That government being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
– Article I Section 2 of the Constitution of Tennessee
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June 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 In a recent post, Stephen “VodkaPundit” Green managed to assign an innovative moniker to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Green objected to Kristof’s claim that domestic terrorists like the militias are just as much a threat as foreign terrorists such as al-Qaeda. After carefully weighing the evidence, Green dismissed the notion as the ramblings of a f—tard. Kristof’s latest offering will do nothing to help him live down his new nickname. He is asking us to believe that the US is complicit in Islamic nations’ institutionalized abuse of women by refusing to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, a document that is now 22 years old but which Kristof finds fit to recycle as cutting edge news. The CEDAW treaty, according to Kristof, “simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.” See? Pakistan has to tone down the misogyny because they signed the treaty. Since the US has not ratified the treaty, US judges are free to sentence adultresses to death by stoning. Clearly, the problem here is with the US, not with Pakistan and the others who signed the treaty, right? Well, actually, it isn’t America’s fault, says Kristof. It is John Ashcroft’s fault. If only the US Congress would ratify the treaty, Pakistani and Saudi and Iranian men would stop abusing women! Besides, everyone knows that even if these men are abusing women, it is just their way of expressing outrage over America’s support of Israel and opposition to Palestinian statehood. In fact, every evil in the world is America’s fault, even when foreigners are perpetrating the evil against America. Kristof insists that there is no political agenda behind the CEDAW treaty, and that conservative objections to the treaty are misguided. However, the treaty openly embraces affirmative action:
… and asserts that a wide variety of welfare-state entitlements such as “access to health care”, paid maternity leave, free education, agricultural loans, public pensions, etc. are actually fundamental rights. Sure, no political grandstanding there. If Kristof wants to live down his new nickname, he is going to have to do better than this. Perhaps Kristof will even join Robert Fisk in having his very name immortalized as a blogosphere synonym for, well, f—tard. June 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Steven Den Beste provides what I think is a plausible analysis of thinking behind the latest Israeli tactic of occupying more of the West Bank in response to terror attacks on Israeli Civilians; a sort of ‘You bomb, We conquer’ strategy. Steven takes the view that the purpose behind the strategy is to make the Palestinians pay a price in land for every attack, even to the point of rolling them into reservations and keeping them there. Given that the bombers are prepared to sacrifice their own lives they will have to consider the well-being of the families and communities they leave behind who will be even worse off after they have carried out their mission i.e. plenty of pain, no gain. To be fair to Steven, he expresses doubts as to whether this strategy will work but he still rather too bullish about it in my view. If the aim is to stop the bloodshed then a prolonged occupation of the whole of the West Bank will only lead to more. Israel simply does not have the resources to maintain such an operation and, in trying to do so, the IDF will be stretched to the limit. The Palestinians are far more radicalised than they have ever been and are hardly likely to accept such occupation with equanimity. They, too, are now well-versed in the art of urban warfare and will wage it fiercely as well as sending as many ‘martyrs’ into Israel proper as they can. Expect lots more Jenins and French Hills. The Drawing-Board calls. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Actually, GBRI stands for Global Business Research Initiative, and to call it the brainchild of my good friend Syed Kamall somewhat exaggerates its current level of development. The enterprise is now hardly more than a strand of intellectual DNA.
