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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Yesterday I had a nice surprise. I was rootling around in the now resting blog of the Oxford (as in Oxford University) Libertarian Society, trying to find the video of a talk I did for them about how to spread libertarian ideas, nearly three years ago now, because I wanted to remind myself about something I had said. I found the video, but also something much better than the video, namely a selection of the more eloquent things I said, cleaned up and clarified by Oxford Libertarian Andrew Gimber. I had not realised until now that this was there, or if I had I had totally forgotten. My belated thanks to Gimber, what with a moderate amount of text being so much better and quicker to take in (to say nothing of more searchable) than a long video performance. It’s the difference between having over an hour to spare, or just a handful of minutes.
And before anyone says, I don’t think vanity linkage like this is quite as vain as it looks. If I don’t link back to my past stuff, nobody will, and I know this.
I wonder what Andrew Gimber is doing now. Something good, for him and for the world, I hope. (This is not, I think, the same Andrew Gimber.) There is an Andrew Gimber on this list, and I think that’s him. Looks good.
I also wonder what the Oxford Libertarians are now up to. Something, I hope.
General point: What you shove on the internet hangs around. Even before the internet, what someone said a long time ago can hang around in someone’s memory and have big long-term consequences, even if whoever said it had no idea at the time that the person with the memory that it stuck in was even listening. That being one of the points that I made in my talk.
To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are [he/she is] possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
– Terry Smith
One of the self-criticisms I hear a lot from Austrian economics devotees is that Austrianists don’t say what should now be done. They write book after book expounding what should not have been done, but most of their responses to the current mess consist of variations on the theme of: not that. Shouldn’t be starting from here.
So, when I read a report like this one, I get interested. Quote:
Within the next few weeks, signatures will be collected to launch an initial referendum that would require the Swiss National Bank to repatriate all of its gold holdings to within the borders of Switzerland, prohibit it from selling any more of its gold, and require a minimum 20% of its assets be gold.
This initiative is likely to be very popular. The Swiss remember that during World War II, the United States refused to provide access to their gold reserves. More important, since 2000, the SNB has sold 1550 tons of gold – more than a half of its total holdings – mostly at prices below $500 an ounce, and bought European government bonds that have plummeted in value by SF40 billion, compared to a total federal budget of SF60 billion.
This referendum will put the issue of gold as money on the political agenda. The next step is to offer a follow-on initiative permitting the free-coinage of GSF.
The creation of a Gold Swiss franc and the free coinage thereof, along with the repeal of taxation by the U.S. of gold and silver coins used as legal tender, would liberate market participants to generate spontaneously a new monetary order. With government barriers removed, people all over the world will find ways to use gold-backed money to facilitate the exchange of goods and services with their counterparts anywhere in the world, and to engage in saving and investing, lending and borrowing using monies whose value would be anchored in the remarkably stable and trustworthy purchasing power of gold.
Initially, such efforts would have little economic consequence. However, in a world of voluntary exchange, good money chases out bad money, turning Gresham’s law upside down. That is why when the dollar’s value was stable, it was the currency of choice throughout the world.
No one can forecast how this process will evolve. However, we can anticipate that the creation of a Gold Swiss franc and the repeal of tax and legal barriers to the use of gold and silver coins as legal tender will be the antecedent to the reform of today’s paper money system – in the U.S and throughout the world.
Assuming that enough Swiss folks vote for such arrangements, will they do any good? Or does such politicking merely flag up the problem, without going any way towards solving it? No doubt the current Rulers of the World will disapprove of such contrivings and do all they can to abort them, but this kind of thing at least might give the rest of us something to vote for, i.e. against the current Rulers of the World. Mightn’t it?
Something Must Be Done This Is Something Therefore We Should Do It is a powerful force in politics. Schemes like this partake of this force. At the very least, they challenge others to do better.
My thanks to Steven Baker MP for the email that alerted me to this. It’s good to know that he is keeping an eye out for such things, don’t you think?
There was an item on the local London TV news early last night about a bunch of cooks who, when confronted by a bunch of crooks, defended themselves, their restaurant and their diners. Yes, here is the story, from earlier in the month, at the time of those riots. Remember them?
