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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Totalitarianism is any political system in which a citizen is totally subject to state authority in all aspects of day-to-day life.
– free-definition.com
Britain and the United States are not what could be reasonably called totalitarian states. The ‘modern’ understanding of what a totalitarian state is falls within frames of reference conjuring up the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: national systems which believed that the state was an all encompassing thing that superseded society, in fact replacing civil society, in the manner advocated by Rousseau and others. To be a totalitarian means a total state in which quite simply no aspect of human life is beyond the remit of the political state.
Because both of these well known forms of totalitarianism enforced their political will via mass murder on a biblical scale, that disguises the fact that National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union differed quite significantly in many ways. Just being ‘total states’ does not mean they were the same kind of total state. Whereas the Soviets simply nationalised literally everything (i.e. took direct political control of all means of production) and maintained control via the supply of, well, everything, Nazi Germany retained large numbers of privately owned companies which were ‘free’ to trade and make several profits provided they did so in ways which complied with regulations and essential national strategic objectives: Willi Messerschmitt was free to run his company, provided he did not decide to stop making aircraft and instead become a refrigerator manufacturing company.
Reasonable commentators have often pointed out that in modern times, totalitarian states have always come about due to cataclysmic events… it was the slaughter, privations and aftermath of World War One which lead to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union after all. However is this understanding of how a total state comes about the only way Totalitarianism one can come about? → Continue reading: Inching closer to a total state
Is Gordon Brown the most irresponsible Chancellor the UK has ever had? So asks Michael Becket, author of Starting Your Own Business, in this month’s issue of Director magazine, published by the Institute of Directors for its members – sorry, but there is no online version. According to Becket:
Despite promising not to raise income tax, Brown has done just that, by not increasing allowances in line with earnings, by raising [National Insurance] by 10 per cent, and by other stealthy changes…
Having enticed small businesses to incorporate by tax incentives, Brown has now closed the trap by imposing a 19 per cent tax on their dividends. Failing to reinvest profits instead of paying themselves was one reason given to directors. But how can the owner of a company with a £10,000 profit afford to eat and invest as well?
People are saving less and putting aside less money for their old age. By stopping pension funds from reclaiming tax on dividends, Brown extracted £5bn a year from the pensions industry. A typical 30-year-old now needs to put an extra £200 a year aside for the whole of his working life to offset that one move. Peps and Tessas were taxed and replaced with Isas, but the amount eligible for tax-free savings has been steadily whittled away…
What makes Brown’s policies appear so irresponsible is that they are the opposite of what the country desperately needs. This grab-what-you-can attitude has many consequences, but few discuss the indirect effect on business.
Fewer savers and smaller pension funds mean less investment for industry… It could also mean less cash for buying shares. It is also possible that it will become more difficult to raise money, especially since business angels will also be taxed out of the market.
A more obvious consequence is the burden to the taxpayer of an increasingly aged population – particularly one that has not been able to save sufficiently for retirement. We are constantly being warned about the “demographic time bomb” when the baby boomers become pensioners in the next few years, with fewer young people to support them. If these people are forced to depend on public benefit, requiring a wide range of help from pensions to health care, the level of taxes on individuals and businesses will rise to an intolerable level.
Yet there seems no alternative prospect. Such policies could amount, in the long term, to our children labouring without return in an impoverished business environment. Pensioners will live on a pittance in ill-health as their pensions get eroded and the NHS turns from a sick joke to full-blown disaster.
Well, that is all very cheering for a British taxpayer to read. I take no convincing on the points that the government is bang out of order in what it takes from us, that the state is forcing people to rely on public benefit, and that the NHS sucks. What I want to know is whether Michael Becket is right: Is Gordon Brown the most irresponsible Chancellor this country has ever had?
The European Union instituted a European wide arrest warrant in order to speed extradition between Member States, without providing some of the basic precautions that a citizen would expect before being deported to a foreign country. These were established to promote the development of a European ‘judicial space’ under the guise of fighting the ‘war on terror’: an old chestnut these days in the campaign to undermine and reduce civil liberties.
However, the EU arrest warrant is running into the obstacles and minefields of laws and judgements. A recent case involved three French citizens, accused of belonging to a group, that Spain considers to be a terrorist and criminal organisation.
A French court on Tuesday rejected a Spanish request for the extradition of three French people accused of being members of an organisation suspected of financing Basque separatist group ETA, judicial sources said.
Amaia Rekarte, Yves Matxikote and Harritza Gallaraga were detained last month — but later released pending the court’s ruling — after Spain demanded their extradition on charges of belonging to a criminal and terrorist group.
