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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The image above, which I took about an half an hour before writing this article, shows an employee of Britain’s premier cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, standing by the front door having a cigarette. This is a man who works in a cancer hospital and comes face to face with the savage realities of what his habit vastly increases his risk of contracting, on a daily basis.
This picture says something very profound about human nature. One thing is for sure, it says more than any lengthy exegesis I could write about the futility of trying to use the violence of law to mandate behaviour the state feels is in the regulated person’s “best interests”. Ponder that.
August 17, on this day in 1795 the slave known only as Tula and his friend Bastian Karpata started a violent revolt against their oppressors.
Mad cow disease (vCJD), foot-and-mouth, MMR, salmonella in eggs… the list goes on and on. The reality of life is that no one has a monopoly on insight, intelligence and information. Yet the state would have us believe that in their case when they say something, is somehow of a higher order compared to any other institution or individual. After all, it that was not the case, how could the fact the state backs its views with the threat of violence be justified?
Yet time and time again we are told in patronising tones that the state’s experts know best, to the extent the state is prepared to after our body chemistry regardless of our individual wishes. We are told for years “Of course British Beef is safe to eat. Our scientists tell us there is nothing to worry about and reports to the contrary are just scare-mongering”… only to discover it can in fact kill us in the most ghastly manner by boring holes in our brains .
Likewise, the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is still foisted on people by Britain’s national Health Service in spite of worries about potentially horrendous side effects. Fortunately, the culture of deference to authority has been breaking down for quite some time as the state finds itself dis-intermediated from the flow of information to people. As yet more information casting doubt upon the safety of MMR comes to light, those who decided to shun the state’s advice and err on the side of safety for their children are shown the wisdom of their ways.
Yet the important issue here is not ‘if it better to fluoridate water’ or ‘should I eat more folic acid’ or ‘should I immunise my children with single jabs or the three-in-one’ or ‘should I wear a seat belt’?’… but ‘Why do I tolerate the state and the experts on its payroll overriding my views on issues which relate directly to my body?’
The fact is fluoride probably does make for better teeth, folic acid for better health, MMR is usually safe and seat belts often save lives. But why on earth entrust these decisions to such a demonstrably fallible institution like the state? We all make mistakes, but the price of individual error is largely confined to the individual making the error or at least to his immediate family or associates… the price for the state making an error however is far wider and much harder to mitigate. When the advice the state gives us proves to be flawed, that can be disastrous, but they it actually makes its views on health as a force backed mandatory law, that should be regarded as intolerable.
In the case of MMR, single vaccines are privately available off the NHS, yet due to the fact people have their money appropriated to fund the NHS regardless of their wishes, the state reduces their ability to actually make meaningful choices independently. In much the same way, you make correctly deduce your children would be better educated either at home or at a private school, yet because the state takes your money and pours it into funding state schools anyway, it greatly reduces the real choice of less wealthy parents to actually opt out.
We are told we have all manner of free choices in the wonderful ‘representative’ democracy in which we live (pick any western country), yet as long as the state appropriates such a large chunk of the money we earn and depend upon to actualise our wishes, the reality is that for many, choice is an illusion as they struggle to manage what remains of their unapproapriated several property.
Related articles
It is a matter of private choice, not a matter of ‘public’ health, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Libertarian ‘Public Health’?, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
The totalitarian mindset, Sunday, June 16, 2002
I agree that Logan (see previous article) is almost certainly not a totalitarian. However I stand by my contention that there is indeed no such thing as ‘public health’ except for communicable diseases not because I disagree with his self evident statement that ‘The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease’ but that ‘health’ is not in fact legitimately ‘public’ except in the case of communicable disease (and possibly some mental illnesses as well) as it goes to who owns a person’s body.
Most other health related matters are essentially only legitimately private rather than public matters. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone spending non-appropriated monies (such as a philanthropic fund) to preach high and low the virtues of folate in bread/low fat diets/wearing seat belts/not smoking/not taking crack cocaine/wearing sensible shoes/eat more fish/eat less fish/avoid mad cow beef or whatever the health scare de jour is… provided the people being preached to ‘for their own good’ are free to respond with a loud yawn and a rude gesture if they are so inclined. Yes, it is legitimate to ‘educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate’… and to induce (not mandate) companies to produce folate bread… but it is not legitimate to mandate it and it was that I was objecting to.
