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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The toxic effects of collectivism rear its ugly Hydra-like heads in Finland, where the state wants to introduce a Chinese style ‘Internet Great Wall’ to stop people expressing political idea the state disapproves of. It also wants to prosecute Mikko Ellilä for the thought crime of expressing a dislike of multiculturalism.
It has been reported to me that Puumalainen said in a government press release in April that “racism” on the internet should be persecuted using the same methods as in the combat against child porn.Since all internet operators in Finland are required by law to block child porn websites, Puumalainen’s statement that “the same methods that have been successful in the combat against child porn should be implemented in weeding out racism on the internet as well” means that in Puumalainen’s opinion it ought to be possible for the government to establish a firewall that blocks all websites that Puumalainen accuses of racism.
In other words, Puumalainen says “racism” is a crime like child porn, and therefore “racist” websites such as blogs that mention crime statistics should be blocked by a governmental firewall.Mikko Puumalainen not only thinks that “racism” (such as data quoted from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice, or by the Interpol, or by the United Nations) should be a crime, but that citizens should not even be able to access websites that Ayatollah Puumalainen has declared to be heretic
And what ‘racist act’ did Mikko Ellilä commit that enraged the state?
Quotes from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice undoubtedly “help maintain an anti-immigrationist political climate” because they prove that e.g. the Somalis commit more than 100 times more (over one hundred times more, as in, over 10,000% more) robberies per capita than the Finns do.
Yup, he quoted official crime statistics. Given that Finland has one of the highest rates of internet usage in the world, I hope this provokes a powerful backlash against the control freaks who run the country.
Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes’ services – despite his prosecuting them in his day job – and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:
People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else’s, period.
John Derbyshire, the UK-born commentator who writes for the right wing US publication National Review, has this comment, which reminds me of why I am not a conservative:
Prostitution, like drug trafficking, is one of those zones where libertarianism bumps up against the realities of human nature.
Wrong. Prostitution and drug trafficking, which are both illegal, demonstrate perfectly the libertarian argument that if you ban trades between consenting adults (children are another matter), then criminals and the plain reckless will provide them, damaging society as a whole.
To a lover of liberty, it is hard to see why a woman shouldn’t sell her favors if she wants to. Trouble is, weak or dimwitted women end up in near-slavery to unscrupulous men, and I think there’s a legitimate public interest in not letting that happen.
Oh come on. One might as well say that liberty is only for intelligent, smart people who write for right-wing Washington magazines. Of course, unintelligent, feeble-minded people screw up, but the case for liberty is that people are better off if they are presumed to be best able to judge their own interests. The fact that some cannot do this does not overturn that point. Encouraging personal responsibility is good for society as a whole (sorry to use such a collectivist expression) even if it is true that some individuals are not good at taking such responsibility.
The best private sector solution would be a guild system, like the geishas had in old Japan. There’d be entry standards for the guild. Women would have to pass exams, and have some entertainment skills other than the obvious ones. The guild would police itself, expelling miscreants. Freelancing outside the guild could be under strong social disapproval, even made illegal.
He is talking about a form of trade union closed shop for prostitutes, sanctioned by law. But then what about the businesses that try to gouge concessions from politicians to get into these closed-shop deals? How would such ‘guilds’ be able to start up? What about registration fees? I can see a wonderful opportunity for political and business corruption here.
No, sometimes we ideologues have it right: the simplest, most radical option is also the most practical one. Even if you morally disapprove of prostitution – I do not – as a practical matter, legalising it makes lots of sense. Compared to what goes on down in most parliaments, prostitution is a noble calling.
Science is a matter of data, experiment and falsification. Nature has no interest whatever in your particular ‘ism’, whether it be liberal, conservative, left, social, commune, cannibal, left, or libertarian. The universe just is and it does not give a damn what you believe about it.
I happen to feel the science is on the side of human caused climate change, but that is not what I want to discuss. In fact, I am going to strongly discourage that particular debate to the point of removing comments arguing either “t’is!” or “No, t’isn’t!”