The three accused belong to an organisation, Segi, with Basque sympathies and posssible links to ETA, the Basque terrorist group. However, membership of the organisation is not banned under French law, and Spain was requesting extradition for the three on actions conducted legally in France, whilst being illegal in Spain. It is not clear if the three acted in France alone or in Spain as well.
This appears to have been a ‘fishing trip’ to arrest three Basque sympathisers. It failed as the French judge in Pau argued that French citizens should not be extradited if their actions were legal in their own Member State. The European Commission played down the judgement:
The ruling appears to be a blow to the ambition behind the EU arrest warrant, which was to facilitate extradition in terrorism cases. However, the EU Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, Antonio Vitorino, does not want to overdramatise the importance of the case. “This is a case of conflicting competences between judges. The arrest warrant as such has not been called into question,” said spokesman Pietro Petrucci to EurActiv.
ETA has murdered over 800 men, women and children since 1968 in pursuit of an independent Basque state. The Spanish are understandably enthusiastic in their wish to prevent further murders in this cause.
Whenever, as is happening just now, a small Political Party seems about to get a big result, the Big Parties orate loudly about how a vote for the Small [fill in the name of the small party] Party will be a “wasted vote“. What does this mean?
To me what it means is that the Big Parties have run out of good arguments to stop people voting for this Small Party in embarassingly unsmall numbers, and are instead resorting to a ridiculous argument which they hope will pack a punch despite the fact that it makes no sense whatever.
A large number of people in Britain have just recently realised that Britain is in the process of becoming a small clutch of provinces of a new country, EUrope. They have never wanted this, but until recently they did not notice that it was happening, so they saw no need to vote against it. Now they realise that it is happening, despite all the mendacious protestations of the Big Parties, and a Small Party has stepped forward to enable them to register their disapproval. And depending on how many people vote for the Small Party, the Big Parties will either perhaps change their policy of British provincialism, or definitely not change it. → Continue reading: The myth of the “wasted vote”
I recently gave a presentation in Bratislava, Slovakia, on the evils of ‘competition policy’ and the ‘entry and exit costs’ economic model, which is little more than an excuse for more business-killing government intervention.
My first trip there in 1991 had been as economic and political adviser to that country’s Prime Minister when Slovakia was part of the Czech & Slovak Federal Republic (1989-1992). In those days, talking about a single tax band, a competitive advantage of Slovakia compared with Germany, why an independent Slovakia would actally reform better than under Prague tutelage and so forth was often like trying to explain Switzerland to a Pol Pot survivor.
The first photo that I took in 1991 was of the Iron Curtain seen from the Austrian side, a forest of trees leading up to the jagged line of a forest of rotting concrete.
This time on the way back I took a coach from Bratislava to Vienna airport. The following photos show the turnaround.
Slovakia�s ruling coalition: conservatives and libertarians
(photo taken at Bratislava bus station)
This Slovak election poster for the EU parliament
seems to get the message. (Sorry about the
quality but I snapped it out of a coach window
on a bend, outskirts of Bratislava)
Austrian Social Democrats know what they stand for:
No privatisation!
(dotted all over the Austrian countryside North of Vienna)
I am watching a television show on Channel 4 at the moment about how an English couple fare in foresaking the home comforts and routine of life in Essex for the risk-taking venture of running a sailing school in the Canary Islands. As a keen yachtsman myself, I identified quite a lot with the guy who became fed up with a routine day job and dreamed of making a living in the sun. This television show, called No Going Back, has featured a number of couples, mostly young, who have emigrated in the search for a dream job.
In many cases, the people selected for the shows chose to go overseas either because they were bored with life in Britain, fed up with their jobs, their neighourhood, and tempted by the glossy magazine images of life abroad. But the programme makers never directly asked any of them if other factors drove them abroad, such as rising domestic taxes and regulations on business, or the rising level of crime and sliding quality of schooling for their children. Maybe this sort of stuff was considered a bit too political in what are essentially ‘fly on the wall’ documentaries about ordinary folk striving after a dream.
What is clear, more broadly, is that a lot of my fellow Britons have had enough of life in this damp little island off the European continent and want out. Some of the issues I mentioned in the previous paragraph have something to do with it. There have in the past, and indeed now, been examples of some of Britain’s best scientists and entrepreneurs leaving the UK for friendlier and more lucrative places abroad. There is also the simple fact that Britain is so densely populated. It is hard to convey to those who have never been here and who live in big nations just how crowded the UK is, particularly in the economically vibrant bits, such as London and the southeast.
I would love to go and work abroad, if only to savour the experience of living in another land and broadening my horizons. I would, however, like to think that I take such a step for the positive reasons of spreading my wings, rather than because I have been pushed to despair by the state of this nation.
