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]
|
Brian remarks that no one posts him advice about what to say about Third World poverty, but that he was relatively flooded with info about the US soccer team. This is a good sign. Worrying about the US soccer team is a relatively harmless past-time. (Revelling in their defeat of Mexico might be dangerous in some places however). The libertarian answer to what radio listeners should do about the Third World is basically “do nothing”. The three main obstacles to enrichment of people in the Third World fifteen years ago were:
1) the skirmishing of the Cold War (which I think was justified by anti-Soviet forces)
2) the absence of the rule of law
3) trade barriers and a belief that socialism was better than capitalism for developing economies
The first is redundant.
The second can only come about by internal pressures or by the imposition of direct colonial rule from the only country whose constitution I would trust: Switzerland. Realistically this means, the Africans are going to have to sort it out for themselves.
The third is very simple. We oppose Bush’s trade tarriffs. We want the European Union Common Agricultural Policy abolished immediately. We should also try to stop the IMF and the World Bank from financing welfare state programmes in countries that can’t afford them (and never will afford them, if they try to leap from pre-industrial to welfare-underclass in one go).
BRING ON BRAZIL!!!!!!!!!
The latest figures for the French parliamentary elections give the Socialists and their allies 155 seats out of 577 (the same proportion as the British Conservatives in 1997: a massacre). Martine Aubry, the creator of the 35 hour week is out, so is the Communist party leader Robert Hue, and one of the leading Greens (Dominique Voynet).
To put the Aubry defeat in context, only Chirac himself, or one of the four blood contamination killers (Laurent Fabius) would be higher up my list of French politicos to revel in their misery.
Meanwhile Alain Madelin the “libéral-libertaire” slipped in by 725 votes (50.6% to 49.4%). One right wing candidate in Paris got 100% of the vote (his run-off opponent, a supporter of Chirac, pulled out and endorsed him). The score in Paris (which has a Socialist mayor) was right/centre-right 9 seats, Socialists 10, Greens 2.
The national abstention rate also hit a record with over 38%, a big jump from 32% in 1993 (the previous record for this sort of election). We haven’t quite been here before. The three tiers of central government (presidency, senate, house of representatives) are all in president Chirac’s hands. He also controls the constitutional court (as much as any president can) and the state media commission (yes I know it should be scrapped). The question is, what will that Byers-brain Chirac do with it.
Unlike a US president he could theoretically fire nukes, declare war, arrange ‘car accidents’ for terrorist sympathisers, appoint his wife the minister for shopping and retail therapy, and screw interns – all by himself – without exceeding his powers. Remember though that the last time (in the mid-1990s) he had the opportunity to purge the state media of leftist political appointees he threatened them with a pay rise. His first spell as prime minister also broke all records for budget deficit, inflation, trade deficit, social security deficit, unemployment growth and the introduction of capital gains tax. His government also gave asylum to Ayatollah Khomeni (probably not personally his fault). These ‘achievements’ were barely matched in the early 1980s by a socialist government which included four Stalinist Communist Party ministers.
Chirac’s latest political philosophy appears to be inspired by Charles Murray’s views of state welfare, the welfare underclass, prison, and a massive tax cut. Unfortunately, how this will translate next week, let alone next month, is open to speculation.
As a victory over Socialism, this is a great night. Whether the ratchet effect will actually be reversed… Not for the first time, I hope Alain Madelin knows what he’s doing.
Brian Micklethwait asserts that Americans ought to be anti-EU then finds some Americans who are anti-America (you can see where ‘Un-American’ came from).
I’ve got news for you. Plenty of Europhiles love the institution of the USA. They wish to copy bits of it. In fact there is a love affair between the liberal vision of the US (‘liberal’ as in anti-gun, federal welfare programme, political correctness agenda) and the socialist vision of the EU (anti-gun, euro-welfare state and political correctness): hence Blair’s popularity in Washington when Clinton was in charge.
‘The EU’ doesn’t hate America anymore than the board of directors of Manchester United Football Club hates Real Madrid. The people who are trying to complete the creation of a European Unionist state see the USA as a competitor, a rival, a model and a partner, often all at the same time. The relationship is love-hate between the EU builders and the edifice that is the US federal government.
What does ‘anti’ mean? I don’t think that Schadenfreude over the short-comings of the US in trying to crack Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (nasty, spiteful and short-sighted as it might be) is the same thing as wishing Euro-fanatics had flown passenger jets into the World Trade Center. The most paranoid EUnionist probably doesn’t expect a gang of Montana militiamen to fly an Airbus into the Europol HQ, though I’ve heard some wonderfully wacky conspiracy theories about the US programme to destroy Western (European) civilisation. Do the Yanks really rig the EU Common Agricultural Policy to suit mid-west farmers? Did the Yanks really push Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1990 in order to have an excuse for stopping the French armaments industry from selling kit to Iraq? Did the Yanks really bomb Serbia as part of a Zionist plot to create an Islamist state in the Balkans? They’d love the US anti-cold war stuff put out by isolationist Libertarians if they knew about it. I think the European parliament is the most vocal opponent of the Echelon mass surveillance project around (for a mixture of good and bad reasons).