To mass medicate, such as putting folic acid in bread or fluoride in water in such a way that people cannot realistically avoid changes to their body chemistry, is to suggest that the state and its experts actually have some over-riding ownership of everyone’s physical body and they may adjust its chemistry as the likes of Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand see fit. Now it that is not a totalitarian value then I don’t know what is. The issue here is not health but who owns your body!
On 27th of May, two eminent medical professors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand are seriously peeved that the recommendations of the advisory scientific committee on nutrition (COMA) are not going to be supported by the government. Those recommendations are to require by law that all bread in the United Kingdom is fortified with folic acid. This is already mandatory in the USA. In their letter the government funded professors wrote:
We believe that the decision of the Food Standards Agency [not to accept the COMA conclusions] is a mistake and illustrates the structural weakness in our ability to make rational public health decisions. The problem goes further than folic acid. It affects our whole approach to public health.
The contemporary view is that public health is essentially an issue of personal choice. In fact, the essence of public health is that it is a collective strategy that does not require personal choice (it is just there for all to benefit from). At present, individual decisions relating to public health [emphasis added] are a separate issue. We need an agency that is mandated to consider public health in a rational, evidence-based manner, with the authority to recommend policy to government and monitor its implementation. We are, regrettably, far from this paradigm.
We hope that ministers will ignore the view of the Food Standards Agency and implement the strategy proposed by COMA, the Governments’s own scientific advisory committee
First off, let me say that I certainly agree that increasing ones intake of Folic acid has beneficial effects (I take a pill of the stuff myself every day). However that efficacy or otherwise of folic acid is utterly irrelevant. By what warped moral value does COMA and professors Wald and Hoffbrand have the right to decide that the entire population are going to be medicated by the state? There is only one person who has the right to decide if I will add chemicals to my body and that person is me. The only conceivable morally justified circumstances in which I might be medicated against my will is that of highly infectious dangerous diseases, on the theory that if I have smallpox (or whatever) then I would pose a clear threat to others.
Yet that is not the case here, and neither is it in the case of water fluoridation. Both are probably harmless and even beneficial yet it would seem that the morality of using the violence of the state to impose the judgement of technocrats like Wald and Hoffbrand does not even get a mention.
If because it is said to be objectively beneficial to force people to ingest certain chemicals, then why not also allow Wald and Hoffbrand to decide what the nations subjects will be required to eat and not eat? High fat low fibre MacDonald’s burgers? Why not just make them illegal and require all restaurants to serve state approved menus set by COMA? If these professors have no moral problem forcibly medicating millions of people every day ‘for their own good’ then why not try to reduce the incidence of heart disease by shutting down the burger joints and pizza parlours? Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’. My diet and supplements are none of Wald and Hoffbrand’s damn business. How dare they try to put chemicals in MY body without my personal and explicit permission?
Of course the totalitarian mindset demonstrated by these people, rooted in collectivist hubris and moral relativism, sees choice itself as irrational… morality does not even come into it. Yet even on the amoral utilitarian basis under which such people operate and to which they would required us to submit our very body chemistry, we all know how well the state’s retained scientists can be trusted regarding ‘public health’. Look at how well they did regarding ‘mad cow disease’.
You might want to take some time today, of all days, to check out The Centre for Freedom and Prosperity. If you need to know why you should look into the idea of organising your life around off-shore banking and business, then might I suggest you need look no further than what today means for your personal wealth… or at least the part of it you are permitted to keep.
Avoiding tax all together can be difficult for most people but you owe it to yourself to try and minimise the extent to which you are financing your own repression (and mine too). It is quite possible to do it by using the law against itself, though frankly whatever means you have to use when dealing with the state is fine by me. Any oath or declaration extracted under the threat of force has no moral basis whatsoever and breaking it is just a matter of deciding based on risk/benefit analysis, not morality.
Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
– J.S. Mill, On Liberty
Charles Dodgson takes aim and fires at Libertarians and our ideas which he clearly regards as ill-conceived and even harmful.
Mr.Dodgson uses an article from the Boston Phoenix exposing the slave trade in Pakistan.
“The bidding starts quickly. About 15 minutes into the bidding, one of the buyers asks for an inspection. The elderly woman removes the girls tunic, fingers the childs breasts, and then shines a flashlight into her open mouth to show that she has a good set of teeth. Bidding resumes with a certain intensity; some of the men can be seen rubbing themselves.”
The article paints a truly pitiful vista and I share Mr.Dodgson’s revulsion. What I do not share, though, is his rather strange conclusion that this is the kind of thing that Libertarians approve of:
“Libertarians argue for a society in which people solve their problems by making whatever commercial bargains they can, and the government takes an enforcement role, if that. The more radical among them suggest that society would be best off without any government at all, with nothing but private trade to regulate their interactions.”
Not quite right, of course, but it is an indication of where Mr.Dodgson is going wrong and he is definitely going wrong even according the article he has used as his source which, further down, advises us:
“Precious few Americans know anything about the history of Pakistan, much less that ul-Haq’s reforms consolidated conservative Islam’s stranglehold on the national imagination. Fewer still know that, in the process of imposing Islamic law on the land, he created a culture of servitude for the poor.”
Ah, that explains it then. Would all those Libertarians who are going around advocating the imposition of Conservative Islamic Law please stop doing it because you are distinctly off-message and giving people like Mr.Dodgson the wrong impression. Thank you.
Any genuine Libertarians could tell Mr.Dodgson that our ideas are based on the sovereign rights of individual human beings. A concept which, in both theory and practice, may lead to all manner of interesting and even exotic consequences, all of which are the very antithesis of slavery.
It is often said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. I don’t know about that and I don’t think that Mr.Dodgson is a man of little learning. The rest of his posting is devoted to taking our Johnny Student to task for his interpretations of the US Civil War in a lengthy rebuttal which appears to be both well-researched and informative.
No, I prefer to think that its a little misconception that is a dangerous thing and, of course, a big misconception is a really dangerous thing. Yes, I ‘m happier with that.
…very different things to different people. Let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary:
patriot /n.a person who is devoted to and ready to support or defend his or her country. ../patriotic adj. //patriotically adv. //patriotism n. [F patriote f. LL patriota f. Gk. patriotes f. patros of one’s father f. pater patros father]
Of course this also rather depends on what you mean by ‘country’
country n. (pl.-ies) 1 a the territory of a nation with its own government; a State. b a territory possessing its own language, people, culture, etc. […] 3 the land of a person’s birth or citizenship; a fatherland or motherland.
And therein lies one of the problems with Patriotism. When some one says ‘I am a patriot’, what the hell does that actually mean? Let’s take me, for example. My mother was American and I have lived about one quarter of my life in the USA. My father was British and I have lived a little under half my life here. For purely accidental reasons, I was actually born in the Netherlands. I feel both/neither British and/or American. So much for the complicated heredity and biology. Now for some ideology: I personally reject as illegitimate any function of the state which is not related to the defence of the individual liberty of people within their area of control, within a broad reasonable definition of those terms. I see the State as, at best, a provider of a service (security) in much the same way as I see the Pepsi-Cola Beverage Company as a provider of cans of fizzy brown liquid. I do not accept the very notion of ‘citizenship’ as I regard that as tantamount to denying me free association with non-citizens and implies the State somehow owns me in some way.
So can I be ‘patriotic’?
To the State? Absolutely not. Try to make me pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the Union Jack or the Tricolour with the intention of extracting an admission of loyalty to the state and I will set it on fire instead. And if it is on a tee shirt saying “Try to burn these colors asshole”, the wearer might just get their wish. Try to conscript me and the state will discover that I am not a pacifist and have no problem with using force against someone who tries to impose servitude upon me: starting with the guy who tries to serve call up papers on me.
