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]

Sometimes Karma works

It seems John McCain, of McCain-Feingold fame and little else, has been hoist on his own petard and run afoul of the anti-democratic, anti-free-speech and anti-liberty FEC regulations.

This could not happen to a more deserving individual.

A familiar complaint

It makes me smile when a grand new book hits the stores proclaiming a supposedly startling new point of view. One of the oldest refrains has been that Britain is run by a clique of super-rich, well connected folk. Robert Peston, a senior BBC journalist who is probably best known to the British viewing public for his jerky speaking voice (how the f**K does someone with such a manner hold down a TV career?), has written a book which, I summarise thus, complains that Britain is ruled by rich people; they are too rich, should not moan about things like high taxes on non-domiciled residents, should therefore pony up their wealth and be a good citizen. So there!

About as original as a BBC drama repeat on a Monday night, in fact. Peston argues that the wealthy, global elite who can supposedly flit around the world seeking the lowest tax regimes, should jolly well stop being so, well, selfish and pay the same taxes as the rest of us. But he gets the argument totally the wrong way round. The vast majority of the population should pay much lower, flatter taxes, so the rich will not need to act in this way. Problem solved, Mr Peston.

It is the existence of great mobility, of the ability by the rich to find the cheapest tax destinations, that acts, however imperfectly, as a check on the ability of socialist and other high-taxing governments from putting up taxes even more. Why do statist organisations like the OECD and others, for instance, bleat about the existence of more than 40 tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands or Monaco? Do you, dear reader, honestly think that they do so out of a fear about criminals stashing away their ill-gotten gains? Of course not. They are worried about “tax leakage”. If you are a leftwing politician or some other brand of political looter, you are not obviously very happy if a lot of people prefer to avoid having their wallets lifted.

Peston’s books has its interesting features: he writes about the rich businessmen who supported Blair, for example. But to be honest, even this is not terribly original. As long as politicians have the powers they have, control the budget spending that they do, then businessmen will have an incentive to try to carve out what benefits they can for themselves. Back in the 18th Century, the complaints of Peston would have been wearily familiar.

Ultimately, if we worry about the influence of rich people over public affairs, the solution is to shrink the state, so that filthy rich can do what they do best: making shedloads more money by providing others with goods and services that other people want, rather than engaging in political rent-seeking. And Peston need not worry, as he does, about children of the rich making a mess of their lives by inheriting “too much”. If governments did not interfere with trust law as they have, then rich parents could stipulate how and when their offspring inherited and spent money, assuming they inherited at all. If some of the children of the rich do mess up, well, so long as the British economy remains dynamic and embraces outsiders with talent, Mr Peston need have nothing to worry about.

For a multiple award winning journalist, this is not a very impressive book. I am afraid I have to give it a “D”.

Steve Fossett declared dead

Well known aviation adventurer Steve Fossett has been declared dead after months of searching for his Nevada crash site using every tool available in the modern search and rescue arsenal.

Steve has joined that small, select group of aviation icons who flew off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

Not a bad way for an aviator to go, actually.

Samizdata quote of the day

Surveys about happiness also show that people say they are happier when they feel their circumstances are improving. They are less likely to profess happiness in a wealthy society that is static than in a less rich society which is advancing. It is the improvement which counts, not the actual level. Jefferson rightly pointed to “the pursuit of happiness” rather than to any given level of it.

Humans are not the sort to enjoy static contentment. They seek challenges and the thrill of achievement. The peaceful calm of the Lotos Eaters is not for them, and neither are the sheep-pen and the secure pasture. Those who think of happiness as needs satisfied fail to spot that those needs include challenge and change. Humans are aspirational, seeking much more than the provision of necessities. Better a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

– Madsen Pirie reaches 39 in his Common Errors series at the ASI Blog (he has today reached 42)

Smarter drugs are coming

Anders Sandberg, gets quoted on the emerging debate on smart drugs and their impact upon the education system in the future. Critics have a dangerous vision of self-medicating nerds plotting to ace their exams and pull ahead of their rivals rather than working out occult symbols, raising D’hoffryn, and attempting to end the world.

“Cod liver oil is taken as a cognitive enhancer,” says Dr Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates how technology will affect the human race.

“Even something as simple as eating a biscuit at the right moment can improve your performance, yet no one would complain about that except your dentist. It doesn’t matter how you bring about change. What matters is the result.

“Surely, anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing,” says Dr Sandberg.

Smart drugs are an emergent tool and the Times Educational Supplement acknowledges that there are forty in production. Modafinil and ritalin are known quantities but “brain botox” sounds really scary. I have this vision that the drug erases all neural wrinkles and a race of golden haired cuckoos reduce their school to ash and then mingle menacingly round the local offy, destroying the effects of the drugs with a liberal dose of cider.

