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After casting our eyes enviously at the Instapundit’s and Bitter Girl’s on-line shops, we decided to also open an on-line shop for Samizdata.net as well (click here or see our sidebar under ‘Network’) Now you too can prove you are one with the sinister globalist Illuminati (not to mention defray the cost of setting up this nice new blog!)  
July 24th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Alice Bachini analyses the nature of the threat from Islamic cultures. I caught a strange TV programme about USSR state secrets coming to light last night on ITV, narrated by the fruity-voiced Roger Moore. After showing us shocking films of agents being forced to have sex with gorgeous women in hotel rooms, Mr Moore started telling us about the unknown numbers of nuclear bombs, some of which are apparently dinky enough to fit into your Louis Vuitton luggage, which are floating around the world’s second-hand weaponry markets looking for Dr Evil-style homes. Apparently again, they are difficult to use without the instructions, but there are very likely one or two ex-Soviet scientists who can’t get jobs at McDonalds and who may well offer helpful how-to guidance in return for a reasonable fee. Now, I dont know how reliable Mr Moore is on these matters, but it seems to me that if NYC gets nuked, everyone will probably be as surprised as they were by 9/11, even though, in retrospect, it was only a matter of when and how those bastards did it. I hope the next set of bastards aren’t at Yale University right now on a Nuclear weapons and how to use them course module, but it wouldn’t surprise me very much if they were. The other thing that struck me was that Bin Laden (whom Mr Moore reliably informs us is still alive – perhaps he has some tracking gadgetry left over from his salad days of saving the world, I dont know) and people like him are absolutely right that vicious jihad attacks were and are inevitable. Of course the Muslim world feels persecuted; it is, and should be treated ‘unfairly’ by the West, because its values are evil and if we don’t stop them they will destroy our better ones. We don’t have to bomb the hell out of them for them to feel persecuted; we only have to treat them like the dodgy, unreliable and dangerous societies that they are. Does making an agreement with the West about not having nuclear weapons make it any more likely that Saddam will stop causing trouble? Of course not. It just makes it more likely that he will hide them better and hate us all the more. And terrorist groups are forces of potentially worse evil than bad governments, precisely because they are underground and festering. We ignore the sub-governmental level of evil at our peril. Freedom isn’t just about getting rid of governments; it’s about getting rid of the evil that threatens freedom. This is why countries get the governments they deserve, why X per cent of Afghan women are still walking round in burqas, why we shouldn’t trust the Saudis, and why we are still so complacent that we will be shocked if NYC is nuked. At least the cold war was cold. The next set of conflicts is about the nastiness that comes up from the bad memes of repressive cultures. Until we understand that, we are never going to understand the nature of the evil we are facing. And until we understand our enemy, we are never going to be able to defend ourselves adequately from it. (See Sarah Lawrence’s “Is that a burqa on the bedroom floor?” and “War, Free Trade and Liberty – Strange Bedfellows?” at www.sarahlawrence.org) Alice Bachini July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Political revolutions do not often accomplish anything of genuine value: their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
 de Havilland Mosquito I am a near-religious reader of the Daily Telegraph obituary page, full of larger-than-life aristocrats, obscure explorers and dozens of extroardinary men and women who served during the Second World War. A classic of the genre is in today’s paper about the late Group Capt John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham, a famous night-fighter pilot and post-war civilian test pilot who was associated for many years with the de Havilland aircraft company, and no doubt Perry has heard all about his exploits*. I met him several years ago in Hatfield to see the restoration of a 1950s British fighter plane called the Venom, which my father worked on as a navigator around the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Anyway, give it a read. A must for aircraft nuts like yours truly. * [Note from Perry: I also met John Cunningham many years ago] July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
There is a general election in New Zealand this weekend. The present Labour party government has done its best to reverse much of the half hearted reform that it inherited – and it looks like the Labour party will be re-elected (and continue to increase the size and scope of the state). I found myself thinking (as I often do) “good, if people vote for statism they deserve to get it – good and hard”. However, the divine right of the 51% (democracy) is (as all libertarians know) quite immoral. There is no reason why those who vote against statism should suffer because of the people who vote for it. Take the example of California. When I rub my hands with glee (which I do) at the latest example of California statism (“jolly good, the reckoning is brought forword and the collapse of California will be a warning to the rest of the nation to repent…”) I am overlooking a few important points. Firstly the innocent (those who vote against the increase in government spending and regulations) suffer at least as much (most likely rather more) than the guilty. And secondly there is no reason to suppose that people in other areas will understand that the suffering is caused by the statism. Take the example of retail price controls on the sale of electricity (in California this is known as ‘deregulation’). Such price controls created a shortage of power (no surprise there) and rather than letting the lights go out the Bush administration demanded that companies outside California sell power (at the government price) to California. I have argued that the lights should have been allowed to go out until the Californians worked