The discussion I would like to see is about the answers we as libertarians have if climate change is indeed real. Now if you believe as I do that it will happen, then obviously you have already been thinking about this issue. If I am wrong and nothing happens, then so much the better. If you believe there is no change, as I am sure many of you do, and you are wrong… the end result could be a complete loss of credibility and a delegitimization of everything we hold dear. The populace will not suffer gladly those who are wrong, especially if they have lost their homes and livelihoods.
Greenists, leftists, socialists and so forth have policies to ‘deal’ with the problem. In many cases these policies are simply their same old statist wish lists intellectually applied to the problem at hand. If change does occur, and most particularly if it occurs and appears or can be claimed to have been ameliorated by those policies they will use it against us.
This need not be the case. I am quite sure there are answers (and better ones) to all, or at least as much of the problem from our framework as from any other. Here is a range of scenarios for our discussion:
We get 1-2 degrees of overall warming.
We get between 1 and 10 meters of rise in mean sea level.
As wildcards, with low probability but not low enough probability:
Fresh water influx from the Greenland icecap modifies the salinity of the North Atlantic deep current and this pushes the Gulf stream southwards, adjusting Europe’s climate to match that of the same latitudes in Canada.
A major iceshelf in Antarctica ‘ungrounds’ and causes really major sea level rises of 30 meters or more over a period of a several decades.
The scenario would unfold over time as follows:
CO2 output hits its maximum value in the late 2020’s or early 2030’s and then begins to fall, despite continuing population increases, due to technological changes in primary energy and fuel production. I do not know whom the market winners will be, only that some technologies will supplant our current way of doing things.
Population peaks around 2060 and then tails off by several billion by the end of the century. This is based on a UN demographic projection whose trends have been roughly correct for as much of my life as I have been interested in such things.
The total CO2 and other factors causing more energy to be absorbed by the Earth climate system lag the CO2 input maximum by some time and begin to trail off around 2050.
No solar Maunder type minimum’s occur, ie, insolation of our planet remains pretty much constant over this century.
Most of the climate changes are neither dramatic nor sudden, although a change in the Gulf Stream might only take a few years if it did happen.
Some examples of the questions to ask are:
How would we handle the disastrous consequences for low lying nations? Would we have a class action suit of the form: ‘Individuals Residing in Bangladesh, Florida, The Netherlands, Pacific Islands et al v. Fossil Fuel Using Individuals’, for recompense for loss of real estate?
To what extent does amortization of property purchases write down the losses?
There would be winners and losers. For example, the US breadbasket would move northwards into Canada; some areas would become arid that were not; some areas would become tropical paradises that were not. As I have said before, complex non-linear systems can do just about anything when you pump energy into them. We will have to presume the results will be surprising and unpredictable. Some places might become hell hole swamps and others find themselves under glaciers. Mathematical chaos moves in strange ways. How should people deal with these unknowns?
Given this set of possible worlds, what do you feel are libertarian solutions which would turn more people towards our ideas than against them? If we do not have and sell our alternatives we are going to see policy decisions by others that we are not going to like one little bit, climate change or no climate change.
As the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared!
Remember, this is not a debate about climate change. Such comments will be deleted to keep things focused. I want discussion to center on how free individuals would deal with the worst, should it happen.
All the London newspapers today are full of a new but familiar “report on strange people to the wonderful and efficient experts in the police” anti-terrorism advertisement.
I am a foreigner. I have five mobile phones. Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is (although it could just be that “I need communication”, or perhaps that I find that sitting in a bar sending text messages to myself relieves the monotony of life). I swap their SIMs around all the time, often in public places and for sinister reasons like “The battery ran out on my main phone and I still want to receive calls on that number”..
Also, I like to wander around London and other cities photographing things like bridges, container ports and other critical infrastructure.
When am I going to be reported? Will I be sent to Guantanamo? Will Brian be there too? Why the fuck are these people wasting my taxes like this?
