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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Nothing like a nice bit of Frog-bashing to fire up the commentariat and get the weekend off to a good start.
Alstom, builder of high speed trains (TGV), nuclear plants and cruise liners, was the showcase of French technology. It is now the showcase of French bankruptcy.
Like France, Alstom is badly managed, unable to balance its accounts, and encumbered with debt. Alstom illustrates the failure of French “social-capitalism,” a state driven capitalism that is actually closer to socialism.
Hmm. State-driven capitalism. Where have we heard of that before?
The socialo-gaullist elites, who control French media groups, buy their support by distributing money to Communist (CGT) and Trotskyite (FO) unions, to 7 million public servants (often useless), to 12 million retirees (often pre-retired), plus millions of immigrants living on welfare. But French politicians are so “generous” that even with the highest taxes of any OECD country, they chronically accumulate huge debts in all public entities: state, regions, cities, social programs, public companies. Having been unable to balance any French budget for more than 30 years, they are driving France to a financial crisis that will shake all of Europe.
A very satisfying rant against the enarquist elite ensues, bringing on a moment of nostalgia for past French contributions to the cause of liberty.
Matthew O’Keeffe also feels the same pangs as Johnathan Pearce at the passing of that magnificent artifact of the 1960’s
I had mixed feelings watching the footage of Concorde’s last flight today.
Concorde belongs with Eurotunnel in the category of things which should never really have been built – at least not by profit-seeking realists. This may even be unfair to Eurotunnel which will now be with us in perpetuity and was built with private money. Concorde, by contrast, was financed by the British and French taxpayers at the behest of the very ridiculous Tony Benn (as Minister for White Hot Technology or some such nonsense). And now it is heading for the scrapyards.
And yet, and yet, through the 1980’s and 1990’s Concorde was the very symbol of the bull market. The shock troops of capitalism could lunch in London before having dinner and closing their deals in New York (it never really made sense the other way round, incidentally, on account of the time differences). As Jeremy Clarkson put it on the radio today, fast is good.
I travelled on the rocket only once myself – and that was the day after the Paris crash. I had a business trip to Wall Street planned that week, purely by chance. Meanwhile, all the supermodels, actors and other weak-kneed types had cancelled their Concorde tickets leaving British Airways happy to upgrade me from Club World to Concorde – with a seat in row one to boot! I was almost ecstatic as we went through the sound barrier and promptly ordered a bottle of their finest champagne – much to the disapproval of the partners from Goldman Sachs who were siiting next to me. Happy days …
One of the more striking statistics of 9-11 is that Concorde lost 40 of its frequent flyers. I’m not sure how many Concorde frequent flyers there could have been but my guess would be not more than a few hundred. Concorde has suffered from the slump in the stock markets on either side of the Atlantic in general but from the particular horror of 9-11.
To end on an optimistic note, historians may look back on this day as the real start of the next big upturn in the world’s economies. One thing that denotes economic cycles is that companies nearly always invest too heavily at the top – and cut back too savagely at the bottom. (British Airways is particularly bad in its timing – they sold Go for £100m to venture capitalists who sold it on to EasyJet a year later for £400m). That our national carrier should retire its flagship, on a route between the two centres of world capitalism, suggests to me that we may be at such a trough point right now. So farewell Concorde – but here’s to the next twenty year bull market.
Matthew O’Keeffe
Yep, I know it was supported by taxpayers’ money (boo, hiss) but I think one would have a piece of brain missing not to feel a pang of sadness that Concorde, the world’s only supersonic jet airliner, has landed for the last time at Britain’s Heathrow airport. An incredible plane, beautiful and able to take folk across the Atlantic at a speed unthinkable to our ancestors.
As a free marketeer, I do of course recognise that state-backed endeavours such as this are largely indefensible, particularly as only the rich could take advantage of something paid for by the poorest taxpayer. But on a more upbeat note, let’s hope that in the years to come, the possibility of superfast transport such as this remains a reality, and not just the stuff of science fiction novels.
And that is why, like Dale Amon and other contributors to this blog, I am eagerly awaiting the start of the race for the X-:Prize. You can read about all the privately-funded space ventures involved here
The age of Concorde is over. But another age may hopefully be about to begin. Chocks away!
Ivelina Konstantinova has made the transition from native of a small city in Bulgaria to US citizen and USAF Airman serving in the Middle East:
“I wanted to serve my country, continue my education, and travel,” said Senior Airman Konstantinova, a recreation services specialist assigned to the 379th Expeditionary Services Squadron here. “The military opened doors. And even though I may not be a natural citizen, I feel proud to serve America.”
