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.
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Simon Heffer has a pretty good – and by his standards, measured – take on how Mr Obama has been doing. Latest election results in Virginia and New Jersey were clear slaps in the face for him, and a boost to the GOP.
But as we have found here with Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has profited from the sheer, plodding ghastliness of Gordon Brown, the welcome fall from grace of Mr Obama, a puffed up Chicago machine politician, is very different from meaning that the GOP is back on the road to recovery. As our own Perry de Havilland points out, the Republicans need to rediscover the “leave me alone” agenda of limited government, low taxes, tight spending and free trade. And they need to rediscover it convincingly, and learn the lessons of George W. Bush’s terrible error of talking the free market talk while doing the exact opposite. The GOP also needs to remember that being in favour of small government is not just about economics, either.
As I wondered at the time, the absurd decision to award Mr Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace was almost like a curse. And maybe it proved a turning point: the point at which the sheer absurdity of this hard-left “community organiser” and his Marxist associates became too much for too many Americans to bear. The odds must be shortening on him becoming a one-term occupant of the White House.
For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of “Stalinism” among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty’s reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return – and has never done so.
Nor is this ancient history.
The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).
The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama – a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.
Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy”) so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day – a year will do.
Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago – by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.
I mean nothing “racist” when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else “Stalinist” is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.
P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a “McCarthyite” as a complement. But then I have read “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.
In New York 23 Hoffman is going up against both the Democrat and the Republican machines (Dede S. having endorsed the Democrat and working closely with him on get-out-the-vote) so if he wins it will be a big upset in a district that supported Barack Obama.
Actually the New York Conservative party may evolve (from an unimportant group that just follows in the wake of the Republicans) into something like the “Barnburner” (later Van Buren) faction of the New York Democrats of the early 19th century.
No doubt the Republicans will reach out to Hoffman if he wins and say “Caucus with us” – but he would be sensible (again if he wins) to keep them at arms length and avoid going back into bed with people who stabbed him the back.
The Virginia race looks won for the Republicans (famous-last-words) a big defeat not just for Barack Obama – but also for the Washington Post (which ran smear ariticles on the Republican almost every day for the last month or so).
New Jersey.
My prediction is the same as I have been saying for a long time – Christie will win on the day, but Goldman Sachs will remain Governor.
One indication already – 3000 absentee ballots were checked and it was found that the signatures did not match. But, no doubt, they will be counted anyway (and this is the tip of the iceberg – there are more absentee ballots this year than there were in the Presidential election year).
In short, as so often, in New Jersey the fix is in.
I hope I am proved wrong on that one – but it would take a get-out-the-vote effort by the Republicans on a scale they have not managed in New Jersey since 1993 (when there were simply so many people voting Republican that their votes outnumbered the fake votes).
I had a good chuckle after reading this over on Goat in the Machine:
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is concerned that her Pakistani hosts have failed to grasp the nettle of good governance, and reminds them of the high purpose and duty for which democratic societies entrust their representatives with the sovereign power:
“We (the US) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan.”
That sure explains Pakistan’s little handful of problems at present. I’m ashamed I never thought of it. I had some childish intuition that they might have something to do with a civil society sufficiently dysfunctional that making a living by taking other people’s stuff off them, was far too easy in comparison to getting paid for producing stuff they wanted.
How could we have been so blind? The Taliban and Al Qaeda are pissed off at the world because they are under-taxed! Oh the humanity.
The creepy thing is I am sure that really is, in essence, what Clinton thinks.
Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.
– David Cameron in 2007.
The obvious conclusion being that he must not be allowed to become Prime Minister as his “cast-iron guarantees” are as firm as limp wet paper. Pathetic.
Bishop Hill:
Devil’s Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn’t swear at all – must be serious.
Indeed.
I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.
Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.
Much garbage has been written about the Professor Nutt affair. The notion that governments hire scientists to make informed decisions is laughable and the fact scientists are outraged that the government fired Nutt for contradicting the official line on drugs is a measure of their self-absorbed pomposity.
Governments hire scientists for the same reason companies often commission consultants to study some aspect of their business and make a report… i.e. to justify a course of action the board already wants to do but which they need to justify to investors. Similarly the job of a scientist on the government lists is to remain torpid until wheeled out in front of a camera to drone the government line with the caption “This man is a SCIENTIST and therefore the government’s edicts are incontrovertible and must be OBEYED”.
Professor Nutt was a stage prop, nothing more, and he is a fool to be surprised he was canned for being off-message. Of course what he said about marijuana and alcohol was true, any fool can see that. But how is that relevant?
To the complete and utter surprise of… er… well no one really… Dave Cameron has refused to jump the fence yet again. This worthless Labour-Lite jackanapes will not give Britain a vote on the Lisbon Treaty after all.
Yeah I know he promised we would get a vote. And you believed him? 
Vote UKIP rather than waste your vote on BlueLabour and the principle-free weathervane who leads it… and if the powers that be have destroyed UKIP by election day via the courts, stay the fuck home and do not dignify the worthless Cameron with a vote that will simply be an endorsement of more-of-the-same.