Amusement aside, there is a report expected from government in the next month on the rules that could govern ‘smart drugs’. This will be one of the strongest tests yet, of how the government plans to resolve the tension between the right to self-medicate and their horror of self-improvement. People who abolish grammars will not promote cognitive enhancement: they are unlikely to abandon mediocrity after it has taken them so many decades to achieve.

London is becoming more civilised

A friend of mine (“Don’t give any names!”) has just told me some very good news. The friend of mine’s landlady has a way of dealing with nasty lodgers, who don’t pay (despite being warned), or who make too much noise at night (despite being warned), or who do anything else evil (despite being warned). She expels them! That’s right, she chucks them out. This is illegal, and they (the scum being chucked out) often point this out. But it works. She has her own locks to the doors, which she duly locks. And just puts all their crap out onto the street and refuses to let them in ever again. They have the law on their side, but what bloody use is that if you need somewhere to live tonight and all your crap is out on the street? The law takes months!

The landlady has now done this thirty six times, including last Sunday, just after Church (the landlady is a born again Christian). They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom. They were warned, but paid no attention.

Good to know. Civil society is being re-established. See this, linked to, again, by Patrick Crozier today, for details. Be civil. Or suffer the consequences.

One shot, one kill

A successful interception of the falling NRO satellite by a US Navy SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) occurred at approximately 10:26 p.m. EST last night. It was hit over the Pacific and much of it will have re-entered and burned up by the time you read this. Remaining shrapnel is in a low orbit and will be down within a few weeks at most.

Great shooting guys!

Meanwhile, tractor production continues to break records

The Financial Times is very much the house journal of corporatist Britain; while not blind to the needs for a vigorously entrepreneurial culture, it tends to be hemmed in by a general acceptance of government and its hold on our lives. This headline says it all in the assumptions that underpin that newspaper:

“Boost for Darling as tax takings increase.”

Marvellous.

Samizdata quote of the day

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

– Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.

Inquiring into Adam Smith

“Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required “little else…but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice.” But those three things were then – and are now – the three hardest things in the world to find. Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood. The Wealth of Nations is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn’t trying to change the roof’s mind about crushing us.”

P.J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations.

O’Rourke’s book – a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket – is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O’Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland’s most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered – not always accurately – to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. He was not particularly fond of businessmen and some of his comments on the latter’s tendencies to collude smacked almost of that fear of big business that later spawned the madness known as anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. He supported a version of the labour theory of value that was ultimately taken to its absurd conclusion by Marx; but Smith being Smith, he was the sort of man who also kind of understood that the value of something is what people will pay for it, nothing else. I suspect – although I cannot prove this – that Smith had the open kind of mind to accept the marginal-utility approach to understanding prices that eventually pounded the labour theory into dust (although not quickly enough to prevent the horrors of Communist economics). → Continue reading: Inquiring into Adam Smith

Mercenary crusade

Private military security companies have expanded their remit in recent years, raked in higher profits from governments using their services and started to undertake campaigns to legitimate their newfound status.

There are pros and cons to using such companies in wartime, and there is a danger that core defence spending is reduced in favour of such companies, when we could do with some poor bloody infantry and a lot less Eurofighters or useless frigates.

Is it War on Want‘s role to really demand that the government act upon this? Their charitable remit is stated as anti-poverty in their press release, and it is unclear why forcing legislation through Parliament would do anything to reduce poverty or alleged human rights abuses by such companies:

The challenge, from the anti-poverty charity War on Want, follows mounting reports of human rights abuse by mercenaries employed by private military and security companies in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Last October guards working for British firm Erinys International opened fire on a taxi near Kirkuk, wounding three civilians. In September mercenaries from the American private military company Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Earlier a video published on the internet showed mercenaries from UK-based Aegis Defence Services randomly shooting at civilian cars from the back of their vehicle on the road to Baghdad airport. War on Want, calling for legislation including a ban on mercenaries’ use in combat, cites hundreds of incidents which have involved guards from Aegis and another British firm ArmorGroup in shootings. In the first four months of 2007 mercenaries working for ArmorGroup were engaged in combat action 293 times. Aegis mercenaries have been involved in combat action 168 times in the last three years and have seen eight employees killed, according to its chief executive officer, Tim Spicer. Spicer broke a UN arms embargo on Sierra Leone with his former company Sandline International, and was jailed in Papua New Guinea for earlier activities.

