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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Occasionally, one stumbles across actions of the regulatory state that masquerade as market policies. Irish health insurance falls into this category.
Health insurance is always a tricky subject as it falls into the wider issues of how private sector medicine can be established. In Europe, with its wide diversity of state driven medical practices, plus voluntary health insurance and complentary health insurance as a tolerated private sector, it is difficult to envisage how one would wean the populace off these systems, even with impending bankruptcy looming. The ‘Big Bang’ approach of deregulation would not work as the infrastructure and skillset to develop an entrepreneurial model does not exist and this is one area where the gradual replacement of state structures by the private sector and/or civil society may be more appropriate. Complex and difficult issues to grasp with few answers. → Continue reading: Irish Health Insurance
It is galling to read endless utilitarian articles for and against banning smoking on commercial (but nevertheless private) property with nary a mention of whether it is actually just to enact authoritarian proscriptions on the acts of others who are, after all, in voluntary close proximity.
At least the erratic Telegraph takes a fairly good stab at doing just that:
Other politicians throughout Europe will be watching the Irish experiment closely. You can be sure that if the Irish surrender to the new law without a strong show of resistance, it will not be long before a similar ban is introduced in Britain.
So Irish smokers have a responsibility to freedom-lovers everywhere to make their displeasure felt. They have already come up with some ingenious suggestions for exploiting loopholes in the new law. We wish them luck in finding more.
We note that prisons are among the very few workplaces exempted from the ban. So anyone incarcerated in the cause of freedom will at least be allowed the consolation of a smoke.
Light up, Ireland. Do not cooperate in your own repression.
recoup (v.) recouped, recouping, recoups
v. tr.
To receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
To return as an equivalent for; reimburse.
Law. To deduct or withhold (part of something due) for an equitable reason.
v. intr.
To regain a former favorable position.
So when we are told that a committee of the Irish parliament will tell the Irish government that it should…
…use taxes or development levies to recoup some of the windfall profits made by property speculators when their land is rezoned.
… we are being told the Irish government should receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
Now how exactly does a property owner profiting from a change in the manner in which the Irish state abridges their property rights (i.e. land use zoning), thereby cause the Irish state a loss that needs to be recouped?
It should be clear that what we have here is an example of our old friend ‘meta-context’ at work again. Underpinning the suggested tax increase is the unspoken axiom that the economy exists for the purpose of allowing the state to acquire resources and any profits derived from the economy which benefit someone else other than the state are in fact a ‘loss’ for the state. That is to say, this is just a slight variation on the bizarre economic fallacy that someone else getting richer perforce makes someone else poorer. The self-evident concept of wealth creation simply does not register.
I wonder how many people sitting in that Oireachtas committee set to tell the Irish leader to increase those taxes would find the notion that the only reason the state ‘allows’ people to engage in economic activity for their own benefit at all is so that the state can tax them? My guess is that it would not be a commonly held overt belief but if you were to actually strap a number of mainstream Irish journalists and TDs to chairs and question them, teasing out the unspoken underlying assumptions within which they see the world, that is indeed what you would discover to be the case.
In what is a splendid testament to the sense and wisdom of Irish youth, when the EU held a conference for young people in Ireland (free registration required)… how many young Irish people turned up?
None.
Clearly they had better things to do. How very, very, very, splendid. 
I hope that nobody in Ireland was naive enough to imagine that the recent public smoking prohibition was the zenith of their government’s ambitions.
Not even close. In fact, they are just getting warmed up:
After piloting through radical laws that will ban smoking in Irish pubs at the end of the month, Irish Health Minister Micheal Martin pledged to bring in new controls on alcohol.
Martin’s smoking prohibition will mean that anyone found lighting up in bars and restaurants after March 29 will face a fine of up to 3,000 euros.
Addressing his Fianna Fail party’s annual conference, Martin said he now planned to target the country’s alcohol problem and to encourage “responsible” drinking, in particular targeting under-age offenders.
Lord only knows what else is on his ‘hit-list’ but his blood his up and his nostrils are flared with the scent of victory so its onwards and upwards to new frontiers of micro-management. His is an addiction for which is there is no ‘cold turkey’. It is a thirst that can never be quenched and neither reason nor persuasion can divert such people from their mission.
How apposite is the wisdom of C.S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I have posted this quotation here on Samizdata before but the age in which we live demands that it be repeated again and again.
Our good friends at Slugger O’Toole were featured on the Northern Ireland TV show “Hearts and Minds” tonight. Politicians from across the spectrum heaped praise on what the blog has accomplished for local politics.
We had Mick Fealty’s smiling face in multiple cuts. The previous time I saw it was after about six pints (or so) in the local, well… locals some months ago. He didn’t look quite the same on TV as when I last saw him that night, searching for his coat under the legs at the bar…
David is too easily impressed. Over here in Ireland, we were doing public sector cannibalism when public sector cannibalism wasn’t cool.
