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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Tom Peters, who presumably found it in this piece, reports:
This banner, in Chinese, hangs in each room of the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd., amidst the Rongcheng Industry Zone, 100 miles from Beijing:
“THE CUSTOMER IS GOD AND THE MARKET DECIDES EVERYTHING”
People say things like this from time to time, but they seldom mean them, and they never mean them when at all severely challenged
I mean, suppose you were to ring up the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. and to say: “Hello, God speaking. I want you to design my daughter’s wedding dress. It must be genuine silk, with genuine gold fiddly bits sewn into it, with miniature iPods for buttons, and must win numerous design awards. However, being God, I don’t want to pay more than 50 pence. Got that did you? Fine. Tomorrow morning then. The wedding’s tomorrow afternoon.” I know, I know, God has no daughter, and if He did have a daughter, she would probably not get married. She would do altogether more dramatic things than that. Not my point. Which is: would the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. knuckle under to such a demand? Would they obey God, the customer, you, and supply an expensive product at less than it costs them to produce it? I think not. They would surely respond instead with something more along the lines of: “Not quite our kind of job. If you want lots of cheap dresses to sell in your shop, maybe we can do business. Take a look at our website, and see if there is anything there that you like.” God might not be satisfied with an answer like that, but you, a mere customer, would have to settle for that, or something like it.
Or to put all of the above another way, “the market” includes everyone, and everyone’s desires and plans, consumers and producers. Customers are indeed sovereign, over themselves and what is rightfully theirs, but so are producers. Customers do not have to pay for things they do not want, and producers do not have to produce things they do not want to produce. The market is not some ghastly new tyrant who tells you what you must do, regardless of your rights or wishes. The market is not some hideous and only slightly nicer collective reincarnation of Chairman Mao. The market is the outcome of everyone’s rights counting for something, and nobody’s rights counting for everything.
So yes, the market does decide a lot of things, but the customer is not God.
This is an exaggeration for the sake of effect. The effect may, in a business sense, be good, but it is still an exaggeration, and that is putting mildly.
Tony Blair showed just how courageous he is… he chose to face up to an internal battle based on one idea – the European Union – rather than just doing his job as just Britain’s prime minister.
– Jacques Chirac
Pity Samizdata.net does not have a catagory for articles called “Treason & Betrayal”.
It has always puzzled me why the state pays ‘compensation’ to victims of certain crimes. Why are fellow taxpayers robbed to compensate an individual for a misfortune? Surely that is a job for an insurance policy.
There are now calls for victims of international terrorism to be financially compensated and again, I cannot quite figure why the general public should be required to stump up for this. Whilst ‘acts of war’ and terrorism are often specifically excluded from insurance policies, it is possible to find policies which include even that if you are willing to pay premiums. It just seems odd to me that folks should have any expectation of a non-charitable, non-insured payment from fellow national subjects.
Seldom in the course of European negotiations has so much been surrendered for so little. It is amazing how the Government has moved miles while the French have barely yielded a centimetre.
– William Hague
Almost uniquely amongst nations, the United States takes upon itself the super-ownership of its subjects even when they are not within the territory over which it claims sovereignty. Even if you live and work outside the USA, you are required to file tax returns and have US tax liabilities. It would appear Americans cannot escape the enveloping grasp of their government and its rules anywhere on this planet.
And yet as soon as you step outside the USA, even though US subjects retain their tax liabilities to the state, it would appear they loose any constitutional protection from its excesses.
Whilst in many ways the USA offers the world a splendid example of defended civil liberties, in so many other ways the freedom Americans assume is theirs is really an illusion.
The state is not your friend.
Perhaps this category should be referred to as prehistorical views. Usually, when we hear that palaeontologists and archaeologists have extended the prehistory of the human species, we think of the Leakeys, Africa, Lucy and the Olduvai Gorge.
For once, such an announcement comes from closer to home. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project has discovered a site near Lowestoft dating human habitation in Britain to seven hundred thousand years ago. This date is based upon the vole teeth discovered on the site, compared with later discoveries at Boxgrove and Westbury sub Mendip in Somerset.
The dates involved are much too early for carbon dating – effective only to about 40,OOOBC – but scientists have been able to calculate good approximate ages from the known ages of animal fossils found at the sites.
In particular, the research centres on teeth belonging to a genus of prehistoric watervole, known as mimomys. About 700,000 years ago these voles had rooted molars, similar to those of human beings, which grow once then get worn down through adult life. But by 500,000 years ago, the animals had evolved rootless molars that continue to grow – an advantage to creatures that eat tough vegetation.
The voles found at Boxgrove are from the later era, but the East Anglian ones have primitive molars, dating the site definitively to at least 700,000 years ago. Those at Westbury are of an intermediate form. “The dating still involves some guesswork, but the best estimate is about 600,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer said. Simon Parfitt, a fossil mammal specialist at the museum and at University College, London, who analysed the vole fossils, said; “We can put everything in a relative order, and Westbury could be 100,000 years earlier than Boxgrove. The Best Anglian finds go as far back as 700,000 years.”
