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There are so many things to do these days, especially in a place like London, that often you make up your mind about what to do of an evening at the very last moment. So, maybe you have the coming Tuesday evening, tomorrow, March 17th, still free. If you do, I strongly recommend the Libertarian Alliance’s 2nd Annual Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, which this year will be given by Professor Kevin Dowd.
Getting on for a hundred people have already signed up to attend this event, in other words quite a few more than showed up for last year’s inaugural Chris Tame lecture given by David Myddleton. But there is room for more still. Attendance is free of charge. All the organisers ask is, if you want to be there, email them beforehand. Follow the link at the top of this for all the details of the event, and for the email to confirm attendance.
What excites me about this lecture is that Dowd is both an unswerving libertarian, and an expert on banking, on the history of banking and on the baleful effects over the decades of state monopoly fiat money and of banking regulation. This is a man who not only believes in the idea of a free market in currencies and in banking, but someone who can actually explain in detail why that would be a better arrangement than anything else now being proposed. He also has firm and positive views about what should immediately be done, right now, to alleviate the crisis. And because he is a Professor, he has some leverage for getting his ideas reported in the mainstream media.
Having been looking forward to this event for several months, I now realise that I have, infuriatingly, a teaching commitment set in concrete for that very same evening. But the good news for me, and for anyone else who won’t be able to attend the lecture in person, is that it will be videoed, and video internetted just as soon as that can be contrived. You may depend upon me to have further things to say about this potentially very important lecture just as soon as that video is available and linkable to.
Can we win the ideological war that now swirls about the current financial catastrophes? Personally I remain optimistic about this possibility, but whether we can actually win or not, we should surely try to win. And those of us who conveniently can should surely support those people, like Kevin Dowd, who are making the biggest efforts to this end. Most of Samizdata’s readers do not live in London and can’t be at this lecture in person, although lots are Londoners and could. But, Londoners or not, I very much hope that a healthy proportion of us will at least give the video our closest attention. Meanwhile, I am sure that almost all of you will join with me in wishing Professor Dowd all the best for tomorrow evening.
It’s like a parallel universe out there. Politicians, newspaper journalists and television presenters are running around like headless chickens with no clue as to how to deal with the economic crisis. But the truth is out there.
Things are quite different from the recession of the 1970’s, which coincided with my discovery of libertarianism and Austrian School economics. Back then one had to be extraordinarily lucky to come across the likes of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard. Now correct explanations of why the crisis arose are just a few clicks away.
– David Farrer
Taylor Dinerman attended a funeral of a respected soldier and space advocate and sent us this small remembrance of the man. I expect a couple of you in the commercial space business knew Mil Roberts from his days in High Frontier.
Taylor is a freelance professional journalist who from time to time graces our pages both on ‘page one’ and as a respected member of the commentariat.
“The flag that he honored with his life, now honors him.” These words spoken by the Army chaplain at the graveside ceremony for General Mil Roberts at Arlington on March 12th, explained why it is so symbolically important that the flag cover the coffins of our fallen heroes. The idea of reciprocal shared honor is one that binds any good military organization together, the past, the present and the future are all embodied in that symbol and with the deep meaning that we Americans give it.
The ceremony, with the honor guard, the riderless horse, a fifteen gun salute, the US Army Band playing Ruffles and Flourishes and America The Beautiful, the firing of the traditional three volleys, all done with precision and strict discipline but without the boot stomping and barked orders that one associates with some military ceremonies. The whole event was simple, elegant and dignified.
Mil was sent off to what he, as a Christian, believed was a better place by his friends, comrades and family in a style and manner that he had earned in combat and in years of service to America. He landed on Omaha Beach on June 6th 1944 and fought his way across Europe ending up in Czechoslovakia. Later he served in the Army reserves while pursuing a normal civilian life. In 1970 he was called up for active duty as head of the Army Reserve in the Pentagon.
As President of the High Frontier Missile Defense advocacy group, he helped get the DC-X program off the ground. That Rocket proved many things, including the fact that worthwhile space launch development programs could be done for far less than the billions of dollars that the government normally requires. This helped jump start the suborbital space tourism industry and may someday lead to a revolutionary low cost way to get into orbit.
Mil always had a great sense of humor and both he and his wife Priscilla had a wonderful gift for friendship.
He lived his life according to the old Jewish rule “Be a Mensch!”
– Taylor Dinerman
This is a tremendous rebuttal of the claim that British manufacturing is in decline. Of course, there is nothing specifically wonderful in having a large or small manufacturing sector, but for those who care about such things, this article nails a lot of cliches about how Britain is supposedly losing the art of making stuff well. In fact, a lot of the manufacturing that goes on in the UK is first class. Take the aero-engine business, for example.
Well, it is nice to grasp at positive news that is going.
From time to time (on this blog and in other places) I call for the abolition of the BBC. Often, someone smug and patronising in the comments will say something along the lines of “Only you heartless and uncultured libertarians would fail to realise that there are some worthwhile/needed/educational programs that will not be produced by the market.
