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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As well as the hypocrisy of a man who seemed at times to delight in locking down fellow citizens during the pandemic, here are some other reasons for enjoying the spectacle of this turd being forced to spend time having rotten tomatoes, dead cats and other items thrown against him in the stocks:
Among the beneficiaries of his department’s largesse are Topwood, a company run by his sister and brother-in-law, in which he has a 20 per cent stake, which secured a contract with NHS Wales worth £150,000; Alex Bourne, who used to run Hancock’s local pub and won a £30million deal for Covid tests despite having no previous experience in the sector; and Hancock’s married lover Gina Coladangelo, appointed to a taxpayer-funded role, and her brother, an executive at a private healthcare company which has won a string of public sector contracts.
From an article by Daniel Miller.
What is perhaps unsurprising is that there is not more anger about this. It’s as if this level of jobs-for-the-boys/girls is now par for the course. The ironies abound. A few years ago, the UK enacted something called the Bribery Act, designed to stop UK companies bribing officials and others into winning contracts. To be clear, it is not stated anywhere I know that what Hancock (an unfortunate surname) did was illegal, but it sails pretty close to the wind. Directors of companies and those in public positions have to disclose a lot these days. I’ll be interested to see what ultimately happens.
To go all libertarian “meta-context” here, a berk such as Hancock is political road-kill, a footnote to history as and when it this melancholy period of history is written. But what he represents is how in the hunt for fame and riches, the public realm attracts such bottom-feeders. Brass neck, a certain pushiness and so forth, can take certain people very far. With such a large chunk of our lives controlled or mediated by the State, such creatures flourish. Large C and small conservatives are supposed to understand all this. Yesterday, the US marked Independence Day and the Founders crafted the Constitution and the elaborate set of checks and balances with such issues in mind. What is troubling about today is that I see zero sign anywhere, and certainly not from the Boris Johnson administration, about learning wider lessons from the venality on display in the Hancock case.
Addendum: I see the Queen (who would have been advised by Mr Johnson) has conferred a collective George Cross medal on the National Health Service. In the eyes of some, the NHS should have been renamed the National Covid Service over the past 18 months or so. To honour a socialist entity such as the NHS is quite a bold step. The only two other collective holders of the GC are the island of Malta (my second nation by marriage) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
“The truth is that China has come out of the lockdowns grimmer, stronger and more assertive. The world we knew has gone.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph today (behind paywall).
He is writing on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and which continues to run a heavily authoritarian and dangerous place. It is nothing to celebrate – quite the reverse.
“The `robber barons’ gave us railroads and public libraries. Zuck gave us Farmville and censorship.”
– Glenn Reynolds, apropos criticisms of how Big Tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg carry on. For what it is worth, the censorship operated by the Facebook and other Big Tech folk is still, in my view, less serious than of the traditional government kind. If you don’t like Facebook then don’t use it. By contrast, with government, we are forced to pay taxes to the bastards, regardless of what we use or how we vote.
And by the way, most of the “robber barons” weren’t robbing anyone, but adding value and doing such evil things as producing cheaper steel, oil and transportation. Much of the anti-trust furore was built around a total failure to see competition as an active process across time, not a static sport. The “perfect competition” model of neoclassical economics has done a lot of damage.
“Your dog is alert, plucky and a fearsome guardian of your property. For all we know, without his services, you would have been burgled over and over again. Your belongings would be depleted and the utility you derived from your home would be much reduced. The difference between the actual value of your home and its unguarded value is the contribution of your dog, and so is the difference between the respective utilities or satisfactions you derive from it. We do not know the exact figure, but the main thing is that there is one.”
– Anthony de Jasay, the late French political philosopher.
His essay addresses a form of argument one sometimes hears from communitarians of the Left and Right, as in the case of former President Barack Obama, who infamously told US entrepreneurs and other such movers and shakers that “you didn’t build that”. (Some people claim that Obama was quoted out of context, so in fairness here is a link to a discussion on that.) It is an argument – if we can dignify it with that word – used to undermine defences against tax and other State predations of private property.
On a related note, one of my least-favourite expressions is “giving back to society”. The term carries the implication that one took something, or rented it, from some sort of collective entity, and must return it to the rightful pool. Of course there can be genuine gratitude of living in a free, prosperous place and wanting to leave something even nicer for others. That’s totally fine. But the “giving back” expression, unless qualified and understood in context, carries a sort of embedded reproach. It’s a way of saying “nice piece of property you have there but don’t get too comfy and it would be a shame if anyone wanted to take it”. (Here is a related discussion about such attitudes.)
