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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Even I had believed the oft repeated mantra that integrated circuits were a result of a spinoff of the Moon Race. According to George Guilder, at the end of Chapter 5 of “Microcosm”:
Like TI before it, Fairchild achieved its breakthroughs with virtually no government assistance while its largest competitors — chiefly the vacuum tube companies — were receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But when the government needed a way to miniaturize the circuitry for its Minuteman missiles and its space flights, it did not use micromodules or any of the other exotic technologies it had subsidized. It turned first to Fairchild rather than to its early favorites and beneficiaries. Fairchild’s lack of military entanglement in the late fifties finally allowed the company to get the bulk of military and aerospace contracts in the early 1960s.
I begin to wonder if the government is actually responsible for the introduction of anything whatever. About the only thing left are a few DARPA projects and on most of those, other than the Internet itself, it is too early to tell.
Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.
The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.
In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.
Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.
Personally, I don’t see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.
Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.
Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.
– Commenter Chris H
It is has surprised me that David Cameron’s Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.
Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?
Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.
Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.
Following from Philip Chaston’s post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying – in vain, hopefully – to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.
I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?
The Counter-Terrorist Unit is using a new strategy to stress test the alertness of their officers and the resilience of their response. By employing some buffoon as their leader, who makes little or no effort to conceal top secret information, the North West CTU entered Jack Bauer territory in order to round up the inevitable band of Pakistanis who just happen to be enjoying the lifelong learning offered by our universities (truncated for their purposes):
Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick was photographed entering Downing Street carrying a briefing note headed SECRET, on which details of an undercover operation against a suspected Al-Qaeda cell could clearly be seen.
The document set out the strategy for for the operation, an investigation into a suspected cell based in the north west of England and allegedly plotting an attack in the UK, including details of suspects and how the police intended to arrest them.
The bumbler has already been tainted by the Damien Green affair, but it takes real quality to walk around with SECRET tattooed on your forehead. Rather fitting that the fools who set up the surveillance society forget that it is a two way street. Watch and you will be watched! Since our security depends upon confidence, could we demote this tarnished officer to the role that he deserves: Sarjeant at Arms in the House of Commons, where he will be amongst those of his own kind.
Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.
From a nice article on revisionist accounts of the New Deal and Roosevelt.
Via Marginal Revolution, which has a quite good comment thread on this issue.
Talk of Warren Harding, a much maligned president, reminds me of Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times, in which that president gets a much-overdue rehabilitation, along with Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge.
This coming Friday, April 10th, I will be giving a talk at the home of the parents of Tim Evans, about the late Chris R. Tame. I was his junior libertarian partner, so to speak, during the 1980s into the mid-1990s, when I helped him to run the Alternative Bookshop, and did pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, so he obviously had a profound effect on my life. If you knew him, or if you have read any of the writings at the other end of the above link to the Libertarian Alliance website, you will know that I was only one among a great many.
 The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, I want to remind people about my talk. Emails have already gone out to most of those likely to be interested, and fliers were distributed at that very well attended Kevin Dowd lecture. But, what with this coming Friday being Good Friday, I have no idea who will show up or in what numbers. If you want to attend and have not yet emailed Tim Evans (tim at libertarian dot co dot uk) to that effect, then do so and he’ll send you attendance details. There has been talk of the event being video-ed. If that doesn’t happen, I will at least sound-record it myself. So, no need to bust a gut to be there in person if you want to at least hear my performance (always assuming that it is not so terrible that I decide to delete the only record of it).
My other purpose with this posting is to solicit help. Chris Tame had a lot of his considerable impact on the world in the form of meetings and relationships, personal and intellectual. He did do quite a bit of published writing and performing, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. When he died just over three years ago, prematurely, he did so while feeling, as did many others, that he would have had lots more to give had he only been allowed the time.
But Chris Tame nevertheless did have a huge influence, as you can tell by reading the comments on this Samizdata posting that marked his death in 2006. It is the nature of this influence that I will be attempting to shed as much further light on as I can in my talk this Friday. The gist of what I’ll be saying can be summed up in this comment by Dale Amon on that earlier posting:
I do not think the libertarian scene in the UK and Ireland would be anything like the same if he had not been there.
In addition to building the foundations and structure of the Libertarian Alliance and libertarian movement in the UK, Chris passed on masses of information, especially about the broad and ever growing range of libertarian books and articles out there, to a huge number of friends and acquaintances, to fellow libertarians of course, but also to many others from different parts of the political spectrum, and just to people he happened to come into contact with. The full range of such influences will never be fully known, but if you have recollections of Chris and of how he influenced or informed you, I would love to read a comment from you, or if you would prefer it, by you sending me an email (brian at brianmicklethwait dot com).
