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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I have often wondered why it is that so many super-rich – and they do not get a lot richer than Warren Buffett – feel the need to make out that their enormous wealth is something embarrassing or shameful, or that they would rather they did not have it. Our capitalists of today are sometimes a rather glum bunch. Buffett says he wishes he could pay more in taxes. Well, Mr Buffett, I am sure you can look up the address of the IRS from the Internet and send them a big cheque. If he really thinks that Congress can make better use of his wealth than one of the smartest investors of modern times, well, go for it. Get out that pen and sign away. Buffett has already demonstrated, via his contributions to the Bill Gates Foundation, that he knows how to use his wealth for philanthropic purposes.
Of course, if he wants to give it to me, I have certain needs……
Mark Mills, makes some pretty outrageous comments about Ayn Rand in the course of how he prefers to defend free enterprise. I have often wondered what is worse: the cultish “official” Objectivists who cannot deal with the slightest criticism of the woman, or those who claim, with little plausibility or evidence, that she contributed nothing valuable apart from an assertion that it is fine and proper to be happy. I came across this piece of nonsense at a link mentioned at the Adam Smith Institute blog:
According to Rand morality is an illusion and truly great individuals act solely in their own interests without giving thought to their impact on others.
Nonsense. The fiction and non-fiction works of the late Miss Rand, which are widely available, such as Atlas Shrugged, are absolutely rammed with discussion – sometimes to the shrill point of tedium – about morality. One may demur about Rand’s version of said, but to claim she had nothing to say on morality is so jaw-droppingly wrong as to wonder what Mr Mills has been smoking. Her view of morality, a code of values, was that morality was essential to the pursuit of life and human flourishing. Her ethical egoism was a kind of progression from the views of Aristotle and an attack on the idea, which stems from the dualism of certain religions, for example, that happiness on this earth and goodness are at war with one another. Rand said this dualism was fatal to both happiness and morality. There is now a large and growing literature on Rand’s views on morality and the importance of it in all aspects of human life (an example is here).
As to the point that her morality gave no thought to the “impact on others” of certain actions, what on earth is he driving at? The pursuit of long-range self interest means that one does not aggress against others, hurt them, rob them, etc. Quite the opposite: as Adam Smith realised, it means serving the wants of others through voluntary exchange in the market makes sense because doing that makes you happier in the long run, gets you friends, riches, etc. Mills statement is bizarre. Of course, Rand was an early sceptic about the environmentalist movement and tended to dismiss worries about pollution, etc, but then there is nothing in her body of ideas as such that would mean that a supporter of her would be blind to the problems of pollution, which can be thought of as a property rights problem.
People will recall that when the USA was founded, the Founders spoke about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It says something about the state of ideas when a so-called defender of liberal capitalism regards a woman who championed the pursuit of happiness and attacked statism as some sort of nutcase. Oh well.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who currently covers economic issues for the Daily Telegraph, wonders whether the €uro zone, faced with a possibly ruinously high exchange rate for the single currency against the dollar and some other major currencies, will embrace the “nuclear option” of imposing exchange controls to prevent the euro rising much further. Evans-Pritchard wonders whether such thoughts are idle. I think he is right but is also right to ponder this issue. If, in order to protect the likes of Airbus and other big exporters, the EU were to halt or control inflows of capital to the euro zone, the impact on places like London, the world’s largest forex market, would be devastating. Tens of thousands of jobs in the money market business would be lost. Such controls would further hammer any idea that the EU had, or ever has had, much to do with free trade. It would set back the cause of global free markets for years. Some defenders for exchange controls might try to argue that they would be less bad than higher tariffs on imports to the EU, but there are plenty of those tariffs already.
The general popularity of the euro at the moment is more because it is – temporarily – seen as a more reliable store of value than the dollar, rather than because of a new-found belief in in the economic prowess of Germany, France, Italy or Spain, for instance. With a large budget and current account deficit, the US has been letting the buck drop to make its exports more competitive overseas and as a result, the euro and the pound have risen, making it cheap for Brits to take their holidays in the States, for example. There is some sign that this exchange rate movement is working (I am actually pretty bullish about American exporters for the next year. I am actually quite upbeat about the US economy, which is always written off, with a hint of anti-American bias, by the usual commentators).
I do not think the EU will embrace exchange controls; such a move would be hugely controversial and unlikely to succeed. Prophets of doom would do well to recall that West Germany, back in the 1970s, lived quite successfully with a strong deutschemark; there is nothing axiomatic about why the EU cannot cope with a strong euro, at least not in the short run. The more fundamental problem, of course, is whether the countries making up the euro zone should have joined it in the first place, given their different characteristics. I think the euro could be a disaster for some nations, or at least a very painful experience. My wife’s country, Malta, is about to join the euro next year. Thank god it does not have a big export market.
