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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All the existing [medical care] schemes, including the present American mixed corporatist/socialist model, represent a transfer from the young and healthy to the old and chronically sick (and to the medical cartel, of course). The way it’s used in practice, the phrase “having health insurance” means having the right to place oneself on the receiving end of these transfers. No honest discussion of the situation is possible until the entirely false and misleading concept of “health insurance” is dropped.
– Commenter Ivan
“We live in a broadly capitalistic society…if Briitish Airways gets into trouble and cannot be sustained as a profitable business, then the government should not step in and bail it out.”
Richard Branson, talking about the economic woes of British Airways. I have no idea whether sincerely believes in untramelled laissez faire (one has doubts) or is just dissing the competition, but it was refreshing to hear such comments on the BBC Breakfast TV show this morning. Take note, Messrs Obama, Brown, and the rest of them.
Brown does not really understand libertarianism, but this is an accolade:
One of the words Brown uses most often in private to describe the Tory leader is “libertarian”: a word that conveys his belief that Cameron’s “compassionate conservatism” is mere window-dressing, but also hints at a decadent strain of Tory libertinage, drug-taking and yacht-fondling.
I expect I shall be arrested for loitering around marinas as yacht-fondling will be outlawed in the next Parliament.
Millions and millions of Americans support Obama’s desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama’s moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain’s ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years.
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
Well yes, it will be different… in that the control obsessed Obama’s of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.
This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry… plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.
Peter Beaumont has an interesting article on Iran that notes how our understanding of the local complexities must trump simplistic perceptions shaped by our own foreign policy assumptions. A valuable lesson, though Beaumont commits the same sin when he artificially divides foreign policy debates into two camps, so that he can pose as the voice of sense.
Of value in his article is the lack of knowledge that we have in the Iranian regime. That Iran is an Islamist conservative state with wider freedoms, though severely circumscribed, than is commonly supposed, must be accepted. This has allowed space for a democratic pillar to develop as a channel for aspirant social mobility and as a safety valve for the competing interests within the elites. When the inherent clash between the revolutionary drive of the rulers and the risk of a democratic vote endangering their goals emerged, a crisis of legitimacy was assured. For Khameini and Ahmedinejad, the crisis preceded and precipitated their decision to rig the election, leading to the current conflict.
Many of the demonstrators want reform and counter-revolution; the maintenance of the Islamic republic without pursuing the destabilising geopolitical foreign policy of the hardliners. Some want a liberal democracy and a westernised state. The current clash over the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran posits a revolutionary hardline or the transition to a post-revolutionary polity.
What an unpleasant choice for libertarians in Iran: an unstable, brittle Islamic dictatership or a republic progressing towards an illiberal democracy. It isn’t a choice. Support is required for the courage of the demonstrators as the value of freedom exercised has the potential for effecting more radical change.
Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
– Milton Friedman
Check out this hilarious analysis of what you can infer from how people sleep after a one night stand.
Was it as good for you as it was for me?
Warning: for the irony-challenged, this is a spoof.
Or maybe not.
Talking of issues to do with property ownership, this Daily Telegraph article about how some of the old industrial cities in the US are shrinking caught my eye. The US authorities are encouraging, with the use of a bit of public funds, the idea of knocking down whole swathes of supposedly defunct towns and cities and returning them to their “pristine” natural state. It is, in one way, a part of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter once called the “creative destruction” that is vital to capitalism.
Except that I don’t see a lot of capitalism going on here, more a sort of hybrid of private enterprise and state involvement. If, as the article claims, hundreds of square miles of urban area in the US/wherever are no longer economically viable, and could be used for something more economically valuable, whether it be farmland, recreational parks, golf courses, boating lakes, race tracks, or so on, then why not leave it to property and land developers? I find it worrying that the US government, either in its federal or local forms, can decree that an area of land is no longer “economically viable,” and decide to send the bulldozers in. And I also cannot help smelling a strong whiff of anti-suburbanism in this article, at least according to some of the folk quoted in it.
I tend to find that it is a revealing about a person’s overall viewpoint as to whether they slag off suburbs or not. If you despise them, chances are that you are a member of the Enemy Class, even though such people hypocritically live in such places.
Maybe it is the garden gnomes, or something.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
– Voltaire, rationalist & satirist (1694 – 1778)
Tim Worstall – back in harness after running for office as a UKIP MEP – writes about the Labour government’s stated desire to ensure that not a single tract of the UK is without broadband access. It is the sort of techie, practical measure that Mr Gordon Brown thinks will help win him a bit of respect in the traditional Tory and LibDem shires.
As Tim says, the logic of this idea is questionable. There are geographical, physical reasons why broadband access, or indeed other forms of communications, are not available everywhere, all the time. Also, as the comment thread attached to Tim’s piece reveals, there is this argument, that I have raised before – also prompted by one of Tim’s articles – about why people feel that because X or Y wants a road, canal, power cables, whatever, that therefore the state should be able to use compulsory purchase powers, and taxation, to pay for whatever it is that is wanted. I have referred to this mindset as “brute utilitarianism”. Also, it is a cost of living in the countryside that one does not always have the same degree of speedy access to certain things that one has living in a town or city. That’s life, so folk should deal with it. (One of the few arguments for land value taxes is that people living in such remote places would, other things being equal, pay less taxes also. However, there are other problems with LVT as the Austrian school of economics points out, attractive at first blush though the idea might be).
