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There is a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times written by Mickey Edwards, a Republican Party apparatchik of many years standing, called Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP. This was the ‘money quote’ for me:
Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.
So George W. Bush and John “I support the Bailout” McCain represented the worship of… small government??? So presumably this ‘small’ government must have consumed a smaller portion of the national wealth when it left office compared to when it took office, right? I mean is that not surely the most direct and uncontroversial measure of the size of a government? Ok, 9/11 happened… so if we were to factor out all military spending, would that give us a smaller state at the end of the Bush presidency than at the start? I will leave you to guess the answer to that very simple question. And are there more regulations governing, well, almost everything, now compared when Bush took power? If there are more, then how is that either small or limited?
In America, government is … us. What is “exceptional” about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.
Of course this ‘us’ of whom he speaks are in reality the political activists who gain the support of a plurality to sanctify the latest looting schedules. His contempt for ‘ Joe the Plumber’ says it all. Joe was indeed one of ‘us’, one of the great unwashed who dared to fart loudly during the chorus of media hosannas surrounding Obama’s stately progress across The Blessed Land. Mickey Edwards on the other hand was a career politician who now lectures on Legislative Politics and International Affairs… in other words, he is about as much one of ‘them’ as you can get.
And there is nothing particularly ‘exceptional’ about his description of American government unless Mickey Edwards thinks most of the rest of the ‘first world’ are organised as feudal states. The ‘limits’ to government expressed in the sainted US Constitution may be still be a viable tool for securing thing like freedom of expression and the right to defend yourself, well at least somewhat, but they do less than nothing to make anyone secure in their property or in any way less vulnerable to the political looter class (whom Mickey Edward could identify by simply looking in a mirror) from using the political system to help themselves to other people’s money.
And that, my chums across the ocean, is exactly why you are just as totally fucked as the rest of us.
[E]verything the government is doing now is going to make the situation much, much worse. They’re trying to reflate this bubble. All along I knew that what would potentially be fatal wasn’t the recession itself but the government’s response. But what they’ve already done exceeds even my worst-case imagination.
– Peter Schiff
I know it is only January but this is a real contender for ‘Samizdata quote of the year’.
Our migration to the new CMS will not happen until next weekend, so you can enjoy your fix of spleenic rants and pro-liberty disgruntlements throughout the weekend uninterrupted.
We felt it was better to get it right than do it fast… plus I am told the stars will be more favourably aligned next weekend.
A civil liberties pressure group has called for the resignation of Prof Janet Hartley, the academic responsible for banning Islam critic Douglas Murray from chairing a discussion tonight at the [London School of Economics].
Modern Islamists will cut a women’s face if she uses make-up and kill women for such ‘crimes’ as being raped, but they are in favour of wild spending and printing (“expansionary fiscal and monetary policies for a counter cycle effect” as the scum of the Economist would put it) – even though such antics are actually denounced by the Koran.
That so many academics sides with the forces of radical Islam should come as no surprise – for the modern left (including modern mutant forms of Marxism that have combined Marxist and Keynesian doctrines in ways that Karl Marx himself would have had nothing but contempt) and radical ‘Islamists’ favour many (although not all) of the same economic policies – as Comrade President Barack Obama would have been reminded by both his leading Marxist (well mutant heretic modern Marxist) and leading Islamist neighbours in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. Although, of course, this is what he had already been taught as a child (both by his Mother and by Frank) and then at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard. Before he was ever sent to Chicago to join the operations of the Comrades there.
“You are off the point Paul – we are talking about academics and free speech”.
Well Pigou (the Cambridge ‘Economics’ Prof who Keynes implies was free market in one of the in-jokes in the ‘General Theory’…) held that anyone who questioned the need for more government spending should be sent to prison.
Collectivist academics have never been pro free speech (it would not be consistent with collectivism if they were in favour of free speech) – the academic that Dr Gabb attacks was following in the tradition of Plato himself.
