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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My area of central London – Pimlico – has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he’s okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:
“As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.”
(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.
In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:
Life At the Bottom;
The Welfare State We’re In.
Mind The Gap.
Guns & Violence: The English Experience.
I’d add that a common complaint – sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives – is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC’s coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory “cuts”, was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.
Obama declares US is still a AAA nation, in his regard. Like when i would try & convince my parents that my C+ in math was pretty much a B-
– Mark Ronson (via Twitter)
These riots could be Cameron’s Falklands War. That’s what just occurred to me, as I was watching my television, as the arson and rioting spreads throughout London and beyond.
Some man on the telly – I don’t know who or what he was – has just said, very uneloquently, that we are about to learn what David Cameron is made of. His decision concerning when to come home from his holiday (arguably he left it far too late), in Tuscany, will pale into insignificance beside the decisions that he will have to make in the course of the next few days.
Enoch Powell said something very similar of a previous Prime Minister, a great deal more memorably, at the time of that earlier war. You can read here what Powell then said, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page:
“The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the ‘Iron Lady’. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.”
Nobody has ever made any such observation about David Cameron, or not in my hearing, but a similar examination of him is now about to occur.
It could actually be the making of the man. But then again, …
Alas, this kind of thing is the Health of the State.
LATER:
Labour politicians and spokespersons are out in force, if only to make it clear that they too are against it all. Smart move. The trick in these situations is to blame your political opponents, but without seeming to blame your political opponents.
Kevin McGuire, a journalist close to the previous political regime, has just said something rather more memorable:
“If he comes back from holiday, and it makes no difference, what’s the point of having a Prime Minister?”
In other words, if he makes no difference, we should have a different Prime Minister. As indeed we should. Nicely put.
I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:
“The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain.”
I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.
Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch’s blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn’t even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.
Anyway, here’s another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:
“How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders.”
On an optimistic note, I’d add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.
Writing in today’s Times behind a paywall, Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire, relates how she stood in the rain outside a miner’s welfare hall smoking with a angry but partially mollified constituent.
…he told me about his father in law who used to come to the welfare every night and spent all evening drinking one pint of Guinness. He was a chain smoker. Since the smoking ban he’s never been back.
“He’s can’t stand outside in the rain like this. He’s an old man.” He told me about how his father-in-law never goes out any more. “He’s lonely and miserable. And he still chain smokes.”
Natascha Engel now says that, given the chance again, she would not vote for the ban. It is good that she has the empathy to see and the courage to state that the reason the smoking ban is wrong is that it makes people more miserable than they would otherwise have been. Just that. That is reason enough. Arguments about health are very interesting, and I have no doubt that the dangers of passive smoking have been exaggerated, but the fact that an old man has had the solace of smoking in company with his friends denied him trumps all that. I do wish Ms Engel had been able to perceive this at the time when her vote might have done some good, but better late than never.
The riots in London over the last couple nights can be condemned as assaults on private property by predatory opportunists. That much is easy.
What is rather harder is commenting on what sparked them off and I have felt no urge at all to swiftly form any opinions.
The police say the dead man was shot after shooting at a policeman and that said policeman’s live was saved by the incoming round lodging in his radio.
Well… is that true or is it a self serving fantasy to exonerate the use of deadly force by the police? I have no idea. But in the aftermath of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, where just about every single ‘fact’ provided by the authorities turned out to be either mistaken or a total fabrication, quite simply how can anything said by the Met be taken at face value until it is corroborated by multiple sources?
Was this a ‘righteous shoot’ of a gangster who fired first or another cack-handed murder by the state justified by a flood of lies?
Only time will tell and my unwillingness to give the police the benefit of the doubt is entirely the fault of the police’s handling of the appalling Menezes affair.
“In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to be able to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom, 1966.
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default”
– Alan Greenspan, on NBC’s Meet the Press, 7 August 2011
(Hat tip for the earlier quote to commenter “El Tut” in the comments to the later one.)
“The US government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone” […] In the Xinhua commentary, China scorned the United States for its “debt addiction” and “short sighted” political wrangling. “China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets,” it said. It urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure.
– Xinhua News Agency.
No kidding but hey, when a state run by a communist party tells the USA to spend less on… welfare, you start to get some idea just how strange the world has become and just how screwed the US actually is.
A year ago I wrote about the Chinese monopoly position in Rare Earths and how unlikely it was to last. It seems I was correct, according to this item Glenn Reynolds linked to today:
Elk Creek, Neb. (population 112), may not be so tiny much longer. Reports suggest that the southeastern Nebraska hamlet may be sitting on the world’s largest untapped deposit of “rare earth” minerals, which have proved to be indispensable to a slew of high-tech and military applications such as laser pointers, stadium lighting, electric car batteries and sophisticated missile-guidance systems.
And the best part of it? The deposits are not in California!
I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it’s Friday:
“Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy.”
And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the “upper class” etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.
Let’s not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.
This has to have been one of the most interesting interruptions to my outdoor coffee break ever.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
August the 4th 1789…
The day when the serfs (the few serfs there actually were in France) were freed and the day that all the old taxes and feudal restrictions were abolished.
Yes I know that what went before this day was evil and what came after this day was evil – but the day itself was good.
The one good day of the French Revolution.
Although (before the pedants start to bash me) I know the repeals did not fit into exactly this 24 hour period.
But the 4th of August has become known for the pro liberty moves.
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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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