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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I have had a couple e-mails asking me what I thought about the situation in Venezuela and the fact Hugo Chevez seems to be back in office after the Army deposed him. I assume the reason these two readers asked me what I thought on the subject, which is a bit off my usual polemical stomping grounds, is presumably because I wrote a well received piece on the subject of Hugo Chavez back in December.
Well all I can say is what is it with kids these days? The younger generation just do not take pride in their work. Back when I was a youngster, we all knew that a coup d’etat was not over until you have shot El Presidente dead on the steps of his palace.
Dale Felber writes in and tell us that he has seen the future.
I smoke. Some years ago the government decided that smoking was bad for me, so they began to tax cigarettes. Law suites began against tobacco companies. Warnings were placed on cigarette packs.
Now the government says that the number one health hazard is obesity! I saw on the news today that California will start taxing soda to fight obesity. Can taxing hamburgers and french fries be far behind? Law suits against McDonalds?– “I didn’t know a BigMac was bad for me… McDonalds owes me $100,000,000!”
The number of products to tax and the companies open to law suites are almost endless. Watch your investments in “Junk Food”. If you don’t believe me keep an eye on OverLawyered.com and remember what happened to big tobacco.
Everyone looked down on me and the other 25% of the population who smokes. Now it’s their turn… the government will divide and tax.
Dale Felber
http://www.businessbay.com
The taxpayer; that’s someone who works for the federal government, but doesn’t have to take a civil service examination.
– Ronald Regan
British government plans for data sharing mentioned earlier in the Libertarian Alliance press release I posted yesterday are a clear indication of the casually authoritarian attitudes of those who would control every aspect of our lives. What I find so infuriating is that the supporters of this giant leap towards the Panopticon State are so arrogant that they are hardly even trying to hide the scope of what they want.
The Orwellian sounding Performance and Innovations Unit (PIU), who are the cutting edge of the leviathan state’s intrusions into every aspect of private life, have had the gall to announce (emphasis added):
Information is processed without people’s knowledge only where necessary for national security, public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, the prevention of crime, the protection of health, morals, or the rights and freedoms of others
Can anyone out there please tell me ANYTHING that the state does which cannot with the barest minimum of effort be classified under one of these amazingly broad categories?
In short, any functionary of the state with a computer terminal can examine any aspect of your life they wish. They are not even really trying to hide what they are planning.
Government bodies with names like the ‘Performance and Innovations Unit’, a body finding new ways to intermediate the state into every aspect of private life, have always reminded me of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil , in which the ‘Information Retrieval Unit’ was the name for the agency who extracted information from people by torture. Perhaps it is time for Harry Tuttle to pay the PIU a visit, spanner in hand.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. This is very exciting and has delighted generations of socialist zealots. But it has no more claim to be a scientific projection than an astrologer’s almanac.
– Paul Johnson, discussing Karl Marx
New revelations that Alec Douglas-Home, the foreign secretary under the conservative government of Edward Heath, had planned to try and find a way to hand Gibraltar over to Spain in 1971 against the wishes of its people have been greeted with ‘shock’ and ‘amazement’ by current members of the Tory party.
Well I can only marvel at the credulity of modern Tories. This is the government that did more to undermine the common law basis of British civil liberty than any other in the 20th century by taking us into the European Economic Community (as it then was) under knowingly false pretenses. If they were happy to do this to all of the UK, is it really so surprising that the harbingers of modern super-statism would think twice about selling out a mere 27,000 people in some remote outpost of the Old Empire?
According to the founders of the International Criminal Court in Rome have delcared that ‘it marks the turning of a new page in human history’. Setting aside, for a moment, the rather pompous tone, they might well be right. But the question is, exactly what ‘page’ is being turned?
The intention of the Court is to bring perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and other ‘crimes against humanity’ to justice regardless of where they are in the world. Their jurisdiction will apply where the domestic courts in question fail to act and they can only act in countries which are signatories to the Rome Treaty establishing the Court.
Certainly these are noble ideals. Who wants to see a world where homicidal regimes can get away with it? Certainly not me but my disquiet is borne from the feeling that it is not quite as simple as that.
Bureaucracies, once established, tend not only to grow but also actively seek reasons for their continued existence and expansion. Just now, it is only the above-mentioned type of activities which are under the ICC’s remit but how long will it be thus circumscribed? A brief to tackle ‘crimes against humanity’ can be interpreted in all manner of ways to cover all manner of policy decisions. A tough anti-immigration policy? A lack of welfare benefits? No nationalised ‘free’ health care? No state education programme? There are no end of people who earnestly believe that such things constitute ‘crimes’.. The ICC may be benign but how long will it stay that way?
