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Jesse Walker at Reason magazine points out something very inconvenient for Naomi Klein, whom I discussed recently at this blog:
Let’s just zero in on the contrast Klein draws between utopian theories and real-world practice. It’s a fair argument if you apply it properly: that is, if you look at the consequences of Friedman’s policy prescriptions where they are put in place. It makes sense, for example, to look at how Friedman’s ideas about denationalization and free trade fared in Chile after they were put into effect. It doesn’t make much sense to look at Blackwater’s contracts in occupied Iraq, because — try as Klein might to pretend otherwise — they don’t have anything to do with Friedman. (And of course, it’s important to examine the ways Pinochet’s Chile deviated from Friedman’s economic ideas as well as the ways it embraced them.)
Exactly.
At the same time, you have to consider how Friedmanism fared everywhere some portion of it was applied, not just cherry-pick the most unappealing regimes that experimented with it. If the only place that adopted any of Friedman’s economic ideas was Chile, then Klein might be onto something when she suggests there’s a connection between libertarian economic policies and deeply un-libertarian ideas about torture, censorship, surveillance, and state-sanctioned murder. But the most sweeping free-market reforms of the last 40 years were not adopted in Pinochet’s Chile, Thatcher’s UK, or anyplace else addressed in Klein’s book. They were enacted by the New Zealand Labour Party in the 1980s. Far from fusing economic liberalization with political repression, the Labour government expanded civil liberties: It adopted a bill of rights, decriminalized homosexuality, improved the treatment of the native Maori. And while Pinochet signed on to the CIA’s war against the Latin American left, New Zealand strained its relations with Washington by making itself a nuclear-free zone, a policy that effectively barred the U.S. Navy from New Zealand ports. By Klein’s logic, these are all effects of Friedmanomics.
One would not expect Ms Klein to respond to this other than with smears. It turns out that she more or less ignored the devastating review of her book by Johan Norberg at CATO recently, did not address his very serious accusations of widespread inaccuracy or misrepesentation. To repeat: it is not just her views that are a problem – I am sure some leftists argue in good faith – but her actual, repeated lying, fabrications and errors that are so easily corrected and yet she cannot be bothered to do so. That is one reason why I loathe so much of this sort of writer. It is a sort of contemptuous attitude towards simple fact-checking that I cannot abide. So Friedman did not support the Iraq war after all? Well, whatever, he might as well have done, seems to be her attitude.
The point that Jesse Walker makes about the varied effects of free market ideas is important. Yes, some repressive regimes around the world may have found it convenient, for whatever reason, to claim they had signed on to the package, as Chile did. But then remember that even former London mayor Ken “friend of Hugo Chavez” Livingstone once argued that he had borrowed the idea of road-charging from the great Chicago professor. In different times, very different types of political leader, such as Richard Nixon, claimed to be Keynesians, just as, right now, a lot of people are scurrying to claim to be in favour of tougher regulations (see Guy Herbert’s comment immediately below this one).
Klein tries to draw an equivalence, in a muddied way, between those leftists who deny that Marx can be blamed for the horrors done in his name and those of us who point out it is absurd to try to blame free market thinkers from what is happening now. Well the reason, Ms Klein, why Friedman et al cannot be so blamed is that what is happening now is not an example of laissez faire capitalism. Re-read that slowly, Ms Klein: what is happening now is not a case of laissez faire. Just to spell it out for those who have not been following this debate: the central banks responsible for setting interest rates are state bodies; the US home loan agencies such as Freddie Mac that underwrote risky mortages are ultimately state bodies; the legislation forcing banks to lend to risky groups is state activity; the Basel and other bank capital rules that have arguably encouraged the irresponsible use of credit derivatives are state rules, and so on. With the exception of Lehman Brothers and some of the Icelandic banks, not a single large financial institution has been allowed to go bust, as a private company would in a free market. Not one.
Sometimes the odd phrase can tell you everything you need to know about the kind of philosophical assumptions, held either wittingly or not, that people carry around in their heads. In a rather fluffy BBC TV news item this morning about how elderly gardeners are helping young schoolkids to learn about the great outdoors, a character involved said that this showed the “valuable contribution that senior citizens make to society”. For some reason that really bugged the hell out of me.
