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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A friend of mine insists that the Cato Institute is nothing more than a sell-out, obsessed with media coverage at the expense of intellectual integrity. This view seems to have been shaped by the jealousy of a less media-effective think-tank. In Britain, the Libertarian Alliance has the ambition of being/becoming the world’s second best libertarian website after Cato.
Having been sent a copy of a recent publication: “Cato Supreme Court Review 2001-2002” I admit that I’m impressed with the quality of the content, the actual book itself, and the fact that it is possible to produce a commentary on the performance of the Supreme Court.
I have not read the Supreme Court Review from cover to cover yet. But leafing through I learnt about the practice of “fast-track plea bargaining” and the conundrum posed by obscenity laws on the one hand and the provisions of the Bill of Rights on the other. I discovered that 90 per cent of criminal cases don’t go to trial by jury in the federal courts because of the “fast-track” system and that British law on defining “child pornography” would be thrown out, probably with a 7-2 majority, if attempted in the USA.
The contrast with the United Kingdom is stunning. No British think-tank has the intellectual quality to produce such an academic work. None produces this level of production quality. And our absence of a constitution makes such a project redundant. The so-called “unwritten constitution” is precisely worth the paper it’s not written on.
My only suggestion for future editions would be that it would be handy to have a listing of all Supreme Court cases over the period, with an indication as to which cases were covered in the various chapters.
Otherwise, I welcome the appearance of this tome which deserves to become both a tool for the academic study of the US Constitution in practice, and an essential campaign guide to the wins and losses of individual freedom in America.
Brian asked if Japan was only pretending to do badly. He seemed to think that there were some grounds for doubting the news of Japanese economic stagnation.
Looking at the World Economic Freedom report I discovered the following interesting figures.
- Income Tax top rates as percentages:
(1st figure 1990), (2nd 1995), 3rd 2000.
Japan 65, 65, 50
USA 33, 42, 42
UK 40, 40, 40
Ireland 58, 48, 42
Sweden 72, 58, 51
OECD average 53, 50, 47
- Corporate Taxes (including regiuonal, state, local etc),
also top rates as percentages: 1990, 1995, 2000
Japan 42, 42, 42
USA 40, 40, 40
UK 30, 30, 30
Ireland 24, 20, 16
Sweden 28, 28, 28
OECD average 34, 33, 31
Note that Japan is consistently higher than the OECD average. Note also that Sweden’s business taxation always was low. The US corporate taxes may be close to Japan’s, but the US economy hasn’t needed tax cuts for the past ten years to stimulate growth.
My conclusion is that Japanese “stimulus packages” are clearly not addressing incentives to produce.
Finally, the overall ranking between 1990 and 2000 is highly revealing:
USA 3rd in 2000, 4th in 1990
UK 4th (2000), 6th (1990)
Ireland 7th (2000), 20th (1990)
Sweden 19th (2000), 26th (1990)
JAPAN 24th (2000), 7th (1990)
Before David Carr wonders how the heck a Labour government pushed the UK up 2 places: 1) independent Bank of England, 2) you should have seen what other governments were like…
A case example of (relative) economic freedom being a precondition for (relative) economic prosperity.
I was reporting the events in and around Parliament Square yesterday afternoon, for a French magazine. Having previously attended the 1998 Countryside March and the 2002 Liberty & Livelihood March, I was able to observe the differences in mood.
In 1998 the typical banner read “Please listen to us!”
In 2002 the banners read “The last peaceful protest…”
Yesterday was not a peaceful protest but an act of civil disobedience.
None of the people I interviewed believed that the government would or could deliver a deal. All criticised the leadership of the Countryside Alliance for as one Devonian middle-aged lady put it: “They are protecting their knighthoods.” Minutes later she was part of the first violent attempt to break into the House of Commons car park.
I took a careful look at the people, mostly men who took on the police. One looked like a soccer hooligan, baseball cap, beer gut and the drooling stupidity of English nationalism at its worst: the police didn’t even bother arresting him when he broke through the police cordon.
The others were in their late thirties or forties. They looked more like farm labourers than landowners. They also looked rather more interested in provoking a battle than dialogue. The campaign badge said “Bollocks to Blair”. No pretence at dialogue there.
In all the police acted with almost incredible restraint, police horses were shoved backwards by huntsmen who tried to unbuckle saddles and throw riders. Smoke bombs were thrown by Real C.A. activists, sometimes at police. The Real C.A. activists, who have promised a campaign of direct action against the ban on hunting, were handing out Real C.A. stickers but not wearing them themselves to avoid detection. Some of the demonstration leaders were giving instructions in Welsh to confuse the eavesdropping Special Branch.
