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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Recently, I heard someone describe the Australian constitution as the second best in the world. No prizes for guessing the best. Since the recent 4th of July celebrations, I have been revelling in the bracing ideological purity of the Constitution of the United States of America, and I have no doubt that it is superior to the constitutions of other nations – in the mind of a liberal, anyway. What of Australia’s, however? It is hopelessly outdated and largely irrelevant – the form of state it envisions bears little likeness to modern Australia. For example, the office of Prime Minister is not mentioned at all and most of the mechanics of government exist thanks to convention rather than doctrine. It is not a bad constitution; mainly for the fact that it contains none of the Fabianesque “positive” rights (citizens have a right to a life free of poverty, etc) which tend to enable and then entrench statism. Such caveats are common in most modern constitutions, to their great detriment. If Australia’s constitution is the second best in the world, it is certainly a very distant second. As regular commenter Chris Harper said in a recent Samizdata thread,
The Constitution of the United States of America, one of the great works of human thought.
Quite. In contrast, Australia’s constitution is passable only due to the elements it does not contain – surely there are a number of superior (in ideology and effectiveness) national constitutions in place today. So what is the second best constitution in the world?
You would think Switzerland’s should be a contender. It is a country that holds a number of liberal values as national traits. It is also admired by many of the Samizdatistas, who tend to be a rather liberal bunch (for the most part). One would not be being unreasonable if they predicted that the Swiss constitution is a relatively liberal document. However, if you did predict that, you would be wrong. I did a little research to test my above hypothesis, and was surprised with what I discovered. Far from being one of the best constitutions around (from a liberal perspective), I believe the Swiss document to be one of the worst – if not the worst. For a start, it is too easily altered. According to Wikipedia, the original Swiss constitution was altered to include
the “right of initiative”, under which a certain number of voters could make a request to amend a constitutional article, or even to introduce a new article into the constitution. Thus, partial revisions of the constitution could be made any time.
Worse still, a revised version of the constitution that came into force in the 1990s
is subject to continual changes
due to
constitutional initiatives and counterproposals[.]
This is no good at all. Most liberals are deeply interested in durably enshrining the rights and freedoms of the individual; if these can be swept away on a majoritarian whim, then sooner or later it is likely they will be. Such ease of amendment dramatically weakens the document, although worse is to come. From the same Wikipedia article mentioned above:
[The] Swiss Federal Constitution has a certain peculiarity when compared to other constitutions in the world. It does not provide for any constitutional jurisdiction over any federal laws, that is, laws proclaimed by Parliament may not be struck down by the Federal Court on the grounds of unconstitutionality. This special provision in the Swiss Constitution is a manifestation of how democratic principles are held to outweigh the principles upon which the constitutional state is built.
What a terrible idea. A liberal would assert that the whole point of a constitution is to constrain majoritarian democracy – has the phrase “tyranny of the majority” been widely translated into French, German or Italian? This “peculiarity” consigns the Swiss constitution to complete irrelevance. Regarding the contents of the document – who cares? They can be ignored at any time by a majority of the Federal parliament. The constitution may currently be adhered to by Swiss federal politicians, but there is nothing enforcing their adherence. The only thing that stands between the relatively liberal arrangement the Swiss enjoy today and a Blairite soft tyranny (or worse) is the Swiss people’s enduring common sense and conservatism. I have met a number of Swiss folk in my time and have found that generally they are predisposed to exhibit both traits. However, events change people. Time changes people. If the Swiss elect a Tony Blair and the political circumstances allow it, such an individual could set about dismantling the various manifestations of Swiss liberalism, completely unrestrained by the toothless constitution. I am led to believe that the Swiss constitution is relatively popular in that country. For a generally conservative people, it is hard not to remark that they paradoxically admire a document that is inherently unconservative – dangerously so.
As for the second best constitution in the world, perhaps some of the readers of this post might put forward a few contenders.
(An English translation of the Swiss constitution can be found here – also via the aforementioned Wikipedia article.)
