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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Andy Duncan, in his rather, umm, shall we say, idiosyncratic post Ode to the future, made a very good point. He noted that we tend to obsess over the bad news here at Samizdata.
As a political professional, I can assure you that nothing turns off your audience more quickly than an unremitting diet of negativity, and nothing harms an advocate more than having only complaints without solutions. I happen to believe that, in the very big picture and the very long view, a lot of trends are running our way. Now, I enjoy complaining about the cult of the state as much as the next fellow, but I will be making a conscious effort to bring some good news to the fore. With that in mind, I give you the retirement of Senator Fritz Hollings.
This is good news, in small part, because it his seat in the US Senate will likely go from the Democratic Party to the Republican next year. As odious as the Republicans frequently are, I find that I can tolerate around 15% of their platform, as opposed to perhaps 2% of the Democratic platform, so this counts as a small plus.
The major reason that this is good news is that ol’ Fritz was perhaps the single most committed protectionist in the Senate.
“Later, in a telephone interview, Hollings said he plans to redouble his efforts before his term ends on issues ranging from budget discipline to protecting textile and other domestic industries, which were among his leading interests for years.”
He recently became known as the ‘Senator from Disney,’ after campaign contributions from that source revealed a previously unsuspected interest in extending intellectual property protections to unprecedented lengths, allowing Disney to retain income streams from Mickey Mouse far into the future.
(For the uninitiated, when a Democrat talks about “budget discipline,” they are referring to increased taxes, not reduced spending.)
David Bernstein, posting on the Volokh Conspiracy, notes that:
The political views of Latinos are troubling for advocates of limited government, who also tend to be advocates of liberal immigration policies. As the New York Times reported yesterday, and has been well-known for some time by those who follow such things, Latinos, like prior waves of immigrants from poor Catholic countries, tend to be socially conservative and in favor of big government in the economic realm. In the famous Nolan Chart, Latino voters are disproportionately in the “authoritarian” quadrant, the opposite quadrant from limited government-oriented libertarians.
Given that Latinos are already considered a very important swing vote, and will become ever more important as they become a larger percentage of voters, the current volume of Latino immigration can’t be good news in the short to medium term for fans of limited government.
This is depressing news, given that Latinos are such a large and rapidly growing ethnic group in the US, and have been identified by both parties as a critical consituency to court. Identifying Latinos are social conservatives likely to, say, oppose gay marriage could go a long way toward explaining the apparent ease with which leading Democrats and Republicans have come out in opposition to the idea. The pursuit of the Latino vote, while it may lead to pandering/sensitivity (take your pick) on immigration issues that is congenial to at least some libertarians, may also lead both parties further into the swamps of government-enforced morality.
One wonders if there are any ethnic groups that are culturally predisposed to liberty. One also wonders whether the fabled ‘self-selection’ of the immigration ordeal skews the immigrant profile toward those who want more freedom than they have at home, or toward those who are inured to enduring the immigration and naturalization bureaucracy.
Not that there is any Deep Libertarian Significance to this story, but no opportunity should be missed to revel in the humiliation of a bureaucrat.
Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has himself flunked a required literacy test three times, The Eagle-Tribune reported Sunday.
. . .
Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test, which has been required since voters passed a law last fall requiring English-only classrooms.
[State Education Commissioner David P.] Driscoll said he is willing to give Laboy more time to prepare for another retest.
”He’s not a native language speaker, so a formal test is something he needs to prepare for,” Driscoll said. ”It doesn’t mean anything now. It will mean more as time goes on because there’s an expectation that he’ll pass.’
I suspect the really scary part of this is that the Lawrence school district had 24 teachers who lack basic English proficiency. The other scary part is that the failure on multiple occasions to demonstrate basic language skills “doesn’t mean anything” if the individual in question is already enfolded in the forgiving arms of the civil service.
And I agree with most of what he says!
Norman Geras, who I had not previously encountered until he recently fired up his blog , has an interesting take on things from what appears to be pretty well left of center. I was particularly taken with his thoughts on the war, which echoed some of my own but were much better put (less spluttering and profanity, for the most part).
But opposition to the war – the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush and so forth – meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children’s jails, and the mass graves recently uncovered.
This was the result which hundreds of thousands of people marched to secure. Well, speaking for myself, comrades, there I draw the line. Not one step.
