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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In a typically overheated article at the Lew Rockwell website, is this extraordinary paragraph by Anthony Gregory:
“More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector – not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America’s past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best.”
This is a mixture of half truths and downright nonsense. (The “war machine” a “saviour of blacks”? WTF?). Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that “affirmative action” – which is euphemism for racial discrimination – is wrong and violates equality before the law. It is also true that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation have encroached on private property rights. But Gregory surely knows that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation addressed such indefensible acts as preventing black people – who were taxpayers – from gaining equal access to the public facilities they had paid for, as well as ensuring equal treatment for voter registration requirements, and so on. And given the statist abomination of the Jim Crow laws (enacted during the Progressive era), it is surely legitimate even for someone like Mr Gregory and his Rockwellian chums to accept that after such state-enforced bigotry was removed, it was a matter of natural justice to ensure that black people were put on an equal footing with whites in terms of access to public services that they had paid for.
It is, of course true in strictly narrow terms that a libertarian defence of the right to life and property does not say anything about how one should use, say, such property, nor should it. But life is so much more than simply focusing on such “negative liberties”; my conception of libertarianism is that it embraces social, not just narrowly legal or economic, freedoms. In my view, a free society is one that encourages “experiments in living”, in encouraging, or at least not scorning, the eccentric, the different, etc, with the key proviso that such experimenters bear the consequences of their actions. And I get a strong sense from Mr Gregory that he hasn’t much time for such things, for all his raving about how the US has been a “fascist” country. The problem is that by using that term to describe something like Civil Rights legislation, it leaves our vocabulary looking a bit inadequate when describing, say, Mussolini’s Italy.
On a slightly tangential point, here is Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, defending his recent book – co-authored with Nick Gillespie – from those “paleo-libertarians” over at the Lew Rockwell outfit. What a rum lot they are.
When I first saw the headline, I thought this was a touch of exaggeration by the Daily Mail (hardly my favourite newspaper). But it turns out to be fairly solid. Here is an AP version. My apologies to readers as this item is a few days’ old:
Scottish officials say they may take four heavy children away from their parents after warnings to help their kids trim down have apparently failed. The children are aged one to 11. The parents are obese and have three older children who are also heavy. For the past two years, the family has lived in government housing and had their eating habits scrutinized. Last week, officials in Dundee told the family their four youngest children could be taken into foster care or adopted. A government spokesman said they would act in the children’s best interests.
In the U.S., there have been several cases where obese children have been taken into care after their parents couldn’t help them lose weight.
Now, the issue of whether or when third parties – not just states – should intervene if children are thought to be at risk is not an easy line to draw. (It is one of those issues that I find can divide libertarians, such as intellectual property and immigration). But this case does seem a particularly egregious example of state over-reach. There is no suggestion that the parents of these children are cruel, or unpleasant, nor is there any suggestion that the children are unhappy, or held against their will. None of the usual markers of harm seem to apply, unless there are facts of the case that have not been issued for reasons of confidentiality or legal reasons. About the most that might be said is that the elders are not very successful in encouraging their offspring to be fit. And that might be fair, but I tend to regard much, if not all, of the current obesity obsession as another of those moral panics about which writers such as HL Mencken famously wrote.
This is a bad case, and I hope the children can be restored to their home as soon as possible. It seems bizarre, at a time when, in the aftermath of the riots, we are told about the importance of families, that certain people in governments should be so determined to break them up even where the problems do not appear to be particularly severe. If a child grows up with a loving mother and father and happens to be a bit on the chubby side, that is surely infinitely better than a generation of fit young thugs without fathers.
I have been away for almost 10 days in the lovely Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily, hence my silence. It is a mental health break to be away from emails, internet, TV and the rest. Nothing but good conversation and the company of lots of pulp thrillers, chatty Italian waiters and friendly locals. But I return to work and home with a bump. And of course, we are close to the 10th anniversary of that day of horror in lower Manhattan and Washington DC:
“The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.”
Christopher Hitchens.
For what it is worth, I am not really very keen on this whole idea of there being a “public intellectual”. Who gets to decide that a person holds this sort of role? Anyway, quibbles aside, it is a good piece.
Here are a couple of other paragraphs that stand out:
The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.
