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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[W]hen we read our newspapers or turn on our TV screens, what we see and hear might well have been “researched” by searching for dirt on the internet. Of course, the mainstream media will never admit it; the pretence that they are above such things is too important to them. They rely on the impression that their reporters are out in the field, fearlessly digging for details on the major issues of the day, not sat in an air-conditioned office with a cup of coffee and an open Google window. But it’s the truth, and for the sake of their own reputations, it might now be time for them to start admitting that they read the blogs just like the rest of us.
– Rob Knight writing at Liberal Review about blog and media reportage of recent Lib Dem scandals
Which British individual has done the most good for the world during the last half century or more since the Second World War? I nominate Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, who died last Saturday.
By applying laissez faire ideology to Hong Kong with greater inflexibility than anyone else was at that time even attempting, anywhere, he became, in Patrick Crozier’s words, the father of Hong Kong’s economic boom.
And that, if you think about it, makes Cowperthwaite the grandfather of the Chinese economic boom.
Without the shining example of Hong Kong, and the economically benign influence that Hong Kong has for a long time now had on nearby places still governed by Beijing, who knows what economic – and political – state China would be in now?
Cowperthwaite was criticised during his time in office for not taxing the people of Hong Kong more, and for ignoring, in particular, education. But has there ever been a more stupendous exercise in business education and everything-else-you-can-think-of education than Hong Kong? Hong Kong has been a University of How To Do It for millions upon millions of Chinese, Chinese who are now struggling to turn China itself from a suicidal and murderous world threat into a creative contributor to the world. The productive and trading templates now being followed in China were mostly devised in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong still provides a huge connection between China and the rest of the world.
So, there is at least a decent chance that China will emerge onto the world stage not as a belligerent superpower in the Soviet mold, but as a creative superpower more like nineteenth century Britain or nineteenth century USA.
Of course China still faces severe problems, as has been well explained here. It could all, and quite soon, go horribly wrong. China’s creatively earned wealth and strength might yet – following some kind of economic melt-down – be cashed in to pay for the means to make only mischief on a huge scale.
But China’s economic strength is not a total illusion, any more (well, maybe a bit more) than the USA’s economic strength was wholly illusory in the late 1920s. (The worry about that comparison being that the USA proved that it could be the engine of world economic growth only after a huge depression and a huge world war.) And if, in a hundred years time, historians are able to look back on a century of (mostly) Chinese creativity and progress rather than of Chinese chaos and ghastliness, Sir John Cowperthwaite will arguably deserve more credit for that happy outcome than any other single individual.
The nightmare always was that the Chinese people would feel that they had to fight and to destroy to get the world’s respect. Cowperthwaite’s Hong Kong showed the Chinese people that they were capable of unleashing a better and more creative way to be respected, a way that the whole world is already benefiting from.
Patrick Crozier, to whom thanks for the link, picks out this particularly choice quote from the Telegraph obituary of the great man:
As for the paucity of economic statistics for the colony, Cowperthwaite explained that he resisted requests to provide any, lest they be used as ammunition by those who wanted more government intervention.
The state is not your friend. The less it knows, the better.
It is not much fun being nearly sixty, but it does have some advantages, one of which is that you can just about remember political debates now long dead, of a sort which younger people may have little idea about.
And during the nineteen fifties, I recall, there was a debate, at any rate in Britain, engaged in by diehard free-marketeers, about the long term consequences of the Welfare State. The name of Anthony LeJeune springs to mind, but most of his recent writing nowadays seems to have been reviews of crime stories. Anyway, these diehard free-marketeers said that the Welfare State would corrupt the working class and turn then from the upstanding citizens that they then mostly were into barbarians. Diehard non-free-marketeers genuinely could not imagine this happening, and dismissed such fears as absurd. Most politicians, similarly unable to imagine that times might seriously change, concurred with the diehard non-free-marketeers.
Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.
I consider the Prime Minister’s somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point. → Continue reading: Abolish the Welfare State and restore some Respect
Incoming email:
Greeting!