A good example of the kind of thing I mean is to be found in the opening paragaphs of Kevin Dowd’s recent lecture, in which Dowd mentioned just how much of an impact Chris had upon him. I know these sentiments to have been very heartfelt, because when I met Dowd just before he gave that lecture, told me all of that and more about how Chris Tame had helped and influenced him.
Without the indirect influence of Chris Tame, the Samizdata story would probably have been a very different one. I am by no means the only Samizdatista to have made a start as a self-conscious libertarian because of him.
My thanks in advance to anyone who can comment in the way I have suggested. If you are reading this for the first time after I have done my talk but still have something pertinent to add, please do not feel on my account that you are too late. I’d still love to read such recollections, and many others surely would too.
A final thought occurs to me. If anyone thinks that Chris Tame’s influence was bad, and did harm, I’d be interested to hear about that too. I will almost certainly not agree, but I will be interested. He has now been dead long enough for anyone who wants to to speak ill of the man without being pelted with the comment equivalent of vegetables. I do not want to encourage this, you understand, just to say that as far as I am concerned, that would be okay.
One issue that does not appear to have provoked a lot of discussion, at least not yet, is how the government bailouts and encouragement of mega mergers between struggling banks has created a banking industry that is, if not monopolistic in its structure, then pretty damn close to so being. Now – as I once argued four years ago (gulp!) – the fact that a firm such as a computer software house or bank is big is not, by itself, harmful. One should not confuse bigness with control over the consumer. A lot of anti-trust laws – which I believe often create more harm than they supposedly solve – are based on the mistaken idea that a firm’s being big is somehow proof of malign intent and that bigness, is, ipso facto, harmful. Well it all depends how the firm got to be big in the first place, and whether it retains its market size by continuing to offer good products that people want. For a firm to stay big at a time when barriers to entry in certain fields are being slashed by new technologies such as the internet, confusing bigness with lack of competition is a serious mistake.
Now turning to the banks, it is clear that the mergers between the likes of UK’s Lloyds and HBOS, or Bank of America and Merrill, or Wells Fargo and Wachovia, have produced a number of large banking groups with the state acting very much as the encourager of such mergers, rather than, as might have been in the case when anti-trust lawyers were on the prowl, hostile to them or at the very least, skeptical. As free marketeers like to point out, monopolies that are supported by state powers and privileges are harmful, while those that arise out of a dynamic market process tend not to be, since state-backed monopolies are the least likely to fall prey to new, nimbler competitors. Without state support, even supposedly invincible big firms, such as IBM, Ford or for that matter, Microsoft, can find their market share eroded by a newcomer.
One of the reasons why I actually favour free banking and competition in money is that it might create more banks and give the established banking sector a much-needed dose of competitive pressure. I am pleased to see that the likes of Tesco’s, the supermarket chain, is getting into banking. That is good news for the consumer, hopefully, although the haters of Big Retail might complain.
In the UK, for example, Lloyds Group, after its acquisition of HBOS, controls almost 45 per cent of the UK mortgage market. Any new entrants that can put that behemoth under pressure are to be welcomed.
Following the dreadful news about the Italian earthquake, this blog about Italy contains a mass of links to charities and organisations helping with the recovery effort in the stricken area. I have some distant Italian relations who live not far away from the area although fortunately they are all okay.
[I]n much the same way that political control of statistical data can grant the holder control over the policy agenda, so control of an individual’s personal and sensitive information can grant dominance over the individual himself. It is precisely this that, in the information age, makes identity theft such a harrowing crime: the dual sensations of violation and helplessness arising from a realisation that one is no longer in control of one’s own life. The fact of the matter is that our personal and sensitive data are the core statistics of our own unique lives and, by extension, the wholesale collection, retention and sharing of our data by government is equivalent to a state-sponsored and thereby legitimised form of identity theft.
– The Earl of Northesk
This item about the recent missile firing by North Korea reminds us that in all the attention currently being focused on the credit crunch and the policies of governments to deal with it, that geo-political threats cannot be ignored. It is, I suppose, all too easy to dismiss the leader of North Korea as some sort of harmless nut if you are living thousands of miles away. For the Japanese, who fear that a leader of a broken country might try something really stupid – as dictators tend to do – the situation is far less easy to shrug off. And Japan had better reckon without a blanket promise of support from the US in the future. I hope the anti-missile defence systems that Japan has installed are in good working order. Japan now has a pretty useful navy.
Not a happy situation. At all. Here’s an agency report on the rocket launch.
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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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