With people like her out there, keep those “…huddled masses yearning to breathe free” coming!
Adriana & I recently returned from a two week business/fun trip to the USA which took us to initially to New Jersey for a couple days…
Samizdatista Walter Uhlman demonstrates conclusively
that things are… bigger… in America
Adriana thought she should practice a little before venturing out
And thence to Los Angeles, where we lurked in the stygian cigar fog that is Brian Linse‘s rather nice home in the Hollywood Hills. We also ventured from there into the equally pungent Cigar Club The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, as this proved to be the perpetual hang-out of our illustrious host. Therein amongst its Armani’ed and Prada’ed denizens, we encountered the splendid actor Robert Davi, who had some, interesting, things to say to us which I cannot repeat 
Welcome to Los Angeles!
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
your papers, please
→ Continue reading: Odyssey across America
Mark Steyn is one of those writers whose effortless prose intimidates me into not taking up a writing career. An expat Canadian who lives in New Hampshire, he has a very nice piece on the apparently permanent supine position that conservatism has assumed in England. Starting about halfway down, though, he gets to the really interesting part, when he talks about the dangers of centralization and the benefits of devolved power:
Conservatism should be committed to as decentralised a politics as possible. If my town has lousy policing, it’s no skin off my neighbours 15 miles down the road. Conversely, if my town hits on a good idea, my neighbours are happy to borrow it. Decentralisation is the best way to ensure a dynamic political culture, full of low-key field studies. That’s one reason why every good idea Britain’s law-and-order monopoly takes up was started in a local American jurisdiction (the ‘broken window’ theory) and every bad idea was cooked up by the national Home Office bureaucracy (the gun ban).
Decentralisation is also the best way to get new politicians in. London’s Euroleft conventional wisdom disdains not only the rude unlovely electorate at large but also any representatives chosen from without the full-time political class. As the Guardian sniffed, ‘Putting Arnie in charge of the world’s fifth largest economy is like making Benny Hill Chancellor of the Exchequer: quirky but unreal — and not very funny.’ Get a grip, lads. Benny Hill would have made a terrific chancellor.
Go for the wit. Stay for the ideas. Ponder how to raise decentralization and devolution on the political radar screen.
There is an enormous hill to climb, of course – politics seems to be subject to a law of centripetal gravitational convergence, where power naturally centralizes, but only devolves during catastrophes or revolutions. Still, devolution strikes me as a fundamentally libertarian project, if for no other reason than it lays the groundwork for that bane of statism – competition between jurisdictions.
George Galloway has been expelled from the Labour Party. Well, well, well. I wonder on whose toes he trodded. Perhaps Tony’s? He must have seriously pissed off the NuLabour powers to be since expulsions from the party are extremely rare.
But to be fair he was accused of inciting Arabs to fight coalition troops during the Iraq war and encouraging British troops to disobey what he called “illegal orders”. Although the official reason for giving the flamboyant Mr Galloway MP a boot was his denouncement of U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair as “wolves” during the Iraq war, there were other charges, most of stemming from an interview the left-wing firebrand gave to Abu Dhabi Television in March 2003.
The charges faced by Mr Galloway before the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party were understood to be that:
- He incited Arabs to fight British troops
- He incited British troops to defy orders
- He incited Plymouth voters to reject Labour MPs
- He threatened to stand against Labour
- He backed an anti-war candidate in Preston
He was found guilty of all but the third charge.
His supporters praised him for speaking his mind while his critics accused him of being an apologist for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom he visited in 2002, and mockingly labelled him “MP for Baghdad Central”. He was defiant to the end, telling reporters:
This was a politically motivated kangaroo court whose verdict had been written in advance in the best tradition of political show trials.
I want to apologise to the wolf. Mr Bush and Mr Blair are a jackal and a jackass. I will ensure Mr Blair regrets this day.
Unfortunately, Mr Galloway has supporters and the anti-war movement will now turn him into their very own martyr. Let’s just sit back and watch the garbage percolate through the British political system.
Many of you know me already. As I have been haunting the blogosphere for the last three years through comments, emails, and guest articles. Those of you that do not will in due time, so I will skip the typical bio/Curriculum Vitae stuff. I was going to post a Micklethwaitian tale of my 50 mile journey of Southern California’s quite righteously maligned public transit system to Brian Linse’s blogger bash, where I met Perry & Adriana face-to-face for the first time. But that got a bit longish for a forum such as this, so I guess I will have to save it for a chapter in my memoirs.
