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]
|
I have been reading this book, by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV. King Henry ascended the throne of England after successfully deposing Richard II, and his own reign seems to have consisted of one attempt after another to depose him. Yet Henry IV died in his bed of natural albeit very painful causes.
One of these failed rebellions against King Henry, at the beginning of the year 1400, involved a certain Sir Thomas Blount.
Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor’s death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount’s execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No, for I do not know where I should put it’, he replied.
I had no idea that the people who suffered these frightful deaths were able to say anything at this late stage in their ordeal. I guess the executioners were trying to be as nice as they could to Sir Thomas, against whom they presumably had no personal animus, rather like Michael Palin in this. But, talk about too little, too late.
I realise that I keep going on about it, and I realise that I dissent from the view often expressed here that the next British government (Cameron’s) will probably be no better than this government now, but if I were allowed just one more thing to say about Gordon Brown and his government, it would be that I wish people would stop saying or writing this:
Mr Brown is a good, decent man but …
Mr Brown is not a good, decent man. He is an utter shit, and his utter shitness is inseparable from the difficulties he now faces in continuing to be Prime Minister despite his obvious unsuitability, and to the miseries he is still inflicting upon the rest of us.
I will not expand at length about Brown’s shititude. Suffice it to say that Gordon Brown is the living embodiment of the phrase “he won’t be told”. When he is told, he shouts like a spoilt but thwarted seven year old, until whoever it is just gives up or goes home and pretends to be ill. And all his henchmen are like this too. All who care have heard the stories. All who can bear to think about them now know of the blunders, and of the refusal to do anything about them except increase the doses of poison. Brown himself is beyond hope, and he will be subjected in due course to the modern, humane version of hanging, drawing and quartering (which is a whole hell of a lot more humane than he deserves), either by his underlings or by the voters. I will merely content myself now with explaining why otherwise sane-seeming journalists like Alice Miles (the one linked to above) keep repeating this obvious tosh about Brown’s goodness and decency, despite all of them knowing perfectly well that it is tosh. It is just possible that if the explanation – the one you are about to read – of this strange phenomenon were to get around commentators might be persuaded to stop talking this particular brand of tosh.
The explanation, briefly, is that when you are denouncing someone as a complete waste of space and begging the earth to open up and swallow him, you find yourself wanting to say something nice about him, anything nice, to prove that you are being fair, that you are willing to give him credit for his virtues, such as they are. And this is where this absurdly false cliché about Brown’s goodness and decency has come from. Brown is a good and decent man (and I am a kind and fair-minded and good-hearted person for saying so), but blah blah blah. But he is a crap Prime Minister, his decisions have all been disastrous, he has wrecked the economy, he is an unreconstructed state centralist despot despite decades of evidence proving the evilness of such despotic centralism, his speeches are intolerable, he must go, he will not go, they must dump him, they will not dump him, the country cannot take much more of this, blah blah blah. But the truth is simpler. Prime Minister Brown has no virtues. None. He is a bad and nasty man. And blah blah blah. It may not serve the argumentative purposes of commentators to find no nice things to say about Mr Brown at all, but it would serve the truth far better.
I went in search of funny quotes, like the one at the start of this posting, but instead found mostly sensible ones, like this (via here):
The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That’s clearly not what happened here. The market is practically shouting at people, “Don’t build something you can’t afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore.”
Instead the state “insurance” scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it’s the government that’s telling people that it’s OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the “insurance.”
And this (via here):
The CRA …
That’s Community Reinvestment Act.
… forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound. Under the CRA, banks must convince a set of bureaucracies that they are not engaging in discrimination, a charge that the act encourages any CRA-recognized community group to bring forward. Otherwise, any merger or expansion the banks attempt will likely be denied. But what counts as discrimination?
According to one enforcement agency, “discrimination exists when a lender’s underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.” Note that these “arbitrary or outdated criteria” include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history – the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.
And this (via here):
If we really wanted advance warning (and a chance to mitigate) the next financial crisis, we wouldn’t be banning short-selling; we’d be legalizing insider trading.
Now there’s a thought. All those quotes are from Americans, about America. But it is at least as bad here. Today, on my wanderings in London, I came across a headline in a free newspaper that went Darling declares war on City’s risk culture.
What new horrors of intervention will be inflicted upon the British economy by this dying government of ours, in its dying months, as they forget about the country as a whole and concentrate on trying to keep the loyalty of their core vote?
