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… er… 2010 When I saw this today:
After a decade in the making, cost over-runs to the tune of billions of euros, and delays of more than three years, the next generation of European military transport aircraft is finally poised for entry into service.
I was reminded of this from back in 2010:
New RAF transport plane is ‘Euro-wanking makework project’
Quite.
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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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A few years back, the Royal Australian Airforce decided it needed a heavier transport aircraft than its existing fleet of the C130J Hercules. The C-17 was the obvious choice, and the decision was made to order some. Boeing was very keen to receive the orders, because they want to keep the production line open as long as possible in the hope of receiving further orders from elsewhere. Therefore, they were cheap. The USAF had a certain number on order, but had plenty in service already and didn’t mind if their future deliveries slipped a month or two. Therefore, a number of aircraft halfway through production were sold to the RAAF rather than the USAF as had been intended , with more being built for the USAF later. As a consequence, the RAAF received the first aircraft something like nine months after it was decided the C-17 was needed, and paid exactly what they intended to when they ordered them. Being without the Eurowanking can certainly make things easier.
I remember many discussions over the years with members of the anti-military crowd, who only seem upset when it’s a US or allied military that does something, in which situations like this are invariably brought up to demonstrate the wastefulness and foolishness of the military.
What always fascinated me, and still does, is the complete inability, or unwillingness, of these same people to understand that these very same budget busting bits of lunacy take place all across the board in statist programs, and that their favorite entitlement program has just as many $6000 toilet seats as the Pentagon, and more.
I was just reading an article about the job situation in California regarding the multi-billion dollar rail line they are determined to build, and how it calls for special set-asides for any minority or protected group, including the homeless, the mentally ill, and those convicted of a crime, among the usual racial and other classes.
But if you presented the case of the military plane cited here, and then asked for their comment on the rail deal, the committed collectivist would find some bizarre way to partition their brains to believe that the plane’s wastefullness would never be replicated or even exceeded by the train project.
I remember Rand writing about the ability of statists to achieve a “blank-out” when confronted with uncomfortable ideas or facts, and this is one of the areas in which it can be seen to operate with a vengeance.
vertyretired:
Maybe there is a logic to it. If you support disarmament and have a dogmatic belief in Keynesianism and the broken window fallacy, don’t you logically up not caring about waste so long as some butter is produced, but also finding waste a very convenient argument when guns are produced? It might be that simple.