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.
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R K Jones eschews the crudity of opening a can of whoop ass and prefers to see rebellion served up in shot glasses
Those obsessed with fine whiskeys are perhaps already familiar with Malt Advocate magazine. Those with functioning livers may think of it as the Guns & Ammo for the discerning tippler. Each issue contains detailed looks at the international trade in liquor, almost always with an anti-regulatory bent. People expect to see reasoned support for free trade in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, or (sometimes) The Economist, but a drinks trade magazine? One doesn’t expect to buy a glossy, high-end specialty liquor magazine for the political commentary, but the current quarter’s issue (sadly, only teasers are available on-line) is worth a look. Any forum where a prominent American distiller opens his portion of a panel discussion (concerning regulation and taxation of the industry) with the words…
We need another Whiskey Rebellion
…is worthy of support.
Given the international, and free trading character of the liquor industry, I suppose the only real surprise should be that the paper mache puppet head brigade hasn’t yet begun picketing distilleries. Does the tone of the magazine mean anything about a change in attitude in the world? Or am I deceiving myself? I don’t know, but writers of a libertarian bent going back as far as Ayn Rand (and further) have been criticizing businessmen for a lack of ideology. Thus it is nice to see an industry niche publication that ‘gets it’.
Self-deception may be central to the human condition, and not exclusively confined to libertarians. However we often seem to have a particularly wide streak of it when it comes to looking at the world around us for signs that others may some day come round to sensible views. Just the same, it is always pleasant to see indications precisely that may indeed be happening.
RK Jones
Phil Bradley observes a nasty combination: voodoo science allied to voodoo economics
The European Parliament’s adoption last week, of ‘the world’s first Kyoto Protocol mandated multi-national emissions trading scheme (ETS) covering greenhouse gases’ gives me an opportunity to rail against the biggest government instigated boondoggle in the history of the world – namely the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. Yes, it still rumbles along, destroying prodigious amounts of wealth without producing any measurable benefit. 117 countries are now signatories, although it has no material effect on most of them, except to funnel some money from rich countries into projects of dubious value. The latest signatory is Switzerland, who, reading between the lines, did so under pressure from the EU.
No one really knows how much Kyoto is costing, or how much it would cost were it to be fully implemented, which it never will be. All we do know is that it both reduces growth and diverts resources into economically pointless activities. This link estimates that by 2010, Kyoto will cost the UK around US$35 billion a year, and result in the permanent loss of half a million jobs. Reams of left-wing econo-babble has been written on how Kyoto will actually increase investment in windmills or whatever and stimulate economies. The simple fact remains that any increase in resources to produce the same result necessarily makes us poorer.
The Kyoto Protocol is an object lesson in what happens when you combine agenda-driven leftists with some dodgy science, a media that is mostly ignorant about most things, and politicians who want to be moral and righteous irrespective of the cost to the taxpayer. Bring them together in a UN sponsored framework that is not accountable to anyone, and you have the right formula for this madness.
Climate change is something I have been interested in for long time. In part, it probably stemmed from spending my childhood playing in the woods and fields situated on a glacial terminal moraine that marked the southern limit of last great ice advance across England. I recall being suitably awestruck when someone explained to me that 10,000 years earlier, where I was standing was the edge of a great ice sheet that stretched all the way to the North Pole.
Climate changes, has always changed and will always change. While we have an imperfect understanding of the mechanisms underlying the changes, we do have accurate data on the climate cycles themselves. These cycles vary from a few years to many thousands of years, and perhaps millions of years. To take England as an example, since the Norman Conquest, the climate has varied from about as warm as the south of France, to about as cold as south central Sweden. The last century has been more or less in the middle of the range for the last thousand years.
The weather is something people can relate to. It is immediate – they can see and feel it, and it affects their lives. In particular, extreme weather can be very disruptive to people’s lives. The Left is always on the lookout for anti-capitalist issues. When some scientists started to suggest that man-made increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were causing a warming trend in the climate, then it did not take long for the media to start publishing alarmist stories of super-hurricanes, floods and droughts of biblical proportions, rising sea levels flooding whole countries, and wholesale extinctions of animal and bird species. It made great copy on a subject people were interested in, and was written by self-styled environmental correspondents. Most of whom graduated in media studies or similar and could not pass a basic high school science exam.
A number of unusually hot summers in North America have now given way to a number of unusually cold winters, in line with a well-understood short-term climate cycle. It also appears that much of the widely publicized increase in global temperatures over the 20th century was a measuring artifact due to most measurement points being in urban areas that are getting warmer for reasons that have nothing to do with global warming. Anyone interested can find more information here.
