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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What is your favourite passage from a novel?
I think mine is that superbly-written scene in Moonraker when Ian Fleming describes how Bond deals out a sequence of cards that in Bridge is known as a Yarborough and as a result, takes the villain Drax to the cleaners. I never thought that a writer could make the game of Bridge sound exciting, but Fleming achieved it.
For second place in this quiz, I think I have to go for the scene in Scoop when William Boot, the hapless correspondent, files his first despatch for the Daily Beast. I still grin whenever I think about it.
There is a scandal in the UK Department of Health’s IT management. The BBC reports it thus:
The Department of Health has apologised for an apparent security lapse which allowed the personal details of junior doctors to be accessed online.
Channel 4 News reported that a breach on the NHS Medical Training Application Service website allowed public access for at least eight hours. The department said the details had only been available briefly, and only to people making employment checks.
[…]
Phone numbers, addresses, previous convictions and sexual orientation were among details available since at least 0900 BST, it reported. The Department of Health was alerted at 1635 BST and the breach closed at 1705 BST.
The opposition spokesmen were on it straightway, pointing out that if this could happen with temporary information on 7,000 junior doctors, what hope was there for the medical records of the entire country intended be held on the NHS Connecting for Health system, or all those personal details being sought out for the NIR, to remain secure?
All very well and good. They won’t be. And we should thank Andrew Lansley MP for taking the opportunity to point it out. But I cannot help feeling let down by the response of media and politicians. “Insecure!” they bleat.
Nowhere, yet, have I heard or read in the mainstream discussion of this incident what seems to me the most screamingly obvious and fundamental questions. What business is it of the DoH to supervise the selection of individual doctors for individual hospital placements at all? And what the hell is it doing collecting information about doctors’ religions, sexual preferences and criminal records in the first place? If you have committed a crime the nature of which debars you from being a doctor, then you’re no longer a doctor, so you should not be on the list. If you have not then your crimes are as irrelevant as your religion or your sexuality, and they should not be. No doubt they were also as carefully classified as to race and ethnic origin as would satisfy apartheid authorities re-equipped with modern computers.
When are people going to rebel against the presumption that government may pigeonhole as it pleases, and anything a bureaucrat with a checklist asks he is entitled to know?
Unless you have a damn good reason, I decide what I’ll tell you about myself based on the nature of our relationship. Information is power. Information is intimacy. Forced disclosure of private information is data-rape.
Those 7,000 young doctors were only incidentally abused by the feeble security. They were deliberately data-raped by the Department of Health first.
…to discover that carbon management and carbon credits are scams.
As for the carbon offsets so beloved of our elite Gulfstream Greens:
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.
A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.
Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
Net effect of most carbon offsets: zero, or close to it. The Gulfstream Green crowd’s carbon footprints are just as big as before, in other words, although by writing a check they have given themselves permission to ignore this fact.
And from the statist/authoritarian wing, we have cap and trade, which many proponents like to claim is a market solution. As if a market in an artificial intangible permit issued by government and valued only because of government regulatory scheme is anything other than gussied up rent-seeking.
This system sets an overall cap on carbon emissions, creates a fixed set of carbon credits which add up to this cap level, and then allows companies to trade credits with each other. There really is no upside to this system, though proponents will argue that it does have a firm cap on carbon emissions. The downsides are that industries will cheat, price volatility will be really high, counties will cheat and the system privileges insiders:
By creating tradable financial assets worth tens of billions of dollars for governments to distribute among their industries and plants and then monitor, a global cap-and-trade program also introduces powerful incentives to cheat by corrupt and radical governments. Corrupt governments will almost certainly distribute permits in ways that favor their business supporters and understate their actual energy use and emissions.
And, of course, the final ‘solution’ to global warming is the carbon tax, which, like any tax, will grind down productivity, transfer wealth from producers to parasites, burden the development of truly poor areas, and (absent a trade war or true Global Total State) be applied only on a local basis and thus be ineffective to reduce carbon output in any meaningful way. Does anyone think that the worlds biggest carbon producer, China, will cripple its economy with this tax?
The three proposed solutions for the carbon problem are ineffective, corrupting, and damaging. Only someone in the grips of green religious mania, or with a profitable angle dialed in, could possibly be in favor of any of them.
Sufferers from epilepsy might – just might – have a cure for their condition thanks to this piece of medical technology. I know one person who has epilepsy and it has had a hugely disruptive impact on her life (she is not allowed to drive, for instance).
As the late musician Ian Dury used to sing, there ain’t half some clever bastards.
I was looking at the Telegraph and saw a very odd story titled Cameroon threatens to jail urine drinkers… my immediate reaction was “ok, now that is moderately revolting, but why the hell does David Cameron feel the need to pronounce on what is hopefully a fairly uncommon activity in the UK? Is there nothing this busybody does not want to regulate?”
And then I read it more closely…
Who will be the next President of the United States?
Some people get disgusted – I guess it is the ‘yuck!’ factor – at the idea that a person can sell his or her own kidney for money, for example. We seem to live in an era of warped values about the donation and use of human body parts, as this article in Reason makes clear. It appears that in some jurisdictions, just about everyone is allowed to make money from the business of using human tissue and bone for medical purposes – except the people from whom the tissue and bone is taken (I think we can take it as read at a liberal blog like this that killing people for their body parts is wrong).