The June edition of technology, futurism and culture magazine Wired has a fascinating piece by Steve Silberman about growing government restrictions in the United States on home-chemistry kits and how this could bar children from learning from, and getting excited by, science. Instead, children are likely to increasingly encounter chemistry and science not up close in a lab and by playing around with kits, but via video or school labs where experiments are conducted in highly protected environments. I can see the thought process here: “If youngsters get home-kits to make chemical experiments, then the odd potential bin Laden brewing up a concoction in his bedroom could go out and try to blow people up.” Small-scale amateur rocketry has already experienced similar bans or restrictions on stuff like the fuel used (“some nut might shoot a plane out of the sky!”).
But the security services are missing the “Pack not a herd” point of Glenn Reynolds and others: namely, that in a rich civil society where lots of people have hobbies and interests including messing around with chemistry, physics and technology in their spare time, it creates a natural “social capital”, if you will, of people who can prove mighty useful in an emergency. The same edition of Wired magazine has an article on how companies like Proctor and Gamble use home-based scientists – what Wired calls “crowdsourcing” – to fix problems that their own in-house professionals take more time and a lot more money to solve. If I were a defence or security official, instead of treating all amateur scientists as potential trouble-makers, I’d co-opt them, issue prizes for new ideas, and so forth. I suppose this links to my point below about the value of X-Prize contests.
So by all means be vigilant in the fight against terror. But if geeky children want to learn more about chemistry at home, I think that is a healthy thing to be encouraged. Our ancestors, such as these fellows, who often arrived at scientific breakthroughs after exploring scientific ideas in a far less regulated environment than today, certainly would have agreed.
The official in this case being the senior civil servant in charge of the project review, according to emails leaked to the Sunday Times:
From: Foord, David (OGC)
Sent: 08 June 2006 15:17
Subject: RE: Procurement Strategy
This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality. The early variant idea introduces huge risk on many levels some of which mature in these procurement options.
How can IPS plan to do anything but extend existing contracts in the absence of an approved business case? The plan on page 8 shows outline business case approval in March 2007 (which incidentally I think is a reasonable target but by no means guaranteed). OJEU is dependent on this (as page 15 plan shows correctly) so Sept 06 is not an option for anything other than supporting business as usual.
Oh there is so much more. Read the whole thing.
Now how does this square with numerous ministerial statements that all was fine and dandy? For instance, Charles Clarke,(Hansard, 18 October 2005, Col.800):
Since the debate on Second Reading, the project has been through a further Office of Government Commerce review on business justification. The review confirmed that the project is ready to proceed to the next phase. An independent assurance panel is now in place to ensure that the work is subject to rigorous, ongoing challenge by experts, as well as major period reviews by the OGC process.
Or Baroness Scotland of Asthal, to the lords (Hansard, 16 Jan 2006, col.459):
The Earl of Northesk: My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness can satisfy my curiosity. At which traffic light, during the various stages, has the ID card been subject to review, and which traffic light has it been given for each of its stages, and which current stage has it just passed?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I think it has gone through its first two stages—that is, nought and one—and it has been given a clear bill of health to continue to the next stage. So the gateway review process is well on its way and is within the ambit of where it should be. The noble Earl will know that it is not usual for the gateway process details to be expanded upon or disclosed.
Or the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on 17th January:
Put to the PMOS that the KPMG report on ID cards had recommended a more detailed risk based cost analysis, the PMOS said that the project had already been through a number of processes. It had already been through a further Office of Government Commerce (OGC) review on business justification. The review confirmed that the project was ready to proceed to the next phase. An independent assurance panel was now in place to ensure that the work was subject to rigorous on-going challenge by experts as well as major periodic reviews via the OGC process.
In addition there had been the KPMG independent review. So in terms of oversight and reviews it had certainly been scrutinised. It was also subject to the normal audit procedures of departmental expenditure through the National Audit Office (NAO). What would not be wise, however, would be to reveal what our baseline was in discussions with commercial contractors because that would take away the commercial flexibility needed to get the best value for money. In any other realm of business you would not expect an organisation to reveal what it’s [sic – GH] baseline cost was precisely for that reason.
