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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Here’s the problem: the global economy has gone tits up. We are doomed. And nowhere is more doomed than Europe whose Monopoly-money currency is going the way of the Zimbabwe dollar and the Reichsmark, and whose constituent economies are so overburdened by sclerotic regulation and so mired in corruption, waste and the kind of institutionalised socialism which might work just about when the going’s good but definitely not now sir now sirree.
And what, pray, is the European Union’s solution to this REAL problem which has already led to riots and death in one country and which could well lead to many more in the horror years to come? Why, to impose on its already hamstrung, over-regulated, over-taxed businesses yet further arbitrary CO2 emissions reductions targets, which will make not the blindest difference to the health of the planet, but which will most certainly slow down economic recovery and make life harder and more miserable for everybody.
In Britain, David Cameron is wedded to the same suicidal policy – on the one hand brandishing £6.5 billion cuts in government spending as though this were a sign of his maturity and his commitment to reducing Britain’s deficit, while on the other remaining committed to a “low carbon” economy set to destroy what’s left of our industry and cost the taxpayer at least £18 billion (yep – almost THREE times as much as the pathetic cuts announced so far by his pathetic chancellor) a year.
– James Delingpole explains why he keeps banging on and on about Global bloody Warming.
Incoming from Michael Jennings, alerting me to this:
UK survey calls iPhone ‘more important than space travel’
The headline could equally well have said: UK survey calls Sky+ ‘more important than Post-it Notes’, but the iPhone and space travel were what they zeroed in on. Fair enough.
I agree about the relative triviality of space travel, except insofar as it makes things like iPhones work better. I mean, you couldn’t have those maps on your iPhone telling you where you are and where you’re going were it not for GPS, as in S for Satellite, now could you? So, space rockets of some sort are needed for iPhones. But space travel? How significant is that? The bigger point, made by all those surveyees but then contested by the headline writer, is that space travel is now rather oversold, compared to how things are – insofar as they are – hurtling forwards here on Earth. Which, I think, it is.
The people who are for space travel keep going on about how Man Needs to Explore the Universe, and no doubt Man does. But is Man anywhere near ready to make a serious go of that yet? The trouble is that there is so little out there, in the immediate vicinity, accessible to actual men, easily and cheaply, now.
I suspect that the problem is that people, especially political people when composing political speeches, automatically assume an equivalance between the expansion of Europe circa 1500, and the expansion of Earth circa now. But the rest of the world in 1500 was full of stuff, much of it really very near to Europe, and much of it right next to Europe. There was continuous positive reinforcement available to any explorer brave enough to give it a go and lucky enough to hit some kind of paydirt. Now? Communications satellites? Weapons? Tourism? Astronomy? All we can yet really do in space is make various very Earthly enterprises work that little bit better. Which is not a trivial thing, and I’m certainly not saying we should give up even on that. All hail Virgin Galactic! Go SpaceX. But for many decades, most of the important space action will be in geo-stationary orbit rather than anywhere beyond.
And as for that constant libertarian refrain you hear about how Earth is becoming a tyranny and we must all migrate to space, to rediscover freedom, etc. … Please. People found freedom in America because there was this great big place to feed themselves with. America. Settlements in America were, pretty soon, potentially if not actually, self-supporting. Our technology has a long way to go before a colony on some god-forsaken wasteland like the Moon or Mars, without even breathable air, could ever be self supporting, in the event of Mission Control back on Earth getting shut down by something like an Earth war of some kind. Profitable, maybe, eventually. But able to stay alive without continuous contact with Earthly back-up of various kinds? That will take far longer. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, any humans who set up camp on the Moon or Mars or wherever will be far more dependent upon the continuing and sustained goodwill of powerful people back on Earth than the average Earthling is. There is no America out there, or China, or Australia or Africa. Those early European pioneers found a world full of land and resources, to say nothing of semi-friendly aliens whom we Europeans could trade with. But now? Just a few little rocks and gas blobs bobbing about in a vast sea of utter emptiness, emptiness that is an order of magnitude emptier than our actual sea, which is a cornucopia by comparison. And apart from that, for decades, nothing seriously big that isn’t literally light years away. It’s an entirely different state of affairs to Europe in 1500.
I wrote all of the above with my own personal blog in mind, but now realise that Samizdata is the place for it, if only because of all the enlightening and perhaps contradictory comments that may become attached. And since this is liable to be picked to pieces by people most of whom are far more technologically savvy than I am, it behoves me to rephrase it all as a question. Which can basically be summarised as: Is that right? Am I missing something here?
