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 had never seen the infamous GULAG system; the Soviet authorities were not keen to document their crimes. But in 1946 they incarcerated an artist, Nikolai Getman, and he survived.
Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.
→ Continue reading: The Gulag
This sums up the case for university top-up fees very nicely:
The new higher education minister, Kim Howells, today stormed into the education debate with a warning for universities that top-up fees would create a “cut throat” market.
Wow, a rabid free marketeer telling the universities that they are going to have to get their act together, not because little old he merely says so or else, but because there is now a market out there.
But it turns out that Kim Howells is against this market:
In his first speech since joining the Department for Education and Skills, Mr Howells risked the ire of his boss, Charles Clarke, with a series of negative remarks about the direction education policy had taken since he was last an education minister in 1998.
This is a classic case of something that happens a lot, namely a good idea being spread by someone who vehemently disagrees with it.
And here comes another combination of rightness and wrongness:
He questioned the government’s focus on the economic benefits of education and admitted that sending his children to university had left him “broke”.
In characteristically colourful language, Mr Howells told an audience at the University of Westminster in London today: “We’ve become very utilitarian in the department for education. I’m in a lucky position of having returned after six or seven years.
“Learning for learning’s sake is something we should criticise very warily. People want to learn simply because learning is wonderful and it’s the second best thing I know in the world.”
Howells has a point about learning for learning’s sake. But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean that other people ought to pay for it. I think that classical music is wonderful, and governments around Europe pay a lot of people to entertain me at way below what it might otherwise cost me. But is this right, just because I get wonderfulness rather than usefulness?
There is also the fact that, I think, classical music would actually be very different and much better if it was not subsidised at all. Ditto education, especially of the “wonderful” sort.
The proportion of “wonderful” education that is now subsidised is now declining rapidly, thanks to the Internet, which is all part of how much more wonderful it has now become.
George W. Bush is a lying, collectivist, protectonist, big-government statist and I despise him. The only, and I do mean only reason I want him to win the election against the other lying, collectivist, protectonist, even bigger-government statist who I despise is to see the stunned faces of those people on the left when they get their arses kicked. Its an expensive ‘cheap thrill’ but I take ’em where I find ’em.
– overheard at a get-together of Samizdatistas recently
The socialist charity and political lobbying group Christian Aid, has a new campaign called Vote for Trade Justice.
Free Trade: some people love it.
Imagine getting mugged after a tough day’s work.
Every. Single.Day.
By the same muggers.
Grind you down, wouldn’t it
That’s what it’s like for people struggling to make a living in the world’s poorest countries. Why?
So called Free Trade. Our government claims Free Trade is the solution to the world’s problems. But that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say. Why? Because it allows the world’s richest countries and their fat cat companies to profit.
Ok, so let me get this straight… Western farmers, their operations subsidised with other western taxpayer’s money and their own domestic markets distorted by ‘protective’ tariff barriers which increase the price of imports, sell to African countries and that is… Free trade? FREE TRADE?
What the hell is free about it?
Western agricultural producers are a nightmarish mix of tax subsidy and production quotas, with bizarrely priced surpluses that are occasionally and erratically dumped on Third World markets… and at the same time western consumers are denied access to both First and Third World products at their true economic cost by a vast raft of arcane state and super-state imposed regulations. Please explain who exactly is engaging in laissez faire here. The only intelligent bit is calling it “so called” free trade.
The problem is that vested economic interests (big business and big labour) have zero interest in free trade. They do not give a damn about the Third World, all they see is the extremely low labour costs in the developing countries and what that implies for their own narrow sectional interests… and they have the state to protect those interests with laws.
So is Christian ‘Aid’ screaming “Remove all tariffs to imports NOW”?
Of course not. They are calling for an end to “Free Trade”. What is needed is not democratically sanctified politically managed trade (which we have now) but real, genuine, non-government regulated free trade. The fact that Kenya actually does manage to sell significant quantities of very high quality green beans in Britain is a testament to how some people will succeed in spite of western regulatory systems which would rather their producers just lived in abject poverty and that westerners pay more for their food than they need to.
