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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The great American satirist P.J. O’Rourke uses his usual combination of deadly-sharp wit and smart understanding of economics to launch a salvo at government regulations in his article How to Stuff a Wild Enron. In this case, he argues that the collapse of U.S. energy titan Enron, far from proving that we need more regulations, proved that regulations can make such catastrophic problems more likely and more dangerous.
Here is a killer paragraph: Regulation creates moral hazard. We don’t understand finance, but it is regulated, so we’re safe. “Regulation,” Jerry Taylor (a friend) says, “dulls the sense that you would take into an unregulated situation. If you hear screaming in the middle of the night, you assume it’s hot sex, not murder.”
The line about sex is brilliant. If only all discussions about market economics and the perils of big government were so racy.
I’ve just been in a discussion on the Artemis Societies digest in which one person bemoaned even after the commecial flight of Dennis Tito people still think of space as a “government thing”, an expensive thing. That attitudes haven’t changed…
Well I didn’t expect them to: at least not yet. Dennis was the very first commercial tourist and in the public’s mind his flight was a one off stunt. For most it’s already forgotten. “Tito who?” is the likely answer you’d elicit from the man or woman on High Street. But I’m more interested in the long term effect, the ‘meta-context’ as Perry puts it.
Imagine a little needle in everyone’s head, one scaled zero to ten on two opposite viewpoints. Day to day events move each person’s needle a tiny bit one way or another while not necessarily being remembered in their own right. Over the next few years that needle is slated for a steady push to the view of space as a place for Joe Bloggs as well as Buzz Lightyear.
At this moment I’m aware of three tourists who are going to fly within the next one to two years:
* Mark Shuttleworth – assigned to a mission
* Lori Garver – if she raises the money
* Lance Bass – NSync lead singer
I understand there are quite a few more serious customers in the queue.
To top it off, NASA’s new administrator has approved Barb Morgan, Teacher-in-Space Christa McAullife’s backup, to finally go up. She’s only been waiting 16 years for the go ahead.
We’re on the edge of a time when a continuos stream of the rich and famous, the energetic fund raisers and the lucky lotto gamblers will be travelling to the Space Station. It will be the “in thing”, the oughties thing to do. The place to see and be seen. It is going to be the punchbowl talk at the exlusive Hollywood parties. I can imagine gossip columnists will be overhearing snippets like, “oh yes, when I was up at the Station…”, “You just won’t believe what you can do in zero G”.
Is there anyone who thinks when Lance comes back down there won’t be space themes sneaking into his music? Artists mine their experience for their creativity. Kids are going to get songs about floating in zero G from singers who’ve been there and done that. This is going to go mainstream guys. Not filk: Top 40.
When Society and Celebrity news regularly cover People in space; when teenage girls read popstar mag articles about their heart throb idols while laying on their bed amidst walls plastered with posters of Lance Bass and others floating in space…
Where’s that little needle gonna go?
Hugo Chavez is back in the presidential palace, as I lamented last Monday when I flippantly suggested the coup plotters should have shot him… only I was not really joking. There are all manner of rumour such as this from Instapundit on Wednesday that this is far from played out.
Hugo Chavez is the duly elected President of Venezuela. So what? When democracy and tyranny are on the same side, to hell with democracy. Democracy is not an end in and of itself, just a means to an end and that end is liberty… if a majority voted to expel all black people from the USA, would that be okay just because it is democratically sanctified? Of course not. If democracy leads to liberty, fine. If it does not, then time for a coup d’état. I am quite serious that my only problem with the coup against Chavez is they did not shoot the bastard dead. Sic semper tyrannis.
This morning on the tube (a mode of shifting vast crowds of people from one place to another, aspiring to the name of London’s underground transport system) the person sitting next to me was drowsing over an article in an issue of today’s newspaper called The Soviet threat was a myth. That really caught my attention so I spent the rest of the journey trying to work out which newspaper was gently resting on my neighbour’s lap. Many furtive glances later I discovered it was The Guardian, a left-wing (to put it mildly) daily. Shock horror but no surprises there with regard to the title then… Nevertheless, I was intrigued and decided to read the online version as soon as I could get to my computer.
The conclusion of the argument was predictable and I am now torn between a point to point response to Andrew Alexander, the author of the article, who apparently is writing a whole book on the subject and just a few well placed words of wisdom, backed up by my personal experience, that would put him in his place. Something tells me that the latter approach would not satisfy the discerning Samizdata audience, so I will briefly highlight the most contentious of Mr Alexander’s statements and assumptions.