There were eight arrests, but most of the violent offenders were allowed to rejoin the crowd. I overheard a reporter interviewing a campaigner and asking why they didn’t go through the normal channels: support the Tories, for instance. The reply indicated that for these protesters at least, they have to create their own opposition.
Shortly before I left I heard a police officer saying to a mother with two young children who were screaming “Blair Out!” and cheering a particularly vigourous charge against the mounted police:
“It’s one thing to be up against Swampy or those Greens, but this just doesn’t feel right!”
He looked as if he’d just realised that his parents could be attacking another part of the human shield of police. Unlike his Parisian police counterparts in 1943, he has the option of refusing to collaborate.
As I have previously, ‘poverty’ is a measure of envy and class hatred Here are some measures that could make poverty worse or better.
One might imagine that importing wealthy people into a country would help reduce poverty: Bill Gates turning up in the United Kingdom with £40,000,000 would increase the average wealth of British inhabitants. In fact this makes “poverty” worse according to poverty-campaigner logic.
Let us imagine a country with nine inhabitants: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h and i. If a, b, and c have incomes of 100 per year, d has 90, e and f have 50, h has 30 and i has 20, then total income is 540, average income is 60 and the poverty line is 30 if calculated as 50 per cent of average, or 36 if calculated as 60 per cent of average.
The next year Bill Gates arrives with an income of 500. He employs h and i for an extra 20 per year (more than they were getting before). The result is: Bill Gates 460, a, b and c 100 each, d has 90, e and f have 50, h now also has 50 and i has 40. So everyone is out of the poverty level of the year before.
But this is where relativism kicks in: the new poverty line is 52 or 57.2 (depending on the 50 or 60 percent definition). So Bill Gates has not only ‘failed’ to lift h and i out of poverty by giving them jobs that paid better, he has impoverished e and f, who were previously not poor, even though neither e nor f has lost any income.
This tells us the first lesson of tackling “poverty”: no wealthy immigrants must be allowed. In fact all inward investment is bad according to this reasoning. Now imagine that the 1,000 million poorest people in the world (average income 0.01) were to come and live in this country instead of Bill Gates. Also imagine that none of them become billionaires but remain objectively poor.
Total income becomes 10,000,540. Average income drops to 0.01000054 per year. So h with 30 and i with 20 are 3,000 and 2,000 times wealthier than the average, despite no increase in objective income. Also the billion paupers have incomes of 0.01 which is over 99.99 percent of the average, so none of them are “poor”, even though they can’t afford to buy a bread roll.
Note that if half of the billion paupers were to raise their income to the previous average (60), they would be “evil exploiters” of the poor, so would h and i, even if they were to lose 90 percent of their incomes (to 3 and 2 respectively). This means that immigrants who are below the poverty line must be kept there for the sake of “social justice”!
Therefore although all the billion immigrants will starve, they will not die in vain: they will have brought about social justice. A believer in immortal souls who suggested this policy, would be insane but sincere. The problem is that most socialists and social democrats are atheists…
In the British case executing all elderly people aged over 60 who live alone on less than average household incomes would statistically eliminate poverty: either they would be dead, or more likely they would choose to live in groups of two or three and therefore rise towards average household income levels. Executing all students would also have a similar effect. Slaughtering everyone who lives alone would be a guaranteed success in a “War on Want”.
This may appear insanely evil. Yet I have just described the policies of the Cambodian holocaust: Pol Pot really was ‘tackling poverty’.
…about people living in miserable material conditions. It is a measure of relative poverty, or a difference in material goods. This is obviously most useful for the promotion of envy and class hatred. It also allows the glossing over of the twin Marxist errors of the “pauperization of the proletariat” in advanced capitalist economies, and the notion that people have no identity outside their membership of an economically determined class.
It is handy for promoters of class hatred to use ‘poverty’ as an issue. First the relative measure is easy to falsify. It is notorious that in the UK, satellite television dishes appeared disproportionately (in the late 1980s early 1990s) among low-income families before spreading to higher income brackets. On the other hand the only people I’ve ever met who didn’t own television sets in the UK were both in the top 20 per cent of incomes.
What value does one put on television ownership? The price of the set? How does one measure the value of the service provided by broadcasting? What about foreign holidays? If a low-income family travels to Spain for the same relative price as their parents once went to Morecombe on the British coast, are they really no better off?
Taking the measure of a household 60 per cent below the average household I once discovered a cute fraud in the British Household Survey (I’m sorry I don’t recall the year but it was in the early 1990s). “Household” is not the same thing as a house full of people. The bottom fifteen per cent households in the UK in the early 1990s had an average of 1.1 people living in them. The top fifteen percent had over four people living in them. The age distribution was equally revealing. I forget the exact figures, but elderly people and students were the bulk of the bottom fifteen percent of the population. This of course fits with what we know of individual people’s incomes over a lifetime: low-income as a youth, rising income until retirement and a drop in income except where large capital savings have been made.