My usual response to this is that we will never know, because the market has never been allowed to demonstrate what it might produce. I have written before about the weird history of British television and how owners of private television channels had little if any control of their own programming. But in some ways radio is even weirder. For one thing, there were no privately owned and/or commercially funded radio stations in the UK before 1973. There are many today, and some might argue that this proves some sort of market exists, but this is still a weird, weird world.
For instance, the highly self-important telecommunications regulator Ofcom, which helpfully “exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age”, made a particularly delightful ruling.
Ofcom staff listened to Bristol radio station GWR FM, and determined that 53% of the music it played was more than two years old. As a consequence, they threatened to take away the station’s licence and force it off the air. This is a commercial, privately owned radio station.
Really.
General Edmond Rasolomahandry . . . President Marc Ravalomanana . . . opposition leader Andry Rajoelina . . . Colonel Noel Ndriarijoana: newsreaders everywhere are praying for a swift resolution to the crisis.
– Mick Hartley notes the possibility of civil war in Madagascar
I posted this item almost as Brian hit the button on his own entry on the same subject. But I think it is worth a second bite at this cherry.
Great work by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator for revealing that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now almost totally owned by the UK government, has been asking prospective clients about their political affiliations. The exact term is to ask whether a wannabe client is a “politically exposed person”. Now, this maybe more of a cockup than a sign of anything more sinister, so my trigger finger may be getting unnecessarily twitchy, but still. This is, as the commenters on the article Fraser writes says, a classic demonstration of why state-owned banks are bad and ripe for corruption. Special favours will be demanded by the ruling party’s clients. In France, remember, the former state-run Credit Lyonnais bank was a sink of corruption.
RBS is also the parent of Coutts, the private bank, and RBS Coutts, the international version of said. These banks provide clients with offshore accounts. The risk is that such a bank could be put under political pressure to deliver details about its clients, a fact that becomes particularly relevant with so many governments currently trying to shut down so-called “tax havens” such as Switzerland.
If it is the case that RBS has been trying to prize out details of potential clients’ political affiliations, then at the very least the management responsible for this dim-witted idea should resign. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should serious consider his own position. On his watch, the once very solid, in fact gloriously dull, UK banking group Lloyds has been pressured into buying the debt-laden UK banking group HBOS. Result: Lloyds’ share price has crashed and most of that bank is now owned by the government. (Full disclosure: I bank with Lloyds).
Unbelievable.
Fraser Nelson:
Some of the worst events in history take place because no one is really in charge. That RBS could blunder their way into this is almost as scary as the idea that they did it deliberately. I accept it was a blunder: God knows, RBS has made enough of them already. But the banking industry should urgently review and clarify the way it handles the issue of “politically exposed persons.” No one in this country should ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank.
Fine prose, I think you will agree. At first I had in mind to make that first sentence there into today’s SQOTD. But think about it. To Nelson, it is obvious that nobody should “ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank”. Excuse me? If I am wondering whether or not to lend you money, I will ask you any questions I feel like asking, and if I don’t like the answers, then it will be no deal. If you don’t like me asking such questions, you are free to look elsewhere for the funds you want to borrow, even if I say yes. If you don’t like a bank you lend money to asking such questions, then don’t lend it to them. I am talking about the right to discriminate, both by lenders and by borrowers. Discrimination is, or should be, at the heart of banking. The attempt to drive discrimination out of banking has been at the heart of our recent banking woes.
That Fraser Nelson, a man most definitely on our side in the broad loves-capitalist-success hates-socialist-slums way that we regularly here celebrate, should write something like that, with no apparent sense of self-contradiction, tells you just how debased – how nationalised – the state of banking already is now in Britain, and has been for some while. It’s not that Nelson favours state micro-management of banks in the deliberate manner which I do agree is suggested by my heading. It’s worse than that. He just takes it for granted. His only question is: how should it be done?
Because you see, what makes this question about whether you are a “politically exposed person” scary and Soviet, which is Nelson’s point, is that the banks already are nationalised, in the sense of their databases being, you know, like that (hands brought together into a combined, intertwined, two-handed prayer fist) with government databases.
If banks operated in a true free market, banks asking about politics, or for that matter being suspected of having (and in fact having) political preferences which they make a point of not asking about, would just be stuff discussed in Which Bank? magazine. And the readers of such magazines would have plenty of banks to choose between, just as they now have plenty of magazines to choose between.
Bloomberg carries this article today about the willingness of China to go on holding Western debt that might deteriorate in value:
China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is “worried” about its holdings of Treasuries and wants assurances that the investment is safe, Premier Wen Jiabao said.
“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Wen said at a press briefing in Beijing today after the annual meeting of the legislature. “I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”
Good luck with that. As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the fact that the US, or indeed the UK, might be downgraded in credit terms as nations or even default on certain debts, is no longer unthinkable. Defaults are not just things that happen in Ecuador, Russia, or competelyfuckedupistan. They can happen in the supposedly rock-solid financial centres of the world.
