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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A friend of mine insists that the Cato Institute is nothing more than a sell-out, obsessed with media coverage at the expense of intellectual integrity. This view seems to have been shaped by the jealousy of a less media-effective think-tank. In Britain, the Libertarian Alliance has the ambition of being/becoming the world’s second best libertarian website after Cato.
Having been sent a copy of a recent publication: “Cato Supreme Court Review 2001-2002” I admit that I’m impressed with the quality of the content, the actual book itself, and the fact that it is possible to produce a commentary on the performance of the Supreme Court.
I have not read the Supreme Court Review from cover to cover yet. But leafing through I learnt about the practice of “fast-track plea bargaining” and the conundrum posed by obscenity laws on the one hand and the provisions of the Bill of Rights on the other. I discovered that 90 per cent of criminal cases don’t go to trial by jury in the federal courts because of the “fast-track” system and that British law on defining “child pornography” would be thrown out, probably with a 7-2 majority, if attempted in the USA.
The contrast with the United Kingdom is stunning. No British think-tank has the intellectual quality to produce such an academic work. None produces this level of production quality. And our absence of a constitution makes such a project redundant. The so-called “unwritten constitution” is precisely worth the paper it’s not written on.
My only suggestion for future editions would be that it would be handy to have a listing of all Supreme Court cases over the period, with an indication as to which cases were covered in the various chapters.
Otherwise, I welcome the appearance of this tome which deserves to become both a tool for the academic study of the US Constitution in practice, and an essential campaign guide to the wins and losses of individual freedom in America.
Blogging is better than college.
– Michael Blowhard (yesterday)
China is a country that appears to be attracting increasing interest from the blogosphere and elsewhere and not without good reason. We all sense the potential lurking in this Asian giant. Depending upon one’s point of view this is either worrying or exciting or, possibly, both.
Only yesterday I took delivery of a new dining table and set of chairs and couldn’t help the raised eyebrow upon noticing the legend ‘Made in China’ stamped on the box. Jolly smart it is too.
I admit to being lured into the ranks of the China-watchers, so I tend to regard throwaway news items like this to be noteworthy:
“China has allowed its citizens to buy gold bullion for the first time since the Communist Party took power in 1949.
Shoppers queued on Thursday to look at gold bars on sale in department stores in Beijing and the southern city of Nanjing
Other moves to develop the gold market include plans for Chinas big four commercial banks to offer gold-related investment products to individual investors next year.”
How ironic that, despite the unarguable ghastliness of their ruling regime, the Chinese are constantly embracing new ideas of enterprise and weath-creation whilst the ruling elites of the West are searching for ever-more elaborate ways of suffocating both.
For us fans of capitalism, watching China is a bit like watching a child develop, from the first utterance of ‘Mamma’ to taking the stabilisers off of their bikes.
Just wait until those hormones begin to kick in!
Last Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of being wined and dined at the Chez de Havilland in the company of the man himself, Brian Micklethwait and a delegation of student bloggers responsible for the St.Andrews Liberty Log.
Spending an evening with these fine, upstanding examples of student life rather put my own persistant grumbles into perspective. Judging from what they have to say about their fellow students at that fine old institution, it has become a Seat of Unlearning. Our dinner companions, it would appear, constitute an oasis of sanity amid a vast, barren desert of addled brains.
One example that sticks in my mind, is a story related by one of the students, Alex Singleton. I believe I recall the details with reasonable accuracy but I’m sure I will hear smartly from Alex if this proves not to be the case.
It seems that St.Andrews University Student Union has its very own ‘Equal Opportunities’ Commission. Or, at least, it used to have one because our Alex managed to get himself elected to head it and then promptly proceeded to trash the entire operation and render it unusable. Chalk one up for the good guys. However, in the midst of performing this great service for mankind, Alex was approached by a diminutive fellow student who wanted Alex to take up her claim that she was a victim of discrimination because of her lack of height.
→ Continue reading: Apart-height
Two of my blog-colleagues are struck down with computer-related grief.
Natalie Solent, who has been unable to blog since last Saturday, has asked Samizdata.net to pass on to as many of her regular readers as we can reach that she has not abandoned them on purpose, but has been wrenched away from them, by an attempt to upgrade from Windows Complicated to Windows Even More Complicated which has proved to be very complicated indeed. But she will be back, just as soon as it’s all sorted.