Chefs and waiters leapt to the defence of members of the public enjoying an evening at The Ledbury, an upmarket restaurant in Notting Hill, London.
Thugs and rioters armed with bats and wearing hooded tops forced their way into the two star restaurant before demanding diners hand over their wallets and wedding rings.
But staff and others fought back with kitchen tools before leading customers into the wine cellar for protection.
Later in the evening, the looters returned, and the diners were ushered by the staff to the safety of the downstairs wine cellar. Which seems like a craven retreat, and in a way it was. But the personal cash and valuables of the diners were what the looters were after, and they were again thwarted.
The significance of the TV coverage I saw this evening wasn’t just that all this happened, but that the TV coverage was so sympathetic to the restaurant staff for doing what they did. The Ledbury (which I had never heard of until now) has apparently won some kind of vote of excellence for its food, organised by a restaurant guide, and the general atmosphere radiating from my TV was: hurrah! Good for them, and the perfect excuse to tell the story, again, of those heroic deeds by the heroic Ledbury staff a few weeks ago.
A few further thoughts occur to me. → Continue reading: Praising the defenders of the Ledbury (again)
This piece, about how people are moving from states in the USA governed according to lefty principles, towards states governed by somewhat less lefty principles, reminded me of this piece I recently did here, about people moving from country to country in the world. As in the world as a whole, so in the USA.
Come the next round of elections, the numbers of Americans on the move, and the unmistakable direction in which they are moving, will be hard for the lefties to explain away.
In the emerging presidential campaign, it’s easy to see a version of these questions dominating the debate. Why should anyone choose to endorse liberal, Democratic policies when a single year (2009-10) saw 880,000 residents packing up their belongings to place Barack Obama’s Illinois in their rear-view mirror, while 782,000 new arrivals helped drive the robust economy in Rick Perry’s Texas?
California, so the piece says, lost two million people in the years 2009 and 2010. The promised land no more, it would seem.
I’d be interested to hear what American readers make of Governor Rick Perry. Will I like him, as and when I learn more about him? I’ve read people saying that Perry sounds too much like President Bush Junior. But I’m thinking that people are in the mood to listen to what is actually being said, next time around, rather than fussing about the mere manner in which it is said. Or is that being too optimistic?
Richard North and Christopher Booker are having a go at the more unpunished sort of looting, by overpaid local council employees. Says North:
Loot a shop, and you go to jail. Loot council tax payers and, if they don’t pay up, they go to jail.
I can’t remember who said it, but what whoever it was (Kingsley Amis?) said was that the rot set in when they stopped calling the Town Clerk the Town Clerk, and started calling him the “Chief Executive”.
LATER: See also this posting, in which trooper Thompson quotes a big chunk from Right-Wing Populism by Murray Rothbard, including this:
Why then did communism implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that even the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed out that a social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that demoralization. But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our own statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive.
Hence the importance, for libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is “negative campaigning” at its finest and most fundamental.
Indeed. I’m not saying I agree with everything in this Rothbard piece, but I do agree with that. But I also believe that if I, and others of my inactive disposition, spread the correct ideas, it is automatic that the kind of people who, unlike me, refer to themselves as “Trooper” are going to want to join in on my side, but more aggressively.
A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution
Thomas Crump
Carroll & Graff, 2007, 370pp., paperback, $15.95 (but now much less – I got my copy for £3.99 in a remainder shop)
The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson’s son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one.
In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages.
But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen’s first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started.
Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn’t it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won’t have occurred to Crump. It’s merely that this book is published as one of a series called “A Brief History of …”, and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out. → Continue reading: The age of steam powered transport
I am now, as if regular readers of my recent stuff here need to be told, paying at least as much attention to the final game, which began this morning, in the England India test match cricket series as I am to such things What To Do About The Deficit. England are already 3-0 up, and are now looking to make it a 4-0 thrashing. This morning England, batting first, made another good start. But then it rained for the rest of the day.
