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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This year’s hunting trip to the Great American West was (another) success, venturing forth heavily armed into the lovely country in south-central Wyoming, amongst the sagebrush flats and quaking aspen. The view from our line cabin:
Another look at the countryside: → Continue reading: Home from the hunt
Nothing like a nice bit of Frog-bashing to fire up the commentariat and get the weekend off to a good start.
Alstom, builder of high speed trains (TGV), nuclear plants and cruise liners, was the showcase of French technology. It is now the showcase of French bankruptcy.
Like France, Alstom is badly managed, unable to balance its accounts, and encumbered with debt. Alstom illustrates the failure of French “social-capitalism,” a state driven capitalism that is actually closer to socialism.
Hmm. State-driven capitalism. Where have we heard of that before?
The socialo-gaullist elites, who control French media groups, buy their support by distributing money to Communist (CGT) and Trotskyite (FO) unions, to 7 million public servants (often useless), to 12 million retirees (often pre-retired), plus millions of immigrants living on welfare. But French politicians are so “generous” that even with the highest taxes of any OECD country, they chronically accumulate huge debts in all public entities: state, regions, cities, social programs, public companies. Having been unable to balance any French budget for more than 30 years, they are driving France to a financial crisis that will shake all of Europe.
A very satisfying rant against the enarquist elite ensues, bringing on a moment of nostalgia for past French contributions to the cause of liberty.
Mark Steyn is one of those writers whose effortless prose intimidates me into not taking up a writing career. An expat Canadian who lives in New Hampshire, he has a very nice piece on the apparently permanent supine position that conservatism has assumed in England. Starting about halfway down, though, he gets to the really interesting part, when he talks about the dangers of centralization and the benefits of devolved power:
Conservatism should be committed to as decentralised a politics as possible. If my town has lousy policing, it’s no skin off my neighbours 15 miles down the road. Conversely, if my town hits on a good idea, my neighbours are happy to borrow it. Decentralisation is the best way to ensure a dynamic political culture, full of low-key field studies. That’s one reason why every good idea Britain’s law-and-order monopoly takes up was started in a local American jurisdiction (the ‘broken window’ theory) and every bad idea was cooked up by the national Home Office bureaucracy (the gun ban).
Decentralisation is also the best way to get new politicians in. London’s Euroleft conventional wisdom disdains not only the rude unlovely electorate at large but also any representatives chosen from without the full-time political class. As the Guardian sniffed, ‘Putting Arnie in charge of the world’s fifth largest economy is like making Benny Hill Chancellor of the Exchequer: quirky but unreal — and not very funny.’ Get a grip, lads. Benny Hill would have made a terrific chancellor.
Go for the wit. Stay for the ideas. Ponder how to raise decentralization and devolution on the political radar screen.
There is an enormous hill to climb, of course – politics seems to be subject to a law of centripetal gravitational convergence, where power naturally centralizes, but only devolves during catastrophes or revolutions. Still, devolution strikes me as a fundamentally libertarian project, if for no other reason than it lays the groundwork for that bane of statism – competition between jurisdictions.
Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at his other blog about breaking the law, and the simultaneous growth and loss of legitimacy of the regulatory state.
There are too many laws — many of them contradictory or obscure — for any person to actually avoid breaking the law completely. (My Criminal Law professor, when I was a law student, announced to us that we were all felons on the first day of class. There were too many felonies on the books for us not to be: Oral sex in Georgia? Oops!) And given that many laws are dumb, actually following all of them would probably bring society to a standstill, just as Air Traffic Controllers and pilots can make air travel grind to a halt by meticulously following every safety rule without exception.
Stop and think about that for a minute. What does it say about a society, when strict adherence to its laws would be an unmitigated disaster?
The other problem is that law is like anything else: when the supply outstrips the demand, its value falls. If law were restricted to things like rape, robbery, and murder, its prestige would be higher. When we make felonies out of trivial crimes, though, the law loses prestige. As the old bumper stickers about the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit used to say: “It’s not a good idea. It’s just the law.”
Instawisdom, in my book.
