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.
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Tim Worstall justifiably gets angry about this plan to force owners of coastal properties to allow the public to have access to the properties, and without compensation. I weighed in with the comments on the board and deciding not to let the discussion go to waste, I wanted to quote a character called Kay, who comes up with what I might call the “brute utilitarian” argument one hears for compulsory purchase/eminent domain laws here and in other nations:
Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock. That ridiculous stance may be taken by some who posted here, but the rest of us would rather live in an advanced civilisation with electricity, railways, roads, public limited companies, etc.
I sense that this argument is nonsense, but there may be something in it. It is interesting that the commenter mentions limited liability corporations – we have been over that issue before at this blog. But is it really the case that say, electricity could not be easily conveyed across the UK without coercing landowners into letting this occur? I assume, of course, that if many landowners refused point blank to do this, that the situation would result in lots of very small, easy-to-move electricity generators being built. But in practice, the vast majority of landowners want easy access to electricity, water and roads like everyone else, and with a bit of inducement – shares in revenues from tolls, rental payments for pipes and pylons – would agree to things being built on their land. There may be “extreme cases”, where landlords hold so much sway that they try to strangle beneficial technologies across a vast tract of land, and I suppose this is possible, but it strikes me as not very likely. I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.
I think the problem with the “brute utilitarian” argument is not simply its undertone of “We want – we take”. It is also its deafness to the fact that most people, most of the time, have sufficient rational self interest to act in ways that benefit not just themselves but most of the rest of us. The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently. I have heard people express admiration for the Continental, Roman Law-based system which supposedly is so much less messy and fuddy-duddy than the Common Law one in this respect. When people start to invoke “efficiency” and so forth, guard your wallet and front door.
Meanwhile, for a good discussion on the tricky issue of how property claims can be arrived at justly in the first place, this book is worth a read. One thing that bugs me about discussions about property is when some character will argue that “X or Y stole the land from poor benighted natives in the Year xxxx BC so all property since is tainted”, as if that somehow justifies looting now. It does not.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that compulsory purchase laws, particularly when used to turf people off their property to create other, supposedly more valuable economic outcomes, is a vehicle for corruption.
Update and side-observation: it is only fair to say that some – in my view misguided – libertarians have tried to argue that land, because it was not created by Man, should be taxed more heavily than income or other things, and for some people, this sort of tax is a sort of “rectification” of any previous injustices inflicted by the acquisition of property. The name of 19th Century writer Henry George occasionally comes up. I was once quite taken with the idea but there are weaknesses to it. For a start, a person who makes more use of land than was the case before because of his entrepreneurial vigour should not, in my view, be penalised for thereby raising the value of that land, which is what a land-tax, if based on land values, would do. There remains this view, widely shared, that land should not be ultimately owned by any individual because land and minerals, or indeed the sea, is “just there”, an inert set of substances that we can manipulate, but not create new value from. That seems to undermine the very notion of wealth creation per se, in my view.
Oh, and here is an item from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on eminent domain.
Another update: Devil’s Kitchen shares my opinion but does so in a more, ahem, salty way. Check out the comments, where Samizdata regular Ian B takes on Kay Tie. In boxing terms, the judge would have had to stop the fight to protect Kay from serious injury.
I have just returned from a short business trip to Geneva in Switzerland and apart from the usual chatter about the disasters that have befallen the banking system – including such titans as UBS – the chatter in the cafes was about voters’ recent decision to allow heroin to be given to drug addicts in medical centres. Switzerland’s experiments with a more liberal approach to drug use has not been without unfortunate result: I remember that some time ago, there was a park in Zurich that got the unfortunate title, “needle park”, on account of the number of folk who used to congregate there from all over to get their fix of heroin. But perhaps that is a sort of example of how, if you have “public spaces” – owned by the nation and hence owned by no-one in particular – what might be a matter of private behaviour can lead to “negative externalities”. The solution, maybe, is for drug users to indulge their habits on private property with the consent of the owners of said; then the issue ceases to be one on which the polity feels a need to express a view one way or the other.
But the Swiss are nothing if not contradictory and the locals do not seem to share a very coherent conception of what the state can or should be able to tell people to do, but I do sense that there is less of a nanny state culture than in Britain. The locals tell me that there is, still, more of a culture of self-responsibility than in some other European nations. But the contradictions are odd: while approving the heroin measure, Swiss electors rejected a proposal to make marijuana legal and to be able to grow it for personal use. And yet this is a nation where smoking continues to happen in restaurants; firearms ownership is far more liberal than in the UK; ditto things like knives and swords; bank secrecy, while not quite as solid as before, remains; and the nation, to its credit, remains cussedly uninterested in joining the EU or allowing itself to be bullied by tax collectors in places such as Germany and the US.
And the chocolate tastes pretty good as well. Yummm…..