There is this continued use of the word “society” as if this were a sort of person. I have contributions that I make to my married life such as paying certain bills and taking care of my wife if she gets ill or needs help, for instance, and I am very delighted to do so. I contribute to paying my mortgage by going out to work. I make contributions to certain services by paying for them, willingly or not, via private payments or through the violence-backed channel of tax (although “contribution” is not the right word in the latter case). But the idea that Johnathan Pearce’s activities somehow “contribute to society” is so much collectivist nonsense.
The turn of phrase shows that how people choose to live their lives is not viewed through an individualistic perspective – the idea that people are entitled to pursue their lives for their own sake and happiness – but according to some sort of utilitarian or altruistic calculus, as Ayn Rand might have put it. There is actually something rather chilling about this, in fact. What if some person decides that the oldies are not making a “contribution to society”? Should they be put down, like a crippled dog?
I am troubled at the spread of a certain meme. It is hostile to liberty, yet seems to be fairly popular with those who in other respects defend freedom of speech and abhor State interference in personal relations. In the comments to this Samizdata post, a regular commenter here, ‘Mandrill’, expressed this particular meme unambiguously:
It should be illegal for any adult, parent or not, to indoctrinate any child in any religion, period. If they choose to follow one of the multitudinous superstitions which we’ve infected our intellects with once they’re an adult that’s their business, but to poison a child’s mind against reason from a very young age is, in my view, abuse and is something that stunts not only the intellectual growth of the child but that of the rest of humanity also. Just as much as genital mutilation (male or female) is.
That is all.
I have a few more examples that I have collected at the end of the post. Those quoted are not necessarily famous or influential, only those that I bestirred myself to note down or to find by casual googling. Trust me, there are plenty more out there. Feel free to add your own examples in comments. I would also welcome comments from anyone – such as Mandrill – who thinks this is a good meme.
Meanwhile let me speculate on how what I hold to be an insidious and bad meme is propagating itself with some success among them as should know better. Such qualities as ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘internal consistency’ are often useful characteristics for a meme to have but are by no means essential to its success as a replicator.
1) Firstly, the ‘ban religion for children’ meme appeals by a having a spurious similarity to generally accepted ideas about when and whether sex should be prohibited. Most of us accept that consenting adults can do what they like, but children and mentally deficient people cannot give meaningful consent. My answer to that is sex is sex and talk is talk.
Campaign groups often try to ‘borrow’ some of the public willingness to abhor and forbid certain sexual acts and use it to get the public to abhor and forbid non-sexual acts of which the pusher disapproves. For instance, campaigners against smacking children often blur the boundaries between sexual and physical child abuse. In a loosely related way campaigners against rape sometimes blur the boundaries between forced sexual intercourse i.e. rape and the sort of ‘force’ involved in the use of emotional blackmail to get sex. → Continue reading: Cherchez le mème
There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians. I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity. Let’s get money out of politics by making politicians less powerful.
– Russell Roberts (over a week ago now but surely worth being made to linger a little)
An agreeably splenetic Pat Condell video to get you in the right mood for the weekend…
I’m sure that Hugo Chavez has done some good. Much more bad than good probably, but some good. And Ken Livingstone is certainly not totally evil. But when the two of them get together it is very implausible that it is good news for the world on average.
Though if Mr Livingstone spends a lot of time in Venezuela, that will be pleasant both for him and for Londoners, I am really quite puzzled what Latin America, or even Mr Chavez, gets from this deal:
Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital’s policing, transport and other municipal issues.
“I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years. I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this,” he told reporters at the presidential palace after meeting Chávez.
But the most puzling thing of all is that use of the phrase “first-world city”. I was under the impression that the ‘first world’ was the capitalist western countries, the ‘second world’ the realm of state-socialism, and the ‘third world’ the unindustrialised rest, not clearly part of either. Continuing the metaphor of separate worlds – and wishing away trade and travel and telegraph – the Rev John Papworth has even coined “Fourth World” for the poorest of the poor and those rejecting economic development altogether.
I cannot believe Red Ken was trying to suggest that the Bolivarian Revolution will fail, and that in 20 years Venezuela will be fully part of the capitalist first world again. Surely Mr Livingstone means he wants Caracas to be a second-world city?
