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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And unfortunately probably not the end of the unerringly off-target Frances Fukuyama. He is one of the more dependably incorrect pundits currently putting quill to parchment, and his ‘The End of History’, coming as it did in the middle of history’s violent resumption in the Balkans in 1992, may go down as the most ludicrous analysis of the world since 1848.
In his latest prognostication he argues that September 11th has undermined the entire thesis of libertarianism.
Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.
There is something almost endearing about Fukuyama’s unerring ability to get it wrong. Fire departments in many places are not ‘government’ at all, but rather local volunteers who need no cohesion or coercion from the state to put their lives on the line for their jobs. In most of the western world, it is not ‘government’ who provides the airport security but private business, and does anyone really think that nationalisation of this function in the USA has actually made airports safer? If you have an incompetent screener, who do you think finds it easier to fire him, a private company or the US government? If emergency services can only exist when set up by the state, then how does ‘historian’ Frances Fukuyama explain the fact that for the last 175 years, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution has provided that service for Britain not just privately manned but privately funded?
Likewise, Fukuyama might like to hold up the Cato Institute‘s dafter remarks about Saddam Hussain as the totality of libertarian foreign policy ideas but it just ain’t so and there is indeed libertarian thought which does not take the strict ‘anti-war’ line, seeing that as being in fact anti-survival. I have huge respect for the Cato Institute and regard it as a superb organisation, but when it comes to matters of defence and co-existing in the real world with psychopathic tyrants who are trying to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, well sorry, the dollar amounts expended in the Gulf War is really not the sensible starting point for analysis. Yet the fact is not all libertarians are full blown anarcho-libertarians, even if we are indeed much informed by anarcho-libertarian ideas… there is in fact libertarian life beyond Murray Rothbard. Many of us support the concept of a nightwatchman ‘state’ in some form or other. Minarchists like me see dropping bombs on the Saddam Hussain’s of this world as being one of the very few legitimate functions of the state and the reality is that my views on that sort of thing are actually those of the majority of ‘small L’ libertarians (and more than a few American Libertarian Party activists as well if the truth be known. I can think of one who contributes to this blog).
Yes, I like the idea of getting the state out of 90% of what it does but the only time I turn the other cheek when my community is threatened is when I need to shoot my rifle off my left shoulder because I am taking cover in a doorway. As I mentioned in several earlier articles, the de facto pacifist libertarian ‘ostrich’ faction is by no means a distinguishing feature of libertarianism, just a faction of it.
Of course as a general rule, if Frances Fukuyama says something, you can safely assume the contrary is in fact the case.
I was going just to email the guys at Liberty Log, but then I thought, no, it’s an interesting item of dirty washing, worth doing in (approximately speaking) public. There’s nothing like a little unpleasantness between comrades to keep us all honest and any passing non-comrades entertained.
And the bit of dirt is: when alluding to and linking to Freedom and Whisky for the first time, they spelt it “Freedom and Whiskey“. (Or they did when I looked. Maybe by the time you get to bother with this they will have been e-heckled by F&W‘s David Farrer into correcting the matter.)
Scotch whisky is whisky. Whiskey with an e is Irish Whisky. That’s what my extremely Little Oxford Dictionary says, and how it says it: whiskey n. Irish whisky.
I guess that’s what happens when some English guys, an American and a Slovakian are running a club based at a Scottish University. They try to be Scottish, but every so often their alien underwear shows through.
Maybe I’m being all superior about this whisky/whiskey thing because I’ve only just learned it myself. When I first set eyes on the words “Freedom and Whisky” at the top of Freedom and Whisky, my immediate, instant reaction was: Holy Christ on a Buffalo he’s mis-spelt the title of his own blog!
Frank Sensenbrenner wants David Blunkett to understand that liberty does indeed mean the freedom to do what you want, rather than the freedom to do what he wants people to do
John Stuart Mill asserted that “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” Yet David Blunkett, the British home secretary, seems to have skipped that chapter. In a recent Daily Telegraph conference, Blunkett submitted that “we cannot have a society in which liberty means the freedom to do whatever one wants when it affects no one”, or something to that effect. Why not? At the very heart of a libertarian philosophy is the acceptance of personal responsibility for one’s actions. After all, social impulses govern more efficiently than diktat. Who is harmed by individuals performing acts affecting only themselves? It is up to Mr Blunkett to suggest an alternative definition of liberty to replace the current ‘airy-fairy’ meaning.
