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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?
Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don’t have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn’t you call the police. Mostly this works. It’s called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.
But most schools, and especially most state schools, don’t work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won’t be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.
It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don’t like what they’re getting keep looking. It’s called freedom.
I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport, although less expert about education “policy” than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.
If you have such stories now, don’t wait for Brian’s Education Blog… send them to Samizdata!
The Opinion Journal’s email letter tonight refers to an article about George Michael’s new song, “Shoot the Dog.” The bit I simply had to share was this quote:
I simply wanted to write a song that said to everybody, ‘People, let’s be aware of this situation and understand there are some very pissed off people out there, and that America–and us, for that matter–need to start to listen to them a little.’
He’s absolutely right on one point. There are indeed some really, really pissed off people out there. Quite a large number of them actually.
They’re called Americans.
Paul Marks responds to David Carr’s article Boiling Mad
I accept that some politicians have evil motives and are statist out of envy and/or power lust. However, I think most politicians are fairly normal people (not particularly evil).
The trouble is that that most people go in to politics to ‘help people’. If one does not have a good understanding of political economy one will ‘do something’ when confronted with a problem – for example, if people need better health care (‘look there are people dying over there’) the least difficult thing to do is to increase government spending on health. It is the same with all other human wants (so government spending tends to rise). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that increasing government spending is a bad thing.
It is the same with regulations. There is a problem – for example rents are high, so one imposes rent control. One wishes to help improve the environment – so one imposes more environmental regulation (and so on, and so on). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that government regulations are a bad thing.
As centuries of free market folk have pointed out, the seemingly good effects of government spending and regulations are obvious – but seeing the real effects of such things takes thought.
Many free market people put their faith in education to enable people to understand the effects of statism. Now here we have the real problem – the vast majority of education (in Britain or any other country) is statist. Whether one goes to a private school or a state school. whether one goes to a private university or a state university the concepts one will be taught (as regards political economy) will most likely be wrong.
It is even possible that someone may be better off not going in for say “higher education” at all. If a person sees that his line of policy seems to be have bad effects the person may change their policy. But if this person has been educated into believing that bad policy is good policy a change of mind is much less likely.
One must also remember that ‘education’ does not just cover school and university, such things as television and radio (at least the ‘serious’ programs) are also part of education – and the ideas of political economy that the television and radio spread are also mostly false. So even a person who is not formally educated is still more likely than not to be filled with false ideas – but it is not as bad as if this person had gone through the formal education process as well.
Of course there are such things as free market books in the world and one can encounter them in such places as university libraries. However, I believe that the vast majority of people who read these works were LOOKING FOR THEM (or at least had their minds open to this sort of work).
Take my own case. I often present myself as a conformist, however the objective evidence shows that I am in fact a pathological rebel.
Even in junior school (i.e. before I was 11 years old) I was already in revolt. The teachers asked us to bring food for a party to ‘share with out friends’, so I strongly objected when they stole the food I brought (they had tried to make me share the food with my enemies).
Nor was this an isolated incident. I disliked the way that lies and brutality were encouraged by people of power – they played lip service to being against bullying, but did nothing to fight it and did their best to work against people who did try and fight it (such as myself). Many (perhaps all) of the teachers where nice people – but they did not do their duty, the system did not work.
Nor was this just a matter of school. I remember going through reference works as a young child looking for countries that did not have Welfare State programs (and feeling great pain when I found out that nations that appeared not to have such programs really did have them). I also went through history books about various nations with almost the sole intention of finding out when and how various “reforms” (i.e. crimes) had happened.
To take one example. I was not convinced by E.G. West‘s book Education and the State (1965) that the idea that without government action most people would not be able to read and write was a false idea. No, I thought that already – and spent ages trying to find a book that would agree with me.
To take another example. When I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980) it did not convince me that such things as rent control were wrong (I already thought that), no it just upset me that even this proclaimed “free market” book seemed to be in favour of such things as government fiat money (such a concept being clearly evil, you see).
I do not claim that all libertarians are as mad as I am. However, I told hold that (in the present intellectual environment) to reject statism someone must have a mind with something odd about it. To be told (endlessly) by nice well read people that (for example) ‘anti monopoly’ laws are a good thing and to think “this is all nonsense, everyone is a fool – apart from me” indicates an odd personality type. It is not to be expected that most politicians (who I repeat tend to by rather ordinary people) would have this personality type – and it might not be a good thing if they did (as not everyone with this personality type is likely to be a libertarian – they might be the very power mad types that people are concerned politicians are).
