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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Not a phrase to grab you by the heartstrings, is it? But these are the words to listen out for if you want your child to learn to read properly. “Synthetic phonics” tells you that this is probably being done properly. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they’re using “eclectic” or “a mixture of” methods, watch out. “Dyslexia” looms.
I also put “dyslexia” in inverted commas, because what we have here is that very common modern phenomenon, a damaged brain diagnosed as caused by its own inherent damagedness when actually it is a brain that has been damaged by having damaging signals thrown at it from outside. The mental radar screen registers muddle not because it is muddled, but because it has been muddled.
The situation is actually a little more complicated than that, or the problem would probably not have got as bad as it has. There is just enough physical basis for the notion of “dyslexia” for the false claim to persist that dyslexia and dyslexia alone causes all reading difficulties, and for a multi-billion pound industry to spring up to fail to solve the problem. The reality is that good teaching automatically gets around almost any inherent, genetic predisposition towards reading difficulty, and teaches virtually all children to read successfully. Bad teaching, on the other hand, is something that the majority of children can hack their way past. They do it with difficulty, but they do it. The become literate despiteall the muddle they are subjected to. But not so the “dyslexics”. They don’t “crack” reading. They don’t get its inherent nature, because they have not been explicitly taught it.
And the explicit nature of reading that is not taught to an appallingly huge number of children these days is that each letter has a name and makes a sound or sounds (the name and the sound(s) not being the same! – obvious point but frequently overlooked), and that when you are confronted with a word, that is to say with a string of letters, the way to spell it out is to spell it out, one letter (or letter group like “ch”) at a time. Don’t guess. Don’t read only the first letter and then guess. Don’t look for the pattern of the “whole word”. Read. That’s synthetic phonics. Dee Oh Gee spells duh- o- guh- DOG.
Why don’t they teach that in all schools? Because they are ess tee you pee eye dee? Because they are mostly parts of a N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-I-S-E-D I-N-D-U-S-T-R-Y? Both, and much more that’s far too complicated to explain in a posting that would keep anyone’s attention.
So what brought all this on? Partly of course, I’m getting into the swing of having arguments that will eventually find their proper home in ‘Brian’s Education Blog’. But the particular provocation was a really good article in last Sunday’s Observer (Review Section, cover story).
You can also chase up the synthetic phonics story in more detail by going to the website of the Reading Reform Foundation.
A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?
Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don’t have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn’t you call the police. Mostly this works. It’s called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.
But most schools, and especially most state schools, don’t work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won’t be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.
It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don’t like what they’re getting keep looking. It’s called freedom.
I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport, although less expert about education “policy” than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.
If you have such stories now, don’t wait for Brian’s Education Blog… send them to Samizdata!
Of course, some libertarian parents don’t pay twenty grand a year to avoid state schools; they keep their kids out of school altogether. Which arguably costs more, as it can mean the loss of an income, although the older they get, the easier it is to do other things than run circles around them all day. And if you work out how many minutes of teacher-time a child in a class of thirty actually gets to himself (something like ten minutes) the prospect of home educating is less overwhelming. It’s mostly a matter of setting them up, and then letting them get on with it.
Advocates of the Taking Children Seriously school of libertarian parenting believe in letting their kids decide for themselves whether they want to spend all day in a classroom doing rote spelling followed by long evenings sweating over homework assignments. The impressive results of independent schools like the one where I taught for seven years don’t just come from their less violent and drug-crazed atmospheres; those kids are made to work like…well, I can’t think of any adult job where you do a seven hour day in a compulsory unpaid job not of your choosing followed by two or three hours of homework, plus regular testing. For, oh, eleven years.
What I remember most about attending school is its mind-blowing tediousness. This is not an experience I could honestly recommend to an innocent small person, and it always amazes me how so many people who patently hate school when they are actually there, suddenly decide it’s just wonderful fun when their kids get to the age of five, or four, or two months, or whatever the school starting age is in the UK these days. I personally think they learn more from “Spiderman” (narrative structure, characterization, moral theories) than from any number of weirdly patronising and contrived government tests.
