I wanted to pass this on to those who might be interested because the Libertarian Alliance, founded by the late Chris R Tame three decades ago, is an organisation through which I got to meet many people, some of whom are now involved in the Samizdata blog, such as Brian Micklethwait, Perry de Havilland and others. This is an interesting development involving Tim Evans, the LA president since Chris’ death five years ago:
After twenty-five enjoyable years of working with the Libertarian Alliance and five as its President Dr. Tim Evans said today that it is now the right time for him to move on from the organisation.”
“I leave the organisation knowing that the Libertarian Alliance has achieved amazing things. Today, the LA is in financial rude health as never before. Its conferences, lectures and seminars are second to none and it freely makes available online 1,000 diverse and scholarly classical liberal and libertarian publications. Moreover, it provides a focal point and network for hundreds of libertarians both in this country and further afield who seek radical free market ideas and debate.”
“As Chief Executive of The Cobden Centre, a Consultant Director at the Adam Smith Institute, Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd – not to mention concluding my studies for an MBA – I have decided to refocus my workload. Wanting in particular to spend more time with my family, I wish the LA and its supporters well for the future. For me, libertarianism has always been at its best when it is positive in outlook, methodologically individualist and it seeks to engage and persuade people from many different backgrounds and outlooks. I wish Dr. Sean Gabb, the Committee, and everyone else associated with the organisation the very best for the future.”
“Just before the organisation’s founder and director Dr. Chris Tame died five years ago Sean and I promised him that we would strive to strengthen and grow the organisation. Today, I leave the Presidency knowing that this objective has been fulfilled. I am reassured that the LA now has the potential to further build upon its record of success.”
I won’t presume to speak for Tim, or for Sean Gabb, whom I have known and regarded as friends for a quarter of a century, but this is clearly sad news, even though Tim’s reasons make plenty of sense. I would add one thing that has concerned me about the LA in recent years, which is that much of its public pronouncements, especially by Sean, have tended to focus on a lot of what I would call the “isolationist/nationalist” side of the street, whereas I know that Tim Evans is not really cut from the same ideological cloth. Tim, for example, radiates optimism and enjoyment of the modern world; Sean, as he’d be the first to tell you, is almost blackly pessimistic (although he seems to enjoy it!), and is also a fierce cultural conservative.
Then again, the LA is an organisation that deliberately stresses that it is a broad church and does not insist on any kind of hard “line” on certain issues. I hope that remains the case.
For my part, I really hope that the LA gets less fixated with what I would call “nation-state” issues, which are not always congruent with issues of liberty, or tilting at absurd historical windmills.
Thanks for the plug, Johnathan! We always appreciate publicity, like any organisation with opinions or axes to grind.
In pointing out what I cheerfully acknowledge to be an “isolationist/nationalist” slant sometimes apparent in our mmore recent writings, you are correct. Sean and I, between us mostly rersponsible for “current output” – which is to say, chiefly, the Blog and also what Sean writes independently on his own sites – see no problem with this at this time: libertarians have been writing, pamphleteerin, holding meetings and conferences, sending stuff to the media, appearing on it even, and a lot in Sean’s case, and the like.
All this is all very well, but in our view it cuts little ice with a wider audience. I personally have for long felt that a simple, black-and-white, few-words explanation of inidividual liberty, digestible quickly and positively by those masses who have been deliberately made uncurious, uncritical and ignorant (in the true sense of that word) by the Enemy-Class, is lacking. I am in fact working on one right now.
I am coming slowly and sadly to the conclusion, and I feel that in his heart Sean is too, that we need to “raise the consciousness of the working classes”. We need to become what I was once labelled – quite accurately I really believe – “Marxists turned upside down.” English Nationalism is a useful force which, perhaps, we might (carefully now ith that on the bus, sonny!”) hijack and harness for liberalism.
That’s just a quick prelim – I may say more later.
I note that your opinion of Sean’s latest book is…how shal I put it….not quite as entirely positive as it might be….” I agree that its sibject matter and strategic slant is not for everybody: fervent pro-USA chaps are, as Sean put it so crisply, “advised not to expose themselves to this novel”.
For myself, Sean knows that I dispute the likely historical scenario and outcomes he relates, on several grounds of important detail. However, I did find it an entertaining read, specially to imagine the various horrible ends to which a number of British political micreants and villains ov the later 20th century are subjected.
I bet it brough a smile to Sean’s face to write it. And it might even make the poor beggar a little money!
I hope that they find someone to take the organisation forward who is at least as relentlessly optimistic as Sean is pessimistic.
Comrade Evans has served the movement with distinction for a quarter century. We owe him a great debt.
Now, how does Perry’s workload look?