Am I, for instance, getting too hung up on mere distance? Yes the Solar System is almost entirely empty. Yes, the Asteroid Belt is a hell of a way away. But, if you are willing to be patient, is it actually quite cheap to send rockets there? Does all that emptiness cancel itself out as a barrier to travel, because of it being so easy (and so much easier than our Earthly sea) to get across?
I actually would quite like to be told that I am wrong about this. In particular, I really really wish that there was somewhere else nearby where the Fight For Liberty blah blah could be restaged, but on better terms to how the same fight seems now to be going here on Earth. But I just , as of now, don’t see that happening any time soon.
Those of us who lived through the previous end of Labour rule, in 1979, recall how that moment was remembered as the time when rubbish was lying in the road uncollected, thanks to strikes by the bin men. That little story summed it all up, and ushered in an age of union bashing. And Labour Party bashing, for several general elections.
Will this story be the abiding memory of the end of Labour rule now?
Civil servants came under increasing pressure from ministers in the dying months of the Labour government to carry out expensive orders that they disagreed with and responded by submitting an unprecedented number of formal protests in the run-up to the general election.
The five separate protests came in the form of written ministerial directions – requested by the most senior civil servant in a department when they disagree with a minister’s decision so strongly that they refuse to be accountable for it.
For me that perfectly captures the public squalour that is always unleashed by dead-on-their-feet Labour governments, as they madly pursued that last ounce of private affluence for their various client groups, and damn the consequences for the country.
Labourites are now pinning their hopes for an early return to office on the notion that the government that now has to clean up their mess will get most of the blame for that mess.
This is partly why Labour sorched all that earth. It wasn’t only tribal greed. It was deliberate political calculation. But if it becomes firmly established that the current mess is indeed a Labour mess, and that all the grief that followed immediately after their time in government was Labour grief, then Labour could be out of business for far longer than they now calculate.
Personally, I hope Labour are out of business for ever. And see also this posting I did for here a couple of years ago, which also had “scorched earth” in its title. This holds up quite well now, I think, especially the final sentence, as do many of the comments.
Michael Jennings then argued, from the behaviour of idiot Australian voters in similar circumstances, that as soon as the mess is cleared up, Labour spendthrifts will be back to create more mess, to scorch more earth. I really hope he’s wrong. But then, two years ago, I also hoped that the above kind of behaviour would itself cause a Labour electoral wipe-out, and that didn’t really happen, did it?
Maybe the Conservatives will now decide that the mess must never be cleared up, that the earth must remain permanently scorched, so that the country never feels able to afford a Labour government ever again. This certainly seems to be their current policy. Which might be great for the Conservatives. Shame about the country.
Many of the relatively new Docklands Light Railway stations I’ve passed through, often being situated on old or new viaducts, or part of similarly elevated main line stations, have offered fine views of the eastern parts of London, which is where many of the big towers are. Yesterday afternoon I took my camera with me in search of more such stations with views. I was not disappointed, and the weather, not good of late, was also on my side.
Pretty much by chance, I found myself at this station:
From this quaintly named viewpoint, I saw what I at first thought was some kind of football stadium. But, it seemed not to be finished. What could it be?
Also, other building was going on not too far away, by London standards. I love a good crane cluster:
But what was it all? Then I saw a weird object looking like a giant deep sea fish. This could only mean one thing: an unpopular sport of the kind that Needs Government Help. This wasn’t football. Of course! This is where the Olympic Games are going to happen:
All those wires in the sky are because regular trains go past this station, although they don’t stop there.
Here’s another picture, relevant to those above, this time of the front page of the London Evening Standard from last Friday:
By us, Mayor Boris means me and my fellow Londoners. Here is the story.
I cursed the day that London got these damn games on the day it got them. It looks like all other London taxpayers will soon be doing the same. And I will be very surprised if all other UK taxpayers don’t end up agreeing, despite what that “Culture Minister” says.
The “GREED IS GOOD” thing concerns Michael Douglas, pictured in the picture, reprising Gordon Gekko. I dare say we will soon all learn that the entire recent economic meltdown was Gekko’s fault. Nothing to do with crazy government monetary policy. But banking, like the Olympic Games, is a nationalised industry, and each is as economically out of control as the other.