Keith Burgess Jackson, a tenured philosophy professor, has just started a new blog designed to deflate thuggish far-Leftist blogger, Brian Leiter. Leiter has a lot of influence and uses it to harm people who dare to challenge him. So Keith wants to try to civilize him a bit. Apparently Leiter is obsessed with his reputation. Keith says that Leiter scours the Internet for references to himself and then writes to people to get bad references removed. He has also apparently hired a lawyer to get the University of Pennsylvania law students to take down their rankings blog. Keith wants to put him down, but only by saying true things about him. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you would like to help, at least please blogroll the new blog so that it rises in Google’s rankings, so that when people type “Brian Leiter” into Google, the new blog comes up. I myself have no connection with the new blog – just a wish to see it thrive. The blog is here: http://brianleiter.blogspot.com
Thanks
John Ray
Sounds like a laugh. Presumably this posting will help.
I have no idea just how much of a shit this Brian Leiter is, and how much he contributes to the “Brians are bad” syndrome, but I expect that he is indeed a shit to some degree. I will visit this blog a few times, and then decide if I want to keep reading it. If I do, I will then blogroll it, here.
Nearly forgot. Happy New Year everybody.
Commenting on the previous posting, RAB says:
Being very non technical, I don’t know how to start a thread, but there is a good leader in the Telegraph today on the 800 million quids worth of government non jobs Bliar and co have created. If someone would like to start one, I’m sure Verity, for one, would have a field day!
It is not technology you lack, RAB; it is the right to do postings on Samizdata. But your point is a good one, I think, even though personally I loathe the word “Bliar”, because name-calling is the language of loser propagandists, I think.
But getting back to that 800 million quid’s worth of government jobbery (as this kind of thing used actually to be called), I think RAB is right to ask us to post about this, and presumably he is referring to this:
There you will see page after page of vacancies on the state payroll: outreach workers, diversity co-ordinators, policy advisers, liaison officers. Some of them come with six-figure salaries. Indeed, the average annual pay for the posts advertised in Guardian Society this year is £10,000 higher than the mean private sector wage.
I seem to recall Richard Littlejohn writing about this years ago, in a book. But that was then (i.e. 1995). This is now.
All governments start out reasonably honest (I speak comparatively), but get more corrupt as they persist, and as the army of camp followers finds its way around and finds out where all the treasure is to be found and how to dig it out and take possession of it. Well, I reckon a big clear out of this lot may now be due any general election now. If not at the next, then pretty soon. → Continue reading: Snouts in the trough
The other night, while getting better from having been rather ill (which was why I contributed so little here over Christmas), I channel-hop-watched TV.
Here were the two best things I heard on my travels up and down the channel numbers.
First, during a reshowing of an earlier Dr Who episode, a very anxious person said:
“That Dalek just absorbed the entire Internet! It knows everything!”
And the second fun snippet I heard was from a show about crumpet, i.e. nice looking and happy looking ladies with fine cleavages but not much to say for themselves in seventies comedy shows and horror movies. The unashamedly excited interviewer asked the one and only Ingrid Pitt if she ever had any reservations about taking her clothes off? Replied La Pitt:
“Only if it was cold.”
I am not yet a hundred per cent. Still coughing, alas, and with my ears afflicted by tape hiss, although the headache is largely gone. But those two snatches of chat did help me get a bit better.
TV also tells me that I am not the only one thus suffering. The cold cure adverts do not sell anything that will cure you, but they do provide definite evidence that you have only got a dose of what lots of other people have also got.
I could have had it far worse, and far scarier. Patrick Crozier was recently struck down by appendicitis. In Japan.
I am dipping into the Bach Christmas that BBC Radio 3 is now indulging in. I am not disorganising myself to listen to particular items, if only because I already have all the big stuff on CD. But I am taking in occasional gobs of what comes, whenever it is convenient and I feel in a Bach mood.