If Christian Aid really cared about people in the Third World rather than just posturing for their own self-important gratification, they would be demanding true laissez faire free trade in which low labour cost agricultural nations could take on the western open air industrial chemical factories, sorry I mean farms, without having the state/super-state controlling access to the target market tilt the scales against them.
Demand for more ‘organic’ produce increases by the year and many Third World countries are well suited to serve that premium high margin market. That is where the foolish self-appointed Paladins of the Oppressed should be directing their attention rather than calling for mere tinkering with the statist system of trade controls that is so integral to the problem in the first place.
With friends like Christian Aid, people in the developing world do not need enemies.
In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley refers to a major opinion survey. When asked the question of how they would help poor people with £200 pounds (about $360) only one per cent of the survey went for the option of giving the money to local government (even though this option said that that local government would have to spend the money on trying to help the poor) and ZERO per cent went for the option of giving the money to national government (even though, again, this option said that the government would have to use the money to try and help the poor).
The British public overwhelmingly opted for directly helping the poor themselves, or for giving the money to a private charity.
I know one can not trust opinion surveys, but it is possible that most British people are not really as collectivist as they sometimes seem.
Constrained democracy can be a splendid check on state power but unconstrained democracy just shifts the locus for where the seat of tyranny lies.
It seems the Tuhoe tribe of New Zealand’s Maoris have decided to think big:
“In answer to my questions, they also confirmed their claims of absolute sovereignty over all air space to the heavens above. It was specifically stated that, once the Foreshore and Seabed legislation is resolved, they would be approaching Air New Zealand and other airlines to negotiate compensation for all incursions into their air space.
“They drew the parallel of other sovereign states where missiles are deployed to shoot down unauthorised aircraft. The group also confirmed that it would be approaching NASA and other authorities in respect of their satellites that orbit the Earth.
You simply could not make it up.
A couple of months ago, I went on the record with my prediction of the US Presidential election would come out. Because so far it looks to be spot on, I am pleased to post a status report.
As I predicted, Kerry has lost ground since early August, and shows every indication of having, indeed, tested the top of his market for votes somewhere in July, somewhere in the high 40s. Current polling shows him with support somewhere in the mid to low 40s.
Bush has made up ground since August, having tested the bottom of his support in mid-August, and is now polling in the high 40s. My market timing was off a trifle on Bush – I thought he had hit bottom in late July/early August, but there was a bit of a lag before he started moving up to his current, fairly stable 5 – 6 point lead.
The Kerry campaign tried to ramp up a new negative attack on Bush (coodinated with CBS) based on allegations that he got special privileges as a National Guard pilot during the Vietnam war. Lost in the kerfuffle over the forgeries that were supposed to drive this story is the fact that this is well-plowed ground – this is at least the third time the Dems have tried to hang Bush with this one. Similarly, Kitty Kelly’s book supposedly detailing Bush’s wastrel past is merely an attempt to sex up a story that has already been put to the voters, and has indeed been coopted by Bush as a tale of sin and redemption. As I guessed, it appears that the Dems have nothing new to try to stick on Bush.
With five weeks until election day, I see nothing on the horizon that can fundamentally change the dynamic of this race (all caveats from my original post apply, of course). I will confess that my prediction of a narrow Bush victory appears to be a little pessimistic at this point.
As government gets ever bigger in various parts of the world, one sign of this is how many signs there are. In the USA, as I discovered over the past two weeks, it is now increasingly common to see signs telling you all about how to prevent death by choking.
That’s right. Apparently, I understand that it is now a bylaw in many states to require owners of restaurants and bars to put up signs showing folk how to avoid death by choking on food, and how to assist someone who may be in trouble. The notices seem to be very detailed. What on earth is going on? Have there been a large number of folk keeling over after choking on a pretzel, as nearly happened to President Bush about a year ago?
That our political and health-conscious masters want to help us to avoid death – so they say – is hardly new. It is also pretty difficult to get indignant about putting up a poster giving handy hints on how to avoid death. It caused me a certain amount of wry amusement, although other state infractions of property rights, such as bans on smoking in privately owned bars, are far less amusing.