Early Man’s reach extended further and earlier than we have anticipated. Who knows what else prehistory will throw at us.
Tony Blair seems to be trying to make it into that dark pantheon of truly dire British Prime Ministers of the last one hundred years. Although given the procession of craven toadies who make up that list, that is really quite a task he has set himself, he is showing considerable promise of being a real contender.
Still, he has quite a way to go yet. He may have just given away £8.2 BILLION of British taxpayers money in return for nothing whatsoever… and it is nothing as all he got in return was a promise from the weak and politically toothless French government to review their huge farm subsidies in return for the UK actually giving up a huge chunk of money (yes, seriously, the French gave up a promise to do nothing more than review how much they get from the EU)… but he is still in the shadows of those who went before him.
Of course, Blair is minor league in his endless pursuit of surrendering British interests compared to such luminaries as Neville Chamberlain (he after all gave away Czechoslovakia, rather than a few billion quid, in return for another European leader’s empty promises), Ted Heath (The Three Day Week and First Great Betrayal to Europe) and the evil twins of Harold Wilson/James Callaghan (joint award for the astounding destruction of British liberty and economy via wholesale nationalisation),. As in all things, Blair is just… lacking… compared to these guys. But he sure shows willing, you got to say that.
In truth, this may well be a good thing in the long run as it brings that day of some sort of ‘Glorious Revolution’ closer, and for all you history buffs out there, no I do not mean a Dutch backed coup d’etat, I am thinking more along the lines of what Thatcher just hinted at. Let the enemy class squeeze harder and harder and until the nation that constantly votes them into power starts to choke on its entirely democratic stupidity.
The U.S. Senate has blocked a vote to extend the Patriot Act, about which Perry de Havilland wrote the other day. Maybe some sanity is breaking out. Many of the Act’s provisions are tenuously linked to protecting the public from terrorism, to put it mildly, and violate parts of the U.S. Constitution. Let’s hope Congress reflects more before passing such laws at such high speed in the future. And the same applies to our own benighted Parliament and the wretched UK Civil Contigencies Act.
I have come across a press release from Britain’s National Health Service. The NHS is currently trying to prevent obese people from having hip replacement operations as they do not “deserve” to have such treatment, despite the little matter of their having been taxpayers like the rest of us.
“The NHS, like any proud creation of a socialist, inclusive Britain, has to operate under certain priorities. Indeed its founder, the great Soviet leader Nye Bevan, stated that socialism is about priorities. Well, there is no place and certainly no priority to treat people, who, by laziness, sloth and lack of intelligence, choose to make themselves ill or incapacitated. In fact ill people are a positive nuisance. It is the fit, able-bodied and alert people of Britain who deserve to be treated by the Greatest Health Service Devised by Mankind. No more obese people. No more smokers. No more drinkers. No more red meat eaters and chocolate fans. Such habits have no place in a socialist Britain. Let such vile habits wither away.”
I am still trying to vouch for the authenticity of this release. Looks plausible to me.
In what used to be called the ‘Middle Ages’ men of learning got together at various places in England (as they had done before in other lands) – Oxford, Cambridge and other towns (where universities were later suppressed by various means).
At first these scholars operated on a fairly informal basis (this was the tiny element of truth in the old lie about Oxford University being founded by Alfred the Great – Alfred visited the town, Alfred always had men of learning with him [indeed was one himself] such men had students, therefore…) and students paid them for their teaching.
Later such learned men operated from collages (the oldest in Cambridge being Peterhouse) and helped educate students (mainly for the church).
Over time students (or those who helped them) tended to pay the collage rather than individual learned men (although the old idea lasted in Scotland – where Adam Smith claimed it was the great advantage that Scottish higher education had over English) and the direct connection between students going to a master they revered became somewhat weaker.
In the 19th century the University (as an institution, backed by Acts of Parliament) started to rise in importance relative to the collages. And in the 20th century government began to play a much bigger role – first through funding individual students (rather than just setting up a collage with an endowment – as various Kings and other leading people had done) and then, rather later, by increasing regulation of what went on in the Universities (he who pays the piper calls the tune – as the academics forgot to their cost).
However, in both Oxford and Cambridge the idea (if not the reality) of the independent scholar – the man (these days ‘the person’) seeking truth and passing it on to students lived on.
This week one of the last reminders of the days when men of learning were independent (rather than just employees of the University) finally died.
For 800 years it has been assumed that it a person made a discovery it was their discovery – but now it has been decided that this is not quite so. → Continue reading: The end of Cambridge?
“Perhaps the meek shall inherit the Earth, but they’ll do it in very small plots . . . about 6′ by 3′.”
Robert Heinlein, quoted at this excellent legal website with stacks of quotations about self defence.
The Italian government, desperate for any additional source of revenue as it beggars the surrounding economy with its imposts, has slapped a fresh tax on the country’s porn industry. It will be intruiging to know just how much this tax raises or whether, as may probably happen in Italy, the tax drives the industry under the bed, so to speak.
Personally, I have more regard for people who earn an honest living making racy videos than tax collectors.
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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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