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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I wonder what Patri Friedman, moving light in the Seasteading Institute and an advocate of the idea of creating new nations, makes of this story.
Sealand is one of the longest-running attempts to create a micro-state. It is off the Suffolk coast, based on an old anti-aircraft tower. The article, by the local newspaper in the East Anglian region, contains a nice photo of the place.
I suspect that if Sealand ever provided services – such as totally encrypted financial service facilities – then a tax-hungry UK would not demur at sending over a frigate to shut the place down. But the guy who set up this place has been known to defend his territory vigorously. For a supposed old eccentric, he’s held out remarkably well.
It is no secret I am no great admirer of some aspects of the US legal system and the corrupting influence of the US trial lawyers lobby, but then along comes a particularly stark example of why the US really really really needs a UK style ‘loser pays’ system to discourage preposterous actions like this…
Man Blames Planes For Divorce, Seeks $555 Million […] (Stanley) Hilton’s 16-page suit against San Francisco International Airport blames 37 organizations for the collapse of his marriage and seeks $15 million from each of them. Targets of the suit include the city and county of San Francisco, the airport and every airline based there, airline engine manufacturers and the real estate agencies involved in the sale of his house.
This is a clear indication of a legal system is in dire need of radical reform. I do not know if Stanley Hilton is in fact deranged, but any legal system which allows him to do what he is doing certainly is.
Yet another example of the vileness of the culture which pervades the management of the public sector…
Paramedics fighting to save a nine-year-old road accident victim were told rigid rest-break regulations meant the closest crew could not be called upon for back-up. Lifesavers at a crash scene in Upton were told they would have to wait for a crew nearly 20 minutes away because paramedics in Poole still had a few minutes left on their break.
Ambulance staff treating little Bethany Dibbs then called Poole ambulance station directly. A second crew abandoned their break and raced to Sandy Lane, arriving just five minutes after their colleagues […] But the South Western Ambulance Service Trust is standing by its decision. A spokesperson said the trust took its statutory health and safety duties for all staff very seriously.
But this is also an example of the fact civil society still has at least some life left in it, because the paramedics on the scene said “screw it” and just called the people they needed directly themselves… and of course those lads came immediately, teacup in hand no doubt, regardless of the rules and regulations that the South Western Ambulance Service Trust and the union think are so damn important.
[via Reason]
Bravo to the security men aboard the MV Maersk Alabama, who when approached and fired on by Somali pirates, fired back and drove them off.
Placing armed security men aboard ships vulnerable to pirate attacks has always been the obvious solution to the problem of piracy. How could anyone have thought that hugely expensive warships designed for real wars, operating under preposterous rules of engagement, was ever the solution to a profusion of scabby predators with small arms zooming about in small fast boats worth a few thousand dollars at most? There simply is no excuse for this having taken so long to implement, but kudos to Maersk for doing the right thing… firearms are a great deal better than relying on a hail of beer bottles.
But I would urge Maersk to invest in a pair of .50 cal HMGs per ship to discourage the more redoubtable of the Somali pirates from upping the ante by taking a Dushka off the back of a ‘technical’. An additional advantage of using heavy machineguns is it makes sinking the attacker and hopefully killing the pirates more likely, which can only be beneficial in both thinning out the herd and encouraging these predatory scum to find a less hazardous line of work.
And then there is always this humorous private sector approach… and the funny thing is, it would probably not only work but also be oversubscribed and profitable for a while, at least as long as the supply of ‘big game’ lasts.
The extremely worthy TPA has a nifty new promo for their new book that dares to think the unthinkable…
The book, Ten Years On, is available to order free here.
The “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside – can sometimes be uncomfortable elements, prone to occasional frictions. The old left, with all its many faults, did at least favour industry and material wealth. And the cause of wealth creation can clash with the Green agenda, though let it be noted that the best way to tackle environmental problems, in my view, is for us to get as rich as we can.
Well it seems that the liberal-leftist film director and actor, Robert Redford, has caused some sharp intakes of breath among the climate change alarmists by airing a “denialist” movie at his Sundance TV channel.
Enjoy!