Also, where did the “thousands” come from? If we are talking the whole world, it would be “billions”. If we are talking the UK it would be “tens of millions”. Statistics actually suggest that there are around seventy million active mobile phones in the UK. Given that that is ten million more than there are people in the national population, and given that there must be at least ten million people who realistically are too young to have one, there are at least twenty million suspicious phones in the UK.
Who knew the terrorism problem was this big?
I’m grateful to an anonymous commentator on a The Register story for this, which deserves a wider audience.
Are there any other examples? Does anyone have an estimate of how much it cost?
David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense – ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government – has had a sort of epiphany:
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
He finishes thus:
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist – and a great one – rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.
Down in the dreary bowels of the Financial Times’ website, which has a list of what we happy people can expect in today’s budget, is this classic of FT understatement:
The chancellor will announce a delay in introducing international financial reporting standards to government.
No shit, Sherlock. In plain English, the vast debt bill incurred in the government’s Private Finance Iniative will not be put on to the public balance sheet for a while yet. How jolly conveeenient. If the PFI debt was so accounted for, it would add tens of billions of pounds of debt to the public balance sheet, making the state of the UK public accounts look positively Italian.
As I have said before, this “off-balance-sheet” stuff is a curse of modern finance, and should be scrapped.
The following headline appeared in The Times (of London) this morning:
Greggs chief attacks speculators for driving up the price of wheat
The managing director of Greggs, the high street baker, has attacked speculators for driving up the price of wheat and fuelling famine in Africa.
Sir Michael Darrington, who yesterday announced that he would be stepping down after 24 years in charge, said commodity traders were more to blame for spiralling food price inflation than poor harvests or farmland given over to biofuels.
Ah, bash the speculators. Where would we be without those terrible people? It may be that some of the high price of wheat – now over $13 a bushell and up 118% in the past 12 months – is down to hordes of greedy, Gordon Gekkos bidding up prices for the stuff, but these people make a living by trying to correctly guess future prices and act on imperfect information. They cannot, however, defy the laws of economic gravity. If supplies increase, as is likely if prices are so high and there are big profits to be made growing the stuff, or if demand slackens, as people use wheat substitutes, then all that speculative mania will fall away. In any event, unless this business executive or other folk have looked at what happens when wheat is no longer traded as a commodity but handled by government regulations, they will realise the nonsensical nature of bashing speculators. In the 1980s, years of agricultural subsidies led to the infamous “wheat mountains” that were subsequently dumped onto the world market, hitting producers in the Third World.
Now consider this headline:
Bread basket that is left to grow weeds
The item goes on to explain that large tracts of good, agricultural land in Eastern Europe are lying fallow, ie, un-planted, because of tariff barriers and other restrictions. The Times rightly hammers the EU’s wretched Common Agricultural Policy, the USA’s farm support system, and other regulatory controls on farm production, for contributing to this farce.
It is a joke to attack speculators, who after all bet their own or their banks’ money on trying for forecast supply/demand trends, when it is politicians, who rarely, if ever suffer the consequences of bad investment decisions, who get to bugger up global agricultural markets in this way. At least if a bank or hedge fund gets a bet wrong, the principals in the fund get bankrupted, or executives are sacked. This does not always happen, of course, but generally the market is much tougher on mistaken bets than the political system is. As prices soar in the shops and hit poor consumers, the petty meddling of Chancellor Alistair Darling in today’s budget statement is small beer indeed. Great former UK politicians like Robert Peel have put free trade front and centre of their economic philosophy. It would be a welcome step if western governments today did the same.
Down in the West Country, fires are being lit:
Imagine, if you can, a party rally, put on by one of its regional branches, and attended by several hundred decent, ordinary people. Imagine, then, being able to watch a dozen or so people called to the podium to speak fluently and with passion about what they truly think. Imagine also being able to mingle throughout with the leaders and elected representatives of that party. Imagine all this, and you have UKIP.
The excellent speeches from that rally can be viewed here.