out “if we pay more money people will sell us power”. However, (of course) people who opposed the price controls would have suffered along with the people who supported them. Also there is no guarantee that people would understand that the suffering was caused by the statism. After all the famous “economist” Paul Krugman has explained that the Californian energy crisis was created by a plot by Enron and other wicked corps. Nothing is so absurd that it will not be argued for by the media and academia. It does not matter whether most academics and media people are liars or whether they believe their own nonsense, the effect is the same – millions of people are mislead. When I argue that the bankruptcy of California would act as a warning to the rest of the United States, or that the bankruptcy of one of the European Welfare States would warn the other nations of Europe to reform themselves whilst there is still time I must come up with a reply to the above. And I have no great reply. I suppose all we can do is to endlessly try and explain to as many people as we can the consequences of statism – sadly we have little access to such things as the mass media, but we must do the best we can. Things are not formally inevitable and we must help when we can. For example in California if the people voted for Bill Simon to be Governor (the election is in November) there is a good chance that collapse could be avoided (almost needless to say – the Bush administration strongly opposed Mr Simon getting the Republican nomination for Governor). And even if Gray Davis is reelected (as he most likely will be) there may still be an election in 2006 (I do not think people will be eating each other by then) and something might be saved. Yes democracy is immoral and it is inefficient (the innocent minority are punished for the votes of the majority and the majority are endlessly mislead by academics and media people anyway), but this does not mean we should ignore democracy. Perhaps the world will collapse and isolated groups of libertarians (or semi libertarians) will have to try and rebuild civilization via a grim struggle to survive – but we should not just give up. To give up (or to treat each example of statism with perverted joy – as I often do) is immoral. Paul Marks July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Adam Breeze emails us from Cheshire, one of England’s golfier counties, thus:
I suspect that there is something libertarian about golf, and that it’s not just the accident of it being the socialising and deal-making game of choice of the Chamber of Commerce types. As Adam says, golf is the ultimate individual’s game, in which every predicament the player finds himself in is the consequence of his own previous actions. In golf, you make your choices and you deal with the results of your own choices. There’s no one else to blame. There can be few greater tests in sport of an individual’s character than to have to play a very difficult golf shot immediately after – and as a direct result of – having just played a very bad shot. Ernie Els passed this kind of test during the final play-off hole that won him The Open last Sunday. I know it’s only a game and all that, but the statistics both of the money involved and of the numbers of folks watching, both at the course and on TV, were presumably vast. Els went into a bunker. But he got himself out to within three feet of the hole, and sank the putt. And all this having earlier lost what looked like a secure lead late in the final regular round, which caused him to have to compete in the play-off holes in the first place. July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
When I was a young articled clerk with firm of London solicitors, I was involved, at some length in what turned out to be fruitless legal action against a notorious slum landlord called Nicholas Hoogstraten. Fruitless, because every time I went to Court to enforce against him, he simply disappeared behind a kaleidoscope of dummy front companies and aliases. He was as elusive as the morning mist. Still, what I learned about him from the file notes left an indelible impression on me that was stirred again today when I heard that Hoogstraten has been convicted of manslaughter and now faces the possibility of a life sentence. In 1999 he ordered two of his henchmen to attack a former business associate who was threatening to sue him. They killed him. The jury accepted Hoogstraten’s plea that he never ordered the man’s death, he merely wanted them to rough him up and frighten him. The two hit-men were convicted of murder. Hoogstraten is the nearest thing to a Bond villain that I have ever actually encountered. He could have sprung, fully-formed, from the fevered mind of a Hollywood script-writer; arrogant, sneering, dapper, ruggedly handsome, enormously rich, wickedly cunning and mind-bogglingly ruthless. He built his property empire on the back of intimidation, violence and outright theft. Every plausible account I have read of him paints a picture of a swaggering ego that was not just prepared to use violence to get what he wanted but actually enjoyed using the violence. The fear he engendered seemed to actually turn him on. Whilst undoubtedly possessed of high intelligence and great business acumen he was flawed by an arching contempt for his fellow men and almost insatiable desire to hold power over them. A man of such single-minded malevolence that he appears to have scarred all who ever came into contact with him. And, now, it’s all over. But why is this a Libertarian view? Because there is apparently no end of people, mostly (but not exclusively) on the left who are convinced that we Libertarians admire and wish to emulate characters like Hoogstraten. That when we call for an end to state intervention and regulation it is because we want the Hoogstratens of the world unshackled and free to wreak whatever havoc they choose; that when we speak of free markets, what we really mean is freedom for Hoogstraten and his ilk to use their wealth and power to stomp on anyone who gets in their way. For socialists of all stripes, Hoogstraten is capitalism made flesh. Wrong. Dead wrong. Libertarianism is not, and never has been, about money or its pursuit. Money is incidental. It is about empowering ordinary people to take control of their own lives and arrange