In France I’ve heard several conservatives claim that the EU is a Yankee plot. I’ve also been assured by a social-democrat politician that the British opt-out from Maastricht and Tony Blair are CIA operations, but that the US will follow the EU and go completely metric by the end of 2002, and the UK adopt the €uro by 2004. He was very good at forecasting the weather in the mountains so I’m not completely confident that he’s wrong on all counts. You don’t have to be a Europhile American to prefer a European Union (as long as it can hold together), to a bigger version of the break-up of Yugoslavia, where the US ends up taking sides and making enemies.
I suspect that a European Unionist state would break-up, possibly in a major war. For this reason I am skeptical about the outcomes proposed by the Euro-unionists. The reason however that I am not affiliated to any Euro-sceptic organisations is that I see no automatic salvation in nation states. Cuba is a nation state. Unification in a NAFTA super-state (with USA, Mexico and Canada) wouldn’t obviously be worse for the Cuban population than independence under Castro and his successors. Germany was a real nation state in 1939: it would take some doing for the EU to be worse. The UK did badly enough as a nation state between 1945 and 1973, not just in the economic sphere.
A question I’m pondering is whether a global market creates a market for a “government standard” with a single currency, single police force, one body of contract law, single crime database, single language, etc. There is a problem of “no exit” from such a state without space travel. There is also the problem of lack of innovation in a monopoly. Absence of tax and regulation competition is another issue. My question is whether ‘government’ is a natural monopoly. If true, this suggests a pragmatic libertarian objection to economic globalisation. As I’m opposed to ‘anti-trust’ law and ‘perfect competition models’ which ‘justify’ state regulation of businesses, this makes my opposition to a world government weak, if this order emerges peacefully, consensually, and with a generally economic liberal agenda (i.e. by a market process).
Only the anarcho-capitalist option of voluntary exchange and contract seems capable of offering a peaceful alternative to a World State. I’m left with the choice of opposing all government, and making the best of the largest chunks of state possible (to reduce the number of border disputes).
‘Judge Ling‘ from Ally McBeal is no more ridiculous than her more pompous colleagues, but both are the products of the common law. One of the sillier libertarian/conservative claims is that ‘the common law’ will automatically sort things out. The heck it will!
The Devil’s Dictionary defines the Common Law as ‘the whim of judges’. As most judges are either social justice creeps or doddering fools it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the common law ‘discovered’ or ‘interpreted’ by such people is as much a threat to freedom than the drafted statutes are. Except that at least one can look up the statutes, whereas only lawyers have the time and means to ‘interpret’ precedent.
Scrapping written legislation in favour of common law solutions is only a good idea for professional lawyers and full-time litigants: the sort of people who walk on cracked pavements hoping to trip up, chip a bone and sue.
Libertarians who want ‘the common law’ and decry ‘the litigation culture’ are like vegetarians asking for steak tartare.
Is this “Paul Foot” who condemns “corporate greed” and “boardroom fraud” the very same “Paul Foot” who – as a lap-dog of the late Mr Robert Maxwell M.C. at the Mirror Group – took money from a crook who was robbing his colleagues’ pension fund, ignored the accumulated evidence of investigations into his masters frauds, and to my knowledge has never shown the slightest remorse for covering up – by his silence – the biggest corporate crime in British history?
I trust that I am completely mistaken, otherwise I could never look at Private Eye or the Guardian again without worrying about the editorial integrity of these fearless organs.
It’s been another seriously bad week for the French left. The consequences of telling French voters to “vote for the crook not the fascist” (“Votez pour l’escroc pas le facho!”) have come back to haunt them. After all, if the left reckon Chirac’s ok to vote for in a presidential election, why isn’t his coalition ok to vote for the legislative elections?
Whoops! The result is that a massive abstention rate (by French standards) of leftists unable to bring themselves to support quasi-market reforms by the socialist party, and a rout by the mainstream right. The new government has stolen just enough of the ‘far-right’ agenda to be able to plausibly claim that voter concerns have been taken on board: the government is apparently promising a socking cut in taxes and to tackle crime with something more substantial than platitudes.
French libertarians will be uncomfortable with the fact that Alain Madelin is backing the government which contains enough crooks and wets to bring down a British Conservative government many times over. Bill Clinton wouldn’t last a year with this bunch. Madelin isn’t as capable a political manipulator (and that isn’t an entirely bad thing).
However, looking at such Socialist ‘intellectual giants’ as Jacques Delors’ daughter Martine Aubry (the ‘mind’ behind the 35 hour week), Elizabeth Guignou and convicted haemophiliac-killer Laurent Fabius, the new French government may prove impotent, corrupt and paralysed by factional strife over reforming the French welfare state, but they won’t actually try to make things worse as the Socialist party would. I still think president Chirac makes Stephen Byers, John Major and Neil Hamilton put together look good, but a government with Aubry in it is even worse.