(H/T: Big Hollywood).
An earlier version of this item referred to the Sundance Festival, not the TV channel. My error.
This comment on the current Speaker, of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who is generally regarded by many people as a slimeball of the first order:
“If you feel that is an exaggeration, look what they did when last entrusted with what was potentially a great reforming measure – the chance to elect a new Speaker to replace the compromised and incapable man we must learn to call Lord Martin. They ended up choosing the legislature’s equivalent of Donald Duck, not because they believed he might step out of his cartoon one day and restore order to a profoundly damaged but vital institution, but because it would upset the Tory party. That is how serious the present parliamentary majority is about restoring the credibility of the Commons. And as we read endless stories about the new Speaker’s lavish refurbishments of his apartments, the size of his television, his wife’s political stunts and his decision not to dress properly for the State Opening, the full force of what a pointless little creep he is, and how he squats vacuously in one of the great positions of state, is brought home to us.”
There is a passage in F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom where the great man writes about how “the worst get on top” in political systems where there are few restraints on power. Mr Bercow validates that theory most admirably.
Oh, and Brian Micklethwait, like me, has met Bercow. He’s not a fan.
Via the Cobden Centre, a relatively new think tank that focuses on banking and money from the “Austrian” point of view, here is a nice article by James Tyler. He sets out how to avoid past problems and what to do about banking and money.
I still think that fractional reserve banking, so long as it is openly stated and so long as legal tender laws are scrapped, is not necessarily an evil. If a person deposits money in an FRB that advertises itself as such and if he takes out commercial insurance to cover a potential disaster, then in a free market based on consent, I am not sure that FRB should be made illegal. For sure, a bank that claimed to be a 100% reserve bank that was in fact, not fully covered, should be prosecuted for running a fraudulent business. But that is simply a case of obtaining money by deception, an offence covered in existing law.
As is so often the case, I think that some of our current woes could be ameliorated, if not solved, if we enforced the basic Common Law of this realm rather than endlessly creating new rules instead. But then I guess that would give politicians nothing much to do, would it?
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The internet is strange.
The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be of the view that somewhere in the Bible, it says “take the wealth of others by force and give it to people best able to work the political system”. Just another statist thug, but then we already knew that.
And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?
John Osimek reports for The Register:
The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.
The questionnaire – or “School Entry Wellbeing Review” – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a “Health Record” on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.
The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child “often lies or cheats”: whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. […]
It’s been twenty years since my firm belief in a better way of life was vindicated. 17th November was the beginning of the end of an era shaped by collectivism, brutality and industrialised inhumanity. I have written about my experiences of communism on Samizdata before. Today I’ll use someone else’s words to describe the wasteland communism leaves behind.
In 1992, Peter Saint-Andre has written a disturbing, brilliant and accurate description of what communism does to the soul:
…the hunger that I found most disturbing was not of the body but of the soul. […] The socialist state cared nothing for the life of the individual, and this was driven home in innumerable ways.
Yet the overall effect was not merely physical — it was a deeply spiritual degradation. It is difficult to put that degradation into words. To me, the most striking sign of it was what I called “Eastern eyes”. I could see and feel the resignation, the defeat, the despair, in the eyes of people I knew. It was an all-too-rare occurrence to come upon a person with some spark of life in his or her eyes (the only exceptions were the children, who had yet to have the life beaten out of them). If it is true that the eyes are windows onto the soul, then the Czech soul under socialism went through life all but dead.
It is tough for me to come up with something to say 20 years on that is not tinged with bitterness and disappointment and if not for the significant anniversary, I would have left this memory unturned. Despite the amazing change 1989 and its aftermath brought to my life I feel no closure over the past and a sense of proportion in the way the fall of communism has been ‘handled’. Today we should be looking back at the last 20 years counting the many communists who died in prison or are still rotting there… I can only hope that future generations will revisit the past and will have far lower tolerance of collectivism and totalitarianism. It may be a futile hope as today’s teenagers have little knowledge of the world my generation grew up and my parents lived in. And so I am bitter and disappointed that people can say the word “communism” without spitting. → Continue reading: Looking back in anger
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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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