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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It is always rather foolish to invoke misty eyed national wells for values. One can always point to counter-examples.Now we know that Alex “a touch of the” Salmond and Gordon Brown have one thing in common? Is Macavity a ‘Scottish’ value?
There is one person in the SNP administration, however, who appears to have worked out just how sensitive this situation is: and that is Mr Salmond. Usually, the First Minister has to be restrained to stop him pushing in front of his ministers when there is an announcement of any import to be made.
However, with this decision, Mr Salmond has been remarkable only by his absence. Mr MacAskill was left to face the world’s press yesterday, on his own, not with his First Minister sitting by his side.
A few months ago I noted the importance of having good people selected for the top jobs at NASA under the Obama administration. I believed then, as now, that NASA and the current way of doing business is a fact of life for those in space business and the best we can hope for is folks in the power seats who are positive towards wholly private space ventures.
There has been much too-ing and fro-ing in Washington during the ensuing months over the role of private sector and the old socialist space model. Surprisingly (to some), the most anti-free market action came from a Republican, Senator Shelby from Alabama. He succeeded in reprogramming funds for the COTS-D program, aimed at enabling the purchase of Astronaut tickets to space in a commercial way, back to funding of the old NASA and Aerospace Design Bureaus model borrowed from the Soviets during the Moon Race. Republicans are no different from Democrats when it comes to the basics. They like the Space Kommisars when they represent jobs and campaign contributions in their district or State.
But change is overdue. There is simply no choice for NASA and everyone knows it. Most importantly, the people now in charge understand it and with the supporting Augustine Commission findings (one of whose members, by the way, is a long standing occasional Samizdata reader) that change is about to be implemented.
As I indicated in the title, the end results of all this appear to be even better than I had dared hope.
Next year in L5 anyone?
Sometimes it is the willingness of a person to be brutalised, rather than its enforcement as such, that chills me to the bone. Check out this story.
Of course, if the woman genuinely consents to such treatment, then I suppose it would be no different to that of a person who visited S&M bars and liked being beaten up, etc. But a lingering suspicion lurks that this woman, and many others, are not really acting with a great deal of control over their lives.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel lays out a pretty solid case for saying that the US government will let down international borrowers, and fairly soon. This is not a new or original argument, but he does so with great aplomb. Definitely worth a read.
“To kill someone for their class origins is just as bad as killing someone for their religious or ethnic origins. You’re killing someone, d’ye see? That Uncle Joe did it in the name of the proletariat while Hitler did it for some other reason he’d made up does not make Joe less evil, sorry, it just doesn’t.”
Tim Worstall.
You simply have to watch this to believe that a bit of sand could be turned into art of such emotional depth.
I am simply left speechless by the performance artistry of this young Ukranian woman.
PS: I owe many thanks to Sharon Shannon for making me aware of this.
As FA Hayek pointed out many years ago in his masterpiece, The Constitution of Liberty, if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation and delivered free at the point of delivery, then in a world of scarce resources – and healthcare is always constrained at any time by the supply of doctors, drugs, etc – then such care must be rationed by some form of bureaucratic/political rule. As Dr Hayek presciently warned at the time (1950s), any such rationing will put doctors, politicians or other people in power in the position of a god, in having the decision about who gets treatment for what, or whether life A is more “worth saving” than life B. For example, one such utiltarian consideration might be that it is more “cost-efficient” to save the life of a young kid with his whole life ahead than an 90-year-old. That is what happens when socialised medicine is established. It transfers key powers to people in ways that raise disturbing issues of accountability and control.