As Glenn Reynolds says sarcastically of the new US government of Mr Obama, the country is in the best possible hands.
Unless American politicians and bureaucrats wise up, there will be a second war with Mexico within a generation.
This is not hyperbole. Drug lords are taking over the border areas between the two countries. Killings are spreading into American cities in the southwest. Firefights near the border are becoming common. There have been kidnappings within the United States in which some of the perpetrators are thought to have not only been using military equipment, but may have been moonlighting Mexican police or military men.
Before you begin to vent your rage on Mexico, I would like you to ponder the source of the problem. This is not an ideological battle where the world vision of the enemy is independent of what we think or do. That is what we face in the Middle East. Our actions there may affect Islamist strategy and tactics, but not their dream. We are not the creators of that problem.
The problem in Mexico is an entirely capitalist one. There are goods which are in great demand. Those goods are profitable and over nearly four decades we have caused a vast global giga-billion dollar industry to come into existence where once there were college students smuggling trunks of grass over the border at Spring Break. That is also not hyperbole. One of the floors of a dorm next to mine did exactly that and supplied the entire CMU campus back in the 1969-71 era. Then came Nixon and ‘Operation Intercept’. And what was the great accomplishment of this at the time great expenditure of taxpayer money? Why, by the time I left grad school prices had doubled, tripled or more and nearly all the smuggling was in the hands of organized crime instead of paying the tuition, room and board of a few engineering students. Even so, enforcement at the time was a still a joke, and much laughed at even as it transitioned from “Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues” to Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke”.
So what did the moralizing Statists do? Admit their failure? Apply tax payer money to something useful? Of course not… they did what governments always do with failures. They increased the budget. When that failed utterly they increased it again. And again. And again. Meanwhile, Libertarians correctly predicted disaster after disaster, decade after decade. Drugs are money and all that it buys. We put drug entrepreneurs outside of our then liberal legal framework… so they adapted and operated by the old fashioned rules of Feudalism.
Feudalism is the name we gave to violent gangs far enough in the past that we can romanticize them as Princes, Princesses, Knights and the like. The rules of the Feudal game are simple. You murder your way to the top then you pillage your competitors and steal their land and resources. If you are a mean enough SOB you get to live a life of sybaritic luxury… until someone nastier and smarter and more underhanded comes along and cuts your throat.
Fifteen hundred years ago it came about due to the post-Roman power vacuum. In our era the power vacuum is in a parallel world and economy. It is outside of our laws and nation states, by our own hands, and it exists side by side with us at every point.
Every time we drive up the cost of doing business, the feudal lords of this parallel universe counter predictably. The government of the United States succeeds only in adding to their cost of doing business. You might imagine that would be a big thing… but Statists have probably increased the cost of doing legal business even more over those decades. The more regulation, the more laws, the more taxes, the more individuals will find the ‘other side’ preferable.
Twenty-five years ago US military men stated they wanted nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Getting involved in it would put their institution at risk of bribary and corruption. The moralistic morons in government would have none of it. The military was called upon to run interdictions at sea and in the air to find potential smugglers. They have been countered by minisubs, UAV’s, counter-radar and a whole range of technological counter-measures. Every escalation provides the income necessary for the counter-escalation.
We have arrived at a predictable state of affairs. Feudal lords are now taking over portions of ‘our’ universe in which they hold the balance of power. Border provinces in Mexico are under their control. Military resources are appearing in their hands. Soon their private gangs will morph into real armies. They will bribe American military men and politicians. Where bribery does not work, they will kidnap and kill children and rape wives as object lessons in what happens when you dare to disobey the new royalty.
A time will come when the Mexican National government is absorbed. What do you think is going to happen then? When Mexican Special Forces are carrying out hits against any American who gets in the way of business, things are going to get very, very ugly. There will be calls to invade our southern neighbor and reasonable people will then have to agree there is no other choice. If and when it comes to that, we will have absolutely no one but our leaders to blame. It will be 100% their fault for getting us there.
You can not stop contraband. You can only make smugglers rich and powerful enough to buy you out or kill you.
But the internet is a city and, like any great city, it has monumental libraries and theatres and museums and places in which you can learn and pick up information and there are facilities for you that are astounding – specialised museums, not just general ones.
But there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn’t want your children wandering alone …
And I think people must understand that about the internet – it is a new city, it’s a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don’t pull down London because it’s got a red light district.
That’s Stephen Fry talking, which I spotted here. This got posted at almost exactly the same time as the one below. Never mind. Both are worth having. And I am sure that Jon Coupal would agree that those wanting to castrate the internet make copious use of children to do it, just as others use children to boost their budgets.
Those in power in the Capitol – as well as many local politicians – make skillful use of those who rely on government services to advance their spending agenda. They use children, the disabled, the elderly and others who appear vulnerable to justify increasing taxes. When reasonable arguments are made that higher taxes in an already high-tax state could lead to fiscal ruin and less for everyone, politicians and bureaucrats use these dependent classes as human shields.
– Jon Coupal
(via John Beck)
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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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