History and ordinary prudence dictated that the union might be broad and shallow (a free-trade area, with embellishments, capable of taking in all-comers) or else narrow and deep (an evolving political union, confined to countries willing to be led there). Of the two, I always believed that the first was better. But the architects did not even have the brains to choose the second. They recognized no limits to their ambitions. They set about creating a union that was both broad and deep. A federal constitution, a parliament, a powerful central executive, one central bank, one currency – all with no binding sense of European identity. As for scale, well, the bigger the better. Today Greece, tomorrow Turkey. And why stop there? Madness.
– Clive Crook ponders the excessive ambitions behind the EUropean project.
Michael Jennings is probably too classy to rave about this here (although I have been checking just to be sure), so I will do it for him. Well, let the man from Cricinfo.com do the raving for the both of us:
Saeed Ajmal to MEK Hussey, SIX, Australianism prevails! What a great dramatic game this has been. Goose bumps! Michael Hussey has played like a dream. Whaddaplaayaaaa! He finished the game with yet another big hit. This is the Twenty20 innings of his lifetime. He finished it in style. He cleared the front foot and swing the ball over long-on. The while ball disappeared beyond the boundary. The Australian dug out erupted in joy. The Pakistani camp is stunned. U N B E L I E V A B L E. Hussey is mobbed by his team-mates. Clarke envelops him with a hug. The entire squad is out there on the ground.
Paskistan recently toured Australia, and I think (Michael J will know) that they lost every game they played, with varying degrees of embarrassment ranging from quite a lot to total. After the tour, their selectors banned various major players for misconduct. It was the tour from hell. There was no way they were not going to be obliterated by the Aussies in this game. Come to that, how the hell did they get to this semi-final in the first place? Yet as the game turned out, they will be gutted to have lost it. At no point during this entire contest other than during the last three or four balls of it, did Australia look like being within a mile of winning, yet thanks to another Aussie Michael, Michael Hussey, who hit 60 in 24 balls, including six sixes (three of them off the last four balls of the game), they did win, and what is more, with an entire ball to spare.
Sunday, it’s Australia v England in the final, of the Twenty Twenty world cup or championship or whatever it is in the West Indies. After they had this scare, you would bet even less against Australia winning the final than you would have done anyway. I don’t see Australia getting ambushed by England now, even though England have played out of their skins throughout this tournament. England’s best chance was always going to be if the Pakistanis beat the Aussies by playing out of their skins (which they did – right up until the bit when they lost) and then partied so hard that they failed to show up for the final.
But then again, as this game demonstrates, in T20, nothing is impossible.
And especially not if you are Australian. Now the Cricinfo man is quoting the late John Arlott:
“Australianism,” wrote Arlott, “means single-minded determination to win – to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them. It means where the ‘impossible’ is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it – and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them. It means they have never lost a match – particularly a Test match – until the last run is scored or their last wicket down.”
Indeed. Good luck England on Sunday. They’ll need it.
A bit later: slightly calmer Cricinfo match report here. Which I will now go and read.
And a bit later than that: incoming email from Michael J. Nothing in it. Title: “YEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!” Copying and pasting of email titles doesn’t work with me, so can’t swear to the exact spelling there.
Sam Bowman, whom I mentioned in my previous posting below about the IEA, responded by emailing me further proof that he is taking his Cobden Centre duties seriously:
The Cobden Centre Education Network is a new network of students in the UK interested in libertarian and classical liberal economics, especially the Austrian school. Working with the Cobden Centre it aims to connect libertarian and classical liberal students across the UK and help them develop their interests and involvement in classical liberalism and libertarianism.
This summer, the Cobden Centre Education Network will be hosting a series of seminars studying Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, a seminal work in Austrian economics that lays the foundation for further study of the Austrian school. The seminars will take place twice a month at the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, and Cobden Centre board members and fellows will join us for some sessions. Electronic copies of all reading materials and a study guide will be provided.
As well as being a unique opportunity to develop a comprehensive knowledge of the Austrian school, this will give Education Network members a chance to meet some of Britain’s foremost libertarian and classical liberal thinkers.
If you are interested in joining the Cobden Centre Education Network, please email Sam (sam @ cobden centre (all one word) dot org – I trust that will deter at least some spammers – BM) with your name, contact email address, and university and course if you are currently in education. Please also state if you are available to attend events during the summer in London.
Outstanding. And good on the IEA for lending them the place to do this.
