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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Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing “bubble”, which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don’t discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time.
– Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog.
But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying!
If you are interested in a much longer exposition of what you have been reading in my aerospace postings over the years, listen to Burt Rutan as he describes how the socialistic model of State space flight has done exactly what socialism always does. It delivers the equivalent of rough brown toilet paper that is subsidized, overpriced anyway, and rationed because there is not enough of it. He does not say it in those words, but it is a view with which he would clearly agree.
He also shows why the Capitalist Space Race (the race to make money!) is going to take the lead in a surprisingly short time and that it will effectively be putting an equivalent of 5 times the NASA budget into human spaceflight within a very few years.
And by the way… I do not know the names of the other investors and developers he hints at, although I am aware (under NDA) of a few who are low profile and not seen on the Discovery Channel.
If you live in the tri-state area, or anywhere actually if you are up for it, please contact the LP team in West Virginia. They are short on people for the final push to get on the ballot.
The LP needs YOU!
Maybe I’m the last one around these parts to have clocked Pat Condell. If so, apologies. But just in case I’m not and you still haven’t heard of this man, well, clock him for yourself, now. He has a YouTube homepage, and I particularly recommend the performance featured here, at the Ezra Levant blog (remember him?), which is how I found out about Condell.
The thing that strikes me about Condell is that if you were to read a transcript of the talk that I’ve just heard, you might dismiss him as, well, some kind of obsessive, in a word, as a crank. Certainly anyone wanting to dismiss him thus would find it fairly easy. But his manner of talking makes him seem a lot more sane than that, and that makes him a potentially huge threat to the forces of darkness. If I were them I’d be quite bothered, and anxiously trying to think of a way of shutting him up which doesn’t risk him becoming a hundred times more famous. Killing him springs to mind, obviously. But what if they fail? And what if they succeed, but turn him into a very, very eloquent cadaver?
Here is an interview he did with The Freethinker which they called Laughing religion off the planet, which I am right now about to read.
UPDATE: On the other hand …
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Ford Model-T car, the vehicle that changed the face of the automobile business, helping to put the four-wheeled auto within reach of a vast swathe of the American population. Ford’s mass-production techniques may not have been totally original, since one can argue that some of the features of mass production used had been employed in parts of the industrialised world before. But the factories that churned out these cars were probably the most famous forms of mass-production in their time, and encouraged a host of imitators.
Here’s a nifty slide-show on the anniversary.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the “second-shift / Costco” sense.
– The wonderful James Lileks.
Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse.
Speaking of Ron Paul… here is a press release I received last night:
If they expected us to retire quietly from the scene, the political elite are in for a surprise.
Today I am making some very big announcements.
First, from August 31 to September 2 in Minneapolis, we will host a handful of events that will shake the political establishment. Everything will culminate on Tuesday with the official launch of the Campaign for Liberty at the Rally for the Republic.
The Campaign for Liberty will be the largest organization for peace, freedom, the Constitution, and sound money in American history. It will launch in grand fashion with lots of special guests and – if the early television and print inquiries we’ve received are any indication – plenty of media attention.
I would like to personally invite you and your family to join me and thousands of others in Minneapolis for these events and send a message to the Republican Party.
Tickets will go on sale for the Rally for the Republic this Friday, July 25 @ 10AM CST. We want this to be an unforgettable day, so we are holding a ticket bomb all day Friday in the tradition of our famous money bombs. How many seats can we sell on the first day?
In patriotic fashion all tickets will cost $17.76, so you can afford to bring the whole family.
This leads me to the second big announcement. After measuring the excitement and enthusiasm, we decided that the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota was just too small to hold you. Therefore, we are making a significant upgrade. The Rally for the Republic will now take place at the Target Center, the largest arena in Minneapolis !
This promises to be the most spirited and provocative political event of the year! We held some very large rallies during the presidential campaign, but I have never attempted anything of this scale before. Its success rests entirely in your hands.
Later this week I will announce two internationally renowned musicians as headliners for the Rally for the Republic. We’ll also be joined by rock star Aimee Allen, NBC’s Tucker Carlson, Barry Goldwater Jr., Gov. Gary Johnson, conservative stalwart Grover Norquist former Reagan deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, presidential historian Doug Wead, MTV’s Adam Curry, musician Mark Scibilia , and Frank Sinatra impersonator Rick Ellis . Other special guests will be announced soon.
My staff has been working overtime to provide you with three full days of entertainment. Please visit the schedule page of the website and read all about upcoming events. We also have a lodging page to help you find?accommodations in Minneapolis.
Together we are taking back our government and restoring the republic. Please join me in Minneapolis to kickoff the Campaign for Liberty and support our Revolution. Can I count on you to be there?
I hope our LP folk in Minnesota will be out there in force!
The Bob Barr for President efforts have been gearing up in Atlanta and if you want to see what you can do, you can find out about it here.
I would love to see that fund raiser counter spinning like the Ron Paul one did!
It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union.
One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:
Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.
That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty.
Here’s another one:
Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical.
Huh?
But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic.
The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap. → Continue reading: A civil, but still flawed look at Hayek from the left
As of July 15th, it is no longer possible for a European to fly in a vintage DC-3. Air Atlantique ran a very successful farewell tour around the UK and its flights were sold out.
Perhaps one continent’s loss is another’s gain and these passenger-worthy classics will find a home across the pond where they can continue to bring the joy of flying in the most marvelous working airplane every built.
Maybe we should start a tradition like that of the Muslims, but instead of bowing towards Brussels at a given hour each day, we could give them the other end to show the full depth of our respect for them.
Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here’s a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.
A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein’s recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.
Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.
At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.
Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.
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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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