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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 To paraphrase Hayek, then, the curious task of the liberty movement is to persuade citizens that our opponents are the idealistic ones, because they believe in unicorns. They understand very little about the State that they imagine they can design.
– Michael Munger
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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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Quite so.
The collectivists want the state to do nice things – things it can not do (even if controlled by the nicest and best people in the world).
They might as well put their faith in invisible fairy castles held up by Moonbeams.
The State that is big enough to give you everything you need is powerful enough to take everything away from you.
A curious task indeed! Has any task proven more fruitless? A rather more productive task for the liberty movement is to understand why it is that democracy and liberty are inherently incompatible.
By any objective measure the liberty movement has failed to permanently shrink the size of any major Western government for decades (if not longer!)
In slightly slowing the relentless expansion of government, the liberty movement serves a valuable function by rendering the general expansion of government appear rather less consistent than it really is over the long-term (in any democratic society).
As a former (and long-time!) libertarian, this conceited writer can assure the reader that arguing for liberty is to put the cart before the horse. The horse is a long story – but figuring out how it came to be that Justine Tunney and Peter Thiel have basically come to agree on politics is a solid place to start.
But they don’t believe in unicorns, they believe in selling unicorns to the gullible and pocketing the cash.
I (a secular Jew, so be unafraid of the religious lingo below) am feeling rather generous, so with the indulgence of our beneficent and all-powerful host, I relay a central insight of Joseph de Maistre (and Reaction):
Well speaking of nice things. I didn’t know where else to put this. Lots of links and quotes:
http://classicalvalues.com/2014/08/republican-big-money-donor-tortured-children-for-profit/
The fantasy is that working together we can achieve more, the reality is that large groups of people can f*ck things up spectacularly when an idiot gets in charge, which they inevitably will. History has shown this reality to be the case over and over again but still people insist on the same, once the page turns and the piles of corpses is out of view. Didn’t Einstein say “insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results”.
What libertarianism has to argue with is the “what if” doubters, yet the alternative is not a “what if”, we know it will end in tears, so an unknown is actually a preferable option. The goal of the libertarian is to show that it can be done another way – don’t be insane.
M Simon, thanks for the link. I find that that piece raises some real red flags for me, and I’ve left a not-too-short comment at Classical Values, if anybody cares.