And so on. A few more bullet points follow. If all I knew of the GBRI was the small amount of verbiage currently on offer at its website, I’d be saying: could mean anything and probably means nothing. However, I had supper with Syed yesterday evening at his home and it all sounded decidedly promising. The Internet has massively reduced the costs in cash, office space, time and emotional wear-and-tear of running something like the GBRI, and Syed is not merely enthusiastic; he is also capable and not given to exaggeration. So I too am optimistic, and will keep you posted of developments, as and when. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Amongst other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
As soon as I started writing for this blog, I got the impression that in some form, blogging is going to affect my journalistic working life and not just my private, ideological, libertarian part. A good article in Tech Central Station by Dominic Busulto makes for an excellent overview of the phenomenon and how writing about business and analyzing companies will change as a result. Certainly, in my brief experience, the arrival of the weblog has already started to affect how I work. When I get in to work in the morning I usually scan my firm’s website (www.reuters.co.uk) before looking at various websites pitched at the financial world to see what other news organisations have been reporting on. But I also click on to certain blogs for current affairs and related financial news. Very often I find that a blog, like that of prolific Glenn Reynolds will have unearthed an important news story or theme which would have been missed by the mainstream media. And this surely beats the hell out of trawling through acres of newsprint, although I do have an incurable need to read the printed sports section of the Daily Telegraph. Very soon, I think, blogging will be the accepted form of business analysis by economists and journalists in the City and Wall Street when it comes to checking out company results, mulling over future trends, or trying to figure out what investors think. Analysts, who have been chastened by the collapse of U.S. energy giant Enron and concerns about the financial results of leading companies, will increasingly not be able to get away with issuing grand press releases giving their views, but instead have to see their ideas challenged, chewed over and discussed through the vibrant medium of the blog. The same goes for news columnists who like to make guesses about the future. Journalists are going to have to become blog-savvy. I guess this puts yours truly in a nice position. Still, I haven’t yet figured how we get to be millionaires out of this. Let’s just say I am working on the notion. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I’ve looked up the biographical details of the French cabinet and discovered that three of them are members of Alain Madelin’s Democratie Liberale party. I’m making enquiries as to whether they’re from the libertarian faction or the soggier ‘liberal democrat’ wing (I think I’ve met one of them). The fact that the prime minister and the health minister would both have been pushed by Madelin could be exciting. It’s the first piece of evidence I have that the new government just might be serious about tax cuts, welfare reform, reducing the number of public sector officials and cutting regulations such as the ludicrous 35 hour week. I’ll keep you posted… June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Walking down Kilburn High Road (a heavily Irish area of London) shortly after the Irish defeat to Spain in the World Cup was a surreal experience on Sunday. What made it even more bizarre was to find a boarded up shop window which carried a few bill posters. Among the promotions of garage music and pop magazines was a fly-poster showing an IRA sniper with the caption “Freed!”. Underneath was a huntsman holding a foxhound and the caption “Jailed?” The stencil-like signature “Real C.A.” [Real Countryside Alliance] explained the poster’s origin. Of all the places in the United Kingdom for such a poster to appear, the Kilburn end of Belsize Road is about as unlikely as they come. That the poster wasn’t defaced in any way suggested it had only just been placed. English toffs chasing foxes are hardly perceived as ‘brothers in the struggle’. It did occur to me that the Countryside Alliance was created as a ‘Real Conservative Party’ in 1998, following the moral and practical collapse of the Conservatives under John Major and William Hague. Now the Countryside Alliance has turned ‘New Labour appeaser’ and is being challenged by a provisional wing. Can anyone tell me how I get a copy of the poster? I would like one for myself and a couple of spares for forthcoming birthday presents!  