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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I happened to catch the BBC Radio 5 sports punditry show Fighting Talk on Saturday. One topic under discussion was whether soccer’s FA Premier League should “do something” about dominance of the current top three teams in the league, it being alleged that their success made the rest of the league boring. One of the pundits was against this notion, making the point that, as little as 15 years ago, there were different dominant teams. Those who celebrated Liverpool’s invulnerability in the mid 1980s could hardly have imagined that that club’s place would be taken by Manchester United in the 1990s. Indeed, barely six months ago, nobody could have predicted the emergence of oligarch-funded Chelsea as title contenders. She argued that the league had evolved “organically” – any problems would tend to correct themselves – and lamented the prospect of a “genetically engineered” league with structures designed to hobble the successful teams and boost the mediocre.
I thought it was interesting to hear those specific terms used to support a laissez faire position and it struck me that there is a paradox about environmentalism. That is that, while it holds that organic processes are desirable in food production and any kind of “artificial engineering” is bad, it holds that the reverse applies to society and the economy. Capitalism has developed without a plan. Nobody had to sit down and design civil society. Yet these natural phenomena are scorned by the likes of the Green party whose underlying premise is that society should be re-engineered so that it can become “more natural”.
At least one member of the ‘great and the good’ seems to think that enterprise is important:
Britain will become a 21st century theme park, unless more is done to create an enterprise culture, a business leader has warned.
George Cox, head of the Institute of Directors, warned the UK was at risk of being reduced to “selling…souvenirs”.
A “can do” mentality must be instilled in young people to benefit business, Mr Cox added.
The comments came ahead of a key government conference on the issue, to be held in London on Monday.
Mr Cox welcomed the talks involving businessmen and women and politicians aimed at boosting enterprise.
Since it is unlikely that an invitation to this event is going to be extended to any members of the Samizdata Team, I expect that the politicians concerned are not going to hear the one thing that they should be told: that the way to ‘boost’ enterprise is to unboost themselves.
If youngsters are being deterred from starting their own businesses then they are hardly to be blamed. Who wants to have to spend most of their time, effort and intellectual energy steering a path through a vast forest of regulations, directives and laws only to watch the taxman take a big, wet, juicy bite out of the little profit you have managed to earn. And, to top it all off, you then switch on the TV or open the morning newspaper only to be told that you are ‘the enemy of the people’.
Contrast this with going for a job in the public sector which will give you a guaranteed income, a job for life and the steadfast loyalty and service of the political classes.
It’s a no-brainer. Life is too short.
Ironic, is it not, that Mr Cox and other business leaders worried about the apparent decline in enterprise are taking their concerns to the very people who are responsible for suppressing it? He will get nowhere.
What he may get for his trouble (apart from a round of champagne cocktails and a plate of canâpes) is a set of ‘Enterprise Regulations’. Mock not, that is very possibly going to be the only tangible outcome and there is no shortage of people either within government or elsewhere who will earnestly see that as a solution.
Mr Cox is to be applauded for at least raising the question. The answer will prove very elusive. How on earth does anybody expect a ‘can do’ spirit to flourish in a political and cultural ethos of ‘should not do’?
Mark Steyn has been running his columns from the 1999 Clinton impeachment trial over at his website, and they are just priceless. The link is likely to rot soon (its not a permalink), so get it while it is hot!
A taste:
The intern has landed. She had, as is her wont, been keeping her head down, but on Saturday, at the behest of a federal judge, Monica Lewinsky returned to Washington for a “debriefing” with House managers (that means an interview, not that her thong’s been subpoenaed).
No larger point; just a pointer for the political junkies to some good stuff.
I last logged out leaving the Samizdata just as I like it. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Yes, it may have been a bit shambolic and démodé but it was comforting and familiar like an old friend or a favourite armchair.
Only look at what has happened! I turn my back for a few hours and some anally-retentive busybodies have gone and called in the Feng Shui consultants. Now my loveable, historical old Blog has been has been consigned to the scrap heap and replaced with this ultra-hi-tech, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art thingy which they are probably going to tell me has been conceived for ‘balance’ or ‘harmony’ or ‘enhanced Chi‘ or something.
And as if that act of wanton cultural vandalism was not enough they have also furnished me with a new-fangled set of coding instructions with ‘stylesheets’ and ‘javascript’ and ‘xhtml’ this and ‘attribute’ that. The whole thing reads like stereo-assembly instructions. How is this old dog supposed to learn all these new tricks? It took me look enough to programme me the first time round. They will doubtless have to ship me off to the manufacturer now to be re-chipped and re-booted.