Badgering politicians is worth a go, because you can get lucky, and because even if they don’t listen, someone else might, especially in an age when letters can double up as internet postings. But politicians will mostly just do their thing, which is fire fighting the fires on their desks within the limits set by public opinion, or by what they suppose to be public opinion, and within the limits that they all set amongst themselves. What matters is the long-term intellectual struggle, that is, the process of creating the limits within which politicians and other decision makers will operate in the future. The above enterprise is a fine example of how you go about doing that.
In the age of social media, blogs, emails and so on, it is tempting to suppose that personal contact is a bit superfluous. But I suspect that the most lasting impact of such novelties is creating and strengthening old fashioned face-to-face contacts, between people who might otherwise never have been introduced.
I wonder if there is an upper age limit.
The Institute of Economic Affairs is the mothership of the free market think tanks, certainly in Europe. Or, it was. Because now, the IEA’s reputation is almost entirely based on the stir that it managed to make when it was presided over by the stellar duopoly that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Those two men ensured that the classical liberal intellectual tradition remained alive in Britain, and they brought it, and the developing tradition of Austrian school economics, to bear on the failed Keynesian consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, laying the intellectual foundations for the Thatcherite economic rescue act of the 1980s.
Harris and Seldon had always been very careful, first, to ground their activities in pro freedom scholarship. The intellectual war was what they cared about most. Seldon fought that war. Harris, although also a considerable warrior himself, concentrated on making sure that the war effort was paid for. Second, they were careful not to get too closely intertwined with the Conservative Party, to the exclusion of any others. They always kept their lines open to anyone who was willing to listen to what they had to say and to help them say it, of any party or of none.
However, when age inevitably caught up with Harris and Seldon, the IEA then chose a man called Graham Mather as its new boss, who proceeded to use the place as his personal campaign office to turn himself into a Conservative MEP, while declaring that “the intellectual arguments have been won”. Mather was hurriedly dumped, and under John Blundell’s leadership the IEA then did rather better, even if it never really lit up the landscape like it had in the old days. To switch metaphors from fireworks to aviation, under Mather, the IEA was crashing earthwards and was about to burn up completely. Under Blundell it glided near horizontally, not at all disastrously, but without any upward impetus that I could see. When I heard that the Institute of Economic Affairs had, however long ago it was, appointed as their new boss Mark Littlewood, whose previous job was as a media relations person for the LibDems, I reacted with indifference. I hardly, that is to say, reacted at all.
Mark Littlewood has clearly always understood what classical liberalism and libertarianism are all about, and has done as much of them as he could, given the day jobs he has had. He has always been a friendly and civilised presence, albeit rather too EUrophile for my liking, at the various Libertarian Alliance events I have seen him at over the years, at quite a few of which he has spoken. Nevertheless, I assumed that in hiring such a person, the IEA was merely going to throw a big chunk of its still impressive stash of money at a pointless media-based charm offensive, which would achieve nothing. Pick a nice chap, with lots of contacts in politics and in what they used to call Fleet Street, hope for the best and get nothing very much. After a few years, Littlewood would move on. In due course, the building would be sold and the IEA would move from Westminster to somewhere or to nowhere. Its few surviving supporters would become even more geriatric. Another member of the Political Class, more unscrupulous than Mark Littlewood and cut from the same cloth as Graham Mather, would move in and hoover up all the remaining money, and that would be that. Way of the world. Old order giving place to new. Such is life. Such is death.
I never really thought any of this through, apart from the Mather episode, when I became tangentially involved as a junior advocate for the team that ousted him. I merely realise, now, that the above sentiments about Littlewood were what I was thinking, insofar as I was thinking anything at all. The point being that as far as the IEA was concerned, and like many others, I had pretty much stopped thinking.
So it was that when I got invited to a Libertarian Alliance dinner about a fortnight ago, at which Mark Littlewood was to speak about how he was setting about his various IEA tasks, I did not, as they say, jump at the invitation. I merely, having nothing else fixed, said yes and went along, expecting little more than some nice food. But as soon as Mark Littlewood started talking, I realised that I had been seriously misjudging him. → Continue reading: Mark Littlewood and the future of the Institute of Economic Affairs
This sounds like the kind of thing that our own Michael Jennings is fond of saying:
“I was recently waiting for a flight in Delhi, when I overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now do I realise that they were speaking “Globish”, the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”
That’s journalist Ben Macintyre, quoted by Robert McCrum, in a recent Guardian piece about the global evolution of the English language. But, McCrum then asks, will English, having spread so widely, and like Latin before it, then fragment into distinct languages? Or will the effect of what is loosely called globalisation mean that enough English speakers who start with their local variant of English will want then to move towards a more internationally tradeable, so to speak, version of English, and make the effort? Will they try to add some of that grammar and structure that Ben Macintyre spoke of? And will global standard English, particularly as spoken by the more globe-trotting sort of American and in due course by most Anglos, itself hold out its hand, as it were, making its own effort, and come half way to meet Globish, to ensure that English, although changing faster than ever before, nevertheless remains one language, or at least one linguistic continuum? Will English, in other words, keep on pulling itself together? Note that Ben Macintyre had no problem understanding the Globish that he heard in Delhi, and would presumably have no problem speaking like that.