them in ways that best suit them. It is about the sanctity of contract, the endless possibilities of voluntary arrangement and real wealth to be found in reputation, decency, civility and honour. All these things are a anathema to men like Hoogstraten. It is also well worth pointing out that Hoogstraten built his empire and wreaked his worst havoc at a time when there was far greater state intervention in the property market than we have now and where the laws and regulations protecting tenants in rented property were far more draconian. Yet none of this stopped Hoogstraten or even slowed him down. He simply possessed the insatiable will to drive under, over and through them. Ultimately, there is no surefire way to stop the Hoogstratens of this world. They are like a malevolent force that nature throws up at us every now and then. But a far surer method of cutting them down to size is to build a strong civil society where people actually care about what happens to their neighbours and have a stake in their neighbourhoods and where toxic bullies like Hoogstraten are kept in check or run out of town on the end of a pitchfork. July 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
During a phone conversation the other night I commented to Perry on the pointlessness of Apple’s decision to charge for formerly free email accounts. We’d both read an item sent us by a friend, and Perry was wondering if perhaps this is a sign of a shift to fees in many areas of the internet. Today he pointed me to this Dodgeblog item and gave my arm a severe virtual twisting in hopes I’d pass my comments on to the world. It’s quite simple actually. Apple and others are battling for a market in email hosting just as it is about to go the way of horseshoes and buggy whips. This is perhaps more apparent to me than it would be to most since I do consultancy to data centres. My question to Perry, and to anyone else is “In a world where broadband into the home is common, why on earth would anyone leave their email hosting in the hands of a distant large corporation?” Or even a nearby small one for that matter! It really hasn’t sunk in to the heads of most people yet that broadband to the home means much more than the opening of a huge market of passive consumers. It’s many to many communication, not one to many like television, radio and the movies. The internet is not just a new mass media. It is a total bypass of central control. For a few hundred quid today and probably less tomorrow, I can put in a Linux firewall; I can run my own email and web hosting for my family photos from home; I can connect with my laptop from anywhere in the world through a So I ask again. Why exactly should anyone care if companies start charging for email hosting? It will just drive the market towards home internet appliances. In a very few years the rest of you will be recieveing your PGP encrypted email over SSL connections into your own secure server where it is stored on an encrypted disk. It’s not science fiction. A lot of us are already there. July 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Every week 13 to 17 million people across the nation tune into Eastenders. This programme is often derided as trash. I would not agree. Eastenders is very clever television. The production values of the show are high, and it skips very cleverly between story lines at least every 90 seconds, which means that the viewers are able to keep numerous plot threads in their minds at once. Eastenders also carries a message. This message is: “Your life is miserable. No matter what you do, it will go on being miserable. You are unable to look after yourself, therefore you need the state to look after you.” Eastenders creates a demand for an intrusive government. In Eastenders a person in a suit is almost always a villain. This must cause many of those watching the show to distrust men in suits. Men in suits are often businessmen. Whenever a big corporation pops up in Eastenders it is more often than not to cause trouble for the cast. Big corporations never seem to offer jobs and opportunities for individuals in the fictional world of Albert Square. The cast of Eastenders are always in a perpetual state of misery. They never seem able to surmount the obstacles in their way. Whenever a cast member seems to find a problem too overwhelming to deal with, the state is generally expected to solve the problem. Eastenders also pushes the Blairite constituional agenda, and seeks to undermine the institutions of this country which protect liberty. New Labour has so far failed in its attempt to abolish trial by jury. In Eastenders, the character of “Little Mo” was found guilty of attempted murder even though she was innocent. “Little Mo” was found guilty by a jury of her peers. The message this gives out is that trial by jury doesn’t work and that a centralised judiciary would do a better job. In Eastenders nobody seems to better themselves substantially. There appears to be little room for entrepreneurial vigour in the world of Albert Square. When a character leaves Eastenders, it is not to pursue opportunities elsewhere. It is due to death, going to prison or the desire to flee from some problem or person. Compare Eastenders with the Australian soap Neighbours, which is also shown every week day on British TV. Neighbours offers viewers a positive message: “Life isn’t miserable. Hard work will get you somewhere. You don’t need the state to solve your problems. There are opportunities if you seek them out.” . In Neighbours, characters often leave due to opportunity elsewhere. The state rarely appears, and when it does it is usually a nuisance. Alas, the production values of Neighbours are lower than those of Eastenders, and Neighbours only attracts an audience of 7 to 8 million viewers per episode. If you sat two children of identical background and mental health in front of a television set for a year, with one watching Neighbours and the other watching Eastenders, the child who watched Neighbours would be less dependent and happier than the child who watched Eastenders. Patrick Sullivan July 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
…Bono And not for nothing either, as he has taken it upon himself to act as a tool for the Holy Belgian Empire and give the Irish people a sound telling-off for voting ‘No’ to the Nice Treaty.
