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]
|
The efforts to slay the tax dragon in Massachusetts have advanced past the last of the expensive hurdles. According to Carla Howell and Michael Cloud:
We collected over 22,117 raw signatures from around the state, sufficiently distributed to meet the state’s requirement that no more than 25% of them may come from any one county. We should end up with plenty to meet the 11,099 certified signature requirement – with a kevlar cushion to slow the challenges from the teachers’ union.
We’re jumping through the last legal hoops necessary to get on the ballot.
We already told you about the legal hoops we had to jump through last fall to get the first 76,000+ certified signatures.
We turned in these additional 22,117 signatures to 319 different town clerks June 18th.
Now we’re waiting for the town clerks to certify those signatures so we can turn them into the Secretary of State by July 2nd. That wouldn’t be very hard – except the town clerks don’t have to give us back our petitions until just two days before July 2nd.
Massachusetts signature drives are hard as hell. Ask the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who just failed to make the 2008 ballot.
We’re almost done. Finally.
it appears they have our enemies quaking in their boots this time around. According to
The North Attleboro Sun Chronicle:
In the meantime, legislators said the ballot initiative has an excellent chance of passing, considering a similar proposal got 45 percent of the vote in 2002.
Poirier said voters feel there is nothing they can do to lower gasoline or food costs and may see wiping out the income tax as the only step they can take to save themselves money.
This is the November contest I look forward to with glee. The passage is likely enough and the libertarian impact great enough that not even MSM will be able to ignore it. If we win this one, it will only be the first of a cascade with which we will sweep the nation.
So if you are in Massachusetts or nearby, get out there and help Carla and Michael fight the teachers union front organization and the AFL-CIO and other hard-line socialist organizations who will be out defending their God, the State.
The assault on liberty could be worse than it is in the United Kingdom. We are nothing like Zimbabwe, say – or Jersey.
Jersey? Yes. And I don’t mean the partly imaginary lawless land of the Sopranos and Frank Sinatra. The supposedly sleepy tax-haven and holiday resort a few miles off the Normandy coast, the oldest possession of the English Crown still in hand*, has entirely astonishingly, and almost secretly, converted itself a police state in the last fortnight:
The report in the Jersey Evening Telegraph is so concise it can only be quoted in full:
The Home Affairs Minister has sent shock waves through the legal profession by authorising the indefinite detention of suspects without charge.
On 5 June, Senator Wendy Kinnard amended the criminal code that had limited pre-charge detention to 36 hours.
She did so under delegated powers enjoyed by the minister under the terms of the Police Procedures and Criminal Evidence (Jersey) Law.
However, that same law states that before such changes to codes are made, the minister is required to publish a draft of the changes and consult interested parties. She did neither of these things – a failure that has left the Island’s criminal lawyers stunned.
The new code came into force on Thursday, but no statement was released to either the media or the legal profession.
Why? What crisis of state is afflicting the Channel Islands?
Suspicious British readers may note that Jersey ministers are accustomed to do what they are told by the UK government. The facts that this peremptory administrative action shortly preceded the House of Commons debate on police detention powers, and that the resistance to HMG’s policies had had some effect by pointing out there are other jurisdictions, where the gutters do not run with human blood, in which long detention without charge is unknown, may be entirely unrelated.
* Pedant’s corner: the dukes of Normandy held the Channel Islands for more than a century before they took possession of the English Crown.
In view of recent legal developments this humble blogger would like to state that her comment over breakfast last Thursday consisting of the words “That Shami Chakrabarti is never off the telly” was mere banter and persiflage and in no way, shape or form meant to suggest that contact between Ms Chakrabarti’s anatomy and said machinery was of a rumptitious or tumptitious nature.
UPDATE: Oh dear, judging from the comments, that was another of my jokes that sailed straight off the edge of the world. I commented later:
“The point was, and I do apologize – though not in a way that admits liability! – if my attempt at making it in a funny way was not clear to all readers, was that while I’m all for the stand David Davis is making, Shami Chakrabarti threatening to sue someone over an ‘innuendo’ so mild that it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, is petty and trivialises the issue.”
Blimey! This is what the deputy leader of the BNP said about the Davis by-election:
We would argue that these people [jihadist extremists] should not be in the country in the first place, but if the price we have to pay for the accommodation of millions of immigrants is the scrapping of our ancient rights, then it is not a price worth paying.
