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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American economist Thomas Sowell remains, in my view, one of the “must-read” authors for folk interested in the case for liberal markets and critiques of well-intentioned but hubristic social policy. In one of his books, The Vision of the Anointed, he hits upon a key fact that is so often ignored by writers making statements such as “X percent of the population own Y percent of the wealth”, and then proceed, in terms of great indignation, to argue for massive redistribution of wealth to rectify said terrible state of affairs. Sowell points out that what such statements miss out is that we are all getting older, our lives change, and as we do so, it is common for folk to pass from one wealth bracket to another:
“One common source of needless alarm about statistics is a failure to understand that a given series of numbers may represent a changing assortment of people. A joke has it that, upon being told that a pedestrian is hit by a car every 20 minutes in New York, the listener responded, “He must get awfully tired of that!” Exactly the same reasoning – or lack of reasoning – appears in statistics that are intended to be taken seriously.” (page 43).
Back in 2004 I put a clothespin on my nose and endorsed the Republicans over the Democrats. This was primarily because with a hot phase of a war against our sworn enemies in progress, the thought of Kerry in the White House just scared the hell out of me.
Several years on, as the Republicans continue to erode civil liberties and dig their snouts into the porker trough as deeply as any of the Democrats ever did, I am beginning to pray for enough of a Democratic success this fall to at the very least deadlock the government. The following, which I have just received from Downsize DC was the last straw:
The politicians want YOU to be a snitch
HR 1528 has already passed through one committee and appears likely to pass through another. This bill, if passed, will force you to inform on your neighbors if you have any knowledge of drug related activity. We’re not making this up. First it was illegal to deal drugs, then use them, and then to be caught with them. Now, Congressman James Sensenbrenner wants to send you to prison if you don’t inform on your neighbors! “Informing on neighbors” has always been a key feature of past totalitarian regimes. Is this really what we want for America? Click here to send your message to Congress opposing this law.
It is time to throw the bums out. The problem is, we already know their replacements are bums who are just as bad. The best we can say is a new bum is less experienced than an old bum and less capable of causing trouble for a few years.
I really wish we could get a few more libertarians into the asylum to jam a spanner into the works of government.
We (classical) liberals have spent a lot of our lives worrying about how to keep the state small and stabilise free institutions against collectivist urges. It seems we missed the point. The gradual socialist slide we were resisting popped. Meanwhile the revolution happened and we missed it. In fact most people seem to have missed it, including the old leftists that we feared and who are now equally perplexed. We were all looking the wrong way: Blair’s Britain is no more like Scandinavia than it is like Soviet Russia.
Matthew Parris might be right to detect something of the Third World in the way that government pronouncements no longer have a relation to reality, but I submit the polity itself is something new. It is nothing so human as kleptocracy. At some point Britain became a totalitarian bureaucratic state in spirit, while retaining plentiful food and clean water, and the forms of the rule of law – where that doesn’t get in the way of official power. Week on week measures are brought forward that present ministers would have organised protests against (and in some cases actually did) had they happened in 20th century South Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America… Had anyone been doing them but the benign guardians of civic republicanism (themselves), in fact.
Last week: Local authories get powers to seize empty housing.
Next week: Some more exciting ways for the Home Office to build a safe just and tolerant society.
1. Seize the profits of companies that employ people who are not permitted to work by the state, or subcontract to companies that do. And remove their directors and ban them from acting as directors.
2. The Serious Organised Crime Agency to have powers to seek ‘control orders’ on those it suspects of involvement in serious crime but does not have evidence sufficient to prosecute. These control orders would be like those on suspected terrorists and control potentially any aspect of a person’s life and their contact with others.
We will have to wait for the announcement to discover whether, “for operational reasons” they will, like the terrorist versions, have to be imposed in secret at secret hearings with the suspect unable to hear or challenge the evidence against them. What’s the betting?
[Note: The current default definition of ‘serious crime’, by the way, is that in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, s81. It is extraterritorial. Activity is serious crime if it would be a crime anywhere in the UK, involves the use of violence, or “substantial financial gain” or is conduct by a “large number” of persons in pursuit of a common purpose… The former NCIS (now part of SOCA) defined “organised” crime as that committed by three persons or more, so a “large number” may not be all that large. Mind how you go.]
So we now know that the police officers who shot dead Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, claiming they thought he was a suicide bomber, will face no charges. Instead, Scotland Yard may face charges under, wait for it, health and safety regulations.
