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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It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.
An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.
Take this dumb paragraph:
“Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture… Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem.”
Phillips’ attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such “libertarianism” undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not – I am not entirely convinced either way – but Fortuyn’s views struck me as entirely coherent.
As for liberalism’s roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?
Phillips’ analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.
It seems my item on Wednesday Lessons for Blair from France, pointing out the advantages of constitutional monarchy as a healthy focus for patriotic sentiment compared to the likely alternatives triggered a few harrumphs from some Samizdata readers. I cannot answer every point but here are a few:
I was trying to figure out how monarchy on the British model might prove useful in some societies roiled by internal strife, such as France. My article was most certainly NOT a starry-eyed defence of monarchy as such. As a minimal statist libertarian who has flirted with the anarcho-capitalist stance, I certainly think our Royal Family should be privatised, its tax-funding status ended and the Civil List significantly curtailed. I also realise the Royal family’s role in standing atop the English class system which, while not as oppressive in the past, has its faults. I am also well aware that the U.S. is the great example of how a republic can hold the allegiance of its citizens and has worked supremely well, give or take the odd hiccup such as the 2000 Florida vote re-count controversy (“George Bush is dead, long live George W. Bush!”) and some unpleasantness during the 1860s.
More broadly, I would say this: until the day comes and we can all live in a libertarian utopia with zero income tax and tiny government, or no government at all, we are likely to have states. Those states will be headed by someone or something. It really unlikely that an elected president, who is bound to be a partisan political figure, could be an improvement. After all, Royalty is a lottery for its members. They don’t ask for the job and are obliged to repay their fortune with a life of duty. (That is why royals get such stick if they are seen to misbehave, like some of the younger present members).
Of course, one day we may be able to dispense with the whole affair and move on. But as a libertarian activist, getting rid of royalty is not exactly top of my priorities. I’d rather focus on cutting the government down to size. If I could pay just 10 percent income tax with the Queen remaining in Buckingham Palace, I’d settle for that rather than a social democratic republic where I’d pay 50 percent.
Anyway, that is my ha’ pennyworth on the subject. For a good, thorough defence of British style monarchy, check out British journalist, blogger and aspiring Shakespearean actor Andrew Sullivan. Worth a read.
Here’s a poser for Samizdata readers – does the institution of constitutional monarchy help to domesticate feelings of patriotism into something more civilized?
Michael Gove, in a splendid column for the UK’s Times newspaper today, makes the point that the monarchy, precisely because it is composed of fallible human beings above the political fray, acts as a far healthier focus of national loyalty than often afforded by more “modern” republics, like, say, France. As our society becomes more individualised, multi-ethnic and diverse, it is surely more, not less, important to have institutions that can provide some kind of common bond. Think, for example, how the breakup of the Hapsburg empire after the First World War led, in short order, to an upswelling of often unpleasant nationalism in the states composed out of its demise.
If the electoral travails of the French tell us anything, it is that, even after five republics and the Empire of Bonaparte, they still haven’t figured out the value of constitutional monarchy as part of a truly liberal order.
Cato Institute member, scourge of protectionist idiocy and blogger Brink Lindsey pays a fulsome and moving tribute to recently-deceased American steelmaker Ken Iverson, who tore up the script on how to make steel. Iverson reads like a character straight out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He founded the “mini-mill” model of steel production using scrap steel and smaller, less cumbersome production techniques, founding the North Carolina firm Nuccor.
Iverson consistently opposed tariffs and other protectionist measures, believing his style of business could flourish in a free market. His success as a businessman is a poke in the eye of deluded economists and vote-grabbing politicians who think that such key industries as steel can only survive under the umbrella of government support. Iverson proved the opposite. Ken Iverson was by all accounts very different from the sleek business figures of left-wing demonology. A down to earth character who took his own phone calls and motivated his staff. He surely will take his place in the Pantheon of real capitalist heroes. Reading his brief life story helped brighten my day.
The great American satirist P.J. O’Rourke uses his usual combination of deadly-sharp wit and smart understanding of economics to launch a salvo at government regulations in his article How to Stuff a Wild Enron. In this case, he argues that the collapse of U.S. energy titan Enron, far from proving that we need more regulations, proved that regulations can make such catastrophic problems more likely and more dangerous.
Here is a killer paragraph: Regulation creates moral hazard. We don’t understand finance, but it is regulated, so we’re safe. “Regulation,” Jerry Taylor (a friend) says, “dulls the sense that you would take into an unregulated situation. If you hear screaming in the middle of the night, you assume it’s hot sex, not murder.”
