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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The EU is a Seventies solution to a Fifties problem
– Nigel Farage
“The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematic violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.”
– Randy Barnett.
Long time readers have no doubt wondered why I have become a scarce commodity on the pages of Samizdata; such readers also are aware of my long term connection with things spatial and free market.
For many years I have made some portion of my mostly meagre living in the Commercial Space arena. Staying in the game has been a costly proposition in terms of what I might have earned by simply forgetting the dream and just going for the gold. Those on the left seem to think that is what Libertarians do; but they are wrong. We are not about maximizing our wealth; we are about maximizing our liberty and doing what we want to do to the extent we can manage with our own resources. In my case, lacking much in the way of resource to begin with, that has meant surviving day to day on whatever short term contracts I could manage while I worked by myself or with others to gain a foothold in the then tiny NewSpace economy. I always thought it would be soon, really soon now… but this world for which I was born for took far longer than I had ever imagined to come to pass.
But it is finally happening and that is why there has been so little heard from me. I am now working under contract for XCOR, a number of whose members are long time Samzidata readers, out at the Mojave Spaceport in California. The future looks very bright for XCOR and many others in this industry. The big milestones are starting to get ticked off. SpaceX has had a stunning launch record and flew its Dragon to-be-manned reusable capsule in ProxOps [Proximity Operations] with the space station; Armadillo will probably bust the Von Karman line this year.
SpaceX is bending metal on the Falcon Heavy which will launch next year and will have the biggest lift capacity in the world. Of all the launchers that ever existed, only the Saturn V moon rocket was bigger. I suspect SpaceX will surpass even that before this decade is out. Bigelow has launch contracts in place and customers for his inflatable habitats that should be up around the mid-decade and will have a significant fraction of the capabilities and volume of the government owned space station. By the end of the decade or earlier in the next he will almost certainly have surpassed them.
By the end of this year or early next year the XCOR Lynx suborbital space plane will see air under its wings. As to when it will see vacuum under its tail, I could not tell you even if I knew for sure. It will happen when it happens and it will not be all that far in the future.
At first blush, Mojave is a speck in a vast desert, an old Western town that grew up into something not far removed from what you saw in old 1950’s SciFi movies. It is so much so I would not be at all surprised to find that the folks from 2 hours drive West in Hollywood did some of those movies here. At night when I drop into the local gas station, there is usually a Sheriff and several troopers hanging out talking with the woman who runs the store: just like it was in those old films.
No gunfighters, but it looks the part.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The current day town has three main industries. Wind farms and the railyards. If you are a train buff you would love the view from my motel as mile long freights go by just about every hour of the day.
→ Continue reading: On the scarcity of one Dale Amon and rumours regarding his whereabouts
This inscription is carved onto the Memorial to those who died serving in Bomber Command during World War II.
The memorial was unveiled by the Queen just under a week ago, on June 28th. It is at Hyde Park Corner, in London, at the western end of Green Park. I photographed it this afternoon.
I live close to one of the great old cities of Britain, Newcastle upon Tyne. In two centuries it has been transformed from a hive of enterprise and local pride, based on locally generated and controlled capital and local mutual institutions of community, into the satrapy of an all-powerful state, its industries controlled from London or abroad (thanks to the collectivization of people’s savings through tax relief for pension funds), and its government an impersonal series of agencies staffed by rotating officials from elsewhere whose main job is to secure grants from London. Such local democracy as remains is itself based entirely on power, not trust. In two centuries the great traditions of trust, mutuality and reciprocity on which such cities were based have been all but destroyed – by governments of both stripes. They took centuries to build. The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, in whose magnificent library I researched some of this book, is but a reminder of the days when the great inventors and thinkers of the region, almost all of them self-made men, were its ambitious luminaries. The city is now notorious for shattered, impersonal neighbourhoods where violence and robbery are so commonplace that enterprise is impossible. Materially, everybody in the city is better off than a century ago, but that is the result of new technology, not government. Socially, the deterioration is marked. Hobbes lives, and I blame too much government, not too little.
– A paragraph near the end (pp. 264-5) of The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. Time was when the best popularisers of science were left wingers, and they bolted left wing conclusions onto the end of their popularisations. Ridley does a similar thing there, but in the service of capitalism, progress and freedom.
Ridley is a terrific writer, and there are dozens of quotes scattered through this book which I could have chosen for the SQotD treatment.
“In order to punish Barclays further, they should have to start life again as a third division Scottish football club.”
Mark Littlewood, boss of the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a private communication via Facebook. It is so good that I don’t think he’ll mind me quoting him here.
He is talking about the resignation, announced today, of Bob Diamond as CEO of Barclays. That bank has been fined a total of £290 million by US and UK authorities for manipulating the inter-bank interest rates known as LIBOR. Criminal prosecutions are high possible and the net could widen very far indeed.
Barclays is one of those UK banks – HSBC being the other big high street one – that did not receive, nor ask for, bailouts by the UK taxpayer. However, that bank, like all the rest, did benefit from the privilege of being able to get access to cheap Bank of England funding; and it also benefited from state-backed guarantees. The point cannot be made too often: we don’t have a proper capitalist banking system but at best a hybrid. But it also needs to be recognised that even in a world of total laissez faire and no funny fiat money, there might still be market conventions for setting a benchmark reference rate for interest rates between banks, just as there is a daily “fix” for the gold price in the London spot gold market. Such market benchmarks arise, like a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order, because they are useful for other economic actors in pricing products of their own.
However, when a bank or other institution fiddles the prices submitted for these benchmarks, it erodes confidence in the system and the reputation of the miscreant will be badly damaged. In a crude sort of way, what has happened is a good sign that organisations which screw up suffer.
Update: Guido Fawkes weighs in, and points out that the manipulation of interest rates has also been government policy for years.
 London, England. (Photographed from a rooftop in Peckham) . 
Chernobyl, Ukraine. (Photographed from a rooftop in Pripyat).
North Wales Police have issued a (probably illegal) “dispersal order” banning unaccompanied teenagers from Bangor in the evenings. They say it is not a blanket ban. The words of the order say it is.
Ellie May O’Hagan opposes it because it makes teenagers feel bad, and because it would have made her feel bad when she was a teenager:
For the 13-year-old me, a curfew would have meant more isolation, more casting adrift, a stronger sense that the town in which I lived didn’t really care about my place in it. I might have felt frustrated that a lack of youth services forced me on to the street, and then that my presence there automatically made me deviant. Then I might have decided not to care about a city that didn’t care about me.
Keith Towler, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales opposes it because it makes people have bad feelings towards teenagers:
“It demonises under 16s, isolates them from their communities, alienates them from police and spreads the misconception all young people are troublemakers.”
There is talk of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission opposing it because it is discrimination. At least they won’t have far to toddle. The EHRC has an office in Bangor.
I am glad all these worthies and unworthies oppose the curfew. It needs opposing. But it saddens me that nobody opposes it on the grounds of how dare they. How dare they stop people who have committed no crime from walking or standing in the public street? In the case of a shopping centre or a nightclub I vehemently support the right of the proprietors to exclude whomsoever they wish. I also support, if more cautiously, the right of small areas to set local rules and covenants as to whether alcohol is permitted, rules about noise and similar constraints. But North Wales Police have exactly as much a right to expel teenagers from a public space as North Wales teenagers have a right to expel the police.
There is a new law in France that every car must carry a breathalyser so that drivers can test themselves and see if they are fit to drive.
Call me a cynic if you like but I strongly suspect that certain law makers may well have significant pecuniary interests in…
… the country’s two companies that make these breathalyser sets 
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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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