David D, don’t get me wrong – I am sure the Churchill Memorandum book is entertaining, but you and I know that SG is also trying to push what he thinks is a serious case – the case for Britain staying neutral in 1940 and therefore, according to the argument, preserving the Empire and keeping those vulgar Americans at bay. (Why a libertarian should care about empire is a topic in itself). Suffice to say that the thesis is based on some very heroic assumptions about how things could have turned out, as well as based upon a refusal to realise how much of a genuine threat Hitler was. He was not just another puffed up nationalist who could have been placated, which is an idea underpinning Sean’s foreign policy views of WW2.
None of what I said is meant to trash isolationism, or a policy of non-interventionism. But I do think that the LA is making a very serious error in overplaying the nationalism card; liberty applies to everyone, and it we know all too well of how ideas of liberty and nationalism can and do conflict.
As far as I am concerned, having been a LA supporter for 20+ years and learned so much from Chris Tame in particular, the organisation is or should be primarily about spreading the ideas of liberty in all their forms. There is a grave danger that if it spends too much of its time getting fussed about creating some sort of working class, nationalistic sensibility, then it can all too easily resemble some very unpleasant forces indeed. I don’t really need to spell this out, do I?
I look forward to seeing it. Coupled with the Nolan Chart it could be a useful tool in helping people understand libertarianism really is.
Well, I went for the Nolan Chart, thinking initially it was of some useful sophistication. Certainly, the randomisation of all possible answers to each question is good: you have to read the whole lot, for each question.
However, by around question 3 (a difficult one for me, given my belief in the family and income tax being levied on family units according to the totality of their composition, ages and on-going educational commitments of any young adults), I became bored. These combinations of things I agree with and things I disagree with, within a single answer, just leave the issues unanswered; worse: unanswerable.
Clearly, the precise meanings of the words matter in such cases, and the scoring is hidden so that the respondent cannot know (prior to answering the questions) what the words mean with respect to the questionnaire.
That just leaves one with trusting the questioner. Perhaps sadly, I’ve seen too much, especially since the inception of the WWW: trust is gone; contract applies; contract requires prior agreement on terms, including the meaning of all the words that are thrown into doubt by their contextual use.
One could put such oppositions, as the questionnaire perhaps attempts to pose, into a tighter context. For example:
Are you with my concern?
Best regards
Do we need an LA in this day and age?
Back to the Libertarian Alliance, they are clearly struggling.
Wikipedia describes them as (at least originally) a fusion of those with anarchist, minarchist and classical liberal views. As an opposition to the largely statist views of current mainstream political parties of the UK and first world, that sounds great.
But it’s not. IMHO, the spread is too wide: vastly wider than that within the statist parties, and competing with the gap between the statists and that side of the defined libertarian alliance spectrum.
Over several years, I’ve tried to align my views somewhat with those of LA and Dr Sean Gabb, or at least take an interest in what they stand for, even if I’m not for all of it (after all, I’ve managed that for others for whom I have less intrinsic sympathy). I’ve failed, and I think the fault is more theirs than mine: too detailed, too obscure, too argumentative (yes, yes, I did say that).
What do they stand for? I went for a look today and ended up as confused as ever. Their main current statement links to Purpose and Strategy of the Libertarian Alliance, a strategy published as the first of a set of tactics (brilliant use of the the language), is an example, recalled from 1981 as (presumably) their main statement of purpose, continuing in its brilliant clarity and applicability.
Sadly, I only got as far as eyeballing the section titles, as the document approaches its 30th anniversary, before being hit by overwhelming interest (to be doing something else):
As inspiring as Obama at second take.
Still, I’ll find the energy, eventually, to go back and read the whole two pages. And I’m sure I won’t find them as elitist and doctrinaire as the Fabians, nor as centralised and underlyingly elitist as Marxists, nor holding out against Popper for the naivety of Plato’s philosopher-kings.
Best regards
Nigel, I understand your concerns, and it’s easy to “overthink” the quiz. Indeed, I probably should have used this link, to the original “simple” form of the Quiz, rather than the one I did, for that very reason. (That one lends itself nicely to printing on little cards.) But you’re missing the larger point: the purpose of Nolan’s quiz is to open people’s eyes to the fact that there isn’t a simple, one-dimensional left-right spectrum in political thought, but other dimensions as well (I’m sure it’s no accident that the Libertarian quadrant us situated up at the top!). Once you get people thinking outside of the “normal” parameters we’ve been foreced into, they become more receptive to different ideas and (equally important) different labels. And I think it’s starting to have an effect: here in the US the word “libertarian” is beginning to enter the mainstream lexicon, and even if people often have a very imperfect understanding of it, that’s a beginning.
Patrick asks: “Do we need an LA in this day and age?”
Well, I’m open to suggestions about what we all here might do instead. Me, I write rather poor stuff from time to time, and sort of manage a blog, a bit, me, from a nissen-hut in Lancashire full of typewriter-chimps. I can,now and then, get odd pig-farmers from North Lancashire to put a hot towel round their heads, and then try to imagine what it’s like to be properly free. Sean goes on the Sound-Wireless from time to time, and even occasionally on the telly, and also writes the odd book. Yasmin-Alibi-for-Gordon-Brown then kicks his head in in front of the anchor-man, and his mike is turned off as he chokes in his own blood and broken teeth, bleeding to death on the sound-studio floor.
