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]

A potential key medical breakthrough

Sufferers from epilepsy might – just might – have a cure for their condition thanks to this piece of medical technology. I know one person who has epilepsy and it has had a hugely disruptive impact on her life (she is not allowed to drive, for instance).

As the late musician Ian Dury used to sing, there ain’t half some clever bastards.

The importance of reading words closely…

I was looking at the Telegraph and saw a very odd story titled Cameroon threatens to jail urine drinkers… my immediate reaction was “ok, now that is moderately revolting, but why the hell does David Cameron feel the need to pronounce on what is hopefully a fairly uncommon activity in the UK? Is there nothing this busybody does not want to regulate?”

And then I read it more closely…

Discussion Point VI

Who will be the next President of the United States?

I should be able flog my kidney if I want to

Some people get disgusted – I guess it is the ‘yuck!’ factor – at the idea that a person can sell his or her own kidney for money, for example. We seem to live in an era of warped values about the donation and use of human body parts, as this article in Reason makes clear. It appears that in some jurisdictions, just about everyone is allowed to make money from the business of using human tissue and bone for medical purposes – except the people from whom the tissue and bone is taken (I think we can take it as read at a liberal blog like this that killing people for their body parts is wrong).

Virginia Postrel, the US-based writer, underwent surgery to give one of her own kidneys to a friend and made sure said friend is alive today (what a great woman Virginia is). As a classical free marketeer, Postrel does not understand why it is so terrible that such acts should be done for financial gain. She has a long and typically thoughtful piece on the subject here. She responds to those who fear that poor or gullible people might be led into selling their body parts out of financial desperation, but that is an argument about curbing poverty, not reducing human freedom. Ultimately, I own my body, and not the state, not the rest of the UK population, not Tony Blair, not god or the Great Cheese Monster in the sky. Of course, a “market in organs” may attract shysters and unscrupulous doctors, but as the Reason article I alluded to makes clear, there are plenty of shysters in the system now.

Of course, in a country like Britain where a lot of the population drink like fish, it is debatable whether anyone would want to buy our kidneys, or even take them for free.

Samizdata quote of the day

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

– Margaret Thatcher

Cameron calls for people to be ‘nicer’

It is hardly a secret I really really do not like Dave Cameron, but I was surprised when a chum of mine called me up to say Cameron was calling for a smaller state. I found this hard to believe and soon found this article called Cameron: People must be nicer to each other.

The Conservative leader accused Labour of treating Britons like children, saying the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to any problem was to bring in laws which often discouraged people from taking responsibility. He argued that measures such as anti-social behaviour orders had been counter-productive because they allowed people to abdicate responsibility for their actions.

[…]

He called for a “revolution in responsibility”, saying that the next Conservative government was not going to treat its citizens like children, promising “to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law”. He insisted that a framework of incentives would prove more effective than regulations and laws. Mr Cameron promised to strengthen the family with the reform of a tax system that he claimed penalised couples who stayed together.

The fact the regulatory state is incredibly corrosive to civil society (in every sense of the phrase) should be self-evident to anyone claiming to be a conservative, but as Dave Cameron is not a conservative, in spite of leading a party called the Conservatives, I would not automatically assume he actually believes that. So you would think I would be pleased to finally see him saying something along these lines. In truth I burst out laughing when I read that article, not because I do not agree but because I do not believe him.

He has previously spent so much time telling us he can be trusted not to ‘do a Thatcher’ and how he intends to regulate our lives just as much as Blair’s Labour party, only ‘better’, why should his sudden enthusiasm for less regulation be believable? Simply put, he is not actually promising any such thing, not really.

The default position of all politicians is to pass laws in order to be seen to ‘do something’ and there is not a chance in hell that Dave Cameron, who is really just a political hack who sees power as an end in and of itself, will seek to actually roll back the state in any meaningful way and thereby deprive himself of patronage and political tools.

So of course the mask quickly slips…

He said a Conservative government would grant councils greater control of spending, while people should be encouraged to become more involved in the ownership and operation of their schools, public spaces, and social and environmental services.

Ah, so actually he is all in favour of the state doing stuff, he just wants it to be the local state rather than the central state. Sorry Dave, the only way you will stop damaging civil society is not by allowing a town council to spend the damn money, it is by not allowing any part of the state to spend so much money. A hell of lot less. There is just as much stupidity, greed and obsession with state control in town halls as there is in Westminster.

More sage advice about “saving the planet”

Somehow, I do not think this line of argument is going to work with my employer. I know this sounds harsh, but aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.

