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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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
Tory candidates’ past drug use is surely of interest to nobody outside the Media-Political Class. Which just underscores how self-obsessed and irrelevant that Class has become
– Eamonn Butler
How can an organisation claim it does not discriminate on the grounds of religion – which is a set of beliefs – and then fire someone for expressing those beliefs outside the organisation?
– Tim Newman
“So well done to them all as they mass on the safe, sunlit and tank-free streets of London in their courageous anti-Trump protest. And on the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of thousands that the (actual fascist) Chinese government pretends never happened, maybe at least some of the more cerebral protesters will allow themselves a bit of pause for thought. These thoughts in particular: I really ought, in the name of consistency, to have been kicking off about the red carpet for Xi Jinping in 2015; and if there’s just one thing I suppose at a push I will give to Trump, he’s got to be right about the whole Chinese government-Huawei-5G business. Happy Tiananmen Anniversary. Happy, easy, safe protest against the non-fascist President of the United States.”
– Julie Lynn.
In Hong Kong, the gruesome anniversary of the Tianamen Square killings were commemorated yesterday. Given that HK is sort of part of China (its autonomy is being eroded), future vigils to mark this day of infamy may not take place.
And yet here’s the thing about that freedom. Why does, why should they, anyone need a licence from the government to export LNG? Note what this isn’t. It’s not a licence saying “and sure, your plant now meets standards.” With something as explosive as natural gas that’s fair enough perhaps, to require one of those. No, this licence is the government taking upon itself the power to regulate who you may sell your own produce to. Which isn’t actually freedom, is it?
– Tim Worstall
“They’ll often talk about anything they do apart from making a profit, which is the central purpose of a business and which is what drives businesses forward.”
– Liz Truss, UK Treasury minister, reflecting on how many business leaders today seem embarrassed and incapable of talking about building wealth, and would rather talk about how they want to give it away, or pander to environmental pressures, etc. It is refreshing to see a UK minister giving this mindset hard treatment. It would be good if this happened more often.
(I am writing these words from Singapore, which I am visiting for a business trip. The city-state that does not appear to have quite such a cringe about capitalist success.)
It really is astonishing. For quite some time, the Tory leadership’s bizarre actions made me suspect May & the party grandees knew something we didn’t. They were playing a diabolically cunning long-game, weaving some devious ploy unfathomable to mere mortals such as us. But I now realise I was mistaking a room full of well educated but basically stupid château-bottled shits for genius supervillains. And as I started adjusting my expectations of their smarts downwards, they kept coming up with displays of ineptitude & Westminster-bubble insularity that have me in a near perpetual state of amazement.
– Perry de Havilland
Happy City UK are one of a whole host of astroturf groups supported by government in order to lobby government for more government.
– Perry de Havilland
In the internet age, for a political party to get their message out, talking to the Old Media is an option, not a necessity.
– Perry de Havilland
Stephen Fry isn’t part of the alt-right. Nobody in their right mind believes he is. Anybody who says something this stupid is just virtue-signaling, performatively reminding the other members of their tribe that they don’t belong to the other tribe. Their eagerness to be more #woke than the next guy and/or gal drives them to say idiotic things like, “Stephen Fry is a racist.”
– Jim Treacher
BBC should be abolished, not because of blatant bias but because the whole idea of a state broadcaster was a terrible idea on day 1 of the BBC’s existence. And in the internet age, it is now an anachronistic bad idea. Bin it entirely or at least make it voluntary subscription
– Perry de Havilland
In between the torturous Brexit process, May’s government has been busy implementing her interventionist vision. Take the minimum wage, first introduced by the Blair government in 1999, which the Tory party long ago dropped opposition to. But now, Chancellor Philip Hammond, supposedly a member of the more free-market wing of the party, is considering hiking the minimum wage from 59% to 66% of median earnings, which would make it the highest in the world and mean that a quarter of British workers would be paid a government mandated wage.
[…]
The rest of the supposedly Conservative Party has seemingly given up on these values, more concerned with virtue signalling and kowtowing to the latest politically correct fad.
– ‘Creative Destruction’ on The looming death of the Tory Party
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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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