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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Fabian Tassano, who has recently written a rather fine book, links to this rather darkly amusing outline of how a country goes down the U-bend.
The interesting question is whether there is an equivalent series of steps showing how things get better. An issue that occasionally comes up in the comment threads is how do we get from the current god-awful statist mess A to sunlit uplands of liberal society B? What should happen first, second, third, fourth, etc? For instance, what would be the sequence of changes? Should we start with the little stuff (abolish the Arts Council, confine Polly Toynbee) or the Big Stuff (slash the Welfare State, abolish state education departments, repeal most taxes)?
Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune…
Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:
Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it’s inconsiderate.
Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.
As suggested by a Samizdata reader called Hugo, I am going to kick off a Friday discussion which takes the following line: “A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we’d let people starve in the streets.”
I think the contention would be grossly unfair, to put it mildly. Libertarians oppose the welfare state, we do not oppose welfare. That logically means that we support charity, although not necessarily existing charities, many of which have been subsumed by the state. As history has shown, mutual aid and philanthropic societies typically thrive because of, not in spite of, a powerful pro-freedom, pro-free enterprise culture. The belief that we are entitled to pursue our self-interest (so long as it does not involve aggression, theft or fraud) does not clash with the idea that it is good to be generous and helpful to those who have been dealt a crap hand in the cardgame of life.
In fact, the philosopher David Kelley recently wrote a book, which I heartily recommend, saying that feelings of generosity and benevolence towards one’s fellow Man are an actual consequence of a society where people feel no shame or guilt about the pursuit of happiness in this life. In many cultures, including the Judeo-Christian one, generosity is a duty that is owed at the command of God. However, in the sense that Kelley and I use it, a generous, friendly approach to our fellows does not have to be commanded because such a trait generates long-term benefits to the giver as well as the recipient. This guy makes a good set of points in a review of Kelley’s book. Okay, vicious, grasping people may be happy in the very short run after they have achieved their goals, but they usually have very few friends and often end up getting shunned. And being shunned is not very nice.
Given all this, a society in which every able-bodied person had to work if they had no private income, and where the rise in wealth would be great because of a free market system, is likely to be one in which there would be plenty of people willing to give to charity to help out the infirm, the handicapped, and so on. It also goes without saying that the idea of poor people starving in the streets would be a near-impossibility in a dynamic economy oozing with wealth and ideas.
The one place where starvation of the poor is a likely occurrence, of course, is under collectivism. Just look at the great socialist disasters of the 20th Century.
David Selbourne is one of those intellectual figures who swims in similar currents to that of John Gray: mixing a sort of gloomy, conservative (small c) dislike of much modern culture and public life; a sort of grumpy dislike of the inevitably messy impact of individual liberty combined with a sort of authortarian desire for those in power to somehow rein in all this terrible individualist excess and take us back to say, 1950. Tim Worstall, well known around here, subjects his latest article to a fairly gentle fisking.
Here is the original piece by Selbourne. It follows a similar, arguably even more incoherent rant in the Spectator last week (sorry, I could not get the link to work, so you will have to trust me). Here he goes:
To expect the fulfilment by the citizen of his or her duties is no impertinence. It is essential to liberal democracy. Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for “constitutional renewal” or for a more “contractual” relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.
As Tim puts it:
To return to a feudal system in which I owe duties to My Noble Lords in return for whatever rights they might see fit to grant me? Fuck that quite frankly.
Quite. Feudalism is actually a polite word for what this character wants to impose. A society in which freedoms are handed over like sweets in return for the prior performance of duties might be known as something rather ruder, like fascism.
Or maybe the problem could be more easily solved if Selbourne was honest about what he understands the definition of “rights” to be. In the classical liberal sense, a right is nothing more than a prohibition on the initiation of force against a person and his or her property; under socialism, the term “right” has been debauched into a claim on things such as the “right” to “free” schooling, which means that someone else be coerced into paying for the latter. The former negative definition of a right implies no such zero-sum game.
Selbourne must surely have heard of Isiah Berlin’s famous attempt to unscramble this confusion.
This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn’t put it up a week ago, when I should have.
So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we’d talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And “Devil’s Kitchen”, one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:
We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen’s Tavern, Westminster.
Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …
So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen’s Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil’s Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. “They all are”, he said.
I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.
Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.
But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.
I also learned something else. Mr Devil’s Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That’s another thing that maybe should not count, but does.
Over on The Line is Here, they are hosting the Carnival of the Libertarians, where various folks sound off about, surprise surprise, issues to do with liberty.
Check it out.
The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.
This quote is great:
“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”
Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.
I like this:
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.
“Us” being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.
To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.
Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!
Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you’re there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.
I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao’s argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).
That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.
On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.
The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: “How to Cure Government Obesity,” which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.
Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA’s president, by email: ———-. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.
I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It’s the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves – even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed “the rape of the libraries” and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.
David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense – ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government – has had a sort of epiphany:
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
He finishes thus:
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist – and a great one – rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.