The line about sex is brilliant. If only all discussions about market economics and the perils of big government were so racy.
Who would have thought it? Oxfam, the charity normally associated with a fairly leftist view of overseas poverty, has released a big document charting how the best hope for the world’s poor lies in more free trade, not less. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation to Samizdata writers or most of its readers, I am sure. Nonetheless, for such a well-known and prestigious body to have set its face against the anti-globalisation crowd is good news. It looks like this liberal (in the true sense of the word) meme of ours just keeps on spreading.
Having made a dig at our Gallic cousins on Thursday it is only fair to point to a welcome burst of common sense from the land which has of course yielded such wise people as Alexis de Toqueville and Frederic Bastiat, both genuine liberals (i.e. not socialists).
In the Financial Times’ editorial pages today, psychoanalyst and author Michel Schneider writes that in France, the state has become so big as to represent a mother-figure to many of its citizens, who increasingly regard themselves as children. Schneider is the author of Big Mother: the psychopathology of political life, and the whole article is worth a read. So as Dr Glenn Reynolds would say, go read it.
Great news item via Reuters in Paris (no link yet, sorry):”a Paris bank employee who works for 37 hours a week, has 37 days holiday a year and sometimes wonders what to do with all her free time.
“When I go down to visit my family in Brittany for a long weekend they ask whether I actually have a job at all,” she says of the new leisure granted to her and millions of other French by a four-year-old law that has shortened working hours.
As certain columnists like to say, you couldn’t make it up.
Like many a Londoner living in the middle of the city, it is all too easy to take the cultural riches of this place for granted, such as its many art galleries. And of course my interest can be all too easily blunted by the mind-erasing trash that goes under the banner of “Modern Art”. So it was great to have seen the American Sublime show at the Tate Britain gallery last weekend.
The exhibition features work from landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Francis Cropsey and Thomas Moran. Some of the pictures were small, some of them were vast canvasses showing the sheer grandeur of the landscape in the early days of Jefferson’s Republic from the early to the middle of the 19th Century.
What these works all had in common was stunning mastery of paint, a razor-sharp eye for detail and an awareness of how to ram home the vastness of the Rockies, the huge waterfall of Niagara or the rough weather found off the coast of Maine. The virtuosity is staggering, and all achieved without the aids of modern technology. Some of the paintings had a melancholy feel, some overtly religious, some were designed merely to revel in the mastery of paint. All left me moved in some way to feel my admission fee was money well spent.
The show also reminded me that all too many of our current so-called artists haven’t the skill to pull off the kind of visual achievement of their 19th century forbears. They cannot be bothered to put in the painstaking effort, and mask their incompetence behind such nonsense as sheep preserved in liquid or bits of dung chucked onto the side of a wall.
The American Sublime exhibition is a demonstration of how great art can be but also that can be no substitutes for effort and practice. If the purpose of art, as the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, is to enhance life, then these painters achieved that goal brilliantly. Or, to take the definition given by Ayn Rand, art is the selective re-creation of reality in the light of certain values. For these painters, they picked out the great, the awe-inspiring, the sheer scale, of what they saw as America was opened up in the rapidly industrialising world of the 19th Century. These were things that mattered to them, and it shows.
I cannot recommend this exhibition highly enough. It continues until May 19. Fellow Londoners have no excuses. Go see it.
A Japanese electronics firm has invented a high-tech pint glass that tells bar staff when it needs refilling. The glass is fitted with a radio-frequency coil in its base that emits a signal to a receiver when it is empty. The glass has been invented by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Strikes me that this is the way for Japan to get out of its current economic mire. Is technology wonderful or what?
The current worrying increase in crime in Britain, with its spate of shootings, muggings, burglaries, as well as the continued rise in general boorishness and incivility, is one of the main topics of public debate in this country. Predictably, our political masters have reacted to this by proposing such illiberal and largely useless “solutions” as restricting the right to trial by jury, state ID cards, and so forth. So it is encouraging to know that an earlier generation was able to tackle what was by then a relatively unruly society withouth raining all over civil liberties. It has been done before and it can be done again.
I refer to that much misunderstood and maligned period – The Victorian age. They brought about a substantial drop in the crime rate without raining all over civil liberties. And one interesting feature of that period was that the school-leaving age was lower than it is now. Of course this is a complex subject, but I cannot help thinking that some of the current bout of delinquency among youngsters is that many of them are bored out of their minds at school and could be spending their lives more usefully elsewhere.
“I don’t want to see lust and rape and incest and sodomy in the theatre. I can get all that at home.”
–Dudley Moore, entertainer, jazz and classical pianist.
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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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