Perhaps Blunkett has attended one too many Council of Europe meetings, and has adopted the Continentalist view that personal liberties derive from the State’s ability to grant them, and all powers not expressly granted in a social contract remain with the State. Anglospherists, on the other hand, believe that the only reason for an authority’s legitimacy is the consent of the governed. Europeans lean on an antediluvian notion of “divine right” to defend their views. Promulgated by Jean-Jacques Colbert, the concept of the “divine right of kings” was used to defend Louis XIV against accusations of gross mismanagement of his subjects, and has survived today as a crutch for governments in similar situations. Currently, this reflects an ‘intellectual’ elitism worthy of Plato’s Republic, on the level of both the nation-state and of the EU. Monnet always maintained of the need for European integration to be controlled by an elite, while referenda are either manipulated or ignored.
Blunkett’s final defence is that liberty is elitist, and insignificant to individuals in dire economic straits. If the 1990 domino fall of Communism proved anything, it was the esteem of liberty as the pinnacle of social values, even among people who were materially disadvantaged. While it may not be material, freedom is essential to the quality of life enjoyed in Western, and especially Anglospherist, nations.
Frank Sensenbrenner
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
– Lily Tomlin
Tony Millard serves up a tasty critique of politics.
I was listening to Radio 4, my only live link with the Anglosphere, the other day and heard a short trailer for Sunday morning’s news and comment slot, Broadcasting House. The journalist listed out five reasonable-sounding but right wing policies and then sought our amazement by saying they were taken from Le Pen’s manifesto. I got thinking about this whilst doing something pointless with a tractor and it occurred to me that the body politic is in many ways like the human body.
Left wing policies – radicchio and polenta, right wing policies – carpaccio of beef and wild boar sausage. No healthy human body can be properly and efficiently nourished with only one or the other, and it’s the same with nations. Some of Mr Le Pen’s view I am sure are reasonable and meritorious but are rejected wholesale by the left because of some of his less palatable concepts. Unfortunately, our politicians believe in a mostly herbivorous diet and lack conviction when it comes to richer flavours. Perhaps someone should gently remind them of our omnivorous tendencies and introduce them to a Fiorentina (T-Bone steak, Tuscan style) every now and then.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
Staying with the Middle Europe theme, it looks like a great deal of partying went on in Hungary when Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude blog fame went there to make his movie Den of Lions, with Steven Dorff, Bob Hoskins and Laura Fraser… I wonder if they remembered to actually shoot the movie?
As I have heard rumours they are still clearing up and rebuilding in Budapest post-Brian, when the dreaded Bad Dude of the Blogosphere arrives in London to do the movie’s post production work, I wonder what havoc will be wrought here? My liver hurts just thinking about it.
Yes, the EU does indeed look different depending on where you look at it from. Daniel Antal and his Greek friend sees a source of a more ‘liberal’ order, seeing Brussels as a fountain of civil rights to refresh the stagnant pools of Greek and Hungarian polity.
Well I certainly understand that. Croatian politics and aspects of civil society are just as ghastly for many of the same reasons. And thus many people in Croatia also look west to the EU and see something hopeful, something better, something more prosperous. Croatian businesses, like Hungarian businesses, salivate at the idea of getting access to the huge EU market… and like our friends in Budapest, they are just as wrong.
Just ask your Greek friend to point out how the Greek economy is going from strength to strength now that it is a member of the EU. Only it isn’t. Greece is stuck on the lower tier of the EU and is going to stay there. Countries like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, have large ‘welfare’ states but they do so by parasitically drawing wealth out of their large wealth creating capitalist economies… Hungary and Greece do not have proper modern economies and by joining the EU they will never develop them.
Hungary will never develop a dynamic wealth generating capitalist economy because Brussels will have thrown a smothering blanket of EU regulations over it, regulations which will be welcomed with open arms by the half-wit socialists which pervade Hungarian polity. Hungarian labour costs will rapidly loose any advantage over French or German ones and even high levels of unemployment will not move them downwards because of the regulatory cost floor that will be put underneath the price of employing someone. This will have the effect of keeping the playing field tilted towards existing producers and economic structures… and the reality is those economic producers and structures are overwhelmingly in the west.
Read the small print. Unless you are an existing large business located in the west and who wants regulatory barriers to reduce the chance of new market entrants competing with you, or are a Trade Unionist working in cahoots with such a company, then the EU is not your friend. The EU is stasis incarnate. For Christ’s sake WAKE UP!
