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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Statists the world over jumped for joy today when the UN released yet another report stating that global warming is due to human activity rather that cyclical solar factors.
Watching the BBC reports about this, one could be forgiven for thinking not a single scientist or logical thinker demurred from that notion. Medieval Warm Period? What Medieval Warm Period? Oh, THAT Medieval Warm Period! No, the approved experts have spoken and no heresy shall be suffered to be reported.
What particularly made me laugh was when the BBC voice over said “and the fact over one hundred governments have endorsed this report will add to its credibility.” So let me get this straight… the fact one hundred states which exercise political power over people have endorsed a report that will be used to justify imposing even more political control over people, and that makes this more credible? I wonder if the BBC would report a pro-tobacco report endorsed by tobacco companies the same way? What do you think?
I have no idea whether the journalists at the Daily Telegraph make it their business to read this blog (although they most certainly should do so, naturally) but this article nicely backed up my point the other day about the economic upsurge of India.
In my posting here, a number of commenters scoffed with disbelief that some jumped up rating agency should be so daft as to proclaim that India’s debt rating has improved, and that the country'[s economy is improving. “My dear boy, this is India!” you can hear them cry. And one commenter, bless him, even suggested that India is still far behind most of Latin America, a comment sure to provoke hollow laughs from any entrepreneural type hoping to prosper in Chavez’s Venezuela. Of course, as I said at the time, India is still moving up from a relatively low base. During the immediate post-war years, the East Asian economies in places like South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan powered ahead while India, influenced by those dreadful Fabians and London School of Economics types who stuffed the old colonial service, embraced socialism, planning and progressive taxes. But the fact, that cannot be denied, is that this country, with its vast, English-speaking population, relatively stable system of property rights and its admirable enthusiasm for the world’s greatest sport, is shooting the economic lights out.
There is just no pleasing some people, it seems.
These Canadians obviously have no sense of fun:
Don’t stone women to death, burn them or circumcise them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada, have been told.
Bah! Killjoys.
In the latest pull-out-of-the-middle-and-bin travel supplement in the Radio Times, there is an advert for going on holiday in Cuba:
Warm golden sand touched by shimmering seas, endlessly clear and calm. Sparkling contrasts. A deep sense of harmony. Cuba is life.
Unless you are one of the poor bastards who actually has to live there.
A Cuba tourism website was mentioned at the bottom of the advert. I went there, seeking further Cubanities to sneer at. I was not disappointed. In the Knowing Culture section, I read:
Cuba’s cultura is very prestigious. It happy people live very rooted to its traditions and customs. If you want to know about that go and visit the museums.
“Rooted to its traditions and customs” as in “bugger all has happened for the last fifty years”. Say what you like about communism, at least it avoids disfiguring the landscape with a lot of mucky economic development. Well, muck they can do. It’s the economic development they avoid. Film companies love communism, because huge swathes of ancient places get preserved by it as if in aspic, needing only a scrub-down and then some mending and a lick of paint to bring the distant past back to instant and authentic life.
As the heading says here, about some very boring-looking historical building:
Arranged Historical Place as Museum
A phrase that would do well as a description of Cuba itself. One instinctively knows which questions not to ask.
Meanwhile, back at the Knowing Culture section, the blurb ends thus:
If you take a tour of our cities you will see the development of music, dance or plastic arts, manifestations that have left a trace in the world.
Mostly in Miami.
So, potential tourists living outside Cuba have no problem accessing the internetted tourist version of Cuba. But what is internet access like for the the natives?
With less than 2 per cent of its population online, Cuba is one of the most backward Internet countries. An investigation carried out by Reporters Without Borders in October revealed that the Cuban government uses several levers to ensure that this medium is not used in a “counter-revolutionary” way. Firstly, it has more or less banned private Internet connections. To surf the Internet or check their e-mail, Cubans have to go to public access points such as Internet cafes, universities and “youth computer clubs” where their activity is more easily monitored. Secondly, the computers in all the Internet cafes and leading hotels contain software installed by the Cuban police that triggers an alert message whenever “subversive” key-words are spotted. The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for dissidents and independent journalists, for whom communicating with people abroad is an ordeal. Finally, the government also relies on self-censorship. You can get 20 years in prison for writing “counter-revolutionary” articles for foreign websites. You can even get five years just for connecting to the Internet illegally. Few Internet users dare to run the risk of defying the regime’s censorship.