This is not just theoretical. Within the last few years the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (a welfare-state cartel) launched a war against ‘money-laundering’ and ‘drug-running’ that morphed almost seamlessly into a campaign (led particularly by France and Sweden) against what they laughably referred to as ‘unfair tax competition’. The justification for this neo-imperialism was that small countries providing tax havens were ‘undermining the democracy’ of countries such as France and Sweden. The result of this was that little countries like Malta, Leichtenstein, the Cayman Islands and Monaco were threatened with everything short of war in order to comply with the demands of the OECD for banking transparency and other domestic changes of law. They had no choice but to toe the line.
Thus the ‘quest for global justice’ becomes the imposition of agendas.
There are even greater dangers than this, though. No criminal code is enforceable without armed agents to act in its name. This leaves the ICC reliant on the military muscle of big powers to act as its appointed ‘police force’. But, as we have seen, in a world of complex alliances and interests, that is rarely going to be available. In time the ICC will demand it’s own ‘police force’ to act independently of nation-state interests. And that is a recipe for war without end.
I say this because, does anybody imagine that Slobodan Milosevic would be facing a War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague today had he had a nuclear arsenal at his disposal? At the risk of upsetting some people, the answer has to be no. It is for that same reason that Vladimir Putin will never have to answer for the Russian Army’s activities in Chechnya and Ariel Sharon remains impervious to the plaintiff cries of the ‘international community’.
This is a lesson which will not have been lost on other nations. The message is, if you want to retain your independence, sovereignty and autonomy of action then you better get yourself heavily armed and, preferably, nuclear armed. When you possess both the ability and the will to vaporise a big chunk of the planet, the ‘international community’ is left grumbling and impotent.
I have no doubt that the formation of the ICC was driven by good intentions, by the best of intentions. Unfortunately, they are exactly the kind of intentions that so often pave the road to hell.
God save me from my friends. I can protect myself from my enemies
-Marshal de Villares
Harry Browne comes to mind
The first round of the French Presential Elections are underway. Here is a list of the candidates:
Lionel Jospin
Current Prime Minister. Socialist.
Jacques Chirac
Incumbent. Markets himself as a ‘Conservative’ but his policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of Jospin.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement
Former Interior Minister. Marxist nationalist.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
Veteran National Socialist.
Bruno Megret
Another National Socialist.
Noel Mamere
Green Party.
Arlette Laguiller
Trotskyite Worker’s Struggle Party.
Robert Hue
Communist Party.
Francois Bayrou
Former Minister of Education. Centrist.
Jean Saint Josse
Hunting, Fishing, Shooting, Nature and Traditions Party.
Daniel Gluckstein
Party of Workers. Another Communist.
Christiane Taubira
Left Radical Party.
Olivier Besancenot
Revolutionary Communist League.
Corinne Lepage
Nationalist Enviromentalist.
Christine Boutin
Socialist.
Alain Madelin
Liberal Democracy Party. Advocates Anglo-Saxon style free market reforms. Very unpopular. Doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting past the first round.
The two candidates polling the most votes go through to a run-off for the Presidency. It is widely expected that these will be Jospin and Chirac although Arlette Lagullier has been putting in a strong show and could pip either one of them.
Many years ago I visited Bergen, in Norway, and the locals told me that the weather for my stay was by far the best it had ever been. Well, now I’m in the south of France, in a town called le Boulou (they call it a ‘village’ here), just south of Perpignan. The weather is the worst it’s ever been. On Wednesday night there was a, by South of England standards, regulation noisy thunderstorm, with lots of rain, as you’d expect from a thunderstorm, and there was further heavy rain the next day. This turned the pathetic little smear of dampness they call their river into a real river! A raging torrent the width of a football field in fact. Le Boulouans couldn’t sleep for the din! The weather is now improving, and by the time I leave it will have recovered its normal warmth and sunniness.
Meanwhile France is … France. The food shops are far better than in England, but finding a job is far harder than in England – two facts which may be related. Employing other people is a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic awfulness. If you aren’t something like an enarque or a multinational or some such, the only way to get ahead economically is to run a Mom and Pop store of some sort and do your own labouring. Thus France abounds with these, and they’re run like crosses between ordinary businesses and art galleries, being expressions both of love and “greed, for want of a better word” (see my previous posting about Wall Street). France has the same inane cartoons on TV as England. It also, more famously, has the same currency as nearby Spain, which I have to admit is a convenience if you live twenty minutes by car from Spain, as my hosts do. The internet seems to work.