Rubbish, for reasons I may go into some other time. You might however expect it to have some idea what those costs are.
In the light of the officials’ view on the facts of the matter, in what way are all these Government comments not lying to the press and to parliament?
I have read Andrew Sullivan’s blog pretty much from the moment he started it. I have a natural sympathy for anyone who defies conventional stereotypes, and a man who is Catholic, gay and a small-government Reaganite conservative, a fan of Madonna and Michael Oakeshott certainly breaks more sterotypes than most. He has been magnificent in taking a stand on the issue of torture, for example. But even our heroes – and Sullivan is one in my eyes – have their feet of clay or views that I regard as stand-out dumb. And on the issue of cars, Sullivan (who does not drive) reverts to nannystatism in all its ugly glory. He endorses an article by Jonathan Rauch arguing that President Bush should press for an international pact to phase out the use of gasoline in cars over the next 30 years. Oh great. So do we humble, much-harassed motorists get a say in this? Don’t give me a line about how this would be ‘democratically’ decided. Oh yeah. Why not leave it to the market, already driving new alternatives to petroleum-based engines? If the real price of oil continues to be high, as it is at the moment, then we will get more hybrids, more hydrogen-powered cars, more innovations and new transport sources, without the need for some Grand International Treaty or 30-year deadline. If Bush did make such a pronouncement, how seriously would anyone take it? Would it not be regarded as the sort of ‘eye-catching initiative’ one has come to associate with our own Tony Blair.
A far better idea, in fact, would be to rely on innovation contests such as the X-Prize to encourage new technologies rather than go for a big Treaty with a deadline. Now that strikes me as the sort of idea a small-government advocate like Sullivan should be pushing.
I can understand the wish to reduce use of oil from the Middle East and curb C02 emissions. But in my gut I feel that Sullivan and others like him just don’t like cars very much and are mystified by most American’ love of a set of wheels (clue, Andrew – America is seriously BIG). Sullivan has lived in the States now for more than two decades, but I fear that in some way, the fella never really left this little damp island known as Britain.
I recently read This is Burning Man by Brian Doherty, chronicling the remarkable phenomenon of the Burning Man annual festival/event/blowout in the middle of the harsh Nevada desert. Despite the occasional slip into Sixties hippyspeak which might suggest a sort of communalistic mushiness, the book contained at its core the profoundly rational message that we can enjoy civil society by reducing the state to its barest minimum. Very subversive of statism, Doherty writes with obvious passion for the festival and affection for the often nutty but loveable characters who have developed the event. A great way to while away the hours while waiting to catch my delayed flight out of Nice after a business conference yesterday. Money quote:
“Any political virtue I saw in Burning Man always had to do with its avoidance of politics as I see it – the game of some people telling other people what to do. Burning Man to me was about liberty, and ordered anarchy, the inherent strength and possible joys of a civilisation in which all the “government” you need can be purchased in a freely chosen market.”
I may even go there one day and try and combine a Burning Man trip with a visit to the magnificent Reno air race festival. Yowza!
Speed limits, especially highway speed limits, are one of those things that bring out the inner libertarian in many Americans. Which is to say, when Americans get on the open road, they tend to drive as fast as they damn well please. Even on crowded urban freeways, the speed limit is routinely ignored. It is universally assumed that the occasional ticket is just a cost of doing business, and that speed limit enforcement isn’t about public safety but about revenue generation.
On the flip side, few things will get a nanny stater on his high horse faster than automotive travel. In some ways, the 55 mph speed limit (signed into law by Richard Nixon, no friend of limited government, but widely associated with Jimmy Carter, the very model of a modern nanny stater) stands as a high watermark of government bossiness. Aside from claims about gas savings (about which more later), 55 mph is universally lauded by Our Betters as saving lives.