[M]aterial prosperity enables people to develop morally as well as intellectually. It provides the very basis through which individuals can begin to live like humans and not act like animals.
– Neil Davenport, in the course of a sp!ked piece that neatly demolishes David Lammy’s barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich. Lammy’s article is more wide-ranging in its insanity than Davenport allows. He ends up advocating compulsory social service and apprenticeships for all as a cure for gangs.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.
This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.
At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.
On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as “Nannyfornia”. In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, “Did you mean California?”. That’s gotta hurt.
I am more than usually depressed by the report of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that is published today. A Bill of Rights for the UK? is a reaction to the present administration’s kite flying for a “British Bill of Rights and Duties“, and goes to confirm my suspicion that human-rights lawyers are equipped with a tin ear for political discourse as part of their education.
They do not see the fierce conditionality of Rights-and-Duties. They are in their eunoetic little universe of the kindly legislator not the populist fury. Rather than a reaction of horror at the transparent desire to entrench ergate slavery to a corporatist ‘civic republican’ state as a citizen’s lot, there’s a mild whinge that the Government isn’t speaking clearly enough – no grasp that there is a different language in use:
33. We regret that there is not greater clarity in the Government’s reasons for embarking on this potentially ambitious course of drawing up a Bill of Rights. A number of the Government’s reasons appear to be concerned with correcting public misperceptions about the current regime of human rights protection, under the HRA. We do not think that this is in itself a good reason for adopting a Bill of Rights. As we have consistently said in previous Reports, the Government should seek proactively to counter public misperceptions about human rights rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true.
That I could support. And the discussion in the same section makes some sense of reframing the ECHR and the Human Rights Act to give better protection to individual liberty against the state. However, it doesn’t face up to the Government’s agenda, which is entirely opposite. It doesn’t, as any Bill of Rights worth the name would do, presuppose the implacable hostility of authority to the exercise of freedom.
The rest is horror. Chandler called the game of chess “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency”. You would need to harness a gigantic advertising group – WPP, say – for a full year, to piss away as much brain and education as has been wasted in the construction of the Outline of a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms. Given the task of criticism and reflection, they have been reflexively orthodox. Not just the committee, but most of their witnesses, have demonstrated that, if it contingently makes the owner deaf to political meanings, the purpose of the tin ear in human-rights legal education is to pour jurisprudential treacle directly into the brain.
→ Continue reading: Like your manifesto, comrade
My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?
– Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book entitled Unjust Rewards
Maybe I’m the last one around these parts to have clocked Pat Condell. If so, apologies. But just in case I’m not and you still haven’t heard of this man, well, clock him for yourself, now. He has a YouTube homepage, and I particularly recommend the performance featured here, at the Ezra Levant blog (remember him?), which is how I found out about Condell.
The thing that strikes me about Condell is that if you were to read a transcript of the talk that I’ve just heard, you might dismiss him as, well, some kind of obsessive, in a word, as a crank. Certainly anyone wanting to dismiss him thus would find it fairly easy. But his manner of talking makes him seem a lot more sane than that, and that makes him a potentially huge threat to the forces of darkness. If I were them I’d be quite bothered, and anxiously trying to think of a way of shutting him up which doesn’t risk him becoming a hundred times more famous. Killing him springs to mind, obviously. But what if they fail? And what if they succeed, but turn him into a very, very eloquent cadaver?
Here is an interview he did with The Freethinker which they called Laughing religion off the planet, which I am right now about to read.
UPDATE: On the other hand …
There’s no doubt that one of life’s pleasure’s is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of “science fiction” that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.
Jeff Read defends Disch thus:
Most literature is about people. That’s a topic that the Asperger’s-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don’t think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.
And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond (“esr”) responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:
This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The “especially modern people” is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about “the terror of the situation”.
The subject of “peak oil” then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, “right on schedule”. Replies Raymond:
Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later “Peak Oil” models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.
In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I’m not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.
As for copper and platinum – they’re not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that’s better quality “ore” than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.
Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:
The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.
Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.
Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?
I did. They’re staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they’re describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.
In among that there’s another potential SQOTD, I think.
There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, …
And so it goes on. I’ve lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond’s Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.
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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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