Ah, the children of the night! What sweet music they make:
Plans by Gordon Brown to make everyone a potential organ donor unless they actively “opt out” will be roundly rejected by the Government’s official advisory body next week, The Times has learnt.
The Prime Minister and the Chief Medical Officer for England believe that thousands of lives could be saved by introducing “presumed consent” – where everyone is automatically placed on the organ donor register unless they or their family object….
The recommendations are not binding on the Government and ministers may still bring legislation forward.
Of course they will. They must feed.
No, it is not a streamlined version of the answer to life, the universe and everything. It is the maximum number of aspirin in a bottle available at the local Clear Pharmacy. According to the Pharmacist on duty, that is the largest number sellable without a prescription.
I am sure I looked perplexed with my jaw hanging open during the few speechless moments before I came out with the only answer I could think of: “You must be joking.”
Before you get too uppity about freedom in America… the last time I bought 24 Hour Cold Capsules in Manhattan I had to sign a register so the government could make sure I was not going to use them to make ‘speed’.
“We’re from the Government. We’re here to help you.”
Not.
PS: Can anyone confirm this is really, genuinely true? I am still having trouble believing it myself. It is just, too absurd.
From NRO ‘The Campaign Spot’:
The tour will begin at McCain field, named for the family in Mississippi. McCain will note in a speech there that a distant ancestor served on George Washington’s staff, and “it seems that my ancestors served in every conflict this country has fought”. One of the themes in that speech will be how government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children.
Holy. Crap. And this is the Republican candidate. Read that again: “government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”. Just de-construct that for a moment. Is that not a phrase that should send cold shivers down the spines of anyone who thinks civil society has been fucked over by the state quite enough for the last fifty or so years, thank you very much?
Clearly the government does not want any old values passed on to the kiddies, so John McCain must see a role for state approved politically vetted family values. And what if someone want to pass on the values of respecting the property of others and so not tolerating proxy theft via third parties (like, say, the state), is Johnny going help out there somehow? How about atheism? Contrary to the popular perceptions, I know a great many God-Free Americans (almost all of whom are self-described hyphenated Republicans). Will the state give them a hand passing that one on to Junior too? How about utter contempt for the political elite and their army of functionaries? John McCain’s kind offer to ‘help‘ is another manifestation of the baseless arrogance of so many members of the political class who think that civil society revolves around the state and is something for them to tinker with.
So John, let me tell you how to “help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”… mind your own goddamn business. There is nothing complicated about that.
Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes’ services – despite his prosecuting them in his day job – and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:
People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else’s, period.
John Derbyshire, the UK-born commentator who writes for the right wing US publication National Review, has this comment, which reminds me of why I am not a conservative:
Prostitution, like drug trafficking, is one of those zones where libertarianism bumps up against the realities of human nature.
Wrong. Prostitution and drug trafficking, which are both illegal, demonstrate perfectly the libertarian argument that if you ban trades between consenting adults (children are another matter), then criminals and the plain reckless will provide them, damaging society as a whole.
To a lover of liberty, it is hard to see why a woman shouldn’t sell her favors if she wants to. Trouble is, weak or dimwitted women end up in near-slavery to unscrupulous men, and I think there’s a legitimate public interest in not letting that happen.
Oh come on. One might as well say that liberty is only for intelligent, smart people who write for right-wing Washington magazines. Of course, unintelligent, feeble-minded people screw up, but the case for liberty is that people are better off if they are presumed to be best able to judge their own interests. The fact that some cannot do this does not overturn that point. Encouraging personal responsibility is good for society as a whole (sorry to use such a collectivist expression) even if it is true that some individuals are not good at taking such responsibility.
The best private sector solution would be a guild system, like the geishas had in old Japan. There’d be entry standards for the guild. Women would have to pass exams, and have some entertainment skills other than the obvious ones. The guild would police itself, expelling miscreants. Freelancing outside the guild could be under strong social disapproval, even made illegal.
He is talking about a form of trade union closed shop for prostitutes, sanctioned by law. But then what about the businesses that try to gouge concessions from politicians to get into these closed-shop deals? How would such ‘guilds’ be able to start up? What about registration fees? I can see a wonderful opportunity for political and business corruption here.
No, sometimes we ideologues have it right: the simplest, most radical option is also the most practical one. Even if you morally disapprove of prostitution – I do not – as a practical matter, legalising it makes lots of sense. Compared to what goes on down in most parliaments, prostitution is a noble calling.
The United Nations and the various NGOs which operate within its orbit, which naturally sees the world in terms of nation-states, regards statelessness as a ‘problem’ and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights include the phrase “everyone has the right to a nationality”.
