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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A Guardian blog commentator attacks the free-market right thus:
[A] criminally insane coterie of maladjusted right wingers – whose regular Pooteresque diatribes against the poor and craven support of neo-liberalism are beyond parody – that infests every political thread on the Guardian blog. Just listen as they condemn themselves out of their own incoherent foaming mouths. Their comments on the poor/disabled/unemployed, exposes the pathology of their neo liberal right wing extremism. Their attack on the NHS is no surprise – how could they not? The NHS stands as a symbol in opposition to everything these disturbed, juvenile, Ayn Rand fantasists and free market barbarians hold dear in their perverse belief system. These people are incapable or unwilling to understand a beloved institution that represents altruism, egalitarianism, self sacrifice and the humanistic collective will of an unselfish inclusive society.
This verminous, parasitic , parvenu, lickspittle, non empathetic sociopathic trash. These reductive whores of unfettered market driven, voodoo Social Darwinism, that wishes to reduce every aspect of humanity to mere units of production, who despise ordinary people, who see their only value, as an entry in a of profit and loss account – to be exploited by the human garbage that this sub-strata of humanity are, and the corporate fascism they serve. To read their comments is to see the true face of their malignant, cancerous moral degeneracy, and in that, they at least serve a purpose. Much like the gargoyles on a church spire, they represent a grotesque warning of how deformed ones humanity can become. These end of pier, amateur hour economists, these workhouse barbarians, these neo liberal whores are, “nothing more than errand boys sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill,” that we’ve already paid for in full. Long may they continue as a reminder of supreme idiocy and malevolence .
It won’t fit on a T-shirt, but maybe “verminous, parasitic , parvenu, lickspittle, non empathetic sociopathic trash” would.
So the cure for the looming ‘fiscal cliff’ will be – surprise! massive income tax increases (expiration of the “Bush tax cuts”) plus significant additional income taxes) and no cuts in spending what-so-ever.
Oh, sure, they’ll eliminate the mohair price support program, and close a post office or two – reducing spending by 0.00000126% – and this will be presented as brutal, inhumane cuts to the very fabric of our society. But the Federal juggernaut will continue unabated.
– Commenter llamas (oopse, sorry)
“Our MPs are now limbering up for a post-Leveson era where their menaces matter. Where they can speak softly, while carrying a big stick. Where the journalist knows that the MPs can ratchet up press regulation any time they want: that we won’t like them when they’re angry. Right now, the British press is in the very lucky position of being unaffected by the flattery or threats of MPs. And its this hugely important principle which is now at stake. In America, this principle is enshrined in the constitution. In Britain, we’ve relied on a commitment to liberty being in the DNA of our elected representatives. Jeremy Paxman once compared the relationship between a journalist and a politician to that between a dog and a lamppost. The lamppost has had enough, an wants to strike back. That’s understandable. But it’s a shame that so many Tory MPs should share that urge.”
Writes Fraser Nelson, Spectator editor.
Given the current state of near-hysteria over the child sex abuse case surrounding the late Jimmy Savile and others, the recent MP expense excuse scandal and the case of newspapers having broken existing laws to hack phones, etc, we are now in a very dangerous situatiion where MPs from all parties have an incentive to try and licence the press and wider media, and secondly, that a large chunk of well-meaning but deluded members of the public apparently feel okay with such regulation, no matter how counterproductive or oppressive this might be.
These are depressing times to be a friend of liberty, but we need to try and take whatever wins we can on the way.
Samizdata will no longer be embedding links to the Daily Telegraph’s site as they have created a pay-wall for overseas readers after they have accessed twenty articles in a month.
As a significant proportion of Samizdata’s readership is overseas, and as there are many alternative sources of news on-line, we bid adieu to the Telegraph, effective immediately.
Andrew Klavan talks a lot in this essay about how the “right” needs to adjust and handle strategy after losing to Obama this week. Of course, mention of “right” immediately begs the question of where classical liberals/libertarians – that I consider to be progressive in the best sense of that misused word – stand. Despite such caveats, this is an interesting essay to read over a coffee. (I disagree with him on religion.)
For me, one thing about this election is clear, and the same applies to Europe. We now have so many people dependent, in whole or part, on state welfare (not just the poor, I am talking about a whole clutch of vested interest groups ranging from farmers to defence contractors to recipients of subsidies and soft loans) that there are not enough people who can see their self interest to vote for small government to swing an election. But this is hardly a new problem. Back in the 70s, Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues such as Nigel Lawson and Sir Keith Joseph were talking about the “ratchet effect” of socialism and big government. And policies such as sales of public housing and privatisation were, in a way, attempts to create a new bloc of voters who favoured free enterprise, property ownership, and the like. The trick for opponents of Big Government on both sides of the Atlantic is to do the same again.
This quote about the absurd Tory MP, Nadine Dorries, caught my eye:
“Ladies, if you really want to be Gladstone and Disraeli, it’s best not to act like Thelma and Louise.”
Of course, Dorries might secretly want to promote the idea in the public’s mind that MPs have now become so powerless and overshadowed by the doings of Brussels and so on that they don’t really have much point any more, so what is wrong with appearing on some moronic “reality TV” show? However, as a taxpayer, I resent paying this woman’s salary and providing her with an opportunity to make a prize twerp of herself. If she wants to make it in entertainment, she should do what thousands of other young actors, actresses and showbiz types have done.
Oh well, at least it means we don’t have to talk about four more years of Obama just yet. My prediction that he would lose turned out to be a dud.