One of the subjects which has piqued my fancy recently is the concept of N-dimensional variants on the classic Nolan chart. This was initiated a few weeks ago when I read this TCS article by Eugene Miller, on a link from Virginia Postrel. In it Miller attempts, quite successfully, to typify political philosophies on a Nolanesce grid – embrace of change forming one axis, and the need for control over change forming the other.
click for larger image
It occurred to me that one could map this function on top of the typical Nolan chart by equating ‘liberty’ with ‘change’. Further analysis led me to sumise that this conjunction of the two concepts was better expressed in differentials. But, for the purposes of both brevity and accessibility, we will spare that dissertation for another day.
Further indulgence of my curiosity led me to this article by Kelley L. Ross. Therein, Ross expands upon the basic Nolan chart with another dimension of what form of government safeguards what liberties (or not). It’s an interesting read. But the average Samizdata.net reader would likely find the first ten pages review, and should skip right to Liberties in Three Dimensions. Although, this little graphic, concerning the US Supreme Court is rather interesting:
click for larger image
The final seven or so pages constitute the meat of the article, where he makes the point that democracy is no guarantor of liberty. In it, he makes an interesting and rather open-ended point with this:
A Republican form was envisioned by people like James Madison, who wished to impose practical, and not just theoretical limits on government by the use of the Separation of Powers and a system of Checks and Balances. This worked well enough but was ultimately undermined by one grave oversight: The United States Constitution provided no mechanism for its own enforcement. That task was soon taken up by the Supreme Court, but Thomas Jefferson realized that the Supreme Court, as a part of the federal government, could not be trusted to faithfully maintain the limits to the power of the federal government itself: “How can we expect impartial decision between the General government, of which they are themselves so eminent a part, and an individual State, from which they have nothing to hope or fear?”
[Autobiography]
In the end, especially during the Civil War, World War I, the New Deal, and the Sixties, the Supreme Court began to concede extra-Constitutional powers to the federal government simply on the principle that it wanted them. The only mechanism that existed to check the failures of the Court was the torturous avenue of Constitutional Amendment, politically impossible when so many people had begun to believe that unlimited power for the federal government was actually a good thing. And then again, it is hard to know how a newer version of the 10th Amendment could be more plainly worded than the old one. A new Amendment would have to descend to the ignoble level of contradicting specific Supreme Court pronouncements that the original Amendment was simply a “tautology” or “truism” that wasn’t really meant to limit federal power. (See Two Logical Errors in Constitutional Jurisprudence.) An effectively updated Constitution would have to address all the sophistry and dishonesty that was used to undermine the original one, besides providing for such additional checks and balances as would abolish the dictatorial powers of the Court.
Indeed, how does one establish practical limitations on power within a republic? Jefferson’s answer was to have an armed revolution every twenty years or so. Serious talk of that today will get you twenty years or so behind bars.
A hastily convened Blogger Booze Up has been called by Gavin Sheridan and Dan Gillmor
When: Friday at 6:30 pm.
Where: Red Lion, Westminster, 48 Parliament St.
Who: Whoever wants to show up.
Why: You have to ask?
I am about to install some bot-killing software, so if comments happen to break for awhile or the site rolls over with its itty bitty paws flailing in the air, you will know why…
Update: Samizdata.net comments will now require you to enter a security code that you copy off a graphic that will appear in the comment pop-up window. This should prevent spam-bots from auto-posting their garbage all over the blog.
Also, we have updated some code to stop spammers harvesting the e-mail addresses of commenters as well.
 
In Australia it is common for voters to receive letters from their political representatives, and these letters are becoming more and more sophisticated in targeting the interests of the individual voters.
The two major political parties are able to do this because they have established databases. The inner workings of the databases have been somewhat elusive, but Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen have written an academic paper (warning- PDF file) on how these databases work. The implications for the privacy of voters are odious, especially considering the temptations for political parties in government to cross check their party databases with government ones.
I found this via Ken Parish, and check out the comments on his post where Wayne Errington makes some further good points about the database’s operation. He says the saving grace (so far) is that the political parties are actually rather slack in maintaining their databases; however, as time goes on, you can expect the party machines to become more professional in this matter.
noun. The community of people who leave comments on a blog.
Usage: “We got some useful suggestion from the commentariat today on how to deal the spammer problem.”
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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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