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]
|
The man tipped as the Labour Party’s next-leader-but-one has made what could be a career-threatening mistake. He has sided with rational evidence against a popular delusion. David Miliband has said in an interview with The Sunday Times that ‘organic’ food is “a lifestyle choice”, and that there is no evidence it is any better for you than the other stuff.
As agriculture minister he may have been trying to be generous to the farmers he works with who are not on that particular bandwagon: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” But it can not be too long before he has to apologise to the green lobby.
There’s a large chunk of the British middle-class that ‘just knows’ organic is good for you, nutritionally and morally, even if they rarely buy it. And as for the Hampstead elite among whom he grew up… Is he suggesting Poppy is stupid paying £6 a jar for strained bio-dynamic baby vegetables to feed little Rufus?
A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:
The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.
The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.
Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. ‘It is messy; we must coordinate it,’ they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the ‘backbone of the country’, they think.
But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don’t get established in the first place. “Interdependent vulnerabilities” are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can’t directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.
The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors – millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the “strategic interventions” that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.
Livestock farming in Britain almost didn’t survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs’ “coordinated” response to the last “foot and mouth” outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn’t see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that’s why things were as bad as they were. The ‘defect’ has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Nobody in government had to tell Tesco’s dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a ‘strategic reserve’ of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country’s stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled – apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.
Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not “critical” and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can’t predict what we will want. Nor can the state.
How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as “key”? Well there’s a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn’t be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.
The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren’t. It may be good to have them in your own life – if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren’t well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.
Given that the papers are full of the most appalling socialist commentators sharpening their knives to butcher Britain’s remaining economic freedoms, when ‘right-wing’ (in their terms, God help us) Tony Blair leaves office, it is nice to be able to point out a ray of sunshine.
I like Nick Cohen. He is often wrong, but he does have the sense to follow his own mind rather than retailing the received wisdom . And he is intellectually honest and self-aware, which is more than can be said for most commentators on the left. This is an impressive example:
Too many on the liberal-left, including me, don’t feel in our bones that it is as wrong for the state to take billions of pounds from taxpayers and waste them on, say, the fatally overambitious National Health Service IT project as it is for the owners of Farepak to take the Christmas savings of thousands of poor families and throw them away.
Leave aside for the moment that no one was compelled to take the appalling bargain offered by Farepak in the first place, and that no one, including the same poor families, has an option about the taxes going to the mad NPfIT or the destruction of their privacy that it entails. Leave aside that, even if one counts as robbery in the same way as the other, the NPfIT is more than 120 times as bad. (Though one couldn’t pass that topic without noting Gordon Brown took out of the nation’s pension funds in one early budget, what it would have taken 300 Robert Maxwells to steal.)
Cohen has recognised (1) that there is something not quite right about the disproportionate outrage lavished by the left on the Farepak disaster, when government spending takes money from people who need it and gives them nothing; and (2) that some other people do not share the reflex. He offers the insight as a matter of electoral strategy for Labour, so insight (1) may be a bit weak. But it looks to me like progress. Cohen can not quite see what is wrong with his viewpoint clearly enough to shift his ingrained value-judgements, but he can see that it might be wrong.
Among the useful tasks accomplished on the Christmas visit to my mother’s house was dealing with (i.e. disposing of) most of my old correspondence. They say that the difference between a radical and a conservative is 20 years. So what should I make of this?
Saxmundham, Suffolk. 14th March 1987
The Editor
The Independent
Sir,
If, as your profile today suggests, the tabloid papers have rehabilitated Boy George as a symbolic “victim of the pushers” then they do drug-users, and the rest of us, who have to support the costs of drug abuse, a great wrong. For they hold out to the user the most powerful and deceptive of excuses: “It isn’t my fault; he made me do it.”
Pushers only supply someone’s demand, and taking a new drug is still a positive decision, even if the first one is free. Continuing a habit requires a long series of decisions to take one’s poison rather than to do other things with one’s time and money. It may feel like a forced choice, but the first step to freedom is to recognise that there is a choice involved. [We might elevate that to a general principle – GH, 2006]
The child’s excuse can still apply: “But I didn’t know… He lied to me. He made me do it.” No pusher is under an obligation to be honest, no in-crowd to evaluate and announce the risks of an essentially exciting-because-surreptitious activity – why believe the authorities about this when it is palpably part of their desire to control you, and they lie about everything?
