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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The Western Roman Emperor Valentinian I (364-375 AD) refused to intervene in theological controversies “It is not right for me, a layman, to meddle in such things. Let the bishops whose business it is meet by themselves wherever they like”.
Valentinian tolerated all sects of Christian (bar the Manichees) and even allowed the traditional pagan rituals to take place in the Senate House in Rome – the alter of Victory remained in place, and the Vestal Virgins and the other ancient Roman priesthoods continued.
Valentinian was not a half hearted Christian – he had been an open Christian during the time of the pagan Emperor Julian (when being a Christian was not exactly a good strategy for promotion).
Nor was Valentinian a kindly man – for example he had men who tried to dodge conscription burned alive.
It was simply that religious toleration was a perfectly respectable point of view for a Christian in Valentinian’s time.
The other point of view (that at least non Christians should be persecuted) was widely held also – for example by the powerful Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Valentinian’s own brother (the Emperor of the East – Valens) persecuted Christians that held to a different point of view to himself (as Valens was an Arian this meant persecuting people who held what later became the mainstream point of view). But the matter was not clear cut – one could be a Christian in good standing and not support persecution. → Continue reading: Augustine
For an anarchist libertarian, things are easy. Of course government folk find ways round every effort to limit the powers of the state – government is a malignant cancer and limited state people and minimal state people are just fools.
For those people (such as myself) who have doubt about anarchism things are difficult. We tend to fall back on ideas about Constitutions to limit the power of government – and the record of such things is not good.
Firstly few Constitutions even try to limit what things government can spend money on, and even those Constitutions that do try and do this by listing what government can spend on do not tend to hold back the state.
In the case of Australian Constitution there were amendments to the Constitution to allow the government to spend money on various welfare state programs (it is, of course, the welfare state or ‘entitlement’ programs that constitute the vast majority of government spending in all Western nations). In the American case the Constitution was simply ignored.
Some Classical Liberals and libertarians regard the fact that United States Constitution was not amended to allow for the growth of the government as a sign of hope (“the Constitution still exists, all we need to do is enforce it”), but I tend to agree with the anarchists that the fact that the United States Constitution has been used for toilet paper (without any real resistance) is deeply scary.
And make no mistake the U.S. Constitution has been smashed. Take the example of paper money. The Founders all opposed the concept of making unbacked notes money simply by government order (they had the example of the ‘Continental’ to remind them of some of the problems with the idea). And the Constitution seems clear enough. → Continue reading: Limited Government and Constitutions
Many people (including myself) comfort themselves with illusions.
Some people misread F.A. Hayek and think of corporations as examples of spontaneous order where people ‘just get on with things’ – rather than accepting the grim truth that whereas the interaction of various corporations and their customers may produce a spontaneous order, what goes on inside a corporation is (in part) a matter of plans and orders – what Hayek called Taxis rather than Cosmos (indeed Hayek greatly feared that most of the employees of a corporation had little direct contact with the market place).
Other people believe that poverty or unemployment can be dealt with by supporting credit-money expansion – a fallacy refuted so many times, but which refuses to die (for it is such an attractive fallacy).
Very many people believe in democracy. If the majority vote for good people things will get better. And if the majority make a mistake – why then they can ‘throw the rascals out’ and vote for different people.
At least (so the pleasing illusion goes on) this will work if most people are basically good.
In the United States the great critic of democracy is seen as H.L. Mencken (he is even honoured by the predictable attempts to smear him as a racist bigot – which would have come as a surprise to all the black and Jewish writers he helped in the interwar period).
However, I believe that the greatest critic of democracy in the United States was not Mencken. The great journalist often failed to use measured language (his attacks on President Roosevelt failed, in part, because people remembered the wild abuse Mencken had flung at such men as President Coolidge -“Stonehead” and all the rest of it). → Continue reading: Irving Babbitt
In the ‘classical age’ of science fiction, most American writers seemed to be limited or even minimal statists (Heinlien, Piper, “Doc” Smith and so on).
Most writers tended to support a strong military defence – but not very much more government (indeed they were hostile to welfare statism).
These days science fiction writing seems to have changed. A minority of writers (such as L. Neil Smith) are actual anarchist (real anarchists – not people who do not like the word ‘government’ but still want a collective power to control everything), but most other writers are welfare state – interventionists writing ‘feminist science fiction’, ‘environmental science fiction’, ‘psychological science fiction’ or even straight science fiction – but with the normal statist slant of main stream literature.
Perhaps the problem started when science fiction began to be ‘taken seriously’ (studied at universities, taught in writing classes and so on). Or perhaps the general statism of our culture just flows in everywhere eventually.
However, whatever the cause the old classical view of science fiction (fairly strict limited statism – tending towards minimal statism) is gone and has been replaced by a few anarchist writers and a mainstream of welfare statists.