However, as a home educating adult, I do vastly appreciate the ability of schools to keep huge numbers of noisy unruly children out of the places I want to go in the daytime with my flawless well-behaved angelic ones (ahem). Except that, the ones who have guns probably aren’t too bothered about whether or not their parents are jailed when they truant.
Alice Bachini
I’m thinking of starting a specialist blog of my own, dedicated to educational issues (“Brian’s Education Blog”?), and the following is the kind of story I have in mind to be featuring, along with things about government education reports and such like. In this case, however, The Times (paper version, yesterday, June 8, news section, page 12) got there ahead of me:
Lorraine Crusham decided to go private after her daughter was assaulted by 20 pupils at the local state school (Glen Own writes).
Nicole, 15, was a few weeks into her first term at Bridgemary Community School, in Gosport, Hampshire, last year when the attack occurred.
“I’d only just dropped her off at school when I received a call saying she had been hurt by a group of boys and girls,” Mrs Crusham said. “She had a massive bruise on her faced and had been kicked up and down her body. Two teachers were also assaulted.
“The school swept it under the carpet, claiming that she had instigated it by insulting someone the day before. But she had been off the previous day. I immediately took her and my 13-year-old son James out of the school.
“James was bullied for having red hair and being Scottish. One teacher suggested he could avoid it by dyeing his hair a different colour. I asked what else they thought I should change – his accent?”
Both children are now boarding at Shebbear College, Devon, where fees cost more than 12,000 GBP a year.
This story illustrates a more general report next to it, headlined “Parents go private as order collapses in state schools.”
On the subject of things Scottish, Freedom and Whisky linked recently to another story about school unpleasantness, and tentatively suggested that it might be something to do with compulsory school attendance laws. I agree, although the young people mentioned in this story were older than the current school leaving age of 16. I believe that almost all seriously nasty and bullying behaviour perpetrated by people who are not career criminals is the result of circumstances that both the perpetrators and their victims can’t (or feel that they can’t) escape from. Nicole Crusham was lucky. She could escape. Millions of others aren’t so lucky.
A free market in education talked about in London and Newcastle – and being done in India
On Saturday (March 16, 2002) I attended a day-long meeting (“Private education: the poor’s best chance”) at the Institute of Economic Affairs. This was one of two meetings (the other being in Newcastle) marking the launch of the E.G.West Centre For Market Solutions in Education, the Director of which is Professor James Tooley.
 Professor James Tooley James Tooley is one of my favourite people. He has discovered a whole world of private sector educational success being achieved by the world’s poor, in places like India and South Africa, and is busily telling this story back to the world, hence the E.G.West Centre.
The final speaker in the morning was Fazalur Khurrum, President of something called the Federation of Private Schools Management, India, which is based in Hyderabad. The story he told was of a hubbub of small private schools in the Indian city of Hyderabad.
Before him was Dr Sugata Mitra, the Director of Research for the Indian free-market-education giant NIIT. He was the star performer of the day. NIIT can see the day fast approaching when it will have gone as far as it can in educating the kind of Indians who are easy to reach and can afford to pay individually serious money. What about the massed millions of India’s (and for that matter the world’s) seriously poor?
Dr Mitra talked about a fascinating project, in which he stuck an internet-connected PC in a wall, protected by see-through armour plating, in various Indian versions of the back of beyond, and awaited results.
A smart and adventurous poor kid sees the computer. He starts pushing buttons. Other kids assemble and join in. Their poor fathers and uncles watch from behind. Their poor mothers and aunts watch from a distance. (He showed some film of all this, and it was like watching a wildlife documentary, with different humans behaving in different, yet classically human ways.) Within a few days there were a cluster of computer literate children helping each other to have fun and find out about the world, and learning about computers. All this was done by the machine and by the juvenile punters. No “staff” were involved. Dr Mitra watched it all from his office in New Delhi, through a video camera, and by eavesdreopping on the computer. He calls this his “hole in the wall” project.
