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.
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Paul Marks puts a very uncomfortable question to English supporters of the British Union.
There has long been a debate, in libertarian circles, about whether there is a special commitment among the people of England (or the cultural institutions of England) to liberty – or whether England is much the same as other Western nations.
My own position is that (whatever may have been true in the past) England today is indeed much the same as other Western nations. The English tend to say that they believe in freedom – but when faced with one of the ‘hard questions’: Are you in favour of the abolition of the National Health Service? Are you in favour of the legalization of cocaine? Do you support adults being allowed to buy automatic rifles? and so on, support for liberty tends to collapse – it is much the same in other Western nations.
In formal politics England is also much the same as other Western nations. One of the two major political parties is in theory in favour of a smaller less interventionist government – the Conservative party. Yet when it is actually in government, the Conservative party is not very good at reducing the size and scope of government – but (again) that is much the same as the Republicans in the United States, the Liberals in Australia, the R.P.R. in France, the Christian Democrats in Germany (and so on).
But have a look at Scotland and Wales. The most important party is Labour (a party, whatever some people may like to think, that is overtly in favour of ever more government spending and regulations). The Labour party is far more important in Scotland and Wales than it is in England and far more important than its sister parties are in other Western nations, but that is not the most important point. The second party of Scotland and Wales is NOT the Conservative party.
The Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the Liberal Democrats are all openly statist parties – and they are more important than the Conservative party in Scotland and Wales.
The Liberal Democrats in Scotland and Wales support the ruling Labour party (so perhaps can be discounted), but the major opposition are the statist nationalist parties.
In short Scotland and Wales have openly statist governments working for ever more government spending and regulations – and openly statist oppositions, working for ever more government spending and regulations.
This is not normal in the Western world. Is it in the interests of England to be bound to Scotland and Wales?
Paul Marks
The British public deserves a high quality news network which ruggedly pursues the virtues of impartiality, integrity and honesty. Alas, it doesn’t have one. Instead it has the BBC. And this is not just my jaundiced opinion anymore. Now it’s official.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has just signed a major development deal with the European Investment Bank (the bribery wing of the EU) worth £25 million (about $40 million) and which will enable them to produce news, education programmes and children’s programmes guaranteed to be ‘objective’.
The cynical among you might imagine that such munificence rarely comes without strings attached but you’d be wrong. In this case, it comes with bloody great mooring ropes i.e. it is an implicit condition of all EIB funding that lucky recipients must not play host to any criticism of the EU. Nice little deal, eh?
So next time you surf onto their website of link to one of their stories or hear one of their broadcasts, remember: the BBC is a whore, bought and paid for.
Lest I appear puritanical about all of this, I must stress that I have no objection to people selling or buying sexual services but it does seem so unfair that the Eurocrats get all the pleasure while the British public get screwed.
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
– Bertrand Russell
Part 2 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.
If as libertarians we believe that we may live in something called ‘society’ but that ‘rights’ are something for individuals, not some corporatised community, then it pretty much follows we are going to be ambivalent at best about nation states, taking either the minarchist/classical liberal position that states should not exist to ‘do stuff’ (such as build roads, educate people, put men on the moon, restrict smoking, discourage single motherhood, prevent discordant architecture etc.) but rather should exist exclusively to guarantee individual rights and thereby reducing it to nothing more than a ‘night watchman state’… or, beyond that, a libertarian takes the anarchist position that states are completely superfluous.
What both ends of the libertarian continuum agree on however is that ‘society’ is essentially a self ordering mechanism in which order rather than chaos, results from the absence of the state’s guiding claws. Spontaneous order does not require a blithe belief in the ‘goodness of man’ or some Rousseau-esque drivel about noble savage, just the observation that order in one form or other is in fact man’s ‘natural’ state and that chaos, not order, is the inherently unstable and unsupportable state of human affairs. Chaotic societies in fact are not produced by the absence of invasive governments but by them. The implosion of the Soviet Union is a splendid example of this in action. This is of course a complex subject that could fill a library by itself.
Markets occur within the context of sets of rules that enable interaction, but throughout human history, the majority of ‘market rules’ were not imposed by the state but evolved naturally to facilitate wealth creating commerce. In much the same way, the customs of a society are not created by the state’s fiat (customs are not laws), they evolve for complex and often poorly understood reasons. Yet it is social customs, the shared meta-context of assumptions, which really enable the extended social and commercial order that is modern society. Of course societies with liberty enabling customs develop better economically and indeed socially than societies with more restrictive customs.