Ramesh Ponnuru scoffs at the notion that Ron Paul’s tilt at the White House has, supposedly, encouraged an upswelling of libertarian sentiment in parts of the Republican Party. My rough guess is that he has had a bit of a positive effect and has raised a lot of money over the internet, pretty fast. Some people try to dismiss Paul as a kook but their dismissals seem to amount to little more than smears of half-understood points, such as his championing of gold-backed money (I am not convinced the dollar should be tied to gold but it is not nearly as daft, when you think about it, as the idea that the world’s largest economy can be run by a Federal Reserve bank by an army of economic gods). Despite my own differences with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy, which, pace some libertarians, is not necessarily a logical outcome of the non-initiation of force principle in the face of major foreign threats, Paul is a breath of fresh air. He is no Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater in terms of his name recognition factor or charisma – I bet hardly anyone in Britain outside a small group of political anoraks has heard of him, but his profile is pretty impressive.
Ponnuru points to Ron Paul’s own stance on abortion to prove that he is not quite the darling of the libertarian movement that some might claim. Rubbish: if Ponnuru has read any libertarian authors thoroughly, he would notice that libertarians can and do differ quite a bit on the issue. The issue of how one goes from the axiom of the right to life to the vexed question of when life begins is a difficult one, and I am not sure I am clear myself on this one. Ron Paul is against federal, ie, tax funds for abortion clinics. But that does not make him anti-abortion, it makes him anti-spending, at least on this issue.
Paul Marks has argued on this blog elsewhere that Ron Paul’s record on spending is not spotless – it is hard to think of any politician who is – but I think he is generally a positive influence on American politics.
The prospect of such a man in Britain’s Conservative Party reaching any sort of senior position at present is, of course, nil.
Unsurprisingly, John Howard and his conservative coalition lost Saturday’s federal election in Australia heavily. It also looks like Howard will lose his seat – a sitting Prime Minister has only ever lost his seat once in Australian political history. On a personal level, his passing is somewhat of a melancholy event for me. I first started taking a strong interest in politics from the age of about 13. Howard was elected when I was 15, so for many years he has been a political figure of very close scrutiny and interest for me. Thus, the “end of an era” aspect is a little sad, and I think that despite the kind of doublespeak people in his former position often need to talk in order to Keep Everyone Happy – or at least keep the minimum amount of balls in the air – he is quite a decent and humane man. He genuinely had the “common touch”; not in the charming, polished, stage-managed way that impresses the media and the elite. He was less of a “gather a media entourage and head to the nearest working class pub to have a sham beer’n’bellylaugh with some rough men in singlets” type – ringing up a late night radio station talk show after he’d clearly had a few too many beverages was more his style. His uncontrived ordinariness, often verging on folksy, is a rare commodity amongst politicians of his seniority – and it is something I will miss.
Having said all of that, we should not get too sentimental about his defeat. John Howard and his party are no friends of ours. Many of his party’s major reforms, whilst bearing objectives which most in the small-government camp would consider a step in the right direction, were implemented with a liberally (pardon the pun) spread layer of added regulation. Consider the tax code which, after eleven years of ongoing “reforms”, stands as an epic bureaucratic tome defying compliance. Or the recent industrial relations changes, which somehow made a fiendishly complicated system even more so.
Certainly, Howard can accurately claim that Australia became richer and more economically stable whilst he was in office. Nevertheless, he and his team should be remembered as big-government conservatives, and we liberals must not forget that Australia is more prosperous today in spite of his government’s efforts, rather than because of them. My only regret is that his successor is likely to be even more meddlesome.
As predicted for many months Mr Kevin Rudd and the ALP have won the Australian elections. The upside of this has already become apparent in the comic value that Mr Rudd has provided – at least for us in the rest of the world, who have heard stuff like his so many times before.
In his acceptance speech Mr Rudd came out with a lot of fatuous waffle about how everyone should believe in the future, create the future, even “embrace” the future. It was like listening Harold Wilson in about 1964. For Americans it must have been like hearing Bill Clinton do one of his JFK impressions about futurism – if I am allowed to steal a word from the Italians.
Then, of course, Mr Rudd came out with a lot of backward looking polices:
Soldiers to run away from Iraq, as if it was 2003 and it was possible for the West to avoid involvement – and totally ignoring the events of the last year that mean it now looks like we are going to win the war. The idea seems to be to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Sign up for Kyoto – as if it was sometime in the 1990s. There was, of course, no mention of reducing regulations on the expansion of the nuclear industry. In short the concern with C02 emissions was a pose – and an excuse for various new taxes and regulations.
And, of course, more money for his friends, and fellow ALP members, in the schools and universities – the people who, along with the media types they produce, worked so hard to get him elected. More money and, vague, “reform” will mean better education – pass the sick bag. Mr Rudd did not actually say “education, education, education” but he might as well have.