And if you’re wondering why it’s techno-moron me telling you this rather than Perry de Havilland, well as you may have guessed already from his recent blog-silence, he too is having computer-related troubles, this time involving a hardware failure. It isn’t going to be too expensive (it’s one of the small connecting boxes rather than the big box itself which has collapsed), but the problem is proving to be time consuming, while Perry queues with other afflicted souls for the services of his computer-guru. He too is doing all he can to get back on line.
TransOrbital, a member of the Artemis Project, will soon carry out its’ first launch, an engineering mockup of their lunar probe. The vehicle is scheduled for launch into low earth orbit (LEO) tomorrow, Dec 20th, on a Russian Dnepr former-ICBM.
TransOrbital hopes to launch the first commercial lunar probe in late 2003.
From all of us at Samizdata: “Good luck and clear jets TO!”
More information is available here
The 2004 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Oklahoma City. The ISDC is the annual National Space Society (NSS) conference. This is a direct inheritance from the L5 Society which began the conferences in Los Angelos in 1982.
The NSS Executive committee voted the final approved of the 2004 site candidate on Dec 12th. The 2003 conference is in Palo Alto, California this coming May. Please check out the web page for more information.
Just for the sake of full disclosure… I chair the committee that makes the location recommendations to the NSS Board of Directors, so I sort of knew this for a few weeks now.
Yesterday I found myself reflecting on that monstrous half-truth, consumer sovereignty. It’s a half truth because the places where consumers do their consuming are also sovereign. (I seem to recall the late Murray Rothbard having some good things to say about “The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty” in Chapter 7, I think it is, of Man, Economy and State). Shops can also do things as they wish, and if you don’t like this then ultimately your only course may be to run away. I don’t favour shop sovereignty extending to the point where they can bolt the door while you’re still there and force you to do things their way, take back what you just said, buy things you don’t want, and so forth. But short of that I like the occasional shop where the constomer has to walk on egg shells to avoid a proprietorial tantrum or to avoid knocking huge tottering piles of random items all over the grubby floor.
Sure, there must be proper shops where the customer is always right and which are helpful, clean, efficient, full of good stuff well displayed and reasonably priced, etc. etc. But not all shops should be like this.
There used to be a wonderful place in Dover Street, just off Seven Dials (a bit to the north of Covent Garden tube station), which was crammed to the ceiling with hardware of every kind you could possibly want or imagine, provided it could be found.
I remember three things in particular about this place, aside from the general mess and dirt and confusion and lack of walking space.
First, the front window was literally a rubbish dump. There it was, displaying a kind of archaeological system of sediments from previous eras of the shop’s history. Nails from the late nineteen fifties, drill bit sets from the early sixties, crushed cardboard boxes, rolls of insulating material, bags full of obscure and complicated joinery items, long discontinued workbench kits, and of course inch upon inch of genuine actual rubbish. All this could be clearly enjoyed through the front window of the shop. → Continue reading: Retailer sovereignty
Brian asked if Japan was only pretending to do badly. He seemed to think that there were some grounds for doubting the news of Japanese economic stagnation.
Looking at the World Economic Freedom report I discovered the following interesting figures.
- Income Tax top rates as percentages:
(1st figure 1990), (2nd 1995), 3rd 2000.
Japan 65, 65, 50
USA 33, 42, 42
UK 40, 40, 40
Ireland 58, 48, 42
Sweden 72, 58, 51
OECD average 53, 50, 47
- Corporate Taxes (including regiuonal, state, local etc),
also top rates as percentages: 1990, 1995, 2000
Japan 42, 42, 42
USA 40, 40, 40
UK 30, 30, 30
Ireland 24, 20, 16
Sweden 28, 28, 28
OECD average 34, 33, 31
Note that Japan is consistently higher than the OECD average. Note also that Sweden’s business taxation always was low. The US corporate taxes may be close to Japan’s, but the US economy hasn’t needed tax cuts for the past ten years to stimulate growth.
My conclusion is that Japanese “stimulus packages” are clearly not addressing incentives to produce.