Which meant that the radio commentators and their various guests had to talk amongst themselves, rather than commentate on the mostly non-existent action. And one of the things they talked about was the contrast between the general demeanour and attitude of the two teams, as illustrated by how they both warmed up at the start of the game. Compared to the quasi-military drill in perfectly matching attire that was the England warm-up, India looked, they said, like a rabble, and have done all series. The biggest recent change in how the Indians actually play, they all agreed, is that the Indian fast bowlers are now significantly slower than they were two or three years ago, and several inches fatter.
Why the contrast? Well, it seems that the top Indian cricketers now play too much cricket of the wrong kind – limited overs slogging basically, which encourages run-restricting rather than wicket-taking bowling, and careless, twist-or-bust batting. And they play not enough cricket of the right kind. Hence their arrival in England in a state combining lack of preparation with apparent exhaustion and general lack of fitness. But, you can’t really blame them, said the commentators. The Indian Premier League now pays its players more in a month than cricketers of an earlier generation would ever see in their entire careers.
The reason I mention all this, apart from the fact that I personally find it all very interesting, is that, in among all this cricket chat, somebody said something very Samizdata-friendly that I thought I would pass on. Former England cricketer, now cricket journalist and pundit, Derek Pringle, threw in the following, concerning the impact of the Indian Premier League on the attitude and physical preparedness of the top Indian players:
The IPL has become a bit of a welfare state for them.
You might reckon it odd to compare the predicament of men who are being paid rather lavishly to do too much work, but of the wrong sort, with the very different circumstances of people who are being paid very little by comparison to do next to nothing, beyond go through the motions of looking for work without actually doing it. You might also want to ask whether limited overs slog-fests really are “wrong”. After all, if that’s the sort of cricket that people generally, and Indians in particular, will now pay most readily to watch, what is so wrong about it?
Good points both, but not the point I want to make now. What my point is about the above soundbite is that Derek Pringle was simply assuming, when he said it, that state welfare makes you fatter and lazier and less industrious than you otherwise might have been. Pringle, famously inclined to being a bit of a fatty himself, just knew that we all knew what he was getting at. It didn’t have to be spelt out. Simply: state welfare rots the body and the mind and the soul. Anything else which, arguably, resembles state welfare in its financial impact upon the individuals concerned is likely to do similarly debilitating and demoralising things to those individuals also. If you are one of those eccentrics who still thinks otherwise, the burden of proof is entirely on you to explain your bizarre and contrarian opinions.
The argument that state welfare corrupts – physically, mentally and morally – is not, to put it mildly, new. When the modern British welfare state got under way after World War 2 this argument about the potential impact on its recipients of state money was already centuries old, and it was duly re-presented in opposition to the new welfare arrangements. But, the old argument was dismissed, with scorn, and also with, I believe, much genuine sincerity. These were the days, remember, when the masses of the British people were at a unique summit of mass moral excellence. (Thousands upon thousands of them used to turn up to watch county cricket, in other words the kind of cricket those cricket commentators are saying the Indian cricketers haven’t been playing enough of.) Are you seriously saying, asked the welfare statists, that a bit of help when times are bad is going to turn these good people (good people who had just won the war, don’t forget) into barbarians? Not, as Americans now say, going to happen. Yet, as a crude first approximation, this is what did happen, if not to them then to a horrifying proportion of their descendants.
And before any anti-immigration commenters pitch in, let me answer them with two questions and my two answers. Given the same welfare arrangements but no mass immigration, would there now be similar barbarism? I strongly believe so, even if maybe not on the same scale. Given the same mass immigration but no state welfare to speak of, would there now be similar barbarism? Much less, I think.
Realising that state welfare corrupts is one thing. Taking state welfare away from the millions of people whose entire lives are now organised around the assumption that state welfare will continue indefinitely is quite another, which is why this radical change of opinion has been somewhat subterranean. So far it has had little practical effect. But, as Derek Pringle’s casual aside illustrates, this changed opinion is now well in place, and sooner or later this will surely have consequences.
Instapundit, whom I revere for his relentless, industrial strength linkage (happy tenth anniversary Professor), has been in the habit, in recent times, of linking to pieces about how Americans are getting ever more disappointed by President Obama. But, as I am sure that Instapundit himself appreciates, the disappointment with Obama coming from Obama’s own former supporters is not because Obama’s preferred economic policies are now correctly understood by those ex-supporters to be disastrously destructive, but rather because Obama seems insufficiently determined and skilful in imposing these policies upon Americans who would prefer relatively sensible economic policies.
