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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“It is not the State that creates a healthy society. When the State grows too powerful people feel they count for less and less. The State drains society, not only of its wealth but also of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best. Our aim is to let people feel that they count for more and more.”
– Margaret Thatcher, 10 October, 1980. Taken from the rather good tome, Great British Speeches, a collection compiled by Simon Heffer. Perhaps out of an impish desire to annoy, the book contains Blair’s ghastly and embarrassing ‘forces of conservatism’ speech, perhaps the ugliest statement of political authoritarianism in recent British political history.
When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be ‘free’. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot – and I doubt that – he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free – it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life ‘ought’ to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, “Why should health, clean water or defence be free”? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all.
To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be ‘free’ is not, alas, all that easy in today’s politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a ‘right’, then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army?
I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about “the right to free health care”. Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a ‘right’.
Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of ‘welfare rights’ and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism.
There is an interesting article about the Russian government backed cyber attacks against Estonia.
(via Instapundit)
I have been watching as the assortment of bad, worse and sickening candidates continues to grow in this premature election campaign. Amongst them are candidates (or at least a candiidate) who would make me vote for the other party: John McCain. There are candidates I find a little less bad on one issue or another. There are my own party contenders who cannot win, will not get much national coverage and will have an anti-war stance I do not support.
But finally, from out of the blue of the Texas sky comes: RON PAUL!
Ron is no stranger to me. I worked with his 1988 campaign manager a bit and wrote some policy papers for his Libertarian campaign. I also introduced him to a crowd at an ISDC (International Space Development Conference) in Denver after giving him a briefing on the audience. I found him thoroughly likable both politically and personally.
True, Ron carries the same anti-war stance as others, but I could ignore that in someone who may actually make a difference. Unlike my party’s candidate he will be unignorable. He could conceivably pull off a Republican nomination. If that were to happen it might cause multiple suicides amongst the kinder, gentler crowd… but no one would miss them anyway.
If he were to win the election, admittedly a very long shot, Statism’s monopoly hold on our political system would be irreparably damaged.
I am willing to take my risks on enemy forces using a weak foreign policy to attack us here because the policies of a President Paul would so liberate Americans and the American economy that we would be accelerating away from the unfree world at a rate they could not possibly match.
Ron would make us freer than we have been since Abe Lincoln mucked things up for limited government. Increased individual liberty would translate into wealth and national strength. There will never be a perfect candidate for me, but at least in Ron Paul I see an overall set of policies that does not make me want to lose my lunch.
Go here to find out how to support him.
I just saw Barack Obama on television saying that he would introduce Universal Socialist Medical Care in the USA and for people who already have insurance policies, the only difference would be such people would pay less in premiums… everything else would be just as good. Yes, you too in the USA can have something as ‘wonderful’ as our decrepit National Health Service. You lucky, lucky people.
And presumably this conjuring act of creating wealth out of nothing with government impositions will come to pass purely via the Triumph of Barack Obama’s will.
Talk about delusional.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies
– Groucho Marx
I mean really geeky! But cool nevertheless.
Although I care very little about the arguments regarding the merits of State Comprehensive Schools vs. State Grammar Schools, it is certainly a topic that has much excited Tories over the years.
Thus when Dave Cameron suddenly decided to jettison his party’s long standing support for Grammar Schools, calling their Tory supporters ‘delusional’, he has been rewarded by losing a member of his front bench, European spokesman Graham Brad MP, who has resigned in protest. And of course regardless of the fawning resignation letter, resigning the front bench is the political equivalent of publicly screaming “bite me, you halfwit loser!” in Cameron’s face. He was ticked off by the chief whip for his support of Grammar schools but rather than kowtow, he has taken his leave. I can respect that.
Who would have thought it? A Tory with principles? Damn! Brady is well out of it as he is clearly a man who was going to be very uncomfortable on the front benches with a weathervane like Cameron as leader.
And now I shall return to my profound indifference to the antics of inane party politics.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
– Karl Marx
It must be plain to the historicist that Tinky Winky is such a personage. First, as supporting character in the American tragedy of Jerry Fallwell; now as a causus belli in the farcical end of Polish ultra-Catholicism. The trouble is, Marx – or at least that Marx) had it wrong, as usual. It is always farce and tragedy at the same time.
This is not me. Save as a result of incompetent shaving, or depressed non-shaving, I have never had a beard. And not more than a couple of millimetres long, in any case. My verse output is formal exercises and satyrical squibs. One directory thinks there are eight Guy Herberts in Britain. More than one of those are, or were, me. I do not know whether any are him.
This startling story from France even made yours truly, who has become a jaundiced observer of French political life, sit up and take notice. Apparently, a bunch of people styling themselves as protectors of the Gallic wine industry have issued an ultimatum to new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, that unless those evil cheap imports from countries such as Australia (the horreur!), New Zealand (Rainbow Warrior, anyone?), South Africa (enough said), America (the Great Satan) and other places are stopped, then supermarkets, offices and other places will be dynamited.
Suppose that people in such venues get killed. I think that such a terrible outcome might begin to get across to the politically and economically uncommitted the true nature of the thuggery that sometimes accompanies protectionism and any form of coercive interference with voluntary economic exchange. Ultimately, such folk believe that you, the consumer, or worker, or entrepreneur, are beholden to buy, produce or sell not on the basis of freely consenting exchanges with your fellows, but on account of some state of affairs that the protectionists deem right and proper. In this case, the wine industry of France, or at least the mass-produced bit of it, is under threat from the cheaper stuff from other parts of the world. (I think it is safe to assume that the producers of Latour or Lafite are unlikely to be worried). I am actually off to Southwestern France in early June for two weeks’ much-needed holiday and the Languedoc region is one of the places where these thugs hail from, apparently. I tend to notice that whenever I visit France, which is quite often, it is hard to see non-French wine in the shops. So if these thugs are getting upset at the arrival of a relatively small amount of foreign imports, they would go totally batshit if they saw the mixed wine-racks in Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s in a standard English town.
Sarkozy’s time in office is unlikely to be a quiet one.
Venezuela is a case study of how democracy is no sure defence against tyranny and how it can actually be the means by which it comes about. I realise we already have the example of Germany in the 1930’s, but unlike the NSDAP, the democratic majority for Chavez was far less ambiguous than the ones that incrementally brought Hitler to power.
It was interesting to note how many on the left (with many honourable exceptions I must add) have supported the establishment of a state television monopoly in Venezuela once the Chavez regime announced it was going to shut down anti-government station Rádio Caracas Televisión.
However is good to see people on the street marching in defiance of Hugo Chavez. Will it make any difference? In the short run, probably not, but it is never wrong to make a stand against a tyrant regardless of how popular he may be.
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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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