I think the muitbats have mated with the froonbats and had baby smelibels in your brain, because I have only the vaguest idea of what your post to me was about. Most of your readers will have even less idea, because at least half of them are so benighted as not to make their daily pilgrimage to my blog. I slipped that one in rather nicely, don’t you think? Were you saying that I could keep the proceeds of my now-uneccessary keyboard fund because I have said some nice things about the Queen sometimes and the British Empire wasn’t so bad? If so, I quite agree with both propositions (a decision helped along by explicit permission from the donors) while not quite giving my full intellectual assent to the chain of reasoning between them.
(What with all these jolly little interjections and in-jokes, this blog is sounding more and more like The Corner all the time. This is no bad thing. It is a cause dear to Perry’s heart that Jonah Goldberg should one day come weeping and penitent to our door, saying brokenly between sobs, “I’m so sorry that I foolishly said that I was so mighty that I needed no hits from an outfit calling itself “Libertarian Samizdata”. Not only do I concede that I copied your format in forming The Corner, I also humbly beg you to take us over, now that the Libertarian Revolution has arrived and President Sullivan is in charge of the Committee for Public Safety and Rending Conservatives In Their Gobberwarts, In A Totally Non-Coercive Manner Of Course.)
Back to the British Empire. I agree with you. Empires are wrong, but as Empires go the British wasn’t so bad. And part of the reason for that not-so-badness was indeed the fair trials for the “fuzzie-wuzzies”. I seem to recall that a very similar remark to that made by Corporal Jones was made by one of the characters in Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast when the party land in the alternative universe where Britain rules Mars as a penal colony. “We may be shot,” said one of the good guys, “but we’ll be shot after a fair trial with a wigged judge and a defence counsel.” Maybe not those exact words, but that was the sense of it.
Concerning Brian’s article below on Euro-Britain for fruitbat read moonbat throughout.
If you go to the home page of Talk Sport Radio you’ll find lots of stuff about sport, and only non-sport news if it’s sport related. Someone let off a bomb in Spain yesterday and the Talk Sport Radio homepage notices, because it happened near a football ground. Interesting priorities. On the radio show itself, however, non-sport news does get regularly mentioned, and even talked about a bit.
I never listen to Talk Sport unless I’m on it, but I will be listening to it just after 10 am this morning because I will be on it. I’m to discuss the fact that according to some insane new law it is now, according to the researcher who’s just rung me, illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards of your house. My memory is surely playing games with me. Our government would never dream of making a law like that. It has to be 270 metres, surely. Either way, we’re in barking fruitbat territory here, with every suburban gardener with a compost heap now breaking yet another idiot law.
The chances are that this particular item of fruitbattery is the result of the idiot collision between the separately sane – but when combined in Britain fruitbatarian – legal traditions of Britain and of Continental Europe. Some Euro grandee says, in some directive or proclamation or fatwa or whatever, that people shouldn’t have violently smelly compost heaps too near their kitchens. Fair enough. Why taxpayers need to pay someone to say things like this isn’t clear, but that’s the price of living in Europe, which by and large is a very fine place as places on this planet go. You nod your head, and get on with your life. You continue to keep your compost heap, if you have one, in the same place as before. All is serene. The big Euro-fromage continues to collect his salary, and God’s in his heaven.
Except in Britain. When Brussels says something, it becomes in Britain the basis of the law. This vague piece of Brussels sermonising is taken away and “clarified”. How smelly? An answer is made up. 94 smelibels. How far away? 270 yds/metres. (Not 250, by the way, which was the number the radio researcher originally supplied to me. 250 would be too round a number. That would sound like they just made it up.) Never mind that about a quarter the suburbanites of Britain have compost heaps stinking to the tune of at least 300 smelibels, and within about 10 yards of their back doors. The point is to abide by our European treaty obligations. And so this law is duly composed, with no more thought given to it than Talk Sport gives to non-sport news, in fact a lot less. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody can be held individually responsible for it. Not the twat who made it up, not his superior (who had 412 new laws to think about that morning alone), certainly not the Undersecretary of State at the Fruitbat and Related Creatures Office who is supposedly in charge of this process. So, the new law of compost heaps, together with all the other laws made up that day, is driven over to the House of Commons in a convoy of articulated lorries, and a few months later the Queen signs something and it’s the law for real.
Members of Parliament? Aren’t they supposed to have “readings” of these things? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that anyone actually reads the stuff. Laws in Britain nowadays are like academic papers in America. The overwhelming majority of them are not actually read by anybody except the drones who write them. Nobody at all.
The remarkable thing about this law is not that it passed, but that someone did eventually read it, pointed out that it was insane, and turned it into a media ruckus and an excuse for me to be on the radio.