A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if the allocation of scarce resources that have competing uses is no longer the province of voluntary market exchange, but state control, it gives all manner of power, sometimes life and death power, to state functionaries. I wrote about the issue of healthcare, but we have had another example here in socialist Britain, in the form of our state education system.
At present, parents who send their children to state schools must send them to a school that operates in a “catchment area”. Parents who want to send their children to a school in a different catchment area cannot do so, except in exceptional circumstances. And much to the comical horror of our educational establishment, some parents have told lies about where they life so they can send their children to the highest-performing schools. The performance figures of school pupils are now published and, while a crude measure of performance in some ways, give parents at least some idea of where the best schools are. And so naturally, parents like to choose the best schools.
Of course, if we scrapped the state schooling system, and gave generous tax breaks or vouchers worth several thousand pounds to any parent with children, they could directly shop around for the best schools, and the whole nonsense of catchment area allocation would disappear. New education entrepreneurs would spring up. The catchment area mentality is partly drawn from a classic piece of egalitarian zero-sum thinking, which goes a bit like this: there are only so many good teachers to go around, and it is wrong that some children should be better schooled than others because of some unjust inequality in the spending power of their parents. But leaving aside the fact that I deny it is unjust for parents to spend as much as they want on their children’s schooling, the fact is that if you give far more choice to parents, competition will drive up the overall standard of schooling, and this, in my view, will disproportionately benefit youngsters from the poorest backgrounds. It is poor children who most need the kind of competition and drive of a school that has to worry about keeping its “customers”. Let’s face it, children from middle class schools will always be able to have some of the benefits of private tuition, etc.
I know that one objection to vouchers is that the state could, presumably, dictate certain standards for any school receiving voucher cash, and might use that power as a way of interfering with education another way. Fair point. To reduce the dangers of that happening, any voucher scheme or tax break system for schools should be accompanied by the obliteration of the current education bureaucracy. This is desirable on a number of grounds, not least for the cuts to state spending. It is, however, folly to imagine that a perfect free market system would be on the table any time soon, but as an intermediary step, greater parental choice, which would be of particularly great value to parents on low or moderate incomes, would be an enormous benefit to society, not just in educational terms, but also as a way of reinforcing the power of parents and of families generally. As some readers might remember me saying before, any such reform should also be accompanied by a reduction in the school leaving age.
But the present system of allocating school places by a rigid geographical formula, and policing it in the current way, is simply unendurable. It is also worth considering something else: in UK society, many of the big spending decisions that people make, either as individuals or as parents, are not mediated through the voluntary exchange of a market, but via the “tax-now and we might give you something in return” route of the state. On education and health – two of the most important issues for us – the role of the private sector is squeezed to the margins. One would have thought that the great growth in the prosperity of the West would have made the involvement of the state in such large areas less necessary than it might have appeared to someone in say, the late 1940s, but judging by this story about schools and catchment areas, the statist mindset is as strong as it was in the era of Clement Attlee.
We are used to all manner of choices in our lives in the West, whether it be our choice of holiday, spouse or computer system. Is it really such a massive leap to hope that parental choice of school will soon be as unremarkable as any other choice we make in our lives?
The predicted insanity of “quantitative easing” (i.e. re-inflating the bubble) is laid bare:
Sharp increases in share prices have improved the outlook for pension funds in every major developed nation apart from the UK, according to research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The news coincides with figures which reveal that the deficits in Britain’s largest privately-sponsored defined benefit schemes have soared by £15bn to £77bn, wiping out almost all the gains achieved by market increases the previous month. […] The deterioration is largely an unhappy consequence of quantitative easing (QE). Pension funds’ deficits depend on two factors: the value of their assets, much of which are equities, but also the potential amounts they will have to pay out when people retire in the future. These future liabilities have been pushed higher as QE has depressed yields on gilts and other bonds
I would quite like to see the people responsible for one of the greatest rolling acts of theft in recent history hanging from lampposts. Bernie Madoff was a minor league player by comparison.
Wise words have been heard coming from the lips of someone in the acting profession, to wit multi-talented MILF action babe Milla Jovovich.
“I think parents need to take a lot more responsibility than they do about whether it’s OK for their children to go to Resident Evil or any other movie with violence or sex or whatever. It’s really easy to blame Hollywood for violence having an effect on kids, but movies would have no power if parents would just set their own standards. And it’s the same with video games.”
Common sense of course and that she had to even say this is an indication of the extent to which civil society has decayed. Violent art forms are as old as art itself.
The trouble is rules based safety nets often end up subsidising what they are supposed to be alleviating.
The big advantage a charity has is that they do not have to give you anything if they do not think you actually deserve it… the state on the other hand operates (quite rightly) not by using discretion but by following politically derived formulae. To get things from the state all you have to do is understand the system. This has all manner of unintended consequences when you (in effect) nationalise charity and replace private institutions with public ones… in short, when you replace charity with an entitlement, you completely change the rules of the game.
– Perry de Havilland
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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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