In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any “simple” solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and “free speech fundamentalism.” The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of “ancient hatreds” but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called “evil.” And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is due to speak in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, later today and according to some of the investment notes that I receive, he is expected to commit that central bank to a third round of credit creation from thin air, otherwise known in these mealy-mouthed days as “quantitative easing.” There are doubters out there about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of this. We can of course expect the usual devotees of hard money to scoff at this, but what intrigues me is how some economists in the commercial world are hostile. Take this from Steen Jakobsen , chief economist at Denmark-based Saxo Bank:
“When talking about the impact from Quantitative Easing (QE) one has to realise that most academic studies show that the biggest “impact” from QE on markets comes from the actual announcement of it rather than the execution of it. An analysis of the two prior QE introductions point to a 50 to 100 basis point reduction on bond yields and subsequent inflation of equities via “a feel good” factor – the so-called wealth effect.”
“But realistically, what has been the net impact of QE1 and QE2? Chairman Bernanke has used 3,000 billion US Dollars to create what? Nothing! Unemployment is still above 9.0 per cent, the housing market is still in a slump, and now the only successful thing going for the Fed is the stock market’s rise from the floor at 666.00 in March 2009. But now there’s talk of an interbank funding crisis and unrealised losses. It certainly smells like 2008, doesn’t it? Or what about August 2010? – Yes! It is almost a 100 per cent analogy to last year. It’s actually like watching the movie Groundhog Day.”
I like his final paragraph:
“There is another political theory stating that the best environment to create growth in is one in which politicians have no power to pass legislation (similar to the U.S. situation for now until the U.S. elections). Think about Clinton: he had a major “programme” coming in as President, yet failed to get anything whatsoever done in his eight years in the White House which then led to the biggest growth period in U.S. history. What does this tell us? Total radio silence works as the micro-economy – investors, consumers and companies – adjust their behaviour and consumption to the new reality and then start moving forward. The last thing that we need is “political noise” and promises of better days ahead with nothing to back them up.”
I can think of a good book on the collapse of paper money that I can send this man.
I see that overnight, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple – now the largest firm in the US by market capitalisation – has resigned. His health has been a worry for many months and this announcement should come as a surprise to few. Even so, it represents something of a moment in the industry. Of course, the usual “dog in the manger” types will say that many others must claim credit for certain things, etc, etc, and they will have a point, as they do. Even so, given that entrepreneurship represents the only real way debt-laden countries can and will pull themselves out of their problems, it sometimes surprises me how, even in libertarian forums, the real-world business leaders we have attract as much bile as they do. And I am not talking about those who obviously benefit from corporate welfare, such as beneficiaries from tariffs, subsidies, eminent domain rulings, and the like. Even the more obviously free marketeer businessmen seem to get it in the neck from us. Perhaps we ought to step back a bit and realise that if this was so easy, why haven’t we achieved such success? Perhaps that is a painful question too far.
Here is a long blog post by Timothy Sandefur dissecting the collectivist economics and moral philosophy of Sam Harris. Harris is one of the “new atheists”, who, along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, have developed a bit of a reputation for bashing religion. I haven’t read Sam Harris, and Sandefur does not make me any more inclined to do so. (Of all these men, Hitchens is the best, in my view.)
It is interesting that those who criticise religion on the grounds of reason and logic can, as in the case of Harris, make such basic errors on subjects such as trade, notions of self-ownership, justice and the like. It is as if they are craving a secular god to fill a gap left by the traditional one. I must say I was quite shocked at the incoherence of some of Harris’s comments and his failure to examine and demonstrate his premises, such as when he talks about “fairness” without asking what he might mean by that. It is disappointing. On a related point, Greg Perkins, who writes at the Noodlefood blog, had a point about the big gaps in “new atheist” thinking a few years ago. (That link has been updated).
I suggest people brew up a coffee for Sandefur’s posting. It is not a 60-second read. Another case, in fact, of how blogging is often where the quality writing is, whatever some sneerers might once have said about this medium.
Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, Reason’s Hit & Run blog has a related issue on how supposedly pro-science leftists can make utter tits of themselves.
Following on from Perry’s post immediately below this one, I see that Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines), has, by his standards, a pretty long, and more significantly, very strongly worded item pointing to all the various links between the late, unlamented Labour government, and the equally unlamented Libyan dictator. I wonder how Tony Blair regrets that photo of him shaking hands with Gaddaffi?
