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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I’d love to have a few here walk with me through South Minneapolis, down Lake Street, maybe talk to a few of my friends who still haven’t been able to re-open and who now seem likely to simply declare BK and walk away, about how it is so much worse that “government” property was invaded for a few short minutes this week. It was “just private property,” after all.
Maybe we could linger in the remains of the burned-down Minneapolis police precinct building that somehow doesn’t represent “government” in their eyes. Burning down the police is somehow less civil-war-ish than temporarily occupying The People’s Chamber?
Several large communities in Minneapolis are still teetering on failure following the riots. But I should be concerned that government staffers felt ill-at-ease?
They are both bad situations. Cooler heads should have prevailed in both, but didn’t. This “oh, but this is so much worse!” handwringing is why liberty declines.
– Bobby B
“There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalisation of medicine that we cannot mention even all the more important ones. But there is one the gravity of which the public has scarcely yet perceived and which is likely to be of the greatest importance. This is the inevitable transformation of doctors, who have been members of a free profession primarily responsible to their patients, into paid servants of the state, officials who are necessarily subject to instruction by authority and who must be released from the duty of secrecy so far as authority is concerned. The most dangerous aspect of the new development may well prove to be that, at a time when the increase in medical knowledge tends to confer more and more power over the minds of men to those who possess it, they should be made dependent on a unified organisation under single direction and be guided by the same reasons of state that generally govern policy.”
– FA Hayek, The Constitution Of Liberty, page 300. First published in the UK in 1960.
“The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.”
– Saki (aka Hector Munro). I just liked this quotation. Yes, it has nothing really to do with anything current, which for my mental balance is a blessing. If anyone needs a mental health break from the Zombie Apocalypse, I recommend all of Saki’s stories.
In less than a year, our government has dictated 1) when we can leave our homes; 2) if we can work; 3) what we can buy; 4) what we have to wear in public; and 5) who we can see in private. All from the initial ‘ask’ of a two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve”. Let that sink in.
– Viva Frei
How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown?
How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again.
How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health?
Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to.
– Kathy Gyngell
Don’t forget, of the two miasmic horrors of the 20th century only one is unfashionable currently. A recommendation to invade Poland and turn people into soap will get you jailed these days. A recommendation to invade Poland and eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class gets you a book contract.
– Tim Worstall
“To truly protect freedom of speech – a fundamental necessity for meaningful democratic life – we must be alert to how it can become weaponised in ideologically coercive ways. Free speech can become a Trojan horse to gain space and attention for retrograde ideas that do not really merit debate. Pretending that all ideas must always be treated as equally valid and worthy of discussion in the idealised “marketplace of ideas” allows discredited ones – such as race science – to be covertly rehabilitated.”
– Priyamvada Gopal and Gavan Titley in a piece for the Guardian called “The free speech row at Cambridge will restrict, not expand, expression”.
Did you guess what was coming?
[R]ight now is really the wrong time to be raising taxes upon anything. This is true whether you use a Keynesian, MMT or even – spit – neoliberal analysis of the economy. Recessions just aren’t the time to be increasing taxation. This means we have some time to discuss that future tax rise of course. My own response would be let’s kill the quangos and pay for everything from their rotting corpses. A minority view to be sure but one that would both work and also gain at least some support.
– Tim Worstall
“With the end of the year approaching, I have been thinking about which of my views have changed over the last 12 months. Here’s one: I no longer think Brexit is a bad idea. I’m not ready to endorse it, because I don’t feel comfortable with the nationalism and populism surrounding so much of the Leave movement, but I no longer wish the referendum had gone the other way.”
– Tyler Cowen, writing in Bloomberg. This article is going to give some of its readers heartburn.
If Jan 1st 2021 comes along & UK has No Deal (or a Canada Deal) with EU, I will be very happy with Boris.
But on Jan 2nd 2021, I will be calling for Boris to be driven from power before he destroys the nation with his eco-fascist Net Zero lunacy & insane lockdowns.
– Perry de Havilland
“Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have all Britons driving electric cars powered by North Sea wind turbines and giving up their gas boilers to heat their homes with ground-source heat pumps. He will invent zero-emission planes and ships. This vast enterprise will create 250,000 jobs.”
– Matt Ridley, who is as unimpressed by the UK government’s fantasy energy policy as I am.
For me, the drive towards a supposedly “zero-carbon” economy is an obsession that I fear will blight much of what is left of my life and those of many others. Pushing back on this will be on a par with the drive to bring down the Soviet Union decades ago.
Roger Waters, a co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, is protesting Twitter for censoring the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party.
It’s funny to see the Left suddenly upset about censorship. I applaud Waters’ stance about the importance of free speech, but where was his activism when social media was (and is) censoring the other side?
– Zilvinas Silenas pointing people at an article by Jon Miltimore
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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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