Which would explain the “deep sense of harmony”.
No doubt I will be attacked (again) for writing critically about this ‘free market’, ‘pro-American’ journal. However, I will proceed.
The Economist magazine (or newspaper, as it chooses to describe itself) last week had a weird racialist rant against Secretary of State Rice. A whole page devoted to claiming (amongst other things) that Condi Rice went along with the evil Bush on Iraq (that the Economist supported the judgement to go into Iraq was somehow forgotten) because she was black and,. therefore, had learned that the way to get ahead was to conform to the will of powerful white men (Rice as Aunt Thomisina?).
There was also a claim that Secretary of State Rice was a poor administrator who ran the State Department badly – this claim rather pleased me, as it can only have come from State Department staff and anyone who is unpopular with the death-to-America fanatics who have tried to dominate Foggy Bottom for decades can not be all bad.
This week the Economist ran a little article on the trial of Lewis Libby. The article claimed that the defence of Mr Libby (against the claim that he obstructed justice in the inquiry into the exposure of CIA agent – the fact that the person was a CIA staff member, not a secret agent, was of course not mentioned in the article) would be that it was all Karl Rove’s fault. But (the Economist article explained) the guilt of Mr Rove does not mean that Mr Libby is innocent.
In fact the ‘exposure’ of the CIA ‘agent’ was nothing to do with Mr Libby or Mr Rove – the person responsible was Richard Armitage.This is common knowledge and Mr Armitage has himself has admitted it.
The whole thing goes back to the effort of the husband of the CIA employee (an ex-State Department person and donor to the 2000 Gore and 2004 Kerry campaign) to discredit American and British claims about Saddam Hussian efforts to buy materials for his atomic weapons program, specifically from the nation of Niger. Elements in the State Department and the CIA opposed British and American policy on Iraq and so tried to discredit the claims made in support of that policy. Richard Armitage, then working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, tried to fight back by pointing out to the media that the supposedly independent people attacking the Administration were part of these factions in the State Department and the CIA who had an agenda of their own. All perfectly normal in the cat fight that is politics.
I am no expert in these matters, but my understanding is that Saddam was after such material. But the Economist article did not cover any of the basic matters – or even that it was Richard Armitage (not Mr Libby or Mr Rove) who ‘leaked’ the fact that the ex Ambassador’s wife was part of a certain faction at the CIA.
All the Economist was concerned with was the ‘lies’ of Mr Libby and Mr Rove. The fact that, whether or not there should be a court case, the whole thing is directed at the wrong person, Mr Libby not being Mr Armitage, escaped them.
In fact the prosecutor involved is politically motivated (no surprise there, we are dealing with the United States after all) and has attacked Mr Libby in order to attack the Vice President and, through him, the President. The jury is of course stacked with Iraq war critics. I did not think highly of the judgement to go to war myself – but I do not like political show trials either.
As for the Economist’s level of knowledge: It was as if an American journal had run an article about British politics and had talked of ‘Prime Minister Cameron’ and ‘Queen Diana’.
I do not know where the Economist gets its staff from (some ‘school of journalism’ perhaps), but I rather resent that they get paid money for writing about things they know nothing about.
Still, as I am careful never to pay for reading bits of the Economist, at least they are not spending my money.
A great secret has been revealed. Personally I think it explains a lot. Brian Micklethwait is really Gully Foyle.
Canberra-based libertarian blogger Tex has been asked to stand as a candidate for the Australian Senate, and has written his campaign speech. I think you willl agree with me that it is a model of Australian eloquence. On the other hand, no one can accuse Tex of taking a ‘populist’ approach.