The conclusion that Stalin had no intention of attacking the West and that therefore the West is to blame for the Cold War just doesn’t hold. Just because the orthodox view of the Cold war as a ‘struggle to the death between Good (Britain and America) and Evil (the Soviet Union)’ may seem today as a simplistic ‘Manichean doctrine’, it does not follow that the Soviet Union’s actions such as installing communist governments throughout central and eastern Europe can be interpreted merely as a frightened response of the war-weary Russia to the speeches made by Churchill (the Iron Curtain speech of March 1946) and Truman (the phrase ‘stand up to Stalin with an iron fist’).
There are two lines of reasoning employed by those who challenge the Cold War orthodoxy, often combined to achieve greater emphasis. One is examination of the internal ideological struggles of Stalin with Trotsky and other opponents within the communist camp such as Tito and Mao to point out that Stalin was not driven by ideology. The logic blind spot is obvious here – Stalin’s version may have been different from the others but not necessarily less virulent and aggressive. And so, this flimsy and unsupported conclusion is then applied to his foreign policy and in combination with the realpolitik school of thought used to argue that Soviet Russia was acting in its national interest. The forceful communisation of central and eastern Europe is transformed to a natural reaction of a state defending its territory and security. By extension, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were necessary as part of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Russia and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however brutal, were ‘aimed at protecting Moscow’s buffer zone’.
Where does one start?! Rather than getting into a detailed discussion about the validity and interpretations of this or that surviving historical evidence of Stalin’s world view (which I plan to do anyway at some stage), I think it is important to point out the power of one’s own propaganda, especially when carried out in the Soviet proportions. Most students of communism tend to forget that it may be impossible to resist such intense and pervasive ‘brainwashing’ (including your own) without a deeply rooted alternative world view. So, how can we assume that Stalin was not susceptible to the effects of his own megalomaniac personality cult? Here my personal experience comes in handy as I remember only too well how insulation and ignorance create a breeding ground for a warped perception of reality and how those who perpetuate it fall victims to their own lies. Therefore, to attribute a perspective of an international relations academic to a dictator of Stalin’s calibre who wielded an ‘unlimited power’ over human lives using an elaborate ideology and a totalitarian regime is at best naive, at worst… well, let’s not be beastly to the Guardianistas in this enlightened day and age…
The most we can acknowledge is that there is no hard evidence (as yet) to prove or disprove the claims that Stalin had a masterplan for invasion of Europe and that only the determination of the West had prevented the Red Russia from taking over the world. However, to say that ‘any post-war Russian government – communist, tsarist or social democratic – would have insisted on effective control at least of Poland, if not of larger areas of eastern Europe, as a buffer zone against future attacks’ as Mr Alexander does, is just plain wrong, bordering on a serious lapse of judgement. The balance of power argument cannot possibly apply in the case of democratic Russia, as Germany, the main threat to Russian security, had been defeated by democratic countries and subjected to forceful democratisation by the US. The only way such an argument can be made, is if it contains an implicit assumption that communism is a morally equivalent (or morally neutral) alternative to the Western democratic regimes. Welcome back to meta-context!
And meta-context is where I want to remain for the moment in the Cold War debate as I do believe that its origins are not as clear as the orthodox or revisionist interpretations would have us believe. The methodology of discovering the causes of the Cold War is crucial as I believe this period of history to be steeped in meta-contextual clashes and misperceptions. This is not to ignore the moral dimension, far from it, but merely separate it from the rubble of the usual academic discourse that hides so many skeletons in its own meta-contextual closet.
semiquaver
pentacle
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X times Gemini plus Gemini plus III
Who am I?
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
– H.L. Mencken
Patrick Crozier of UK Transport looks at Britain and realises we have seen it all before.
It is an essential service. It has been starved of funds. It is in desparate need of modernisation. Of course, this will require some money but the politicians promise us that after they’ve got the new technology working everything will be as right as rain. Is this the National Health Service (NHS) we’re talking about? No, British Rail in the 1950s.
The railway was clapped out just like the NHS. It had been the pride of the nation – just like the NHS It had faced years of re-organisation coupled with fare control, followed by Depression, followed by War, followed by nationalisation. In an age of diesel and electricity, British trains were powered by steam and the industry was losing money fast. So, they called for a Modernisation Plan and a stack of cash was produced. And in the late 1950s British Rail spent it – just like the NHS is about to. And, boy, did they spend it. They spent it on diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, steam locomotives (would you believe it), marshalling yards, DMUs, EMUs, electrification projects. They commissioned something like 20 different types of locomotive – some of which actually worked. Some of which are rattling around the network to this very day.
