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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The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the ‘Yeah, but what they’re really saying…’ tendency. The ‘tea’ stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already’ but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it’s against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They’d much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda.
– Daniel Hannan, writing about the extraordinary abuse heaped on the Tea Party crowd. Well, they want to cut taxes and push back the State. I guess they must be psychotic or something.
Correction: I mistakenly wrote in an earlier version of this that Hari was being sent on a course at the expense of his employer, but that is not so. He is paying for it himself. I am still not quite sure how this helps: do you need to learn how to be honest? Maybe he should read some books on ethics instead. Anyway, the error was mine.
Reading this comment about the revolting Johann Hari, a journalist who fabricated interviews and, well, basically made stuff up, I am still stunned that he has not been fired by his current employer. Instead, the creep writes a sort of mea culpa and is attending a course to learn about journalism. He should have been fired, in my opinion. There are thousands of talented people trying to make a career in the media; why should this shit be allowed to stay in the business?
Of course, in a free market, he should be able to do what he likes so long as he does so not at my expense, so I would, for example, object if he ever got a job working for the BBC, which is funded by a tax. But this sorry saga does rather suggest that if you are a leftie, self-styled preacher of idealism like Hari, that you can get away with a lot.
Here is a blog, with the beguiling title of Splintered Sunrise, by a man who obviously swings to that side of the political spectrum who is rightly appalled by Hari and his antics.
Sometimes it pays to call a spade a spade. Johann Hari is a conman. End of subject.
Christina Odone, who was on the receiving end of Hari’s behaviour, is unimpressed.
If this lowlife ever resurfaces in journalism, he should be referred to as “Johann Hari, the plagiarist”, in much the same way as Paul Krugman is sometimes dubbed “the former Enron advisor”.
This is interesting:
“As the EU debt drama continues unspooling like a perversely watchable soap opera (the FT’s Neil Hume describes it as ‘eurozone crisis porn’), an intriguing sub-plot has emerged: Britain is suing the European Central Bank. The Treasury is unhappy with an ECB move to limit the kind of euro-denominated products that can pass through UK clearing houses, suspecting it’s a bid to shift financial activity from London to Paris/Berlin. So it’s taking legal action, the first of its kind by an EU member state.)”
Via the Spectator’s “Coffee House” blog.
I enjoyed this paragraph:
“On a wider level, there’s some irony in the fact that the UK and the EU are squabbling over euro-denominated transactions. Who even knows which countries will still be using the euro by the time the year is out? Exactly what kind of euro will be cleared in clearing houses come Christmas?”
Someone explain to me why we are in the EU. I am sure there is a reason, but bugger me if I can remember now. Old age creeping in.
David Friedman (son of Milton F.) has a good post here in which he asks the question of why we don’t focus more on the possible positive impacts of man-made global warming, rather than always focus on the bads. If you live in Siberia or have endured the winters of Canada, the idea of a bit more warmth will, well, warm your heart. And assuming the net impact of AGW is to leave more people with climates that have positives, such as longer growing seasons, fewer deaths from cold, etc, then surely this is a good thing? I remember Bjorn Lomborg, in his book, Cool It, looking at how many people die every year from cold and comparing that with current deaths from extreme heat and projected deaths from more heat.
The good thing about the way David Friedman poses this question is that he is not taking a view on whether AGW is bunk or not. Rather, he is saying that assuming X or Y is happening, we need to weigh the positive impacts as well as the bads before deciding on the right response.
Of course, from a cynical point of view, the reason the bad effects of AGW get so much attention is because it is more fun for grant-seeking scientists and journalists looking for a good story to play up disaster. Greater crop yields in northern Canada don’t sell newspapers.
Thanks to EconLog for the pointer to the Friedman piece.
Apropos that Kevin Dowd speech which Brian Micklethwait wrote about earlier, the name Paul Krugman came up when Prof. Dowd pointed to the absurdity of calls for ever more money-printing, government spending and debt as a way to solve our current economic malaise. Some readers will remember that extraordinary comment by Krugman a few days back when he suggested that policymakers should act as if they believed the Earth was under some sort of attack from space aliens. And of course he’s argued that the Great Depression was ended by WW2 (it wasn’t, or not in the way Krugman suggests). And a day or so ago, he seems determined to cause dangerously high blood pressure problems by comments such as this, apropos the commemorations of the 9/11 mass murders:
“What happened after 9/11–and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not–was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”
This is unhinged. Whoever Bernie Kerik is (information gratefully received, Ed), I don’t think that you can really say that the Mayor of New York was “cashing in” on the immolation of the southern part of Manhattan. If you want an account of how Guiliani and his colleagues dealt with those terrible days, here is an interview he did with Steve Forbes. As for GWB, I don’t think there was some crazy, cynical exploitation of a terrible event although some politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, used the understandably heightened fears about security to hit certain civil liberties, expand government power, and the like. Now by all means criticise the policies pursued at the time by governments in the US and overseas, and goodness knows, libertarians of various hues haven’t been shy on that score, but I detected no immediate “cashing in” on the crisis. When events of such enormity occur, any reaction from a politician, sensible or not, could with hindsight be slagged off as “cashing in”. Suppose Bush/whoever had done nothing other than mount a police operation, hold a few ceremonies of condolence and leave it at that, or go in for lots of vacuous platitudes. No doubt Prof. Krugman would now be foaming about the complacency of such a stance.
