilst Tugendhat was eliminated.
Despite this, Cleverly was unexpectedly eliminated in a close fourth round of voting when both Badenoch and Jenrick overtook him.
What happened? The Guardian‘s Andrew Sparrow quotes this tweet from Alex Wickham of Bloomberg that might explain it:
Tories saying they think the Cleverly camp lent Jenrick votes to try to keep Badenoch off the ballot but lent too many. Or Cleverly supporters did it off their own backs thinking he was nailed on for the final
One detail that perhaps got lost in the recent UK decision about the Indian Ocean group of islands containing Diego Garcia – taken very fast and over the heads of the Chagos Islands locals (which hardly fits with ideas about decolonisation) – was that President Biden applauded the move. In way this isn’t surprising. Pr. Biden doesn’t particularly like the UK, and like a certain kind of American politician, has a grudge about the old, post-imperial network of relationships and territories that the UK has, or had, around the world. More fool him.
In this transfer and lease deal (which is not, as far as I know, formally signed and there has been no formal debate or legislation about this in Parliament) the UK is transferring taxpayers money in a payment programme to a tax haven (Mauritius). If the Tories had done this, the tax haven angle would have been constantly mentioned.
It seems ironic that Labour, a party not exactly known for its love of tax havens (unless Tony Blair uses one) or such international conduits, feels it is okay to deal with Mauritius financially in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I am for tax havens, and the more of them the better, because they deter otherwise high-tax governments from going crazy when capital is mobile, although as UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is proving, that’s not a solid protection. Tax hikes are likely in the 30 October UK budget. People are leaving.
Biden’s support for what’s happened should give pause, given what a poor President he is on foreign affairs, in my view. Also, he hasn’t made much disguise of his distaste for Brexit and the UK’s independence out of the bloc, and neither did Barack Obama. There’s no enthusiasm from that quarter for the UK to engage in new trade and other deals with countries outside the EU. And Biden’s own recent judgement about foreign affairs is spotty at best: half-decent on Israel and Ukraine, and shockingly inept over Afghanistan, with the rushed departure and loss of billions of dollars of equipment.
Those on the Republican side are, apparently, far less happy about the Chagos islands deal, and the potential risk to security of the Diego Garcia airbase jointly used by the UK and US. They know how porous leasehold deals can be, and have seen that Mauritius has used all legal pressure to change the terms of its independence settlement with the UK of 1968. The US Air Force has used the base in recent conflicts; if it wanted to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, and do so via Diego Garcia, the situation becomes dicier than it might have been. One has to wonder about the role of China in all this (Chinese money flows through Mauritius.)
This whole saga also shows that if the UK is to pursue a more “blue water” foreign policy in future as it expands trade links with countries outside Europe, particular in Asia, that getting its defence arrangements locked down is essential. And we need to lose our illusions about how special our relationship with the US really is at times.
Daniel Hannan has this excellent overview of just what a shockingly poor transaction the UK has made with Mauritius. Hannan argues that Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the islands, a fact that is so shocking it is hard to argue how on earth we reached this point and how the Mauritius government thought it could bully its way ahead on this. However, a future, different UK government should certainly revisit the terms of this deal, and press hard on Mauritius if, for example, that country’s anti-money laundering standards are questioned in future. Time for a bit of nastiness behind the smiles.
It may be too late now to change course on this specific, shabby deal, at least under the current Starmer government. I fear it is. And now there’s speculation about what happens to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. The UK has shown itself to be weak. People tend to notice.
Hours later that day, a video emerged showing Louk’s body,[28][29][b][c] partially clothed, with a significant head injury and blood-matted hair, being paraded in the streets of Gaza City by Hamas militants in the back of a pickup truck; they were exclaiming “Allahu Akbar”, and were joined in the cheers by the people in the crowd surrounding the vehicle, some of whom spat on the body.[33][23][34][35] The video went viral,[36][37][2] becoming one of the first viral videos of the Israel–Hamas war.[36] It was released in a wave of videos of Hamas members parading hostages and bodies.