Of course, in years to come, Channel 4 may be screening a show about how a young couple from Essex packed up their belongings and decided to ‘start over’ in the recently terraformed Mars.
In case anyone was wondering why the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party,” it turns out that the Bushies, those erstwhile evil geniuses, have scheduled themselves to nominate W as the Republican candidate after the deadline set by several states for placing a nominee on the ballot.
Sadly, every state but one has scrambled to accomodate these patent screw-up. Now, I can understand Republican state legislatures amending their statutes in this circumstance, but why on earth would anyone expect the Democrats in Illinois to do so?
Our own Natalie Solent posted a really good piece at her personal blog last night, about the fact that many, many bad things continue to be done to the world, but that the difference is that they are soon liable to be done with equal relentlessness everywhere, spread around the world evenly, in a way that will make it much harder to notice and complain. Time was when evil was done with maximum ferocity in country A, but hardly done at all in countries B and C, and the evil done by the evil was eventually obvious to all, even to those at first most inclined to support it. Sometimes it was even easier than that:
… To help you along to this conclusion the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. …
But not any more. Will the day come when that same goddess ordains that we are all to be governed by the same benign, suffocating, righteous, repressive elite, and no comparisons between them ruling and them not ruling will possible, because everywhere will be theirs?
What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. …
She mentions that extraordinary moment in history, notable for the fact that hugely important and portentous things were made to not happen:
I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China’s vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.
And the worry is that, unlike the blood-sodden grindings and thrashings of evil in the twentieth century, the clicks we are about to be subjected to will be inaudible.
It is a beautiful and melancholy piece. David Carr rewritten by Jane Austen. It contains at least another half dozen sentences I wanted to copy and paste here, but since it is all there, go there, and read it all.
It is a long time since I have contributed anything to White Rose. And it is a long time since this article by journalist and novelist Alexandra Campbell appeared, in the Telegraph, on May 14th. Apologies on both counts, but better occasional contributions and late reports of White Rose relevant material than never, I hope you agree.
This article did not just appear in the Telegraph. It was also reproduced in full, in the “last word” slot, towards the end of the “all you need to know about everything that matters” magazine (i.e. lots of good bits from all the different British newspapers) The Week, of May 29th, Issue 462. That was where and (approximately) when I first read the piece.
Ms. Campbell, on the basis of vague CCTV “evidence”, was falsely accused of a crime, and it took a scarily long time for the system to stop persecuting her.
Concluding paragraphs:
“In theory,” said Mark, “it’s innocent until proved guilty. In practice, whoever makes the allegation first is believed.”
Now that we are all picked up on CCTVs up to 300 times a day, and can also easily be identified electronically through swipe cards (health clubs, the office, season tickets, etc), there is a real risk of someone linking you to a passing resemblance on a fuzzy CCTV image and making an allegation against you.
It had taken about eight months to get to this point of the inquiry and I was terrified of enduring months’ more worry before I was cleared, but the police followed up my brother’s statement quickly and dropped the charges. However, they told me that current policy is to leave fingerprints, pictures and allegations permanently on file.
Checking subsequently with the police press office, I find that “fingerprints may not be held for more than 42 days”, but I find it scary that nobody really seems to know. I suspect our civil rights are being chipped away all the time in the name of crime and terrorism prevention.
The whole thing, I discovered, was based on a breach of the Data Protection Act. Companies using CCTV are supposed to show images only to authorised people, such as the police. The supermarket involved should never have allowed the receptionist and the credit card victim to see footage on demand. The receptionist, himself in charge of CCTV, should have known this. He wasn’t even following his own company’s code of practice, which asks staff who are suspicious of members to take the matter to a manager first. But he has done nothing illegal.
And neither have I. But while I struggle to have my records deleted from police files, he has drifted on and cannot, so far, be contacted. Nobody knows if he made the allegation out of boredom, spite, or genuine, if misplaced, civic-mindedness. It’s Kafkaesque, said friends. It’s a joke, said others. But it wasn’t fiction and it wasn’t funny. I was actually very lucky.
I might not have been able to prove where I was. If I’d been a lawyer, police officer, accountant or worked in financial services, my career and livelihood would also have been on the line, and if I’d been a celebrity, the story would have been splashed all over the papers before it was disproved. If the allegation had been connected to terrorism, I would have been jailed immediately.
I used to think that if you didn’t break the law, you had nothing to fear from it. Now I know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
Privacy advocates and some lawmakers are pushing a debate over potential privacy abuses from the growing use of radio frequency identification chips as huge retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. move toward large-scale use of the technology.
They see the potential for retailers and other companies to be able to track consumers long after a consumer purchases an item – for example, a tennis shoe manufacturer scanning a sporting event for the number of people wearing its product.