Or maybe they are planning to give me a make-over. Yes, I bet they are. After all age and experience counts for nothing these days. It’s all about image, image, image and daresay I am no longer regarded as sufficiently ‘happening’ anymore. I can see myself now, being prodded and poked around by a squadron of invidious design-gurus (“Dahhling, that haircut is just sooooo 2003″).
I would write a letter of complaint to these soulless technocrats but what good would it do? Besides they have all probably swanned off to some fashionable Islington eatery where they are quaffing down the polenta with rocket salad and feeling very smug about being so ‘cool’ and a la mode.
Bah! It’s all humbug.
For some years, I have preferred to take my holidays around the Baltic (herewith classified as Eastern Europe, because it is north east of the British Isles and the Finns come from the Urals anyway). Larking about in the Nordic and Baltic countries always includes a visit to the local museum concerning the Second World War and the Resistance. These museums often give a snapshot of the the way these countries view themselves, their place in the world and their history.
The most disappointing museum that I ever came across was in Helsinki, Finland. Their military museum, near the Lutheran Cathedral, included an exhibition covering the Finnish contribution to the Second World War which finished at the end of the Winter War. The wartime alliance with Germany from 1941, which one could view as a necessary defence against Stalinism on the grounds that my enemy’s enemy is my friend was excised from their exhibition. This was the state of play in 2000 and I haven’t been back to the museum since, so they may have extended the scope since but the omission at that time was rather surprising. → Continue reading: Resistance and War Museums
As our regular readers will notice, Samizdata.net has had a major re-design and functional upgrade. The old site was great but things moves on and it was time for an upgrade. Take a moment to examine all the new options and links! Also see the revamped domain page and blogging glossary!
We would like to thanks thank the Dissident Frogman for his really great work.
Samizdata.net may be unavailable for a while today and tomorrow as we work to upgrade our software. Also we will be bring you some interesting… changes 
This week’s Economist has an article on online retailing in the UK. The basic gist of the story is simply that in the last six months it has really taken off. Online sales in November-December were 60 percent greater than in the lead in to Christmas 2002. Forrester Research forecasts that 5.7% of the British retail market will be online sales in 2004, compared to 5.6% in the US. (Actually, the difference is greater than this, as the US number includes travel and auctions, and the British number does not).
This is entirely consistent with my own impressions of the situation, and indeed my own behaviour in the last six months. I have been buying certain things (most prominently books) online for quite a few years now, but the number and more importantly the diversity of the things I have been buying has exploded in the last twelve months. Okay, my personal tastes in shopping perhaps aren’t that of the average consumer – I buy too many electronic products, no doubt – but I have found that the number of websites I can find selling almost any of the things I want to buy has increased enormously.
Whereas in the insane dot com boom years there were lots of large capitalised businesses without that good an idea of their business model and with few customers, a second wave of internet retailers seem to have come into being that are small, focused, and lean. For electronics there suddenly seem to be lots of little garage based stores, selling a good selection of one very specialist type of product. The credit card handling is outsourced to a company that specialises in handling credit card transactions for small internet retailers, off the shelf software is used to run the website and keep track of inventory, suppliers have to be found, orders have to be packed and presumably the post office has to be asked to send a truck round once a day to collect the filled orders. No expensive retail premises have to be rented, and there are no losses to shoplifting. The honesty of such retailers is generally not an issue. The level of consumer protection given to credit card holders is such that the retailer will be dropped instantly by the company to which it outsources its credit card processing if it fails to deliver what it promises. And in any event other web sites exist that provide feedback on online retailers.
What does all this mean? → Continue reading: Thoughts on the online retail business, and why Britain leads the world.
Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night’s episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the “Colossus” computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his “difference engine”. Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage’s machine, and it worked.
But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.
I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.
For many years now, I’ve been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage’s restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … “it worked”, which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.
So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.
British Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge, has been publicly displaying her licensed copy of ‘Root Causes Version 2.0’:
“I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from,” Dr Tonge told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
She was speaking to a pro-Palestinian lobby when she said of Palestinian suicide bombers: “If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider becoming one myself.”
Well, if Mrs Tonge feels that she really must blow herself to smithereens, then so be it. But before she turns herself into an abstract art installation, I hope someone takes the trouble to ask her for an explanation of this:
With the identification of two suicide bombers in Israel as British subjects, Britain faced suggestions Thursday that young British Muslims, previously associated with militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere had now shifted focus to terrorism in the Middle East.
The identification as British citizens of Asif Hanif, 21, who died in a bomb attack that killed three people in a Tel Aviv nightclub Wednesday, and an accomplice, Omar Sharif, 27, also represented the first known instance in recent years of Britons prepared to kill themselves launching a terror attack. The news seemed to leave British officials stunned. “We think that the terrorists had British passports, which is something especially sad,” said Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador in Israel.
