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I, and I am sure many other readers of and writers of Samizdata, have been following the career of Steve Baker MP, ever since he was elected MP for Wycombe in 2010. However, the last posting I did here about Baker elicited understandable scepticism from commenters about whether Baker would stick to his free market principles long enough to make any difference. Yeah, sure, he is now on the Treasury Select Committee. Big deal. Baker, like all the others, said doubters, would soon go native.
Well maybe he will, but he hasn’t yet. Not if this City A.M. report by
…continue Steve Baker MP on the absurdity of monetary kremlinology
Speaking in this video, Steve Baker makes a point that cannot be made too often:
It’s a crazy thing. In most price systems or most parts of the economy, people understand that it’s wrong to plan prices. So here we are, we’ve had chaos in the credit markets, and the credit markets are centrally planned by a cooperating international network of central banks, committees of planners, who deliberately alter the height of interest rates. And we don’t make the connection that central planning causes chaos. And it’s just a really simple thing, and it’s true in money and banking and
…continue Steve Baker on centrally planned interest rates: “It’s a crazy thing!”
My favourite MP in Britain is Steven Baker, and he has a very interesting take on the Left. His attitude is not: “Wrong answers, you idiots!” It is: “Good question!” The question being, along the lines of: “What the hell is happening?!?!”, and Steve Baker’s answer being variations on the theme of Austrianism. Government-controlled money ruining us. Sort out the money, and take the financial bad news that will come with a return to monetary sanity. Then: progress! Tim Evans has a recent piece up at the Cobden Centre blog in which he adopts exactly this approach:
While such conclusions
…continue The right answers to the right question – Steve Baker MP and the Ron Paul tendency
Today’s SQotD is already taken, and in any case yesterday’s SQotD was also about banking, but here is more quotability, from regular quotee here, Steve Baker MP, writing for the Spectator Blog about the LIBOR scandal:
The really important question today is not whether the Bank of England encouraged manipulation of credit markets by self-interested rogues but why we tolerate systematic credit market manipulation by the central banks as a matter of policy: nowhere else in the economic system would we accept explicit planning of the price and quantity of a vital commodity. If it worked, we’d all be communists.
…continue Steve Baker on central banking: “If it worked, we’d all be communists …”
Samizdata’s favourite Member of Parliament, Steve Baker, has been elected an Executive Member of the 1922 Committee. What this shows is that he is the kind of Member of Parliament whom other Members of Parliament rate highly, and pay respectful attention to. It means that Baker has a Parliamentary following. He is not a loan (!!!) lone voice in the wilderness. Good.
In other words, ideas like this (written by Baker in response to some recent remarks by William Hague to the effect that we should all work harder) are now getting around:
Senior politicians must realise that hard work
…continue Proof that Steve Baker MP is making some headway
This afternoon I visited the office of The Real Asset Co, and talked with Ralph Hazell (CEO), William Bancroft (Head of operations), and Jan Skoyles (Economist). I have hardly begun to digest the lessons I learned from what they told me. But in the meantime, let me at least supply a link to this video interview that Jan Skoyles did with Steve Baker MP, our favourite politician by some distance here at Samizdata. Jan Skoyles is living proof that you can earn a living as an “economist” without knowing an enormous pile of things which are not so.
More and
…continue Jan Skoyles interviews Steve Baker MP
Steve Baker, the MP whom we here actually rather like, has a piece in the latest Jewish Chronicle, which makes what seems to me like a very important point. I have this point alluded to vaguely, but never spelled out. It is that the outrageous behaviour of the merchant banking fraternity in recent years is as much a product of bad bank regulations as it is of mere capitalistic greed.
It being the Jewish Chronicle he’s contributing to, Baker alludes to some scales that are criticised at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 11 (which American readers may
…continue Steve Baker MP on how the IFRS makes bankers behave badly
Yesterday, there was a mini-rebellion in Parliament, to be precise in one of its Committee Rooms. Britain’s (increased) IMF subscription was being discussed, and although it got through, there was a little flurry of excitement, as Guido reported:
Something very rare happened in what is usually the dullest of committees. A dozen or so Tory non-members of the committee came and spoke against affirming the instrument. Government whips cajoled the pliant Tory and LibDem members of the committee to vote to affirm the instrument while Tory MPs spoke from the floor against it. Promising new boy Steve Baker and backbench
…continue Steve Baker MP quotes von Mises in the Commons: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion …”
I know we keep banging on here about Steve Baker MP, but he really is excellent.
The thing about Baker is that he doesn’t just say the uncompromisingly libertarian things that he does say about economics and economic policy, and about, to quote the title of his talk, honest money and the future of banking. He is willing to be immortalised on video saying them, and therefore potentially to be heard saying them everywhere on earth. Amazing. Truly amazing.
This performance lasts just over forty minutes. I urge you to make the time to look at it and listen to
…continue Steve Baker’s talk to the Libertarian Alliance Conference on October 31st – on video
Tomorrow evening, I am hosting a talk at my home which will be given by Jack Powell. Here’s the short biographical note that Powell sent me, to send out to my email list of potential attenders:
Jack Powell founded 1828, which is a new neoliberal news and opinion website, to champion freedom, especially within British Conservative politics. He is the editor of the website as well as being in his final year at King’s College London, studying Spanish and Portuguese.
Interesting guy. Here is the link to the 1828 website.
In the spiel about his talk that followed, Powell goes
…continue Why Jack Powell and 1828 are not wasting their time trying to influence the Conservative Party – despite what Steve Davies says
I’ve said it here before and I am sure I will say it here again. Steve Baker MP is a remarkable man.
Last week, Steve Baker published, in a new Spectator venture, this list of books that he admires, with very brief notes saying why. The list contains several books by authors of the sort that no normal MP would admit to admiring, whatever he might privately claim. Nozick, Jesus Huerta de Soto, Schlichter (Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse being Baker’s answer to the question: “What book best describes now?”), Nigel Ashford (an excellent populariser and clarifier of libertarian ideas), Bastiat,
…continue Baker’s books
My wife is a fellow – she finds it useful to work there occasionally and attend events – at the Royal Society of Arts. I know Anton Howes, the RSA’s in-house historian (his writings on the Industrial Revolution are excellent, and he’s known to groups like the Adam Smith Institute).
(Here is Anton’s substack
In issue three, 2023, in what the RSA calls “The Planet Issue” of its quarterly magazine, are articles asserting how serious the climate “emergency” is, and in one article, (the print edition, I cannot find the web version, which makes me wonder why not) it
…continue The Royal Society of Arts succumbs to the Dark Greens
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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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