But by the early 1960s things were looking bleak. British Rail was still shipping cash even though it was supposed to be breaking even. It seems that people had found alternatives to one-size-fits-all railways. They had bought themselves flexible, go-anywhere-anytime cars and lorries and didn’t need boring old trains anymore. Cue Doctor Beeching. Cue the closure of half the network.
As with the railways, so (up to a point) with the NHS. They will spend the money. Some of their IT projects will work. There will be some nice new hospitals. And in 5 years’ time there will be little else to show for it.
The big difference is customers. British Rail wanted customers. The NHS doesn’t. British Rail didn’t get what it wanted and neither will the NHS. British Rail lost out because there was an alternative. The NHS will lose out because there isn’t. The NHS is going to gouge out the private sector for doctors, nurses and beds. In doing so it will force even more people to suffer its tender mercies. And in 5 years’ time a new Doctor Beeching will have to sort out the mess.
Patrick Crozier
I have had two e-mails asking what ‘our’ views are on the Jenin massacre/counter-terrorist operation (choose one), both of which seem to expect ‘us’ to reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
Firstly, there is no Samizdata editorial position per se on anything in particular. Our contributors write within a libertarian meta-context (i.e. a world view or frames of reference) but other than that, we all have separate views on many issues and air them as we wish on this blog.
My personal views on what did/did not happen in Jenin are… I really do not know. I regard the IDF as no more or less reliable a source of information than the Palestinians. Both lie through their teeth when it suits them. That is what all governments do.
I regard press accounts as something that need to be assessed on the basis of past performance and plausibility. Some bloggers have noticed that UK media reports are similar and have taken this as a sign of either collective hostility to Israel or collusion or whatever. I suspect the fact they were being herded around in a group by the Israeli authorities might have something to do with their similarity of reports and observations. However the mere fact Israel is not receiving collective songs of praise from the UK media is evidence enough for some people of all manner of sinister motives. Sorry but the entire UK media is not represented by Robert Fisk and I for one am far from reflexively supportive of what the State of Israel tends to do. Thus sometimes I think maybe the reason some people write that Israel did something bad was that Israel did indeed do something bad. Do I think the IDF is institutionally capable of wiping out hundreds of Palestinian civilians to get a much smaller group of terrorists as some have claimed? Yes, I don’t doubt they are capable but that is not the same as saying I think they actually did that in Jenin. I simply have no way of knowing one way or the other.
However, the fact Israel wants to control what the media sees and the fact this is going to upset the media is also no evidence that what the Palestinians have claimed the IDF have done is true either. Israel is conducting a military operation and in military operations, security is life. As I pointed out in a post yesterday regarding Antony Loyd’s rather daft remarks about the US and UK militaries keeping journalists in the dark in Afghanistan, there are sound reasons for doing just that which have nothing to do with hiding atrocities or failures. And just because Arafat is howling about atrocities, so what? Most of what the Palestinians do ‘militarily’ are criminal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and as Arafat is bottled up in a room by the IDF, I doubt he has any more idea of what really happened in Jenin than I do… thus anything he says can be safely ignored (plus the ‘minor’ fact history has demonstrated he is a pathological liar). High intensity urban street fighting is a messy business and sometimes innocent people get killed. That is not the same as a cold blooded massacre and professional journalists are just as capable of failing to understand what they are looking at as anyone else. Destroyed houses and the pitiable residue of shattered lives are not in and of themselves evidence of Israeli malfeasance. Maybe there was a guy with an RPG-7 leaning out of a window immediately before the Merkava tank put an H.E. shell into the building. Or maybe not. Context is everything.
And so I have no idea what the truth is about Jenin and really have no desire to venture much in the way of opinions on that. I am sure who is telling the truth will come out (if anyone) but not for a while yet in all likelihood.
In 1909, British prime minister Lloyd George imposed a levy which was transformed by William Beveridge in 1946 into the modern idea of ‘National Insurance’ by which the welfare state would appropriate money from people to fund various socialist objectives. William Beveridge was the main architect of the British model of force based theft by the state of a huge chunk of national private property.
Today, Britain’s socialist ‘National Health Service’ (NHS) is set to consume £184 billion per year soon… which an article in the Times today pointed put was enough to fight the 1982 Falklands War with Argentine 40 times, or about the same at the total Gross Domestic Product of Belgium or twice that of the GDP of Saudi Arabia or South Africa… and this is just Britain’s appropriated healthcare budget.