On a ‘least bad option available’ there is a case for kicking the Socialists out. It seems a large portion of the French electorate agrees.
I would like to say “Well Done” to all the libertarian comrades who attended the Liberty conference at the week-end. I’m sure it was rather tedious, frustrating and confirmed all the usual complaints we have against the leftist so-called defenders of liberty. However the first virtue of attending such events is that it clears up in their minds whether we’re in only favour of the right of our corporate sponsors to screw the poor, or in favour of freedom for white people, or whether we’re serious about liberty.
No doubt there are some leftists who come away from an encounter with the Libertarian Alliance with the private realization that actually, they hate freedom if freedom means other people being allowed to choose capitalism as their mode of dealing with the universe. As someone who values truth above delusion I suppose the Libertarian Alliance performs a valuable educational function when it allows fascists to discover their inner selves and come out of the closet.
The value of such an exercise is that it makes the claim that libertarians are closet nazis unsustainable. Being accused of being naive utopians is rather an improvement on being falsely associated with every horror of the 20th century.
One of the elements of Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” I enjoyed was the casual references to anarcho-capitalist mechanisms for dealing with services that are currently provided by the state. In answer to a question about social security, the narrator said that a bookmaker will agree odds and take a stake for any eventualities covered by insurance schemes.
Certainly the evolution of spread betting and online betting has brought such a vision closer to reality. What struck me about the recent soccer match involving two beef-eating nations was the speed with which the price mechanism adjusted: England went from a 16 to 1 chance to win the FIFA World Cup to 7 to 1 in the space of a couple of hours. Meanwhile, Argentina went from 3 to 1 favourites to 8 to 1. One could claim that this shift is merely a symptom of nationalist delusion by the English.
Planning freaks would say that if the government set the odds they wouldn’t shift, because they would be based on a rational assessment of the various teams merits. I beg to differ.
First, it’s a lot more fun for the outcomes to be unexpected. Visiting market-places is generally more entertaining than visiting a planning office.
Second, the planners can’t put every factor into their equations (as the state price fixers in Argentina have recently discovered, to the distress of millions).
Third, bookmakers aren’t sentimental or swayed by public opinion, only committed cash. If Her Majesty the Queen were to stake £10 million on a Commonwealth team to win the World Cup, it would shift the price the same as if one million punters did the same with £10 each. The same isn’t true of such political decisions as working if, when, and at what rate at which the pound should join the Euro. The planners will decide with other people’s money, trusting to public opinion (or lack of it), and hoping to freeze the price mechanism if not to ignore it altogether.
So here’s my tip. 1) Ignore the opinion polls, check the bookies for the results of the next elections, dates of Euro referendum, future market prices. 2) Don’t stake too much on a single event.
Antoine Clarke
Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don’t have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that…
I’m a fan of Charles Murray’s writings on the “underclass” which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian’s neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.
Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily “cared for” places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to “help” immigrant communities.
As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven’t been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they’re fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they’re mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.
When there’s a riot in a town “by Moslems” it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew “finds”), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.
I’m guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of “Rebel Without A Cause”, except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?
None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren’t Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).
The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to “blow it all away” and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can’t remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.
The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don’t understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won’t be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.
The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don’t believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.
So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.
The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister’s wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who’s receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister’s children won’t have the autism jab.
Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren’t working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.
The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a “back street” media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that’s the most unlikely argument I’ve ever put forward for banning abortions.
According to the BBC website, 11,990 people have voted on whether Roy Keane, the captain of the Republic of Ireland team at the soccer world cup in Japan (who can’t play England unless both sides win or lose in the semi-finals) should have been dropped by his manager or not.
Last week about 3,000 voted on whether Britain is ready to join the euro and 55 per cent said yes. If England are knocked out playing badly, by a EU country, I predict a swing to the euro. If England win, then Mr Blair can bamboozle us in during the celebrations (he’ll have about three years if the last time is anything to go by). Go the Eurosceptic should hope for dignified defeat at the hands of Brazil in the semi-final.
I don’t like “Yes you did” “No I didn’t” conversations in newsgroups so I’m wary of doing so here. Brian refers to the horrors faced by mixed-married couples in Yugoslavia. I think we’ll find that these are precisely the people who didn’t start looking for an ethnic or religious war with their neighbours. Oscar Wilde would no doubt have suggested that matrimonial strife was amply sufficient. Alexander the Great tried to solve racial problems by ordering his officers to marry Persians. Napoleon suggested that if the French all married blacks then the issue would be ended once and for all. Both were poisoned for their pains. Next time someone compares these tyrants to Hitler I’ll dig out the reference.
As for my awkward posts: suck eggs Brian! and let’s look forward to Zinedine Zidane (a Moslem who’s idea of terror is firing footballs into a goal full of terrified innocent defenders) versus Nicky Butt in the second round, assuming Cameroon don’t cripple half the England team in the ‘friendly’.
|
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.
|