In the mean time, global warming was ‘clearly’ a problem for the whole world and of course that well-known fixer of the world’s problems, the United Nations, got into the act, resulting in Kyoto. Even if the world were facing a global catastrophe (and don’t imagine for a moment that it is), Kyoto doesn’t fix the problem. All it does, in line with left-wing agendas, is hobble developed countries with huge costs, it does nothing to limit the fastest growing carbon emitters – the developing world, and picks a ludicrously arbitrary target of some percentage of carbon emissions in a particular year for a country, and for which there has never been any scientific justification. If atmospheric CO2 really were a problem, then probably the only way to fix it would be to build a massive infrastructure to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Of course, it is not a real problem and Kyoto is not a real solution.
Of the countries that are affected by the Kyoto Protocols (and most are not), the USA has, as usual, taken the most rational approach, and rejected it outright. Japan has decided that compliance will be voluntary – what ever that means. In both Canada and Australia, Kyoto remains deeply controversial. Australia has yet to ratify it, and while Canada has, there is still substantial resistance from the provinces (you would think Canada would be in favour of some climate warming). Which leaves Europe left holding the UN’s baby, valiantly trying to save the world by implementing Kyoto, and in the process impoverishing its citizens. As usual!
Phil Bradley
Ian Boys of Dissident UK points out that essential civil liberties are collateral damage in the war against terrorism
For better or for worse the war against terrorism is Britain’s war too: we sent a few thousand soldiers to Afghanistan and made our political support for President Bush quite clear. Now it has come back to haunt us: nine of our citizens are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay, together with several more from the Commonwealth. We do at least know who and where they are, even if we do not know why they are being held. Their families cannot visit them and they cannot speak to outside lawyers. Their status has been determined by the US Secretary of Defence and the only lawyers they will be allowed are US military officers: it has been suggested that their conversations even with these will be overheard. The same camp holds children as young as 13, while 16-year olds are mixed in with the adult detainees.
Imagine that Argentina’s Junta of the 1980’s or today’s Iran were holding these 680-odd detainees, including nine Britons. The outcry would be phenomenal. There would be talk of sanctions at the very least.
Yet these are actually the ‘lucky few’ among the hundreds detained by the USA. Many many more have disappeared. Let’s look at that word – reminiscent of the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 70’s. Do I mean that they have been murdered? No, probably not. Do I mean that they have been tortured? Yes – whether outright physical pressure or just being held in a steel container at Bagram airbase in the blazing sun. Do I mean that they have vanished, held in some solitary hell-hole? Most certainly. → Continue reading: The disappeared
Cobden Bright posted a comment in an earlier article that deserves the prominence of full posting, slightly edited. This follows on from The Anglosphere and Economic Freedom
The fact that a country taxing over 40% of GDP from its populace can be considered the 5th most “economically free” country in the world is rather depressing. Let’s face it, most countries on that list are not economically free at all – they are just slightly less bad than most of the others.
The people at Cato also seem to have forgotten about tax rates. A person paying 0% tax is in most respects an economically free man – someone paying 50% per year is a slave for half their working life. So they should have included tax havens like Monaco, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Cayman Islands etc, and low tax larger countries like Russia.
Also, as noted by a previous poster, it is actions, not written laws or words, which achieve freedom. A backward country with repressive laws may be freer for you personally if those laws are not enforced, or avoidable at low cost via bribes or cunning. So a corrupt backwater may be relatively free in real terms, whereas a “free” country like America will tax you ruthlessly even if you move to live on the other side of the world, and will exact severe penalties for certain voluntary economic exchanges (e.g. buying a joint or a Cuban cigar).
Which raises the final question – is there any meaningful distinction between economic and personal liberty? I would say no. How free are Hong Kong, Singaporean, UK or US citizens to buy and sell firearms, narcotics, or sexual entertainment?
Finally, there is a bizarre tendency for everyone to take GDP figures at face value. Remember who makes these up? Yes, that’s right folks, it’s our old friend the government. So take GDP figures with a pinch of salt. Firstly, much government spending, most of which is highly wasteful, is regarded as a positive contribution to GDP. So employing someone on $30k per annum to build bridges to nowhere is seen as economically just as “good” in GDP terms as paying someone $30k per year to build a house, or work as a doctor or shopkeeper. Yet obviously the latter activities are productive, and the former destructive or at best worthless. This focus on production per se, rather than useful production, means utterly worthless projects drive a country up the GDP ranks. Thus countries with large amounts of state spending get an artificially high GDP rating.
The only real way to measure economic prosperity is to visit a place for a while and see what kind of real living standards prevail. What kind of cars do people drive, what clothes do they wear, how nice are their houses, are the streets clean, how good are the restaurants, how long does it take to get from A to B?
Cobden Bright
Phil Bradley asks us to spot the common thread here
The Cato institute has just released its annual Economic Freedom of the World Report and interesting reading it makes.