Of course libertarians will not tend to like the above. I think that is why (for example) one gets so many silly ‘libertarian tests’ – you know the sort I mean, they have questions like ‘are you against a police state?’ or ‘do you think freedom is a good idea?’ and if you say ‘yes’ to such question (or ‘no’ to certain other questions) you ‘must be a libertarian’. I believe that such tests are created so that libertarians can think that there are more of us than there really are.
If the questions were things like ‘are you in favour of the abolition of Old Age Pensions [or ‘Social Security’ if it was an American test]?’ without loading the question by talking about Cato Institute style ‘Individual Retirement Accounts’ (or other such attempts to have free market reform, whilst pretending that no one will lose), then our true numbers would be revealed. It is not to be expected that politicians would think in the same way as a small minority of the population.
There really are no clever ways one can have reform. There are no painless options when statism is as advanced as it is in the world today. I would recommend Lew Rockwell’s recent article Freedom is not “public policy”, which explains this better than any other work I know of.
Paul Marks
Sex doesn’t interfere with the tennis. It’s staying out all night trying to find it that affects your tennis.
-Andre Agassi
(Agassi, now happily married to Steffi Graf, didn’t make it to the last sixteen in the men’s singles at this year’s Wimbledon, and nor did any other Americans, the first time this has happened since nineteen twenty something. Maybe they should get out more.)
It’s bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you’re there. That’s the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. “It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry,” he says. “I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating.”
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don’t misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What’s wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there’s another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn’t need any.) Presumably they couldn’t think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That’s the way to do these things.
First, they kicked the Kyoto Protocol into touch. Now, they’re sticking it to the International Criminal Court.
Will America’s flagrant unilateralism and contempt for world opinion ever end?
I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT
British musician and now geopolitical sage George Michael has cooked up a memorable ditty bashing the British government for being the White House’s poodle.
Wow. How original. Can you imagine a musician lampooning “blame-America-firsters”? No. Neither can I. (If there is one out there, I’d love to know). Michael’s fearless effort, which will no doubt prove a real hit with some, comes in for a superb fisking (oops, a bit non-PC there) from blogger James Lileks. Read and enjoy as Lileks spells out a few basic truths.
I received this email from Sean Gabb today. It deserves a wider readership:
I did the Mike Parr show this morning – BBC Radio Newcastle – about ID cards. I was very polite to the local police boss who was on against me. He ended by agreeing that he’d rather have more officers than a scheme that he though might easily be abused.
Sean Gabb does lots of this kind of thing.
I just took part in a French online discussion about abortion, sale of human organs, genetic material etc. It occurs to me that a libertarian point view includes the following idea:
· The components for the manufacture of human beings are legitimately tradeble.
· The finished product is not.
What is the boundary?
A French libertarian arguing about infidelity in relationships said that unless a contract is written, it isn’t valid. In the torrent of refutations (to which I contributed my ha’penny worth) Stefan Metzeler included the following anecdote:
Here’s another example which demonstrates the advantage of a good reputation, even “collective”. About ten years ago, I was in Martinique (a very, very beautiful place). On my last day, I chanced upon a boutique with jewels and I thought that this would be a nice present for my girlfriend. So I chose some for a little more than $100 and I want to pay by VISA. No luck, she [the shop-keeper] couldn’t take it and I didn’t have any cash. But then the saleswoman says to me looking at my card: “Are you Swiss? Do you have your passport?” I reply “Yes, of course.”
“Then no problem, I’ll give you credit and you just wire me the money when you get home. I’ve never had a problem with the Swiss.”
I must admit that I was gob-smacked… a reputation like that is worth more than gold in the bank. Of course, I settled up the day after I returned to Switzerland.
Patrick Crozier says that he’s finding it harder to do UK Transport than when he first started it, because he’s running out of things he’s burning to say. That’s partly why I’ve accepted his invitation to become a regular (although I’ve warned him that it won’t be that regular) contributor to UKT. I don’t think that Patrick will be the only blogmeister who moves towards the Samizdata team-of-writers approach.
I did a piece for UKT last week (complete with a photo I took at Clapham Junction) about the blessing of electric signs which say when trains are coming and where they’re going, and I did another piece last Sunday about the important transport option of just saying no and staying put and not using any transport. Both are unashamedly amateur writings. I have little idea of what government transport policy is this week, not having read any of the relevant pronouncements. I merely travel, sometimes. Go and read these pieces if you want to, but like the second one says, maybe you could rearrange your life a little and not go there.
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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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