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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Samizdata quote of the day A smaller state in Victorian terms isn’t on the cards. The electorate would take flight at such talk. What the electorate is after, however, is a redrawing of the state’s boundaries. There is no fall in demand for collective services like health and education but voters are seeking two clear advances in their freedom from such a redrawing exercise. The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time. The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.
– Frank Field, Labour MP. He is probably right, but once people get into this habit of choosing to live their lives as they please, who knows where it may end up.
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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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Yeah, they may even “think the unthinkable”…
Sadly in the article he never quite gets to grips with the idea that the best way to let people use their own money to run their own services is to not take it off them in the first place. Instead, he offers a thrilling idea of giving everyone who has a baby twentyfive grand of other peoples’ money.
Yeah, that’ll work, Frank.
The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time.
That is the inevitable endpoint of what he claims is the non-negotiable “demand for collective services.” Both “social equality” and budgetary realities drive state-provided services to this end. Sorry, British electorate – you can have your collective services, but if you do it will inevitably be from a limited menu.
The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.
This is gibberish, in the context of “collective services” (which I take to mean state-subsidized services to which there is an entitlement). If this is supposed to mean that people use their own money to buy what they want, then we aren’t talking about collective services at all, because we aren’t talking about services that are subsidized by others via the tax system, and we aren’t talking about services to which you are entitled if you can’t pay.
Once the public sets its mind on state-subsidized services to which there is an entitlement, then the provision of lowest common denominator services funded by extortion of the wealthy is inevitable.
Frank Field is nearly so good…. Unfortunately he is a natural authoritarian, and, time after time, having spotted the question correctly and articulated the logic of the argument adequately, will veer off at the last minute to an answer in social control.