Finally, the overall ranking between 1990 and 2000 is highly revealing:
USA 3rd in 2000, 4th in 1990
UK 4th (2000), 6th (1990)
Ireland 7th (2000), 20th (1990)
Sweden 19th (2000), 26th (1990)
JAPAN 24th (2000), 7th (1990)
Before David Carr wonders how the heck a Labour government pushed the UK up 2 places: 1) independent Bank of England, 2) you should have seen what other governments were like…
A case example of (relative) economic freedom being a precondition for (relative) economic prosperity.
Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.
– Herman Melville (Pierre – 1852)
Today I had lunch (a sandwich and coffee anyway) with my friend Kristine Lowe, who is a journalist – you know, one of those people who writes stories for a “newspaper”, which is “printed”, on a Big Machine somewhere in London. The newspaper that Kristine writes for is called the “Daily Express”. She had a story in it today, about the improving business performance of a company called London Clubs International, which is now doing better than it was, because of the relaxing of the British regulations concerning gambling which apparently occurred last August. (So something is being deregulated here, even if it’s only gambling.)
The reason I am reporting for Samizdata.net on this meeting is that, much to my surprise, I found that I was able to tell Kristine things – about business, about the big wide world, about the world of men trying to damage each other – things which she didn’t know much about and which I knew somewhat more about, as a result of me being a blogger. I talked of Glenn Reynolds (K: Who is he? What does he do when he’s not blogging?”) and of Trent Lott (“Who’s Trent Lott?” – this despite Lott having finally made it to the British TV news shows last night), of the arguments about data copying and patent protection, in connection with the music industry and the pharmaceutical industry. I told her of particular bloggers to pay attention to, such as Stephen Pollard (pharmaceutical patents and intellectual property generally), Michael Jennings (telecommunications), my recent discovery China Hand (China), and Reynolds of course (for the Lott story, and for his very different take on intellectual property).
I had assumed that my blogging activities would be a matter of at most polite interest, but basically indifference – like amateur dramatics talk to a real professional actor. But actually Kristine started scribbling things down and didn’t stop until her lunch hour did. Interesting. I wonder if anything – Daily Express-wise – will come of this.
We haven’t become The Media. But we are starting to be a part of The Media’s nervous system.
Just who is being protected here? Just what benefit is being bestowed upon our society? What good can possibly be derived from a ruling like this?
“A mother-of-two has been jailed for failing to prevent her daughters from playing truant from school.
The Brighton woman was sentenced to seven days in prison and is only the second parent in the country to be jailed because her children skipped lessons.”
Why incarcerate this woman for the ‘refusenik’ behaviour of her children? I presume it’s because the state takes the view that threatening the liberty of parents will oblige them to become more coercive and bullying towards their own offspring in order that they may toe the educational establishment line. How degraded and immoral is that? I am reminded of the late Philip Larkin’s injunction:
“Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out, as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself”
The once misanthropically gloomy Larkin begins to sound more and more like a pragmatist.
This woman has been sent to jail because education for children is compulsory and the state is the monopoly provider. Sadly, this paradigm is now a fixture of just about all Western societies but has anybody thought to ask the children themselves if this process is something that they either want or need? Clearly, the two little girls in question were fed up with being forced to traipse day after day to a draughty, municipal building and sat at a desk while a low-grade public servant with halitosis and a short temper drones at them about the French Revolution. Or Algorithms. Or something.
I am at a loss to understand how these two children, or the society of which they are a part, have anything to gain from being forced back into a situation where they are likely to be nothing except sullen and resentful prisoners? Very few people take the view that forcing human beings to work in state-owned factories on government-mandated projects will be in any way beneficial yet nearly everybody is entrenched in the dogmatic belief that doing the very same thing to human beings under the age of 18 will be nothing but beneficial.
This is an orthodoxy to which I once held myself: education is good, but children don’t realise this. Therefore prescribed and generally agreed packages of learning must be forced on them for their own good. Is this true? I must confess that I have no ready alternatives available nor any glib answers on what parents should do instead. But I do know that I am increasingly unsettled by noxious enforcements of the kind reported above and by the quiet, persuasive ideas of people like Alice Bachini.
Compulsory education is about compulsion not education. It is a received wisdom to which I am finding it increasingly difficult to subscribe and which I believe should be revisited and re-examined at a systemic level.
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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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