The calls for ‘democratic’ control of the private security companies are accompanied by demands that they are not allowed a role in combat. That seems to defeat the point of employing mercenaries and avoids looking at the problem: what rules are required for policing the actions of the private security companies.

The problem of abuse is clear and extends to any party involved in a war zone. Such matters are best dealt with through contract, rules of engagement and local law. If local law is unable to police the activity of mercenaries in a meaningful sense, then self-regulation and internal discipline are second best. If that does not work, then ensure that they are subject to the laws of those who hired them.

War on Want is unable to think beyond the normal route of political control, UN transnational imposition and legislative fiat. Democratic control is a staging post on the road to the complete abolition of such companies. When one sees the allegations, one wonders what states, the icons of democratic justice, have not committed far worse crimes. And their press release gives the impression that their worst crime is to make money, an unpardonable sin for the ethical crusader:

Iraq has turned this commercial opportunity into a huge money spinner, with UK companies among those making a real killing. British companies increased profits from £320 million in 2003 to £1.8 billion in 2004. Estimates have suggested the total income for the private security sector worldwide has reached $80-100 billion a year. In 2006, UK company ArmorGroup saw revenues totalling $273 million. The company earned $133 million in Iraq that year. Aegis and ArmorGroup have won valuable contracts with the US and UK governments in recent months. Aegis has won a new contract with the Pentagon worth $475 million dollars over the next two years. The US Army has favoured the company for a second time, following its earlier $293 million contract from 2004. In 2007 ArmorGroup won the UK government’s £20 million annual contract for security services in Afghanistan. Ruth Tanner, senior campaigns officer at War on Want, said: “Despite increasing evidence on human rights abuse by private military companies in Iraq, the government has failed to act. This free for all cannot be allowed to continue. David Miliband must act on this mercenary crisis as an urgent priority.”

When companies appear unaccountable and their employees free to abuse whomever they like, then there is a role for law: but a charity rationalises this as an improvement in social justice or poverty to undertake a politicised crusade that will not aid anyone apart from the puffed up conscience of the socialist.

What use is maths?

I am not sneering; I am genuinely asking.

For the last few months I have been education blogging. I’ve never been much good at working out site stats, and things are made harder by my education blog sharing its numbers, or all the ones that I see, with my personal blog. But, going only by how the comment rate has gone from zero to detectable, my education blog is now showing occasional but definite signs of life. I reckon that education blogging is rather like teaching. To begin with you often achieve very little, but if you stick at it, good things may eventually start happening.

In connection with my education blog, and in connection with the helping out that I am now doing once a week at one of the supplementary schools run by the think tank Civitas, I find myself asking: what is the point of learning maths? I entirely accept that there is a point, in fact many points. It’s just that I don’t know much about what these points are. Some of the boys at the supplementary school – two in particular spring to mind – strike me as showing real mathematical talent, at any rate compared to the others. What can I say to them that might encourage them – and encourage their parents to encourage them – to get every bit as far in maths as they can? What use is maths? For lots of people, especially for lots of teachers and lots of children, that is surely a question worth knowing answers to.

I don’t need to be convinced about the usefulness of arithmetic. People cheating you out of change in a shop, or loading you with debt obligations that you did not understand when you made the deal – working out floor areas and carpet costs – getting enough nails and screws and planks when you are DIYing about the house – just generally keeping track of work. I get all that. And, I find, I’m pretty good at teaching arithmetic to young boys and girls, partly because I do indeed understand how important it is.

But what about the kind of maths that really is maths, as opposed to mere arithmetic, with lots of complicated sorts of squiggles? What about infinite series, irrational numbers, non-Euclidian geometry, that kind of thing? I, sort of, vaguely, know that such things have all manner of practical and technological applications. But what are they? What practical use is the kind of maths you do at university? I hit my maths ceiling with a loud bump at school, half way through doing A levels and just when all the truly mathematical stuff got seriously started, and I never learned much even about what the practical uses of it all were, let alone how to do it.

I also get that maths has huge aesthetic appeal, and that it is worth studying and experiencing for the pure fun and the pure beauty of it all, just like the symphonies of Beethoven or the plays of Euripides.

But what are its real world applications? Please note that I am not asking how to teach maths, although I cannot of course stop people who want to comment about that doing so, and although I am interested in that also. No, here, I am specifically asking: why learn maths?

Occasional Samizdatista Michael Jennings works as a Something in the City, analysing things like technological trends. Not at all coincidentally he has a PhD in maths. He is the ideal sort of person to answer such questions, and he and I have fixed to record a conversation about the usefulness of mathematics later this week. But I am sure that a Samizdata comment thread on this subject would help us both, if only by helping me to ask some slightly smarter questions.