In the US, the process has not really been all that different, merely started somewhat later. This process really began under FDR during the Depression but did not start in earnest until the ‘Great Society’ programmes of Lyndon B. Johnson. Clinton recently tried to go a more socialist route by moving US healthcare towards a more state-based system of appropriated funding, which thankfully failed.
But it should show that regardless of the example of failed socialist programmes the world over, not even information rich societies such as the USA and UK are immune to the intellectually bankrupt and economically moronic lure of such ideas as nationally directed healthcare. You may be sure than the next time the Democrats are back in control in the USA, such ideas will reappear, suitably re-branded and re-spun.
Due to a major UK routing server going splat, our e-mail is not working at the moment (and neither is that of several dozen UK ISPs apparently). If you sent us any e-mail this afternoon, you might want to resend it to our back-up address.
As it is such a major router which has done down, it will hopefully be repaired quite soon.
Update as of 18:45 GMT: The problem has been fixed!
According to the Washington Post:
“The cause of Israel drew a multitude of Americans yesterday to the historic West Front of the U.S. Capitol, where Israeli flags fluttered by the score, thousands of signs signaled support, and speakers at the podium and in the crowd voiced vigorous defenses of the country’s right to strike back against Palestinian bomb attacks aimed at its civilians,”
According to James Taranto in the Opinion Journal email newsletter:
Local officials estimated the size of the crowd at 100,000, with an estimated 1,200 charter buses carrying out-of-towners to the capital for the rally. The crowd was fired up; a few churls even booed Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, when he observed–accurately–that there are innocent Palestinians among the casualties of the war in the Mideast.
Given that politics is the act of finding the biggest parade and getting in front of it, I’m sure the Bush administration will soon enough get the point. The Israeli’s have every bit as much right to kick the crap out of the people supporting Kamikazi bombings in their cities as Americans do.
And we’d better support them because this time around the Nazis* have someone higher on their killing agenda than those of the Jewish faith.
*= Mein Kampf sales are said to be skyrocketing in Arab communities; Arab newspapers are pulling out 60 year old Nazi disinformation; Arab pundits are saying Hitler didn’t finish the job of the Final Solution. I do not mean Nazi in a figurative term. I mean it absolutely and literally.
Britain’s worst-kept secret is now out in the very public domain. Chancellor Gordon Brown announced his annual budget today and, as widely-expected, has hiked up National Insurance (a type of payroll tax) in order to increase funding of the National Health Service.
This was called the ‘Budget For Health’ by the government. Whose health? Certainly not the health of the economy. The business sector will have to stump up a whopping £3.9 billion a year more in taxes in a desperate attempt by the government to placate its public sector supporters and defer the dark day when the NHS simply collapses.
And it probably will collapse in due course. The NHS is Britain’s version of Yasser Arafat; an odious, Soviet-inspired monstrosity that has caused countless deaths and yet is mysteriously exempt from anything even approaching a critical word. Its status among the British is that of Sacred Cow, nay Red Heiffer. It is the Holy of Holies, the state of which is the barometer by which every government is finally judged. It is hardly a surprise that the press roundly trumpets opinion poll results which overwhelmingly endorse tax rises to improve the NHS when an answer in the negative is probably more outrageous than supporting legalised child-prostitution. The left never miss an opportunity to hector the British public with the admonition that, if they want improved health care, they have to pay for it. I agree, of course. I just think they should cut out the middle-man.
But the cracks have been showing of late. Too many people have been travelling abroad for their health care treatment, forking out for private insurance or watching their elderly relatives expire on trolleys in dank state hospital corridors and you can’t keep that kind of disquiet from spreading. Everybody seems to know or sense that the NHS is crocked and beyond redemption but they are prepared to shut their eyes and wish very, very hard that the government will hose enough money at it to make it all wonderful, gleaming, efficient and keep it free.
It won’t work in the long-term or even the medium-term but the government is gambling that the massive cash boost will tide them over to the next election when they will be able to annouce that they have ‘saved’ the NHS and ensured its future as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. On the face of it, it is a dangerous gamble. The Labour government was elected on the promise that they had put behind them, for ever, their old ‘tax and spend’ policies and it is at least pragmatic to assume that they will be judged harshly for breaking their promise without delivering.
On the other hand, it might just fool ’em by providing a glimmer of ersatz hope. It is almost impossible to underestimate the sacred status of the NHS. The faith it is has traditionally inspired may prove a strong enough medicine to anaesthetise the public’s critical faculties and enable them to go on believing in the Easter Bunny.
In the meantime, we’re all going to get poorer. Poverty is bad for your health.
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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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