 Dr Sugata Mitra I could go on. On Sunday I did, at unbloggable length, partly provoked by the embarrassingly boring British people who talked after lunch. The lunch only seemed free; they were the price. What they said wasn’t even fluorescent idiocy – that would have been interesting. It was just generic brand idiocy. For that you’ll have to wait until the Libertarian Alliance (by which I mean me) gets around to toning the insults down and publishing it all as an Educational Note.
A final point. A big reason why even very poor people prefer paying for private education in India is that this way their kids get a good start learning English. In Indian government schools, teaching English to children under ten – even teaching in English – is forbidden.
I have been labouring under the impression that the growth of Home-Schooling is a purely US phenomenon.
Not so. A refreshingly illuminating documentary programme was shown last night on UK’s Channel 4 about the rapidly growing popularity of Home-Schooling here in Britain. Sorry, it was a TV show so no link.
Actually, this should not come as a surprise given the current educational choices faces parents in Britain. Whilst private schools are widely available in Britain they are ferociously expensive so people of modest means have no choice but to process their precious charges through the state meat-grinders that HM government so kindly provides. The repute of the latter plumbs lower depths with each passing year.
The Home-schooling parents were all interviewed at length and, unanimously, they declared that their motivation was entirely due to the way they felt their children were being harmed or hindered by being sent to school in the ‘traditional’ manner so they just upped and decided to take matters into their own hands. Judging from the kids they were gloriously right; without exception these children were articulate, bright, curious, well-behaved, ambitious and highly-motivated. Furthermore, the time-worn prediction that Home-schooled children would grow up shy and withdrawn was proven to be egregious nonsense.
Now it might be said that the documentary-makers wanted to put a positive slant on things but programme-makers and TV producers in this country are notoriously hostile to free market ideas so if there was any bias it would most certainly tend towards the opposite.
Watching this show was a revelatory joy for someone like me but I almost had to be peeled off the ceiling when I heard some of the things these parents were saying. One mother said:
“I wouldn’t want any money from the government because I wouldn’t them involved in any way in what I am doing. That’s what’s so nice about what we’re doing; the government has no juristiction over me….They have no involvement in what I do and I’d like to keep it that way”
And another mother said:
“What tends to happen is that when parents grow more confident they question not just the type of schooling we’re given but also the type of health care we’re given and how Councils are run. It leads to you saying, hang on, if I can take this large amount of responsibility back into my own life, why can’t I live in a different way?”
Why indeed?
Warning: explaining free markets and freedom is too trite and too simple! Yep, that is right…or at least according to an “unbiased” teacher of mine.
Last week we had to write an essay fro class answering the question, “The 20th century showed us the problems of freedom, as seen in WWI, WWII, and Sept. 11. Please explain the future implications of this problem of freedom, specifically in the policy realm.” In explaining the question for us, the teacher clearly (and wrongly) explained how freedom caused WWI and WWII and Sept. 11. He also said that from this we can learn that freedom causes societal chaos…we need government or a level of control to prevent freedom from causing this chaos.
Any reader of Libertarian Samizdata knows how many lies this statement contains. Is this teacher actually going to tell me that Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Mussolini or FDR and the results of their administrations were a result of freedom when the logical answer clearly would dictate the exact opposite?
Anyway, I wrote a very lengthy essay debating his premise about freedom causing problems. And today, I got my essay back, and his one and only comment on my paper was: “While I do not mind the fact that your essay debates my premise, and indeed I am glad to see it does, your argument is too simple and results in simple rhetoric about free markets equaling freedom, C+”. My twenty-six page essay that raised twenty separate questions weighing the costs and benefits of free markets vs. collectivist states in a clearly detailed manner was too simple for his liking.
