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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James Lileks captures the angst of the social statist in America in this exchange regarding John Kerry’s promise to raise taxes by rolling back the rather meager and back-loaded Bush tax cuts:
Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide . . . . Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen – I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?
“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.
“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”
“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”
“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”
That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:
“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
Two responses to this last quote. First, it is James’ money because he earned it. Second, he has no objection to it becoming the worker’s money, so long as they earn it from him. In fact, the money James kept because of his tax cut now is the worker’s money. Her point, such as it is, evaporates into thin air.
The only difference? Mr. Lileks, sturdy Midwesterner that he is, believes people should should earn their money. His earnest young interlocutor, following in the sadly well-worn path of Minnesota socialism, thinks money should shower down like manna from heaven.
The occasional refrain here at Samizdata is that we are relentlessly pessimistic. Even though the recent series on Burt Rutan’s space adventure was anything but, our political writings rarely highlight good news. Alrighty then, two items that should brighten your long-term outlook for liberty:
First, Mark Steyn reviews recent history in Latin America and notes how it might apply to the Middle East.
If you think the democratization of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratization of Latin America. But it happened.
Second, the Iraqis are showing more spine than most, maintaining confidence in their pending government in hte face of terrorist brutality.
The first survey since the new government was announced by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi about three weeks ago showed that 68 percent of Iraqis have confidence in their new leaders. The numbers are in stark contrast to widespread disillusionment with the previous Iraqi Governing Council, which was made up of 25 members picked by the United States and which served as the Iraqi partner to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
Connect the dots.
Very interesting appraisal of Bill Clinton. I confess I loathe the man and his wife, who strike me as distilling the worst elements of their generation and of the New Ruling Class in America into two near-sociopathic personalities.
Also apropos Clinton and the current President, one of the mysteries of their terms:
The mystery of Clinton is that he was an essentially conservative president — perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland — and yet he was loathed by conservatives… I’m not sure I can explain it either — any more than I can explain why George W. Bush has inspired such antipathy from the Al Franken wing of the Democratic Party even while so abjectly pandering to them with his Medicare expansion, No Child Left Behind Act, campaign finance reform and budget-busting spending increases. Here’s Dubya expanding the Great Society, and yet he gets accused of dismantling the New Deal. Go figure” — columnist Max Boot, writing in the Los Angeles Times. (link not provided due to odious registration process, which pissed me off).
Clinton (despite his tax increase and failed nationalization of health care) has a domestic policy legacy that most Republicans would be proud of, and Bush’s domestic policy has been largely scripted to satisfy his Democratic opponents. Yet both are vilified by the very people whose policy positions they advanced. Something to ponder.
Of course, neither has done much to increase liberty within the four corners of the US of A.
The eight British sailors arrested by Iran have been paraded on television and forced to make public confessions. It just occurred to me that these are both violations of the Geneva Convention, which I believe applies in this case because the British sailors were in uniform, etc.
So why have I not heard any screams of outrage from the Usual Suspects? There are, after all, interest groups out there so enamored of the Convention that they want it followed in cases (illegal combatants, nonstate actors, etc.) where its provisions clearly do not apply. You would think they would be double-extra hot to have it followed where its provisions do apply, but apparently not. I guess we can file their complaints under Outrage, Manufactured Selective Partisan, Discount and Dispose of Soonest.
It is fashionable to accuse the US of being an imperialist nation due to its extensive activities and interests overseas. The US, though, is sadly short of exotic tropical possessions, in contrast to one of its biggest and most self-righteous detractors, France, which is still a true imperialist, presiding over a bona fide colony of brown-skinned natives who have had the temerity to express a desire for independence.
Now, I am not sure exactly what the political arrangements are with respect to Tahiti. It is interesting to see that the French are placing their own self-interest ahead of Tahitian independence.
France is likely to oppose any move towards independence. Thousands of French troops and civil servants are based on Tahiti.
And a sweet posting that must be. 
“French Polynesia is part of France’s aspirations to have a presence in every ocean and any loss of territory would have an impact on their status as a power with global reach,” said Mr Maclellan. “The territory also has a huge exclusive economic zone, with rights to fishing and sea bed minerals.”
Classic imperialist/exploitative greed, non?
The Tahitians have been heavily subsidized by France, a way of getting French taxpayer to foot the bill for the aforementioned sweet civil service postings and for whatever sweetheart deals French businesses get for all those fish and minerals. However, in a real shocker “allegations of corruption, poor economic management and a desire for fresh political blood” have led to a political victory for the pro-independence party over the political hacks who stood for continued subjugation to the French imperium. In the punchline, the new leader is aligning himself more closely with the nearby Anglosphere nations.
Will the usual suspects who decry US imperialism at every turn show up to protest the real item when practiced by the French? Will there be international objections to the heavy-handed tactics the French bureaucrats will employ to defend their perquisites? Will one of the last outposts of colonialism disappear? Stay tuned.
Here, a story on how refusing to medicate your child can be deemed child abuse.
So Taylor took Daniel off Ritalin, against his doctor’s wishes. And though Taylor noticed Daniel was sleeping better and his appetite had returned, his teachers complained about the return of his disruptive behavior. Daniel seemed unable to sit still and was inattentive. His teachers ultimately learned that he was no longer taking Ritalin.
School officials reported Daniel’s parents to New Mexico’s Department of Children, Youth and Families.Then a detective and social worker made a home visit.
“The detective told me if I did not medicate my son, I would be arrested for child abuse and neglect,” Taylor said.
One hardly knows where to begin. The bogus “medicalization” of behavior? The all-too-common abdication of parental and teacher responsibility in favor of the easy fix of medication? The heavy hand of the state telling a man he has to drug his child for the convenience of public employees, even though the drugs are causing sleep and appetite problems.