And what I am getting from it all is how extremely religious it all is. I realise that this is a very obvious thing to be noticing. But hearing cantata after cantata introduced with its German wording, and then being told in English what it all means and why the contralto aria in particular is so deeply felt and beautiful and then what the chorus will be singing about at the end, has connected all this music to religion in a way that I have preferred to – not ignore exactly – just not pay all that much attention to. Of course I know what the St Matthew Passion is about, but for me the harmonies and melodies are the reason for listening. The religion of it is, for me, merely the platform Bach used to build the thing, even as I am aware that for Bach religion was the point. Bach also wrote a lot of purely instrumental music, such as the Brandenberg Concertos, the violin and the keyboard concertos, and the solo works for violin, for cello and for keyboard, and of course I cannot get enough of those.
But if you want to understand Johann Sebastian Bach, as opposed merely to enjoying him, you cannot ignore religion. Here is yet another historical circumstance which twentieth century atheists like me are now able to understand that little bit better, now that once again we have in our midst people who really believe in this kind of stuff, and who believe in combining their beliefs with the exercise of secular power, in ways that Christians mostly now do not. Listening at around midnight, early on in the proceedings, to one march-like tune from a cantata, and remembering what the announcer had just said that it was about, I suddenly felt scared. My God, I am being attacked by an army of True Believers. In short, I got the message. → Continue reading: Bach and God
All hail the Bugatti Veyron, the world’s most expensive car that you can drive on a road, as opposed to a circuit. From nothing to 250mph in less than a minute. The audio system alone costs $30,000. Have you got $350,000 to spare? Then go for it. That will cover the deposit if you want to place an order.
And all hail to Jeremy Clarkson for featuring this mighty vehicle on Top Gear. It is this evening’s repeat, of the show first shown on December 11th, which I am now listening to.
Clarkson also wrote in the Times – on November 27th, but I doubt (see below) if any faster car has appeared since then – about the Bugatti Veyron, and the struggle to make it go as fast as it does:
Somehow they had to find an extra 30kph, and there was no point in looking to the engine for answers because each extra 1kph increase in speed requires an extra 8bhp from the power plant. An extra 30kph then would need an extra 240bhp. That was not possible.
The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone.
In other words, the door mirrors were generating downforce. That gives you an idea of how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.
Volkswagen, the parent company, decided to make this Bugatti wonder car as a mere “engineering exercise”, and they are apparently taking an enormous loss on each one that they sell. Clarkson reckons this is a car Concorde, and that what with “everyone twittering on about global warming”, they might never again make another such.
Having, almost three months ago now, tracked down the latest Rolls Royce, this is my current must-photo car.
Tom Peters, who presumably found it in this piece, reports:
This banner, in Chinese, hangs in each room of the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd., amidst the Rongcheng Industry Zone, 100 miles from Beijing:
“THE CUSTOMER IS GOD AND THE MARKET DECIDES EVERYTHING”
People say things like this from time to time, but they seldom mean them, and they never mean them when at all severely challenged
I mean, suppose you were to ring up the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. and to say: “Hello, God speaking. I want you to design my daughter’s wedding dress. It must be genuine silk, with genuine gold fiddly bits sewn into it, with miniature iPods for buttons, and must win numerous design awards. However, being God, I don’t want to pay more than 50 pence. Got that did you? Fine. Tomorrow morning then. The wedding’s tomorrow afternoon.” I know, I know, God has no daughter, and if He did have a daughter, she would probably not get married. She would do altogether more dramatic things than that. Not my point. Which is: would the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. knuckle under to such a demand? Would they obey God, the customer, you, and supply an expensive product at less than it costs them to produce it? I think not. They would surely respond instead with something more along the lines of: “Not quite our kind of job. If you want lots of cheap dresses to sell in your shop, maybe we can do business. Take a look at our website, and see if there is anything there that you like.” God might not be satisfied with an answer like that, but you, a mere customer, would have to settle for that, or something like it.