Others write stuff here and there, make movies of important conference speeches about aspects of liberty, and slowly (too slowly in my opinion) word get about that there might be an intellectual alternative to Big-Statism. The LA is a useful portmanteau for this sort of stuff. At least it’s better than a sole blog or page: people like Guido got going at the right moment and got enough traction to run on their own, from a screen. We can’t yet.
At least, everyone likes to come to our conferences, which are suitable grand and in a traditional Imperial setting, and are always sold out. We even make a profit of a couple of hundred a time. Perhaps we should take Wembley Stadium in 2011? But perhaps that also is premature.
We have decided that we will become more publishingly-proactive, and soon. Nearly all the paper-stuff from the era of Chris, Brian and Sean duplicating stuff on Roneo-gestallt-machines or whatever they used to be called, is now digitised. New articles, pamphlets and even the odd short book are due to come on stream.
We could always sit in a large room and talk to ourselves, of course. But perhaps it won’t do much good.
We’ll just keep buggering on, I guess.
Is it me, or is David Davis barking mad?
There are probably more Somalia-born British citizens in the UK than “North Lancashire” farmers, of pigs or anything else. The masses Mr Davis wants to appeal to either do not exist, or have no idea what a Nisssen hut is, and they care even less. Take your weaselly white supremacism elsewhere.
I think the LA serves a useful purpose myself, if only so that David can annoy people like Gustave with his humorous verbal anachronisms.
The basic problem with libertarianism really is that there are too many thinkers and not enough do-ers. Everyone’s being a Marx and Engels instead of a street-corner organsier. So far in the history of Western Reformist Civilisation, the people who have succeeded are the ones who did the Community Organising; Christian reformers in the nineteenth century, communists in the twentieth; conservationists and greens, and so on.
People tend to say that the masses have dumbed down and that’s why we get nowhere, but the reality is there has never been a great educated proleteriat. They need somebody to stand on a crate and offer them something straightforward. None of us have the time or the inclination to do that. We’ll give a talk on fractional reserve banking to the same hundred people who came to the last one on mutualist anarcho-capitalism, but that’s not reaching a mass audience.
Some time ago here at Samizdata I suggested going to schools to give talks in assembly. The few reactions I got were all negative, of the “what’s the point?” and “they wouldn’t let us anyway” type. But that’s what the commies did. They organised in schools and factories and social clubs and working mens clubs and mission halls.
Maybe the internet can help us somewhat, but most people don’t read the kind of stuff we write. They’re too busy thinking about other things. “Libertarianism” like all political theories is for the nerds. You then need to create the mass movement. You need some kind of institutional base. You know why there is a big active conservative movement in the USA?
Is it the Constitution? Is it American “can do”? Is it a superior political system? It’s none of those things. It’s the churches, that act as an institutional base for community organising efforts. They act as a direct counterhegemony to the “liberal” organising base in education.
So anyway, I think the LA is an important institution. But we’re not going to get anywhere until we can broaden out and find a community base. Until we can do that, all our earnest theories are just castles in the air.
Who is Gustave Lajoie? Is it a construct? It sounds like an anagram for something.
One thing I can’t remember ever having been linked with is weaselly white supremacists, whatever those might be!
My second comment on this thread had now exited Smite Control. It may be found at the posted time of February 3, 2011 08:22 PM, and is more on the main theme of Johnathan’s posting than my earlier comment.
Best regards
Sean Gabb.
It is not “pessimism” it is not even “nationalism”.
I know there is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism – ***
[unsubstantiated assertion here edited out by the Samizdata management]
Nor is it “just” this.
Who are the “anarchocommunalists” that Sean has on the Libertarian Alliance blog and its publications?
Are they nice follwers of Robert Owen who want to be in a little commume somewhere – living the rest of us alone?
NO THEY ARE NOT.
Kevin Carson and those who are allied with him are the fundemental enemies of property.
They are foe – the enemy.
They are black flag people – the types who always end up rioting WITH (on the same said as) the red flag people (the Marxists).
Their interest is loot and power – to burn, steal and kill in the name of a “stateless community” that would be as “stateless” in practice as the schemes of the Marxists (also “stateless” after the “transitional stage”).
How do I know they want to loot – that they are the enemies of property.
BECAUSE THEY SAY SO.
And not just in Egypt – it is the same (for them) in Britian and the United States also.
And do not let them fool you.
It is NOT just corrupt companies like General Electric and J.P. Morgan Chase.
It is EVERY company and every rich individual also.
Not even the socially liberal (and anti war) Koch brothers would be off limits to them.