The folks in Iowa have got their market up and running for the 2004 Presidential election. Each contract pays a dollar; as of yesterday, you can spend just over 58 cents on a Bush contract, and around 43 cents on a Kerry contract. As you can see, the futures market is bullish for Bush (hmm, there’s a slogan in there somewhere, possibly with an R rated logo) as compared to the opinion polls (right hand column, scroll down a little for a summary/average of current polling – very handy for the political junky).
The Iowa market is worth keeping an eye on – over the last several elections, it has half the forecast error of the opinion polls.
Update: For those hankering to put their money where there mouth is, and perhaps fleece a few rubes, the main page for the Iowa Electronic Futures Market is here. Sadly, there is a $500 cap on positions.
In case anyone was wondering why the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party,” it turns out that the Bushies, those erstwhile evil geniuses, have scheduled themselves to nominate W as the Republican candidate after the deadline set by several states for placing a nominee on the ballot.
Sadly, every state but one has scrambled to accomodate these patent screw-up. Now, I can understand Republican state legislatures amending their statutes in this circumstance, but why on earth would anyone expect the Democrats in Illinois to do so?
The federal court sitting in (of course) San Francisco has struck down the recent federal ban on “partial-birth abortion.”
First, I agree with this decision, but on federalism grounds, not the privacy grounds cited by the Court. Nowhere does the US Constitution grant the national government the power to ban any medical procedure, as far as I can tell. It is interesting that this particular basis for overturning the statute apparently never occurred to the (liberal/statist) federal court in San Fran. Liberal statists are horrified by any reference to the fact that the Constitution grants the national government very limited powers, as taking these limitations seriously would probably require either extensive amendment of the Constitution or the junking of over half of what the national government does.
Second, it is interesting to observe the politics around this decision. The statement by the abortion rights spokesman that whether a fetus feels pain is irrelevant to a woman’s right to choose is utterly tone-deaf, and seems to be telegraphing a belief that at no point does a fetus acquire personhood that would negate or need to be balanced off against the woman’s right to choose. That is a losing position with the American electorate, and probably explains the rather noticeable silence from the Kerry camp.
The doctors probably have the law, and the morality of it, about right according to this article. The seminal Roe decision granted/recognized a right to choose abortion up until the point of viability, and was basically silent after that. I am no abortion scholar, but I do not think that the Supreme Court has ever really expanded on this time period in any explicit way, although it has danced around it in a number of decisions on ancillary and peripheral issues. Doubtless the inveterate Samizdata commenters will refine my understanding of the law, but I think that viability is not a bad place to draw a line on abortion rights. The difficulty is, of course, that technology constantly pushes the point of viability backwards, but that is a discussion for another day.
However, whether the common medical understanding of abortion rights is correct in turn begs the Constitutional question of whether the US Supreme Court had any business overturning state laws on abortion in the first place. The underlying reasoning, relying as it does on “emanations” and “penumbras,” has been endlessly mocked, and rightly so, for it signalled a Court that no longer cared much what the words on the page said, but rather what they wished the words on the page said.
This in turn showed a Court much less concerned with what the Constitution says than with what the Court says. This disregard for the plain meaning of the Constitution, although arguably employed in the service of individual rights in the abortion cases, paved the way for such utter travesties as a Court upholding extensive and explicit restrictions on political speech. Very little of the US Constitution’s substantive provisions concerning the powers of government and the rights of citizens are still operative in any meaningful way, because the primary enforcer of the Constitution no longer cares to apply the plain language of that document.
Gotta give Matt Drudge credit for these back to back headlines:
Putin fights off ‘authoritarian’ charges…
Report: Russia Guards Told to Smile More…
I dunno about you, but I was bored stiff. I was driving home from work when it came on the radio, and I damn near dozed off and drove into a light pole.
Sure, the delivery was that kind of Rotary Club tumpty-tump that we have come to expect from W, but really, substance aside, couldn’t the text have been a lot better? This is just mediocre writing, the kind of dull crap that I expect from a third-rate consulting firm, not from what should be the pinnacle of any writer’s career.
In this particular war, in which all the meaningful battles are being fought between the ears of Iraqis, Americans, and a handful of other nationalities, having such an ineffective communications team on our side is probably worth at least an armored division to the Islamonutters.
For an interesting insight into how the statist meme became so dominant, check out these comments by an Instapundit reader:
Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem.
. . . .
It’s no accident that for the most part, the news is dominated by people whose value is largely driven by how much publicity they receive: politicians, athletes and entertainers. The people who actually make the world work – people in private industry, rank-and-file government employees and conscientious parents – are largely invisible in the news, except when they’re unlucky enough to make one of the rare mistakes that reporters manage to find out about.
My reading of this is that the mainstream/elite media and the state sort of bootstrapped each other to the top of the pile, in classic one-hand-washes-the-other fashion.
The media propagated the statist meme because it was both easy and it elevated them to the degree that centralized media is parasitic (or perhaps symbiotic) with a centralized state.
The comments come just as yet another survey is released demonstrating that the denizens of American newsrooms are significantly more “liberal” (in the newfangled sense of the term, the one where the jackboot is made by Birkenstock) than the general public. Perhaps the best illustration of the whole dynamic is that a survey showing the media is significantly more hostile to President Bush than the general public went out under the title Press Going Too Easy on Bush.
You can’t make this stuff up. Now, I certainly have my beefs with the current President, but the self-appointed Fourth Estate has really gotten up my nose lately. They could play an important role in society, as a necessary feedback mechanism, but they have largely abrogated that role, in my view. Thank goodness that a new, distributed feedback mechanism is emerging in the form of the blogosphere.
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