June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I would like to qualify Natalie Solent’s agreement with Brendan O’Neill that right-wing is “out of the mainstream”. In 1992 the British left was utterly convinced that Labour would win the election. I know this because I spoke to activists from the Communist fringe to the social-democrat Labour ‘wets’ who want deals with the Liberal Democrats. All were convinced at 10pm on election night that Neil Kinnock was the new prime minister. On 1st May 1997 the same people were convinced that “something will go wrong”, “somehow the Tories would narrow the gap”. On both occasions, most Conservatives agreed. I made over a hundred pounds (a fortune for me) in bets with these people about the outcomes of these elections. My trick is extremely simple. I have noticed that the last people to understand what’s going on are the inner cabinet. In concentric circles around the elite are rings of isolation from the truth. The people who know most are those who spend the least time watching TV political programmes, never listen to the Today programme and don’t rely on reading press clippings for their news gathering. Never speaking to a national politician or spin doctor is a definite advantage. I try to make a point of listening to as little as possible of what politicians are talking about. I also find that it keeps me relatively sane and in good humour. Instead of asking Alistair Campbell or his Tory equivalent who’s going to win the next election (which is literally how most of the media decide, especially foreign correspondents), I talk to people about the World Cup, house prices and the pleasures of “cheating” the Chancellor out of cigarette and alcohol taxes. Asking about family discloses the local horrors of crime and the national health service. My conclusions on the National Health Service are that the system is expected to collapse soon, that if this can be avoided by massive tax rises that’s fine, but there is a deep worry about what the future may hold. The public private partnerships are seen as publicity stunts or dodgy deals to enrich politically connected businessmen. At best it is considered a stop-gap solution. The problem that is not being addressed but which is on the minds of many people is “How the hell am I going to afford health care for myself and my family when the NHS collapses?” On education, as Brian has reported elsewhere, there is a growing underground of teaching going on, not just home education but extra tuition for children. This is primarily a growth industry in the poorest sections of British society and is almost completely unknown to politicians. On the third world the idea that British experts can or should do anything is a minority view. The idea that the Common Agricultural Policy is bankrupt morally, financially and practically is almost universal. There is no debate necessary on these issues, what is lacking is the product, the advert for a business that offers a solution rather like the solution to traffic jams mentioned below by Tom Burroughes. In this respect there is little to be gained from telling international aid obsessives that they’re wasting our money and their time. Everyone else knows. If I were on a TV programme talking about Third World poverty I would make two points: 1) that there is nothing outsiders can do if the locals don’t understand the value of trade and the rule of law, 2) that viewers who care should write to MPs, newspapers a short letter or email saying that the CAP is a disgrace and must be scrapped at once. If proof that the public debate is way ahead of what the ruling class calls ‘political reality’ is needed, a look at the political demise of all the Clinton/Blair clones around Europe and the USA should be instructive. The shattering defeat of the British Conservatives in 1997 has been matched by the left in France, Spain, Italy and is likely to be followed in Germany. Gerhard Schroder’s main selling point used to be that he was “Germany’s Tony Blair”. Today his best hope of avoiding oblivion would be a German victory in the World Cup. Defeat to England would be catastrophic (i.e good). Democrats in the USA are reduced to sending out pictures of themselves standing next to president Bush to try to hold onto their fiefdoms. Will anyone remember what these guys were saying about Mr Bush less than two years ago in connection with Florida? In Britain the Conservative Party is outside the mainstream, almost everywhere else the ideas of free markets and opposition to total welfare statism look to be if not dominant, at least competitive. The €uro is quietly picking up in the foreign exchanges as the balance tips towards welfare reform. I reckon we will either see remarkably swift demolition of state welfare programmes in Europe, or the €uro is going to lose some of its members. The Euro-socialists are desperate for Blair to take Britain into the €uro soon. British socialists are beginning to wonder if staying out might not be the best way to keep the socialist welfare system going a bit longer. Labour euro-sceptics don’t want to protect the monarchy from Corpus Juris or prevent a European with-holding tax. They see the euro as an expensive policy which will lead to international currency traders deciding what the government is allowed to spend on the NHS. They suspect that Socialist parties will either be socialist and be over-ruled by the bankers, or ditch socialism and be ditched by irate public sector workers. If the recent French experience of the Socialist Party is anything to go by the Labour socialists have a point. It can’t be a coincidence that the issue that has most agitated Libertarian Samizdata lately: the RIPA, has seen a government back-down (at least for a while) which was prompted by amateurs taking on the government and the Tories playing catch-up. The ‘Grauniad’ (Guardian) readers may shout to each other how important they are, but hardly anyone else is listening. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