As on previous occasions when British Muslims were found to have been fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan or planning alleged terrorism in Britain, the suspected terrorists seemed to have grown up in innocuous, middle-class or blue-collar environments far from the conflicts they came to espouse as their own. That seemed to differentiate them from the more usual image of suicide bombers molded by the hardships of Gaza or the West Bank.
Small wonder that people like Mrs Tonge have conveniently chosen to forget this particular case of ‘desperation’.
The growing examples of Western firms outsourcing or “offshoring” jobs, including hi-tech ones in software, to locations such as India has triggered a certain amount of bleating in parts of the commentariat as well as some excellent responses, such as at the blog Catallarchy. What this does show, however, is that those nations best able to cope with the ever-shifting sands of the global economy are those with the ability to harness skills to best effect.
For some time, we self-deprecating Brits have tended to downplay the extent to which we can still punch our economic weight in such a harshly competitive world economy. Well, this entertaining book, Backroom Boys, by Francis Spufford (never heard of him before, BTW) is a pleasurable, if sometimes maddening account of how the British scientists have pioneered or collaborated in a range of economic fields, such as the early space race of the 1950s and 1960s, computer games, the supersonic jet plane Concorde, and perhaps most significant for our present lives – mobile phones.
What I particularly liked about Spufford’s book is how he got under the skin of how scientists work and co-operate with one another. He nailed home the point that in scientific establishments, both in the public and private sector, what counts for a scientist is not necessarily big money, but the respect of one’s peers. For a scientist, you are respected as much for the ideas you share with your peers as to how many times you get your face on the front of Time magazine. In short, he says scientists operate an intellectual “gift economy” where altruism pays.
The book also shows how British scientific efforts, often “hobbled” by supposed lack of funds, often had to adapt and employ more nimble ways of research while their better-funded American rivals could just bully ahead. The best example, of course, is the contrast between Britain’s puny efforts to launch its own space programme, including the Black Arrow rocket programme, and the various endeavours of NASA. (I wonder how many readers know Britain had this programme? I certainly did not).
The story of how Concorde, a collaborative Anglo-French venture came into being and was supported by the taxpayer before eventually being drawn into the maw of privatised British Airways was instructive. Libertarian purists will, of course, blanche at the idea of such a plane being created with tax funds in the first place. I side with them, but I could not help noticing that Concorde came into its own as part of an overall business package when BA became a private business. There is a lot of interesting description in the book about the “halo” effect, whereby a luxury, loss-making entity like Concorde is kept within a business to make the whole operation more appealing. Spufford also reflects about the nature of luxury goods and how they are priced. It may seem irrational that a Concorde seat costs X times more than that of a seat on a Boeing 747, but making the seat so costly was part of the cachet, like the cost of a Rolex watch or an Aston Martin sports car.
Perhaps in a moment of rare hubris, Spufford ends his book speculating about the now-fated Beagle 2 Mars project. He dreams that a “British suitcase is on Mars”. Oh well, you cannot win ’em all.
Earlier this evening the launch was held at the Institute of Economic Affairs of Dennis O’Keeffe’s translation of Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, which is published by Liberty Fund Inc. Dennis is to be congratulated for this mighty undertaking, which is bound to reverberate through the Anglosphere in the months and years to come.
At the IEA, Dennis spoke only briefly. Rather than regale us at length with his own views of Benjamin Constant, he let the man speak to us for himself. We were offered the following few Constant quotations. Dennis commented hardly at all other than to note how much sense they still made of the people and events of our own time:
How bizarre that those who called themselves ardent friends of freedom have worked so relentlessly to destroy the natural basis of patriotism, to replace it with a false passion for an abstract being, for a general idea deprived of everything which strikes the imagination or speaks to memory. (p.326)
People always take mediocrity as peaceful. It is peaceful only when it is locked up. When chance invests it with power, it is a thousand times more incalculable in its motion, more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive than talent,… (pp. 329-40)
This next one, said Dennis, could – its extreme eloquence aside – have as easily been said by the most committed twenty first century libertarian:
… society has no right to be unjust to a single one of its members, … the whole society minus one, is not authorised to obstruct the latter in his opinions, nor in those actions which are not harmful, in the use of his property or the exercise of his labour, save in those cases where that use or that exercise would obstruct another individual possessing the same rights. (p. 384)
The final one, said Dennis, he could not supply a page number for, despite a lot of searching. It had just stuck in his mind.
If human nature is a good argument against freedom, it is an even better one against despotism.
I am ashamed to admit that until now, for me, Benjamin Constant has only been a name. Not any more. I bought the book, and I recommend you do too if you are at all interested in the history of liberty and of the idea of liberty.
UPDATE: Here is what Benjamin Constant looked like.
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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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