Maybe not. Maybe, Blair might argue, that yes, the guy was and is a bastard, but he came clean about his own WMD programmes in 2003 after Saddam was toppled and to that limited extent, it was right for the West to “reward” those countries run by people who had shown some signs of seeing sense. But the trouble with this sort of realpolitik is that it requires a country like Britain to turn a sort of Nelsonian blind eye to the manifest wickedness of a regime and its past. And let’s not be partisan here: the same calculations have been taken by rightwing administrations as well. Such statecraft is an ugly business, and not a place for high-falutin sanctimony. That said, the deal to release the guy blamed for the Lockerbie massacre, only to see how this release was treated by the Libyan authorities, stank to high heaven. It also unnecessarily has damaged relations between the UK and US.
As for what happens next, I haven’t the foggiest idea.
A graph on the growth of the regulatory state, courtesy of the National Review Corner blog.
This person at the Daily Caller appears – with some justification I might add – to take a dim view of Ron Paul, the US congressman and Republican primary contender for the presidential ticket known as “Dr No” on account of his saying no to various government measures and enterprises. He is, famously or infamously, a hardline anti-interventionist in foreign affairs, so much so that his views might be dubbed as almost pacifist. He has called for accountability by the Federal Reserve, and argues that institution ought to be closed down. But he has feet of clay, and this article I link to, which is written in a sort of furious burst of anger, focuses on those flaws and makes light of Paul’s merits. In particular, the article unfairly misrepresents the Austrian school of economics and its methodology. It also seems to smear libertarianism on issues like legalising prostitution and drugs, ignoring the obvious arguments that criminalising consensual acts has created huge costs for society.
All the way down at the bottom of a comment thread prompted by this article, is large item by commenter Michael P. Ivy. It is so good that I reproduce it here. There is the odd typo, but it is worth quoting in the raw:
I am always amused by wannabe economists, who call themselves capitalists, but, are unable to embrace or understand the true axioms of capitalism when push comes to shove. Austrian economics spins on essentially to axioms: (1) that there is no free lunch, and (2) all human action is purposeful action motivated by the individual’s (not society’s) desire to move from a less to a more desired state. These are self evident truths, much like the “more is preferred to less” axiom of the neoclassical school. You butcher Rothbard without understanding his work and particularly his crititique of the neo classical school of wackjob indifference curve analysis and welfare economics. The notion that an individual can be indifferent between two different states of the world without ever actually exercising choice is not a reliable basis for recommending redistribution measures of the Kaldor/Hicks kind. Even Samuelson so much as admitted that it is impossible to derive a social welfare function without making assumptions about the marginal utility of money et al (1951).
The problem with Keynes’ economics, is that it must rob resources from one sector of the economy to furnish another and it consumes resources in the process. Moreover, in doing so, the government does so without the knowledge of the benefits that those resources procure that only those individuals holding those resources…know. This is the problem with any measure of government involvement in economics. That they suffer from fiscal illusion (not my money so it don’t matter) is one thing, but, they effectively create an environment of uncertainty by destroying productive incentives. Incentives do matter after all and I have yet to see the mathematical models of the neo-classicals actually recognize this and quantify them. The fact is, is that you can’t unless you invoke a value judgement of the Keynesian/Samuelson kind.
Welfare economics has never worked and it never will work, for as M. Thatcher so plainly points out, “Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people’s money”. The statement captures two notions: (1) if their actually was a multiplier effect on GDP from government spending, don’t you think this would be a permanent line item of the government’s income/expense statement?, and (2) the No Free Lunch axiom is underscored by the fact that since government is an unproductive entity that consumes resources for its existence without actually creating anything of value is that eventually the productivity of the market is unable to keep up with and compensate for the unproductive actions of government. True capitalists understand this.