Of course, for sheer entertainment value, we have Francois Hollande, the president of France, now that Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to four years in the slammer. Maybe the old “bunga-bunga” politician should be put on the show with Ms Dorries.
Big state cronyism is a bad thing, economically, socially and ethically but it is not Soviet Communism. Get a grip, people. Nor is it possible for a big, strong and basically rich country to be destroyed and annihilated by one bad Administration though it is very bad. No country gets annihilated just like that. Heck, even Belgium cannot destroy itself.
– Helen Szamuely Nor is it the case that the American people, as this bizarre Economist blog claims, “endorsed macroeconomics”. They just voted very marginally for known dull over unknown boring, neither of whom would have enough power to implement a root-and-branch plan of reform. That is presumably why neither man had much of a plan to do so. Drift continues, roughly in the same direction.
They say that’s what Margaret Thatcher said, the day she fell. I was in the small crowd that watched as the car brought her back from the Commons to Downing Street, a self-conscious little crowd, split about fifty-fifty between sympathisers and opponents, the sort of crowd from which occasional shouts pop out like kittens nervously venturing forth from a cardboard box. I did not shout either to jeer or console; I was only there because at the time I worked in the Treasury building in the next street and wanted to see a little history being made.
It might cheer up any American readers saddened by the result of the recent US election to recall that the first shot in the fusillade that brought the Prime Minister down was this:
On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher’s original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European single currency.
Howe thought he was making straight the path down which the forces of modernity would march, but he didn’t know the future any more than Thatcher did, or you, or I. I’ll tell you something, though, his political delusion on 1 November 1990 regarding the desirability of currency union looks a lot more foolish now than her personal delusion that she would still have the key to No.10 Downing Street a few weeks later.
That’s the trouble with the future. It won’t stay put.
Today we are hearing much (in tones of glee or despair) about how “a permanent Democratic majority” is emerging, an oligarchy dispensing patronage to fiefdoms of class and race that will only fall when the money runs out, and then with vast misery and perhaps bloodshed. Similar predictions are made for the UK and other developed countries. I do fear that, but a tempering memory, again from my Treasury days in the early nineties, is of seeing earnest policy papers written by Conservative MPs who worried that in order to preserve democracy it might be needful for the Conservative party to split into two, because it was obvious that Labour was never getting back in.
I cannot say quite what I am aiming to do in this post, other than possibly bore some harried souls into tranquility with my recollections des élections perdues and similar political ups and downs. Just saying, it’s a funny old world.
The Republican party fucked this up all by themselves – they could have made clear points to rebut the arguments that led my family members to making rational decisions to vote Obama. But they didn’t.
How hard would it have been to say “OK, we all know that entitlement spending is unsustainable. We also know that whole generations have made retirement plans that depend upon those entitlements. So we’ll guarantee to maintain them for anybody over (whatever age) but things must change for people who are younger.”
How hard would it have been to say “Abortion is a divisive issue, but the law is settled. America faces far more pressing challenges, right now, so I pledge not to mess with abortion – there are more immediate matters that demand my attention.”
Apparently, it was too hard. That’s what happens when a political party becomes nothing more than a cynical, office seeking, machine. It tries to pander to too many special interests and ends up satisfying none sufficiently
– Commenter ‘The Other Rob‘, discussing why the Stupid Party (USA branch) lost to the Evil Party (USA branch)
The Republican party saw an authoritarian, fiscally profligate, regulation crazy President whose flagship program was ObamaCare and who worked tirelessly to expand the remit of the state… and decided that what they needed to do was run a candidate whose entire political career featured expanding the remit of the state and … RomneyCare. Moreover they choose a candidate whose positions on civil liberties was every bit as odious (if not more so) than the dismal Obama.
So unsurprisingly to anyone thinking clearly, the Republican failed to retake the White House.
Good.
So let me repeat what I said in 2009 in ‘An appeal for disunity‘:
2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack “The One” Obama crushed Big State Republican John “I Support the Bail Outs” McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for… statism.
Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.
Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic ‘broad church’ politics no longer apply on the so-called ‘right’… no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.
In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.
I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become… conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question “do you want the state to have less control over people’s lives or more control?” If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller.
This is the time to apply that test to Republican politicians, every last one of them… and drive any who fail that simple test out of the party by whatever means necessary. Now is the time for a figurative internal ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This is the opportunity to destroy a great many political careers and remake the Republican Party into the party of constitutionally limited government and to start fighting the culture war that the party should have been fighting since the day Ronald Reagan left office with his job only half done.
It’s like deja vu all over again only this time the global economy is well into melt down and the money printing driven ‘recovery’ in the USA is taking it over a fiscal cliff.
Ok Tea Party, start your engines in earnest this time. Get nasty, really nasty. And all you Republican apparatchiks? Help the Tea Party drive the Big Government Republicans from office and drum them out the party, because not only are they The Enemy, they keep loosing elections and that can negatively impact your precious careers and that, even if you are almost all amoral scum no better than the Democrats you purport to oppose, should get your undivided attention.
“The People have spoken, the bastards.”
– Attributed to Dick Tuck.
Patrick Crozier, Michael Jennings and Brian Micklethwait are currently sat around my television discussing the election. We plan to stay here eating pizza and drinking beer for as long as we can stand. I will be posting some sort of running commentary in a hastily prepared chat room. If you want to join in, give yourself a username and leave the password blank.
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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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