Wall Street Journal Online’s Claudia Rosett has a stunning article on repression in North Korea, where the prison camp state may have reached its apotheosis. The article served to remind me of the righteousness of our project here at Samizdata. I can only pray that our small efforts make a difference, somewhere down the line.
Of immediate interest is the link she draws between the utter savagery of the North Korean regime and the newly ascendant strategy of appeasement of that regime. Sadly, it appears that the Bush administration has opted for appeasement as well, after resisting such a policy for many months.
The latest hallucination of geopolitics has it that if only we can make North Korea’s Great Leader Kim Jong Il feel safe from the fate of Saddam Hussein, maybe he’ll stop testing missiles and making nuclear bombs. So the experts–whose ranks have now swelled to include, alas, even President George W. Bush–have been scrambling for ways to make Kim feel more secure.
Bad mistake. Even in the exquisitely complex realms of geopolitics, there comes a point at which right and wrong really do matter. Ensuring the safety of monsters is not only an invitation to even more trouble ahead, it is also wrong. Before Mr. Bush says another word about security for North Korea’s regime, before any more policy makers suggest any more deals to gratify Kim Jong Il’s deep appetite for his own ease and longevity, there’s a report the entire civilized world needs to read–released today by the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. In landmark depth and detail, this report documents the filthiest of all Kim’s backroom projects: North Korea’s vast system of political prisons, which underpin Kim’s precious security right there in his own home.
As an aside, I never cease to be amazed at the useful idiots who view corporations and the market as more of a threat to their well-being than the state. When Microsoft and Exxon order “babies tossed on the ground to die, with their mothers forced to watch. . . , or assign [grandmothers] to help in the delivery of babies who were thrown immediately into a plastic-lined box to die in bulk lots,” I will be willing to listen to these morons, but not before.
The state is not your friend.
The Bush administration recently has been pummeled by a quasi-scandal involving the leak of the name of a purported CIA “covert operative.” I won’t go into any details here, as I don’t think there is any “there” there. One of the responses of the Bushies was to crack down on leakers in the administration.
This new anti-leaking policy was, of course, promptly, well, leaked.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he ‘didn’t want to see any stories’ quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.”
From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance, a very interesting article on the close historical links between fascism and socialism (or at least Marxism). It has never ceased to amaze me how many people think that fascism/nazism and socialism are somehow divided by a wide gulf.
Sure, states professing fascism and nazism went to war with a state professing to be communist/socialist, but the most bitter struggles are always internecine, and anyway how can you miss the fact that the name of the Nazi party was National Socialist?
The article should provide you with ample ammunition to make uncomfortable the many, many socialists out there who view “fascist” as the ultimate in derogation.
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.
Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.
Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures.
Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?
What indeed? The remainder of the article, on first read, seems to be well-researched and well-thought out story of intellectual and political ferment.
James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.
Yes, the authoritarian acorn never falls far from the collectivist tree.
Great story posted at the Volokh Conspiracy:
Ron Simpson knows guns — and instantly knew the one in front of him Wednesday night was a phony.
Sure, the gun in the hands of the would-be robber at Action Video at 1058 Alamance Church Road had the look of a 9 mm, but Simpson, the manager, said he was “95 percent sure” the muzzle was too small to project a bullet.
“That is not a real gun,” Simpson told the robber. “This is a real gun,” he said, pulling a .25-caliber derringer from his front-right jeans pocket. . . .
Simpson picked up a cordless phone, dialed 911 and followed the robber outside. The fearful criminal stayed about a minute and ran before police arrived. . . .
Reminds me of that scene in Crocodile Dundee when the eponymous hero is confronted by a street punk with a switchblade.
This particular article on the oral argument before the US Supreme Court concerning search and siezure doctrine doesn’t really have any looming significance for the future of planetary liberty. I mostly thought it was well-written and funny, and gives some insight into the “sausage factory” of the common law.
First, the set-up:
The Fourth Amendment bars the state from unreasonable searches and seizures. One of the things that makes a search constitutionally “reasonable” is the presence of a warrant. Another is an old common-law requirement: the so-called knock-and-announce rule. The rule is codified in 18 USC § 3109, which provides that in executing a search warrant, “an officer may break open any outer or inner door or window of a house, or any part of a house … if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance.” In cases of likely destruction of the evidence, or danger to life, the cops are free to bash first and knock later.