The greater the repression of drug-use, the more ruthless and dishonest will be the surviving suppliers. (Far from being the Mafia’s enemy, the Drug Squad is its greatest friend, cutting down the competition and making control easier.)
No, the Great and the Good (and the tabloids) have it wrong. The cycle, of horror stories leading to unjustified fears, leading to repression, to ignorance, to gangsterism, more horrors, fears… obscures the relatively simple danger for the user, and vastly inflates the problem for everyone.
There is a step – and a difficult, but the only one – which can reduce in the long run the ignorant bravado, addiction, mess, disease, expense, accidental poisoning, purposeful deception, and organised crime stemming from heroin; the one which throws back all responsibility to the user, who must be able to say, “my decision,” and “I made a mistake.” Legalise it.
Yours truly,
Guy Herbert
Though there are some ways my opinions have evolved (I no longer accept, even for rhetorical purposes the mirror-magic conception of “organised crime”, for example), I am still making the same point to a deaf establishment 20 years later. So, very nearly, is George.
Is there no mellowing path for a libertarian? Am I a singualar case of arrested development? Or is the generational reversal thesis sense when applied to musical and fashion-sense, nonsense on social and political questions?
The OR may not be exclusive, folks.
If you want to make money, work directly with money.
– Bernie Cornfeld’s explanation of Jonathan’s puzzle. Financial markets seek meaning, and discount luck. Financiers are therefore in a strong position to get rent from their luck as well as their brains. And a lot of other people’s money passes through their hands, so they do not have to worry about cashflow much.
Let us consider, my lords, that arbitrary power has seldom or never been introduced into any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step, lest the people should see its approach. The barriers and fences of the people’s liberty must be plucked up one by one, and some plausible pretences must be found for removing or hoodwinking, one after another, those sentries who are posted by the constitution of a free country, for warning the people of their danger. When these preparatory steps are once made, the people may then, indeed, with regret, see slavery and arbitrary power making long strides over their land; but it will be too late to think of preventing or avoiding the impending ruin.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to the House of Lords in 1737 (though reported rather later)
Who is speaking? Where? When? And of what political philiosophy is this an epiphany?
It is anticipated that recording an alternative address will be of benefit to the individual, enabling him or her to prove legitimate residence at that address.
Only the last question is really hard, but Googling the answer to the rest is cheating. More marks will be earned by creative guesses.
This is a weird story. From The Mail on Sunday, 2nd December 2006:
Estate agents secretly selling home details to tax inspectors
Snooping: tax officers can now find out exactly what your home is worth.
Government officials have been given access to a vast database of properties, revealing their sale prices and detailed floorplans, under a deal with the website Rightmove.co.uk.
The site, run by four of Britain’s biggest estate agents, contains information on 800,000 properties – and the contract, which runs until 2008, also gives inspectors access to old records.
The Valuation Office Agency – the department of HM Revenue & Customs that allocates a council tax band to every home in England and Wales – will be able to use the data to find out about improvements such as double-glazing and conservatories that may increase tax bills.
What’s weird is this: Property sales in Britain now involve a direct return to the Revenue as part of the new Stamp Duty Land Tax regime. And the Lands Registry has a definitive record of all such transactions, now online, which ought to be accessible to the Revenue. Unless the transaction is registered, you haven’t bought the property. And a house’s recent, actual, sale price is going to be pretty conclusive evidence of its valuation.
So why pay a website whose coverage can be at best partial? Either HMRC is wholly incompetent (possible). Or they think transactions are being under-declared in the hot market (difficult in most cases, when two sets of solicitors and bankers are involved). Or the Mail on Sunday is missing the point and HMRC is not targeting sellers but renters and landlords. Or this is a publicity exercise, and HMRC is engaging in its favourite hobby: public intimidation of the public.
This cheerful seasonal scene, complete with 9-foot inflatable Santa, is brought to you from the Beckham Salon, Crawford Street, W1. This small Arab hairdresser’s shop is normally merely a shrine (verging on homoerotic, to my eye) to the most carefully coiffed man in international soccer, and hangout for young men whose hair is almost as insanely tidy as their hero’s.
