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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Paul Marks has a question for the blogosphere
Some weeks ago I bought a copy of the American journal Liberty (the September edition). I bought the publication because it had an interesting section on State and local taxes in the United States (written by R.W. Bradford).
On reading the section I found various minor errors (which I will not bore you all with), but one feature of the section keeps tormenting me.
Mr Bradford makes a major point of families in Connecticut paying over a fifth of their incomes in State and local taxes (with the biggest bite coming from property taxes).
Is this really true? Do families in Connecticut really lose more than a fifth of their income (regardless of whether the family income is 25,000 dollars or 150,000 dollars – or anything in between), to the various State and local taxes (income tax, sales tax, property tax and so on).
You see Connecticut is a high income State (so the Feds income tax takes a big chunk of Connecticut incomes). If the State and local governments take more than 20% of people’s incomes (in one way or another) and the Feds take another large junk (in Social Security tax, Income Tax and so on) then people in Connecticut are rather more harshly taxed than people in Britain.
Paul Marks
Nicholas Chatfort is exasperated by Israel’s latest appallingly timed stunt regarding Arafat
It has often been said of the Palestinians that they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It appears that the Israelis have picked up this same bad habit. According to a report in Ha’aretz, the Isreali Defence Force’s (IDF) recent assault on Arafat’s compound in Ramallah prevented the convening of a special meeting of the Fatah Central Committee scheduled for Saturday to pressure Arafat to accept the appointment of a prime minister. Arafat has been resisting the appointment of a prime minister as this would diminish his own power, possibly leading to turning him into a figurehead leader.
While the Israeli desire to retaliate for the recent suicide bombings is understandable, the heavy-handed action may unfortunately have the opposite effect to that which the Israelis apparently intended. Instead of weakening Arafat, it is likely that the demolition of Arafat’s compound will now abort, or at least seriously delay, moves by the Palestinians to pull power away from Arafat as they once again rally around him.
Although Ha’aretz reports that Palestinian requests for committee members to travel to Ramallah for the meeting were known to senior Israeli political and military officials, Israeli cabinet ministers who approved the IDF operation claim that they had not been told of the meeting. If this is true, it appears that senior Israeli officials were negligent in their duty to provide the cabinet with all of the information that they needed to make their decisions.
Nicholas Chatfort
Paul Marks points out the importance of remorselessly pushing out the libertarian memes into a world that does not ‘get it’.
As I write this the results of the German general election are not known. However, there will be few clear lessons to learn even if the Red-Green alliance win (as it could be argued that the Germans voted Red or Green out of hatred of the United States and hatred of Jews [oh sorry, ‘love of the Arab people’] rather than because of support of Red/Green economic policy).
However, the recent election in Sweden teaches us some clear lessons. Promising tax cuts and pretending there will be no cuts in the Welfare State (the policy of the Swedish opposition “Moderate Party”) does not work. People, quite correctly, reject the idea that ‘public-private partnerships’ (or other clever schemes) mean that one can have tax cuts and much the same level of ‘public services’.
The Swedish election also shows us that given the choice of tax cuts at what people believe will be the ‘cost’ of cuts in the public services most people reject tax cuts. Although (it could be argued) that an honest approach “we are going to cut taxes and government spending” would have done better (some people may have voted against the Moderate party because they were seen as liars).
The basic ideology of our age is that government should look after the poor, the weak, the children, the old, the sick (and so on). So are we doomed? Is libertarianism (which runs directly counter to the basic ideology of our age) simply never going to be ‘relevant’ to most people?
I do not think we are doomed. I continue to believe that in a time of economic crisis people are capable of changing their beliefs.
It is a matter of making libertarian ideas known – not so they will be accepted now (they will not be accepted at present), but so that they are available to be turned to in a time of crisis.
Paul Marks
Paul Marks feels that Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read.
I have been re-reading this work (no, security guards do not have a lot of time to read – that is, sadly, a myth).
There is a lot of ‘good stuff’ in Democracy in America and it is well worth reading (although please be careful that you do not buy or borrow an edition with bits cut out, it only takes a few seconds to check – by reading what the translator has to say for himself).