In 1992, the Irish Labour party broke with tradition by entering into a coalition government with Fianna Fail. The Labour party had increased its share of the vote after a campaign of vigorous opposition to Fianna Fail. To placate its voters, most of whom had expected that they were kicking FF out of government, and because they were feeling cocky, Labour demanded a whole raft of rhetorical leftiness in the government program. One of these was to rename the crusty old “right wing” Department of Justice as the brand new, “compassionate” Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. A consequence of this was the establishment of Citizen Traveller, charged with:
implementing an integrated communications initiative to promote the visibility and participation of Travellers within Irish society, to nurture the development of Traveller pride and self confidence, and to give Travellers a sense of community identity that could be expressed internally and externally.
This translates as: a Traveller-advocacy group working out of a government department, their motto: “Promoting travellers as an ethnic minority”. So when one government department – the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform – enacted legislation to enable the police to evict caravans which were trespassing on private property, a branch of the same government department – Citizen Traveller – took out expensive billboard and newspaper advertisements to protest this “racist and unworkable law”.
We are unfortunate in that, despite his classical liberal background, our current Justice minister Michael McDowell has developed a Blunkett-like authoritarianism but he is to be congratulated for phasing “Equality” out of his department and ultimately shutting down Citizen Traveller.
I mentioned before that Ireland has an oxymoronically titled Competition Authority. If that level of government intrusion was all we had to worry about, I wouldn’t mind too much. Unfortunately we are also saddled with the similarly Orwellian-sounding Equality Authority. Their motto is “Diversity for an Equal Ireland” or “Equality for a Diverse Ireland” or something else equally bland but diversely platitudinous like “Be Reasonable, It Pays!”. This bunch of state-stipended, humourless entitlement-enforcers is headed by – some achievement this – probably the most pompous man in Ireland: Niall Crowley. He is an insistent hectoring presence on our radio waves. Through the the op-ed and letters pages of our newspapers he regularly reminds us of our “reponsibilities” in prose laden with jargon, tautologies and sundry infelicities. So it was with delight today that I read Blog Irish’s eloquent skewering of this self-serving organisation and supremo.
One of the most appealing aspects of a libertarian outlook is simplicity. It is often the case that when one examines, in greater depth, what initially appears to be a libertarian conundrum, it proves not to be. One such faux-dilemma, suggested to me by Alan K. Henderson’s comments to Andy’s post below, is the extent to which liberty can be threatened by non-state interests.
This can be the basis for populist political crusades against “Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, even “Big Food”. The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of “real competition”: to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced “tolerance” of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.
A similar dilemma is suggested by considering the plight of those in Northern Ireland who have fallen foul of paramilitaries. It matters little to a person tortured or exiled on threat of death whether his tormentors are acting for the state or a paramilitary group, Yet so-called human rights bodies such as Amnesty International, pay little attention to the human rights of such individuals, reserving their comments for infringements by state forces. Glenn Reynolds struck a chord when he cheered David Trimble for pointing this out. Needless to say this did not go down too well with some of the socialists and nationalists who comment at Slugger O’Toole. The conundrum is that surely a libertarian can agree with Amnesty’s justification: It is proper to be more concerned by state abuses than actions by private agents.
In examining this “conundrum” it also evaporates but leads to a surprising, counter-intuitive insight. In the segregated, working class urban ‘bantustans’ of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries are in a position to exert punishment and enforce exiles because they have been ceded a monopoly of violence. By the state. Local hostility to police forces means they are reluctant to carry out normal policing and individuals are prevented from defending themselves. This gives the paramilitaries a free run. Though they are nominal antagonists, the IRA effectively operates a monopoly of violence backed by the British state. The plight of its victims should be the proper concern of any agency which professes to uphold human rights.
French anti-terror police have arrested five people suspected of links with the Real IRA. This is the splinter group of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process (such as it may be) and has been blamed for a series of attacks since breaking away from the IRA. The most serious was the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence.
The suspects were all French nationals and they are suspected of involvement in a support network for the Irish group. They were held after police discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition outside the ferry port of Dieppe.
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening…
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.
Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever… that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.
You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as ‘hate speech’ by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships… and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.
And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.
I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that…The state is not your friend.
More and faster please.
As a libertarian I shall boycott Ryanair on political grounds while that state- backed parasite Michael O’Leary is in charge.
Before I explain, my apologies to Andy Duncan, for I intend to exercise the privilege of a Samizdatista and make my comment on his posting below a posting in itself. I want lots of people to read it and think as I do.
Why am I so against O’Leary? No, it is not his cheap flights (in themselves cheap flights are a good thing), nor his not paying dividends (I neither know nor care about dividends), nor his safety record (take the risk or don’t: up to you), nor his comments about wishing to be a dictator (unimportant bombast), nor the environment (a side issue: to protect it, privatise it), nor his intention to move his business elsewhere if the bureacrats mess him about (I actively like that bit).
It’s because he intends to make his airline strong by massive compulsory purchase of people’s homes, homes they love and desperately want to keep, so that airports can be expanded. Stansted Airport is the one I know about personally, but I stress that state compulsory purchase for any airport anywhere is as clear a violation of liberty as you will ever see. Like force-advocates everywhere O’Leary has a pep-talk about how it’s all necessary for the greater good, adding a positively Stakhanovite spiel about how Britain must compete with France and Germany. I stress that he doesn’t merely go along with this because he can’t imagine any other way; he is an enthusiast.
Also my neighbour saw him speak and said he was an arrogant git.
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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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