Unspoken assumptions

Be very suspicious when you hear the phrase “gap between rich and poor”. In the print version of the Evening Standard (I could not find a link to the article), Financial editor Anthony Hilton writes an article that makes a lot of rather questionable unspoken assumptions.

Gordon Brown will not change the rules that attract tax exiles to London. he is right to want the super-rich to stay but we must be aware the increasing gap between rich and poor

…and…

The British economy could be about to enjoy another 50-year boom but the major challenge remains the division of the spoils

…and…

The unwritten deal is that they pay little tax in return for adding to the general prosperity of the nation. It may be unfair to normal British taxpayers, it may be unfair competition from the perspective of foreign competitor countries, but it is pragmatic and it has worked

Although this article goes on to say that it is now the uncontested view that market economies are the only way to go, Anthony Hilton’s words are redolent with an assumed underpinning Marxist meta-context, to use Samizdata-speak. The fact that there is a gap between rich and poor is bad is a given to him. Why is it bad? He does not say because his meta-context takes it as a given that such a notion will be shared by his readers.

And that an economy is something that must be ‘divided as spoils’ is very strongly indicative of the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy. It suggests that for someone to get richer, someone else has to get poorer, which is perhaps the single most important underpinning notion behind almost every form of command based economics. Wealth is seen as something “we” have to divide, rather than something which is created.

Finally, for it to be “unfair” for someone else to have less of their money taken by the state even when that person can bring a quality of economic value beyond that of “normal British taxpayers”, seems to indicate that Anthony Hilton thinks the person being taxed more (in relative terms) should feel aggrieved against the person being taxed less rather than feeling aggrieved against the state which is taxing them more. Of course Anthony Hilton might not mean that but somehow I suspect he does.

Make no mistake, Anthony Hilton is not some poisonous Polly Toynbee style Stalinist as he does accept that market economies are the way to go, yet in almost everything he writes there is a large (and often unspoken) ‘but’ implicit in notion after notion… which is why I do not actually think he really does like the idea of market economies when it really comes down to it.

The next French President

Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal?

We forgot that you were here

The Balkans have been very quiet for what seems to be the longest time. Or, if not exactly quiet, then so overshadowed by other events that I had almost forgotten about them. Almost. But I have always regarded the region as an occasionally dormant volcano as opposed to a dead one.

In that context, this rather gloomy editorial from the Asia Times is worth reading:

When the outcome of a tragedy is known in advance, it finds ways of occurring earlier than expected. In this case, the fate of 100,000 Serbian Christians who remain in Kosovo may pre-empt the debate over Europe’s eventual absorption into the Muslim world.

The author makes no attempt to disguise his own sympathies so caveat lector.

I sometimes wonder how the last Balkan war would have played out without the NATO (read American) intervention. Very differently I suspect. In the event of another eruption, does the USA have the available resources and sufficient political will to perform an encore?

Samizdata quote of the day

Really, if The Economist is going to opine on this sort of thing, its writers need to know something on the subject.

Glenn Reynolds

Computers and the financial machine

For finance geeks and stock market punters, here is an article about the growing use of computer programmes to trade the equity, bond and other markets. Even as early as 1987, when equities fell dramatically – was it really nearly 20 year ago? – I vaguely recall reference to ‘programme-trading’, a process whereby orders to buy or sell a bunch of stocks was automated. Banks and hedge funds now use what are called algorithmic trading systems, which, in plain English, make use of recognisable patterns of behaviour that can be expressed mathematically in order to give out ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ signals in a market, spot trends, etc.

The usual worriers, not all of them anti-market people, may fret that all this mathematical wizardry, aided by the powers of modern computing, will make markets dangerously volatile, but as Iain Dey’s Telegraph article suggests, this does not appear to be the case. In recent years, in fact, global equity and bond markets have been pretty calm, although punctuated by the occasional sharp selloff, as happened in late February and early March. The last really big blowup was when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1998, triggering the meltdown of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund. When last year the fund Amranth nearly collapsed in the natural gas market, it hardly caused a wider ripple.

In fact, contrary to what the Will Huttons of this world might have us believe, the growing use of financial derivatives to offload risks seems to be making markets more, not less, able to deal with risk and ultimately, makes the whole financial system safer. That is not, of course to say that all is well. It is not. In Britain, a profligate government could yet put the market into a spin if the inflation problem gets worse (UK retail price inflation is nearly at 5%). House prices could, if interest rates rise as expected, take a nasty fallback. So there are gremlins in the systems. But the blame, as usual, should be pinned on the real culprits, and not computers or strange-sounding things like collateralised debt obligations.

Of course, this also explains why some of the best science graduates and post-graduates now work in the City, rather than making space rockets. Money talks.

(I have corrected the spelling of Iain Dey).