To associate with Sean Gabb is to associate with the blag flag people – both the anarchocommunalists and the other sort of black flag people.
It as brutal as that.
And that is why I have to say I regard Tim’s statement as too timid.
It tells no lies – but leaves out things of great importance.
Which is why I have just written what I have written.
“The masses will not read difficult books – they want something simple”
Are the books that Glenn Beck suggests people read simple? They are actually often very tough indeed.
And they go straight up to the top of the sales charts.
And people really do read them – even if they have to read them with an internet connection open (to look things up on).
Ordinary people – they sweat blood, but they do it (in their millions).
“But they are Americans Paul”.
And British people are another species?
Perhaps the fault is not in the “common people”.
Perhaps the fault is in US – perhaps we have never tried hard enough, or well enough, to get people interested in reading (really reading) difficult books.
If Glenn can do it – why not us?
After all the man spent only a short time in university (he ran out of money) and has been working since he was 13 years of age.
So he was hardly born with massive advantages over us.
Isn’t that the point?
That in a truly free society, anyone can publish anything they want?
Not “be allowed to”.
But as an inalienable right.
Wow, Paul, you’re great at slander and jingoistic fake-history worship. You should try to get a job at Cato!
First of all, Winston Churchill was a drunken bastard, a cheat, a liar, a thug, a scumbag, a mass murderer; the only place his effigy belongs is hung.
Adolf Hitler was all of these things, too, but unlike Churchill he didn’t start a world war.
Golly!
Chu-hua ZhŠ«: objectively correct; Churchill started WW2.
Don’t you just love it.
Best regards
Churchill started WW2? You are a delusional moonbat, mate.
Unless you’re Chinese, it is usually accepted that World War 2 kicked off with the German invasion of Poland.
What to say? Ten years ago, when what was then Libertarian Samizdata got its start, no one knew what the hell a libertarian was. Now, we’re somewhere between the “Ridicule” and “Fight” stages of Gandhi’s famous quote. And a large part of that, in the UK at least, is due to the Libertarian Alliance.
Personally, it’s thanks to the LA and Chris and Sean that I learned that there was such a thing as a libertarian, that I was one, and that I wasn’t alone. I’ll keep supporting them, but like Johnathan I am worried about the direction it might take now Tim is leaving. English nationalism, David Davis? Liberty knows no borders.
And, to Paul Marks, I don’t recognise Sean Gabb in the description you give. He’s no anarchist, he’s a conservative. Restoration, not destruction, is his goal. And even so, there’s a place for anarchists – it’s a Libertarian Alliance, where those who value liberty can work together without going all Judean Peoples’ Front on each other. Once we have liberty, we can sort out the details later…
I have to agree with paul marks here. The LA is full of moonbats, black flag anarchists and anti western idiots. A number of them even describe themselves as ‘anti capitalists’ which only proves that they are the enemy. those interested in preserving western civilastion against the left and islam should look elsewhere
I went to Edward King’s linked website (www.reason.com/blog) and searched for quoted “edward king”. This is what I got in the single hit:
I also looked down the list of staff and list of contributors (eyeballs and text search), with no hit.
Now, it is possible that the commenter on this thread of Samizdata (February 5, 2011 12:00 PM) at had good reason for that link (or that Reason Magazine’s website has a crap search facility, or that I’ve missed some requirement on competence in doing such searches), but I’d like to know what is the legitimacy of that link.
Best regards
Nigel
I thank you for your interest. It’s quite simple – the Reason Foundation is an organisation I admire and support financially. The link is there so that people who follow the link, as you did, can see their work and if they like it, perhaps support them too. I have no affiliation with them other than that mentioned above – the Kochtopus has yet to wave its tentacles of money in my direction ;-).
I wasn’t aware that the URL link needed to be one of a website you personally controlled. Perry, if this is the case please advise and I will remove the link.
[editor: no, unless a link is spam, linking to things of interest is not a problem… even if our occasionally piranha-like smitebot can sometimes take umbrage at innocuous sites for no apparent reason]
Lara Stein wrote:
Ah, but which of the two Chinas is Chu-hua ZhŠ« from? Does that change the answer?
I have never said that Sean Gabb is an anarchist.
I have said that he pushes people like KEVIN CARSON who is a an ANTI PROPERTY anarchist.
Anyone who thinks that Sean Gabb has not been pushing Kevin Carson stuff over the last few years must be blind,deaf and stupid.
As for “Churchill started World War II” – how sweet.
By the way I do NOT think that Sean Gabb is a Nazi – I think he is too much of a opportunist to even be a sincere Nazi.
I do NOT think that Sean Gabb believes that Jews are subhuman. That would be a “belief” a false belief – but a belief.
Sean is, in my judgement, not a man of sincere beliefs – not even false ones.