Yet all this utterly misses the point. I am willing to believe that the event itself was all just a horrible cock-up but what I am not willing to accept is that after shooting dead the wrong man, the authorities can issue a stream of bare faced lies with complete impunity. Very soon after the event it must have been clear to the police they had made a horrible blunder and this fact soon came out. However we were then told that the unfortunate Brazilian had significantly contributed to his own fate… he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket1, he had run when challenged by the armed police and been chased in the tube station2 and finally had vaulted over the gate and run on to the train pursued by the cops3… all of which we now know was completely false.
The reasons for such lies are clear. I was horrified when I first heard they had got the wrong man but given what we were told about how it had all gone down, I was not unsympathetic to the police. After all, in the aftermath of the suicide attacks on London a few weeks earlier and failed attacks a few days before, anyone who runs from armed police when challenged only to dive onto a crowded train can only expect one thing. But then the truth came out as there were simply too many witnesses and too many inconsistencies. Yet even that did not stop the London Transport CCTV footage that we are told makes us ‘secure beneath the watchful eyes’ from being mysteriously blank.
So where did those lies come from? Who told the police spokesman to offer up those fabricated events and why are they not on trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?
And yet it seems the entire stream of disinformation that the authorities tried to use to mitigate this ghastly error has just vanished down the memory hole. Why are Britain’s self-important press silent on this? THAT is what I want to know.
1 = He was in fact wearing a short jeans jacket
2 = He rode to the station on a bus without being challenged
3 = He calmly used his season ticket to pass though the automated gate
I am still unconvinced of the isolationist argument vis Iraq that would have had Western militaries – and probably as a result civilians – quit the entire Middle East, and leave Saddam to wreak havoc as he has before, but my goodness, the case for non-interventionist foreign policy has never looked so good at the moment as the insurgency in Iraq gets worse. Jim Henley sums up the “do as little as possible” school of libertarian foreign policy as well as anyone:
If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.
My main problem with Jim’s argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that’s putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view – if I can presume to call it that – should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again – and Jim and others have to answer this question – does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian “leave-well-alone” foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel’s actions in Lebanon (see the posts below).
What to do?
Politician A says: Give me money. If I get power, I’ll let you have some of my power.
Politician B says: Give me power. If I get power, I’ll take other people’s money and give some of it to you.
Which is the more corrupt?
I take a more equivocal view of the current military actions in Lebanon than Dale. I strongly question the wisdom of dislocating communications and infrastructure in the non-Hezbollah controlled parts of the country, i.e. punishing people who are, if not natural allies of Israel (though some are), at least not currently Israel’s enemies.
And yet…
We cannot pretend that Lebanon is a normal nation-state. The Lebanese government does not in reality control Lebanon, or more correctly, it controls Lebanon’s various regions at the sufferance of the local factional leaders. Clearly just as the Lebanese government is not responsible for the actions of Hezbollah within Lebanon, they cannot then claim their sovereignty has been violated when Israel attacks Hezbollah within Lebanon: they cannot have it both ways. If they are responsible, then the Lebanese state must stop Hezbollah. As they clearly cannot do that, they cannot reasonably object to Israel doing so. But similarly Israel should be very discriminating upon whom they drop their munitions.
I cannot really complain about Israel hammering Hezbollah anywhere they can be found (and I do mean anywhere). Hezbollah must be destroyed in the most literal sense of the word. Moreover the people in Syria and Iran who make Hezbollah possible must also be destroyed, again quite literally… and political posturing, UN resolutions and negotiations will not achieve those objectives. To this end right now Israel should be striking targets in Iran and Syria in retaliation for Hezbollah activities. In short, whilst I am very unhappy to see Israel attacking the airport in Beirut, I would have little problem with them doing exactly that to Tehran or Damascus. I think they are ‘sharing the pain’ with the wrong people.
It is easy to point the finger at Israel (I am certainly not reflexively pro-Israeli myself and Lord knows they can be pretty arrogant and unsympathetic), but in truth I have yet to hear any workable alternatives to what they are doing being offered up by the critics. Hezbollah’s actions are intolerable and so why should Israel tolerate them? If not this then what should Israel do? Methinks this is not an easy question to answer.
The air attack on the Beirut airport in Lebanon has put me in an unusual position: I must condemn Israel’s act as one of egotistical stupidity of the highest order. it is in no one’s interest to push a newly liberated and tentatively democratic Lebanon back into the throes of barbarism and chaos from whence it so recently came. I cannot help but imagine this attack has solidified even the most open minded of the Lebanonese population into a common distaste of their southern neighbor. Should this cause violence amongst factions with Lebanon to flare again, it will be an open invitation for Syria to once more crush Lebanon under its dictatorial tank treads.
