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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There’s a White Rose angle to the Pfizer drugs story, and of course Pfizer aren’t the only drugs company involved. They just seem to have a higher profile.
The present situation is that the Canadian government is making it a condition of sale for the drugs companies that in Canada they must charge less for their drugs than they would like to. In the USA no such rule applies, and the prices charged for their drugs are higher. So, some Canadian retailers of drugs are, as predicted, making money by selling on some of the drugs they buy at the cheap rate, back to the USA.
This has caused the drug companies to intensify their already elaborate product tracking efforts so that they can spot Canadian retailers who are doing this.
Drug companies have sophisticated means of controlling imports. Data-tracking companies keep close tabs on doctors’ prescriptions, so companies are keenly aware of actual local demand in much of the industrialized world. The companies also closely track buying trends. When drug orders at a particular pharmacy spike in the absence of a similar jump in nearby doctors’ prescriptions, executives investigate.
Drug wholesalers also help manufacturers track these trends. “Together with the manufacturers, we have worked to identify the pharmacies that have been shipping back illegally,” said Larry Kurtz, a spokesman for the McKesson Corporation, one of the largest drug wholesalers in the United States and Canada.
The general point: when an economy is working without state interference, a seller is glad to sell to anybody, so long as the seller is willing to pay the asked-for price. Once he has, great. The buyer can then do with the product anything he likes, including resell it to someone else. The seller, in other words, will have no motive to spy on buyers to see what they do with the product. But in an interfered-with market, sellers do have a motive for such tracking.
Well, correction. Sellers often do want to know what buyers do with products. It’s called market research. But if a customer wants to buy a product, but doesn’t want to cooperate in such market research, the seller usually takes the money and does the business, and lays off with the market research.
Not so, with these errant Canadian drugs retailers. They definitely don’t want to tell the drugs companies how they are using their products, if they are using them by reselling back to the USA. But the drugs companies really want to know about this. If that makes for a fight, too bad. The drugs companies still want to know. The retailers are playing dirty if they resell to the USA. The drugs companies will also want to play rather dirty, to find out, the way they never would to do mere market research. It all makes for bad vibes, and creates a drugs-companies-lead demand for further intrusive and creepy product tracking systems which normally they might shun, on the grounds that regular customers might not like such arrangements.
The American Liberty Foundation has an hilarious advert in progress called “Suzie and the Senator” which you can listen to here. They have previously produced some of the best Second Amendment adverts that have ever aired and are now targetting Washington DC with intent to Down Size.
If you like what you hear, you may make a donation via the website. It is up to you to ensure “Suzie and the Senator” and ALF’s other marvelous adverts go on the air.
Watching the news on the ITN television channel last night, the lead item was about the current high temperatures we are experiencing at the moment. What I thought was interesting was the way in which presenter David Suchet announced that “global warming is happening” as if it were no more controversial a statement than to say that night follows day.
Over at the BBC website, meanwhile, you can read all about climate change. Again, the main page presents climate change as a given assumption. There is no place for dissent, scepticism or doubt. For that you have to delve into places like the recent book by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, etc.
Now, unlike some red-blooded defenders of free enterprise, I do not challenge the Greenhouse Effect case as something being put around by neo-luddite technophobes and control freaks. It may just be that the Greenhouse Effect is genuinely occuring. If so, then a good question for the likes of liberty-loving folk is to ask what, if anything, can citizens in a liberal order do about it?
It seems to me that this is a more interesting way to present our case rather than simply say, when hearing the latest piece of doomongering, that so-and-so is a Luddite.
In the meantime, thank heavens for the invention of air conditioning.
Sometimes a good story hides an even better one. In the sidebar of the Sun page quoted by Robert Clayton Dean I read:
And all that booze and the need for skimpy summerwear is good news for Durex condom maker SSL INTERNATIONAL, which firmed 1.5p to 335.
The European Commission is to fine Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corp for what it claims is the firms’ continuing misuse of its ‘dominant’ market position and will force it to change how its Media Player software is distributed, according to Reuters.
I don’t want to get into the complex issues of whether Gates has or has not ‘abused’ his market position in any way but rather address the core issue: does Bill Gates and his colleagues have a right to exploit the source code they have created, or not? If Microsoft cannot do so, what is the point of intellectual property rights and patents? And how does the Commission judge if a firm X holds a ‘dominant’ position in a particular market? Is it claiming that Microsoft salesmen force to us to buy their products at the point of a gun? Surely not.
Using alternatives to Micrsosoft’s products may be – and often is – inconvenient. Ask any computer user. But unless the EU, the U.S. Justice Dept or any other bunch of property-right grabbers can show that a firm forces us to use its products, such claims should be treated with scorn. Just because a firm is very big, as Microsoft unquestionably is, does not by itself confer coercive power on such a firm. Of course such firms can try to acquire this by screwing privileges out of government, but that is a separate issue.
Bill Gates is not everyone’s idea of a victim, and frankly he is not the most endearing of business leaders. That, however, is besides the point. He and his colleagues created a source code. Over the years, and due to some savvy business decisions, they have made this code the basis of a hugely successful business. Obviously this is mighty troubling to some, even those who may claim to be in favour of free enterprise.
The EU is telling Bill Gates, “Don’t get too big for your boots, and certainly don’t get too successful”.
Following on from Mr Carr’s education piece, earlier in the week, comes further ‘pragmatic’ news from the UK’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
In a bid to make the UK’s A-level mathematics courses more ‘accessible’, this august and incorruptible State body has announced it will be making the subject even ‘easier’. Is this possible? And please don’t laugh at the next bit, it’s really not funny. To study it, you won’t even need to have studied elementary algebra, beforehand. Yep, you heard that right.