A spot of googling reveals that Mr. Geras is Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. His books include Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, and Men of Waugh: Ashes 2001, and he shows up in rags like Imprints: A Journal of Analytical Socialism (I confess to Windexing my computer screen after that web page opened up). One is always searching for sane lefties to try to gain some insight into the cult of the state, and Norm looks like he may be worth keeping an eye on.
Sometimes, the gods of the internet just give you a gift.
A new panel charged with finding ways to make Connecticut government run more efficiently will release its report six months later than scheduled.
Yeah, I want to take advice on efficiency from these guys.
The ubiquitous Instapundit, who is accumulating a stable of international correspondents, posts a missive from Afghanistan that is sure to remind you of why you loathe transnational progressives, their NGO tools, and all associated parasites, hangers-on, and do gooders. A juicy bit, to whet your appetite:
It’s not all monotonous or pointless in Kabul; at one French NGO housed in a stunning antique-laden chalet, I’ve devoured a seven-course meal prepared by a 4 star chef. Then there’s always the sumptuous UN House, where one can take a dip, mingle poolside among scandalous bikinis and dowse dehydration with inspired cocktails fashioned by our languid Euro masters. Unfortunately, since “American UN employee” is an oxymoron, our one attempt to storm the formidable barricades is a spectacular failure. We’re rudely turned away, despite flashing $20 bills to the Afghan UN security. My companion, a fierce Pushtoon-American licensed to pack a very visible Glock 19, glances back at the sunbathers as we’re escorted out: “We’ve paid for all this with our taxes, you bastards!”
One has to shake one’s head at the pistol-packing Pushtoon’s naivete; since when has the fact that a taxpayer funded something ever triggered appropriate feelings of gratitude and respect from our betters in government ‘service’?
A debate is currently raging in libertarian as well as in less refined political circles about whether the USA should allow ‘reimportation’ of prescription drugs. Basically, the problem is that patented drugs in the US are sold at prices much higher than they are available overseas. Patented drugs are the newer drugs for which no generic equivalents are available, giving the patent-holder a monopoly on that drug while the patent endures.
The drugs are available more cheaply in other countries for a variety of reasons, but in large part because the governments of those other countries have intervened in the drug markets to set prices. Canada, in particular, has ‘negotiated’ some sweet deals for high-demand drugs, and Americans have flocked across the border to get some of that cheap drug action. With prescription drug prices soaring in the USA, legislation has surfaced to allow drugs to be ‘reimported’ from these socialist havens at the prices that prevail.
On the one side, many libertarians see lifting the ban on reimporting as a simple case of freeing up the market to let it do its magic. Probably the best case that I have seen for this side of the ledger is Conservative Drug Split at National Review Online.
However, it seems to me that this approach overlooks some pretty major issues. Leaving aside the safety issue, which my clients in the drug industry assure me is no straw argument, I do not believe that the cause of free markets is well-served by allowing reimportation.
To cut a long and sordid story short, prices are so cheap in other countries because the governments of those countries demand that the drugs be sold at slightly above their production cost. They can do this because (a) in many countries the government is a monopsonist via the national health system and/or (b) the government simply threatens to break the patent and start manufacturing the drug itself (or allowing someone else to manufacture the drug).
To claim that the sale or reimportation of drugs that are priced under this system has anything to do with the free market strikes me as delusional. First, of course, the prices now obtaining in these markets are not market prices, but are monopsonist prices extracted by threatening to break the patent. Keeping these drugs out of the relatively free US market is no more of a barrier to free trade than keeping the local fence from selling stolen TVs out of the back of a truck.
Proponents of reimportation seem to assume that, when reimportation is allowed, the drug companies will go to these nations and threaten to either cut them off or raise their prices, and the governments will meekly go along. This in turn assumes that these governments will not simply break the patents, as they have repeatedly threatened to do and in fact have occasionally done in the past. Nor am I convinced that breaking the patents will result in any real consequences for the nations that do so. The only hammer over these nations would be the WTO or other treaties, and I do not believe that the government of the US would go to the mattresses to protect Big Pharma’s patents. It never has in the past, and there is no reason to believe that it would in the future. With reimportation allowed, in fact, the US government would have to be crazy to do so, as protecting the patents overseas would dry up sources of cheap drugs that reimportation allows back into the US.
Sadly, the lure of cheap drugs is too much for your average politico to resist, so I think we can look forward to the corruption of the US drug market by overseas socialism.
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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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