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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From time to time I get into a lot of trouble with my allies because I express skepticism of the value of prescriptive rights, regulation or transparency. In fact am inclined to think (though there may be tactical advantage in their reception in law) human rights are an ornamental distraction from the pursuit of liberty, Gucci belts for those who think buying trousers is disgusting.
One of the reasons we are in such a terrible mess in the UK is that those on the left who used to care about personal liberty became utterly infatuated with the legalism, having been given the Human Rights Act as a pretty distraction, and now spend all their time defending its importance.
– Guy Herbert
John Bercow is the sort of politician I love: so dependably grasping and filled with a sense of entitlement that, whilst others have the wit to keep their heads down as MP expenses are under increased public scrutiny, good ol’ John just cannot stop himself from noisily grunting and ramming his snout deeper into the taxpayer’s trough.
As I mentioned before, the longer this goes on and the more disrepute it brings upon the entire political class, the happier I am. They just cannot help themselves… I mean what is the point of all the power if you cannot trouser a few poxy quid, eh?
Richard Reeves writes an article in the Telegraph called It’s not about the size of the state – it’s what David Cameron does with it that not only falls at the first fence (the title pretty much alerted me to the fact this was going to be filled ‘advice from the enemy’), it is overflowing with analysis that encapsulates the intellectual failing that underpin BlueLabour. Let me do a fisk-lette:
This week Cameron strayed further still, using the Hugo Young memorial lecture to attack Labour’s record on poverty and inequality. He said that a “re-imagination in the role, as well as size” of the state was needed to build what he called “The Big Society”. It is audacious stuff. Cameron has adopted Labour’s goals of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, reducing child poverty and promoting social mobility, and then damns Labour for failing to achieve them.
What is audacious about conceding the choice of battleground entirely to the nominal enemy? I say ‘nominal’ because in truth the philosophical/ideological differences between New Labour and the Tory Party (BlueLabour) are not that significant.
It is a bit like the ‘audacious’ plans by the allies in World War II to area bomb German cities to break morale by slaughtering enemy workers even though earlier German attempts to do that to Britain had been an abject failure. If “London can take it”, it did not seem to occur to the ‘audacious’ RAF and USAAF that, chances are, Hamburg and Berlin probably can “take it” too.
And so Cameron’s audacious stuff is to try and do what Labour tried, just ‘do it better’. Far from being audacious, this is just more of the same heard-it-all-before by-the-numbers political droning, tailored slightly to appeal to whoever he is talking to at the moment and which way the weathervane is pointing today. Audacious would require an actual meta-contextual shift and Cameron has made it clear he represents continuity, not radical change.
Labour’s response has been to accuse Cameron of advocating “Thatcherism or 19th-century liberalism”. Wrong on both counts. Mrs Thatcher was more likely to join the National Union of Mineworkers than to say, as Cameron did, that “strong and concerted government action” was needed to “remake society.
So if government action (i.e. the welfare state) has hollowed out civil society, it seems remarkable that the notion that more government action might far from “remake society” but rather just continue its unravelling. The brutal truth is that David Cameron (and I suspect Richard Reeves) do not really understand that society may be something governments can weaken and destroy but they is not something that states can “remake” because societies are not “things” in the same way states are, they are emergent collective properties produced by countless several interactions.
But for much of the 20th century, politics was defined by attitudes to the state: the Right against, the Left in favour. And in one area Cameron remains instinctively opposed to state action, which is financial redistribution to reduce poverty. Cameron claims that inequality has worsened under Labour. Actually, the picture is complex: on some measures the gap has narrowed. The fairest assessment is that income inequality today is roughly the same as it was in 1997.
The ‘right’ (a sloppy term really) is against the state? Like Ted Heath maybe? And just how many ‘right’ leaders in the 20th century actually shrunk back the size of the state, as opposed to just growing it a bit more gradually? Never mind that ‘inequality’ per se should not even be an issue (someone else getting richer does not make me poorer), the size of the state is the issue. The larger the state, the more civil society is circumscribed. The larger the state, the more wealth and opportunity is sucked out of productive sectors by confiscation and regulation.
The only think we need more of from government is inaction… we need less across the board, not more… Richard Reeves cannot see that because he is a regulatory statist who sees government in terms of the parties being competing ‘management teams’ rather like Soviet design bureaus… offering creative options within essentially the same ideological system and meta-contextual framework. But in truth we do not need ‘better’ government action, we need ‘less’ government action… dramatically less. We also need actual intellectual opposition, not a difference of management theories. In short we need a far less powerful and intrusive state vis a vis civil society.
It is very much about the size of the state.
Germany is particularly odious when it comes to censorship and allowing legal interference with freedom of expression, but his one takes the biscuit for sheer absurdity…
Some 19 years ago, a man in Germany, together with his half brother, reportedly murdered an actor named Walter Sedlmayr. The man was convicted and served 15 years in jail. Now he is free. And, according to Wired, he has exercised that freedom by instructing lawyers, the elegantly named firm of Stopp and Stopp, to sue Wikipedia.
The lawsuit claims that German privacy law, designed to help criminals re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association with Walter Sedlmayr’s murder. Wired quotes Jennifer Granick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying that the lawyers are not only demanding that publications change whatever they write now, but that online archives must endure revision, too.