A friend of mine (“Don’t give any names!”) has just told me some very good news. The friend of mine’s landlady has a way of dealing with nasty lodgers, who don’t pay (despite being warned), or who make too much noise at night (despite being warned), or who do anything else evil (despite being warned). She expels them! That’s right, she chucks them out. This is illegal, and they (the scum being chucked out) often point this out. But it works. She has her own locks to the doors, which she duly locks. And just puts all their crap out onto the street and refuses to let them in ever again. They have the law on their side, but what bloody use is that if you need somewhere to live tonight and all your crap is out on the street? The law takes months!
The landlady has now done this thirty six times, including last Sunday, just after Church (the landlady is a born again Christian). They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom. They were warned, but paid no attention.
Good to know. Civil society is being re-established. See this, linked to, again, by Patrick Crozier today, for details. Be civil. Or suffer the consequences.
Rob Johnston has produced a very interesting essay on the true soulmates of Green Politics in Britain
- Forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants
- Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles
- Grant British citizenship only to children born here
- Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites
- Restrict tourism and immigration from outside Europe
- Prohibit embryo research
- Stop lorry movements on the Lord’s Day
- Require State approval for national sports teams to compete overseas
- Disconnect Britain from the European electricity grid
- Establish a “new order” between nations to resolve the world economic crisis
These are the policies of one of Britain’s most influential political parties: a party that has steadily increased its vote over the last decade; a party that appeals overwhelmingly to whites; and a party that shares significant objectives with neo-fascists and religious fundamentalists.
Perhaps – the BNP? Despite its attempts to appear modern and inclusive and the soothing talk in its 2005 General Election Manifesto, of “genuine ethnic and cultural diversity” [1].
Or UKIP? It harbours some pretty backward-looking individuals – but would they stop Britain buying electricity from France if necessary?
Or, maybe, the Conservatives? Could that be a list of recommendations from one of Dave’s lesser-known policy groups – chaired by the ghost of Enoch Powell – quietly shredded to avoid “re-contaminating the Brand”?
Actually, affiliates of the progressive consensus may be surprised to learn that all the reactionary policies in the first paragraph are from the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (MfSS) or were adopted at the party’s Autumn Conference in Liverpool over the weekend of September 13-16, 2007 [2].
Of course, the Green Party will protest against the accusation of reactionary politics. However, in an article critical of the G8 leaders in June, George Monbiot, (capo di tutti capi of the green movement) advised readers to judge politicians for “what they do, not what they say”.
For example, as well as supporting ethnic and cultural diversity, the BNP says it accepts:
“… the right of law-abiding minorities, in our country because they or their ancestors came here legally, to remain here and to enjoy the full protection of the law against any form of harassment or hostility…” [3]
But, use Monbiot’s argument, disregard the rhetoric and look at what the rest of the BNP manifesto promises would actually do and it remains a party of racist and neo-fascist ideology – internationally isolationist and domestically reactionary.
The trouble for Greens is that their manifesto pledges would result in many of the same outcomes as the BNP programme.
You will not find the words “Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites”, in the Green Party’s manifesto, but consider Monbiot’s advice about the effects of these policies:
“The Green Party recognises that subsidies are sometimes necessary to protect local, regional and national economies and the environment, and we will support them in these instances” [4].
“Controls such as tariff barriers and quotas should be gradually introduced on a national and/or regional bloc level, with the aim of allowing localities and countries to produce as much of their food, goods and services as they can themselves. Anything that cannot be provided nationally should be obtained from neighbouring countries, with long distance trade the very last resort” [5].
The paradox of arguing for Fair Trade while refusing to buy African vegetables because of “food miles” has been noted many times, but it is a paradox the Green Party simply ignores. According to the Guardian, Britain has two black farmers [6], so any policy to subsidise domestic produce and erect barriers to outsiders will, ipso facto, support white farmers and disadvantage black farmers. Even if supplies are “obtained from neighbouring countries”, white European farmers benefit at the expense of poor farmers in Africa and the developing world.
On agricultural policy in general, Greens will agree with the following sentiments:
“Britain’s farming industry will be encouraged to produce a much greater part of the nation’s need in food products. Priority will be switched from quantity to quality, as we move from competing in a global economy to maximum self-sufficiency for Britain, sustainable agriculture, decreased reliance on petro-chemical products and more organic production” [7].
However, those promises come from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto – in a section indistinguishable from the Green Party manifesto:
“To be able to fulfil all our basic food needs locally. To grow as many other products as we can to meet our basic needs (e.g. for textiles, fuel, paper) on a local or regional basis. To enable all communities to have access to land which can be used for growing for basic needs. To ensure that all growing systems use only natural, renewable inputs and that all organic waste outputs are able to be recycled back into the soil or water system” [8].
Perhaps this is why, according to the BNP:
“We are the only true ‘Green Party’ in Britain as only the BNP intends to end mass immigration into Britain and thereby remove at a stroke the need for an extra 4 million homes in the green belts of the South East and elsewhere, which are required to house the influx of 5 million immigrants expected to enter the country under present trends over the next twenty years” [9].
Greens agree with the BNP about migration and the green belt. They promise to: minimise the environmental degradation caused by migration; not allow increased net migration; and end the pressure on the Green Belt by reducing population and stopping growth-oriented development [10]. Reduction in non-white tourism and immigration would be an inevitable consequence of government restrictions on air travel. Few refugees from Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe manage to get all the way to Britain without a large carbon footprint, neither can tourists from beyond Europe. → Continue reading: Vote green – go blackshirt
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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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