Some of my friends in Australia are a bit down in the dumps about the election result, although they all predicted it, but my message to them is simple – if you can not do anything about the farce you might as well enjoy it.
There will be plenty of laughs over the next three years.
The only thing I believe in print these days is the date.
– Sienna Miller
The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, those somewhat indistinct eras between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Napoleonic Wars, were when the modern world was born. It was when rationalism emerged from the previous millennia where superstition and obscurantism were mankind’s norm and goring a sacred cow could bring down the wrath of the powers-that-be.
Yet it seems that there are still those in the west who hanker after having their beliefs protected by the force of the state in ways that other sets of personal values are not. So rather than surrender to Christian authoritarians who wish their views to be protected by law, thereby quite reasonably handing even loonier Muslims a tool to protect their equally preposterous views, a little final clean up work, a final long overdue flourish of Enlightenment thought, is needed.
Abolish every last one of the ludicrous blasphemy laws. Right now.
The left may have fun with Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, having died on November 20th – the same day as Franco in 1975, and Primo de Rivera back in 1936.
There was a BBC Radio Four discussion on Mr Smith today, but I do not know whether any mention was made of the date of his death – I turned the show off after it became clear that all the participants in the discussion hated Ian Smith and, more importantly, had no interest in truth.
The obituary of Ian Smith in today’s Economist did not make any joke about the date of his death, it just contented itself with accusing him of ‘tyranny’ and saying the government he headed, and the whole of the Rhodesian effort, was “rather squalid”.
However, both the BBC show and the Economist obituary said that Ian Smith had delayed black majority rule for “fifteen years” (1965 to 1980) – this is false.
Some background:
Under the 1923 Constitution of Southern Rhodesia there were educational and property qualifications on voting – which meant that the vast majority of voters (although not all of them) were white. Even under the Constitution drawn up under Ian Smith in 1969 only eight of the members of House of Assembly were to be directly elected by blacks who do not meet the educational and property qualifications (although another eight were to be chosen by tribal chiefs) – whereas the mainly white voters who did meet the qualifications got to elect fifty members. It is true that the Senate was more balanced – with a minimum of ten Senators (out of 23) being elected by the tribal chiefs. But the Senate only had delaying powers.
However, Ian Smith accepted the 1971 deal proposed by the British government headed by Edward Heath – a deal that would have speeded up the process by which more blacks got the vote on an equal basis with whites. But after widespread protests about how it was wrong to link voting with property ownership at all (oh silly Aristotle for thinking that majority rule can only work when the majority are property owners) this proposal was withdrawn – which Mr Smith regarded as a betrayal (one of many). Ian Smith said many times that he would never accept “majority rule” if this meant the rule of non property owners, i.e. the tribal masses, but in the end he did accept it – and his acceptance was not in 1980…so the “fifteen years” is false.
In March 1978 Ian Smith accepted majority rule in a deal with some of the black leaders, including Ndabaningi Sithole, the founder of African nationalism in Rhodesia, and Bishop Abel Muzorewa – who had played a leading role in sinking the 1971 deal. It is true that under the 1978 deal the new ‘Zimbabwe Rhodesia’ would reserve a third of the seats in Parliament for the mainly white property owners, and it is also true that there were other constitutional protections.
Ian Smith also hoped to be Minister of Defence under a black Prime Minister, but after the elections of 1979 he had to make do with being Minister without Portfolio – a white Defence Minister yes – but not old burnt face, seems to have been the position of the new government.
However, the British government, in spite of the Conservatives having said during the British elections of May 1979 that they would support the internal settlement) undermined the deal and demanded, at the Lancaster House talks, that Prime Minister Muzorewa and the whole government be removed and the country be placed under British control for new elections. Thus Bishop Muzorewa was humiliated in the eyes of his tribe, who made up the majority of the population, and with the British in charge there was nothing to prevent intimidation winning the elections for the most radical elements – as Ian Smith predicted would happen.
So the new Prime Minister in 1980 was the Marxist terrorist Comrade Bob – on the grounds that he was from the majority tribe, unlike the rival terrorist leader, and had the best organized intimidation.
Both the BBC and the Economist choose to date majority rule from this date.
As for the picture presented of Ian Smith as being unwilling to compromise and as having learnt nothing from his experiences in World War II, the Economist obituary makes the latter claim, I do not know whether the BBC show claimed it as well – I do not know for the reason I explained above, well I think what I have already explained casts doubt on this picture.
The government has managed to lose data on 25 million people this week. An impressive achievement, you must agree. Question: what information about yourself would you most hate losing? I think my bank account number comes top of that list.
Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.
– Alice Thompson.
Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:
“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of ‘betraying’ it by… doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.
If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do… On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don’t believe in. Make up your mind.
A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any ‘phobic’ way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.
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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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