Here it is to be observed, of what authoritie antient lectures or readings upon statutes were, for that they had five excellent qualities. First, they declared what the common law was before the making of the statute, as here it appeareth. Secondly, they opened the true sense and meaning of the statute. Thirdly, their cases were brief, having at the most one poynt at the common law, and another upon the statute. Fourthly, plaine and perspicuous, for then the honour of the reader was to excell others in authorities, arguments, and reasons for proofe of his opinion, and for confutation of the objections against it. Fifthly, they read, to suppresse subtill inventions to creepe out of the statute. But now readings having lost the said former qualities, have lost also their former authorities: for now the cases are long, obscure, and intricate, full of new conceits, liker rather to riddles than lectures, which when they are opened they vanish away like smoke, and the readers are like to lapwings, who seeme to bee nearest their nests, when they are farthest from them, and all their studie is to find nice evasions out of the statute.
– Sir Edward Coke (Institutes of the Law of England, I, 280b) ever more applicable in an age of legislative acceleration.
There are currenly more than 20 government bills in progress, several of which have profound implications for the common law and some of which MPs will have had less than two weeks notice of before they are called to vote on timetable motions to hustle them through regardless of consideration.
As a result of these increasingly numerous timetable motions, elected representatives cannot scrutinise important legislation. That means that we cannot express our views on the amendments before us; it means that the interested parties who look to us to articulate their concerns will not have their concerns reflected in discussion; and it means that our constituents will not be able, through their elected Members, to express their views on legislation. All that is profoundly wrong.
With these timetable motions, we are stripping out part of the democratic process. If that were not bad enough, we are also stripping out part of the legislative process.
– Douglas Hogg MP (Hansard 27 Nov 2000 : Column 680)
One need not sidestep a legislature in order to rule by decree. It suffices to exhaust it. Perhaps he has his own reasons for doing what he does in his own political context – and crudity is a selling point for the mob – but it makes Mr Chavez’s behaviour look unsophisticated and extemporised.
Yet again, the Leviathan crushes dreams.
Next question: is there anyone out there for whom this does not make the point of why libertarians hold the state and its defenders in deep contempt?
In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.
The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.
and…
Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.
and…
… and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?
The row about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to refuse to give children up to gay couples has already caused a great deal of controversy, and there is a very, smart article on the issue at The Devil’s Kitchen blog which takes a pretty firm libertarian line on the matter. In my view, if a Catholic or any other religious organisation wishes to refuse to hand over children entrusted to it to certain sorts of people on grounds of religious doctrine, then one can certainly object to those views, but they should not be banned, in my view.
The problem, however, is that such adoption organisations receive money from the taxpayer: you and me. I am not a Catholic (although my wife is) and I am not happy that I may be financially enabling people to act on views I regard as wrong. This in my view demonstrates the great dangers of encouraging charities to receive tax moneys or indeed to get involved in state initiatives of any kind. By receiving such moneys, these bodies will slowly but surely lose their autonomy. The Catholic charities that are involved in areas like adoption may choose to sever any links with the state apparatus, and I strongly urge them to do so.
This government, remember, is one that regards autonomous institutions, be they businesses, charities, or any associations of people, as a threat to its power and designs. It wishes to bend these institutions to its corporatist, collectivist ends. In a sense, this is in fact a profoundly fascist government, in that it maintains the appearance of tolerating private property rights and institutions, but in fact seeks to regulate them so closely as to turn them into empty husks.
I hope this whole episode drives home in people’s minds the extent to which civil society, traditionally understood, has been weakened by this government. It was the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen I think, who once remarked that NuLabour would no longer seek to nationalise industries. Instead, it would nationalise people.
The good news from India keeps coming. This week, the international credit rating agency, Standard & Poors pronounced that the “Third World” nation had become so prosperous that the risk of lending money to the country had fallen significantly.
New York-based Standard & Poor’s said it upgraded India’s sovereign rating to BBB-, the lowest investment grade rating, from BB+, the highest junk rating.
The rating revision could help reduce India’s borrowing costs on the global market.
As anyone who has taken out a personal loan or mortgage will know, getting a stronger credit rating is a big deal. India is now ahead of economic basket-cases such as Argentina or Venezuela, and has got there by a programme of economic liberalisation. I keep banging on about the vigour of the Indian economy – notwithstanding the still-grinding poverty in parts of the country – because it is probably the most positive economic story of our times. It shouts, loud and clear, that markets work. Market economics is doubly potent when combined with a relatively robust civil society, protection of property rights and the priceless asset of an international language like English.
Meanwhile, India-based Tata Steel has sealed its purchase of UK steelmaker Corus.
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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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