I pay more to live in my rabbit hutch apartment in Pimlico and for the same outlay I could live in a big place in the sticks. But for the benefit of living in SW1, I get quick access to airports (a short trip from Victoria to Gatwick); the Tube, buses, taxis, broadband access, etc. This is part of the cost “package”, if you like, that comes with my locational choice. A person who lives in a remote area and who demands Pimlico or New York-style communcations is demanding that the citizens of a city should subsidize that preference. And yet many of the people who migrate from the towns to the country are quite well off; as I have noted in my native Suffolk, as soon as the townies settle in, they start demanding all kinds of amenities, not realising, or caring, that such things don’t exist because they are relatively expensive to put in rural areas, which is precisely why Mr and Mrs Chartered Accountant can afford to live in their nice village cottages in the first place.
Sometimes such debates are as easy as this: if people want something, then damn well pay for it yourself, and do not use the robber powers of the state to grab it off someone else.
Rant over.
Er, not quite: my reference to LVT brought out a crop of Henry George “land-is-special!” types on the comment board. Several of us have responded to them, but I came across this nice essay by Jan Narveson, which I think is one of the best smackdowns for the land value tax mob that I have ever read. Excerpt:
Now, the point of this little essay is that that is basically all there is to it, and there doesn’t need to be anything else. The idea that we all have an equal right to the land is amazingly arbitrary, and contrary to all human experience while it’s at it. It’s arbitrary in that it has no basis. The fact that we don’t make the land is irrelevant, as already seen: we don’t make the natural part of anything we have or own, no matter whether we have “made” it or not. But the point is, it doesn’t matter. For things are just things: they do not come with labels saying that they “belong” to some people or that some people, somehow, have a “claim” on them, nor in turn that everybody has a claim on them, equal or otherwise.
Unlike the dismal Economist, Newsweek magazine does not claim to be a free market supporting publication.
Henry Hazlitt stopped writing for Newsweek back in 1966 and his replacement, as a free market voice, Milton Friedman was fired (asked to stop writing for the magazine – which is being ‘fired’ as far as I am concerned) many years ago – which is the reason I stopped subscribing to Newsweek, which I had done as a youngster.
In recent years Newsweek magazine has been fairly openly socialist (although it does not formally admit this). So why am I bothering to write a post about the publication? I am doing so because I have just seen perhaps the most insane edition of Newsweek that I have seen – not just ‘leftwing’, or whatever, but an edition that just makes no sense, whether from a socialist or any other point of view. Makes no sense as in ‘senseless’ – insane.
The front cover of the edition has the headline ‘Capitalist Manifesto‘ and this article is odd enough – page after page of standard statist stuff (supporting the bank bailouts and so on) written by one Newsweek‘s high ups. Why the high up is being given about half the magazine for his statist musings (rather than doing his job of editing the articles of real writers) is not explained – and the title of ‘Capitalist Manifesto’, for standard statism that one could hear and see on the BBC or American ‘mainstream’ broadcasters any day of the week, is also not explained.
However, this is by no means the most odd article.
There is also an article about a group of ‘rebels’ who are out to “save capitalism” from President Barack Obama. I was astonished to see such an article in the ‘mainstream media’ (especially in Newsweek) and read it. That is when the utter insanity of this edition of Newsweek hit me.
The ‘rebels’ are actually Democrats (and one is Bernard Sanders, the openly Socialist Senator from Vermont) who are “saving capitalism” by “opposing” Barack Obama (in reality they are all strong supporters of Barack Obama) who they fear is “too soft on Wall Street”.
So capitalism is to be “saved” by even more statism than there is already. People like Senator Sanders of Vermont are interested in “saving” capitalism (which it has been their life long dream to destroy) and they are “rebels” against the (life long far leftist with Marxist background, whom they all really support) Barack Obama, who is too free market – in much the way Lenin or Mussolini were too free market I guess.
After I put my head back together (it had exploded), I tried to make some sense of this article. The only thing I can come up with is it is some sort of cover for the new regulations announced by President Barack Obama. By saying they are not enough (selling out to Wall Street and so on) and pointing at ‘rebels’ (i.e. pro Obama fanatics) who are out to “save capitalism” (i.e. are determined to utterly destroy what is left of the free market), life long far leftist Barack Obama can be presented as a ‘moderate’.
Also the real causes of the present crises (the endless increases in the credit money supply by the Federal Reserve system and the wildly harmful “affordable housing policy” pushed by Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama and the rest via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and so on) can be hidden by lies about the “deregulated” (!) financial system.
However, this explanation is rather complex and does not really convince me. A more simple explanation is that the people over at Newsweek have just finally gone totally insane.
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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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