However, I would warn anyone against treating Democracy in America as an accurate picture of the United States in the 1830’s.
Firstly De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements (I almost find myself typing ‘like so many Frenchmen, De Tocqueville is fond of making sweeping statements’). For example, we are told that Americans know little of the various schools of philosophy. → Continue reading: Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
I read in The Telegraph the depressing statistic that even when the police know a child has been killed by one of his parents, they still only convict 27 percent of murderers, as opposed to 90 percent when the murderer is a stranger.
“This failure to convict arises when parents blame each other or refuse to disclose any details about the injuries and there is no independent evidence.”
So the law against murder doesn’t exactly guarantee children’s safety. And I’m not sure giving them guns is the answer. The trouble goes deeper than anything libertarianism is qualified to solve, because it is about what goes on behind closed doors, and libertarians are only interested in protecting the rights of door-owners.
Except that I don’t think this is true. I think there are some libertarians who believe in right and wrong, and who think that the reason freedom matters is that it is morally a good thing, and that children benefit from it just as much as adults do.
At the moment, the family, or the parent/child relationship, is a largely private institution. This benefits those of us who want to improve on the norm in radical ways without being scrutinised, but those who want to do evil to their children sometimes abuse this private freedom in the most horrible ways imaginable.
Libertarians are right, I believe, that subjecting all families to more state interference would, even on this kind of balance, be wrong. But this does not mean that murdering children should be more legal than murdering adults. Nor does it make hitting kids OK. It just means that legislation is too flawed and clumsy a mechanism for improving children’s lives.
What’s the real answer? You really need to ask?!
Alice Bachini
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
Think about this: your husband decides that you need to go to the dentist. He drags you there against your will, and orders you to have a tooth extracted. You don‚t want the treatment. He threatens you, then strips half of your clothes off, in full view of everyone in the waiting-room, forces you down onto your front, and starts hitting you painfully on the exposed parts of your body.
The wrongs of the case of the man who was convicted for smacking his daughter as mentioned by Natalie Solent on her blog go much deeper than smacking and whether it should be prosecutable. Of course, I think that violence against children should be illegal if violence against adults is illegal, which it is. But I don’t know how much laws about it will help children in the current climate. A law change might even damage children more than they are being damaged already, if it results in people they want to have around being forcibly removed from their homes, for example.
There is a correlation between bad coercive parenting and smacking, but it is perfectly possible to be extremely damagingly nasty without smacking, and (theoretically, at least) above (the not-very-impressive) averagely useful to your kids while habitually tapping them lightly on the wrist if they do something you don‚t like (although IME this kind of pointless exercise is not actually the most of it).
→ Continue reading: Violence is violence
In the song Rule Britannia, it is said that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’: Paul Marks wonders exactly when that was most true.
When was liberty in Britain at its height?
First of all I discount the talk of either Celtic liberty or Anglo Saxon liberty being the peak of liberty on this island. We have little information of how much lords took in tribute/taxes so it is not possible to know whether the ancients paid less of their incomes in tax than, say, people in the mid 19th century.
What we do know about the Celtic age is that it was time of war and plunder (as various lords struggled for power) – so even if we choose to ignore such things as human sacrifice the Celtic age does not seem very libertarian.
It is true that in some periods the Anglo Saxons managed to set up a fairly orderly society in those parts of this island known as England – however (to give just one example of un-libertarian practice) the Domesday Book records that about one in ten people in the newly conquered England was a slave.
So when was liberty at its height in this island? Well the ‘official’ reply to this (the reply I have given to children studying history) is “the early 1870’s”. The figures we have indicate that central taxes reached their low point (as a proportion of total income) in 1874 – also in 1875 we have a orgy of statism. Many functions which had been optional for local councils become compulsory by a Act of 1875, the trade unions are put above the law of contract by an Act of the same year and (finally) taxes begin to rise.
True, the Education Act of 1870 (the Forster Act) meant that in some parts of the country there were boards of education demanding education rates before 1875 and there was a decline in agriculture (putting pressure on the poor rates in some places) after 1873. However, if we are basically interested in government spending, taxes and regulations the peak of freedom seems to be 1874 – and then everything goes down hill.