Sometimes I wonder if I/Sean/Tim, versus some other people on here, are talking about the same Libertarian Alliance. Look, we started off (I know, I was there in the room) as an outfit that would publish things. We used a Roneo-Gestetner-machine first (anybody remember them?) and then, WOW! we got a photocopier! YAY! (You didn’t say “yay” then, it was pre-Blair and pre-the “New Britain, a YOUNG COUNTRY”.)
Paul is trying to wriggle of a couple of hooks here, and I’d like to keep him on side. Personally I don’t think Sean is any kind of Nazi, even a scheming dishonest one. I could not feel it right for the rest of humanity, to entertain him and his good lady wife and his child, in my home for as long as it would ever please them to stay, if I thought he was: and that, Paul, is the real test.
I may be a simple naive conductor of chimpanzee-type-writer-battalions-in-a-freezing-Lancashire-Nissen-Hut, but I here sense nothing more that a silly prattish spat between someone called “Paul Marks” and someone else called “Kevin Carson”.
I really have no idea who either of these people are, not ever having met either one (please trust me on this one: I have never met either fellow.) Why should I have done? They are very, very young, and probably live in “London”. I expect they are students. Both seem to know everything about libertarian philosophy, so this must be the case and would explain everything about their seeming anger at each other.
Old Chris Tame used to say, in jest, but not really (I knew when he was joking and when not) “There may be two libertarians, somewhere, on Earth, who agree about everything, but I AM NOT ONE OF THEM”!!
THIS IS OUR TROUBLE, and this is why we shall fail, and why the Political-Enemy-Class will succeed in destroying individual freedom and its prospects, for a very very very long time, possibly for ever.
YOU have to decide what to do.
I sent a well-argued post (much better than my normal standard) but it’s got held by the smitebot.
Never mind. It said nothing.
Nigel, and while I’m here the quote you unearthed from reason.com was not mine. Edward VII was Wilhelm II’s uncle, not his cousin… 😉
If my other comment does some up out of the smitebot, ever (it was about Sean Gabb!) then it’ll probably be irrelevant by now, or have been superceded by more erudite ones from other samizdatistas.
Oh well, never mind, perhaps there is no need to bother. It’d be better to all get really drunk, as our biochemistry tutor said we’d all do, with him, on finishing Schools.
Perhaps the LA needs some kind of unity government of all factions to prevent us descending into rock throwing and, perhaps, an Islamist takeover.
David Davis – you are mistaken about me, on all counts.
I wish you were correct – “young” and so on.
As for my dispute with certain people – I have promised not to discuss them on this blog, so I will not.
Should you wish to know my side of these matters, then feel free to e.mail me.
However, I will in no way hold it against you if you decide there are less boring ways of spending your time.
I find all this desperately sad.
Tim’s decided to move on. So what? The Libertarian Alliance has existed for some time, exists, and will continue to exist.
People who think we are about to implode, and (as seen from comments on Brian Micklethwait’s blog) are frantically “downloading their own contributions from the LA’s archive of published material” as though this is the Titanic filling with water, merely display their own narcissism and inappropriate levels of self-regard. Reading those statements amused me in a macabre way, rather than anything else.
One of those commenters has also written, over there, about the contents of a confidential email from Sean. He will know who he is.
David, it is not that I think that the LA is about to implode; rather, my concern is that when someone as prominent as Tim leaves, this is not something you can or should just shrug off. I haven’t presumed to second-guess Tim’s motives, but I would wager that when the LA puts out press releases calling for the execution of former PM for “treason”, etc, it is fair to assume that this is the sort of thing that causes concern about whether the LA is behaving stupidly.
Of course Tim is a very busy guy; we all are. I’d be very interested to know what Sean is going to do and I would appreciate it if he could lay down some markers for future strategy.
Johnathan,
The British libertarian movement is bursting at the seams with worthy fellows, all doing intellectual stuff, all the hours that they can spare (which may be a little or a lot) to promote the cause of libertarian thought and its prcticality in improving the lot of all people everywhere, as the cure fo excessive statism. This has been going on for years…..decades.
If Tim thought…”Hell! My organisation’s director is behaving stupidly by writing _//and publishing//_ a note to the effect that “Tony Blair is a traitor”, and recommending a certain course of action! I must get off the ship before it sinks!” …. all he had to do was pick up the phone to Sean and say “remove it, you silly boy!”
Tim did not do that. He resigned, announced it to the world and then told Sean afterwards. He didn’t even tell me at all, so that I could say something approriately praiseworthy on the blog: he did’nt even say anything himself on the blog, where he is at liberty to do so whenever he wishes. The first I heard of all this was on this blog of yours here. But then, I’m not important and I don’t go to “gatherings” much, so it doesn’t matter who tells me what.
I do not believe for one second that Tim has resigned over Sean’s post about Tony Blair. He’s probably got other stuff to do, or else there are things going on in his life that are nothing to do with us.
Oh and it wasn’t a press release, Johnathan. It was a blog post.