There goes the phone. Excuse me while I dazzle the nation …
It turns out that it is illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards (it is yards) of your house without a license. This is actually just as insane, but a bit more subtle. The insanity will only get seriously under way when the Compost Heap Office opens, and gets swallowed up in financial scandal, and when people with bona fide Compost Heap Licenses, which they just went and got, for seventeen quid, start keeping totally unregulated compost heaps in their kitchens (which used to be sort of illegal). Why has the Minister for Fruitbats not taken immediate action to curb this malpractice? … Why have more resources not been set aside? (That’s spent, to you and me.) Why? … Why? … Why? …
Another radio call. Busy day. Next up: I’m on BBC Radio Scotland at lunchtime, on whether Britain needs twenty three new laws to curb the British National Party. Here’s my plan. Keep a few of the laws we already have against being seriously nasty. Punish people if they break them. Apply them vigorously to the BNP, and to everyone else.
Another call. LBC Radio. Cannabis march on Saturday, you’ve heard about that? (No, being a libertarian these days means that you miss things.) Okay. 2 pm tomorrow.
All this chat radio excitement probably results from Sean Gabb being on BBC Radio 4‘s Today Programme, yesterday morning. Unlike most of the stuff I do, that’s a big one.
Hungarian economist Daniel Antal has read various anti-EU articles on the Samizdata and wonders how differently the EU looks depending on where you look at it from
We Europeans keep on asking from each other time to time a question, always and always again, and we find no answer. A Greek lawyer has asked me this question again about two hours ago: Why the hell are the British still in the European Union? Why can’t they quit? They seem to hate it, we seem to like it, they always block its evolution, we always complain on their obstruction… David Carr, can you explain to me, why won’t the British quit? Wouldn’t it benefit both sides?
Tony Blair keeps on lying about it all the time, because he could never sell the European federation to the public. Last time he returned from the summit with the lie that Europe is getting a new shape after Britain. He keeps on saying that Britain will never give up sovereignty, although she already has. In the meantime, the Convention has gathered to finish the European constitution…
I come from a country where the case law of the European Court of Justice, a source of the new constitution, is hopelessly liberal for my fellow citizens. I come from a country which could never dream of such a liberal legal order like the European Community law, and which would never get such a liberal constitution as the European one will be. Human rights groups and civil liberty groups are counting back the days when we’ll be members of the Union, by that time the European Bill of Rights, the new declaration on European human rights will be legally binding.
For many European countries European jurisdiction means liberalism. And there are many countries which would love to join in. I think many countries would love to be members instead of the British. So, why not?
Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)
[Editor replies: Daniel asks some interesting questions which I think demonstrate the profound difference between the Anglosphere and much (though not all) of continental Europe.
The EU’s “liberal” order is nothing of the sort (unless you use the word in its debased sense as code for ‘socialist’ which I suspect Daniel is not doing). For Hungary, with its recent communist past still a vivid memory, perhaps it might look that way but the truth is rather different. The EU offers the political classes of eastern Europe their best chance of clinging to a vestige of power by preventing the change and prosperity that a less statist capitalist order would bring… and as some eastern European societies are still wracked with the corrupting legacy of communism, the EU might seem vastly preferable.
Yet I suspect Daniel says much when he says “and there are many countries which would love to join in”… yes, but I am not a country Daniel and neither are you. People need to understand that the interests of a ‘country’ usually means the interests of the political class of a state, not the people within that country. The EU has nothing to offer except mediocrity and well funded structural unemployment.]
Hello Natalie. I didn’t send any money for your keybo8rd because I too am a cheapskate. But keep it all, I say. We’re British. We have our reputation in the USA to live down to. Over there, us Brits are a bunch of sciving scrounging parasitical sciver scrounger parasites, or so it said in The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the film they changed the Brit sciver etc. journo to an American. No wonder it bombed.
We’re scroungers, that is to say, when we’re not tormenting the world’s ethnic minorities in their countries of origin. In connection with David Carr’s spat with the warblogwatchers, concerning another trans-Atlantic stereotype, one of my favourite lines in a TV sitcom was in Dad’s Army (which, for the benefit of uncultured, can’t finish a sentence without a script to read it from, ignorant of everything outside America, cameras on enormous beerguts, Macdonald building, gas guzzling, napalming, friendly fire killing, plastically surgicated and let’s face it just plain crazy Americans) is about the British WW2 Home Guard. Ex-member of the Thin Red Line Corporal Jones the Butcher, during a discussion of the merits of the British legal system, said:
“We always gave the fuzzy wuzzies a fair trial before we shot ’em.”
The British Empire in one line.
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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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