However – is the above all that matters? In my ‘gut’ I would not say the early 1870’s were the ‘great age of liberty’ – I would say that this sounds more like the 1820s. → Continue reading: British Liberty
Paul Marks points out that John Maynard Keynes’ theories are not just wrong but are complete nonsense.
Libertarians tend to reject the economic doctrines of J.M. Keynes. Some people may argue (as Lady Thatcher once did) that Lord Keynes’ thought was distorted by his followers, but most people (or most libertarians anyway) would accept that Lord Keynes and/or his follows were in error in regard to the understanding of political economy.
The trouble is that most libertarians think that showing the errors of Keynesianism is very complicated and that one needs a detailed knowledge of Austrian School economics to show these errors – this is not so.
Lord Keynes’ 1936 book (“The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”) implies that one can increase the money supply up to the “full employment level” without a trend of rising prices (as long as the new money is spent on such things as public works – rather than being hoarded or spent on imports). However, it does not matter if one interprets the “General Theory” to hold that Keynes accepted that his policy of money supply expansion would lead to a trend of rising prices (rather than, say, just restoring the prices of goods to the level they were at before some fall in prices).
It does not matter because there is no long term trade off between unemployment and rising prices. In the 1950’s and after Keynesians played with such concepts as the “Phillips Curve” to claim that there was such a trade off – but eventually no amount of moving the curve (to fit the fact that the unemployment and inflation numbers did not fit the curve) could hide the fact that such concepts would not save Keynesianism. → Continue reading: Keynesianism is rubbish
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a libertarian home educator and freelance writer who supports ‘Taking Children Seriously’. She writes in with some insightful views on the Orwellian ‘Connexions’ programme.
The nine most frightening words in the English language, Ronald Reagan is once reputed to have said, are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” One only has to glance at the latest brainchild of ‘joined-up government’ to know the truth of that statement. The Connexions scheme is meant to ensure that children are tracked in order to give them maximum access to the benefits everything taxation has to offer. The price tag comes in the form of an electronic card that is programmed with a complete history of the child. It is optional, no one has to join the scheme – it’s simply that learning institutions can make it a requirement for registration and it remains to be seen how many other public sector institutions will be joining in the rush for data.
This back door identity card is administered by ‘personal advisors’ (PAs) using the ‘Connexions Assessment Tool’. Based on a system used by Social Services, the tool enables PAs to assess eighteen areas of private life and ‘score’ the answers from 1 – ‘positive strengths’ to 5 – ‘critical or complex issues identified’. With just one simple tool these PAs can sum up and objectify young people under the all encompassing headings of: Life Skills
Key Skills
Basic Skills
Achievements
Participation
Substance use issues
Emotional well-being
Physical health
Income
Housing
Social & community factors
Family history & functioning
Capacity of parents/carers
Risk of offending
Relationships within family & society
Attitudes & motivation
Identity & self-image
Aspirations
When it comes to ‘exploring issues’ with the young person no category escapes scrutiny, for example ‘attitude to authority’ is ‘explored’ as a key skill for young people. As the sickening document develops, PAs are advised to look for evidence of living in a criminal environment to predict risk of offending. Blair’s advisors have not yet discovered any gifted precogniscants who can see the future and lock up offenders before they commit their crime in the manner of the recent ‘Minority Report’ Movie, but they are doing their best to decide people’s futures even without the aid of extra sensory perception.
Young people are expected to report on their parents as part of this welfare provision, telling all about the level of their parents’ aspirations for the young person, what kind of dental care they have provided and how often they are made to take a shower. Parental stability, difficulties and ‘evidence’ of substance abuse by parents, all as perceived by the young person, are all recorded.
Again and again the recurrent word is ‘appropriate’ and the document suggests that it is highly appropriate for some under trained, intrusive PA to explore a young person’s private sexual history alongside her ‘developmental progress’ and immunisation history. Moreover, this PA, fresh from her in service training course on how to be an authoritarian government lackey goes on to delve into the young person’s mental health. ‘Do you now or have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ Does the teenager have any other juicy emotional life experiences that can be recorded for his own good? Self harm? Bereavement? Masturbation doesn’t seem to be listed, but then there is enough of that going on in this document already.