No doubt the honest government which rules us won’t then take the increased grades, which they hope will result from this heavyweight dumbing-down operation, and use them to promote how effective their education policies have been? Yeah, right.
Is the UK the only country in the world in which even Homer Simpson could get an A* grade, in a higher education mathematics qualification? Maybe, not this year. But give them a chance. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually. Everyone must have prizes.
In the meantime, the poisoned A-level gold standard is going the same way as the Pound Sterling gold standard, i.e. straight down the pan to get the UK government off the hook of its own continuing failure. Expect all private schools to abandon A-levels, entirely, within the next few years, to replace them with the International Baccalaureate. A-levels will then become purely the concern of the State system, which will suit the State admirably, as they’ll be able to inflate their achievements to levels of magnificence previously undreamed of, without any reference required to any kind of external reality. What a banana.
So as I gaze lovingly at my A-level certificate, up there on the wall, I wonder if now is not the time to replace it with a small poster of Kylie Minogue, in the hope that when she visits she’ll be much more impressed. I should be so lucky.
US Senate will be voting on a proposed law that would prevent the taxation of Internet access. The Internet Tax Non-Discrimination Act was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee whose approval sends the measure to the full Senate for a vote. Computerworld reports:
The bill, introduced by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), would make permanent a five-year-old moratorium on Internet-specific taxes. Congress first approved a three-year moratorium in 1998 and renewed it again in 2001, but it’s now set to expire on November 1st.
The moratorium prohibits taxes on Internet access, discriminatory taxes on purchases made over the Internet and the double-taxation of Internet commerce (by two different states, for instance). It doesn’t, however, outlaw the collection of sales taxes on items bought in Internet transactions.
All technologies used to provide Internet access, which now include wireless, Digital Subscriber Line, cable modem and dial-up connections would be exempt.
Sounds like good news to me. And if TCPA/TCG and Palladium/NGSCB were stopped somehow, now that would be great news!
According to Fox News, the FBI has released a new list of “things that can be used as weapons”. Airport security personnel are being briefed on how to spot the new no-no’s. I am certain we are all pleased the FBI are on their toes. In a mere two years they have discovered hidden knives and other weapons are available in martial arts catalogues. I’m sure we will all breathe easier knowing we are now completely safe.
I am of course being facetious. The list is inadequate and will always be so. They could perhaps force us to check everything at the ticket counter and fly naked. That certainly would limit the possibilities for smuggling knives on board. While the idea does have its’ charms and would certainly ease the boredom of long transoceanic flights, it would be insufficient. There is an old adage: “There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous people.” In the hands of a trained warrior virtually anything is a deadly weapon quite capable of intimidation of the cowardly. One can do terrible things with bare hands.
So let’s get real guys. You are wasting your time and ours at the gate. You will fail to spot the terrorists or their weapons. They will do something you have not thought of. They will get on board a number of airliners again one day. They will imagine they can intimidate an airliner full of Americans into submission again… and we, the flying public will then tear them into pieces too small for burial.
There is a field in Western Pennsylvania that shows who the truly dangerous people are.
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening…
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.
Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever… that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.
You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as ‘hate speech’ by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships… and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.
And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.
I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that…The state is not your friend.
More and faster please.
Who makes the crucial decision about whether to prosecute in the first place? And who picks the person who does this? And who have they picked?
From today’s Independent:
The government was accused of “rampant cronyism” last night after a barrister from Cherie Blair’s law firm was named as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
Ken Macdonald, a founding member of Matrix Chambers, where the Prime Minister’s wife practises under her maiden name Cherie Booth, will become Director of Public Prosecutions in the autumn.
Doesn’t sound good, put like that, does it?
A spokeswoman for the CPS said Mr Macdonald had been appointed to the £145,000-a-year post by a panel of impartial senior civil servants and legal figures. She said: “The selection process was completely transparent and accountable. It was an open competition. The fact he comes from a distinguished chambers signals that he is a leading barrister, but the chambers he comes from had no other bearing on the appointment.”
I suppose that could be true.
SFGate.com reports on a legal challenge to the Patriot Act:
Civil rights lawyers filed a challenge Tuesday to a section of the federal Patriot Act that makes it illegal to provide “expert advice and assistance” to groups with alleged links to terrorists.
The ban is unconstitutionally vague and should be struck down, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights argued in a motion filed in federal court.
Some of Samizdata’s more socially conservative readers seem to think gay marriage is a bad idea. But trying to work out why they hold that view is, at least at first, puzzling. They rail against social freedom saying that it leads to social degradation and also to lots of government spending. Well, I’m against ‘social degradation’ and ‘government spending’. So why don’t I agree with them?
The reality is that homosexual marriage would not lead to any degradation whatsoever. Homosexuals already live in a society where on the whole they are able to be open about their sexuality, and are able to have sex without the government arresting them. If the government lets two gay people marry, that if anything encourages fidelity. If you ask social conservatives to explain how this causes social degradation, the response is… BLANK.
The idea that homosexual marriage means that government spending has to go up is just plainly stupid. Homosexuals don’t have children, so they don’t impose the cost of education on the taxpayer. They generally die younger (although I suspect this will change), meaning they impose less cost in terms of pensions. If they split up, the taxpayer doesn’t have to look after the mother because both partners generally work.
The social conservative arguments are quite obviously bogus.
Could the real reason why social conservatives oppose gay marriage be much simpler? They oppose it because they hate gay people. They think it’s disgusting what these faggots do. They think the state should punish them for their depravity.
If not, could they perhaps explain themselves?
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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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