The top 10 rankings of economic freedom – 1. being the most free – are as follows:
- Hong Kong
- Singapore
- United States
- New Zealand
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Switzerland
- Ireland
- Australia
- Netherlands
The report itself analyses how over the long term differences in economic freedom results in large differences in economic growth and prosperity. If you are interested in the details you can read the report.
What struck me is that every significant anglophone country makes the top ten and only a single continental EU country (Holland) sneaks in at last place. The list is rounded out by Britain’s last colony of any size (Hong Kong), another ex-british colony that has 100% anglophone middle class (Singapore), and the last continental EU hold-out (Switzerland).
France comes far down the list at number 44, Italy and German do a little better, ranked at 35th and 20th respectively.
Most people think of the Anglosphere in terms of political alignment in world affairs. The Cato report identifies something more important, which is a common understanding of how economic freedoms are integral to society, our economic well-being and personal liberty. Those in continental Europe who wonder why Britain is so sceptical of the EU and its attempts to ‘harmonize’, have only to read this report to see that harmonization would unavoidably result in the erosion of freedoms in Britain.
Phil Bradley
Andy Duncan may take up smoking again…
The UK government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government’s response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a ‘voluntary’ ban, it will be ‘forced’ to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will ‘regretfully’ impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire’s very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don’t like a place because people are smoking don’t go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
Andy Duncan on a free vote on gay partnerships.
Following David Carr’s earlier piece, on Conservative plans to raise the UK motorway speed limit to 80mph, further signs are emerging of the Conservatives thawing out their 1950s attitudes, in a ‘what have we got to lose?’ policy shake-out.
In a probable truce with outspoken maverick MPs, like John Bercow, IDS is going to allow a free vote on the government’s planned ‘civil partnerships’ for same-sex couples.
Come on IDS, frighten a few more horses!
I don’t think they’re going to abolish the NHS, the day after a possible Conservative victory, or hold an immediate referendum to leave the EU, but the old paternalism, which puts so many of us off the Conservatives, looks though it may be fading at very long last. Though as Mr Carr might add, let’s see how long it lasts, before we get too excited.
Samizdata.net aficionados, particularly those in same-sex business partnerships, may also be interested in a difficult-to-plug tax spin-off from the planned new gay rights extension. Many in such a position may choose to use the new gay rights as a way to avoid Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax. Shhhhh!!! Don’t tell Gordon.
Paul Staines ponders the grim events unfolding in Liberia and wonders who is going to support what action… if any
The Left seems strangely quiet about Liberia. Bad things are happening in that inappropiately named land, Liberians themselves are calling for intervention – US intervention. Various European foreign ministries hint that they think US intervention might be a ‘good thing’.
The UN offices and food programs have come under attack form Liberian government forces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urges the Security Council to dispatch a multinational intervention force to Liberia to prevent ‘a humanitarian catastrophe’. Annan hinted a strongly worded letter to the Security Council president, that this should be led by the United States. He also said it should be authorised under chapter Vll of the UN Charter which permits the use of force to restore order. (Why didn’t we use that in Iraq?)
Even France urged Washington to take the lead on military intervention in Liberia. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is brokering peace talks between the Liberian government and rebels in the Ghanaian capital Accra, has also urged the United States to take a leading role in the dispatch of peacekeepers.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, said during a visit to Ghana on Saturday that Britain and France had “assumed their responsibilities” in two of Liberia’s neighbours, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, where they had led recent military interventions to halt civil war. Villepin said it was now time for the United States to do the same in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.
The Left here faces a tricky dilemma – unable as ‘anti-imperialists’ to ever give the US the benefit of the doubt they prefer, I suspect, to let Liberia go up in flames rather than sanction a US led intervention.
Paul Staines
Andy Duncan decries the bigotry of Members of Parliament in persecuting a minority.
Backbench Labour MPs have voted for a total ban on hunting with dogs. What remains very unclear, however, is what happened to the government’s murky ‘compromise’ option, to allow licensed hunting to continue.
This disappeared due to a mysterious House of Commons drafting error, and a warning to Labour whips, that the Parliament Act could not be used with a total ban. But for a government of control freaks, this seems a mere fig-leaf covering over the traces of some kind of deal between the backbench and the executive of the “You support us, when we need you, and we’ll give you the Ban” type.
Or does it? Could it be even more labyrinthine than this simple conspiracy theory? You may remember last week Mr Peter Hain, our friend from Wales, attempting a complex manoeuvre to kick the Hunting Ban into the long grass. The last thing New Labour needs, with the Tories moving into a fragile lead in the polls, is to cement this lead with a class-war move highly unpopular within Middle England. With the Countryside Alliance able to get 400,000 people to march down Whitehall any time of their choosing, my guess is Tony Blair would rather this problem went away, until he is at least dealt with Iraqgate.