The country’s gone to the dogs, the economy’s going down the toilet, crime is through the roof, I’m on half the wages I was two years ago and am barely keeping my head above water and crossing my fingers that I’m going to even have a job in six month’s time, like lots of others no doubt, and all these assorted wonks do is wiffle on and on about which interchangeable dipstick is going to which interchangeable, ineffectual government department next.
Who the chuff is Alan Johnson? Who the chuff is Ed Balls? Who the chuff cares? Just clear off the whole damn lot of you.
– Blognor Regis gives his opinion yesterday about some recent reshuffle speculation
This Sunday Essay at Coffee House, entitled How cutting corporate tax rates raises revenue, written by Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance is a reminder that however well libertarianism, free marketism, classical liberalism, whatever, may be doing – in the sense of increasing the number of individual libertarians, free marketeers, classical liberals, whateverists – public opinion about taxation, out there beyond the battles of the mere ideologists, seems to remain stubbornly unaltered. Taxes should be as high as we can afford, but no higher than we can afford. That’s what public opinion still seems to believe, and people like Matthew Sinclair cannot afford to challenge this opinion. The Taxpayers’ Alliance is, you could say, built on not challenging it. It is an alliance between those who want taxes cut, and cut, and cut, until they scarcely exist, and those who believe that, just for now, taxes are too high, and that public spending should be done better, so that public spending can be boosted rather than the very idea of it discredited.
Sinclair justifies lower tax rates, at any rate in this piece, entirely by pointing out that lower corporate tax rates will yield higher tax revenues. As they will. But could the same not be said for other taxes? By talking about lowering corporate taxes, Sinclair confirms the prejudice that tax cuts are only for a certain sort of person and a certain sort of institution. The libertarian political nearly-nirvana – a world in which politicians agree that taxes must be cut and cut and cut (see above) to the point where tax revenue, having done its predictable surge upwards, then starts instead to surge downwards again – but quarrel about exactly whose taxes should be cut first, and exactly whose benefits should be cut first and exactly which tyrannical bureaucracy should be shut first and exactly which costly laws and regulations should be repealed first, even as total tax revenue continues to go down, seems as far away as ever.
I still want to believe that under the radar – under the Laffer Curve, you might say – the change I really want may actually be happening. I want to believe, and I do actually think it makes some sense to believe, that the majority that favours high (as I would call it) taxes and high spending (just not too high) may be diminishing, and that the minority that wants taxes and spending both to be cut radically may be increasing. I also believe that the Taxpayers’ Alliance is doing more good than harm on this front. But Sinclair’s piece tells me little about that, one way or the other.
The Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Matthew Elliott, is giving the after dinner speech on the Saturday of the Libertarian Alliance’s annual conference in October. He speech will be entitled “Reasons to be Optimistic: Why we are winning the battle for lower taxes”. Lower rather than low is the point there, I think.
It won’t last, but while it does …
An Australian pub offering free drinks to women who remove their underwear and display it to patrons and staff will be investigated by alcohol licencing regulators, authorities said on Thursday.
The Saint Hotel in Melbourne has promised a “No Undie Sundie” event over the coming weekend, where woman who remove their underwear and hang it above the bar will receive A$50 ($39) worth of free drinks.
I wouldn’t like this. It’s not the female anatomy qua female anatomy. It’s more the other men who’d be there, yelling and drinking, and slapping me on my frail back. But me not liking something is not the same as me thinking something should be illegal. Sadly, it seems that “Liquor Licensing Victoria director Sue Maclellan” is not in the habit of making such subtle distinctions.
Good that Guido, to whom thanks, and who currently has this report in his Seen Elsewhere section, doesn’t just babble on about party politics, but from time to time at least notices more fundamental issues.
Lower Marsh, just beyond Waterloo Station from me, is one of my favourite London streets. It has carts loaded up with goodies from vans, and amongst these goodies are classical CDs sold by a bloke called Neil. A few yards due west from where Neil plies his trade, there is Gramex, a regular shop, which also sells an abundance of classical CDs. These CDs cost far less than downloads from the internet, and unlike downloads they are things, which I prefer. When you drop a Wagner opera on CD on your foot, it hurts. That’s what I call real value.
Anyway, yesterday, in the autumn sunshine (finally!) I came across this, which surely says something profound about the current state of the financial markets, although I am not sure quite what:
There was another one next to it, the same only black. These pigs are quite big and very solid, made of cast iron I suspect. Don’t drop one of them on your foot. They were going yesterday for a tenner each. Hurry while stocks last.