You people and I have known Sean for 30-odd years or more. Are you all now saying that he’s lost his marbles and wants to have Tony Blair executed? And that he’ll bring the LA into disrepute, and by inference all those of you who distance yourselves a bit from us, thinking us some collection of vulgar populists, who will make certain others look “less serious”? Are you?
I see blogs as a journalism form that emulates cartoons. You would not, I feel sure, denigrate the role of cartoons in transmitting the underlying structure of political thought in an instant way. You don’t see a cartoon of, say, a man n Weimar Germany about to be guillotined, flanked by Lloyd-George, Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson and the Italian fellow whose name I can’t recall, and then say : Oh God! We’re saying we, the Allies, want to kill all Germans! get it off the paper, quick!” There was exactly that cartoon incidentally, about reparations, in, I think, late 1919. You don’t object to Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed with a lit timefuse coming out of his turban, do you, saying that “this shows that all Western liberals want to kill Muslims and defame the Name of the Prophet!”
My position is that the British Libertarian movement is getting nowhere, and in your heart you also know it is not, because it does not appeal to people who understand cartoons.
I also would like to know why the contents of a confidential email, to me and to others on Sean’s list, were leaked on Brian’s blog in a comment (it’s not Brian’s fault – don’t misunderstand me there please.)
And, regarding “laying down markers for future strategy”, I’d say that’s initially a matter for the LA’s shareholders, of whom Tim is one….but it seems he has resigned…..
Frankly, all the faintly condescending, even patronising, stuff coming out from some people about the LA in the last few days, such as “the LA Blog’s a mess” and so forth, upsets me. Furthermore, the feeling abroad that we are some sort of sinking ship is not something I thought that the few libertarians on the planet could afford to harbour, at all.
I’m tempted to shout “go forth, – together with advice concerning very wide foreign travel combined with the procreative act – and set up your own LA if you really want one! – and cease badmouthing ours!” because I know that nobody will.
What is plain is that Tim, given his other commitments, no longer wants to be a part of the LA, but his comment, praising the work of that organisation, and Sean’s work, is hardly that of a bitter person. He’d obviously made up his mind to move on after 5 years and that was that. The press release was sent to this blog because, let me put this as gently as I can, Samizdata has a large readership and many of its readers will know the persons concerned.
This line is bizarre:
I happen to think that the execution press release is a sign that Sean has shown appalling judgement on this specific issue., yes.
And it is a press release in the sense that the director of the LA, in a blog that carries the LA’s name, is calling for X to occur, and any casual reader will assume this is the policy of that organisation, rather than just a sort of piece of whimsy.
Or is this now the tactic: call for certain persons to be killed and then say, “oh, but this is just a blog post, nothing to see here, please don’t worry about it”.
For goodness sake.
Well, I’m not part of the Libertarian cabal and so far as I can tell am the only er “regular internets libertarian” who has never met any of the rest of you in the flesh, at least partly because I don’t get out much for medical reasons, but so far as my limited experience of you all goes, I think David Davis is a jolly nice chap and I’m finding his obvious distress in this thread a little upsetting really. I think Sean is a nice chap too so far as I can tell, and so is Paul Marks. But then Paul must be a nice chap, because he hails from Kettering, and so do I, so I am bound by the ancient bonds of blood that only Ketteringtonians can understand.
It seems to me that if this fellow who I’ve never met either and wasn’t previously much aware of has resigned publicly without first informing the others in the organisation he was resigning from, that is rather a rude thing to do. The big problem with the internet is it provides an enormous platform for showboating and the public washing of dirty linen. Who can forget Old Holborn’s grand flouncy exit from the LPUK?
I’ve made some criticisms of the direction the LA blog has gone in on the LA Blog, which David and Sean are of course at total liberty to ignore. My own primary selfish interest is that I want “name” blogs like the LA one to be safe places I can send Libertarian greenhorns to without fear of them being put off. That is just my own personal view, but it’s not what I am tending to see there at the moment.
Maybe the problem is that Libertarianism is in a long haul, and the frustration at lack of movement leads people in more diverse or extreme directions. We’ve all had so many debates over Misesian economics and fractional reserve banking, there’s nothing left to be said. But blogs need constant new material and it gets tedious repeating the same thing over and over again.
I keep dreaming that somebody will write a “book that changes the world” like Das Kapital or The General Theory Of Why John Maynard Keynes Should Run The World or Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Pot, because libertarianism just doesn’t seem to have produced one. But maybe the days of the Great Book are over. I dunno. It just feels to me like libertarianism is splintered into a great number of people grasping different parts of the elephant.
If I were the LA, in that situation, I think I’d probably be unsure as to what to do next also. Maybe an attempt to describe the elephant itself and represent some kind of consensus on what the elephant is? Whatever, I am inclined to agree with Johnathan that posts like the Tony Blair one are ill-judged output for an august institution and more suited to the ranting fringe.