And yet…
I live in London at the moment but I have ‘Old Glory’ displayed in my front window for all to see. Try walking down Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea and you will see which is my house. It has been there since September 12th 2001. I do indeed feel an affinity for what James Bennett aptly calls The Anglosphere. I regard myself as a member of a cosmopolitan, English speaking global community, a civil society far greater than any mere nation state. For all its flaws, that extended society is the best hope for freedom and liberty the world has ever known and that is something worth defending. Unlike British society, which has a myriad cultural and regional symbols redolent with meaning, only Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Star Spangled Banner, truly represents not just the American state but also American society, warts and all. Truth is I much prefer the Gadsden flag (see side bar of this blog) but most people would not know what it means. And so that is why the Stars and Stripes is stuck in my window for all to see. It was not just the people of New York who were wounded, it was all of us and that is a point I think well worth making publicly.
So is that ‘patriotism’? Opinions vary.
Last night I was in lovely Prague but tonight I am in more exciting but less lovely Belgrade. So let me tear myself away from my new biMac «hehehe» and give you a Balkan perspective on the articles by Dale Amon and Perry de Havilland regarding hairy John Walker in Afghanistan.
As a person who is not from what Perry interestingly calls the ‘Anglosphere’, maybe I see this matter of John Walker slightly differently. In what used to be Yugoslavia, people split along largely ethnic lines when the civil war ripped us apart. Yet many people made decisions to not let an accident of birth choose who they stood by. There were Serbs who joined the Croatian HV Army, there were Croatians who supported the Krajina Serbs, there were Croatians who joined the Bosnian ‘Muslim’ Armia rather than the Croatian HVO. There were Serbs in Yugoslavia who supported Milosevic and the paramilitaries and others who opposed them. Still others everywhere decided to support ‘none of the above’ and either refused to take up arms against anyone or moved abroad.
It seems to me, a person who turns his back on their ethnic origin and joins with another culture during a conflict is either a person of principle or a traitor. Which you are judged to be is only decided when it is all over. So for example, Croatians who supported the Serbian regime in Krajina are ‘traitors’ and Serbs who supported Tudjman’s Croatia are ‘principled’.
Why? Because if anyone can be said to have emerged the ‘winner’ in the Balkan Wars, it is Croatia. It is that simple. As the US has won the war in Afghanistan, it will be decided that Walker is a traitor. The winners make the rules and they write the history books. The winner is always right. Perry takes a position of pure and very good libertarian principle in this matter, but what Dale says is what will actually happen: the US will throw him in jail regardless for exactly the reasons he says.
It may not be fair or just or moral or even reasonable. But it is the truth. That is how the world works.
Dale‘s points are well made, particularly the one that when Walker joined the Taliban, he could hardly have reasonably expected to find himself at war with the United States! I have a slightly different take on it, however.
I think many of the comments regarding the dismal Walker begs the question of why is he being regarded as having any particular affinity or duty of loyalty to the USA at all? Just because he originated from there, how does that somehow make him irretrievably beholden? People come from all over the world and emigrate to America and the US has no problem with them ‘becoming Americans’. So why is it so hard to see the process in reverse?
For goodness sake, if going to Afghanistan and joining the Taliban does not constitute the complete and utter repudiation of not just the United States but the entire western world, then I guess I don’t know what does. When he was captured, as far as I know he was certainly not yelling “I’m an American! I wanna see the nearest American consulate!” Far from it. There should be no expectation that he still owes the US anything or the US owes him anything.
If it turns out he is a member of Al Qaeda, then he is still very much our enemy and should be treated in the same manner as we treated captured members of the SS or Gestapo or Nazi Party after WWII. If he is just a member of the defeated Taliban’s army, as seems likely, then just question him and then dump his sorry arse back in the hell hole we found him in. Even if he was involved in the death of CIA man Mike Spann, so what? Walker was a soldier with the Taliban and we were the Taliban’s openly declared enemy. People get killed in war. That is what soldiers do. Big deal.
I do not think Walker is ‘just a misguided kid’. I think he is a misguided adult who made his choices freely and should reap the consequences of supporting a vile regime in Afghanistan. But his crimes are again the Afghan people who suffered under the Taliban, not the US. Unless he turns out to be a member of Al Qaeda, leave it to to the Afghans to deal with him.
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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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