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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As I write this, it is raining in a slight but persistent drizzle outside my Pimlico flat, central London. It has been a mixed bag on the weather front recently: some spells of great warm weather but a fair amount of rain. The cricket match at Lords was briefly interrupted by it. One can bet that the Wimbledon tennis tournament later in the summer will undergo the familiar ritual of thrilling matches being interrupted by rain (although I hear there are plans afoot to put a giant cover over the Centre Court stadium in due course).
Despite all this, we are told that Britain faces an unprecedented drought. All manner of water restrictions are threatened, although thankfully, given the less-than-wonderful personal habits of Londoners (any Tube user will know what I mean) it is still allowed for us to take a morning shower. In short, shortages. This appears insane in a country famed or infamous for its damp summers. It is an island in which few places are more than 100 miles from the sea. In a wider context, most of the Earth’s surface is covered in the stuff. What’s the problem?
The ‘shortages’ we have now have a number of causes, from what I can glean. There has been a substantial population rise in the southeast of England. Greater affluence means more dishwashers, bigger washing machines. Increasingly, many people will often have more than one bathroom in a house. Other, wetter, parts of the UK like the famously wet area to the west of the Pennines have not seen the same sort of population growth. There is plenty of water in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. → Continue reading: Water and some basic economics
The Smithsonian’s entrepreneurial impulse to exploit new media for profit is a healthy one, at root. The Smithsonian is already a quasi-private entity, where most staff is on the public payroll, while most executives are paid with privately solicited donations. It could conceivably, like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the federal student loan agency Sallie Mae, aspire to becoming a self-supporting entity within the government. So of course, the institution is taking a lot of flack for its deal to produce on-demand, for-pay documentaries in conjunction with Showtime. Congress has even joined in, cutting the institution’s funding while citing the high executive pay as an excuse.
The deal is bad, but not for the reasons being stated in editorials. It is bad because of an anti-competitive clause that gives Showtime first-refusal over the ‘right’ to fund documentary projects seeking to use Smithsonian archival material. Far from privatizing the Smithsonian, this makes Showtime a de facto government agency. Forcing documentarians to seek funding from a single source in order to pursue a creative project based on national archival material is an awfully pink concept, and the kind of move that gives privatization a bad name.
With a monopolistic provider, divided into a number of exam boards, and facing the requirement of meeting the targets set by the government, the A-level is no longer perceived as the de facto ‘gold standard’. Now that the anecdotal tales of remedial lessons in grammar for first year students, and bullet point answers, private schools are searching for alternatives:
One of the most damning criticisms is that pupils can gain top grades in the exams by providing only “bite-sized” paragraphs of information or bullet points.
A grade has risen to 22.8 per cent, up from 11.9 per cent in 1991.
Some questions even tell candidates what they should mention in their answer. For instance, an English literature A-level question from a 2003 paper, in which pupils are asked to comment on a passage in Othello, goes on to say “in the course of your answer, look closely at the language, tone and imagery of the dialogue and comment on what the passage suggests about attitudes to Othello.”
A group of private schools and Cambridge Universities International Examinations are constructing a new exam, the Pre-U, based upon stronger syllabi and ensuring academic rigour through the teaching of essay techniques. The centralised state sector is unable to innovate and set up a new examination system due to the demands of the government for greater control over the education system. They can prevent students stuck with state schooling from participating in dangerous ‘improvements’:
While the Pre-U will be available to state schools, they will effectively be barred from taking it up because it is unlikely to be included on the Government’s list of accredited qualifications.
Some state schools already complain bitterly that they cannot offer international GCSEs, which many believe are superior to normal GCSEs because they do not include coursework.
However, this new examination has stirred the civil servants to lift a pencil:
The criticism has led the Government to consider including tougher questions in A-level papers as part of its secondary education reforms, from 2008.
Would it not be a fitting amendment for the Tory party to champion the freedom to choose examinations, either at a parental or at school level? Perhaps, if the majority of parents vote for the ‘Pre-U’ or International GCSEs, the school should be forced to honour their wishes.
The details of this story are still unfolding. Irrespective of these, the Dutch appear to have lost a brave, eloquent and credible voice against the backward Islamic extremism that is threatening their liberal traditions.
Ronald Bailey does not pull his punches when dealing with opponents of biotechnology:
Bioconservative intellectuals are fully cognizant of the tendency for our species to be suspicious of the new and the strange, and they clearly want to harness that suspicion as a strategy to restrain biotechnological progress. To that end they advocate adopting the so-called precautionary principle… it would mean that new biotechnological techniques such as stem cells, cloning, and sex selection should be presumed innocent, and those who propose a new intervention must bear the burden of showing that its promise outweighs its peril.
The problem is that humanity is terrible at anticipating benefits. Consider the optical laser. When the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as “an invention for looking for a job”. No one could imagine what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now it is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products: it runs our printers and optical telephone networks, corrects myopia, removes tattoos, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, etc. It is ubiquitous.
(pages 242-3)
His praise for the idea of material progress reminds of me what Brian Mickelthwait wrote a few weeks back on this blog.
I also liked this passage, where he refers to the unashamed opponent of material progress, Bill McKibben and others:
Respecting the sanctity of life doesn’t require that we take whatever random horrors nature dishes out. Safe genetic engineering, when it becomes possible, strongly affirms the intrinsic value of human life by producing healthier, stronger, smarter people more equipped to enjoy their lifes and to thrive during them.
(page 178)
Bailey’s book is strongly recommended and I pretty much agree with all of it. A point of his that I would emphasise is that of course, people are entitled to say that if they don’t want biotech or whatever, then they should not be made to pay for it. If biocons want to stop tax-funding of stem cell research, then as a libertarian, I entirely defend their right to refuse such funding but of course my view changes if such folk try to actually prevent private funding of such ventures.