I calculated that the income per person of the top fifteen percent households was about five times that of the bottom fifteen percent per person households, after taxes and cash benefits were taken into account. Considering that students and elderly people aren’t generally earning salaries, or of they are, these would often be part-time or seasonal, British “poverty” isn’t all its cranked out to be by campaigners for class hatred.
This has intriguing consequences for ways of “tackling poverty”…
More on this subject tomorrow
TANSTAAFL Times is dead. In early 1996 I founded a libertarian newspaper called TANSTAAFL Times. The title was based on Robert Heinlein’s coined motto: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. To date the publication has made me a small profit (under $100). The original intention was to publish twice monthly and as material became available I would shift to a weekly format.
The first edition carried two cartoons I drew (badly) myself, a news report and an opinionated feature article. It sold for 50 pence and went like hot cakes at a Libertarian Alliance conference. I had little trouble finding subscribers, my peak being 97 and with a peak print run of 250. I doubled the price without any problems.
Despite these low circulation figures and the fact that I paid contributors, I never made a loss. I managed to sell advertising space which alone covered all my costs except postage.
So why did only 24 editions appear in six years? After all if Samizdata offered to pay $50 for a 500 word article or a cartoon, I’m sure our editors would be at risk of being crushed in the stampede of eager wannabe contributors.
I took a lot of criticism, some of it to my face, for the failure to produce regular editions of TANSTAAFL Times. True, 24 editions is six times more than the average periodical achieves in a lifetime (anything more than five editions is a sort of success). The critics didn’t help, because they failed to understand the nature of editing a periodical.
I calculated that there were 74 distinct tasks involved in producing TANSTAAFL Times properly. As owner, editor, chief columnist, sole reporter, designer and subscriptions administrator (I’m forgetting some of my job description) I estimated that the job could not properly be done in less than eight days a month. But this assumed that I had material to publish. The reason that I offered $50 per article was twofold. First I wanted to be able to refuse rubbish. Second I wanted to attract lots of libertarians with something to say.
In six years I received exactly three unsolicited articles one of which was 10,000 words long. One was published. I had one offer of cartoons, but no samples. For two years every week I begged a cartoonist (who complained that he was broke) to let me have a look at the rejected material he offered to Private Eye which they found too “politically incorrect”. I offered £20, £30, once going as high as £150. Nada. In total I managed to scrape fewer than twenty articles out of different authors, most of which refused payment. I note that Samizdata gets more contributions than that every single week.
I had intended to produce a glorious 25th edition of TANSTAAFL Times, I’ve written four articles for it. But the fact that I knew that I wouldn’t get any authors without a fight was simply a battle not worth fighting.
So I’ve decided to write this blog and acknowledge that Samizdata.net is achieving what I had hoped for, and that I’m better off, at least for the time being, as a regular contributor to this blog, than ruling my own dilapidated kingdom.
I hope in due course to put an on-line archive of the 24 editions of TANSTAAFL Times. In the meantime they can be accessed through the British Library. I like to think that TANSTAAFL Times was ahead of its time: offering a libertarian slant on current affairs. I will miss it.
Samizdata Illuminatus occasionally has a turn of phrase that I can only envy:
“This bespeaks a political elite on the Continent of Europe that is increasingly aloof and out of touch with ordinary citizens. On one level, this is encouraging, because such arrogance usually comes before a fall from grace. However, it also suggests that if the situation is not tackled soon, the anger boiling up in Germany and elsewhere could turn ugly.”
I don’t know about Germany but I can report that to some extent the problem of an out of touch elite may be addressed in France. Unlike anywhere else in Western Europe the French presidential election in France this year produced a second round run-off between one right-wing sleazeball and a beyond the pale authoritarian populist. The Socialist Party candidate got less than one in five votes on such a low turnout that the abstention rate alone spoke of “a crisis for democracy”.
In Britain we’ve become so accustomed to hearing hyped up scaremongering every time a racialist candidate gets more than 500 votes in Blackburn, that we don’t realise that the scared commentators in France were, well… really scared.
Unlike Britain, most of Europe contains large numbers of people who actually know what it’s like to have soldiers kick down the door of their home, or a neighbour’s. → Continue reading: “Oui, premier ministre!”
I don’t normally respond publicly to comments, but I will make an exception. Peter Cutbertson has a blog called Conservative Commentary, it is certainly better than the Conservative Party’s website. He thinks that this conclusion I made makes me insane:
“The problem for British libertarians is that they aren’t really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don’t think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy.”
In the exchange which follows he appears to believe that “without law or government” society cannot function, and those who disagree with him are “insane” or follow “an incoherent, warped political philosophy”.