More banking and piggy banking photos by me here, and further market speculations here. The smiling china pigs are currently on show in the window of a fancy goods (I think they call such places) shop in Strutton Ground, another market street in my part of London, just off Victoria Street.
For some further commentary on what things cost these days, try this very Dail Mail piece by Robert Hughes. Hughes ought to realise that ‘artists’ these days are like small and badly behaved children. The more you complain, the happier they are, because what they crave most is attention.
“It can’t go on for much longer,” says one Cabinet member who described yesterday’s meeting as “excruciating: an embarrassment”.
“It’s not just the country that’s not listening to Gordon any longer: the Cabinet isn’t listening to him. Something is going to give. There were people staring at their hands, some scribbling on their papers, someone else on their BlackBerry.” Anything rather than look their own leader in the eye.
Mr Brown told his Cabinet that issues about the direction of the party should not be raised until after the present economic turmoil.
The minister adds: “Gordon is now measuring his survival in two-week horizons. It’s humiliating for everyone.”
– Anne McElvoy – quoted here, and I should imagine, there and everywhere during the next few days
There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians. I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity. Let’s get money out of politics by making politicians less powerful.
– Russell Roberts (over a week ago now but surely worth being made to linger a little)
Here is a small conjecture concerning the claim that secret racism may be causing US pollsters to overestimate Barack Obama’s true support, which I have most recently been reading about in this article.
Party elders also believe the Obama camp is in denial about warnings from Democratic pollsters that his true standing is four to six points lower than that in published polls because of hidden racism from voters – something that would put him a long way behind Mr McCain.
Maybe the concealment is real, and maybe some of what is being concealed is indeed racism, but maybe some of it is something else. What if a lot of people secretly oppose Obama being the President for good non-racist reasons, but fear of getting involved in arguments which will involve them being accused of racism, even just thought to be racists, by annoying pollsters? Although not Obama supporters, such people just say “I will vote Obama” to avoid even the hint of such unpleasantness. They will not be voting Obama, because they think he is a vacuous windbag, from Chicago, too thin, dodgy on Iraq, or because they don’t care for Biden, whatever. They will be voting for McCain for similarly varied reasons, other than McCain’s mere whiteness. But they fear that the pollsters they are talking to might suspect otherwise, and who needs that grief?
For that to make sense, it is necessary to believe that people care what stupid strangers think of them. But surely, at least some do. I certainly care, a bit, what people whom I hardly rate at all think of me. I don’t like being cursed for my lack of generosity by drunkards in the street, or shouted at by people who are clearly rather unstable, or denounced for bumping into someone by someone who actually bumped into me. I don’t like it when a mere fleeting expression on the face of such a person even suggests such critical thoughts on their part.
None of this matters to me very much. Such slights are very quickly forgotten But then again, nor would lying about my true voting intentions to some annoying pollster in what is, after all, supposed to be a secret ballot.
Remember that merely replying that “most people” would never think like this is no answer, although a sadly frequent error when all that is being surmised is that a few people might be persuaded to act differently by an oddity in their environment, although not a majority, and certainly not everybody. This is a surmised marginal effect, influencing a few but ignored by most, like a small change in the price of a chocolate bar. To dismiss what I am suggesting, you would have to believe either that nobody thinks thus, or that there are other concerns – what concerns? – that might cancel out such tendencies.
Just a thought. No link, because I have not seen anyone else say such a thing, although I’m sure plenty have. If not, I am sure that some have thought this.
More US election speculations from me here, which has links to more. I am flattered that the mighty Guido Fawkes thought this piece worth linking to in his Seen Elsewhere section, although blink and you would miss that, because Guido sees a lot.
UDATED UPDATE Sunday evening. The link chaos of the final paragraph is now all corrected. Posting errors by me have been cleaned up and my own blog is now back in business. Apologies for all the confusion, and apologies also for spelling apologies wrongly in the previous version of this update.
Here is a comment at Coffee House on this posting:
Brown will pull a rabbit out of his hat. He will declare that he will hold a referendum on the UK being IN or OUT of the EU! He will promise to accept the decision and make policy changes following the result!
SUCH a policy, such a move would instantly wipe the smiles off the Tories as we will have the spectacle of Cameron/Osborne etc in the IN camp and forever losing their eurosceptic labels!
Brown knows that being out of the EU will bring in massive investment and also save the country billions.
Expect this in late Autumn.
This is from “alan” and is comment number nine, at 8.09am. As a political prophecy I think it is barking moonbattery. But as a description of economic reality, does what alan says, suicide note capitals and all (“SUCH a policy”), perhaps have merit?