This is even getting into fantasy writing. Again I am not referring to modern British writers (I do not expect much from writers beloved by the B.B.C. – such as Mr Pullman), but even best selling American fantasy writers seem to be coloured by statism.
For example Mr Jordan (of the highly successful ten book Wheel of Time series) seems to assume that good government involves all sorts of interventions (hence his hero, oddly enough called Rand, keeps ordering people about in their economic life), and there are the normal signs of mainstream literature – wealthy businessmen are dodgy, the utopian society of the ‘Age of Legends’ was an interventionist welfare-state and so on.
Actually modern fantasy writing in Britain started out as broadly anti-statist. Tolkien (for all his Catholic distaste for people who were obsessed with money making) was no statist – and neither was C.S. Lewis. And the American fantasy writers followed them in the their belief that a good government was one which protected the nation against other powers and did not do many other things.
In short there was similar political outlook among the fantasy writers and the science fiction writers.
This reflected itself in role-playing (when this grow up), the format of most role playing was an individual or group of individuals opposing evil (evil being defined as forces, human or other, who came to rob-kill-control). External invaders, internal corruption, tyrannical government – it was all basically the same thing (force attacking people).
People who were socialists in ‘real life’ never thought of setting up welfare states in fantasy or science fiction games – because that was not the nature of things (and games did have an effect on “real life” beliefs over time).
Sadly this all seems to be ending.
The best known free market economist in Britain after World War II was not F.A. Hayek (who taught mainly in the United States and then Germany), but rather John Jewkes of Oxford.
John Jewkes was the main voice opposing government economic ‘planning’ and the endless taxes, spending programs and regulations of modern Britian.
Jewkes opposed statism in many ways – he tried to show students and fellow academics some of the errors of statist policy in his university work, he sat on official commissions (and tried to make their reports less insane), and he wrote a series of articles and books for the layman. Such books as Ordeal by Planning and The Sources of Invention.
John Jewkes was, in many ways, the best British economics had to offer in the post war world – and he shows that British economics was dying as a serious discipline. How can I say this? Well consider the following.
“It would be idle to deny that the White Paper was a ‘Keynesian’ document. Keynes was, after all, the major prophet of the idea that governments could, by increasing aggregate demand, reduce unemployment. Some of those who collaborated in the preparation of White Paper had been his pupils or had long been his followers. Those who resisted some of his ideas before the war had later gained an enormours respect for and confidence in him as they watched, and collaborated in, his superbly dextrous negotiations with the American Government and its economic officials. Those who had perhaps been most suspicious of the pre-war ideas of Keynes (I was among these) had seen at first hand the horrible consequences of the pre-war high rates of unemployment in the depressed areas, especially among juveniles and were only too ready to concede that, if the doctrine of the White Paper could be made to work, the post-war world might be a safer and more humane place”.
The Government and Economic Policy: A Defence of the White Paper on Employment Policy 1944, page 42.
Essay Three of John Jewkes’ A Return to Free Market Economics (Macmillan Press 1978).
My first concern here is not with the the idea that ‘increasing aggregate demand” (government issuing more funny money) is a good idea (absurd though that is), but the total lack of interest in basic economic theory that John Jewkes shows. → Continue reading: The death of economics in Britain
Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government.
A recent reminder of this in the British context:
A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences.
It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid – but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for).
They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government’s power to regulate (although the very institution of a ‘licence’ should have reminded them of this power).
Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls.
In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away.
The “close working relationship” they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their “support for British high tech business” (like the late Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” back in the 1960’s) was quite mistaken.
Now the companies are screaming and going to court – but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place.
It is often said that technology is developing far more rapidly than would have predicted at such-and-such a time. But there is another point of view.
And it is still being claimed that we live in a period of exceptionally rapid technical progress and one in which the time elapsing between invention and application tends to get shorter whereas it seems to be true that ours is really an epoch of comparative technological sluggishness when there are not very many authentically new things about and even these, for many different reasons, are being developed rather slowly. (How much longer, for example, will we have to wait for efficient battery-operated motorcars which will enable the pounding, smelly reciprocating engine to be thrown on the scrap-heap; or the typewriter which will type as one dictates, which will release hundreds of young women for other more interesting tasks; or audio-visual cassettes which will enable us to break away from the tyranny and the interminable boredom of modern television; or a cure for the common cold; or much cheaper and efficient ways of digging tunnels so that the surface of the earth could reoccupied by people instead of being overrun by machines; or really substantial cuts in costs of desalination rendering it possible to turn deserts into gardens. This list could easily extended.)
John Jewkes, Government and Technology, Third Wincott Memorial Lecture, 31st October 1972.