The function of a university (as explained by Gramsci and Marcuse) is to produce minds indoctrinated with ‘progressive’ thought – so indoctrinated that any ideas that are hostile to the cause will be rejected by them (without consideration), and reject them with great hatred.
Universities are not totally successful – in that most students are just given a vague mind set of support for ‘progressive’ ideas and a built in hostility to ‘reactionary’ ideas, but only in a very loose way, enough to, say, vote for Obama – but not enough to kill for him. They become the sort of people who think the Economist is free market, laugh at the “humour” of the Communist comics on Radio 4 without actually sharing their ideology and do not see anything odd in the selection of books in British bookshops.
“But what has this got to do with radical Islam”.
Sadly quite a lot – as far from being seen as reactionary (with its hatred of women’s rights and so on) radical Islam is seen as progressive. And it is (if one defines progressive in the way the academics would) – Islamic socialism (the word “socialism” is used) is common among both the Sunni and the Shia radicals.
And communist groups (in spite of the atheism of Karl Marx and co) ally with them – look for the banners on the demonstrations (they are there). Students are taught to be anti-American (this will continue in spite of Comrade President Barack Obama) and anti Israeli – and anti capitalist. And radical Islam is all three. Therefore they feel vaguely “pro” it – in spite of its tearing women to bits, and so on, and so on… after all plenty of female radical Islamists can be found – and we must not be “culturally imperialist”.
As for reforming the universities – they can not be reformed. They must be de-funded – no more taxpayers money for them (directly or indirectly).
Oh and if anyone thinks I am judging the ‘educated classes’ too harshly, then spend five minutes in a British book shop (not just the wall of Obama books, but the other books you will find – and the books you will not find) or listening to the news (or film reviews) of private broadcasters such as ‘Classic FM’
They know their market – the people who accepted (or half accepted) the ‘progressive‘ ideas they were taught at school and university, such as a ‘progressive conservative’ leader who attacks ‘big government’ whilst at the same time explicitly promising to… increase the size of the government.
Jonah Goldberg, who writes at the US conservative publication, National Review – and other places – is over in the UK next week talking about his recently-published book, Liberal Fascism. I have not read it but some of the readership might find it interesting. He’s in London at venues like the London School of Economics.
Meanwhile, as our own Brian Micklethwait pointed out the other day on his own blog, Kevin Dowd, an economist very much in the free market camp and an authority of monetary economics, is delivering the annual Chris R. Tame memorial lecture of the Libertarian Alliance in March. Kevin Dowd is not just a very nice fellow and a sharp economist, he is also an advocate of free banking and a critic of state monopoly money. He and his colleagues have been doing important research on the topic up in his academic redoubt in Nottingham. I definitely recommend this lecture. It pays to book early.
This weekend, if all goes well, the bloated monstrosity that is Samizdata’s back-end, all 11,000+ articles and 182,000+ comments (hopefully) will get dumped into a new CMS.
I fully expect all manner of server burps, devoured articles and comments and sundry debugging issues will crop up but we will try to keep the disruption to our crazed rants and your edification to a minimum. Wish us luck.
Following on from Perry’s post below, I am pleased to note that there is something we can do to help Geert Wilders.
For those among you who want to actively help, go to his website and donate what you can to help defray what will likely be a ruinous legal bill. The link is here.
Geert Wilders is one of the pitifully few public figures in Europe who is willing to confront the Islamist menace. As a result, his enemies have sentenced him to death (because all they want is peace, don’t you know) and his own government has decided to prosecute him.
Even if you cannot contribute financially then I urge you at least to get a message to him to let him know that he is not alone and that he has many, many friends. He needs them.
With the raised anxieties over national bankruptcy and the failure of the government to produce a strategy over the medium term for the control of public expenditure and the reduction of the national debt, the potential for a crisis in gilts funding has risen.This comes in the form of a disruptive change, propelled by external financial events, that undermines and destroys the government’s economic strategy. If such a crisis were to take place, it is worth considering the transformative effect upon national politics and the government. The decisions taken by Gordon Brown and the Labour party would form the framework of change and we can surmise that they have already examined possible scenarios at some length.
