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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Over on Blithering Idiot, blogger Will Sulik has a hilarious post called Hermeneutics in Everyday life which needs some libertarian perspectives added:
14. An anarcho-libertarian refuses to acknowledge the validity of the repressive state to place force-backed STOP signs and accelerates past.
15. A minarchist libertarian halts at the STOP sign and waits for evolutionary epistemology to transform the understanding of society-state relationships to the point where all roads become private property.
16. An Randian refuses to see any objective reason to STOP at the sign and plows into the back of the minarchist, causing automotive catallaxy.
Harry Browne has a new item online at Worldnet Daily. It’s an interesting take on why the loss of Enron’s employee pension money can be laid at the IRS’s door. The income tax laws are the reason employee pensions are handled inside companies rather than by the employees themselves.
I’d never looked at it this way before, but he’s right.
New blog Global Grumpy raises an interesting point about the surprising lack of reaction from the US media and muted reaction from conservative bloggers regarding the asinine steel tariffs. He also links to a somewhat pointless article on Slate on the legality of the subject, as if the problem was a legal one rather than an economic and political one. The fact left wing bloggers have little to say is hardly surprising but one can only speculate why the neo-con bloggers are not howling much louder.
Bush’s action is clearly damaging to the US economy due to the inevitable knock-on effects it will have on international trade, not to mention the increased costs passed on directly as US steel becomes more expensive. I was expecting to hear people making much stronger remarks about ‘The Bush Steel Tax on US consumers’ (for that is what it is). The headlines I was expecting were:
- ‘Bush causes squeals of delight amongst anti-globalization advocates’
- ‘Is Bush trying to get France to award him the Legion d’Honneur for inconsistency?’
- ‘Bush encourages reduction in global trade’
- ‘Bush to World: please add tariff barriers against goods exported from USA’
- ‘Bush tells Russians: ‘Yeah I know we are proping up your economy with aid on one hand and trying to wreck your steel industry with the other… so what? If you need money go sell nukes to Iran and stop bugging us’
I hope the reason for this is not the flip side of a phenomena I saw many times during the ghastly Clinton years: even when Clinton occasionally got something right (very occasionally), so great was the detestation of several otherwise analytical commentators (and friends) that they opposed policies which if conducted identically under any US president except Clinton, they would have supported without question. I wonder if ‘wartime’ admiration for Bush has not cause a similar blindness in the other direction towards a truly inane policy.
This is not a trivial issue and could have disastrous implications for the international trade system that are far more important than an industry which employs 150,000 people out of a population of 260 million.
[Note to ‘Global Grumpy’: the two e-mail addresses I have for you both bounce]
‘Crypto-Libertarian-in-denial’ Brian Linse is mistaken as to which weapon was the result of the humourous ‘which weapon are you?’ test: Dale Amon was the H&K PDW…my result was
Alas as Brian points out, the only weapon I can legally own in Britain is… a squirt gun. 
At least if I am attacked by a female mugger, I can try to instigate an impromptu wet tee-shirt contest.
I do not know why I do it to myself. I watch Enterprise, the latest and by far the lamest of the Star Trek series and have to restrain myself from throwing things at the television. In the latest idiotic episode, the crew of a freighter starship which has been repeatedly attacked by non-human pirates finally captures one and tries to strong arm information out of the prisoner to gain a tactical advantage in order to retaliate effectively against their tormentors. However we are shown that the virtuous Star Fleet crew of Enterprise do not approve of this. Not just the fact the freighter crew are trying to beat information out of the captive but the very fact they are holding him at all, we are lead to believe, is bad. I wonder what Captain Archer of the Enterprise would have to say about Guantanamo Bay?
Many TV shows have fantastical settings and an implausible premise underlying them, but this is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is fiction after all. The socialist future for humanity posited by Star Trek is implausible but sadly by no means impossible. The technology theorised for the future is likewise as good a guess as any other. All that is okay. What is not okay is the fact that the human characters simply do not act like humans. They are utterly implausible as future examples of homo sapiens: people simply do not act that way when in life threatening situations. We are shown that tracking down and attacking the people who have been repeatedly attacking you is bad.
I wonder what Star Fleet would do if some alien species hijacked a starship and flew it into the 23rd Century equivalent of the World Trade Centre? Well they certainly would not a George Bush style “smash the Taliban” on them, that is for sure! Any culture that demanded such behaviour would simply not survive contact with less squeamish cultures or more rational disaffected members of its own culture. Star Trek is truly TV with rocks in its head.
Then look at Alias, the new spy-drama with the superb Jennifer Garner. It too has fantastical settings and a highly implausible underlying premise (a college girl/spy-commando).