But this time of year it sprouts, with utter disregard for the cultural apartheid strangers suppose to operate in Marble Arch – and danger to low-flying aircraft – the most fabulously gaudy Christmas decorations.
It is a reflexive tic among libertarian types to describe Britain’s NHS as ‘Stalinist’, in reference to its vast monolithic structure and institutional preference for central state planning. Now some indications that the parallels run a little deeper.
The Department of Health’s first reaction to the campaign for people to opt out of the “Spine” medical records database, that I mentioned a couple of days ago, is not to attack it as ‘irresponsible’ as I was expecting. It is to demand that doctors report any patients who try to the authorities. “Let us deal with them,” it appears to be saying.
The Guardian reported yesterday:
The Department of Health provoked uproar among doctors yesterday by asking GPs in England to send in correspondence from objectors who do not want their confidential medical records placed on the Spine, a national NHS database.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government’s reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for “full consideration”.
You will recall that such suggested letters were personal communications with doctors, asking them personally to do something: to code patients records so that they would not be uploaded to the Spine. That’s something that can only (as I understand it) be done locally. “Consideration” by the Secretary of State defeats it.
It also seems to me that it would be a fundamental breach of confidentiality, and if the letter were posted, possibly a criminal offence contrary to the Postal Services Act 2000, for the letter to be forwarded to the Secretary of State without patient consent.
But neither law nor morals may stand in the way of the great plan.
…
BBC Radio 4 had another example this evening. Its File on 4 programme considered endemic MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria in NHS hospitals. It interviewed a couple of epidemiological specialists who said with the current control regime slow progress was to be expected and the government target of 50% reduction in MRSA infections by 2008 is unrealistic. Andy Burnham MP, usually characterised as one of the brightest and best of the Primrose Hill group of New Labour heirs presumptive, was asked to comment. He said the complacency and defeatism of the clinical scientists was unacceptable: there was a target and the Health Service would meet it.
… Gave a very good account of themselves at NO2ID’s public meeting on “The Database State” at Imperial College on Wednesday night. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Professor Ross Anderson, and Henry Porter tore pieces out of, respectively, the ID card scheme, Connecting for Health, and generalised surveillance in the UK. People keep telling me how good the chairman was as well [blush].
Meanwhile, continuing one of the main themes of the meeting, another wise man, Phil Booth (formerly of the infinite ideas machine, but now too busy being my boss at NO2ID to post, sends an email that I thought I’d share with you all.
From: Phil Booth [mailto:national.coordinator@no2id.net]
Sent: 30 November 2006 19:04
To: Guy Herbert (general.secretary@no2id.net)
Subject: Please don’t send me a Christmas card this year
Importance: High
Instead, use the stamp to send a copy of this letter to your GP:
http://www.TheBigOptOut.org/?page_id=23
Doing this will not only keep your own medical records where they should be – between yourself and your doctor – it will help protect medical confidentiality for everyone by demonstrating that you, like millions of others*, do not consent to your personal health information being uploaded to NHS central systems and made accessible to over 400,000 people – very few of whom would have anything to do with your clinical care.
Opting out in this way will not affect your access to healthcare but, if enough of us do it, it will send a powerful message to those in Whitehall who are currently trying to seize all of everybody’s most private information without even seeking permission.
I was half-kidding about the Christmas card, but I’m deadly serious about opting out. Please read the letter and, if you agree that your privacy (and the privacy of everyone else in your family) is worth the price of a stamp, fill it in and send it to your GP.
And if you could also forward this mail to *your* Christmas card list, 2007 might end up being a very good New Year…
Phil
*The latest Medix poll [pdf here – GH] shows that 52% of GPs would not upload their patients’ records to the spine, and only 13% would be willing to proceed without consent. An even more recent survey by JRRT shows that 53% of patients are opposed to automatic uploading of their records, with only 27% in favour – even though most people haven’t heard about this yet.
You would all be on my Christmas card list, dear readers, if I had any idea who you are (and did not have to sign 2,000 already in my various capacities). You know what to do.
Where coercive institutions are strong a fanatical minority is well placed to capture them and turn them to its own purposes.
– Natalie Solent, in this discussion, which is a an interesting touchstone of liberalism.
|
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.
|
