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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Continuing on the topic of Belgian idiocy, I have been marvelling at the way the police in Brussels have been pronouncing on yet another night of rioting by Muslims in that city.
Philippe Close, the chef de cabinet of the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said that the authorities would continue their efforts to defuse the situation in a peaceful manner, but he announced that the police will be less complacent in future, “since we cannot tolerate that this [Marollen] neighbourhood falls victim to a problem from outside the neighbourhood.”
Why ‘in a peaceful manner’? People try to set fire to a hospital and that should be solved ‘peacefully’? After three days of violence and looting of private property, the police should be cracking skulls without apology and to make the important point that violence should be met with greater violence. If they cannot protect the taxpayers who pay their salaries, what use are they? Moreover what are we to make of Philippe Close’s remark about the Marollen district falling victim to a problem from “outside the neighbourhood?” Does that mean it would be okay if only the rioters were local lads?
No doubt the Vlaams Belang (about whom I am deeply ambivalent) will reap the rewards from the Muslim rioting at the upcoming Belgian municipal elections, probably leading to the Belgian government banning them at some point in the near future.
The fact Belgian newspapers want it to be harder to find the content they put on the internet is weird (why bother having an on-line presence at all then?), the fact they went to court to force Google to stop driving traffic to their sites is bizarre, the fact a Belgian court found against Google is insane.
This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).
Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.
There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it’s the “dank and gray” area of the Hague he was raised in or the “arrogance” of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.
Van Gogh’s murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland’s flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan “activist”, who didn’t like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. “The sobering truth,” wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, “is that Europe – democratic, gun-controlling Europe – is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.”
Read the whole article.
There is an interesting article in Newsweek suggesting capitalism is on the march in more minds than you might think.
In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. “Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer,” reports “20th-Century History,” a popular high-school text published by Hatier. Another suggests Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dangerous free-market extremists whose reforms plunged their countries into chaos and despair. Such blatant disinformation sheds new light on the debate over why it is that Europeans lag so far behind Americans in rates of entrepreneurship and job creation.
[…]
a recent poll by the IPOS Institute finds the market economy’s approval rating rising to 59 percent among Germans under 30, with only 32 percent saying the state needs to play a bigger role. Ten years ago, the figures were reversed. “The values shift is already underway,” says Bürklin. It’s about time.
Indeed it is about time. The absurdities and contradictions of the statist world view is our biggest ally and gradually more people do figure out better theories for understanding reality regardless of what they are taught.
The Europeans mess up once again. We look at them playing power politics without a powerful hand or a sense of bluff. It takes some level of incompetence to have the Chinese do to you what you tried to do to the Americans:
Today, the Chinese are attempting to do to the Galileo system the same thing that Europe tried, and failed, to do to the US. China has registered with the ITU its intent to use frequencies that are as close to Galileo’s as Galileo’s were planned to be to GPS 3. The speculation is that this is the Chinese response to the European refusal to allow China into the charmed circle of senior Galileo management.
I mustn’t gloat.
Spain’s socialist government is turning its back on the post-Franco ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach with regard to the Spanish civil war. It plans to prohibits any political event at the location of Franco’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid. Yet whilst I am hardly a fan of Franco, the notion that a socialist government has any moral authority to suppress pro-Franco sentiments strikes me as absurd. There were no ‘good guys’ in the Spanish civil war and if the current Spanish socialists see themselves as the heirs of those who fought Franco then they see themselves as heirs to despicable would-be tyrants who were in no way admirable just because their enemy was little better. It was a war between mass murderous collectivist socialists of various dispositions against mass murderous collectivist national socialists.
In many ways the one thing Franco had to commend him was that his system of government was always unlikely to outlive him whereas a socialist system might have lasted longer… which is to say it might have lasted until the late 1980’s and in which case more the mass graves being dug up now would be filled with falangists and their families as opposed to socialists and their families (not that the left was shy about slaughtering its civilian enemies during the war).
People who get misty eyed over the resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war are fools. It did not really matter who won, Spain was going to lose regardless. A pox on both sides of that terrible war.