Home-educated young people are amongst the few escaping the routine invasion of this new and invidious scheme, but as they enter colleges later in their education they are being asked for details of their Connexions cards and pressurized to join the herd of electronically tagged Blairite citizen fodder. Having libertarian views would no doubt earn them a 5 score for critical and complex attitudes to authority. Living in a household where they are taken seriously as autonomous human beings able to initiate and motivate their own learning would put them well off the scale, a new class of ‘potential offenders’ in their own right. The Connexions scheme is inimical to liberty and we need to be campaigning against it vociferously before all young people are made the subjects of joined up government ‘help’.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood, North Wales
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator to four children aged 8-15. She is a supporter of ‘Taking Children Seriously’ and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.
All kinds of disparate and quiet groups become politicised when they are attacked by the state, scapegoated and weakened. That’s what Brian Micklethwait pointed out in an article on August 26th on Samizdata. He cites as an example Britain’s gun owners, who were made to take the blame for the actions of evil people and who as a result “suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.”
It’s a point well made, but when he goes on to say that another group who may be about to experience a similar process are ‘home schoolers’ (the British term he was struggling to find is actually ‘home educators’ or ‘home based educators’) he is several years behind the movement. Micklethwait is quite right that across the English-speaking world there are various efforts of “professional state educators” trying to erode the rights of home educators on the grounds that it is “a strange and scandalous legal anomaly.” However, what he has not realised is that we home educators have been on to them for some time and politicisation is well and truly underway, even maturing in certain sectors.
The home education movement in Britain is at least twenty five years old in its established form and the last ten years have seen a massive rise in politicisation, much of it associated with the communication benefits afforded by the Internet. One home education support group (Education Otherwise) was instrumental in getting a change in the law so that parents can now automatically de-register their children from school without the old legal loophole of needing to establish and prove their educational provision before de-registration could take place. → Continue reading: The Politicisation of Home Education
Daniel Antal, who is a Strategic Economic Policy Advisor to the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and Transport in Hungary, has spotted a fascinating article about some very different protesters in Johannesburg.
It has been a while since I posted comments to Samizdata. I would just like to draw readers attention to a very interesting Reuters articles.
At the Johannesburg Earth summit, besides to usual white middle class college dropouts typically supporting ‘good causes’ against globalization, libertarian policies and effective corporations, some poor third world farmers and street traders have been demonstrating for Free Trade.
The trade debate spilled onto the streets outside the tightly guarded conference center in the wealthy suburb of Sandton, where 200 poor farmers and local street traders from nearby shanty townships shouted slogans demanding freer trade.
“We want the freedom to grow what we want, when we want, with what technology we want, and without trade-distorting subsidies or tariffs,” said Barun Mitra, an Indian farm activist leading about 30 farmers from his country.
Quite so!
Daniel Antal, Hungary
Russ Lemley sees trouble ahead regarding California’s attack on home schoolers
I share Brian’s sense of unease about the reasons about why the Libertarian movement may pick up steam. It’s because the state has decided to harangue certain people who just don’t see the reason why they’re being bothered. It upsets their lives, causing a great deal of grief and consternation about what to do next. To avoid possible punishment, some parents may decide to send their kids to public schools, albeit not because they think it’s the right thing to do.
The general reaction to the Education Department’s ‘guidance’ in California has been one of derision. Private (especially Catholic) schools don’t require teachers to have a credential, and their students simply perform better. My wife went through the accreditation process. I attended a couple of classes with her, and they were a joke. They were basically PC bullshit sessions that had nothing to do with how to be a good teacher.
I am hoping that many home-schooling parents will simply ignore the Education Department’s ‘guidance’ and continue to keep their kids where they are. Still, all you need is one idiotic bureaucrat to ‘enforce’ this crap. When that happens, though, I’m not sure how home-schoolers will react. It could get ugly, in a non-violent sort of way. There’s been a movement among Christians, mostly, to pull their kids out of public schools because of their concerns about the moral environment. If the state decided to clamp down on home schooling, they could be in for a nasty surprise.
Will this help build support for the Libertarian cause? Maybe. But I sure don’t feel happy about it.
Russ Lemley, Torrance, California
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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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