This posting began life as a continuation of the previous posting, which I suggest you read first. Adriana read the previous thing and said you’ve got two blogs there, not just one. I’ll take her word for it, and this is Part 2. So, we’re comparing the actual Economic Calculation debate (Mises, Hayek etc.) with a proposed equivalent in the realm of Public Safety. Continue… Another big point, which was made by Richard Miniter at the Simon Davies meeting, concerns the matter of what kind of information we’re talking about here. (Miniter is a colleague of Tim Evans at the Centre for the New Europe. His book The Myth of Market Share is coming out in October, and he will also be bringing out another book soon about the Clinton regime’s handling of Al-Qaeda. Verdict: they handled it badly.) One of the basic impossibilities of central planning, made much of especially by Hayek, concerned the importance of “unexplicit” knowledge, the sort of knowledge that consists of knowing, without having a prayer of being able to convince a state bureaucrat about it, that this kind of product would be just, you know, nicer than that one, and that people will prefer the nicer one. An entrepreneur in a free economy is able to back his hunch with his own money. Hunch. Now there’s an interesting word. Hunches are those things that old-fashioned policemen also used to have. They would have a feeling that something bad was being planned, or that someone bad had already done something bad, and they’d act. Mostly how they’d act is by trying to obtain some more information, of the explicit sort, the sort that you can type into a computerised database without being accused of unsubstantiated waffling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that people should be banged up in jail just because some old copper doesn’t like the smell of them. What I am arguing is that the shift from observation to action and hence, perhaps, to something like prevention, should not depend on persuading the Great Centralised Security Beast in Washington or London or wherever that this is a good idea. Public safety, I’m arguing, is a lot more like washing machines that work and for which you can get decent spare parts and maintenance than public safety is now assumed to be. (See also my short Libertarian Alliance piece The Menace of the Apocalyptic Individual (Political Notes 164), towards the end, for a brief elaboration of that last point. This was written before 9/11, but survives 9/11 really quite well.) Well, I could go on, and at the privacy(?) of my own desk I intend to. But maybe all this has been said before and said better, and if so I’d like to know. I could live with that. I’m one of Hayek’s second-hand dealers in ideas. I only resort to trying to make an actual car in my own garage (or more realistically, to urging others to get to work on the thing) if the required intellectual vehicle does not already exist. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
At the last two Putney Debates, the ones addressed by Simon Davies of Privacy International on May 10, and by Mark Littlewood of Liberty on June 14, I have heard myself giving a little speech and have liked what I heard. This speech has gone approximately as follows. Current debate about the proper limits of anti-terrorism, internet snooping, sharing of such information by different government departments, and so on and so forth, is now framed as a conflict between the demands of, on the one hand, the ever more centralised and ever more powerful state, and on the other hand, the freedom and the privacy of the individual. The first is assumed to be necessary for the satisfactory achievement of public safety. The second is presented only as a privately desirable benefit that must inevitably be sacrificed to a lesser or greater degree, the argument being merely about how much of this private benefit should be sacrificed. “Is this a price worth paying?” “Are we paying too big a price?” That an improvement in public safety will be purchased with this price is assumed. The likes of Simon Davies and Mark Littlewood are both painfully aware that they spend their lives saying “yes but”. “Yes”, protecting the public is indeed important. “But”, we shouldn’t be quite so ready as we seem to be now to sacrifice personal freedom and personal privacy for public safety. Adriana Cronin‘s piece just below this one is also a good example of the kind of fighting-a-losing-battle agonising that I have in mind. And Samizdata’s most recent Slogan of the day also embodied this assumed relationship, which we were urged to defy, but not to disagree with as a false assumption. Once again, safety was presented as a price worth paying, although by including the word “temporary”, Ben Franklin at least hinted at a contrary theory of how things might really be. I believe that if public safety and liberty continue to be regarded, even (especially!) by libertarians, as things that the people in general are to be asked to choose between, liberty is bound to be the loser. This dangerous contrast reminds me of an earlier time, somewhat less than a century ago, when liberty was widely regarded as being a private benefit that ought to be sacrificed for economic reasons. Centralised state control of the economy was presented as being essential to achieve the maximum of public prosperity, in much the same way that large convoys were a better way to protect wartime merchant shipping than individually scattered vessels. (By the way, the convoy parallel is not my illustration only. I distinctly remember reading George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his