David asked what the LA should be doing. My own feeling is that it should accept that it needs to be a rather dull august institution, and I would focus on forging links in a Gramscian War Of Position to eventually enable a War Of Movement. I have no idea of how much of that they are actually doing, but that would be my strategy. I would leave the fatwahs to the crazies on the fringe who can be plausibly denied. If Libertarianism does become a serious threat to the Establishment- as we hope- we must be sure that their researchers will be all over everything posted to the internet for dirt to dredge up. It would be disappointing to be discredited as a movement due to the existence of too much of it. All I can really say is that it’s a bit ridiculous for Sean to be calling publicly for extra-judicial executions, then throw a hissy fit when somebody likens him to those regimes who have gone in for that sort of thing.
THE LEFT all want to queue up to “dance on Thatcher’s grave”. They have cheerfully and loudly proclaimed that objective, for years. During the Miners’ strike, a taxi-driver was killed ( you know, like dead) from a paving-slab dropped from a motorway bridge on his car while he took a non-striking miner to work. The socialists get away with all sorts of things: not only death-threats but actual deaths.
They are theirs have directly and deliberately murdered something like 250 million people, and that’s a conservative estimate, since Sidney and Beatrice Webb set up their Bloomsbury shagging-shop and made the rantings of bank-robbers like Stalin respectable.
Nobody gives a damn about all that stuff: perhaps it’s good to murder people if you are an idealist, but not if you are a consrvative? I do not know.
Then, Sean publishes a virtual-scenario, in which Parliament agrees a Bill of Attainder on a man who you high-minded, intellectual and lofty worthies all agree (I know you do, because you did, and I have a long memory, me) brought disaster to the UK and liberalism in particular and on purpose. And he did it in a way whereby he pretended he and his outfit was “none other than the political arm of the british People”.
LET HIM who is without sin, cast the first stone…..How many libertarian blogs have I read in the past 5 years, on which someone comments about how many MPs, many with real names, should be hung from lamp-posts? Have all of you, those so-recently-turned-LA-critics, forgotten all that?
Have you forgotten about the many instances where “there would not be enough lamp-posts for all the bureaucrats”?
What did you say to those commenters, and those who owned and ran the sites? What did you say? Did you all cringe and withdraw the hems of your togas (or whatever it is you wear)?
Did you publish vociferous denunciations, and arrange via skype-calls for funding to be withdrawn (a leftist tactic – read the papers)?
Did you? Nah.
Then, you all throw a staged hissy-fit when Sean writes a vignette imagining something which might be desirable: such as that Tony Blair (who ought to have bloody known better anyway, than to associate himself, an intelligent and potentially useful man) has been attainted for treason and will be executed.
You might just as well have Sean sued for what he does to certain politicians in “The Churchill Memorandum”.
All Tim had to do was to pick up the phone to Sean, and me and one or two others like David Farrer if he felt like it (I expect he didn’t care, we are just cogs) and say what was troubling him. If he wanted to resign from the Presidency as well for other reasons, it would have simply been nice to know anyway.
I continue to remain pissed off, very, that the first I heard of all this nonsense (and nonsense it is) was on here. Thank you at least for being sufficiently readable as a blog that I go on every day, or I’d not have known till Sean rang me as soon as he could. Yes, IanB is right: I am distressed, and mostly that the LA gets loftily ignored for 99.9% of the last 5 years, and then gleefully trashed in public by those who we thought were its friends.
If you want a LA for yourselves, start one. Go on: I dare you. You can do it if you try!
That’s enough: I’m very tired now.
Well as I said before, whatever the rights and wrongs of the blog post, and I think it was ill advised, but that’s just me, the decision of this Tim Evans chap to resign via samizdata rather than via a phone call to Sean or David seems to me to be calculatedly rude and not the kind of conduct that a gentleman engages in. Rather like the unpleasant occasional Hollywood popular actor thing of dumping one’s girlfriend on a chat show.
David, you should not need to be reminded that we are better than much of the left. We don’t need to excuse our “virtual scenarios” in which a democratically elected politician is put to death because we disagree with the foreign policy of said person. We are better than that.
This is indeed true. They are guttersnipes, the lot of them. But again, how does this excuse calls for killing Blair? You continue to try and play down the sheer awfulness of Sean’s post. It was not a throwaway line, such as saying “there aren’t enough lamposts”. It was a far more significant comment than that. You just don’t seem to grasp why I felt that this is one of the things that makes me wonder whether Sean has lost his ability to understand how things actually appear to the outsider. Imagine a person who was trying to understand libertarianism and this is the first thing he sees. Get the point?
I should also point out, by the way, that Sean Gabb has said some pretty brutal things about Mrs Thatcher in the past, not least the accusation that by preventing economic disaster and so on, she actually made it easier for there to be the assault on civil liberties, etc. (I happen to think his argument is nuts, but I will let that pass). I have heard him denounce the Adam Smith Institute and others for their role in advising on privatisation, arguing that all this did was to make the modern state more affordable, etc. So I imagine he’ll dance a little jig when the old lady goes.