And just for the record, the people in question who were convicted of murdering Walter Sedlmayr are Wolfgang Wehrle and his half brother Manfred Lauber (just to add yet another place in the google cache where that information can sit). This is wacko enough on its own, but the linked article in turn links to geek.com, quoting the EFF, where they make the much broader point as to why this latest legal excess cannot be tolerated…
As the EFF beautifully puts it: “At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders”.
As the world networks together, increasingly we cannot tolerate legal attacks anywhere because the repercussions will not stay neatly within national borders, so neither can our hostility to such assaults on our liberty… now let us also do something about Britain’s intolerable defamation laws.
“The first World War is one of the topics in history that interests me the most. I really think that if more people focused on leadership during that war, the concerns over “market failure” and the faith in political leadership would decline. I challenge anyone to come up with a group of business villains who caused as much death and suffering as the “legitimate” political leaders of 1914. My proposal for Veterans’ Day observances is that they should include a re-telling of the history of World War I along the lines of the Passover re-telling of the Exodus. My goal would be to help inoculate people from believing in the wisdom of the ruling class.”
– Arnold Kling
So how is Zimbabwe doing these days? According to this article, linked to yesterday by Patrick Crozier, things are actually improving. Patrick quotes this bit:
Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products.
While reading this article, I could not shake the feeling that I was really reading a piece of libertarian science fiction. Could they really have done anything so very sensible, and could things really be improving so definitely? The piece does appear to be genuine, so far as I can tell, but if it turns out to be fantasy-fiction, this paragraph will get me off the credulity hook. File under maybe true but maybe too good to be true.
Meanwhile, if the piece really is true, the best bit of all in it is that there is now no “lender of last resort” in Zimbabwe. Could it be that libertarian economic policy – in particular libertarian banking policy – is about to get a serious test, which it will pass, and hence another serious showcase, highly pertinent given the world’s current banking woes, to educate the world with? How will socialism and state-centralism get the credit for that I wonder?
If genuine, this piece reminds me of a vivid British recollection from way back. Someone on the telly asked a City commentator, just after Black Wednesday (the day in 1992 when John Major’s economic policies collapsed in ruins), what the prospects were now for the British economy. Well, he said, now that the government has not got a policy, rather good.
A member of the Australian military went missing in the middle of a deadly clash with the Taliban then, fourteen months later, she just wanders back into camp. Is a court martial convened to see if she is guilty of desertion? No, people just shrug their shoulders and start playing tennis with her. What madness is this?
What is the world coming to when a valued member of the armed services takes off under fire and leaves their comrades chasing their tails wondering what happened to her? And it should be noted there were persistent rumours that far from being held captive by the Taliban, she was sniffing around an area of Afghanistan notorious for opium production while her compatriots were risking their lives facing down the enemy. How can this not cause serious repercussions when she wanders back to base after being located by US soldiers (who reportedly said she was a real bitch)? Shocking.
The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.
You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying… by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means… and that’s it. There’s a running competition for the best pics.
It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public’s attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.
Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.
I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new President of the EU state – for that is what it now is – will not be our own former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, but a Belgian politician of glorious anonymity. And quite right too. While some of us might have hoped that the election of Mr Blair might have provided much entertainment as he swanked around the chancelleries of Europe and the world with his wife, and therby discredited the whole purpose of his office, it was not to be. Far too many European politicians, while they are enthusiastic members of the EU oligarchy and supporters of transnational progressivism like Mr Blair, did not approve of his full-hearted support for the recent removal from power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and of Mr Blair’s support for the evil Boooosh. So that was that.
Oh well, I am sure Mr Blair will find a way to pay for all his expensive houses.
“…how will the media blame it on the failure of capitalism?”
Well, you know, China started market-friendly practices, it goes belly up, nothing bad ever happened in Mao’s China, and so on. The editorial in The Guardian writes itself.
– Commenter ‘Dom‘
I find this horribly convincing:
Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics – like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption – indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth.
Another data point cited by the bears: overcapacity. For example, the Chinese already consume more cement than the rest of the world combined, at 1.4 billion tons per year. But they have dramatically ramped up their ability to produce even more in recent years, leading to an estimated spare capacity of about 340 million tons, which, according to a report prepared earlier this year by Pivot Capital Management, is more than the consumption in the U.S., India and Japan combined.
This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.
The Pivot Capital report was extremely popular in Chanos’s office and concluded, “We believe the coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed event for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom.”
To me the moral of the last couple of decades of world economic history is clear. The world was indeed somewhat released from the dead hand of politics. In particular, the making of stuff was released into the wild. Consequently, during the last two decades, stuff has just got better and better.
But the world’s financial systems remained under rigid political control, everywhere.
Stuff-making roared ahead. But then the financial systems started collapsing, and China looks like being next. Managed capitalism has indeed only been a very partial success, but which word in that phrase will get the blame?
I say that the stuff-makers, the truly honest capitalists of the last two decades, should not be blamed. They did, and continue to do, a fabulous job. On the contrary, the politician/financiers should, instead of trying to shift the blame and the burden onto them, be looking to the stuff-makers for lessons in how to make an honest living.
History is an interesting thing, often said to be “written by the winners”… but is it? Certainly in much of Eastern Europe, the end of Communism did not necessarily means the political end of the communists behind the system.
James Mark is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and he has written a very insightful article on the subject that I commend to all Samizdata.net readers.
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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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