Yet as the world becomes more cosmopolitan and globalised, the primary threats to security are themselves non-state based (such as radical Islam) and private trade without the intermediation of states has never been easier in the dawning age of virtualised networked economics. Could we one day see a time in which many see modern narrow concepts of nationality and ‘citizenship’ of any Westphalian style state as an imposition rather than a ‘right’?
Anders Sandberg, gets quoted on the emerging debate on smart drugs and their impact upon the education system in the future. Critics have a dangerous vision of self-medicating nerds plotting to ace their exams and pull ahead of their rivals rather than working out occult symbols, raising D’hoffryn, and attempting to end the world.
“Cod liver oil is taken as a cognitive enhancer,” says Dr Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates how technology will affect the human race.
“Even something as simple as eating a biscuit at the right moment can improve your performance, yet no one would complain about that except your dentist. It doesn’t matter how you bring about change. What matters is the result.
“Surely, anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing,” says Dr Sandberg.
Smart drugs are an emergent tool and the Times Educational Supplement acknowledges that there are forty in production. Modafinil and ritalin are known quantities but “brain botox” sounds really scary. I have this vision that the drug erases all neural wrinkles and a race of golden haired cuckoos reduce their school to ash and then mingle menacingly round the local offy, destroying the effects of the drugs with a liberal dose of cider.
Amusement aside, there is a report expected from government in the next month on the rules that could govern ‘smart drugs’. This will be one of the strongest tests yet, of how the government plans to resolve the tension between the right to self-medicate and their horror of self-improvement. People who abolish grammars will not promote cognitive enhancement: they are unlikely to abandon mediocrity after it has taken them so many decades to achieve.
On some, if not all issues, Rod Liddle is a man of sound views. He loathes the nanny state; he is unconvinced that we need to crack down on freedom of speech in order to avoid giving offence to religious groups. He is a patriot. In this week’s edition of the Spectator, where other authors rant away splendidly, Liddle rails against the six-month-old government ban on smoking in all public buildings, including privately owned ones (apart from private homes), such as pubs and restaurants. He makes a good case and some of his paragraphs are cheer-out-loud material:
Of course, one shouldn’t drop a policy simply because the pubs are having a rather hard time of it as a result. But in which case, don’t bother to pretend that they’re not, that actually there are queues all down the street consisting of shiny, happy people who wish nothing more than to drink in a new, healthy, smoke-free environment. Stop lying. Say, instead, that the smoke ban is putting pubs out of business but actually we couldn’t give a toss. Truth is, the government — and the health charities — are caught by their previous, gerrymandered poll findings which purported to suggest that the entire country was in favour of a complete ban on smoking everywhere, when — and again, do a quick vox pop if you doubt this — the reverse was true. People would like to see genuinely smoke-free areas of restaurants and pubs, for sure — but only chose a complete ban on smoking when the alternative on the poll sheet was ‘or would you like your testicles sawn off?’.
Or this:
Perhaps it is true, though, that because of the ban, I shall live for ever, for which many thanks, Dawn. But I doubt it; we will have recourse to one or another means of killing ourselves, such as driving a car (4,000 deaths per year), drinking more (40,000 deaths per year) or visiting a doctor (30,000 deaths per year through negligence or incompetence: never forget that figure. It exceeds the numbers killed through smoking-related illness. And it really, really hacks off the doctors).
But as always with Mr Liddle, the carelessness with which he chucks around numbers makes me wonder if any reader will want to get past his first paragraph:
I am still not sure what I hate the most about this government: its decision to invade Iraq and thus either effect or facilitate the murder of 500,000 Iraqis, or its decision to stop me from smoking in pubs and restaurants.
500,000 Iraqis? Is that correct? Liddle gives no source for this or attempts to do so later in the piece. Now Rod may be right to suggest that the overthrow of a power-mad, dangerous dictator was even worse than letting him stay in power (I occasionally wonder why a certain type of right-winger is so indulgent towards evil men like Saddam). But if he is going to make an argument with statistics as part of his core argument, it is probably not a great idea to kick off an argument with a massive figure based on, whatever.
Oh, in case anyone asks, I don’t smoke, except on National No Smoking Day.
The controversial Australian euthanasia advocate and doctor Phillip Nitschke has been arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, and books that he had in his possession have been seized. Nitschke, the moving spirit behind Exit International, had gone to New Zealand to host some ‘workshops’ on euthanasia.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, this seems to me to be a clear case of ‘thoughtcrime’, and New Zealand authorities deserve nothing but scorn for this.
I, Perry Anthony de Havilland, hereby declare that in the event I die and my body comes into the possession of the State, under no circumstances whatsoever may the State, in the form of the National Health Service or any other component of the State, harvest my organs on the grounds of implied consent. I explicitly and absolutely refuse consent for my organs to be harvested.
This is because the State’s plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive. Consent to harvest my organs for medical purposes may, however, be granted (or refused) by my designated next of kin, and no one else.
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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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