And yet whereas the dismal Enterprise fails miserably to convincingly portray human interaction within its given premises, Alias does so triumphantly. Quite apart from the fact Jennifer Garner can act the socks off any of the current Star Trek cast, the show is superbly written and the characters plausibly drawn. Within the extraordinary fictional settings in which the show occurs, the people act like humans. They act the way you or I might act is suddenly plunged into the scripted situations. Jennifer Garner’s character, Sydney, was shown being tortured (none of the namby pamby crap of many shows… we actually see her being electrocuted and Garner makes it look very unpleasant indeed). Later in the episode, she escapes and in doing so takes an electro-prod from a guard. We see her standing over the man who had earlier presided over her torture and, if this had been Star Trek, we would have been treated to a brief sermon on the importance of non-violence or some disdainful grimace as she asserts her moral superiority as ‘New Socialist Woman’ over her ex-captor. But fortunately it was not Star Trek. Sydney steps over to the prone helpless man, jabs him with the electro-prod and as he screams says words to the effect, “Yeah, it hurts, don’t it?”
So which do you think makes for a more engaging story? Alias rocks!
Jennifer Garner as ‘Sydney Bristow’ in Alias
And quite reasonably too I might add. Josh Marshall lays out what he meant and raises the valid point that his remarks were aimed with an American audience and context in mind.
But the Internet being what it is, one’s audience can be far more diverse than a person might expect and thus the context within which the remarks will be read can be quite different. I had this brought home to me a week ago when I got a detailed and intelligent critique of my views on the EU from a man in Dakar, Senegal.
Although I suspect I do not entirely agree with all of Josh Marshall’s views on the subject, for the most part I actually do. His post is measured and intelligent and in reality there is not that much daylight between his and Natalija’s views either. What is more, the point that increased Natalija’s blood pressure was really more a matter of how she interpreted what was being said. As she is off on a business trip I doubt she will be posting herself for a few days but I did speak to her on the telephone, repeated the article to her and she does concede that perhaps she did read a more negative spin on the original piece than was really justified. In truth the recent ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ petition and associated procession of totalitarianism’s “useful idiots” has made her a tad sensitive on certain matters.
As the leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man.
– Senor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) in “Casablanca”
The We The People Foundation held their own hearing as the US Federal Government broke its word to do so. They claim testimony taken under oath shows the entire income tax system to be unconstitutional.
Decide for yourself. The hearing webcast is available here.
Monday’s Belfast Telegraph headline read Church Facing Priests Crisis. As it was not immediately obvious to me what a priests crisis might be, and because the free copy had been shoved in my bag at Eason’s along with my magazine purchases, I spent a few minutes to actually read it.
It seems the Church in Ulster is not attracting many young men to the life of celebacy. Of course, rather than look at itself, the Church blames it on people like us:
“I also think this is a symptom of the culture of liberalism and individualism we live in today. People are not so keen now on life-long commitment, whether that be the priesthood or marriage.”
Perhaps if they went back to the old ways: the way things were before Rome tried to use Henry to enforce their will on the Irish Church and got used by him instead. Priests would marry, have great big Irish families and all would be well.
I’ll bet this pronouncement did more to up the popularity of individualism in Ulster than all the pub chatter I’ve done in 15 years.
Perry’s comments on George W. Bush’s economically illiterate steel tariffs below are surely a reminder that conservatives (with a large or small c) are often the worst defenders of free enterprise.
How on earth can Dubya, for whom I have a fair amount of respect, talk about free markets any more with a straight face? Looks like the worst kind of vote-grubbing measure to me. Clearly bound to have an adverse impact on other sectors of the economy as well as sour relations with other parts of the world.
Bush has given the euro-weenies a stick to beat him with – and this time they have right on their side. Bush’s move is clearly related to next November’s Congressional elections. George, get a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” and wise up!
The recent trip by George Bush to Asia in which he preached the value of free trade and capitalism was of course widely reported in the media across the world. As a result, his remarks about the lowering of trade barriers are inevitably going to be thrown back in his face following the ludicrous imposition of 30% tariffs on steel imported into the USA.
Given that the underlying trend for steel imports into the USA has been downwards for years (down 30% over the last four) it is particularly bizarre that this politically motivated protectionism should have been allowed to happened. Of course this will also result in more expensive steel for the domestic US construction and manufacturing industry, it will cause retaliatory tariffs against US products overseas and most importantly, completely destroys the US ability to put political or moral pressure on other countries to lower tariffs against US goods.
So in order to protect some jobs in an inefficient sector, other US jobs are put at risk in not just steel consuming areas of the economy but also possibly the entire export sector once anti-US retaliatory measures are used to hit back by US trading partners.
Perhaps someone needs to point out to Dubya that compared to the value of liberalisation of the world trading system to a massive high tech external trading nation like the USA, the US steel industry is really not that important in the overall scheme of things. In any case, the whole idea that less competition will make the US steel industry more efficient, well, how does that work? It will just penalize the modern and the more competitive US steel producers in order to protect the less efficient unionised dinosaurs who will go bust in a few years anyway regardless. In the meantime overall competitiveness of US industry suffers versus overseas steel users who have access to steel at the regular non-‘protected’ price. Nice one George.
I have been a long time Japan watcher. From a big distance, you understand. Unconfused by too much detailed knowledge. I’ve never been there. But Japan is a big noise in the world, and if you keep your ears open …
Japan, it seems to me, does things unanimously. It moves unanimously, from one unanimous policy to another. It takes an age to change its mind, but once it does, the impact is, for good or for bad, electrifying.