Another argument that Bailey confronts head-on is the idea that by penetrating the mysteries of the physical world, we somehow lose our reverence or respect for life. That always struck me as a dumb argument. My amazement at the wonders of space is hardly dented by the insights of a Newton or the glorious photos taken by space probes. Quite the opposite. And whatever some genetic determinists (some of whom are sadly racists) may say, I don’t believe that the argument for free will and Man’s capacity for making meaningful choices in life is reduced one iota by our understanding of genetics. The more we know, the more power that gives us to shape our futures. I think it was a chap called Francis Bacon who said something to the effect that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Bailey is one of the better writers for Reason magazine. I definitely can recommend this book for those looking at controversies in this area, such as this subject.
The Onion just keeps on getting better.
Ever read something you wrote not all that long ago and pondered how you could have got it so epically wrong? Take this article I wrote last year about forcing the Middle East into a strategic decline. My prescription? Government action – tax breaks, subsidies, strategic state investment; a Keynesian smorgasbord. Ugh! Why did I not think this through more fully? Five years of sky-high oil prices will go an awful long way towards solving the problems mentioned in the article, courtesy of the market. No government meddling required. As it happens, I submitted the essay for a university assignment and received a pleasing mark. A bit regrettable that I felt sticking the bloody thing up around this rather more intellectually rigorous domain was a good idea.
Liberals often talk about the incremental implementation of their creed, envisaging liberal ideals slowly seeping into the mainstream to eventually supplant the will to plan and the will to coerce. I disagree with this prediction of events. The model of the modern developed state will only decline when a popular perception that it is simply unaffordable exists. I contend that such a notion will only be wholly planted in the popular imagination by a sudden, catastrophic failure of the state, of which I believe we will sooner or later experience. This is not an unrealistic prediction; the state-initiated welfare programmes in all their myriad contortions are by nature self-perpetuating and ever-expanding, and thus the parasite will eventually consume so much of the creative juices of its host that the host will starve. This will result in massive social and economic upheaval for an enormous bulk of individuals who had made provisions for the future assuming the existence of government-controlled and distributed social welfare.
Consequently, the modern first world welfare state is in the process of clogging its own arteries. I am envisaging a scenario whereby a critical mass of nonproductive citizens and inadequately funded retirees overwhelm the social security systems of the developed world, causing most (if not all) of these governments to respond in a manner befitting a state hell-bent on survival – namely, progressively increasing taxes. Of course, the majority of future retirees are likely to be underfunded to such an extent that the welfare state, supported by relatively few, could never hope to provide for so many people. However, the period in which this is being realised will see taxes increase, in the vain hope of closing the funding gap, to a level whereby the aforementioned taxes start killing the economic activity that enables taxation revenue to be collected in the first place. Desperately, governments will make increasingly onerous tax imposts on the productive, which will result in collapse – not fiscal equilibrium. I think that the trend towards increasing individual responsibility will find its genesis in a widespread and deeply painful economic catastrophe as severe as any that has gone before; something equal to or greater than the magnitude of the Great Depression, which profoundly and permanently altered the values of so many of those who lived through it. I believe that liberalism’s best chance of popular acceptance will rapidly rise out of fateful ashes like these. → Continue reading: Liberty’s revolution
According to something I just watched on UK TV, in a survey the public ranked estate agents lower in terms of trustworthiness than any other professional group in Britain… except for politicians. The programme also discussed how increasing numbers of buyers and sellers were doing business via the internet in order to cut out estate agents altogether.
As part of the show’s segment dealing with this, some woman from Which? (a statist ‘consumer group’ which acts as a pro-regulation lobby) came on supporting the idea that the state should regulate estate agents, requiring them to be licenced… in other words she wants to trust the most un-trusted group in Britain to regulate the second most un-trusted group in Britain.
Do my eyes deceive me or are Australia’s two main parties in effect in a race to see who can get the credit for abolishing the top rate of taxation? Now that is a vibe I would like to see spreading to other parts of the world.
I hope they decide to not stop there… if reducing the tax rate for some is good, reducing it for everyone is even better!
I would love to know if this is the result of some nefarious power play or just some good old fashioned ‘hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ naughtiness that got discovered.
Even at the CIA I tend to assume venal cock-ups explain most things rather than dark conspiracies… but I will follow this with interest.
The novellist William Gibson was interviewed on open source radio talking about the NSA wiretap scandal. The wonderful folks at BoingBoing transcribed part of it, and one part of it struck me as particularly interesting.
I’ve been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I’ve noticed on the Internet that there aren’t many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.
I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, “Oh, they’re doing it anyway.” In some way our culture believes that, and it’s a real problem, because evidently they haven’t been doing it anyway, and now that they’ve started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.
It’s very hard to get some people on-board because they think it’s a fait accompli…
I think it’s [the X-Files, Nixon wiretapping, science fiction]. I think it’s predicated in our delirious sense of what’s been happening to us as a species for the past 100 years. During the Cold War it was almost comforting to believe that the CIA was reading everything…
In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We’ve gotten somewhere we’ve never been before. It’s very interesting. In the short term, I’ve taken the position that it’s very, very illegal and I hope something is done about it.
I was particularly taken with the idea that popular culture has a role to play here. Did Hollywood create the paranoid ‘they are all listening in to us’ culture, or was it merely responding to popular demand. Who creates the zeitgeist that can often have a very big impact on the way the public perceives political and economic and social events? No one controls it, no one can control it, and no one person is in charge of it. And I think that makes it all the more an interesting phenomena to observe.
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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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