So then what is the role of ‘laws’ if evolved social custom is really the glue that holds everything together? Well I would say ‘law’ is legitimately the choice-less aspect of custom, which is clarified for the avoidance of misunderstanding, and backed by force. For example you have no right to take my property without my consent. You may not legitimately ‘choose’ to do that because your right to acquire my property is rationally and objectively trumped by my right to maintain my pre-existing ownership. To a minarchist like me, backing up that fact is why some sort of ‘night watchman’ state is required, but to a libertarian anarchist, protection agencies and mutated insurance companies take on that sort of role.
Coming in Part 3: So what are we to do about tyranny?
Patrick Crozier Sees signs of mental infirmity in a great many places other than just Charlton Heston
The news that Charlton Heston has Alzheimer’s will sadden all decent people. The news that the authorities will be able to take his gun from his hands long before they are either cold or dead pisses me off like hell.
But if it is the case that individuals with Alzheimer’s should be disarmed shouldn’t the same apply to governments? Take the British state – it’s showing definite signs.
It is definitely getting forgetful. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t keep putting out the same press release time after time or announcing an old spending increase as a new one.
It’s cognitive functions are not what they were. How else could one explain its obsession with prosecuting a War on Drugs which it can’t possibly win or continued membership of the European Union – the answer to a question no one asked?
There is a definite tendency to nostalgia. Why else would it still cling on to a Stalinist model of healthcare long since rejected by the rest of the world?
It suffers from mood swings. One moment it is counting every last penny, the next splurging cash in the general direction of the NHS and railways.
And it seems to be incapable of carrying out even the most basic tasks, like supplying the armed forces with a rifle that works or putting guilty people in jail or teaching its citizens to read or cleaning air conditioning systems or dealing with foot and mouth.
I wonder if we could do a swap?
Patrick Crozier
How many people have indulged in that fantasy at some point in their lives? I know I have. Of course, the fantasy has been no more than a fleeting moment, usually upon hearing of the latest piece of idiotarian nonsense being peddled as fact on the BBC or passed into law by HM Government. Yes, those are the moments when I wish that I simply had the power to slap it down with a stroke of my pen or a contemptuous pronouncement.
I do not believe I am alone. After all, isn’t the phenomenon of blogging the very manifestation of that itch; the compounded fury at all that’s wrong with the world and the irresistable urge to put it right. But what if you really had the power to put it right not merely complain about it.
So let’s play a game. I am the genie released from the bottle and my first act is to make you Ruler of the World. You now have three wishes. What would they be?
Although the BBC was unable to prove that government officials had hacked its system, the staff were “morally certain” it had happened. Leaving aside the meaning of “morally certain”, this is a serious matter. The way this breach of the BBC’s already dubious independence was perpetrated was that one correspondent noticed that when he wrote a script on the newsroom computer for the next news bulletin “he would be rung up by Downing Street before it was broadcast and lobbied on a point or two”. This didn’t happen just once or twice and John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, claims in his new book that the tactics were part of widespread attempts by the government to pressure the BBC and other broadcasters into more favourable coverage of its politics.
Apparently, another BBC broadcaster said the corporation knew the identity of the hacker but lacked the evidence to make a complaint. This is the bit I can’t understand, as someone has to be at the other end of the phone persuading the reporters to temper bulletins that had not yet been transmitted. My first reaction would be: “how the hell did you know what I just wrote on the newsroom computer?!” It seems a measure of how unquestioning of the government the BBC must be, if no one has challenged their big brother tactics. Or is it just ‘cos its family.
Oh, and the government officials say:
This story is utterly ridiculous, complete drivel.
But then, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
For reasons that will only be clear to certain people who are ‘in
the know’, here is a very splendid picture of a Hippopotamus.
Part 1 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.
I have often pondered what principles are shared by all real libertarians, and have periodically tried to produce a set of ‘distilled axioms’ that we all share. This has always proved harder than one might think. Minarchism, Objectivism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Agorism, Dynamism, capital ‘L’ Political Party Libertarianism, Hoppeism, cultural conservative libertarianism, classical liberalism, Whigs, etc. etc. all more or less fall within the nebulous taxonomy of ‘libertarians’ whilst at the same time often vilifying each other’s ‘-isms’.
I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not the ‘non-initiation of force principle’ which is frequently offered up as the core axiom that characterises us all (I regard that as emergent default behaviour, which is to say a consequence, not an underlying axiom). What I offer up is:
You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.