My friend, who, in one sentence accepted the premise and explained the question in one and a half pages, was told that his essay reached the appropriate level of depth and understanding. Now while I am the first to admit page numbers do not attest to a paper’s level of logic (Marx wrote a lot, but did that make him logical? Short answer: no!), my paper was well reasoned and well documented. In fact, I took it to three of my other professors and asked them to read it for logic only. The verdict reached by each was that I had great logical writing in this piece.
The remark about my paper being too simple is merely a cover for his real thought: you are wrong in your belief of free markets. Is it any wonder why we foster such lack of thought in today’s younger generation?
When I was a teacher I would sometimes, not often but sometimes, convince a yob* to do some work. When this happened I would do my best to welcome him back to favour but also tried to avoid giving said yob an easier ride than those who had always been working. I felt that giving him an easier ride would send the wrong messages to both yob and good kids. Correction, stuff the “wrong messages” bit, it would be radically unfair to both yob and good kids.
If I could work this out within weeks of first facing a class, why can’t Tony Blair? I say all this to illustrate why I heartily support David Carr’s recent post “A warning to George W. Bush” while opposing, in gnomic fashion, his post a little further down where he appears to lament the partial reform of terrorists.
* Editor’s translation for our American cousins: yob = English slang for a disorderly young man
While enthralled in an argument over God with one of my philosophy teachers, we hit upon an interesting subject that severely challenged my beliefs about the world. That subject was the question: are we determined by God to do things, or do we have the power of free will via spontaneous order.
The teacher’s assertion was that we are determined by God to do whatever God wants us to do. He further declared that the silly idea of individuality and the other silly idea of natural laws were a bunch of bunk that Thomas Jefferson (among many others) abused to gain power. These natural laws and notions that the individual was sovereign believed that spontaneous order works. Let me divert from the post for a moment and argue against two things here:
1) I believe that there are natural laws. In the state of nature, with no forms of civilization or order (including religion, government, and other oppressors) around, we would behave by these fundamental natural laws, without question, because they are natural. By nature, for example, we have the ability to operate individually for our personal good. That good involves saying what we think, owning property, having the ability to defend ourselves, and, among many others, having the ability to live. If those natural rights sound familiar, that is only because they are defended by the Bill of Rights. Libertarianism, I contend, revolves heavily around the idea of natural rights or natural laws. Without them, there is no justification for claiming that the individual is sovereign, which, need I say, libertarianism does.
2) Spontaneous order is what guides the world, not some cockeyed notion of God’s will determining us from birth to death. By nature things happen which force us to adjust and change our beliefs about the world. This is seen daily in capitalism, because of the innovation that is constantly undergone to correct past problems. I contend that people innovate and change without being determined to do so. But as my teacher would say, do we really know anything?
Let me stop with my philosophical diatribes that seem to be more prominent on Sunday morning than other times (those dang religious shows) and turn now to the question of what does this have to with liberal bias on campus. Just wait!
The teacher, as I stated, declared that every course of action was chosen by God. God had determined John Locke and others to invent the notion that in the state of nature, there are natural laws. This was to trick humans to think that God did not exist, hence the rise in the 18th and 19th centuries of deistic and atheistic notions; which God had determined.
He continued to say that in the 20th century God showed his power by causing the Great Depression (he determined the stock market to crash), to force religion back into our lives. Then he determined us to call for big government as a sign of religion; big government was a new age pyramid for God, if you will. I am not making this up!
Now here is how I look at it: I am a deist: there are laws in the universe that are not intruded upon by God. Second, I believe, as stated, in natural laws. Third, I believe that natural laws clearly defy the growth of government; and seeming that God does not supervise or enforce those natural laws, God does not support big government either.