The most likely tactic employed by Brown is to go long, calling an election in 2010, whilst using the same methods to deny responsibility for the crisis and blaming the necessary cuts in public expensiture upon others. The government is mugged by the markets and forced to conform to the footsteps of Healey in 1976. This is the headless socialists mugged by reality model.
Less likely are radical and unpredictable political changes: Labour forming a national government with the Liberal Democrats and/or the Tories; the government toppling in a welter of incumbent incompetence with an election to follow; or Brown knifed by his own Malvolio and a novitiate attempting to rescue their reputation under a caretaker Prme Minister. Whatever political changes do follow, this will not prevent the years of national humiliation and deleveraging: if they buck the trend and halve the state, the recovery won’t come so late.
The most unlikely and frightening scenario is the one that depends upon Brown’s psychology: that the ‘man with a plan’ is convinced he can steer the country through the national crisis and that transferring power to the Tories would be an act of personal and national treason. If so, Brown could invoke the enabling act, prorogue Parliament and declare a national emergency for the duration of the financial crisis. This is the least likely outcome as the stakes are very high and Brown could not be sure that he would enjoy the support of the Civil Service, the police or the armed forces. The support of his own party is a given, spineless apparatchiks that they would become. On his past record of dithering and reluctance it is a long shot that he would only undertake this action in the most desperate of circumstances, but New Labour’s authoritarian bent and antipathy to democratic accountability are clear.
The moral of the story is that any successor to this Parliament should abolish the Civil Contingencies Act and ensure that temptation is placed out of harm’s way for any other self-righteous prophets who happen to pass through the doors of Number Ten.
When visiting China in October of last year, I found myself in a supermarket. I like visiting supermarkets in foreign countries, as despite globalisation, imports, and exports, there are still many products that are produced and only available locally, and a supermarket tells you far more about the culture and consumption habits of normal people than anything you would learn by (say) going to a restaurant.
For instance, China is now one of the world’s top ten (in terms of volume, at least) wine producers. Chinese wine is not generally seen anywhere outside China, but is very readily available in China. The producers have even mastered putting some mixture of faux-Frenchness and Chinese clicheness on the labels.
I suppose, at least, we were spared a panda. I suspect that they may not realise that “vin de table” on a French wine label means approximately “This is bad wine” (ie it failed the quality control tests that exist under French wine laws and which would have allowed the winemakers to put anything else on the label), but in the case of most Chinese wine it is for the moment fairly appropriate.
However, I digress. While Chinese wine can be made fun of a little, there are other products at which the Chinese are indeed the experts. It was not long ago that China was principally known in the west for its tea, and although China now produces and sells many other things, the country still produces and consumes truly vast quantities of the stuff. When I was in the supermarket in Shenzhen, I found seemingly most of an aisle devoted to the stuff.
This happened to be convenient, as my sister happens to enjoy interesting and exotic teas. My thoughts were immediately that I would buy a couple of packets of some of the more interesting teas in the shop, and ultimately send them to her as a Christmas gift. I purchased them, and took them back to England with me.
I rather failed to get my act together in December, and as a consequence, on December 31 I posted a package containing tea to my sister from Clapham Junction post office in London to the Blue Mountains near Sydney in Australia, along with various other parcels that I posted at the same time. I made a deliberately vague statement on the customs declaration sticker. Australia has amazingly (and at times idiotically) strict quarantine regulations, and it is possible that the unauthorised importation of tea is prohibited.
Thus when my sister told me last week that she had not received anything from me, I was not completely surprised. I had visions of Australian customs office going through enormous stacks of mail with large Alsations looking for illicit tea, and the package sent to my sister being confiscated by some stern official with a moustache.
