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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Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online – as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:
Newspapers employ “fact-checkers”, but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that “The moon is made of green cheese” it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.
This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.
There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.
– Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.
Wired reports on a scheme to make new nations:
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
Excellent. Most of the bad ideas about how to govern nations have been tried out for centuries. They work moderately well for luckier ones amongst the plunderers, more or less appallingly for the plunderees. The good ideas, like very low taxes, very light regulation – in short: liberty – have been attempted only very occasionally. Anything which tilts that balance in the good direction is to be welcomed. I strongly believe that all social, political, and legal ideas should indeed be allowed on these jumped-up oil rigs (rather than merely my own social, political, and legal ideas), as the Seasteading Institute clearly envisages, but only if all those involved in each attempt consent to being part of it.
That should shoot most of the collectivists at the starting line. Most collectivist political ideas are about what should be done by them, the evil collectivists and their evil friends, to others who can’t defend themselves against their ghastly ideas even by running away, let alone resisting plunder. If only for that reason, the evil collectivists are all going to hate this stuff. And if only for that reason, I already like it, even if it never gets much beyond internet speculation.
The more honestly deluded among the collectivists, who really think that people will consent and go on consenting to their rancid notions, like those 1620-vintage (have I got that date right?) settlers on the east coast of what is now the USA, will, if they are ever silly enough to try one of these schemes, get a crash course in what they really should be doing and how the world really works.
I found out about this plan via one of my internet favourites just now, BLDG BLOG. The BLDG BLOG man is torn between architectural excitement and political unease:
It’s not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it’s a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn’t just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.
He’s not advocating it, you understand. Perish the thought. Who knows what frightful political genies may be let out of the bottle of the twentieth century collectivism to which most architects are still wedded? But, he can’t stop himself thinking: cool. I hope he’s right. About the coolness, I mean.
I’ve been doing some more reading of the Wired piece. One of the moving spirits behind the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, who is David Friedman’s son. If David Friedman is anything to go by, Patri (whom I have not met but whose blog I dip into from time to time) is surely a great guy. However, this makes me fear that the people doing this particular scheme are experts not on money, power, etc., but on libertarianism. This is not a good sign. Schemes like this cannot merely be virtuous. They have to work, and I fear that this one won’t. I mean, if it only starts to look like working, think of the number and nature of the people who will want it squashed. I really do hope that I’m wrong about this particular scheme. If I’m only wrong once about schemes like this, it will be a different world and a massively better one.
So that’s it. The argument is over… Low tax-low spend economics is finally threatening to become not just irresistible in terms of rational debate and empirical evidence – which, in fact, it is has been since at least the 1980s – but something far more devastating in electoral terms: it is poised to become cool. It will now be unthinkably unfashionable at dinner parties to defend the notion of the state as the monopoly supplier of virtue and fairness.
– Janet Daley in a Telegraph blog
The Daily Telegraph, perhaps not surprisingly as this is not a flattering story for the current government, points out that official figures show that almost 2 million Britons have left the UK since 1997. However one tries to spin this, such an outflow of people is not exactly a ringing endorsement of government policy, although there has always been and I hope will remain a steady two-way flow of people to and from this island, if only as an expression of the understandable desire of people to live in new places, to strike out to make a new life and so forth. Naturally, much of the media focus will be on the reasons why people are leaving. This is well-trodden ground already (crime, tax, weather, cost of living, etc).
One factor that struck me was that 1.58 million foreigners resident in the UK left during the 1997-2006/7 period, which suggests that while millions of foreigners come to the country, many of them do not choose to stay for more than a few years. What counts of course is the net trend. During the period, 3.9 million people came to the UK, with 500,000 arriving in 2006 alone. The pace of inflow – and possibly outflow – seems to be speeding up.
As I learned on a previous posting about immigration and emigration, there is a tendency – even among generally liberal people – to treat the movement of people from A to B as a utilitarian calculus, to work out if the net benefit or harm of human migration can be computed into a neat, hard number. Rarely does one hear the question addressed in terms of the freedom of a person to move to another place more to their liking so long as they respect the rights and property of whomever they choose to make their new neighbours, do not violate the laws of a host country, etc. Instead, the point is asked, “How does the arrival or departure of people to and from this nation benefit or harm me?” The question has no easy answer. For some low-paid indigenous workers, the sudden arrival of foreigners will put downward pressure on wages in the short run, but add new sources of consumer demand in the medium and long run. An exodus of entrepreneurs, meanwhile, reduces the “national pie”: but should any classical liberal worthy of that name care about the collective wealth held within a given geographical area? The UK is not a company – which has a defined end, like making cars – but an association of hopefully free persons pursuing their own ends within the boundaries of certain laws. I think it is sometimes worth stepping back to reflect on the fact that in this globalised age, millions of people are taking advantage of the ability to find the place to live that most suits them and their families and achieve their ambitions. I happen to think this is mostly a good thing, whatever caveats one can throw in about welfare, the pace of cultural assimilation and the like.
Here is an article by the journalist and parliamentary sketch-writer, Edward Pearce, that is well worth a read.
Thanks to those invaluable guys at The Taxpayers’ Alliance, we have a clearer idea of how much of our money is spent on quasi-governmental organisations. What is even more shocking is that the UK government does not provide such clear information and as a result, we have to rely on the likes of TA to provide it. I guess it bears out the comment of P.J. O’ Rourke in his wonderful “Parliament of Whores” book, to the effect that one of the key reasons why government and its agencies are so massive is no one can understand the sheer amount of what government does or claims to do.