Regardless if you agree with me or not on my religious views, I think most of us (I hope) can agree that God does not support big government. However, if you listened to the teacher one might think that FDR was God’s second son. (That would make Daschle…)
But wait, it gets better. I asked him to explain the infidels who do not support big government? His answer: the devil put them on this earth to torment God, and so far God is winning showing his strength with every new government program. So, to my fellow devil worshiping libertarians, advocate evil by advocating limited government.
In a nauseating opinion piece by authoritarian paleo-socialist Dea Birkett, writing in The Guardian (naturally), the state is urged to use force to abolish private education altogether in Britain. Birkett wants people to be deprived of even having the possibility of privately educating their children. We are told society must have a common purpose and once private education is made illegal, presumably socialist education police will start locking up people who dare to set up underground schools or educate at home. Birkett urges nothing less than universal forced backed nationally planned state education for all, regardless of what a family actually wants, in order to further national socialist goals.
But such a tiny minority holding on to such an outdated view on the right to exclusivity would increasingly appear absurd, as redundant as the royal family. Once private schools were reduced to such insignificant numbers, they could be easily, quietly closed down. The benefits would be enormous.
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Education would become something we all shared, equal stakeholders in its quality and worth. Education could be effectively and efficiently planned on a national basis, in the knowledge that every child would go to a local school.
[…]
It’s no longer any good just offering carrots. It’s time to reach for the stick.
Will someone please remind me which side won the Cold War? Natalie Solent has described the equality and sense of common purpose Birkett demands as the equality and common purpose of galley slaves. If that ever comes to pass, Birkett and her ilk need to be shown that they are not the only ones who can reach for the stick.
In class today, the subject of the strength of man became a focus of discussion. Many in my class offered the theory that all people (can’t dare say man) are perfect and through societal reforms can become more perfect. I challenged this mind set as a bunch of baloney. Men, err people, are not angels! Men, argh people, are fundamentally egotistical and only improve their outcome and behavior, if not their interior character, so as to adhere to some incentive. (Thankfully a really hot girl in the class agreed with me, but that is another story…)
Eventually the teacher asked me (the hot chic too) if we had read too much Friedman or too much Ayn Rand. Once we said yes the teacher asked if we were Libertarians. I love listening to my profs on Libertarianism, here is why.
There are two main arguments they use against the fundamental principal of Libertarianism (as I define it, the ability of all people to act freely in the market to spontaneously create societal good [as luck would have it this is the same definition I discovered that this hot libertarian chic uses too]). First, Libertarianism is too simple for today’s complex world. Second, Libertarianism is now two centuries old; its glory days died with the Great Depression. Let me deal with these both in turn.
Libertarianism is too simple
Upon analyzing the way our society is, I have concluded that this complexity is a result of the elite wishing to keep it complex. The minute these elites say it is simple, they are no longer elite. It should come as no surprise that the tool of creating this complexity is the government.
So, to protect their elite-ness, they have made the world more complex, via laws and also via their discussion of “heady” issues. An example of these heady issues is their common cry that unless you understand that you can never really know anything, like natural rights as described by Locke, you can never really ever understand anything about the world, or, put differently, you cannot be elite until you understand this moral ambiguity. Well, I am in the top 8% of my class, apparently I know something – and I know enough to say %*** the &*** elites! Oh sorry, let me stop swearing.
The world is fundamentally simple, and operates better as such. If there are too many regulations, you just have trouble. Market forces are not allowed to work properly to solve social ills. Libertarianism does advocate this level of simplicity, and thus it works better than anything else.