I am very tempted to ask our Mr Cuthbertson to define Conservative political philosophy, in plain coherent terms, with the agreement of those current and former leaders of the Conservative Party who are still alive: Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and Duncan Smith. But I don’t hate the man, so I won’t.
However, it amazes me that Mr Cuthbertson cannot see that law doesn’t necessarily derive from government. For a start, any conservative who believes in God ought to consider the possibility that there is a higher authority than the State. Assuming atheism (which isn’t very conservative, but hey, who’s being coherent?), I should have hoped that a conservative might believe in the organic, spontaneous order of common law. Assuming God doesn’t exist, and the common law is a fiction (sounds more like a French Jacobin!), what has Mr Cuthbertson done with civil society? Is it true that members of the Carlton Club only behave because of the fear of being arrested by the police? Does the members’ code of conduct depend on the State for its existence and enforcement? Is there an Act of Parliament for table manners?
If the cream of the Conservative movement believe that regulation of human behaviour is only possible by State intervention, then it is no wonder the Conservative Parliamentary Party is an unelectable shambles comprised largely of cretins, petty crooks, pompous buffoons and in-bred yahoos. I will take no lessons in morality or “coherent political philosophy” from a Tory.
The main differences between a British libertarian gathering and an American one is the attitude towards foreign affairs and their own governments. During the Cold War many American libertarians, Murray Rothbard especially, denounced the US federal government’s attempts to “encircle” Communism, build alliances, station troops in Europe etc.
Most British libertarians, being somewhat closer to the Iron Curtain, and feeling that the English Channel might not be a huge obstacle to the Asiatic hordes of the Red Army, were rather happier with the presence of large, well equipped armies. We also took a more relaxed view of state violations of individual rights when the persons concerned were Communists, pro-Soviet peace protesters or “useful idiots” who acted spontaneously in a manner which would have delighted Stalin, Hitler or Napoleon.
We tended to admire the antics of the security services as they “bugged and burgled their way across London”. Some of us cheered when police officers on horseback smashed their way through ranks of protesting miners in 1984. I know no one in British libertarian circles who wondered if it might not be our turn some day, although Sean Gabb came closest.
The gloom among British libertarians today is partly the result of the realisation that now the apparatus of state oppression is randomly destroying people’s lives like in the final chapters of “Atlas Shrugged”.
But there is something particularly awful about the gloom engulfing British libertarians. No one born in the mainland of the United Kingdom and alive today has ever seen a group of police officers march up a residential street, knocking at selected doors and leading families away to some awful fate. Yet in every other member state of the European Union except Finland and Sweden, the are people who remember watching their neighbours being taken away. In the case of recent refugees from the former Yugoslavia, such memories may be very recent indeed.
The problem for British libertarians is that they aren’t really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don’t think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy.
Next Sunday I expect to be headed with a crowd of French libertarians, from the place de la Bastille towards the headquarters of the French finance ministry at Bercy in the eastern districts of Paris.
Interest in the event seems to be building up, with emails buzzing around asking for a lift from places like Pau (almost in Spain), or has anyone got a couple of flag poles? The Gadsden and the Culpepper flag should be flying.
Meanwhile, in London, not a sausage.
There is a tendency among Libertarians to worry obsessively about every infringement by the state, to link up instances of state oppression, and to deduce from this either that there is a vast campaign to destroy freedom, or that we’re powerless to combat the tide of enslavement. This makes us seem obsessive, paranoid and miserable company, except to others of a similar emotional condition.
One of the problems is that it is literally possible for a single libertarian activist to discover every single instance of arbitrary power by state officials on a given day. The posting by Brian on some local bureaucratic monster in the U.S. state of Illinois is a case in point.
Most Europeans would be unable to pick out the state of Illinois on a map (so much for the vaunted European superiority at geography). Yet thanks to Brian’s posting, any English-speaking European looking for examples of state oppression could discover that – somewhere in Illinois – there is an instance of heavy-handedness happening now.
Consider what our knowledge in Europe would be of the Waco massacre if it had taken place before outside television broadcasts. Instead of assuming that everything’s worse because our databases are overflowing with complaints, we should note that we have the tools to expose state oppression almost anywhere on this planet. Think of Rodney King. Did police officers never beat black men before hand-held video cameras existed?
Sunday 1st December starting 2:30pm from the place de la Bastille, a hundred French Libertarians intend to march on the Ministry of Finance at the quai de Bercy (about 2kms). I intend to join them and will be making a collection for the costs of the demo (hand-bills, megaphone, banners, hire-cars, etc.).
Last year 60 were expected and over 200 sympathisers turned up, after the Paris daily “Le Figaro” had carried a mention of the march on the front page the day before. The event is part of the world-wide walk for capitalism. I’m unaware of any plans for a march in London on that day, perhaps organisers could post details to Samizdata.
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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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