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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Samizdata quote of the day “The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and day care workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.”
– “Ivana“, a Substack author.
The whole item is a gem. It is also funny because it is true, even if I quibble about the author’s comment that housing is a “right” and that big business should be broken up by anti-trust. Even so, for political perceptiveness, this is good.
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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.
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When people are hating on billionaires it is generally due to the misconception that there is a metaphorical pie which is a fixed size. This being the case, someone being really rich is the reason that other people are poor and therefore all that is needed to make the world rosy is to take their money and share it out.
I think that Nicolas Hayek is interesting. He made his money by turning around struggling businesses. Many people’s jobs were saved because of his interventions. The entire Swiss watch industry owes its continued existence to him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Hayek
See also a recent SQOTD Fixed quantity of biscuits fallacy”
The modern socialist imagination believes that the existing society is unfair with the oppressors oppressing various victim groups and that if the status quo is pulled down a glorious socialist utopia will magically arise.
Thank you for drawing my attention to this painfully accurate and witty piece. Below it she points out to one of the commenters that she does not in fact believe housing to be a right; that is the premise she was considering and not her belief.
Nicolas Hayek: I would love to think that he is related to the great FA Hayek.
Indeed JP, that article is pure bliss 😀
Thank you so much, JP, for bringing this to us. Ivana’s post is great.
I left her this comment: “Great post, Ivana. Really great. You might have added an eleventh: She thinks she wants more government but she’s never known smaller government. I’d love to hear your attack-thoughts on big government along the lines of your attacks on big corporations. The key is “big”—it’s almost never good!”
Moderates, such as Ivana, do indeed mock the extreme left – failing to understand that the extreme left are just the logical extension of their own position.
Leaving aside the absurdities of “anti trust” (Theodore Roosevelt was arbitrary in his attacks – he attacked on the basis of whether he liked or disliked a business owner, and President Taft spent his life looking for clear principles in anti-trust – and never-found-them, he could not articulate a clear legal definition – not even as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), if “housing is a right” – then so is everything else.
Food, medical care, and so on – after all they are just as important as housing.
And, to be fair to the socialists, the economy of major cities such as New York appear to run by MAGIC.
There is little industry left in these cities – yet millions of people live there, and most get money some-how, so, if it is magic, why not just cast spells to give everyone what they want?
In reality it is not magic – New York City is a vast Credit Money Bubble.
Paul Marks:
Leaving aside the absurdities of “anti trust” (Theodore Roosevelt was arbitrary in his attacks – he attacked on the basis of whether he liked or disliked a business owner, and President Taft spent his life looking for clear principles in anti-trust – and never-found-them, he could not articulate a clear legal definition – not even as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), if “housing is a right” – then so is everything else.
I’d love to see the whole anti-trust nonsense debunked in an entertaining fashion again, even though a few serious writers have had a crack at it, such as Folsom and of course Ayn Rand, who memorably skewered it. A few years ago I read Titan, the biography of J D Rockefeller by Ron Chernow, and while the book has considerable merits, the core of it is about making out that JDR got where he did as an entrepreneur though sharp practice. He claims that JDR got favourable rail freight routes in ways that were unfair, but it is far from obvious that the charge of unfairness is made out.
Chernow more or less recycles the canard that big business puts ideas of competition at risk, and largely ignores the “Austrian” and Chicago schools’ debunking of false notions of competition. By dramatically reducing the price of oil, developing an integrated business for extracting, refining and distributing oil products, and making it plentiful, JDR also helped fuel (sorry for that one!) the US automobile industry, and made a level of wealth possible – and freedom of movement around the country – that put all kinds of new freedoms in the hands of ordinary Americans. Eventually, even Rockefeller could not withstand the effects of new forms of oil and energy sector competition. To any extent that his empire was produced by bad methods, competition eventually straightened that out.
Interestingly, one of the people who rose to fame as a journalist was the “muckraker” Ida Tarbell, who as Chernow admits, had a large grudge against JDR that went beyond professional journalistic curiosity and something less worthy. She was bitter about her own family’s unsuccessful oil industry efforts and lashed out.