Now the reason I think this is the case is that whilst we objectively derive our rights as individuals, we nevertheless exist within a social setting. We are not isolated atomic entities living in fortified towers, we are social individuals. Misrepresenting this self-evident fact results in people thinking that ‘libertarians’ are in fact nihilists and therefore treating libertarian theories on ‘anarchy’ (the rule of no-one) as synonym for ‘disorder’. Now part of the reason for this is that libertarian revulsion for the statist force based collective in all its modern forms (socialism, the overt end of the collectivist continuum… and statist conservatism, the covert end of the continuum), makes them condemn any function of the modern state because that what is being done is currently being carried out by the state, rather than because the function is inherently antithetical to liberty: the military immediately springs to mind.
This has blinded many to the fact collectivist and collective are not the same thing at all. We can come together to create wealth (for example, getting a job and working for someone else) or band together to deal with an emergency when one or all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come calling, i.e. act collectively without without becoming collectivists, because a collectivist does not accept that you, an individual, actually owns anything… and so how can you voluntarily elect for collective action what is not yours to loan or dispose of. To them is was never your land, your capital, your labour to begin with because several property does not exist.
And therein also lies the difference between the covert form of collectivism, statist conservativism, and actual libertarians. A conservative will accept the concept of several property, but only sort of. This also has misleading echoes of the difference between the libertarian propertarian/anarcho-capitalist view of absolute personal sovereignty over several property and the libertarian minarchist views to which folks like me subscribe to, which sees property rights as contextual: within the context of a forest fire or war, your property rights are subordinated to the reality of non-civil society, without being alienated once civil society is restored. Conservatives on the other hand will sing paeans to private property whilst supporting compulsory purchase (US: eminent domain) for ‘important’ yet non-emergency reasons, such as roads, parks, urban redevelopments or whatever seems ‘sensible’ for the ‘common good’. Yes, you can own property but not if Donald Trump really wants to build on it.
Statist conservatives generally see societies as having separate ‘rights’ too, as it they were somehow more than shorthand for an aggregated expression of individual decisions, blurring the boundary between society and state in the process and masking the reality that they really agree with the socialists that the collective trumps the individual when push comes to shove. Socialists take that a giant step further, seeing state and society as one just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau always argued, the individual as no more independent from the society-as-state than a blood cell from a human body. So a libertarian is someone who thinks rights are something only individuals have but opinions vary greatly how we actually interact socially within the context of our objectively (or naturally or divinely or even subjectively…pick one depending on your -ism) derived rights.
Until recent heavy pressure from the US Congress, Saudi Arabia had a fast track for US Visas. All you had to do was talk to your travel agent and everything was sorted. Of course you had to make other arrangements for your AK47 and explosives, but what the hey?
Meanwhile, Marcelo Tosatti, a top Brazilian Computer Scientist with Connectiva, the current maintainer of the Linux 2.4 Stable kernel and the resident of a free democratic country that doesn’t treat women like excrement, is banned from entry. In his words:
I wouldn’t avoid going into the United States because of the DMCA, but I can’t go there anyway. I went into the United States for business on a B1 tourist visa, by mistake. I’ve been doing it for a long time, I never thought about it. They turned me away, I had to turn around and fly back. Before they always let me into the country on this visa, but after September 11 they’re more paranoid.
It’s not a big deal, with the B2 (business) visa you just have to pay $40. But now I can’t go into America.
Yep, that’s the way to do it. Keep out those pesky well paid computer geeks from friendly democratic countries. You just can’t tell what they might get up to.
The awful disappearance of two young girls in Britain who were possibly lured to a meeting via the Internet and then kidnapped by some vile monster has renewed calls for a clamp down on the Internet. The sort of things being talked about to contain the perceived threat from on-line ‘paedophiles’ (by which people really mean pederasts) is fairly mild stuff but that is always how it starts out. I just hope that this is not used as yet another excuse for the Panopticon state to stick its proboscis ever deeper into our private on-line lives.
Just how much influence Washington had in the establishment and growth of the EU is moot but what is certain is that successive US administrations looked favourably upon the EU, and British membership of it, seeing it (not unreasonably at the time) as a bulwark against the spread of communism.
No such bulwark is required now and, as Bruce Anderson points out, facts on the ground have dramatically altered the lofty ideals in the air:
“This mutual incomprehension and disdain will have far-reaching consequences, including a reassessment of American interests. Initially hurt by the Europeans’ attitudes, the Americans have rapidly ceased to care. They have now reached a stage at which they are no longer interested in what European countries think, with two exceptions: Britain — and Russia.”
The hope that the US might use its hyper-power influence to keep Russia out of the EU and, more importantly for me, get Britain out of the EU doesn’t look like quite such a long shot any more.
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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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