I spoke to Sean Gabb the following day. He told me that he perceived a ‘great suppressed anger’ among the people he met.
Good.
[A blogapotamus]
Mr Speaker,
Income tax is an evil. It is an evil not because it is a tax, but because of the way it works.
First, it takes from the citizen the choice of how to spend his money. Indirect taxation, though often in the past tweaked to show the state’s displeasure at certain choices, still leaves you a choice; to spend or save, and whether to have booze, burgers or broccoli for lunch.
Second, it requires the tax authorities to enquire how you obtain your money and how you spend it. The existence of exemptions and allowances, of deductible business expenses, returns and taxes management is essential to the operation of a system that would widely be seen as unfair if it fell as heavily on the pauper, the producer, and the rentier drone. But the existence of allowances and schedules, and latterly tax-credits, means people rightly use their rights, and the Revenue is incentivised to regard everyone as a cheat, to treat careful self-management as a form of fraud, and press for more powers and more bureaucracy. The system becomes ever more complicated, by special pleading and anti-avoidance; the complication allows for ever closer investigation of personal affairs, ever more complicated and impenetrable forms, and ever harsher treatment of the negligent, confused or exhausted taxpayer.
The result tends to a system of brigandage, where the law of collection is as uncertain as the Tax Inspector’s patience, where the small taxpayer is as much prey as he has fat on him, and only someone rich enough to fight a case as far as the House of Lords will ever find out what the law is. Having made the travellers empty their pockets, the suspicious highwayman will resort to strip searches, then to probing body orifices. Anyone who has made tax or tax-credit returns for a few years has had a similar experience.
Third through PAYE and deduction at source, it takes and spends your money before you get it. You may never notice it has gone. And if you do, and your financial knowledge is small, you may not realise how much of it has gone, nor make the connection between your vanishing money and state spending. That makes it easy for tens of millions of people to believe that it is always someone else who is paying for political promises.
Yes, income taxation is great evil. It tends to destroy liberty, privacy, and personal responsibility.
It may come as a surprise to the House and the country, therefore, that I, as the first Samizdatista Chancellor, am proposing to increase the rate of personal income tax. → Continue reading: Playing the budget game
I have just received my new passport. I am not British, and I will be deliberately vague about the country that issued it. The fee for getting it renewed was significantly higher than last time. I do like the nice touch of requiring me to pay a “priority fee” for getting the new passport in a reasonable time. The idea that we should help our citizens by being prompt and efficient in the first place is gone completely.
Upon receiving the passport, I perhaps discovered the reason for the higher fee. The passport has a little logo of a chip on the front cover and on the details page. There is an insert stating that “This is an ePassport. This passport contains a microchip which stores the same information that as appears on the data age. The chip can be read electronically to confirm the identity of the bearer. This document complies with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and incorporates security features to prevent illegal access to the information stored on the chip. See the centre page of the passport for further information”.
My country is the sort of place that tends to be proud of being first on the block with respect to implementing fancy new international protocols, so I suppose this does not greatly surprise me. If the chip only contains the same data as the details page, then I rather fail to see the point, given that the passport is machine readable already. If the intention is to add more data to such chips later, I am not sure that the present “This is just a new way of storing the same data” claims are entirely honest. Storing digitally signed data on the chip probably does make sense and genuinely does make such a passport harder to forge. So I will concede that point.
Still, making it possible to read the passport without requiring it to be opened seems to me to rather reduce my security rather than increase it. As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it. Even if I made the ludicrous assumption that I trust every government in the world, I still find it hard to believe that such a widely distributed technology would not fall into private hands.
So, where from here. Well, as it happens I can turn to the centre page of the passport. This page is stiffer than the others, presumably due to having a chip embedded in it. It also has information written on it. “This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, please do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures or excess moisture”.
So, which of those things should I try first?
Hysterical Guardian readers are getting absurdly upset. The reason? A member of the Samizdata team suggested that a new tax on prestige cars was more about the politics of envy than saving the planet.
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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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