Recently, I heard someone describe the Australian constitution as the second best in the world. No prizes for guessing the best. Since the recent 4th of July celebrations, I have been revelling in the bracing ideological purity of the Constitution of the United States of America, and I have no doubt that it is superior to the constitutions of other nations – in the mind of a liberal, anyway. What of Australia’s, however? It is hopelessly outdated and largely irrelevant – the form of state it envisions bears little likeness to modern Australia. For example, the office of Prime Minister is not mentioned at all and most of the mechanics of government exist thanks to convention rather than doctrine. It is not a bad constitution; mainly for the fact that it contains none of the Fabianesque “positive” rights (citizens have a right to a life free of poverty, etc) which tend to enable and then entrench statism. Such caveats are common in most modern constitutions, to their great detriment. If Australia’s constitution is the second best in the world, it is certainly a very distant second. As regular commenter Chris Harper said in a recent Samizdata thread,
The Constitution of the United States of America, one of the great works of human thought.
Quite. In contrast, Australia’s constitution is passable only due to the elements it does not contain – surely there are a number of superior (in ideology and effectiveness) national constitutions in place today. So what is the second best constitution in the world?
You would think Switzerland’s should be a contender. It is a country that holds a number of liberal values as national traits. It is also admired by many of the Samizdatistas, who tend to be a rather liberal bunch (for the most part). One would not be being unreasonable if they predicted that the Swiss constitution is a relatively liberal document. However, if you did predict that, you would be wrong. I did a little research to test my above hypothesis, and was surprised with what I discovered. Far from being one of the best constitutions around (from a liberal perspective), I believe the Swiss document to be one of the worst – if not the worst. For a start, it is too easily altered. According to Wikipedia, the original Swiss constitution was altered to include
the “right of initiative”, under which a certain number of voters could make a request to amend a constitutional article, or even to introduce a new article into the constitution. Thus, partial revisions of the constitution could be made any time.
Worse still, a revised version of the constitution that came into force in the 1990s
is subject to continual changes
due to
constitutional initiatives and counterproposals[.]
This is no good at all. Most liberals are deeply interested in durably enshrining the rights and freedoms of the individual; if these can be swept away on a majoritarian whim, then sooner or later it is likely they will be. Such ease of amendment dramatically weakens the document, although worse is to come. From the same Wikipedia article mentioned above:
[The] Swiss Federal Constitution has a certain peculiarity when compared to other constitutions in the world. It does not provide for any constitutional jurisdiction over any federal laws, that is, laws proclaimed by Parliament may not be struck down by the Federal Court on the grounds of unconstitutionality. This special provision in the Swiss Constitution is a manifestation of how democratic principles are held to outweigh the principles upon which the constitutional state is built.
What a terrible idea. A liberal would assert that the whole point of a constitution is to constrain majoritarian democracy – has the phrase “tyranny of the majority” been widely translated into French, German or Italian? This “peculiarity” consigns the Swiss constitution to complete irrelevance. Regarding the contents of the document – who cares? They can be ignored at any time by a majority of the Federal parliament. The constitution may currently be adhered to by Swiss federal politicians, but there is nothing enforcing their adherence. The only thing that stands between the relatively liberal arrangement the Swiss enjoy today and a Blairite soft tyranny (or worse) is the Swiss people’s enduring common sense and conservatism. I have met a number of Swiss folk in my time and have found that generally they are predisposed to exhibit both traits. However, events change people. Time changes people. If the Swiss elect a Tony Blair and the political circumstances allow it, such an individual could set about dismantling the various manifestations of Swiss liberalism, completely unrestrained by the toothless constitution. I am led to believe that the Swiss constitution is relatively popular in that country. For a generally conservative people, it is hard not to remark that they paradoxically admire a document that is inherently unconservative – dangerously so.
As for the second best constitution in the world, perhaps some of the readers of this post might put forward a few contenders.
(An English translation of the Swiss constitution can be found here – also via the aforementioned Wikipedia article.)
In connection with my regular writing duties here (at one of the blogs that Alex Singleton was recently so kind about) I have been unable to avoid learning about the huge takeover battle that now surrounds Arcelor. I hazarded the guess over a month ago that Lakshmi Mittal, one of the protagonists, seemed to be doing okay, despite much opposition, and now it does indeed look as if he will win.
Cécille Philippe‘s latest piece for the Molinari Economic Institute may have been particularly inspired by this huge news story, although all that she alludes to is a “large wave of takeovers”. Anyway, she writes lucidly about the benefits of takeovers, and of the constant disciplinary effect they have upon the managers of large enterprises, concluding thus:
Takeovers make it possible to put an end to sources of loss, to increase the wealth of shareholders and thus to preserve employment which would otherwise have been lost if the company had been brought to bankruptcy for failing to satisfy its consumers. Takeovers are thus an alternative to bankruptcy which leads in a brutal way to a total reallocation of assets to better performing companies.