Except, it does no such thing. When the 55 mph federal mandate was being repealed:
Ralph Nader claimed that “history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life.” Judith Stone, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, predicted to Katie Couric on NBC’s “Today Show” that there would be “6,400 added highway fatalities a year and millions of more injuries.” Federico Pena, the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of Transportation, declared: “Allowing speed limits to rise above 55 simply means that more Americans will die and be injured on our highways.”
So were St. Ralph and his cohort of busybodies correct? The envelope, please:
We now have 10 years of evidence proving that the only “assault” was on the sanctity of the truth. The nearby table shows that the death, injury and crash rates have fallen sharply since 1995. Per mile traveled, there were about 5,000 fewer deaths and almost one million fewer injuries in 2005 than in the mid-1990s. This is all the more remarkable given that a dozen years ago Americans lacked today’s distraction of driving while also talking on their cell phones.
Of the 31 states that have raised their speed limits to more than 70 mph, 29 saw a decline in the death and injury rate and only two – the Dakotas – have seen fatalities increase. Two studies, by the National Motorists Association and by the Cato Institute, have compared crash data in states that raised their speed limits with those that didn’t and found no increase in deaths in the higher speed states.
So what about conservation? Everyone opposed to driving fast parrots the bare fact that driving 55 mph is more efficient, but oddly no one seems to mention what percentage we could reduce our total energy use if everyone did so. Given that most driving is done off the freeways, one suspects that the global impact of 55 mph is not great. While there is no doubt that driving slower uses less gas, driving slower is not cost free:
Americans have also arrived at their destinations sooner, worth an estimated $30 billion a year in time saved, according to the Cato study.
So do not forget to offset any savings with the cost of achieving them.
Efficiency is good, no doubt about that. Efficiency is generally not achieved via government mandate, but by the to and fro of the market. All things being equal, a more efficient gizmo, automotive or otherwise, is more attractive the consumer.
So what is the case for 55 mph? Like so many nanny state initiatives, it is rooted not so much in safety (impact: minimal) or efficiency (net global impact: minimal), but in a puritanical desire to control.
Paul Routledge in the Mirror (not a permalink, sorry) offers a follow up to the “Bollocks to Blair” story covered here by Brian the other day:
“Getting fined worked,” he says. “I had only sold two before the police came. Once word got round, people took pity on me and everyone wanted one. I ended up selling 375.”
But more scarily…
The cops asked for the shirt seller’s eye colour, shoe size and National Insurance number to keep track of him “in case he reoffended”.
Once you know that, you know what the fuzz are up to – building a national database of people they don’t like.
Well that we knew. In fact the government is building a database of everybody just in case it might not like them – or might have some reason to ‘assist’ them personally (as a matter of ‘enabling’ a more ‘active citizenship,’ you understand) by telling them what to do – at any time in the future.
For myself I’m only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do – I kid you not. Or perhaps they did…
John Lettice in The Register calmly points out how so much ‘anti-terrorist’ activity and supposed ‘terrorist threat’ arises from the dogs of war chasing their own tails:
Real terror cases and claimed terror plots frequently include plans to attack major public buildings, tall buildings (e.g. Canary Wharf), international airports, and references to CBRN weapons use. Few if any of those that have been “frustrated” or documented so far include convincing plans (even plans, full stop) for actually mounting the attacks, sourcing the deadly poisons and constructing the weapons. Transcripts meanwhile are peppered with lurid and unfeasible attack ideas (often sounding uncannily like the sort of thing a mouthy teenager would say to impress his mates) and references to ‘terror manuals’ which often turn out to be dodgy survivalist poison recipes and/or the ubiquitous Encyclopaedia of Jihad which, as it includes references to tall buildings, is a handy fall-back if the prosecution is in want of a target list.
Read the whole thing here.
Meanwhile we have testimony from an amateur bomber that makes it pretty clear how coherent the ‘mouthy teenager’ Islamist ideology and planning is:
He says non-Muslims of Britain “deserve to be attacked” because they voted for a government which “continues to oppress our mothers, children, brothers and sisters in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya.”