Their action is about as negative to American and British strategic interests as it is possible to get. I am certain they are getting exceedingly harsh and less than diplomatic words behind the scenes words from Condileeza Rice and from Tony Blair’s envoys as well.
The damage this has done to Israel’s cause is almost inestimable.
You have lost an awful lot of friends guys. Actions have consequences.
Remember not so long ago?
As readers of Samizdata may know from my previous articles, I do not think highly of British bookshops and recent visits have reminded me why. John Adamson (of Peterhouse Cambridge) has had a new book published called The Noble Revolt – it is an important work arguing the case that the resistance to Charles the first was mostly organized by great lords. Adamson’s work has been widely discussed, not just in academic journals but in popular magazines. So I visited a few books shops to have a look for it.
Borders – not there.
Waterstones – not there.
W.H. Smith (which owns Waterstones I believe) – not there.
History books sell well in Britain and this was an important new book – and it was not in the shops. “You could order it” – if I am going to order the book why should I not just buy it over the internet, where it would be cheaper anyway? So what new books did the bookshops have?
Almost needless to say there were three new death-to-America books.
One by Chomsky, one by Pilger and one by Mark Thomas.
I could not miss them – they were shoved in the most prominent places in the stores (sometimes side by side in a sort of unholy Trinity). The Thomas book ended up with him denouncing Radstone technology (a company I used to guard) for selling electronics to the evil Americans which they use in their unmanned Predator aircraft.
Mr Thomas boasted that the evil Americans had failed to kill a prominent terrorist (something he described as an attempted “extra judicial killing” – something which non-scumbags call “killing the enemy in time of war”), but had killed women and children (the fact that other terrorists had been killed in the attack was something he did not mention – no doubt because the death of comrades upset him too much). I could not bring myself to look at the new Chomsky and Pilger books – but if they are any different from the death-to-America stuff they have written a hundred times before I am six feet tall and have a full head of hair.
So there we have it. An important history book that would likely sell well is nowhere to be found (so people who pop in to book shops will not see and and therefore will not buy it) and another three books coming out with the same death-to-America stuff that their authors have written a hundred times before are displayed as if they were wonderful new works. I am told that the British bookshop enterprises are getting into financial trouble and they may eventually go bust.
Well, the sooner the better
There is now a very high chance that Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium operating the Channel Tunnel rail-link between London and the continent, could be liquidated by this September, having failed to reach a key agreement earlier this week with creditors. The saga of how the operator would persuade a group of banks to let it restructure a huge pile of debt has been chugging along for months. Now there is a real risk that this marvel of civil engineering could be known as one of the biggest transport commercial flops in history. The free-marketeer in me says well, the venture was never based on fully commercial grounds in the first place. The folks concerned probably no doubt rightly thought that if the project was a flop, then the fortunate taxpayers of Europe would pick up the tab, just as they did with that other venture of high-tech wonder and dubious economics, Concorde. The romantic in me would be very sad to see this wonder of rail come to an end. I have used the Eurotunnel service several times, both for work and for short breaks to France in recent years. Every time I have marvelled at the smoothness of the service, only occasionally marred by delays in the English side of the operation, or by the odd rude French ticket inspector.
It certainly beats messing around in airport lounges, that is for sure.
Bob Bigelow’s one third scale inflatable space station is in orbit after a launch from Russia. This is the first of several unmanned test articles which will lead to a full scale station by 2015. Even so, at 8 feet in diameter and 14 feet in length when inflated, this habitat is not exactly small.
You can read a bit more about it at CNN. I would also recommend checking space.com and the other usual suspects for more detailed accounts, something I am about to do myself.
I was just watching a BBC Two special on the TV on political youth movements in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia. During the programme a member of Yabloko was interviewed, the voice-over describing it as a ‘liberal’ (in the British sense of the word) opposition group, which according to its stated platform it sort of is (at least by local standards).
And on the wall behind the Yabloko spokesman being interview was a large picture of… Che Guevara.
So let me get this straight, some of their activists have a fondness for a mass murdering communist whose ‘philosophy of the wall’ was to simply execute ‘class enemies’, but they are ‘liberal’? Really? How liberal exactly? It reminded me of the commentary during the attempted military coup d’etat against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 in which a CNN reporter described the orthodox communists in the military attempting to roll back the collapse of the Soviet Empire as ‘right wing’. Well what constitutes ‘left wing’ if being a communist does not? I would say that CNN reporter was just using the term to mean ‘the bad guys’.
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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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