Time will tell what this über-manipulative government is up to, but my guess is that the ban will fail again, in this session of Parliament, due to some “technical error”, and we will be back to where we started, next year, for the whole sorry mess to begin again. You would think they had a majority of ten, the way New Labour carry on, rather than over one hundred. It must be terrible being a socialist back-bencher lion, being led by such donkeys. Excellent.
Andy Duncan has heard the voice of Metatron Peter Hain and he is pretty sure it may have been Hain’s lips that were moving but it was Tony Blair’s voice we were hearing
On the BBC Today program this morning, Labour Party Leader of the House of Commons, and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain floated the idea of increased income taxes. As he’s the semi-official Voice on Earth, for the internal workings of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s mind, his attempt to start this ‘debate’ can be assumed to have been cleared by Downing Street.
Is this the last desperate throw, by an increasingly desperate Prime Minister?
In the interview, the BBC Radio 4 Presenter, John Humphrys, tried to press Mr Hain on this ‘debate’, but didn’t get the minister further than saying the rich would be ‘asked’ to contribute more, for the common good of the public services.
Mr Hain refused to define what is ‘rich’, and refused to define how much income tax would be going up by, except to say it wouldn’t be “punitive”.
Mr Humphrys put forward the figures of £50,000 pounds a year as being the Labour Party’s definition of rich, and 60% per cent income tax, as being a ‘fair’ contribution. Mr Hain did not refute these figures, merely avoided answering the questions in his self-styled ‘debate’.
Given that Tony Blair hinted at more tax increases, earlier in the week in his Fabian Society speech, it seems he is ready to formally break his 1997 ‘pledge’ to not increase income tax.
But does this really signal it’s time up for Tony Blair?
Andy Duncan
Ilana Radwinter captures a precious moment of French ‘democracy’ and shares with us her experience of encountering striking teachers.
Well, most of the people demonstrating are teachers — and not too many of those either — but they are trying to engage others and actually managed to do a lot of damage by disrupting the end of year examinations as well as gross acts of vandalism.
Last Monday, I was driving my children to school at about 8 o’clock. On the way to the centre of Perpignan, just before a large roundabout, we hit a huge traffic jam. I saw a lot of cars turning back in front of me but I decided to continue. Eventually, the cars in front could no longer turn easily and I spotted some men holding banners. Ah, the strike! I had the choice of staying put or getting off the road and driving on the grass.
All around me there were people who were meekly waiting to be able to turn back. I could not believe it. Why couldn’t we all shout and rev our engines and hoot and call them names and go past?! Haven’t these people ever been to a football match?! After all, these were not the burly, tattooed hunks we saw last year during the truckers’ strike! They were the normal, testosterone-depleted, round-hipped western males as seen putting the rubbish out on Monday mornings.
I chose the way forward and soon I found myself in front of the eight men who were stopping all the traffic. They pounced on my car and forced me to stop. It was just me, a petite middle-aged woman, dressed in pyjamas as mornings before school are too hectic to allow for any grooming, and my three children (11-year old girl and 7-year old twin boys).
I rolled the window down and I asked why I am not allowed to go where I needed to. I said that I respected their right to strike, I lied but I was not in a position to start fight, so a bit of politeness was probably wise, but by the same token they should respect other people’s right to go about their business. After all, I was neither the government nor another teacher trying to cross the picket line.
They gave me leaflet and told me they were actually fighting for my children’s future. Then, I really lost it — I can’t stand people using my children as an excuse for their anti-social acts. I told them that on the contrary, they are fighting for my children’s ruin as in the future they will have to work for next to nothing to pay for their pensions. As anger tends to exacerbate a foreign accent, they realised I am a ‘foreigner’ and told me to go back where I come from. I retorted that they should go as they are the ones who clearly do not like their country as they were rebelling against a legitimate government. I suggested North Korea as a possible destination.
My 11-year old daughter was crying — she had been crying all morning because her elder sister was going back to London — and the boys at the back were speculating who was going to win, Mummy or those old men.
Sometimes during the argument, the bullies took their hands off my car and, quite unexpectedly, started to back off. It transpired that they were not in charge, just being big mouths. The real ‘master of ceremony’ was someone else, who kept quiet during all this. As they backed off, a nice woman approached me and said that many demonstrators did not approve of such methods.
A group of teachers just wanted to slow down the traffic, smile and hand out leaflets. So there were two camps: those who wanted to allow us to pass and those who did not. In the end, we were allowed to go…
Ilana Radwinter, Perpignan, France
Miceal O’Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go
The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:
“…Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more.”
[…]
“Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain’s roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well.”
Here are the technical specifications for the system:
- EU network is preferred system
- A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU’s Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.
- The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.
- Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.
But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.
Miceal O’Ronain
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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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