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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One of the beauties of the blogs, I find, is that the link-rich medium enables you to fly off on all manner of tangents and think through issues that might otherwise not arise or come into one’s head so fast. The recent posting on Samizdata about Ayn Rand – which seemed to trigger a rather bad-tempered and long comment thread – led me to a site put together by this fellow, who wrote a rather rude comment about Rand – nothing very new there – and I decided to take a look at his own blog. This is what I found. James Hooper is a socialist who once, apparently, was a “teenage libertarian”. I guess one does not come across many libertarians who imbibed their Hayeks, Rands, or Rothbards and later decided that what the world really needed, in fact, was lots of collectivism, progressive taxes, and the rest of it. I suppose John Gray fits a similar path, although as Brian Micklethwait has noted, Gray is consistent in his pathological gloomsterism.
Anway, back to James Hooper. In his latest post, he writes this:
“Healthcare is an area where the market has proven utterly inadequate, indeed it’s hard to find any pure market approach outside of the Third World (company insurance is decided by CEO boards and unions, state insurance by governments), although I’d imagine that those who have died in America owing to lack of insurance didn’t rate the distinction that much.”
Now it seems to me that there is something very wrong about this statement. Human beings require health care, just as they require food. Now, in the West, food is – mostly – produced by the free market, although as a libertarian I’d be the first to note that there is a lot of regulatory control over food production (ask any farmer, slaughterhouse owner, food retailer, etc) and a lot of subsidies, such as under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. But by and large, the process by which we get our fruit, veg, meat and carbs is via capitalism. This seems to work tolerably well. It could work a heck of a lot better, of course, but in general, you don’t see people, even the very poor, starving in the streets as happened under communism in Russia (1930s) or Mao’s China (1950s, 60s), or see the sort of state-induced disasters in Zimbabwe, etc. So clearly, something as basic as food seems to work best when left to the market.
So what is so different about health care that it can only – according to various statists, including many right Tories – be provided by a mixture of private/public operations or even, only by state monopolies, such as the UK’s National Health Service? For sure, some people, such as the very poor, will not be able to afford all the healthcare they want, but then the same issue applies to very poor people who cannot get all the food or housing that they want. Their problem is poverty, not something peculiar about food or housing. I understand that healthcare purchases tend to be less frequent than purchases of food; there may be inefficiencies or supply-demand issues that perhaps don’t let a market in health care function as well as in say, baked beans. But even so, for a person to state as a bald fact that a market in health care does not work seems, well, to be a case of ideology trumping experience and elementary logic. This article by Ronald Bailey lays out a good argument for a free market in health.
Of course, if, like Marx, Mr Hooper believes that a socialist society will be based on the “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, then that of course begs all kind of momentous questions of interest to defenders of liberty and prosperity. As I have pointed out before, if you say, for example, that I have a “right” to “free” healthcare, what that really means, in practice, is that I have a right to coerce someone who is able to work as a doctor/nurse/lab technician to give me what I want. In short, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities” presumably means that the state must have the power to decide what are the “abilities” that Johnathan Pearce, or James Hooper, etc, actually have, and then have the power to harness those abilities to fullfill the needs, as the state has defined them. In short, the Marxian formulation requires conscription of abilities.
There is a word for this state of affairs. It is called totalitarianism.
Mary Riddell, who seems, as it was once said of Oxford University in the 19th Century, to be the home of lost causes, has a column with this glorious headline in the Daily Telegraph (WTF?) today:
“Brown is a better hope for Labour than his rivals”.
In other words, all the other remaining senior figures in the party are even worse, even madder, more delusional, more statist, tax-grabbing, unpleasant, devious and venal than this guy.
That’s the end of that lot, then.
Speaking personally, I can’t help wondering why the Left are so ready to believe that everyone who gets a tax bill for £50,000 will just grit their teeth and pay it, but putting 20p on a pint of beer will force average Joes like us to quit drinking. Either incentives matter, or they don’t.
– a throwaway thought in brackets in a long Britblog roundup from Mr Eugenides
Lawrence Berkeley Labs has a movie here that shows Carbon atoms in live action movement in a sheet of graphene. That is the stuff you make when you drag your pencil across a sheet of paper and it may be one of the more important materials of the 21st Century.
This story is bizarre: China is ordering folk to smoke to boost the economy? Maybe the Chinese authorities figure that with air pollution already so bad, what could be any worse?
It goes without saying that being a good liberal that I am, I consider it as outrageous for a government to encourage smoking as to use invasions of property rights and censorship of things like adverts to stop it. This sort of issue cuts both ways. What next: forcing folk to get hammered every evening?
They want to manage and control every aspect of daily life. That is not the role of the EU. It is the role of local government.
– A French euroskeptic cheese merchant, interview broadcast on BBC World Service this morning.
19th century romantic nationalism still rules even in places one hoped were civilized: Slavery is not the problem, as long as the master is one of us; being enslaved by foreigners stirs the blood of popular rebellion.
Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today’s Observer:
YouTube if you want to. …
Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady’s not for tubing, it would seem. (LATER: Except that … she is.) This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don’t like it.
And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:
“You are impugning my integrity.”
Well, yes.
Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown’s protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved – intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind – are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown’s moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.
Mike Oliver (who blogs as ‘Mr. Integrity’… currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.
BB&T – and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason – I say!
Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of “business leaders” who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that “rationalize” their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them – the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.
But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.
National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand’s rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so – Buckley’s first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled “capitalism.” with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.
Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices – of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of “capitalism”… or Marxism… which to so many seemed a “scientific” or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later – either Marxism or many of its falsely-“humanist” variants.
Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism – almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it’s probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.
What is the worst case scenario for swine flu cases in the United States? About 1,700.
This is not a pandemic, and the ballet of institutional panic in government combined irresponsible media coverage over the last few days has been instrumental in ticking public health as another area where contemporary alarmism, fanned by governments, signposts higher mortality when a crisis finally arrives.
Taxi drivers have a place in British political life not unlike the Oracle of Delphi in the affairs of Classical Greece. And they are now, based on my admitted rather small sample, speaking with one voice. Following my mother’s death earlier this year, I was yesterday lugging possessions from home to home, so to speak, and had need of two such oracles. Both, without any encouragement from me, even as they were steering me from and to Egham station, also steered the conversation towards the expenses being run up by Labour MPs. Specifically Labour MPs, please note. “My grandad who was in the miner’s union – Labour all his life – know what I’m saying? – must be turning in his grave …” “If any of us did that kind of thing, we’d be up before the Old Bill.” Shouldn’t that be arrested (“nabbed”) by the Old Bill and up before the “Beaks?” No matter, he was in full flood and in no mood to be interrupted about side-issues.
I recall being a bit scornful here about how this issue seems now to dominate the thinking of so many voters. But, as commenters pointed out, there is a direct connection between the grand larcenies being committed by our government in its panic reactions to the banking crisis and the petty thievings of our MPs. MPs should have their minds on All That. Instead they have been contriving second homes for themselves, and fourth giant flat screen televisions, and are now most concerned not about the state of the nation’s finances, but about being caught out in their own little thievings. Recently I read somewhere – link anybody? – about a Labour MP saying something like: “I don’t care if Gordon Brown ruins the world economy; but he should keep his hands off my expenses.” The failure of MPs to exercise oversight over the big stuff was directly related to their over-concentration on their own little living arrangements, and I apologise for not seeing that more quickly. It’s a variant of that Parkinson’s Law (so many of these are now relevant) about how people who are fussing about their new headquarters building are going to do that actual job rather badly for the duration of the move.
Can it be an accident that (a) one of the most splendid new pieces of sports architecture in London in recent years has been the resplendent new curved stand at the Oval cricket ground, the home of Surrey CCC, but that (b) the mere Surrey cricket team has gone from heroes to zeroes during the period of this new stand’s construction and opening? I digress, although not that much, because another even more striking (if far less handsome) recent addition to the London architectural scene has been the brand spanking new office block that has recently been constructed across the road from Parliament, for … correct: Britain’s MPs.
Maybe unfairly, those oracular taxi drivers, as I say, and contrary to what I talked about in my earlier piece (where I suggested that it is now MPs of all parties who are in the firing line), homed in on Labour MPs. Labour MPs, they said, are supposed to be better than that. What’s happened to them? Conservatives look after themselves better, but at least they do this, at least partly, most of them, with their own money, which they have obtained either by inheriting it, or by doing more elevated versions of driving taxis.
But one bit of that earlier posting about the smallness of MP thieving compared to the bail-out thieving at least stands up very well, namely the bit that said that it is electorally very portentous when the voters decide who the biggest thieves are, and if it is true that the voters (as represented by their spokesmen the taxi drivers) have decided that it is actually Labour MPs, then that spells electoral doom for Labour. Sacking Gordon Brown won’t save any of the doomed, which is perhaps why they may not now bother to sack Gordon Brown, despite all my recent imprecations. No wonder they’re feeling suicidal. This government is not just topped by a spectacularly rotten Prime Minister; it is backed by a rotten party.
I realise that I owe Samizdata a separate piece about why I take the particular rottenness of Gordon Brown so much more seriously than, according to strictly libertarian notions, I am supposed to. Surely they are all just as bad. Briefly, my argument will be: no they aren’t. There are degrees of rottenness among politicians, and it is foolish to deny this. As for the other argument I hear here, that we need a spell of absolute darkness in order to educate The Masses and build a Movement truly capable of ushering in a genuine New Dawn, well, that kind of talk scares me. Briefly (this is a huge subject I know) what if we get the absolute darkness, but not the dawn? I say that the sooner this country switches from the deepening gloom of Labour to the relative if flickering and fitful illumination that might (although I agree: might not) be the Conservatives under David Cameron, the better. If that means (which actually I don’t think it does mean – see my future posting if it ever materialises) that it takes rather longer to find our way to the Promised Land, well so be it.
Kraków, Poland. April 2009
Some of us do think that designer labels will save our souls. That’s bad. But it’s a whole lot better than thinking that, say, the Führer will save your soul, or a crusade against the infidels, or nationalism, or a host of other collective salvations. When the inevitable disappointment from consumerism comes, it’s a private tragedy. When the inevitable disappointment from a collective salvation comes, it’s a national crisis inviting some new, possibly worse, collective salvation. Until humans learn the wisdom of angels, I will remain a great supporter of crass consumerism and conspicuous consumption.
– Roger Koppl. I encountered this by randomly exploring the IEA blog‘s blogroll. I will now go shopping.
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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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