Well, obviously, a bunch of unilateralist simplisme Irish cowboys, that’s what.
‘Louis, Sven, Dirk, come quickly, it’s a famous rock star. At last, we can enjoin a profound discussion on the socio-political consequences of Eastward expansion of the existing regulatory framework’.
Did you hear that, you scruffy lot in Dublin? If you keep exercising your constitutional right to choose, then the Brussels politicians are going to get very, very, very angry with you. I mean, really angry. They’re going to hold an Angry Conference and share their anger. Then they are going to pass at least a few thousand more regulations in pure anger. And then strike primitive, aggressive postures and denounce you, angrily. So just watch your step. Bono? Is that a proper name? It can’t be his real name, surely? Perhaps it stands for something. Somebody once told me that it is Gaelic for ‘dickhead’.  July 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Yes, here’s the latest crop of Libertarian Alliance publications. They were posted out some weeks ago on paper but getting them up at the LA website has been delayed by LA Webmaster Sean Gabb having recently had to upgrade his computer while simultaneously being engaged in moving house, a vexing combination of circumstances. Since the LA’s stuff is for Posterity, not to cause a stir next week (although we don’t object if that happens), I let Sean take his time and didn’t nag him unduly after I’d given him the files. But now, here they are. They’re only in Acrobat format, I’m afraid. Sean told me the other day that HTML is a format of diminishing importance, and that Acrobat files can now be searched by the best search engines. Or something. The gist of it being that maybe Acrobat will suffice. But can you cut and paste stuff, the way you can with another blog? Surely not, but what do I know. Please feel free to quote from these pieces at will, at whatever length you like, unless doing that is too laborious. Since there’s so many of them, I’ll keep this blurb very brief and let the titles speak for themselves, which I hope they do. Suffice it to say that the pieces by Perry all appeared first here on Samizdata, and that almost as soon as my piece about blogging (Personal Perspectives No. 17) was published, either my opinion of the Libertarian Alliance Forum changed for the better, or the LA-F changed for the better. A bit of both, I suspect. Unfortunately all references in these publications to Samizdata are to the old, pre-Movable-Type version of it, which I hope in due course to correct. Political Notes No. 177. Neil Lock, State Your Terms! On The Mis-Use of Language to Convey Subtle Collectivist Messages, 2pp. Political Notes No. 178. Paul Anderton, The Real Nature of and the Abuse of the Drugs Problem text here, 10pp. Political Notes No. 179. Perry de Havilland, I Do Not Fear The Immigrant: A Critical Response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Ilana Mercer, 2pp. Political Notes No. 180. Perry de Havilland, Citizenship: The State’s Way of Saying It Owns You text, 2pp. Political Notes No. 181. Brian Micklethwait, I Am A Libertarian Because …, 2pp. Economic Notes No. 94. Kevin McFarlane, Why “Trader Sovereignty” Makes More Sense Than Consumer Sovereignty, 2pp. Philosophical Notes No. 63. Peter Richards, In Defence of the Freedom to Fish, Shoot and Hunt, 4pp. Legal Notes No. 38. Peter Tachell, Why The Age of Consent in Britain Should Be Lowered to Fourteen, 2pp. Cultural Notes No. 47. Perry de Havilland, Tolkein’s Ring: An Allegory for the Modern State, 2pp. Historical Notes No. 41. Gerard Radnitzky, The EU: The European Miracle in Reverse, 6pp. Historical Notes No. 42, Roderick Moore, The History of Civilisation and the Influence of the Environment, 4pp. Educational Notes No. 33. Brian Micklethwait, The Failure of Politics and the Pull of Freedom: Reflections on the Work of the Reading Reform Foundation, 4pp. Tactical Notes No. 29. Perry de Havilland, Giving Libertarianism a Left Hook: How To Make The Traditions of The Left Our Own, 2pp. Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 38. Roderick Moore, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, 4pp. Personal Perspectives No. 17. Brian Micklethwait, Losing, Blogging and Winning, 4pp. Pamphlet No. 27, Miranda Matthews, Why “Sex Work” Can’t Be Unionised and Shouldn’t Be “Legalised”, 4pp. July 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
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