An insight into the fundamental problem with the appellate courts in the US:
Stevens is still hung up on the statute. The statute requires “refusal” to admit the cops. Silence is not refusal, he says. Salmons replies, “That is the way the statute is worded. But this court has never construed the statute to be read literally.”
Hold the phone.
This is a court that is rabid about construing statutes literally. This is a court that would read Dada poetry literally. They are strangely satisfied with this answer.
Actually, the Supreme Court, like almost any court, only reads statutes literally when that will get them where they want to go. When the words on the page of the governing authority, whether a statute or the Constitution, are inconvenient, well, then we get a lot of blather about “living documents” or “legislative intent” or whatever, until the courts feel we have been lulled into not noticing they are about to say that the governing authority says something which it clearly does not say.
Anyhow, read the article mostly for the wit and the bathroom humor. What’s that, you say? Bathroom humor at the Supreme Court of the United States?
You bet. Read the whole thing, and find out.
What a sorry state of affairs, when we are reduced to hoping that the Queen of England, a monarch, will prove to be the bulwark of liberty against the encroaching EU superstate.
The Queen is growing more concerned about Tony Blair’s plans to sign a European constitution that she fears could undermine her role as sovereign.
The Telegraph has learnt that Buckingham Palace has asked for documents highlighting the constitutional implications of the EU’s plans to be sent to her advisers.
It is believed that the Palace’s concerns focus on whether the Queen’s supreme authority as the guardian of the British constitution, asserted through the sovereignty of Parliament, could be altered or undermined by article 10 of the draft text.
This states: “The constitution and law adopted by the union’s institutions in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the member states.”
Many MPs say that this will rob the House of Commons of its ultimate authority to override decisions and laws made by the EU.
I love that “many MPs.” I mean, it isn’t like they are making their interpretation up out of thin air. Isn’t that what the damn thing says in so many words?
So, fill in this American on what, if anything, the Queen can do to toss a spanner in the works. I tend to believe that liberty is preserved when power is dispersed through competing authorities. Does the old girl still have the stuff to make a difference?
Doesn’t it?
Just when you thought you’d seen it all, someone opened up with a set of twin-mounted .30-caliber machine guns, or the more lethal array of quad-mounted .50-cals in a swivel turret.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS, for the acronym-addicted) began laying out its agenda for its upcoming session by announcing the cases that it has accepted for review, and those that it has not. Among the cases that it has refused to review is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (federal circuit courts are the appellate courts for the federal system in the US; the 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over the West Coast) decision barring the federal government from prosecuting (or persecuting, take your pick) doctors for recommending marijuana to their patients.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that physicians should be able to speak candidly with patients without fear of government sanctions, but they can be punished if they actually help patients obtain the drug.
So, this has been pitched relatively narrowly as a free speech issue, rather than as a broader liberty/self-ownership issue. That is probably a wise strategic decision on the part of marijuana advocates. I personally don’t see where the federal government has the Constitutional power to outlaw drug use in the first place, but I am old-fashioned and believe the Constitution means what it says. SCOTUS hasn’t subscribed to that view since FDR intimidated the Court into submission in the 1930s.
Nine states have laws legalizing marijuana for people with physician recommendations or prescriptions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. And 35 states have passed legislation recognizing marijuana’s medicinal value.
But federal law bans the use of pot under any circumstances.
The case gave the court an opportunity to review its second medical marijuana case in two years. The last one involved cannabis clubs.
As I recall, in that case SCOTUS said that cannabis clubs could prosecuted even if they were supplying only medical marijuana users.
The optimism expressed by various advocates about the import of SCOTUS refusing to take this case is badly misplaced, in my opinion. A refusal to take a case is far short of a SCOTUS opinion upholding the ruling of the 9th Circuit, and the annals of the Court are replete with examples of cases declined, only to have the same issue come up in a different posture later on to be reversed by SCOTUS.
Still, this is qualified win for the forces of good, feel free to celebrate with your substance of choice.
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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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