However, as it turned out, I was imagining things. The truth, to the extent that I have discovered it, was far stranger than that. This morning, my sister received a package with my handwriting on the envelope and my return address on the back. One side of the envelope had been ripped open, and had been sealed again with plastic tape. Attached to the envelope was a sticker from Canada Post, stating (in both English and French)
Package found damaged, torn, or opened and officially repaired.
Adressee:
If liability coverage applies, please contact Canada Post on 1-800-267-1177 or www.canadapost.ca
Please note the packaging and contents may be required.
When my sister opened the envelope, it contained a data CD entitled ‘Canon Step Up Photography – Accessories to enhance your creativity’ for Windows and Macintosh, but no tea.
Okay, I can just about imagine that some mail was damaged and the postmen had difficulty figuring out what had fallen out of which envelope. But what in the name of Micklethwait was the package doing in Canada in the first place?
In all, I think this has to go down as my oddest experience since the time a French policeman called me in my flat in London from a village in the Pyrenees to ask if I was lonely. If people ask nicely, I will tell that story next week.
Also, I am intrigued as to what happened to the tea. Perhaps the mysterious world odyssey of this product that was never intended to leave China is continuing, and it has somehow, Teela Brown style, found its way to South America, or is somehow plotting its way to the far side of the galaxy in search of Arthur Dent.
Just as Gordon Brown steers the UK full throttle into the ground for the most spectacular economic crash since the 1930’s, far from fighting the culture war in order to set the nation up for an alternative, yet again the utterly absurd David Cameron and his lemming-like party are bending over backwards to show that they represent kleptocratic continuity with the Labour Party.
Demos, a leading thinktank, is today launching a major project to develop “progressive conservative” policies. David Cameron, the Tory leader, will be speaking at the launch of the initiative, which will explore ideas such as how the market can be organised to alleviate poverty and what policies can bolster civic autonomy. Demos, which is independent but which used to be closely associated with New Labour, will have up to four staff working on the project, which will be funded by outside partners, but not the Conservative party.
[…]
As Tory leader Cameron has pledged to pursue “progressive ends”, such as social justice and poverty reduction, through “conservative means”. But this claim has been challenged by Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have questioned his credentials as a true progressive.
How “the market can be organised to alleviate poverty and what policies can bolster civic autonomy”… When politicians ‘organise’ markets, that is always high on political organisation and low on markets. And what policies can “boost civic autonomy”? Dave needs a think-tank to tell him that? Less state policies, taxes and interference generally. Anyone want to make a book on the chance Demos offers that up as a solution? Fat chance.
“But this claim has been challenged by Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have questioned his credentials as a true progressive.” This is like members of a cartel howling about other members competing with them as a way of hiding the fact there is actually no competition going on at all. Labour, the LibDems and the Tories make a fetish of the minor difference between each other to hide the fact there is actually very little between them.
My theory? They have no interest whatsoever in the traditional Conservative voter, whose ovine voting can usually be counted on anyway, but rather plan on gaining power via the strategy of simply waiting for Labour to lose rather than planning to pro-actively win themselves. Therefore they are working up policy statements calculated to appeal to the same Guardian reading looter class seeking more of the same only this time with ‘a sensible safe pair of hands’, to use nauseating Tory-speak.
A vote for the Tory party (I refuse to call them the ‘Conservative’ party) under Cameron is a vote wasted because even if they win, nothing changes. Even if you ‘win’, you lose. They are beyond salvage.
Want to vote? Then vote UKIP. I do not support all their policies but there simply is no meaningful choice any more and at least they have a more or less nationwide political organisation. Is a vote for UKIP a wasted vote? Well at least you will be wasting your vote on a genuine alternative rather than the illusion of change under ‘Dave’ Cameron and his dismal shower of ‘progressives’.
And if enough people do that then it was not a wasted vote after all.
It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively.
– Fraser Nelson, The Spectator.
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
– ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak
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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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