An industry’s prosperity cannot be decided by law, it has to be created. If one allows the owner’s deeds to be exchanged freely on the financial markets, they end up in the hands of those who think they are most capable of developing them. The reason why they are better placed than the public authorities to carry out this task is that they will have to undergo the financial consequences of their actions in the event of failure. The bureaucrats while escaping the sanction of loss and profit, cannot do other than carry out industrial projects by hazard and chance.
It is thus necessary to recognise the legitimacy of takeovers and to make sure that foreigners are free to make purchase offers. It is equally important that nationals are free to compete with them. The freer the financial market is and the more the shareholders’ right is respected, the more the industry’s prosperity depends on industrial projects being adequate to consumers’ requirements.
Most of which will be fairly obvious to the average Samizdata reader. But France is, perhaps, a country in which such obvious propositions need to be stated with particular clarity just now. Knowing Cécille Philippe a little, I not only hope but assume that she is also doing this in French.
However, Arcelor is a very special case, and Cécille is probably right not to name that particular case in this piece, because it would complicate her argument dreadfully. With Arcelor, wider considerations, as they say, are at stake. However, having now come across this earlier piece, I am surer than ever that it is the Arcelor case that she, and her, I trust, numerous French readers, have been particularly thinking about.
The Libertarian Alliance is highlighting the disgraceful way Belgium has been trying to intimidate people who hold politically incorrect views. Put an article up that the powers-that-be do not like and they will order you to take it down or face prosecution. But then what can you expect from a country which simply bans established political parties they dislike?
Support the right to home school your children? Advocate the right to self-defence? Want to express your views about Islamic culture? Prepare to be criminalised by the Belgian state.
This takes some beating for an alarming sub-header for an article:
As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima
Blimey! At least it happened in the middle of nowhere rather than downtown Oslo.
Still, we all know it was really caused by George Bush capitalism McDonald’s global warming!
Funny that Paul should mention Italian elections; I watched a piece on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Foreign Correspondent tonight that trailed a couple of Australians (I call them Australians, because that’s what they are – not Italians, despite their declarations to the contrary) who have just been elected to the Italian federal parliament under the utterly ridiculous new system that mandates a level of parliamentary representation to “Italians abroad” – that is, emigrants. One of the two men, Nino Randazzo (who’s been an Australian for more than fifty years), nominally supports Romano Prodi’s coalition, however he is seen as a potentially swinging voter in a tightly balanced senate and thus holds power far beyond that which his diminutive stature implies.
Notwithstanding the fact that the legitimacy of these foreign men wielding Italian political power is extraordinarily tenuous, what do these people want from the Italian state? According to one of the two, financial assistance for “cultural purposes” to benefit people who have left Italy to make better lives for themselves in other countries. One newly-elected American member of the Italian parliament declared that Italy somehow owed its émigrés something due to the remittances they voluntarily sent back to Italy many years ago.* The mind boggles. Why, oh why do these privileged foreigners think they have the right to extract funds from the already hard-pressed Italian taxpayer – a group they deserted long ago? Why on earth are Italians not apoplectic with rage over these people who are only going to make the Italian government’s deficit slide further into the red with their demands of cultural grants for foreigners? And we’re talking about foreigners who have already helped create rich Italian cultures in their chosen countries and as a group could effortlessly afford to fund whatever cultural boondoggles these new enemies of the Italian taxpayer have in mind. Of course, most Australian-Italians would not give a cent (Australian or Euro) for these cultural pursuits – whatever they may be. Amazingly, in this circumstance the new Italian electoral system has made it easier to arm-twist a foreign government to do one’s bidding.
You have probably ascertained from my colourful use of formatting that I am a wee bit irritated by the exploits of these men. For a start, I do not like parasitic types who think they have some divine right to expropriate other people’s money. Secondly, I cannot stand those who move to a country like Australia, make their lives here and by all accounts do very well for themselves in a way that they could not have if they’d have stayed in the land of their birth, only to turn around and insult the nation that provided them with so much opportunity and declare “I’m Italian”. There is a simple solution to this problem. The Italians can have their new politicians back. It seems only fair; they are paying for them, after all.
*Apologies for not providing quotes; the programme in question – Foreign Correspondent on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television channel – tends not to post the transcript of the segment until the day after it’s aired. It will be available here, and when it becomes available I will edit this post accordingly.
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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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