And David, for what it is worth, here at Samizdata, while there has been the odd lapse and we have had to kick various nutters and bores off our comment threads, by and large we have tried – I think pretty successfully – to be a voice of intelligence. We don’t go in for “swearblogging” etc.
As far as I know, Tim had made up his mind, issued his statement, and then contacted various people. I have no idea of the exact sequence. If he did not contact people like Sean as he was making up his mind, that in itself is worrying since it shows a serious breakdown in proper relations.
In any event, organisations such as the LA, or indeed other campaigning groups and firms, can and should have succession plans in place, or at least be prepared if someone wants to go for whatever reasons. In my business life, it is something I have to be conscious of all the time.
End of subject.
That’s a pretty respectable thesis, Johnathan, as it goes. She presided over a general expansion of State power, even if she reduced the State’s direct economic ownership; most obviously in a very deliberate reform of the Police in a quasi-military direction.
Thatcher wasn’t a libertarian, and I don’t think libertarians have any responsibility to not criticise her. Britain was a less free country by the end of her administration than at the beginning in many respects, even if she did abolish exchange controls. And besides all else, her economics were Chicago, not Austrian. 3% per year inflation every year is the prescription, isn’t it? Libertarian?
Whatever other sins Sean may have committed, this criticism is a bit weak, I think.
That is not what I said. What I said – in response to DD’s point about how the left wants to “dance on Thatcher’s grave” – is that a lot of libertarians, such as Sean Gabb, are criticis, and fierce ones. I mentioned that I feel that part of the thesis – that she made it easier to attack civil liberties by rescuing the economy – is unproven.
For instance, consider if, instead of the Tories winning in 1979, we had instead seen the re-election of an even more leftist, socialist regime. Imagine the economic carnage. It is a fair point to make that in those circumstances, civil liberties would have been eroded, since governments in deep trouble often will lash out at certain groups/targets either in order to create scapegoats and diversions, or for some other reason.
I have heard Sean argue – no doubt sincerely – that we’d have been better off, in some ways from a libertarian PoV, had Maggie not achieved the limited success on the economics front. I think that’s delusional.
No one here, certainly not me, would argue that Maggie is a great figure from a libertarian point of view, although I don’t write off the achievement in at least checking state power and deregulating certain bits of the economy as much as some like to do. If you are an ideologue like me, practical politicians will always disappoint. That’s life.
Regarding Thatcher? Yes of course she was nowhere near being a libertarian, and I agree with Sean, and also you people too, that she actually managed to extend British State power to our general loss. She was a (sort of) liberal although very imperfect, who got sadly outed by the Tories and killed because she might have upset an emerging ruling Political-Class, whose plans had been laid for decades.
She was actually about 15 years too early. If she’d emerged, fully-formed in about 1996, Callaghan/Foot/Kinnock/Brown/Smith/Smith (Jacqui)/Harman having totally Cubanised us, she’d have got somewhere. I feel another revisionist history novel coming on.
However, I object to the Left getting away with issuing cheerful, loud and public death threats against her, other “desires” such as to “dance on her grave” – and against anybody else whom it pleased them to threaten. Not to mention about 250 million (+++ ?) deaths so far unaccounted and unrevenged.
I am uninterested to learn that we are better than they are, for of course we are, Johnathan! Or you and I would not be talking on here. It is axiomatic, for there is objective good and objective evil in the World. Perhaps all we need to do is become less graphic in our sharply-drawn (with charcoal stubs) descriptions of evil….no I shall not go there just now – I have been made to promise not to make any more inflammatory remarks. OK, I will leave it there.
You may find it uninteresting, but as you know full well, David, that being a libertarian has for a long time been about having to rebut various smears. How well I remember, early on, how anyone who failed to bow the knee to the post-war Welfare State etc was automatically assumed to be a baby eating fascist. And a lot of people who are starting to show an interest in us might be easily put off by smears, which is all the more reason why I think we do have to be careful in pronouncements (such as the Blair one). It may not be fair, but that’s the way it is.
One of the prime achievements of Chris Tame, Sean Gabb, Brian Micklethwait, and dare I argue, Tim Evans, has been to make it much harder for that charge to stick.
That is precisely why, in fact, it bothers me rather that in recent years, Sean Gabb has devoted such a high proportion of his energies on what I would characterise as nationalism issues. It tends to drown out a lot of the other stuff for which he deserves praise (like leading the fight against ID cards, etc). It also makes it a lot easier for enemies of libertarianism to repeat the old smears, however unfairly.
Sometimes the hardest thing is to tell comrades and friends – and I have counted LA folk as those – that things are going off the rails. If I did not care, I would not have bothered to spend 25 years of my life contributing to the LA both financially and in other ways.