I rather like this story about one of the smallest islands in the Channel Islands group being up for sale, or at least its lease is.
I like this detail:
Herm is the first Channel Island to go on sale for years. The asking price for the 40-year lease includes a manor house, 13th century chapel, 80 acres of farmland complete with a dairy herd and what is thought to be the world’s smallest jail.
And this:
Buyers could in effect have their own tax haven, paying 20% on income and avoiding death duties and capital gains, in common with other Channel Islands residents.
The only catch is that the price tag is £15 million.
As to whether the new owner of the property would be in a position to declare self-government and become an independent state, I am not sure. It would be a nice idea, though. Here’s a book on the subject.
As a Pimlico resident, I naturally would be amused to see if we could ever follow the example of a brilliant 1940s movie.
Even though I do not know if it should be done, given that it would be done by the people who would do it rather than by people who would do it well, I’m glad someone has at least said this:
Invade the country, shoot the generals and feed the people.
Those are apparently the words of David Davis, opposition spokesman for something or other. His colleagues were “stunned”, says Iain Dale.
Incidentally, Biased BBC, who I do not always like (basically because I do not always dislike the BBC), made a good point recently about those Burmese generals. After quoting a Wikipedia entry to the effect that the Burmese generals are quite a bit more socialist than not, Niall Kilmartin says:
This socialist origin and orientation of military rule in Burma seems to have been airbrushed out of routine BBC coverage. The mention of ‘generals’ and ‘military’ with no hint of their ideology has an obvious tendency to suggest a right-wing regime rather than the left-wing regime it more appears to be.
Well, whatever. What is definitely true is that if, during a natural disaster, a government treats its own people as hostages rather than anyone they are supposed to help, then helping those people means shoving the government aside, at least for the duration of the disaster. Trouble is, smashing up a government does not, to put it mildly, necessarily mean helping its people. It’s one of those necessary-but-insufficient situations. I actually think that if these generals did fear an old-fashioned invasion, a bit more than they do now, they might tolerate an NGO invasion instead. Surely, a threatened invasion, a real one, might accomplish something here. Trouble is, if you threaten something, it is better to mean it.
Latest from the BBC on Burma here. Things are said, by some, to be “improving”. Hmm.
Let us welcome the work of John Harris, (Professor of Bioethics, University of Manchester) in popularising the potential of enhancement in relation to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill would allow for inter-species embryos that will not only enable medical science to overcome the acute shortage of human eggs for research, but would provide models for the understanding of many disease processes, an essential precursor to the development of effective therapies.
Whilst I support many of the liberal arguments promoted by Harris in favour of enhancement, and understand that the limitations of an article in The Times circumscribes argument, the points that he raises point to his wider positions. They also denote a more political argument on how they should be debated at a popular level.
The first concern is Harris’s timeline for the future: with the replacement of homo sapiens sapiens with a posthuman speciation, that is more intelligent and better adapted than we are. This sits at odds with a picture of radical technologies that would allow the enhancement of existing individuals.
Darwinian evolution has taken millions of years to create human beings; the next phase of evolution, a phase I call “enhancement evolution”, could occur before the end of the century. The result may be the emergence of a new species that will initially live alongside us and eventually may entirely replace humankind.
There is an uncomfortable Darwinian ring to this replacement theory. It will discomfort many and undermines liberal arguments for enhancement at an individual level. Enhance now, die later. The solution is that we may indeed, as individuals, bridge the transition from old to new species, from human to posthuman: and that the inspiration for this concept is Moravec and Kurzweil, not some future genocide that we should welcome with open arms. If it were not, why should this differ from those green anti-humanists who support a dieback of our species.
Harris uses some extraordinary examples in support of his argument: and there is a neatness in looking back to simple but radical changes when supporting self-enhancement without restraint from the state.
Before fires, candles, lamps and other forms of man-made light, most people went to sleep when it got dark. Candles enabled social life and work to continue into and through the night and conferred all sorts of advantages on those able and willing to benefit from it, at the expense of those who couldn’t or didn’t.
Contemporary and future biological enhancements may create problems of injustice both in that they provide a means for some to gain an advantage (those who read by candlelight gain in a way that others do not), and because they may create unfair pressures as a result of the capabilities conferred by enhancement (like the pressure to stay up late and read or work because one can).
The solution is establishing “fair” working hours and provision, at public expense if necessary, of sources of light – not banning candles. The solution is a combination of regulation and distributive justice, not a Luddite rejection of technology.
Whilst disagreeing with Harris’s solution, which favours state regulation over market distribution, the clear thrust of his article is to open up the potential opportunities and benefits that could be denied to us by social democratic governments in the name of social equality. For further exploration, you can pick up his book here. One looks forward to an age of bootstrap enhancement.
In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as ‘misogynistic’, if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:
She complains how the Daily Mail ‘ratcheted up its attacks on me’, demanding to know – though Mr Blair could have answered just as well – if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave ‘the press chapter and verse’.
I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family’s privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair’s current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.
Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people’s children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.
And nor should they be, but here is Patsy Kensit interviewed in last week’s Observer Magazine:
Q. How do you feel about plastic surgery?
A. If it means you can look like Sharon Osborne, then why not?
If it is not a fierce deadpan joke, then that’s a spectacular case of body dysmorphic disorder you have there, Miss Kensit.
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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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