It’s old and dead, bury it already
This argument cracks me up! Here is how it works: The 18th century saw the rise of Capitalism; the 19th century abused capitalism, and the 20th century saw why Capitalism does not work, and why we should ban it all together in the 21st century. Now I have a disagreement with their interpretation, as I think the 20th most clearly showed the strength of capitalism and the death of socialism. This is clearly defined in the Cold War; however, it can also be seen in the areas of society that innovated the most throughout the last century. Let me quickly examine as an example: education and technology. (To confess this example was originally offered in class by the loveliest Libertarian I have ever met, but I agree with it and am throwing in some of my own stuff.) Education saw little to no innovation in how it was taught; it saw innovation (if you can call it that) in the administrative process of education. There are more education regulations, but quality is dropping. Technology saw great innovation, not in the administration but in how it works. Computers are faster now than ever before. The quality has improved. I care a lot more about quality of the product over the administration of the development of the administration for the product. In other words, capitalism still works to this day and is not dead. (However, it is because of this professor that I have found at least one reason to support the Drug War.)
(P.S. – Although this may be a really interesting discussion, I must admit that I was struggling to prevent drooling while listening to the hot Libertarian chic, and therefore did not do the argument justice in class, hence my posting it here, after allowing time to regain some composure)
(P.P.S. – Point of clarification about my last post. It was not intended to defend sales taxes. They are wrong, evil, and nasty stuff for more reasons than what I mentioned.)
Another report from the front lines of socialist-land from the student hiding behind the “pixilated burqa of on-line anonymity”
I love the “logic” of the majority of my fellow students. They “hate” taxes and love big government programs. Hypocritical? Yes, but it gets so much better than it might appear at first glance.
One tax they hate the most is the sales tax on text books. Now a 3.7%+ tax can add a bit to the bill when an average bill is over $200. While understandable, the student legislature has a weird solution to this problem: ban sales taxes on campus.
Now while I love the thought of banning taxes all together (I am a Libertarian after all), I find it hypocritical that they also call for big government. If they (the supporters of this big government) don’t pay for it, then who do they think will? The hypocrisy is unbelievable. You pay for what you advocate.
These student bureaucrats, oh I am sorry student legislators, apparently have some problem with sales taxes. I hardly doubt that it is the same problem I have. My problem is that it takes money from people and spends it on horrid and wasteful government programs that violate the very nature of the US Constitution. (This is true with me of all taxes.) Unlike me, their problem is that sales taxes are more visible to them than payroll taxes and income taxes (they’re wards of Mummy and Pappy and don’t need jobs). In my opinion, sales taxes are the best of all the evil taxes available. As sales taxes are the least unfair because it is harder for the politicians to politicize them. With income taxes they can change the rates so that the rich get screwed and the poor get helped. That is exactly what we have right now in America (the majority of taxpayers are rich paying for the poor – the minority of people paying for the majority of people because of the tax structure). The student legislatures (who really dislike me, by the way) really do not care about the payroll taxes or other forms of income taxes that their fellow working students (the minority of students need you be told) have to pay
Let us pretend for a minute that I am mistaken: they just dislike all taxes, not just the visible ones. Assuming that this is true, and it is not, they are clearly fighting the wrong battle. Want to reduce taxes? First reduce the government, then taxes will follow as spending will decrease then all politicians will have nothing left to do with the money except return it. However, I highly doubt that this is what they think, as they suffer from the liberal’s contagious cancer that encourages a pro-tax bias. There are two other reasons why I know this is not the case. First, they want to eradicate taxes in just the bookstore, not in nearby restaurants and stores. Dare I say that this may be, in some twisted way, a political move of these future bureaucrats?
I also know this because they like to see the government doing things: education, health care, energy, environmental protection, euro-creation, food distribution, retirement provisions, and whatever else. In other words, they have no problem with people paying 100% taxes, if that is what it takes to have these utopia-based government programs. Furthermore, they dislike any mention of broad scoping tax cuts, even the petty cuts proposed by the president and the governor of whatever state I happen to be in.
The idea of anti-taxes is not bad, but that is clearly not what they really believe. They just want to save their political hides by not having on campus taxes. Like all politicians, these student politicians also see the need to eradicate visible taxes from those they represent. At least if their hearts were really against taxes I may not be so displeased with their decision, but as it stands, these politicians are operating at the same level of intelligence as Tom Daschle and Karl Marx.
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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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