Obama’s leftist critics are not disappointed with Obama because they have come, reluctantly and through bitter experience, to share the opinion of his policies held by the Tea Party. Rather are such critics disappointed with Obama because he is not crushing the Tea Party, but instead haggling with them, and doing so, as these critics see it, with insufficient skill and nastiness.
Yes, Obama still seems to believe in the same daft policies that these leftist critics favour. But where is the passionate commitment to folly that he persuaded them he felt when he was getting elected, and that they still yearn for? Perhaps someone else (Hillary Clinton?), with greater energy, industriousness and human warmth, could lead America over the cliff with the proper amount of dash and determination, instead of Obama just leading the herd from somewhere in among it.
One should not, in short, confuse the fact – if fact it be – that President Obama is now being thought by ever more Americans to be doing a bad job, with the claim that all of America is coming to its senses in the matter of what it should do about its current economic woes, or what will happen to it, and to the world, if it does not do what it should do.
One of my little hobbies is spotting when words change their meaning, often to the disgust of (over?) zealous grammarians.
“Refute” now seems merely to mean disagreeing, rather than disagreeing successfully and persuasively, which is what refuting an argument definitely used to mean.
“Sophisticated” has, for many years now, meant admirably and subtly complicated. But in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear himself uses the word sophisticated (here 1899-1900) to mean complicated in a bad way, as in over-complicated, affected, over-elaborate, over-socialised.
“Disinterested” now merely means “not interested”, in many mouths.
A fellow Samizdatista whose hospitality I enjoyed this afternoon reminded me that the words “hack” and “hacker” have also been on a bit of a journey, following the quite recent invention of the word to mean the various things it means now (as opposed to just hacking meat from a bone or some such thing). Hacking used to mean merely acquiring an understanding of a complicated, often computerised of course, system. It meant sussing it out, working it out. It still does, among the people who still use the word this way. But those of us not familiar with the hacker fraternity typically regard hacking as computerised breaking and entering, and thieving, of information. Hacking, to us non-illuminati, means the same as hacking into. What started out as a morally neutral, even admiring, word has taken on a meaning that automatically includes wickedness.
Earlier today, while wallowing in England’s cricketing success yesterday against India, I think I may have spotted another of these walkabout words, here, although in this particular case I hope not, because this is a word I would personally like to stay put:
England demolished India at a delirious Edgbaston to usurp the tourists at the top of the world Test rankings.
“Usurp”, to me, says that there was something illegal or improper about England’s arrival at the number one test match cricket spot. The implication, to me, is that maybe an English cricket delegation – perhaps those two Andrews again – somehow pressurised the custodians of the ranking system into declaring England the top team despite England not actually having enough points, or whatever it is you must have the most of to be the top team for real. But nobody – not the writer of the above sentence, Sam Sheringham, nor anybody else – is suggesting this. Not on purpose anyway. Also, you usurp a title or a throne, not the person who previously held it.
Is Sheringham perhaps wanting to imply (infer?) that, given their lofty status in the world of cricket – because of them having by far the most cricket fans and, until now, a stellar batting line-up, still a stellar line-up if you go by the mere names and their test match achievements in the past – India have some sort of divine right to be the top team? Well, some vague thought along these lines may be why the word occurred to him, and why his editors didn’t change it. But what Sheringham is really reporting is that India used to be the top team, but now England have toppled them, fair and square. “Supplant” or “replace” would have been better words for his purpose. My video recorder tells me that earlier this evening Mark Nicholas, finishing up a highlights show of the series so far, on Channel 5 TV, used the word “toppled”.
Personally, I like the fluidity of language. I like how we can all invent new words, which immediately get across something otherwise hard to explain. I like “walkabout” for example, even if nobody outside of Australia knew of this word two centuries ago (although perhaps they did, I don’t know). And I regard the loss of good words as the price that must be paid for the widespread right that we Anglos all enjoy to make up new words, or acquire new words from each other. The common point of both word destruction and word creation being that together, we do it, rather than being told what’s what, verbally, by some damn committee of self-important academics in London.
