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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Prudent savers hit by ‘excessive’ hidden fees on pensions
… sayeth the Telegraph…
The National Association of Pension Funds says that fees are too high and that consumers face an “eye wateringly complex” system of hidden levies. Last year, The Daily Telegraph exposed how pension charges could strip pensioners of up to three quarters of their income.
Well ok, that is entirely possible.
But does the fees that ‘prudent savers’ get charged not pale into insignificance compared to year after year of what artificially (i.e. politically driven) low interest rates has done to the very notion of being a ‘prudent saver’?
Indeed if you simply save your money in some safe low yield instrument, in such an environment as we find ourselves today you are not being a ‘prudent saver’ at all. There is nothing prudent about it as your money is very unlikely to maintain its value vis a vis inflation… and that is exactly the intention behind the policies of the Fed and Bank of England. They want you to spend in order to appease the animal spirits that drive the economy, rather than be a ‘prudent saver’.
That is who would-be ‘prudent savers’ should be railing against.
I was responding to a comment under this article… when it struck me: why do so many people find this screamingly obvious fact so bloody hard to figure out?
“The banks stole our money. If you are not banker, that includes you. The banks stole from everyone – businesses, countries, citizens.”
No, the politicians who bailed them out with taxpayer money stole ‘our’ money after they created the moral hazard that led to the banks doing the things that they were given the incentives to do.
In a sane world, said bankers should have simply been allowed to go bust… so the problem is not ‘bankers’, it is the people who refused to let the bastards go broke by giving them third party… taxpayer… money.
But the 9/11 deniers have two mighty weapons. One is technological. In the age of the internet, if you don’t want to read evidence that contradicts your fantasies, then you don’t need to. Just visit one of hundreds of websites that will supply you with freshly minted “evidence” to replace any bits of your theory that have fallen apart on you.
The other weapon is cultural. Thanks, in part, to multiculturalism, facts have been reduced to accessories in the West’s intellectual wardrobe. The postmodern message is that your version of reality is part of you; don’t let inconvenient truths damage your customised worldview and your self-esteem
– Damian Thompson. Often when I quote Thompson it is to fisk him but this one hits the nail squarely on the head.
Just when we [have] the strongest possible proof that Keynsianism doesn’t work, someone yells for an encore
– Commenter “J Cuttance” on the Telegraph
“Scottish Conservative Party set to disband” screams the title of an article…
Well why not? Scotland already has two Mega-Statiist major parties (SNP and Labour) so what need is there for a third? Indeed perhaps a new party north of the border might actually be, you know… conservative! If that comes to pass, perhaps someone might decide England needs a conservative party too because gawd knows it does not have one at the moment.
Apparently Greece has stopped the export of Tzatziki and Taramasalata… They’re worried about a double dip recession…
– Bert Trubshaw, seen in the comments over on the Telegraph.
So I suppose the jet she flew in on from her home in Colorado worked on rubber bands.
– a commenter called ‘SouthendViking’ on the Telegraph, remarking about actress Daryl Hannah, who was arrested at a protest where she reportedly said:
Before she was arrested, Hannah told WRC-TV the protesters want to be free from the “death and destruction” that fossil fuels cause. The group is calling for clean energy instead.
Greens… they want us living as serfs in a pre-industrial society.
As I mentioned earlier, the TV networks are giving this wall-to-wall coverage. TJ Holmes on CNN is repeatedly calling it a “monster storm”, and everyone is desperately trying not to mention that it has been downgraded to a category one hurricane, the weakest category in the Saffir-Simoson hurricane scale.
The politicians are falling over themselves to be seen to be doing something. The president, Barack Obama, called it a “historic” hurricane yesterday and has returned to the White House a day early from his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. He is desperate to avoid the mistakes of George Bush, who was slow to act over Hurricane Katrina.
Here in New York, mayor Bloomberg was slammed over his slow response to the big snow dump last year. City Hall is at the end of my street – they’ve been up all night there, co-ordinating the response to this.
Hurricane Irene is political, as well as meteorological.
– Matthew Wells
Children will be banned from watching shooting events under Boris Johnson’s Olympic ticket giveaway.
London schoolchildren are eligible for 125,000 Olympic tickets but these will not include any featuring guns, as Games organisers and City Hall fear a backlash from the anti-gun lobby.
The sheer idiocy of this speaks volumes of the rot at the heart of British society and its decadent political class. A different take on this can be found here.
I hope the reports of rebel triumph prove to be the case… and kudos to the UK and France for helping things along whist also resisting the urge to get too deeply involved.
But that said, I cannot help but hope the dirty secrets now emerge of how overseas politicians aided and abetted Qadaffi over the years, in particularly the disgusting deal over Abdelbaset al Megrahi. It would be wonderful to see the polities in England and Scotland take one in the face if the unlovely details eventually come out.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
– Alexis de Tocqueville (attributed to…)
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it.
But whenever the King’s debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews.
I’m seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom?
– Ellen Kuhfeld
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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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