The link with the text “Palestinians celebrate” takes you to my post of that title. The quoted text takes you to the Wikipedia article with the title “Killing of Shani Louk”, which describes how her half-naked corpse was paraded in triumph to the mob, and how members of that mob happily filmed it and shared the videos with their friends. A detail it does not mention but which is burned into my memory is that the Hamas men sat on her dead body, as if it were a hunting trophy.
Usually when I post a Wikipedia extract, I strip out the numbers in square brackets that show where the Wikipedia article links to a source. In this case I have left them in. If anyone reading this has the slightest doubt about whether these events really were as depraved as they sound, prepare yourself mentally then follow those links to confirm it for yourself. Remember as you look that Shani Louk was but one of 364 festival-goers murdered by Hamas. Nor was she the only victim paraded before a Palestinian crowd most of whose members were not members of Hamas. What struck me about that mob was that there was no pretence that Shani Louk was guilty of anything, even by their standards. There was no claim that she was a blasphemer against Islam or an Israeli soldier – the fact that her body was displayed in her underwear flaunted that she was just a random Jewish woman they had caught and killed.
Kemi Badenoch MP, one of the contenders to be the next leader of the Conservative party, recently and astonishly caused controversy by saying ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’. I agree with this statement. Some cultures are worse than others. Now that ISIS is gone, Hamas-ruled Gaza is probably the most horrible culture currently present on Earth. Please note that this makes absolutely no difference to the obligation of Israel to adhere to the laws of war, even against an enemy that does not. It just lets the Israelis know what to expect from Gaza if they do not defeat Hamas.
Should we conclude that the Palestinians, or the Gazans, are an accursed people by nature? No. There is a dark mirror to the past in the fact that Shani Louk was half German. In living memory Germany fell as low as any nation in human history. Let us not delude ourselves that the attempted extermination of the Jews was carried out by the Nazi party alone. A brave but tiny minority of Germans who were not Nazis sheltered Jews, a larger minority at least did not report their suspicions that their neighbours were doing so, and the majority obeyed the Nazis so long as they remained in power.
Who would have dreamed eighty years ago that one day the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin would be illuminated with an image of the Star of David to remember Jews murdered in a pogrom? Yes, a mere symbol, but a true symbol – Germany re-joined the family of nations decades ago. What brought about this change? The complete military defeat of the Nazi regime. Cynics observe that the change did not happen until after the defeat. Optimists observe that it did happen after the defeat.
This is the first anniversary of the October 7th attacks. The savage invasion of last year in which Hamas broke through the borders of Israel and proceeded to kill, rape, behead, burn, maim, and kidnap innocent civilians predictably provoked the Israeli government to retaliate.
It was perhaps also unsurprising that Israel’s reprisal would be denounced by the usual unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists. These perennial detractors of Israelis and Jews had, for decades, made a habit of not only excusing Palestinian intransigence but also blaming Israel no matter what.
“The past year has not been a Palestinian war against Israel, nor an Arab war against Israel. It has been an Iranian war against Israel, fought directly by Tehran’s own military and through its numerous terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraq and Syrian milita groups. And behind the terrorist storm troopers lies Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.”
– John Bolton, Daily Telegraph, writing today on the grim anniversary of the 7 October progrom inflicted by Hamas on southern Israel last year.
My thoughts with those who grieve for the loss of their loved ones.
“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.
The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.”
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk.
The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.)
As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984.
The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.)
As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place.
Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.
And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.
The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”.
“Ethnically cleansed” … “Goebbels” … “full power over government, space and people” … With the mad courage of despair, in the next sentence Mr Rau gets down to specifics about what form this onrushing horror will take:
In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest
I wasn’t expecting that.
and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of.
Ah, now I understand.
In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.
In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.
In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict.
From what I have read about the FPÖ, it does seem that the party’s “far right” label has more substance behind it than is usual, but the party “cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable” does not contribute to my having that opinion. Mr Rau seems to think that that the disbursement of government subsidies being a political matter, taxpayer money being treated as a finite resource, and subsidy-funded arts organisations actually having to compete with each other all constitute outrages against the natural order.
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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