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 appeal of Millennial Socialism rests on the delusion that the democratic, bottom-up socialism Millennial Socialists aspire to is a fundamentally novel aspiration, and that nobody in history has ever tried to build anything like this before.
But it is not a new aspiration. This was precisely what Chávez’s and Maduro’s “21st Century Socialism” was also about, which is why it used to be so popular in the West. A moratorium on the V-word would just play into the hands of those who now want to pretend that none of this ever happened, and that “Millennial Socialism” is novel, untried and untested.
So no, I absolutely won’t stop banging on about it, and if you don’t want to hear it, tough luck, because I’ll bore you with it anyway. We shouldn’t stop banging on about Venezuela until the Left stops banging on about socialism.
– Kristian Niemietz
British companies, pension funds may have to report climate risks – Did you vote Tory thinking this is what you were supporting? Keep that in mind next time you are tempted to vote for the people doing this
– Perry de Havilland, commenting on this.
It’s interesting that the people who believe that throwing a milkshake in someone’s face shouldn’t be considered assault are often the same people who believe that ‘saying things’ should be.
– Ricky Gervais
Government crowds out productive research by betting on the wrong horses—those who seek funding by dipping their hands in the public till. As Ridley puts it, “If the government spends money on the wrong kind of science, it tends to stop people working on the right kind of science.” Before you cheer for politicians promising medical breakthroughs, realise their actions may prevent the discovery of cancer cures.
– Barry Brownstein
The very concept of progress—of the continual betterment of the human condition through the application of science and the spread of freedom—was a product of the European Enlightenment, as Kishore Mahbubani reminds us. These thinkers were among the first to advance the idea that humanity’s problems are soluble, and that we are not condemned to misery and misfortune. The spectacular progress that ensued, first for the West and then increasingly also for the rest, was a matter not of historical necessity, but of diligent human effort and struggle. Pessimism is not just factually wrong, it is also harmful because it undermines our confidence in our ability to bring about further progress. The best argument that progress is possible is that it has been achieved in the past.
– Maarten Boudry
I say let the Nazis speak. There is no evidence that the alt-right’s propagandists can turn impressionable YouTube viewers into deranged mass-shooters. We have little to fear from open debate. Let the Nazis preach white separatism and white supremacy. Let them deny the Holocaust. Let everybody see how full of shit they are. Let them openly sell a product nobody wants. These ideas have been around for decades, and few people are persuaded by them. There is significant reason to believe that Twilight Sparkle will prevail over the alt-right in the marketplace of ideas.
– Daniel Friedman
One of the least-read but most important sections of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the appendix which outlines ‘The principles of Newspeak’ – how the regime rewrote and redefined the English language to suit its ends.
Take the priceless word ‘free’. This word, writes Orwell, ‘still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as “The dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free”, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.’
That redefinition of free to mean the restrictive ‘freedom from’ rather than the liberating ‘freedom to’ is a feature of modern political discourse. A few years ago, when the UK authorities were pushing for the ban on smoking in public places, I wrote about the public-health crusaders’ new slogan ‘smokefree’ as a classic example of Orwell’s Newspeak – a made-up word that turns the concept of freedom into a real denial of the freedom to smoke. A ban on public smoking might be good for public health, I noted then, but the twisting of language being used to justify it would prove unhealthy for public debate.
– Mick Hume
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Just a periodic reminder from Frédéric 😉
I’ve been pondering the Jo Brand acid “joke”. Sensible reaction: “Crap joke but just a joke, move along, nothing to see here.”
But maybe HMS Sensible had sailed, so perhaps every indignant reaction the Left has to jokes they dislike must be embraced & rammed down their throats as well. My strong preference is “For fuck sake, stop trying to get people fired over crap jokes, no matter how awful” and just apply that to everyone. But if that is not going to be an option, then perhaps we need to share the pain without mercy. The golden rule when people shoot at you is… shoot back
– Perry de Havilland
“Socialism always begins with a universal vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people having to eat their own pets.”
– Toby Young, found via Guido Fawkes, who has video.
Government run operations tend to produce perverse incentives that have a habit of producing bad outcomes.
It depends on your definition of “bad”. If by “bad” you mean produces shitty products for hugely inflated prices, sure you are right. If by “bad” you mean “not corresponding to the thing that was promised” you’d also be mostly right. However, if by “bad” you mean “producing bad results for the people in charge” you’d be completely wrong. The goal of all government programs is twofold: get politicians re-elected, and grow and expand the budget and power of government departments. One need only look at the result over the past 100 years to see that it has, in those terms, been a roaring success.
The incentives are only “perverse” if you are not aligned with these two goals. Otherwise they are really quite effective in achieving their actual ends.
– Fraser Orr
In a Marxist view of the world, capital owners are not just disparate individuals, who all do their own thing, and who have little in common with one another. They are a social class, and in a Marxist perspective, a social class has agency of its own. Its members act collectively, to further their own class interests.
So for them, the issue of nationalisation and privatisation is not about the relative efficiency of the public and the private sector. It’s about class power. Nationalisation is not about reducing train fares or energy bills by a few pounds. It’s about reducing the power of “the capitalist class”, and transferring that power to “the working class”.
Of course, so far, state ownership has not been particularly “empowering” for ordinary people, neither in mixed economies like 1970s Britain, nor in fully socialised ones like the Soviet Union. This is a point which most Millennial Socialists would readily concede. But they would insist that public ownership could also take completely different forms, that it could mean genuine democratic control, with mass public participation. It has just never been properly tried.
They are wrong. But it’s a point that the remaining defenders of the market economy need to address. Which is what I’m doing in this book.
– Kristian Niemietz
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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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