Consider that late nineteenth century moment when, virtually overnight, they suddenly started wearing western suits and top hats. They went from a nation of Kurosawa extras to a nation of Oddjobs, just like that. And with that sartorial switch went a basic switch of worldview, from isolation to looking outwards, from ignoring the West to competing fiercely with it by copying everything it did that seemed to work. One moment, an American admiral is humiliating them by driving a modern warship into one of their ancient harbours. In a blink, the Japanese have their own warships and are knocking seven bells out of the Russians. Japan does all it can to try to catch up with and overtake America peacefully, but America isn’t having it, or so it seems to them. So kaboom!!! Pearl Harbour. Instant conquest of the Pacific. After humiliation in war and further humiliation in the peace that followed, the Japanese mutate from a people who despise modern consumer comforts to people who make the best consumer goods on earth. One moment Japan is making “notoriously shoddy goods”. A blink of an eye later (kaboom!!!), Scottish electronics companies have to call themselves things like “Hinari” in order to do any business.
But now the elite-guided-crony-capitalist status quo which presided over the creation of the Sony Walkman is running seriously out of steam, seemingly with Japan’s entire elite unanimously powerless to reverse the steady drift towards catastrophe. To solve their Keynesian mess, all they now seem capable of is more Keynesianism.
The Economist of February 16th 2002 (print edition) expressed the kind of pessimism about Japan that is now the orthodoxy. The cover shows a Japanese face with a tear falling from its eye. On the contents page (p. 5) the picture is elaborated upon with the following caption:
Japan is sliding slowly downhill. The sad thing is that the Japanese don’t seem to mind. Or if they do, they certainly aren’t doing anything about it.
In the leader article on page 11, The Economist ruminates on all the things that the Japanese should do, but reckons they won’t do it:
How much easier it is simply to muddle through, slipping downhill more or less gracefully…Japan now looks to be an irrelevance…
Now, I agree that things in Japan will have to get worse before they get better But then, get better they surely will. Japan will be back.
When Britain gets into trouble, or faces a big decision, we have a huge and very public row, like the row we’re now having, still, about the EU, and we go out of our way to embroil foreigners in our rowing. (Look at the way British anti-EU’ers are now using the Internet to badmouth the EU in America.) And we never completely settle the matter. In Britain, when you say “we”, you are always leaving lots of people – who continue stubbornly to say “I” – out of your generalisation. Same in the USA, yes?
In Japan that’s not how they do things. They do not wash their dirty linen in public. When crisis strikes, they don’t all ring The Economist and argue their particular corners against each other. No, the Japanese elite goes into an endless succession of secret huddles where it sits cross-legged on the floor in big circles, drinks about a trillion gallons of tea and has untranslatable conversations about how worrying it all is. Slowly a New Approach emerges. Slowly. Very slowly. It is reflected upon from all angles, it strengths pondered, its drawbacks thought through. It is tweaked. Then the underlings are drawn into the New Approach, in their own tea circles, lead by those who have participated in the higher tea circles. They contribute their own untranslatable murmurings. More tweaking. More tea circles. And then, just when the outside world has completely given up on Japan, that’s right: kaboom!!!
Do you really believe that the Japanese are content to sink slowly into the ranks of the “irrelevant” nations, and then stay there for ever? I say: Just because we can’t see anything happening just now, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. I assume that another Japanese kaboom!!! is even now being got ready, very slowly.
Japan will, as always, do whatever its rivals are now doing that seems to be working best. The Japanese are even now roaming the earth, mentally speaking and probably literally too, searching out “best practice”. They’ll then knit together all the bits of best practice that they can find into a new combined national entity so well-crafted as almost to amount to a new invention. That’s what they did with photocopiers, motorbikes, luxury cars, cameras. That’s what they’ll eventually do with Japan itself.
“Best practice” now consists of, among other things, free market economics as “extreme” as can be contrived. This is the economic policy lesson now being absorbed with such bad grace by the European elites. This is what the Japanese are also learning, but unlike the Europeans they are learning it in secret. Once the lesson is learned, they will apply it with extreme thoroughness.
Japan can’t copy the USA exactly, because they’re too different. Too small, too resource poor. And in any case it wouldn’t want to, because the USA isn’t actually all that “extreme”, only relatively so. My guess is they’ll look at Hong Kong in its glory days, and turn Japan into a cluster of Hong Kongs. They will surely deregulate their banking system, and free up their domestic markets. But whatever they do, it will, I believe, be massively good news for free market supporters everywhere.
Imagine the impact on the world of Japan embracing free market economics with its own unique brand of unanimous enthusiasm, and imagine the further impact when that policy is a triumphant success, as it surely will be.
It won’t be completely libertarian, no way. Too much “we” for that. If you are a foreigner and not part of the Japanese “we”, your participation rights may still be limited, even if not so much as now. Our own Admiral Perry won’t be satisfied. But even so …
Well, we’ll see. I wonder if any real Japan experts will find time to comment on this. It would be great if someone like that did give us a reaction. But don’t expect any Japanese to join in.
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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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