It seems they have principles deeper than the anti-immigrant feeling that people like me assume is their prime appeal. That’s a very pleasant surprise, though for this open-border freemarketeer rationalist and sexual anarchist they have a little way to go to catch my vote. HMG on the other hand makes a big fuss about its ‘anti-racist’ credentials, but is happy to appeal to xenophobia at every conceivable opportunity in order to promote the destruction of liberty for its own sake.
Tim Worstall provides a suitably terse response to the latest piece of economic illiteracy from leftie writer Richard Murphy, who is against admirable things like avoidance of high taxes, and who now is supporting measures to prevent, or at least hamper, investors from making money by “shorting” the shares of firms they think are likely to perform badly.
The practice of “shorting” seems to get a certain class of person all upset. Earlier this year, when the shares of HBOS, the UK banking group, came under pressure, the cry went up that those irresponsible wreckers called hedge funds were deliberately trying to destroy the firm to make a fast profit. What this ignores is that if there were not investors willing to temporarily borrow stock as part of their short-selling tactics, then this would reduce the total number of counterparties in a market, and reduce liquidity and efficiency in the pricing of shares, which is a bad thing. Illiquid markets – which can produce big jumps up or down in the prices of shares – are generally not good places to be in, particularly for smaller investors.
If I take a dim view of a company that I do not own, shorting lets me act on that view and maybe make some money out of it. Quite why this is so terrible, Mr Murphy does not bother to explain.
Some time ago, when I wrote about this topic, one sarcastic commenter moaned that I was insulting the intelligence of readers by trying to explain what “shorting” is. I reject that criticism since it s plainly obvious that even among supposedly intelligent people, the workings of the financial markets are mysterious. And what people do not understand, they fear.
The Irish “no” vote on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty has already had some positive effects, such as the lessening chances of the European major states attempting to create a tax cartel. Well, we can all hope, anyway:
France has dropped plans to push forward with tax harmonisation under its European Union presidency, following Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty.
Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, told the Financial Times that while the proposal for a common consolidated corporate tax base had not been abandoned altogether, Paris would no longer press other governments to back it over the next six months.
Yes, perhaps the French, rather than attempting to prevent some horrific “race to the bottom” on tax rates, should instead admit that tax competition, including that which comes from those dreadful offshore centres, is a good thing.
The comments ought to underscore just how serious are the consequences of creating an EU state and the benefits that exist from resisting that ambition.
Well, maybe I write these words in a spirit of optimism as the light pours through my window. Indulge me for a while.
“Freedom is participation in power.”
– Mike Gravell, on Thom Hartmann’s Air America show.
“O, RLY?”
– Commenter Sunfish, when he heard that.
Yes, Sunfish, ‘Freedom’ is the freedom to join a gang and fight over who gets plundering rights on ‘your’ turf, I thought everyone knew that!
It is a bad idea to run Windows XP on your internet connected coffee machine, as it will of course be vulnerable to various nasty exploits. The potential risks of this are horrendous. Imagine what could happen if nasty Eastern European hackers managed to take control of the strength and consistency of Gordon Brown’s coffee. On the other hand, perhaps they already have? It would explain a lot.
… we have given people new rights to protest outside Parliament …
– Gordon Brown on “Liberty and Security”
… omitting to mention that until 2005 there was a general liberty to protest outside Parliament, and giving just a little bit of it back, having fortified the area in the meantime, is not all that impressive. Read the whole thing, if you haven’t been paying attention while a free country changed into something else.
Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:
My message is that the 42 days issue is not important to most people as we are unlikely to be affected by it. However, living on the national average salary as I do, I believe that what is important to taxpayers is how MPs have become overpaid, out of touch and are wasting billions of pounds of our money when the cost of living is spiraling out of control.”
So other people’s liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man …who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won’t) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties.
Nice item on the writings of this wonderful author. I remember watching the TV series Shogun many years ago and remember how enthralled I was.
I have been following the slow transition of laser weaponry from infancy to toddler over the last 25 years so I keep my eyes open for interesting developments in that area. This small item from Jane’s (subscription only) is quite interesting:
Lasers for area defence. Raytheon is forging ahead with a demonstration programme to show that a laser can equal or better the performance of traditional gun-based systems, with greater development potential and at reduced cost. The company’s Laser Area Defense System (LA DS) utilises the Phalanx platform, combined with current solid-state laser capability to tackle the very real threat of mortars and Katyusha rockets.
I saw video of a laser taking down two Katyusha’s in flight quite some time ago and am pleased to see things developing apace. I can think of one small Middle Eastern democracy which might find a system of this type highly efficacious.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments