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 advertised (where else?) in the Guardian:
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The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy
– Fred L. Smith
Unlike some free marketeers, I do not have a visceral loathing of trade unions, although I can understand why some people do dislike them. With very large businesses, such as say, ICI or GM, it probably saves a lot of time and bother to negotiate pay and conditions through a union and its representatives.
So long as they do not try to form monopolies and freeze non-union members out of a company via a ‘closed shop’ or expect to be free of the ordinary tort liabilities of the Common Law, I think unions are often beneficial. They can provide services to their members like insurance or other benefits, help members with specific disputes, and occasionally their strikes for better pay and conditions do in fact help workers in vulnerable situations, such as where there are few other sources of work and an employer has a de-facto monopoly negotiation power – although such cases are pretty rare and do not last long in a properly free and efficient market place.
There is debate on whether employers really do have a structural upper hand in negotiating pay with employees and whether unions do anything useful to ‘correct’ that supposed imbalance. The economist W. Hutt was a notable skeptic on how much of an advantage employers actually have, if at all. Anyway, even if there is not a significant structural imbalance between the negotiating freedom of labour and employers, unions can smooth the pay negotiation path at times.
So there you have it. A member of the Samizdata writing crew, that band of capitalist oppressors, says that unions can be a force for good.
And then, as Stephen Pollard notes, the NUJ reminds us of why so many folk dislike unions and their antics. Sigh.
Considering how good squatters have it in England and Wales, I find it hard to take the faux-incredulousness in the British press about people who organize themselves on MySpace before going into unoccupied homes and destroying them for the fun of it. The law of the land has such little regard for property rights that it should come as a shock to no one that these teenagers do not, either.
This quote is from a year ago, January.
Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”
And this editorial was written last August.
We must give due criticism to the University for its decisions that put students in greater danger than was necessary. By that I am not so much referring to the decision to allow morning classes to take place, but rather the decades-old policy that prohibits students, faculty and staff from legally carrying firearms on campus. This ban even goes so far as to include those who have valid Concealed Handgun Permits.
For those of you who have not heard yet, 32 people died at Virginia Tech today.
Here was Virginia Tech’s solution to a mass killer on campus.
Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:
They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.
They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:
Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.
This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.
They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.
I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.
Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.
In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.
The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.
So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
I do not have a link, but David Brooks was speaking on Meet the Press this morning about the Don Imus affair in the USA.
He says shock-jock popularity is not about racism. It is about cruelty. Institutionalized culturally based cruelty. Indiscriminate cruelty for its own sake.
On hearing the case (allegedly put forth by Snoop Dog in defense of his own misogynistic lyrics) that these particular women, the basketball players should not have been spoken about that way, Brooks said with sad derision, “We can only step on the down trodden.”
Brooks also points out that Imus was very heavily watched and listened to by the power elite. After an appearance on Imus’ show he, Brooks, received a remarkable amount of feedback from the power elite that make made up a disproportionate part of Imus’ audience. So now I ask, what does this say about the souls of those who demand the power and authority to be our masters? What does it mean that the powerful should be so enamoured of deliberate and systematic cruelty that they listen to it for entertainment? Somehow, I am not as surprised as I would like to be.
I think this path to cruelty is one that has been travelled farther in the UK than here, but we appear to be following closely behind you. My personal opinion is that cruelty is a/the clear marker for both the decadence and impotence of a society. Celebrated cruelty is the symptom of a society that has reoriented from protecting its weakest members to baiting them for entertainment. It is historically clear that cruelty, a cultural coldness in the extremities of society, is one of the final signs of its imminent death.
On a positive note, watching this exposure of the internal tensions in the power cabal has provided some interesting moments. For me, the most interesting of all was hearing the market place being praised from the left for having removed Imus from the air (referring to the actions of sponsors). I will take all such statements/concessions as a sign of our strength.
When you hear the word ‘inspectorate’, expectorate.
Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate – perhaps wisely – to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, “South Park and Philosophy,” a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley’s assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.
Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. “Too much” choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:
“A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ’s sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do.”
And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don’t have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don’t have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don’t have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market….I want consumer protection, so I don’t have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the “sea monkeys” Cartman buys in “Simpsons Already Did It”. I want state utilities, so I don’t have to be constantly figuring out the best deal”…..
He concludes, “What I am proposing is not so very radical.”
No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth – presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is – is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers’ best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.
Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport – pretty much anything serious – and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.
There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by “too many” choices – a question-begging notion if there ever was one – they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.
What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the “victim” culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.
Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O’Rourke’s wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.
Blogger Rurrik at The Whims of Fate has a terrific collection of photos of the anti-Putin marches in Russia (including Kasparov being detained). There are so many images that I will not link to a specific article, just check out the whole blog (do not just look at the first page).
The sidebar statement about the Russian Federation on The Whims of Fate is:
- Brutally Suppressed Opposition
- Bureaucratic, Corrupt, Backwards Government
- By the Grace of God, Emperor Tsar
- Byzantine Justice
- Censorship
- Church as Arm of the State
- Extravagant Ruling Elite
- Huge Unwieldy Army
- Political Assassinations
- Powerful Secret Police
- Subservient Parliament
- Widespread Abject Poverty
Not a film review. Truth is more horrifying than fiction, sometimes.
The truth in question being the willingness of those close to power openly to advocate ever more interference with you and me, not ad hoc for venal, corrupt, human reasons, but in order systematically to enforce the currently approved good life on society.
From the BBC (Public Policy Research1 is by subscription, and I am not subsidising the bastards any more than I already do from taxes):
Jasper Gerard argues in PPR: “When it comes to booze, society seems to have lost its senses.”
He says current regulations are failing to tackle the growing trend of under age and binge drinking. By raising the age threshold, he claims: “It is at least possible that those in their early and mid teens will not see drink as something they will soon be allowed to do so therefore they might as well start doing it surreptitiously now.”
Alternatively, he proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units. [Cant for a pint and a half of ordinary beer – or one decent cocktail – GH]
He conceded that no measure would stamp out youthful drinking entirely, but said it was time for a crackdown.
I note the BBC has this story under ‘health’, rather than ‘politics’. It does not have a ‘neo-Puritanism’ category (perhaps we should have). Medicalised bullying sails past the questioning pickets of journalism and gets straight into the credulous baggage train. As does technological bullying. And here we have medicalised state bullying enabled by technology. Woo-hoo!
One can not quote this fragment of C.S. Lewis too often:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
It may spoil the mesodiplosis, but those first too mays should be ises. The robber baron pursues his own whims and pleasures, regardless of others; the neo-Puritan is only happy when the lives of others are under control.
1 = The journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, the tank in which New Labour thinking goes on.
The pope is publishing the first part of his book Jesus of Nazareth. An authorised biography, I guess.
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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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