Or to put all of the above another way, “the market” includes everyone, and everyone’s desires and plans, consumers and producers. Customers are indeed sovereign, over themselves and what is rightfully theirs, but so are producers. Customers do not have to pay for things they do not want, and producers do not have to produce things they do not want to produce. The market is not some ghastly new tyrant who tells you what you must do, regardless of your rights or wishes. The market is not some hideous and only slightly nicer collective reincarnation of Chairman Mao. The market is the outcome of everyone’s rights counting for something, and nobody’s rights counting for everything.
So yes, the market does decide a lot of things, but the customer is not God.
This is an exaggeration for the sake of effect. The effect may, in a business sense, be good, but it is still an exaggeration, and that is putting mildly.
My least favourite radical chic interviewee: the talented but humourless Ute Lemper. Ensconced in a luxury suite at the Savoy, she embarked on a lecture about the downtrodden masses, and was so busy talking about how East German workers were exploited that she forgot to even acknowledge the existence of the maid who’d put a tray of tea in front of her.
– Clive Davis commenting on this.
In search of things to write about for the Globalisation Institute blog, I came across this report, itself about a report issued by the International Labour Organisation.
Global economic growth is increasingly failing to translate into new and better jobs to reduce poverty, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said in a report Friday.
As a summary of what follows in this report of the report, this turns out to be severely misleading. Globalisation, according to what follows, is cranking out new jobs, and it is cranking out better jobs. True, it is not cranking out “new and better” jobs, all in one go, if by that is meant people in dirt poor countries now being able to leap in their thousands from having no jobs to having nice jobs, but that is hardly surprising.
Half of the world’s workers still do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the $2 a day poverty line, the fourth edition of Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), said.
There is still a lot of poverty in the world, in other words. So?
“The key message is that up to now better jobs and income for the world’s workers has not been a priority in policy-making”, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said.
This is, at best, thoughtless bluster, and probably a flat lie. If he thought at all about this claim, Juan Somavia would realise that it is false, but he makes it anyway. I believe that he assumes that only the spending of tax money in explicitly labelled better job creation schemes would count as the intention to create better jobs. But I support globalisation, and write regular contributions for the Globalisation Institute blog, because I believe that globalisation is creating and will continue to create “better jobs and income for people” all over the world. This is a big part of why I do this. And I am definitely not the only one who thinks thus. Does Juan Somavia sincerely believe that all of us who enthusiastically support globalisation are indifferent to “better jobs and income for people”? Maybe he really is that ignorant, but I doubt it.
“Globalisation has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said, we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies.”
Once again, bad policies to achieve “decent work” – making indecent work illegal, and making it obligatory to perpetuate all decent work (“sustainable”) indefinitely, I assume – are confused with wanting lots of decent work. I do want lots of decent work for people, but believe that making indecent work illegal, and all firing of people from decent work illegal, is the absolute worst possible way to achieve that outcome. Making indecent work illegal hurts the very poorest people in a downright lethal way, by taking away even the crap jobs that they do now have and can now get, and it kicks away a vital rung in the ladder from no work to indecent work to decent work, which guarantees that the lethality will continue indefinitely. Charming. Demanding that all decent work be “sustainable” is to demand the impossible, and to guarantee idleness for all.
The other thing to say about that weasely paragraph is that all that it really says is that poverty is not being got rid of as fast as it might be, and as fast as would be nice. My interpretation of that truism being that globalisation is not working as fast as it might to make all that decent work (some of it perhaps even somewhat sustainable), all that “better jobs and income for people”, and my conclusion is that globalisation should be intensified, and that Juan Somavia and his ilk should get out the way and let that happen. → Continue reading: Juan Somavia and the ILO lose the globalisation argument
How quickly this (click on this picture to make the triumph even bigger!) . . .
. . . has turned into this:
After England sneaked the Ashes 2-1, they have now been soundly beaten 2-0 by Pakistan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Warne don’t get you then Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria must. I wonder what Al Qaeda will make of that.
All very catastrophic. Until you turn your mind to a real catastrophe. To put all of the above in perspective, spare a thought for cricket in Zimbabwe, a grain of sand through which to see the chaos of the world out there. → Continue reading: Cricket and not cricket
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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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