Le Boulou seems to be a real ‘community’. People know each other, perhaps because they still shop in the same local Mom and Pop stores that the English have abandoned for supermarkets. Tomorrow I am attending a rugby match, which will presumably abound with local spirit, rugby being at its strongest in this part of France (France having just beaten England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy, i.e. everybody, in the recently concluded Six Nations Rugby Championship). I’m looking forward to this game greatly.
I’ve not been able to meet any local libertarian intellectuals so far. It would seem that they’re all on holiday, elsewhere.
“Government’s data sharing plan is a dagger to the heart of liberty”, says Free market and civil liberties think tank.
The Labour’s government’s plans to integrate the personal data held on British citizens by various government departments and agencies is a dagger to the heart of liberty, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“In the light of the ever-more blatant attack on civil liberties in this country – including the proliferation of camera surveillance systems, the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in political surveillance and dirty tricks operations, the push for a national ID card and DNA database, the gradual abolition of common law liberties by the removal of jury trials, of the presumption of innocence, of the right of silence and of double jeopardy, and by the adoption of the EU’s despotic corpus juris – this proposal is even more ominous. The government’s claim that data would be processed only ‘where necessary’ is laughable – especially when one sees that their list of ‘necessary’ reasons covers every conceivable excuse for nanny statism, paternalism, censorship, socialism, prudery, puritanism and prohibitionism.
It is ironic that when the state has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing any ‘public service’ adequately, when it cannot defend its citizens from predators of every stripe, that is should be attempting to turn us into supplicants and serfs. The common argument that ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ is absurd. In an age when health fascists have declared smoking to be a form of child abuse, it is clear that everyone can be subjected to the prejudices of demented paternalists – whether of the fundamentalist religious nutters, the peddlers of PC pieties, the environmentalists, or the feminist anti-sex cranks. Your life style, your tastes, your sexuality, your political and social views, can be subjected to tomorrow’s moral panic, propaganda scare campaign and witch-hunt and legislated as ‘crimes’ or as ‘politically incorrect’.
The citizens of Britain need to send a message to our would-be masters that we are not numbers, that we will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered – that our lives are our own.
It is now clear that the ‘social contract’ has been broken by the state. Resistance to the usurpations of the state is both a right and a moral duty. It is the right, the duty, of all to resist and disrupt the state’s data gathering and record-keeping ability, by whatever means are necessary”.
It had to happen eventually. Someone has finally gotten a space lottery “off the ground” as it were:
There will be 10 lottery or raffle winners selected to participate with the training. The individual who trains the best (one out of ten) then receives the trip on the Russian Soyuz rocket. The nine winners who pass the miniature cosmonaut training program – yet do not liftoff on the Russian Soyuz will journey into space via Interorbital Systems Neptune Orbital Space Liner, TGV Rocket or another RLV.
I hope the Internet Is With Them and that millions of people take them up on this.
It gets even better. They are out to water the sprouts of the new space tourism industry:
Twenty percent (20%) of the ticket price (less card processing fees) goes directly to the private aerospace companies or space tourism related organizations of choice.
Among the beneficiaries will be Mir Corp, the company which tried to save Mir, the Worlds first permanent manned space station, the true “Alpha Station”.
The space lottery idea has been around for perhaps twenty to twenty-five years. In all that time I know of only one truely serious attempt to do it, and that was by Jim Davidson when he still lived in Houston… before he went off to enjoy life in the anarchy of Somalia where he now resides. Jim unfortunately was taken on by a Texas Prosecutor who had political designs. In the end the entire incident was nothing except extortion and a shake down by the State. Jim was “allowed” to not go to jail so long as he didn’t complain about the money they stole from him. Thus ended the first Space Lottery attempt.
But good ideas never die, so here we are another 14 years on with the idea finally up and running. I’m not the betting sort. I can walk through a Las Vegas Casino, put one coin in one slot machine… and walk on. Just so if someone asks me if I gambled in the casinos, I can truthfully say “yes”. I know far too much Probability and Statistics to enjoy gambling unless I wanted to put in the time to learn card counting strategies in Blackjack. This is different. Even though I’ll “lose” my money, I’ll be directly helping companies build the infrastructure that will one day take ME up.
I wish them Godspeed and lotsa money.
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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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