I love that “television” is a mixture of Latin and Greek, and that – or so the story goes – an irate newspaper correspondent once argued that because of this linguistic abomination, the thing itself would never work. I had no idea, until I found my way to this collection today, that there are so many such Latin/Greek hybrid words in common English use.
I also enjoy, from time to time, concocting sentences without proper verbs in them. What’s that you say? Not allowed? Hard cheese.
I also enjoy turning nouns into adjectives, as English allows as a matter of routine.
Even so, all that being said, I would be sorry to see the word “usurp” ceasing to mean, well: usurp. It’s a good word and a useful word, and a word with a significant history. I think we should keep it meaning what it has meant for centuries. If we do not, a lot of history will have to be laboriously rewritten.
“Usurp” should not, that is to say, be usurped.
Today I learned, from someone who was involved in the making of it, that:
The Radio 4 bosses liked the Keynes v Hayek debate so much that they are going to repeat it at 9 am on Wednesday 24th August. This sort of thing is very very unusual. This is probably going to add around 1.5 million listeners to the estimated 1 million radio listeners the programme has already had. (I haven’t looked at the podcast stats yet but it was in the iTunes News and Politics top 5 in the UK.)
My own personal reaction to the debate was that a true clash of archetypes was too often, for my taste, dragged off into nitpicking about who said what, when, and just what Keynes would have made of Q(antitative) E(asing), when the real point is that he wouldn’t have started from there. But then again, the show was flagged up as “Keynes v Hayek”, rather than as “Mainstream Economics v Austrian Economics”, so I probably shouldn’t grumble but should instead be counting blessings.
Which are numerous. Far more to the point, the above news makes me think, again, more so, this, which said that we are at least, at last, having this argument, beyond the confines of the Austrian Economics tribe and of the tiny few others who had until recently actually heard of it. Austrianism is now emerging from the great gaggle of alternatives to the present disastrous economic policies to take pride of place, at least in the heads of a great many of those who think seriously about economic policy, as The Leading Contender.
This is, in short, very good news, which puts an interesting slant on the ever ongoing argument about whether and how the BBC is biased.
An Englishman’s Castle:
As far as I can see no one seems to be pointing out the essential cause of all these riots. Rioting is fun, exciting and you get to pick a prize at the end. Even young bloods at Oxford have been known to smash stuff up for the hell of it. It relieves the tedium of it all.
Talking about “the” essential cause is silly. I can think of about a dozen “essential causes” of these riots, as could you, each as “essential” as each other (this being one reason why there have been so many recent postings here on the subject (this being the ninth consecutive one)). Causes do not work alone; they combine, in clusters. For “the” read “an”. “The” Englishman, as he signs himself at the bottom of each posting (is there only one of those?), himself immediately proceeds to add some more “essential causes” of the rioting, like the fact that the penalties for rioting are now too small, along with the fun of it being fun.
Another essential cause of the rioting is that the rioters don’t think that rioting is wrong. They are, in short, scum. Why are they scum? Partly because so many of them have no live-in dads, which is another essential cause of all this.
Another essential cause of the rioting is, as was much discussed by me and the commenters here, that we, the non-rioting classes, are severely discouraged by our rulers from defending ourselves and counter-attacking against the rioters, which is one of many reasons why rioters now face too few penalties for their rioting. (Such defending and counter-attacking might also be fun. Different posting.)
Another cause of the rioting is that the rioters are stuck in a welfare trap. They are paid and consequently trained to do nothing, and have become incapable of doing anything more honestly lucrative. The Englishman alludes to all this by quoting at some length from a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams. Her description of what it’s like being stuck in a welfare trap is quite a good one, and should not be dismissed as mere “guff”, as the Englishman dismisses it, merely because Zoe Williams’s opinion about welfare is (I presume) that there should be more of it, and hence that more should be sucked into welfare traps. She describes the problem well.
Nevertheless, the Englishman has a good, big point here. Rioting is fun. This is not the only or “the essential” cause of the rioting, but it is definitely one of the causes of it.
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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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