(Bars in New York are not quite the smelly places of old, but seemed to be less full than the last time I was in town).
Back here in Britain, though, it seems the country has a bad case of “sign overload”, as Rod Liddle describes here in the Spectator. He argues, rightly, that any place which carries lots of signs telling us not to hit the staff or behave like a thug is precisely the sort of place to avoid. It is now routine for London Underground stations, railway stations and hospital waiting rooms to have signs warning us not to be rude to staff and to refrain from beating them up.
In a healthy civil society where moral standards are ‘internalised’ and tacitly accepted, it is not necessary to state what ought to be blindingly obvious to the average man or woman. Telling folk with signs to behave decently is a reflection of how infantilised our society has become, and tells us everything about the mindset of those who run what are laughably called our “public services”. It is a lame admission that once-widely accepted standards of conduct are no longer part of the common stock of human knowledge, but have to be spelled out as if explaining maths to a five-year-old for the first time.
Of course there are many factors to explain this tendency. That great vehicle of moral hazard, known as the Welfare State, has a lot to do with erosion of behaviours, but it is by no means the only reason. Some may cite the decline in religious belief, although it is by no means clear to this atheist that belief in a Supreme Being is necessary to avoid society collapsing into some sort of Hobbesian chaos.
Is it too much to hope that if we treat our fellows like adults, that they will behave accordingly? Perhaps I am an incurable optimist.
(As a side-observation, I have noted that whenever the announcer on the London Underground tells us to “mind the gap” between the train and the platform, it produces howls of mirth from foreigners. I think they imagine it is some sort of strange national ritual, like tea, Wimbledon fortnight or the Proms).
At long last, the Liberal Democrats have promised to do something that will genuinely benefit the wider community:
The Liberal Democrats today vowed to deal with the “real” weapon of mass destruction, climate change, and put their environmental principles into action by making all future party conferences “carbon neutral”.
Yes, we can all look forward to a better world for our children if Liberal Democrats stop breathing.
I will be the first person to admit I do not greatly enjoy driving a car and trying to map read at the same time. I am one of those folk who get on a lot better in a strange place when I have a passenger with the intelligence to give me decent directions. So one of the great boons of technology for a chap like me has been the developing use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation technology.
I have just returned from a terrific holiday in the USA. During the first week – staying at the northern California home of long-time pal and libertarian blogger Russell Whitaker – I rented a nice big saloon complete with GPS. It was a Magellan device and in my opinion, worth every cent. You can choose from a menu of different languages and the machine either enables you to take the fastest route home, or the most scenic, as well as pinpointing interesting places to visit. On balance I estimate I saved several hours that would have been otherwise spent trying to use a map. On only about three occasions did I get lost. In one case the GPS was wrong footed by a roadwork, and in another by a bad traffic jam. (And er, human error is not removed by GPS). But on the whole, my message to anyone who wants to avoid getting lost is to get GPS.
GPS is now widely used, not just by motorists but also by hikers, bikers, yachtsmen and powerboat users, as well as by the armed forces. GPS started out as part of the US Defence Dept’s satellite system to make it easier for America’s military to identify and hit targets. This point will of course be mentioned by those who want to argue that GPS would never exist without Big Government backing. However, given that launch costs can be radically reduced if only we let that happen – as suggested by the CATO Institute, it seems to me implausible to argue that a system like GPS can only get under way in the State sector. It strikes me as entirely plausible to imagine a rich businessman like Bill Gates, say, launching a few satellites and creating a luxury product of GPS that could eventually drop radically in price while also extending its range. GPS, like other breakthrough technologies, could have started as a high-end luxury good and gradually expand in scope and fall in cost like pocket calculators, DVD machines or jet travel.
There are also civil liberties issues to do with the government use of GPS, and I recommend that it is probably not a good idea for users to programme their individual street address into rented GPS machines if they can avoid it. And also do not imagine that this technology renders older methods redundant. For example, any yachtsman who puts to sea without the right charts, compasses and knowledge of navigation is asking for trouble. Oh, and remember that handheld GPS machines run on batteries, which run out.
Okay, anyone want to buy me a machine for Christmas?
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding.
– Louis D Brandeis
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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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