Now a socialist might respond that it is still better for health care to be rationed by some rule they consider to be “fair” than by the supposed lottery of the market, although in fact, as I would respond, there is, due to the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship, far greater chance that all but the poorest will get better healthcare under a genuine free market in health than under the system of centralised, state-provided healthcare. Also, if the possession of a large fortune is partly a matter of luck, then luck, being blind, cannot be either just or unjust. It just is. Some folk have access to better dentists or whatever because they are richer. That may annoy someone who cannot afford the whitest teeth, but that is not proof of unfairness, as such. To prove it, one would have to construct an ethical theory that says that humans have an apriori claim on their fellows to receive a certain amount of healthcare/watever as a “right”. But such “rights” are abuses of the term: one cannot have a right to X that requires that another be forced to provide X, such as forcing folk to train as doctors to serve the sick, and so on.
I was led to think about the latest twist in the US healthcare debate by reading an article by the US writer, Nat Hentoff. He totally bypasses the issue of how to deal with scarcity under socialism in ways that are fair. He rightly worries about the sort of brutal choices that state-rationed healthcare provides, but then does not see that any system of state-run, and socialised medicine, makes such issues of rationing unavoidable. Rationing by such tests of age, “need” and so forth is a feature of socialised medicine, not a bug.
(H/T: The Corner).
Excalibur-Almaz has announced its orbital tourism plans. They have built up a great team of astronauts, cosmonauts and contractors and are in the process of resurrecting a flight tested Russian military capsule and space station. They have a long way to go to get the thing flying again, but that is the point, it is ‘flying again’, not ‘flying the first time’.
I unfortunately must step lightly here as I was one of the persons in my company involved in some early consulting for them. NDA’s you know!
I can say that it is a very interesting project!
Like his blogging Highness, Glenn Reynolds, while I love the visual cleverness of Mad Men, the TV series, and the brilliance with which this show has caught the mood of the time, I find the series rather depressing. I mean, the guys who are portrayed as “having it all” in an age of heavy smoking, drinking in the workplace, womanising and the rest seem to be, a rather depressed bunch. It is a series that certainly plays to the stereotype of business as venal and zero-sum – which is what anti-capitalists like to think it is. But these guys and gals certainly knew how to dress snazzily for work.
But whatever one thinks of the sense of life communicated by the series, Jon Hamm, who plays the main character, Don Draper, is unquestionably a compelling actor who has created one of the most memorable characters in TV drama for a long time (he certainly seems to have quite an effect on this lady). It will be interesting to see what he does next.
A thought occurs to me: Hamm makes a potentially good James Bond and even looks more like the character of Mr Fleming’s books than Daniel Craig, even though the latter actor did a very good turn in Casino Royale.. But the last film, Quantum of Solace, while brilliant in its stunts, was awfully humourless and bereft of character development. And it would not be that big a shift to cast an American in the role: our Jim is an Anglosphere character, anyway.
“In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie.”
Stephen Pollard.
I agree with some of Mr Pollard’s analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt “progressive” or “traditional” methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.
Watch this and weep for what once was and is now gone.
Arnold Kling has been debating – in a friendly way – with fellow US blogger Will Wilkinson on the relative power of exit, the ability to take oneself and one’s business away from place A to B, for example, with “voice”, such as voting. There is a good Wikipedia item on the forces of “voice” and “exit”. Arnold is definitely an “exit” man and is in favour of things like creating new nations and the power to secede and emigrate. I need to think a bit more about the exchange between Will and Arnold before commenting at great length, but my two cents on this issue amounts to observing how the right of an individual to take his or her money out of reach of a country’s tax net to a less oppressive place has come under a harsh spotlight because of the recent case of Swiss bank UBS.
As I keep saying, the current crackdown on certain so-called tax havens shows that some political leaders understand the power of “exit” only too well; they know that if folk can emigrate, take their money and affairs abroad, then that puts a monkey wrench into the wheels of Big Government. And so there is no wonder that such Transnational Progressive organisations as the OECD and the rest are kicking up a stink about the supposed evils of tax evasion, and putting huge pressure on such countries as Switzerland. It is, in my view, rather important that escape routes remain plentiful, and multiply.
Yes, that’s three posts from me in a day. My holiday break in France seems to have done the trick.
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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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