There is something called the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, and it has carried out an alleged hit piece on Toby Young, founder of The Free Speech Union (full disclosure: I am a member of it, and proudly so). So I wonder if the sulphorous spirit of Ida Tarbell continues to operate.
Johnathan Pearce.
Yes – “perfect competition” is a nonsense – for example it assumes that enterprises all have the same cost structure (in which case competition would force down profits to zero – and the concept of “normal profit” is just silly).
The basic point of competition is (as you know) to find better ways of doing things – of making your enterprise different, and keeping it ahead of the competition.
As for J.D. Rockefeller – there were a couple of times when he got “dodgy” aid and did “dogey” things, but normally he was better at reducing costs – and at find new products, he found uses for things that no one had thought were useful.
As you mention – a lot of the attacks on him were based on personal grudges, and other attacks were based on the rise of Collectivist doctrines.
Ironically his sons and grandsons (and so on) ended up supporting these Collectivist doctrines – at least in some form, sharing assumptions JDR himself would have been horrified by.
The Rockefellers (like so many rich families) made sure their children got the “best” education.
This was a mistake – a terrible blunder, as what they were taught was both wrong and harmful.
As for the illegitimate concentration of income or wealth.
Odd that the people who attack this, rarely attack the endless government regulations that disproportionately harm small business enterprises – they (with some exceptions) normally just assume the Regulation State is a good thing.
And they also tend to love Credit Money – as if Richard Cantillon (Cantillon Effect) never wrote a word.
I remember reading that breaking up Standard Oil resulted in consumers paying MORE due to destroying the efficiences of integrated production.
That made me think of Farmers Markets. If you don’t think about it too much, farmers selling direct to customers and bypassing the supermarkets seems like a brilliant idea. The notion is that the supermarkets aren’t contributing anything but their markup. In fact the supermarket companies apply the economies of scale to logistics and distribution. They provide a retail space where all kinds of products are brought together in one place meaning that shoppers can get everything that they need for the week all in one place. They do all this with an amazing level of efficiency that everyone just takes so much for granted that they never even think about it. Instead of sticking all of their stuff onto trucks and letting the supermarkets do the rest of the work, the farmer has to take a day out of farming to load up a van with produce, drive off to the market and spend a day selling stuff himself. Doing it all on such a small scale is horribly inefficient meaning that he has to charge more than the supermarkets do.
jgh – correct, and that was what the competitors of Standard Oil (who urged the case in the first place) wanted.
Just as the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 was about INCREASING the cost of rail travel – trying to enforce a cartel (not break one up – enforce one).
Stonyground – quite so, farmers markets are charming – but trying feed millions of people every day by asking them to go to farmers markets – would be insane.
@stonyground
Farmers’ markets are a very different thing than supermarkets, they have different pros and cons. That is the thing about competition, you get choices. Maybe Bernie Sanders thinks that having 15 kinds of deodorant is a waste. I do not. It is nice, for example, to get your strawberries picked fresh from the field that morning, however, it is also nice to get strawberries in the dead of winter too.
One downside of farmers’ markets is that they are usually open for a few hours every week. One of the biggest ongoing losses of Covid is that Walmart and all these other mega stores are generally no longer open 24/7. When I first moved to the United States many years ago I always found it delightful doing my grocery shopping at 3am in the morning something you simply could not do (at the time anyway) in Britain.
Fraser Orr.
As I said – farmers markets are charming, but it would be mad (insane) to try and feed many millions of people that way.
And – to add the what Stonyground wrote – we shouldn’t overlook that most vendors at ‘farmer’s markets’ deal strictly in cash, for reasons which are self-evident.
I don’t care about that – we deal direct with several local farmers, always in cash, I’m fine with it, the less money that Leviathan gets, the better – but right-on woke lefties ought to be opposed to this sort of free enterprise.
llater,
llamas
llamas.
Quite so.