Virginia Postrel, the US-based writer, underwent surgery to give one of her own kidneys to a friend and made sure said friend is alive today (what a great woman Virginia is). As a classical free marketeer, Postrel does not understand why it is so terrible that such acts should be done for financial gain. She has a long and typically thoughtful piece on the subject here. She responds to those who fear that poor or gullible people might be led into selling their body parts out of financial desperation, but that is an argument about curbing poverty, not reducing human freedom. Ultimately, I own my body, and not the state, not the rest of the UK population, not Tony Blair, not god or the Great Cheese Monster in the sky. Of course, a “market in organs” may attract shysters and unscrupulous doctors, but as the Reason article I alluded to makes clear, there are plenty of shysters in the system now.
Of course, in a country like Britain where a lot of the population drink like fish, it is debatable whether anyone would want to buy our kidneys, or even take them for free.
Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.
– Margaret Thatcher
It is hardly a secret I really really do not like Dave Cameron, but I was surprised when a chum of mine called me up to say Cameron was calling for a smaller state. I found this hard to believe and soon found this article called Cameron: People must be nicer to each other.
The Conservative leader accused Labour of treating Britons like children, saying the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to any problem was to bring in laws which often discouraged people from taking responsibility. He argued that measures such as anti-social behaviour orders had been counter-productive because they allowed people to abdicate responsibility for their actions.
[…]
He called for a “revolution in responsibility”, saying that the next Conservative government was not going to treat its citizens like children, promising “to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law”. He insisted that a framework of incentives would prove more effective than regulations and laws. Mr Cameron promised to strengthen the family with the reform of a tax system that he claimed penalised couples who stayed together.
The fact the regulatory state is incredibly corrosive to civil society (in every sense of the phrase) should be self-evident to anyone claiming to be a conservative, but as Dave Cameron is not a conservative, in spite of leading a party called the Conservatives, I would not automatically assume he actually believes that. So you would think I would be pleased to finally see him saying something along these lines. In truth I burst out laughing when I read that article, not because I do not agree but because I do not believe him.
He has previously spent so much time telling us he can be trusted not to ‘do a Thatcher’ and how he intends to regulate our lives just as much as Blair’s Labour party, only ‘better’, why should his sudden enthusiasm for less regulation be believable? Simply put, he is not actually promising any such thing, not really.
The default position of all politicians is to pass laws in order to be seen to ‘do something’ and there is not a chance in hell that Dave Cameron, who is really just a political hack who sees power as an end in and of itself, will seek to actually roll back the state in any meaningful way and thereby deprive himself of patronage and political tools.
So of course the mask quickly slips…
He said a Conservative government would grant councils greater control of spending, while people should be encouraged to become more involved in the ownership and operation of their schools, public spaces, and social and environmental services.
Ah, so actually he is all in favour of the state doing stuff, he just wants it to be the local state rather than the central state. Sorry Dave, the only way you will stop damaging civil society is not by allowing a town council to spend the damn money, it is by not allowing any part of the state to spend so much money. A hell of lot less. There is just as much stupidity, greed and obsession with state control in town halls as there is in Westminster.
Somehow, I do not think this line of argument is going to work with my employer. I know this sounds harsh, but aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.
Be very suspicious when you hear the phrase “gap between rich and poor”. In the print version of the Evening Standard (I could not find a link to the article), Financial editor Anthony Hilton writes an article that makes a lot of rather questionable unspoken assumptions.
Gordon Brown will not change the rules that attract tax exiles to London. he is right to want the super-rich to stay but we must be aware the increasing gap between rich and poor
…and…
The British economy could be about to enjoy another 50-year boom but the major challenge remains the division of the spoils
…and…
The unwritten deal is that they pay little tax in return for adding to the general prosperity of the nation. It may be unfair to normal British taxpayers, it may be unfair competition from the perspective of foreign competitor countries, but it is pragmatic and it has worked
Although this article goes on to say that it is now the uncontested view that market economies are the only way to go, Anthony Hilton’s words are redolent with an assumed underpinning Marxist meta-context, to use Samizdata-speak. The fact that there is a gap between rich and poor is bad is a given to him. Why is it bad? He does not say because his meta-context takes it as a given that such a notion will be shared by his readers.
And that an economy is something that must be ‘divided as spoils’ is very strongly indicative of the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy. It suggests that for someone to get richer, someone else has to get poorer, which is perhaps the single most important underpinning notion behind almost every form of command based economics. Wealth is seen as something “we” have to divide, rather than something which is created.
Finally, for it to be “unfair” for someone else to have less of their money taken by the state even when that person can bring a quality of economic value beyond that of “normal British taxpayers”, seems to indicate that Anthony Hilton thinks the person being taxed more (in relative terms) should feel aggrieved against the person being taxed less rather than feeling aggrieved against the state which is taxing them more. Of course Anthony Hilton might not mean that but somehow I suspect he does.
Make no mistake, Anthony Hilton is not some poisonous Polly Toynbee style Stalinist as he does accept that market economies are the way to go, yet in almost everything he writes there is a large (and often unspoken) ‘but’ implicit in notion after notion… which is why I do not actually think he really does like the idea of market economies when it really comes down to it.
Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal?
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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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