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]
One detail that perhaps got lost in the recent UK decision about the Indian Ocean group of islands containing Diego Garcia – taken very fast and over the heads of the Chagos Islands locals (which hardly fits with ideas about decolonisation) – was that President Biden applauded the move. In way this isn’t surprising. Pr. Biden doesn’t particularly like the UK, and like a certain kind of American politician, has a grudge about the old, post-imperial network of relationships and territories that the UK has, or had, around the world. More fool him.
In this transfer and lease deal (which is not, as far as I know, formally signed and there has been no formal debate or legislation about this in Parliament) the UK is transferring taxpayers money in a payment programme to a tax haven (Mauritius). If the Tories had done this, the tax haven angle would have been constantly mentioned.
It seems ironic that Labour, a party not exactly known for its love of tax havens (unless Tony Blair uses one) or such international conduits, feels it is okay to deal with Mauritius financially in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I am for tax havens, and the more of them the better, because they deter otherwise high-tax governments from going crazy when capital is mobile, although as UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is proving, that’s not a solid protection. Tax hikes are likely in the 30 October UK budget. People are leaving.
Biden’s support for what’s happened should give pause, given what a poor President he is on foreign affairs, in my view. Also, he hasn’t made much disguise of his distaste for Brexit and the UK’s independence out of the bloc, and neither did Barack Obama. There’s no enthusiasm from that quarter for the UK to engage in new trade and other deals with countries outside the EU. And Biden’s own recent judgement about foreign affairs is spotty at best: half-decent on Israel and Ukraine, and shockingly inept over Afghanistan, with the rushed departure and loss of billions of dollars of equipment.
Those on the Republican side are, apparently, far less happy about the Chagos islands deal, and the potential risk to security of the Diego Garcia airbase jointly used by the UK and US. They know how porous leasehold deals can be, and have seen that Mauritius has used all legal pressure to change the terms of its independence settlement with the UK of 1968. The US Air Force has used the base in recent conflicts; if it wanted to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, and do so via Diego Garcia, the situation becomes dicier than it might have been. One has to wonder about the role of China in all this (Chinese money flows through Mauritius.)
This whole saga also shows that if the UK is to pursue a more “blue water” foreign policy in future as it expands trade links with countries outside Europe, particular in Asia, that getting its defence arrangements locked down is essential. And we need to lose our illusions about how special our relationship with the US really is at times.
Daniel Hannan has this excellent overview of just what a shockingly poor transaction the UK has made with Mauritius. Hannan argues that Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the islands, a fact that is so shocking it is hard to argue how on earth we reached this point and how the Mauritius government thought it could bully its way ahead on this. However, a future, different UK government should certainly revisit the terms of this deal, and press hard on Mauritius if, for example, that country’s anti-money laundering standards are questioned in future. Time for a bit of nastiness behind the smiles.
It may be too late now to change course on this specific, shabby deal, at least under the current Starmer government. I fear it is. And now there’s speculation about what happens to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. The UK has shown itself to be weak. People tend to notice.
“The past year has not been a Palestinian war against Israel, nor an Arab war against Israel. It has been an Iranian war against Israel, fought directly by Tehran’s own military and through its numerous terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraq and Syrian milita groups. And behind the terrorist storm troopers lies Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.”
– John Bolton, Daily Telegraph, writing today on the grim anniversary of the 7 October progrom inflicted by Hamas on southern Israel last year.
My thoughts with those who grieve for the loss of their loved ones.
“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.
The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.”
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk.
The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.)
As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984.
The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.)
As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place.
“The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?” Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.”
In my second country of Malta, which I visit regularly, it is hard to miss the fact that the island’s national flag bears the George Cross. The GC was awarded, collectively, to the island during the Second World War by the British government because of how Malta had withstood the bombardments of Italian and German air forces. The bombing of the island from 1941-43 was greater in total than the ordnance hurled at London during the Blitz. Malta was a major British naval base: it was able to intercept and destroy Axis shipping to North Africa and hence was key in tipping the scales against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in its attempted invasion of Egypt. Malta mattered.
It appears today, in these “decolonisation” times, that some of the citizens of Malta – a country sadly tainted by issues such as corruption and the murder of an investigative journalist in 2017 – want the GC symbol to be removed.
On a Facebook page that I follow, a person (who will remain nameless), put up this comment:
If we really and truly want to celebrate this important milestone [Maltese independence], all we need to do is remove that stain from our national flag and send that bloodstained cross to Buckingham Palace. I will volunteer to act as a courier pro bono.
I was glad to see that the vast majority of responses from the locals were hostile to this person, if not enlightening.
I tried to raise the tone a bit, because the person concerned might be stupid as a bag of rocks, but it is good to put these points into places where someone might pick up on them:
I sort of understand why people who live in Malta today think that a British person (although with scores of Maltese relatives, British navy ancestors, and the rest of it) should not be talking about these things. People can be prickly about someone from abroad talking about their country.