My guess is that there are powerful unifying forces at work here, as well as fragmenting forces. What follows began life as a separate posting, and was mostly written before I encountered the above article. → Continue reading: Bangalore changing to Bengaluru says that English will keep on pulling itself together
Indeed, and here he was just before delivering it, earlier this evening, to the assembled friends and supporters of the Libertarian Alliance, at the National Liberal Club:
His subject was Public Goods and Private Action: How Voluntary Action Can Provide Law, Welfare and Infrastructure – and Build a Good Society.
Academics who are supportive of the free market and the free society tend to be economists. Such thinkers might have based an argument like that one on economic theories concerning the alleged possibility and desirability of such arrangements. But Dr. Davies is a historian, with a wealth of knowledge concerning how such arrangements did exist, and accordingly might again. It is hard to argue with any persuasiveness that voluntarily funded policing, or unemployment insurance, or roads or railways cannot exist, if the fact that these things actually did exist is widely known. The current crop of fiscally disastrous and morally destructive social and infrastructural policies depend for their continuation on perpetuating ignorance of how such voluntary alternatives existed in the past. (Hence in particular the importance of voluntarily organised and voluntarily funded education.)
Dr. Davies argued that the current fiscal crisis of the modern state, not just in Britain but everywhere, means that an historic opportunity now exists to revive such ideas as these.
A fellow Samizdatista asked, during the Q&A that followed Dr. Davies’s lecture: Will the text of it be published? Answer: yes. I await this text with eagerness, as do many others. All to whom I spoke afterwards agreed that this was an outstandingly effective and informative lecture.
The election has dealt a major blow to the political class, though it hasn’t been a catharsis; we still hate them.
– Raedwald
Well, it was Samizdata wot won it. Perry de Havilland said a plague on all their houses last week. Chris Cooper said last night that he’d voted for none of the above. And the result? None of the above. A plague on all their houses. Who says blogs don’t have any influence?
Here are the various plagues:
Conservatives: A horror story. No absolute majority. Will Cameron manage to contrive an absolute majority after another general election? (Think 1974.) Will he be able to contrive any kind of government in the meantime? Maybe and maybe, but there’s a world out there, and what Cameron has to do about that may make him even less electorally appealing than he is now. Cameron has been all at sea ever since the boom went bust. As have …
Labour: A horror story. In terms of percentage of the vote, Michael Foot did a tiny bit worse in 1983 than Brown. That’s Brown’s only comfort. But now, do they try to cling on or do they walk away? Neither choice makes them look good. Unelectedness versus “we made the mess but the rest of you must sort it out”.
LibDems: A horror story. Cleggmania fizzled out ignominiously. Yet they can still decide everything, in the short run. So which of two profoundly unappealing big parties do the LibDems pick? Neither choice makes them look good. Plus: do they plunge the political system into a huge row about proportional representation? But the problem is not how they’re picked; it’s what the hell they now do about that world out there. And what the hell kind of “mandate” do the LibDems now have to demand anything at all? Yet if Clegg comes away from all this with nothing, what will his party think?
Others: BNP, UKIP, Greens, etc. My impression is UKIP did not too shabbily, but not too shabbily doesn’t really count. At least the Greenies got a stuffing. SNP hardly laid a glove on Labour in Scotland.
Just heard a politician talking on the telly – I think somebody called Tony McNulty:
“Anyone who thinks this is a good result for any party, locally or nationally, needs their head examining.”
Boris Johnson agrees. Now I’m watching him say that the voters hate all the politicians, and have found a way to make all of them suffer. All those us who wanted the whole damn lot of them squirming as a result of this election have now got our wish.
Now Brown is making a speech. He’s trying to cling on.
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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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