Krugman is a man who, let’s not forget, was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, and it would be nice if a certain gravitas could come with such a position. When I try to recall the way that Milton Friedman, that other Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about world affairs to great effect for Newsweek magazine – succeeding the great Henry Hazlitt – there is simply no comparison in tone as well as content. The hatred that seems to pour out of Krugman is actually quite worrying. What is eating him?
At a time when what are called “rare earths” – key ingredients in many of our high-tech goods – are becoming, well, rarer and more costly, here is an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how firms are looking to do without such metals via the use of substitutes.
Substitution of one substance of nature for another, coupled with processes of minaturisation and use of smaller, lighter materials, is helping to deal with the supposed nightmare of how we are all running out of stuff. At this point, I must make my standard plug for that wonderful book, The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L Simon, and here also is the recently published and excellent The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley.
As Brian Micklethwait notes below in his piece about a Kevin Dowd speech, we are likely heading for serious trouble on the monetary front. All the more reason, therefore, to bang on about the continued creativity and adaptability of people working in free markets.
By the way, on the subject of rare earths, a good person to follow is libertarian blogger Tim Worstall, who makes a living from this area.
For those interested in the battles of classical antiquity, today represents an important date. And the name “Marathon” lives on for all those masochists who insist on doing those punishing runs in London, New York and other places.
“A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.”
– Michael Barone. The veteran chronicler of US politics is not given to harsh language, but he’s certainly not pulling his punches today.
“If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author.”
– Audrey Bilger.
She is having a go at VS Naipaul, and even though I dislike aspects of feminism, I think her argument deserves respect. An interesting piece.
“I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that.”
– David Henderson.
In Italy last week, where I holidayed, I also attended the ISIL conference with a great bunch of fellow libertarian conspirators, such as Kevin Dowd, Tom Palmer and Detlev Schlichter. One of the talks was by Mary Ruwart, who has worked for many years in the medical field and has first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of the US Food and Drugs Administration. She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects.
As Ruwart said, one of the issues that comes up in any discussion about drugs are patents. She disapproves of them – she called the process of getting a patent a “game”; but at the same time she pointed out that if drug firms have no certainty of being able to recoup some of their research costs due to a patent, and those research costs are inflated by the FDA and other regulators, then abolishing patents without first removing such regulators would be bad. In my view, it would be disastrous.
I thought about her talk when I came across this rather lame article by the Economist, in which the publication wonders why US drugs are so expensive and why production of them has slowed. Wow, I wonder why that can be?
Update: the FDA has been carrying out an absurd attempt to hammer dietary supplements. US citizens who want to stop this nonsense can register their views at this site.
I get all sorts of emails, and this one, from a fairly well known money manager in the UK by the name of Terry Smith, is worth reading in full. It is the text of a letter he has sent to the Financial Times newspaper. The FT is behind a paywall so I reproduce it in full:
From Mr Terry Smith.
Sir, I refer to the debate being conducted in the pages of the Financial Times between those who propose further Keynesian measures, such as Martin Wolf (“Struggling with a great contraction”, August 31), and those who do not accept that they will work, such as Wolfgang Schäuble (“Austerity is the only cure for the eurozone”, September 6).
Such so-called Keynesian measures as advocated by, among others, Ed Balls, Samuel Brittan, Paul Krugman, George Magnus and Barack Obama as well as Mr Wolf have not worked to date, and they will not work. Their advocates seem to assume that their repeated failure to solve our economic problems just means that the medicine must be repeated, which reminds me of Richard Nixon’s motto that “if two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”.
I say “so-called” Keynesians because these advocates seem not to realise that Keynes’ theories did not rescue us from the Great Depression. They are also asymmetric in their application of his theories – calling for ever larger deficit spending, having overlooked the bit about running a surplus in a boom. But above all, they do not seem to realise that they cannot work in a period of debt deflation in which a recession is preceded by the collapse of the banking system, as their current failure is demonstrating.
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 possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
The first step in rectifying this situation should be to make a clear and unambiguous statement about the actual debt the UK is carrying.
To give a lead to this, today we have circulated to every member of parliament a tin can emblazoned with the UK debt figure – £3,589bn including commitments for public sector pension commitments, private finance initiative and banking sector guarantees, so that they can see what it is they are metaphorically “kicking down the road” with their present policies. This, ahead of the party conference season, I hope might spur some considered and honest debate on this issue.
It is time for those who wish to lead us out of this crisis to tell people how bad the current situation really is and the painful remedies which will be needed to remedy it.
Terry Smith, Chief Executive, Tullett Prebon, London EC2, UK
I get the impression that this man is not looking to be elevated to the peerage. Good.
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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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