But history is what it is: Malta was a naval and military base coveted by great powers from the dawn of time. Hitler and Mussolini would have tried to take it over and subdue it; neutrality on the Swiss model wasn’t likely and even the Swiss would have been forced to go along with terrible things eventually as a price. (And the Swiss, to their shame, later became known for shielding money looted from Jewish people.) Malta’s position in the central Med was vital for control of the sea. A successful Allied liberation of Italy/southern Europe, launched from the sea, would have required a base such as that of Malta to be in friendly hands. We can see what happens when a place chooses neutrality as in the case of the Republic of Ireland. It massively hampered the ability of the British to counter German U-boat attacks in the eastern Atlantic shipping lanes, costing thousands of lives and loss of material.
What sort of things about the war are taught in Malta today, if at all? As a journalist of 36 years’ professional experience, working around the world, and a student of history, it strikes me as interesting to know how many people think that the symbol of the George’s Cross is somehow a stain on the Maltese flag, rather than a symbol of honour and supreme courage.
I can recommend Sir Max Hastings’ book about the Operation Pedestal convoy as a good study about what was at stake in the Mediterranean campaign.
Politicians of all stripes like to talk about “sustainability” – although I’ve noticed that some of the enthusiasm for this when it comes to the “green” angle has been dented by rising energy costs and worries about how we keep the lights on when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine. The realities of how to produce energy when fossil fuels are off the table and nuclear is not taken seriously are going to bite us, and hard, in the years to come.
Even so, sustainability is a useful word, and it is a shame that it gets tainted as the word “liberal” does by association with bad ideas. (The same goes for “progressive”, while we are at it.)
Well, one point I come across in my day job in covering business and finance is how family-owned/run firms can often show superior returns, when compounded over time, and be more robust, and more sustainable, than those that don’t have a family connection. That’s not cheesy sentimentality about how a business is better when Grandad, Mum and the cousins are around. (There can be very tricky succession and control issues with families; wealth advisors often earn big bucks advising families in how to resolve conflicts. And we’ve all seen Dallas.) Even so, for all the caveats, family businesses are important. They employ millions of people. In countries such as Germany and Italy, family-run firms have been the norm; the fashion houses, specialist sportscar firms, and many others, have deep and long family connections. Same goes for agriculture and food, for example. Here is some UK family business data that shows how big these firms are, in aggregate.
Well, it seems that one thing that the UK government is thinking of is ending the business property and agriculture reliefs from inheritance tax. At present, the tax – 40 per cent above a “nil-rate” threshold of £325,000 – does not hit if you inherit a family business, including a farm. In the US, such tax is called Estate Tax, and thresholds are far higher than in the UK.
But apparently, Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, is considering sweeping some of these reliefs away. It means family businesses where the stake in a business are high might get broken up and sold, such as to corporations and private equity firms, when a founder or business holder dies. Family-run farms will be a one-generation gig. And corporates, sovereign wealth funds and big groups such as pension funds will consolidate their ownership of business, including the land. Wealth becomes more centrally concentrated, not more dispersed. This seems a very paradoxical outcome from a supposedly egalitarian government. Maybe Ms Reeves does not understand this point or is indifferent to it.
However, ignorance is only part of it, I think. There’s a general hostility towards inheritance of any kind in our culture today, from my impression. There is a lot of the “tall poppy” mindset around. Years of central bank QE also inflated asset prices, and certain groups did well, but that’s not really what is going on, in my view, because things such as QE are too abstract for the average voter.
I think resentments are given more respect today, when in fact they should be called out. I think we allow jealousy of others’ good fortune to be given the time of day, when in the past that would be seen as a bad thing.
There are many good, consequentialist reasons why this dislike has bad outcomes when used as a motor for public policy, but there are important moral arguments against this attack on inheritance: the rights of those of those who own the property and want to give it to this or that cause are being violated. If I want to give my sons and daughters a business, or a 400-acre farm, for example, that’s my affair, period. Whether those persons “deserve” what I give them, in the eyes of some sort of social justice advocate, is irrelevant. If economics is not a zero-sum game, such demands for redistribution are just thieving.
What inheritance taxes do, at root, is make it clear that ownership of wealth and control of it is at the sufferance of the State. The justifications of insisting on this servile relationship may vary – sometimes by reference to the flawed ideas such as those of a Thomas Piketty – but the underlying position remains.
The argument seems to say that you don’t really ever own anything absolutely and control it. You have to defer to the crowd if it, and its elected representatives, wants your stuff, however virtuously you acquired it in the first place. It is only one step from saying that because we don’t “deserve” our brains or bodies, that we don’t have grounds for objecting to other coercive measures to take the fruits of our mental and physical labour, either at source, or when we die. (The dystopian novel, Facial Justice, by LP Hartley, shows where this leads when it comes to beauty and physical appearance.)