Jabbing his finger emphatically, he warns: “What have you witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel.”
(From The Guardian)
This quote no longer appears on the BBC site. Maybe they think it is somehow persuasive. But the misconceptions that Blair’s government can have any influence on the Russians in Chechnya, that it oppresses (rather than in fact succouring) the Palestinians, or that it provides financial support to either Israel or the US, ought to show how clueless these guys are about the real world. As should the idea that bombing the general population can make any difference to the policy of a state. (What touching faith in democracy!) As should the empty braggadocio of continuing, stronger, attacks. Compare that with what we’ve actually seen: outside the Middle East only wildly sporadic and variable isolated actions.
Unfortunately, if there’s anything more stupid than Mr Tanweer it is the fear-frenzy of the mainstream media. What has been continuing and strengthening is fuss and panic. A fevered but entirely vacuous piece by Gordon Correra, BBC Security Correspondent says: “Shehzad Tanweer’s videotape provides more evidence linking the London bombers to al-Qaeda.” Er, no it does not. It provides evidence for the not very shocking hypotheses that videotapes made for purposes of self-satisfaction can travel almost anywhere in a year, that post production is cheap and easy these days, and that the chief function of ‘al-Qaeda’ is as a brand-name. Mr Correra has spent too much time reading ‘security’ briefings and too little considering celebrity sex tapes. A clip in a video package of someone drawing a circle on a map has more worldwide effect than any physical activity in a real place, just as watching Paris Hilton, et al., has led to more considerably more sexual stimulation than they could ever have achieved personally.
This isn’t a clash of civilisations; it is a clash of fantasists. It is just a pity that both sides have some capacity to do real harm to the peaceful lives of non-players.
Yesterday… I saw a homemade butane-powered cannon shoot a saboted blueberry muffin across my lawn.
– Tamara K
A budget impasse caused by New Jersey state governor Jon Corzine attempting to increase taxes has caused many of the state’s functions to be shut down for the first time in New Jersey’s history.
This is of course splendid news and I hope the longer the shut down lasts, the more people in that bastion of statism that is New Jersey will realise that life goes on without the nanny state constantly interfering. More than half the state work force, 45,000 people, have been ordered to stay home. Perhaps people will eventually conclude this is actually rather a good thing and wonder why they have been paying for these people all these years. Moreover when it comes to things people really do seem to want, I would be willing to bet that most of the statistically challenged folks who entertain themselves in the now closed Atlantic City casinos would be just as happy to gamble without state regulators on the premises (who after all are there primarily to make sure the state gets their tax money).
Jon Corzine is showing the way: the world is not going to come to an end when large chunks of the state stop functioning. More and faster please.
Must go, got a government to destabilise.
– Guido Fawkes explains the brevity of his comment on this posting at my blog
It may sound like an odd thing to claim that a ‘saint’ has nothing to do with religion but in the case of St. George, that is quite a reasonable thing to say. Thus when the politically correct functionaries of the Church of England start floating the idea of replacing St. George with St. Alban as the patron saint of England, I would have to say that the Church of England are flattering themselves if they think it is actually up to them. Dating from the reign of Edward III, a certain conception of St. George has been part of English iconography considerably longer that there has been a Church of England and I suspect the association of this mythic dragon-slayer with ‘Englishness’ will outlive England’s established church comfortably.
In a post-Christian society like England, St. George, who may or may not have been a Roman general, is really just a cultural construct that embodies certain mythic values ascribed to England. And that is, of course, why the emasculated appeasers who make up the leadership of the Church of England really want to replace the mythic warrior St. George:
But the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St. George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.
And given that Britain is fighting two wars at the moment in Iraq and Afghanistan, against an enemy who are Muslims, I can think of nothing better to commend St. George to a nation which may feel the need to summon the fortitude of warlike archetypes more than it needs an irrelevent and collapsing Church.
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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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