I have long believed that leaving the EU would be good for Britain’s economy, quite aside from such incidentals as the rule of law rather versus rule by the mere say-so of rulers, and in due course getting dragged into whatever European civil wars accompany the eventual break-up of the EU. But I have tended to assume that leaving the EU in the nearer future would inevitably involve a period of economic bad news, during which the associated dislocations – and the EU’s enraged punishments – would be immediate, but during which the clear eventual benefits to Britain’s economy would be somewhat slower to materialise.
However, would leaving the EU be a short-term fix for Britain’s present economic woes? Would it have the immediate benefits that alan claims for it? If so, that would be a meme worth getting behind.
UPDATE: Some interesting EUro-commentary from Guido.
Although of course it is a joke, see the posting immediately below. As Jonathan has already noted, Guido Fawkes has had a lot of fun over the last few months noting that every time Gordon Brown comes out in support of anything, it immediately tanks. Andy Murray was Mr Brown’s latest victim, apparently. So when I read on the Coffee House blog this morning that Gordon Brown now supports Barack Obama, I knew that Guido would be crowing with laughter, if not now then very soon, and sure enough, he is. Obama, says a delighted Guido, is now officially doomed. Luckily, before posting this, I also checked out Samizdata to see if anyone else here was having a laugh about this, and of course, they are.
Apologies if you think I am duplicating here, but behind the hilarity of all this is to be observed an interesting re-arrangement of the political conventions, which is why I still put this thought up as a separate posting. More and more mere people, especially political people, like the ones who read Samizdata for example, have their particular preferences not just in their own countries and constituencies and districts and states and towns, but in ‘foreign’ parts also. The logic of the internet – even of instant electronic communication itself, which got started getting on for two hundred years ago – has always, to me, suggested global political affiliations, and in due course, global political parties. Certainly the Communist movement thought so. Maybe language remains a big barrier, but geography now matters less and less.
Remember that counter-productive attempt by the Guardian to swing the last (was it?) Presidential election against Bush? Many concluded that this proved the wisdom of political people staying out of foreign elections. To me it merely proved that if you want to help this or that side in foreign parts, make sure that you really are helping. Because attempts to help like this are absolutely not going to stop. As the very existence of Samizdata now nicely illustrates, this is all now one big Anglospherical conversation.
Obama’s idiotic campaign trip to Germany was, you might say, a self-inflicted version of that same Guardian blunder. But nor does that folly prove, to me, that campaigners should never go abroad and seek foreign support when campaigning, merely that they should choose their foreign supporters with more care than Obama did. Having the right sort of foreigners waving and cheering next to him can do a politician all kinds of good, now that the pictures can be flashed around the world in seconds.
Under pressure from the McCain camp, the Brown regime is conducting another of its hasty and shambolic retreats. All sorts of stuff gets read out by Mr Brown, or appears under his name in printed articles. But you don’t suppose that he actually reads it all beforehand, do you? Mr Brown’s people are now assuring us that it was one of them who inadvertently revealed this sentiment, rather than Mr Brown himself who actually said it. All Mr Brown did was allow his name to be attached to the bottom of a newspaper article. So once again, there is this pattern, of the political leader trying, but failing, to observe the old and obsolete conventions, against his natural instincts, but his mere people not being so inhibited about saying what they think. Sooner or later the world’s leaders will all follow their mere supporters, and stop pretending to be neutral in foreign elections. Their line should be, because this will be the truth: of course I’ll work with whoever wins, I’m a politician. But meanwhile, yes, I do most definitely have my preferences.
The particular awfulness and embarrassingness of Mr Brown’s particular expression of a preference in the US Presidential election should not detract from the more general interestingness of this little event. Inevitably, most of the commentary will be about how the Obama campaign may now have peaked (the comments on Jonathan’s previous posting are already saying yes it has), and about how the Brown regime is unravelling, definitely, again, some more. But I find the more general global political party angle at least as interesting.
After all, this is not now only Brown preferring Obama, which we all know he does despite any denials (does anybody at all in what is left of the Labour Party not prefer Obama to McCain?). This is also now the McCain team opposing Brown, and not caring who knows it. And by extension, and whatever Mr McCain may personally feel or even know about the man, helping David Cameron. After all, the heading at Coffee House says: “The McCain campaign mocks Gordon Brown”. So now Mr McCain is doing it too, whatever denials he may subsequently issue.
|
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.
|
