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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Someone has been doing their homework And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan [1]. But then, I am a liberal – conservative only in my suspicion of social management and ‘fixing’ things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.
This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:
[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.
[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes.
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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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The Economist:
The only thing I’m noticing that they’ve caught up with is the possibility to make more “business” for themselves by using computer data manipulation in parallel to (rather than instead of) old-fashioned paper pushing. To take my favorite example, I just love it when Canadian government allows you to pay for their services online, but once you do it, you’re emailed a customized form that you have to print out, fill, and send by snail mail as proof of payment. 🙂 The funniest thing is that the record of payment enters their computers not when you do the actual transaction online, but when a bureaucrat takes that paper form and enters the data into the computer manually (to be fair, they’ve apparently optimized the last step by including barcodes on those papers :-)).
Another lovely governmental use of the internet is when they publish web pages that are supposed to replace paper info brochures. People in charge of writing those often have the attitude “if it’s just a web page, it can’t be that serious”, and end up producing badly written, misleading, and incomplete documents. I’ve known people who got themselves into nightmarish bureaucratic tangles because of outright falsehoods listed in those.
The front cover of the “Economist” – a picture of Senator Obama with the words “can he deliver?”
Can he deliver what?
The vast increases in the higher rates of income tax and capital gains tax (with the resulting FALL of revenue that this would mean) and the vast increases in government Welfare State spending (increases so huge they make Bush brain look like a fiscal conservative) that he has promised?
Yes, if elected President, Senator Obama can deliver these things with ease – with a few changes hear and there, the Democrat majority in the House and Senate will fall over themselves to pass them. And Republican efforts to hold them back will be half hearted and torn apart by the main stream media.
I rather doubt that the feature article in the “Economist” was very much like the above few paragraphs.
Which is why I am not a fan of this publication.
As for the article itself:
“Badly managed organisations will remain badly managed” in spite of getting lots of computer stuff.
Quite true.
But it is not “bad management” that it is the problem – it it the govenment trying to do things it should not be doing. It is the size and scope of government, not the skill of its managers, that is is the problem.
But there remains “hope” – hope of what?
It mentions the Indian blogs – good, perhaps such things will expose the new government welfare programs as the fraud they are. And perhaps they will put enough pressure on the government to obey the to obey the Indian Constitution and stop blocking the redrawing of constituency boundaries – they have not been redrawn in decades and population shifts have made them a rigged farce.
The article also says things such as.
“Citizens are not only customers of the state” – which is absurd as people are not “customers” of the state who can refuse to give it money if they choose.
“they are also owners of the state” – which is also absurd, as people are not allowed to sell “their bit” of the state.
However, it is hard to tell whether the above is the opinion of the (unnamed) “Economist” writer, or if the writer is just truthfully citing the nonsensical opinions of other folk.
An odd article from today’s “Financial Times” (the sister publication of the “Economist”).
A Mr Clive Crook (I am assuming this was a real name) lists some of the bad policies of Senator Obama – some of the higher taxes and wild spending plans.
Then Mr Crook implies that Senator Obama is wonderful and people should vote for him – and the front page of the F.T. suggests the same, people should “take a gamble on Obama”.
What “gamble”? I do not understand.
Perhaps it is because I do not understand these Economist and F.T. people that I hate them so much.
Before anyone suggests it, I am certain they were not being sarcastic.
“You do not understand Paul – such articles are balanced, they mix different things”.
I am not interested in an article that is a mixture of truth and absurdity – because the result is absurd.
Just as if one equally mixes water and urine one gets urine.