plays I think, using this illustration to make this exact argument.) There then followed the “Economic Calculation Debate”, in which the likes of Hayek and von Mises did something that they are still not perhaps fully appreciated for. As academics they eventually triumphed. They stated their theoretical objections to centralised economic planning, and enough people in the West were convinced to keep capitalism bumbling onwards, thus enabling it to triumph utterly against centralised economic planning. In short, Mises and Hayek were right, and were proved right. But they also triumphed as propaganda street-fighters. What they did was turn the argument about economics from being freedom-versus-prosperty into freedom-is-necessary-for-prosperity. In order to have yourself an even semi-satisfactory twentieth century economy, you had to have freedom, if not for political stirrers then at least in the form of “economic freedom”, for people such as businessmen and industrial investors. I wonder, might the same thing apply to public safety? Is centralised power the answer to achieving the defence of good people against bad people, or is centralised power actually one of the biggest problems? It is now being said, and I’m most definitely one of the ones saying it, that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were not completely missed. Quite a lot of people observed various fishy things going on. The problem was that the one almighty, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing Washington Public Protection Apparatus had its single, collective, bureaucratic mind on other things. But suppose that the power to act had been as dispersed as the power to observe. Consider those people who picked up those vital stories that were actually not acted upon by the great Washington Security Monster, about strange Saudi Arabians taking flying lessons but being indifferent to the usually somewhat essential art of actually landing an airplane. Suppose that those people had been allowed simply to announce, perhaps to their local media, that these guys sure were behaving strangely, and suppose they’d urged the local media hacks to chase the story up. Hey, what are you guys doing? Who are you? What are your real names? Would those strange Saudis have had such an easy ride, so to speak? I think not. I think it distinctly possible that they might have called the whole thing off. You’ll never prove this kind of thing (although you can illustrate your generalised theory/suspicions) merely with individual anecdotes. What’s needed is a transformed theoretical framework, a repainted big picture, a different and utterly contrary way of looking at things to the way things are looked at now. A new meta-context. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Last month, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged that privacy is a central concern for e-businesses and individuals alike and announced the appointment of a new Internet privacy aide within the office of the Deputy Attorney General, who will be charged with the protection of consumer rights on the Net. Other than customer service, no single issue has hampered the growth of online business more than public perception of Internet businesses compromising in the privacy of individuals. Although new privacy aide’s initial assignments will apparently be focused on the FBI’s controversial “Carnivore” e-mail surveillance system, Ashcroft’s decision apparently signals the government’s recognition of personal privacy online as an national priority. Or does it? On May 30 John Ashcroft also gave the FBI expanded authority for its agents to monitor Internet chat rooms, Web sites, and commercial databases in search of clues to suspected terrorist activities; and to initiate inquiries at libraries and other public places without a warrant or even the need to show that a crime was committed. The new guidelines allow the FBI to send undercover agents to any event “open to the public”—including political gatherings and places of worship—to look for signs of terrorist or criminal activity. The agency will also be able to collect information on consumers through magazine subscriptions, book purchases, charitable contributions, and travel itineraries. The new powers clash dramatically with the obligation of public libraries to maintain the privacy of their records, an issue that caused consternation when the FBI confiscated library computer records following the terrorist attacks of September 11. And last month Mr Ashcroft said something to the effect that churches, libraries and the Internet are public places where law-abiding citizens should have no expectation of privacy. I have voiced my objections to such powers wielded by a government agency in a previous posting. It was encouraging to see that P.J. Connolly of InfoWorld takes issue with Ashcroft’s position that people have little, if any, expectation of privacy in public places.
He also admits to being ‘a conflicted libertarian’ (small ‘l’) who doesn’t trust any governmental institution that he can’t walk to and challenges his audience:
That’s the spirit. Together with yesterday’s postponement, and hopefully amendment, of the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA), it is a positive blip in the battle against the steady erosion of personal freedoms by the state. June 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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