Well we have audio-visual cassettes now, and instead of typewriters that do not take dictation we have computers that still (in spite of the endless “computer that understands the human voice” inventions reported regularly since the 1960’s) have problems taking dictation. As for such things as cheap desalination (promised in California as long ago as 1956) we are still waiting – I would also mention nuclear fusion (we have been promised that since the early 1950’s).
The oft voiced claim that ours is the age of the most rapid technological development can certainly be contested.
President Bush has announced a proposal to abolish the Federal tax on dividend payments.
This proposal is defended partly on the grounds that reducing taxation (i.e. letting people keep more more of their own money) is generally a good thing, and partly because taxing dividends is ‘double taxation’ (the money that companies make already being taxed via Federal Corporation tax – which is actually quite high in the United States).
However, there is another factor to be considered. Financial institutions such as Pension Funds do not tend to be taxed as highly on their share holdings as individuals are (if indeed such trusts are taxed at all), so the effect of taxing individuals on their share holdings (not just the dividend tax but capital gains tax) is to concentrate a higher and higher percentage of stock into the ownership of financial institutions.
In short a group of hired managers in financial instructions ‘owning’ corporations managed by another group of hired managers. This may well be unhealthy (with a ‘magic circle’ of managers having developed, who tend to sit on each other’s ‘remuneration committees’ and lobby for State and Federal laws to make takeovers [if they are a threat to managers] more difficult and …)
In Britain the government also considered the difference between the regime of personal and financial institution taxation a problem. However, here the government responded by increasing the taxes that the pension funds (etc) had to pay – thus undermining further people’s incentive to save.
For all its many problems the United States is still a better country than Britain.
No one seems to have mentioned the death of Joe Foss (who died on New Year’s Day) here yet. As I have just read his obituary in the Daily Telegraph (link to article is currently down) I had better write something.
Joe Foss was a true American Hero, “Ace of Aces” in the struggle against the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, destroying at least 27 enemy aircraft personnally. He was a fine officer and an inspiration to the men who served with him. He survived being shot down and spent hours drifting in shark invested waters. Joe Foss was also a fine thinking officer who never let his aircraft be tricked into hunting enemy fighters – if this meant letting enemy bombers through to attack U.S. air bases.
For his bravery and skill Joe Foss won the Congressional Medal of Honour and many other decoratons.
However, Joe Foss was not just a good Marine – he was also a man of grit in civilian life, helping to save his families’ farm in Depression hit South Dakota (after the early death of his father) by hard slog. After the war Joe Foss turned down a vast sum of money for the film rights to his life (he was to have been played by John Wayne) because the film company wished to include a love affair that did not occur.
From running a flight school in Sioux Falls South Dakota Joe Foss served his State as Governor and in the United States Congress – before being defeated by George McGovern.
Joe Foss then became an outstanding broadcaster famous for such long running series on American rural life as “Joe Foss Outdoorsman”.
Joe Foss’s commitment to liberty did not weaken with age and he was President of the National Rifle Association from 1988 to 1990 and was staunch in his belief that Americans had the right to be armed to defend themselves and others “period”.
I have just watched part of a left wing John Wayne film (I did not see it all – I got so irritated I turned it off)… In Harm’s Way (1965) blames American problems in the Pacific war against the Japanese, on stuffed shirt Conservative officers – people who call the war ‘Mr Roosevelt’s war’ as people from their evil wealthy families called WWI ‘Mr Wilson’s war’.
Of course there is no mention of the film that President Roosevelt deprived the Pacific front of resources so that he could prop up Soviet Russia. Nor was this policy confined to the United States. Why did Singapore have no Spitfire fighters for air defence? Because the Spitfires earmarked for Singapore were diverted to Soviet Russia. 100, 000 troops of the British Empire were captured at Singapore – and they were left to rot and die. About 80, 000 Americans were captured in the Philippines – and they were left rot for years as well (many thousands died).
This was not because American commanders (Navy or Army) were poor in the Pacific (although some of the British ones were poor indeed). It was because the New Dealers in Washington D.C. did not care – all they cared about was their sacred Soviet Union.
Before anyone says that the Soviet Union saved Britain from German invasion think about the following: Thousands of allied sailors died taking supplies to the Soviet Union (not Soviet sailors dying taking supplies to Britain). Whether operation ‘Sea Lion’ (the German invasion of Britain) was practical or not (and the Germans certainly lacked the resources vital to operation ‘Overlord’ the allied invasion of France in 1944), the choice by Hitler to switch German air attacks from British airfields to British cities made operation Sea Lion a dead letter.
This choice was made before the Germany invasion of the Soviet Union. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was won before the invasion of the Soviet Union (not after it).
Of course there would have been no WWII anyway if Hitler and Stalin had not allied in 1939 – but the New Dealers (and their friends in Britain) blanked that out.
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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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