Those advantages are why large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target Corp., as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), are embracing RFID technology as a way to improve their supply-chain efficiency. Wal-Mart, leading the way on RFID adoption, plans to phase in use of RFID, with major suppliers of its north Texas stores required to use RFID chips on pallets and cases by January 2005. The DOD plans to require suppliers to use RFID tags by early 2005.
But early experiments with RFID haven’t gone smoothly, at least in the public relations arena. In early 2003, Wal-Mart and The Procter & Gamble Co. tested the use of RFID chips on individual packages of lipstick in an Oklahoma store, and the supposedly secret test raised the hackles of privacy advocates everywhere. The RFID chips allowed Wal-Mart to track the customers as they took the lipstick off shelves.
Wal-Mart’s test of RFID chips on individual products also prompted Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, to suggest that federal legislation may be necessary at some point. He criticized what he called Wal-Mart’s “clandestine” testing of RFID.
In November, a group of privacy advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), issued a position statement on the use RFID in consumer products. The statement called for retailers to give notice to consumers when RFID chips are being used, what the purpose is and to have security measures in place verified by third parties.
The statement (pdf) calls on merchants to voluntarily comply with RFID privacy measures, and asks retailers to comply with a moratorium on item-level use of RFID chips until a technology assessment involving consumers and other stakeholders can be completed. The statement asked retailers not to force consumers to buy products with RFID tags and advocated that consumers should be able to remove or disable the tags, but the statement did not advocate federal legislation.
Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), one of the groups signing on to the November privacy statement.
There has to be a way to kill these chips. The question is really what it’s used for and how it’s done, rather than the technology itself. Most of the benefit out there comes on the back end, in the stock room, and most of the privacy concerns come when it leaves the stock room.
Most retail uses of RFID so far are limited to stock rooms, and with retailers and vendors open to privacy discussion, Schwartz doesn’t yet see the need for federal legislation.
The United Nations is seen by many, idiotarians and some otherwise quite reasonable people, as the nearest thing we have, in these modern times, to some sort of institution with ‘divine’ authority. I am sick of hearing about how the United States or UK or any other country is evil because it is acting without authorisation from the UN. It is therefore with glee that I relay any news showing that behind the edifice of self-righteousness and vast amounts of funds is all too human and corrupt an institution.
The Inter Press Service News Agency reports that the United Nations has been hit by a rash of new complaints about sexual abuse of women and children by peacekeepers, civilian staff and humanitarian organisations operating either with the blessings of the world body or under the U.N. flag. In May the news wrote about a UN probe into reports of sexual abuse by Congo staff, but things have ‘progressed’ since then.
A system-wide investigation was triggered by a report from Annan, who says that six out of 48 U.N. agencies operating in the field have received reports of new cases of sexual exploitation or abuse, mostly by blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers, during 2003.
The agencies that received the complaints include the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N. Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Margaret Stanley of Ireland said:
Sexual exploitation, including all forms of trafficking and related offences, particularly in the case of vulnerable persons dependent on international aid, is completely unacceptable.
Rosemary McCreery, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management, specifically singled out the sexual abuse perpetrated by civilian, police and military contingents in Kosovo and in the Bunia region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). McCreery said preliminary internal investigations this year had revealed ”widespread abuses” in DRC.
The ‘Washington Times’ also reported that a soon-to-be-released book by current and former U.N. employees contends that Bulgarian peacekeepers in Cambodia in the mid-1990s were actually former convicts who agreed to serve six months in the Southeast country in exchange for their freedom at the end of their term. The Bulgarians were “drunk as sailors” and “rape vulnerable Cambodian women”, according to the book, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth. Bulgaria’s ambassador to the United States has denied the allegations.
The investigation into such allegations are not examplary either and several delegates are complaining that the world body is not doing enough. Karen Lock of South Africa said:
The secretary-general’s report had not elaborated extensively on measures taken to improve the conditions of refugees and vulnerable communities. It was hoped that those measures would be reported in greater detail to the appropriate inter-governmental bodies.
So we have oil for food or rather oil-for-terror and money for UN officials and assorted politicians, humanitarian aid that dare not speak its name and a sanctimonious veneer that gives tranzis and Guardianistas of all shades opportunity to draw on moral ‘authority’ for their deranged vision for the world.
It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it.
I have been doing my bit for the War against woman-hating, religious bigotry by checking out the Miss Universe finalists. Personally I think the registered Republican Miss USA looked much better than Miss Australia, the eventual winner.
Useful sociological experiment: check out Miss Sweden and try to focus on horrible tax rates in that country. So if Sweden had the burqah, perhaps they would have lower taxes. Tough call.
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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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