The point about people benefiting from what others have done is rarely considered the other way around when the costs are involved. We also inherit, or deal with, lots of bad things that others intentionally or unintentionally impose upon us, such as hostile attitudes towards those who are successful and so on. There are liabilities and costs imposed on us that we have no control over, and which are a burden to handle. So the “you didn’t build that” works in the other direction too.
Back to De Jasay’s point, he’s noting how the protection we are afforded by a guard (“woof!”) can and has been used to command political fidelity and support for all manner of State institutions. He brilliantly dissects this way of thinking. It is one of those essays that ought to be better known.
“There’s also the problem of, as our liberal friends would put it, power dynamics. At least when Stewart was battling the Bush administration, you could make the argument that liberalism was a minority persuasion in America. Today, the left is a political and cultural juggernaut, dominating the elected federal government, the civil service, the mainstream press, Hollywood, Big Tech, increasingly even the corporate world. It’s our new civic religion, which has turned its comedians into something like high priests, mouthing its tenets and ridiculing its apostates. All the old rules of satire — don’t punch down, afflict the comfortable — amount to a generally anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic mindset. Yet Stewart’s imitators exist only to reinforce the existing authorities while at the same time pretending they don’t have any authority at all.”
– Matt Purple. He is writing in the US edition of the UK-based Spectator, so usual health warnings apply to the American misuse of the word “liberal”.
“It has become something of a cliche, but it also happens to be true. If you want to do your bit for the planet, forget Tesla and other super-expensive electric vehicles: just carry on driving the same old gas-guzzling banger you’ve always had. As much, if not more, carbon tends to be expended producing a new car as actually driving one.”
– Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph (£).
I own an S-Type Jaguar (V6, 3-litre) – one of the last ones to be built – and it drives as smooth as you like, and what makes it all the sweeter is knowing that every time I turn that big black cat’s engine on, a little bit of Greta Thunberg’s cult hopefully dies.
“It is no surprise that a liberalism that embraced the “1619 Project’s” rewriting of the U.S.’s founding history would not stop there and try now, despite its almost invisible congressional majority, to displace the country’s originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad birth-to-death entitlement state.”
– Daniel Henniger, Wall Street Journal (paywall).
Remember, for some of the hyenas of the Left, the plot of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged isn’t a warning, but an inspiration.
“It is one thing to compete with China. I firmly believe we need to do that in every domain, from artificial intelligence to Covid vaccines. But the minute we start copying China, we are on the path to perdition.”
– Niall Ferguson, in the Spectator. He also writes about Prof. Neil Ferguson, the character whose modelling of pandemics has had such a baleful impact on our existence.
“America innovates, China duplicates and Europe regulates.”
– Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph, (behind paywall). (He is writing about the EU’s Precautionary Principle and generally silly approach to new technologies. These are differences of degree, of course: it is not as if the US is quite the swinging-from-the-chandeliers classical liberal place of yore.)
“It is said that politicians, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.”
– Sarah Napton, Daily Telegraph, writing about how the UK Government appears reluctant to accept that now that vaccines have been offered to all over-50-year-olds in the UK (a group covering 99 per cent of Covid deaths) that the threat has been massively reduced.
It gets harder by the day to resist the view that too many in government, and indeed among the public, rather enjoy the covid pandemic. It gives them the same buzz of imagining what it might have been like to live through a war, and an episode they look forward to boring their relations and descendants about for years to come. Call it also a form of pandemic Stockholm Syndrome.
“Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war West German chancellor, reportedly once said that people who own a detached house rarely become revolutionaries. Whether he actually said that or not, his government certainly acted upon it, facilitating large-scale housebuilding as a means to promote political and social stability (as well as, presumably, for the more self-interested motive of winning votes). The dictum also holds in reverse: if you deliberately wanted to alienate an entire generation and turn them against the market economy, creating a severely supply-constrained housing market like the British one is exactly the way you would do it.”
– Kristian Niemietz
In case anyone brings this up, central bank money printing is a factor behind the inflation in residential prices (rents, mortgages) relative to post-tax income, but probably not the only factor. There’s also a rising population as birthrates are a touch above replacement level, immigration (although that might have changed a bit since the Brexit vote of 2016) and changed household composition (divorce, more people living in single-person units, etc).
“Totalitarianism depends on the enforcement of false beliefs. Postmodernism admittedly and purposively leaves us no way to adjudicate beliefs. Likewise, postmodernism lends itself to totalitarianism.”
– Michael Rectenwald
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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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