I see little by way of fundamental critiques of this assault on inheritance of honestly acquired wealth. The Tories, now in opposition, don’t really take the discussion to this level; neither do other supposedly more conservative parties in other parts of the world. But the monstrosity of what attacks on inheritance amount to needs to be more widely remarked on than it is.
On the subject of the family and why protecting it is subversive of overweening authority, I can recommend this book, The Subversive Family, by former Downing Street policy unit figure and journalist/novelist Ferdinand Mount. He’s deeply influenced by the Origins of English Individualism, by Alan Macfarlane, for example.
On a more prosaic level, the ever-widening burden of tax in much of the developed world, and particularly in the UK, means that even people who are not by any means well off are going to learn about the joys of inheritance tax and all that goes with it. That might ultimately shift the needle against the tax. But a lot of hard work in changing attitudes is also needed.
“The overwhelming issue facing any UK government is: what do we stop doing? Governments over the last two decades have pretended, especially to the media, that they can tackle any issue that either journalists or lobby groups get upset about. But that is patently impossible within current resources of people, money & political consent.
So what we get are nonsensical policies to ban advertising of junk food – who knows what that is – online or before the evening watershed. Lots of people waste large amounts of time trying to write & interpret regulations that won’t have the slightest impact on the problem of obesity. This is all displacement activity for governments that are clueless and utterly incompetent. All the signs are that the current government is doomed, both because of the personality of the Prime Minister and the inclinations of his party. Since any outsider can read the runes, why would anyone commit money to underpin economic growth without being heavily bribed to do so? That is not a viable way of turning the ship of state around.”
I came across this comment, by a person called Gordon Hughes, in the UnHerd website article about the problems in the current UK government civil service machine and cabinet structure, and thought it was so good and incisive that I take the liberty of sharing it here.
Also, I take the opportunity for another plug for a book that I recommend about how a lot of people, including journalists, seem to think about everything today: Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott.
A theme appears to be building in this splendid US Presidential election.
JD Vance, the running mate for Mr Trump, has been beaten up for talking about “childless cat ladies”; Taylor Swift, the singer, has come out for Harris and proudly declared herself to be a childless cat lady. Mr Trump, meanwhile, apparently made comments about illegal immigrants eating the moggies.
Meanwhile, 10 Downing Street, the official UK residence in London of the Prime Minister, is renowned for also being home to Larry, a cat who has lived through and endured various prime ministers. A benevolent dictatorship behind the scenes?
(Full disclosure: I drive a Jaguar.)
Question: Where do the dog-owners enter this election cycle?
In all the genuflections about the impact of the mass-murders inflicted in New York and Washington and the deaths of the passengers fighting against the hijackers on Flight 93, I thought these comments by Glenn Reynolds stood out. His blog, Instapundit, was one of those that saw a massive rise in traffic as people sought information outside the usual MSM gates at the time. And Samizdata, founded around that time, was part of that process too.
Prof Reynolds is unimpressed by US politics, overall, since that terrible day, and by the performance of parts of the security services and the like. Far too few people at the CIA and other places were fired. If there was any cleaning house, I missed it. A huge amount of taxpayers’ money was spent on new organisations (TSA) but I never got a sense of a general purge of incompetence and sloppiness that made it easier for the 19 hijackers and enablers to do what they did.
Of course, there have been some great exceptions, and let’s not forget that for every terrorist outrage that gets covered in the media, we often don’t hear about those plots that get disrupted or thwarted, and by people who cannot be named. Bear that in mind amidst the sombre atmosphere that such an anniversary causes.
To this day, I consider radical Islamism, in all its nihilistic fury and ugliness, the number one problem for humanity today. It is an attack on all the best features of human civilisation, if I may presume to use that word. Islamists hate ideas such as individual rights, free personal agency, human curiosity, a sense of adventure, production of material values, equality before the law – all of it.
Back to Prof. Reynolds:
We said “never forget.” Well, we haven’t forgotten the heroism of people like Rick Rescorla, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters who charged up the WTC stairs, or the volunteers who set up the American Dunkirk evacuation of lower Manhattan by boat.
But we have forgotten the criminal negligence of our political leaders and intelligence services that got us to that point. We should have purged the incompetents then. Instead, they’re still running the show. The country is still sound, but the people in charge of it have only gotten worse.
“If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble. A crackdown on expression and the denial of due process for those who contradict the state’s version of the truth dates back to 2020. Now it’s getting worse.”
– Mary Anastasia O’Grady Wall Street Journal ($). She is writing about Brazil’s clampdown on X, aka Twitter. Other countries are looking and watching.
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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