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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Samizdata quote of the day Usually in politics, we say one guy is great and the other guy is bad and the they’ll say their guy is great and our guy is bad. But can’t we compromise and agree they’re all awful? Treating all politicians with contempt is the first steps towards a smaller government, because when you hate and distrust them all, you realize how imperative it is to give them as little power as possible.
– Frank J
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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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Q. Why are war-time leaders Churchill, De Gaul, and Roosevelt called great politicians?
A. Because they’re dead!
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Q. What do you call a great politician?
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A. Trick question- there’s no such creature!
Any more jokes, to keep politicians in their place?
It is a proper attitude to have towards people whos lifes objective is to tell others how to live.
If during wars politicians were the only ones to be killed, there’d be a lot less wars. Think of all the people who’d be saved if Hitler and his goons were assasinated?
Which was precisely the point made by Sir Thomas More in “Utopia“, Regional, way back in the 16th century.
While I understand, and sympathize with, the view expressed here, I will demur to a limited extent.
There is nothing inherently bad or evil about engaging in politics in a representative governmental system which respects the rights and liberties of its citizens.
There are, and have been, many decent and honorable people who have attempted to perform their role as an elected representative to the best of their ability, with the goal of fulfilling their civic duty to advance the people’s business and protect their legitimate interests.
Unfortunately, for far too long, politics has become a career path for those whose primary interest is the accumulation of power and wealth, not a limited period of public service for the benefit of one’s community.
It will be a long and arduous process to slowly win control of the many schoolboards, city councils, and county commissioner boards as stepping stones to long term control of state and federal legislatures, and the other various executive and judicial positions which are left after the reduction of the state at all levels is completed.
As I have said before, it took over a century of relentless effort and coalition building to accumulate the enormous power, and stifling bureaucratic apparatus, which constitutes the modern leviathon state.
The current oligarchy has so mismanaged and bankrupted our society that even the most wealthy and powerful nation state the world has ever known is now in a state of complete economic, moral, and social collapse.
We do not face the type of murderous totalitarian foe that the late Vclav Havel confronted, nor the type of amoral state corporatism being endured by the heroic citizens who have suffered imprisonment and death in China.
Those of us fortunate enough to live in the still moderately free anglosphere face a still difficult challenge, however, as we confront the legalistic, administrative regulatory state, overgrown with regulations and rules, strewn thick with lawsuits and endless permit processes, slowly strangling ourselves with advocacy groups and lobbyists run amuck within a state structure which now lays claim to jurisdiction over all aspects of life.
In fact, in a certain sense we have the upper hand in this current phase of the endless struggle to gain and maintain our individual rights and liberties because the statist/collectivist camp has revealed their fundamental flaw before they were able to acquire the dictatorial powers that has made their rule so dangerous and devastating in other societies.
By running the most successful economic system in history into bankruptcy, the elites have demonstrated much more clearly and convincingly than any argument on our part could ever have done that they are utterly incompetent to manage a modern national economy.
This is the sword they have forged and thrust into our hands—their own glaring lack of knowledge and managerial skill.
Nothing that they may claim, no good intentions, no grandiose philosophical schemes, no ideology, can cover up what is now brightly lit on the center stage of all the world’s daily news theater—they don’t know what they’re doing.
In order to compel the wastrels of the collapsing modern state to accept and acknowledge their responsibility, we must have any number of courageous, diligent, commmitted, and principled citizens who are willing to do the endless, dirty task of reforming, reducing, and re-legitimizing our political structures, and thereby restoring our economic and social viability.
As Napoleon once said of the crown of France, so we may say of the future of liberty, and our societies’ well-being—there it is laying in the gutter, where it has been cast aside by the collectivists and their enablers.
Pick it up. No one else but those committed to liberty has any right to it anyway, nor can anyone else achieve any success in building a free and prosperous community.
The future belongs to the free and independent mind, and those who use that powerful engine to create it are worthy of respect, even if they may have to endure the burden of public office on occasion.
I am quite happy to say that recent Republican Presidents (and Conservative Prime Ministers) have been terrible.
So I have done my bit – now may the left denounce Obama.