And if you think the market is unable to coordinate itself with respect to defense, innovation, policing of private property, mass transit, health, education, indeed all the things you think we require a central planner for, then you obviously have not bothered to school yourself on the opportunities that can and will present themselves if productive individuals are left alone and allowed to participate. Finally, I see that your article is riddled throughout with incorrect and obnoxious assertions about economic theory presented by Rothbard, Mises et al. (semi-autistic dogmatism). The fact is, is that there is nothing dogmatic about the Austrian school. Its core tenet is that the best production, exchange, and coordination of resources occurs when individuals are left free and unfettered to choose. And by whatever math you might care to invoke, given the level of debt ($16T) incurred by the Welfare State, I’d say you’re pointing the dogmatic finger in the entirely wrong direction. THAT is what is dogmatic….doing the same illogical, nonsensical thing over and over again (at the people’s expense), and expecting a different result every time. So before you decide to write another diatribe on someting you don’t know much about, I’d recommend that you review Rothbard…again, and in particular his piece on “Towards a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics”. There is nothing dogmatic, hairy scary or offensive about it.
Very good.
Ron Paul is very much a mixed bag, and I would not vote for him, and I am troubled by some of his views. But the fact has to be faced that almost unique in Western politics, he has put forward a classical liberal agenda on certain issues, and done so consistently. And he has managed, despite his age, to touch a lot of young people. There is a lesson here somewhere.
As has been noted before, the disaster of the eurozone is, in the eyes of some policymakers, as much an opportunity for further pan-European empire-building as it is an occasion for shame and embarrassment. This week, Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy (remember him? He’s the one who married one of Mick Jagger’s old flames), came up with this barnstormer of an idea, in the form of a European-style “Tobin tax” and a form of increased economic central government. It has the ring of inevitability about it.
The problem for the UK is that said tax, which has been assailed by the likes of Tim Worstall before, would apply not just to the eurozone, but to the UK, which is not in the euro. And given the relative size of London as a financial centre compared to Paris, Frankfurt or Milan, guess which place takes the biggest relative hit? You guessed: London. Never mind, of course, that banks that can do so will put some of their activities outside the EU, or that the costs of the tax will be borne by savers, borrowers and users of financial services generally, in the form of lower rates of savings interest – already negative in real terms – more expensive costs of hedging forex transactions, and the like. This is what is known as tax incidence. Politicians are not, as we know, in the business of understanding the Law of Unintended Consequences. Indeed, we might even define today’s political class as people who defy this law.
Of course, Cameron, Osborne and others (but not their LibDem allies) will protest about such a tax on London’s financial sector, but look how far such protests got us before concerning sovereign debt bailouts by the UK. And such men have shamefully pandered to such anti-capitalist sentiment in the past, so there is a sort of brute justice if they fail to prevent this latest move now. Such men, of course, have enjoyed the fruits of financial wheeler-dealing when the going was good, such as financing of the Tory party by the likes of Michael Spencer, the founder of derivatives powerhouse ICAP. (As an aside, I see that the odious Vincent Cable, Business Secretary, wants to slap capital gains tax on housing transactions of wealthy properties if the Tories decide to ditch the top 50 per cent rate of income tax. Even a land value tax is better than CGT, although not by very much. There is no such thing as a benign tax.)
Alas, banker bashing has reached such heights of hysteria that some might even try and argue that such a tax on the evils of speculation is a jolly good idea. It pained me to see that even that otherwise fine book on the recent market disaster by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson, floated the idea.
Allister Heath weighs on the latest eurozone wheeze. He’s unimpressed, not surprisingly.
Update: Here is a twist on the issue of tax incidence and taxes on companies. Milton Friedman is magnificent.
“Richtie is the true Clausewitzian nightmare, an industrious idiot who never stops.”
– David Moore, commenting on an item by Tim Worstall, who fisks the absurd Richard Murphy.
Okay, back to the recent violent disorder. Eating in a local cheap restaurant for lunch, I grabbed a copy of the Daily Mail and was pleasantly surprised at this remarkably non-hysterical piece on the recent controversy about David Starkey, the historian. But of course, if you want a reliable mix of social conservative rant and shafts of lucid insight in the same piece, there is always Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) on hand. In the article I link to here, I broadly agreed with some of it but as usual, there is always the equivalent of a crack in the pavement.
“Say to him [Cameron] that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.”
Interesting. So Mr Hitchens thinks that mass immigration should be “reversed”. How exactly? There is often, I find in some of the denunciations of mass immigration, an unspoken assumption, never fleshed out, as to what said denouncers want to do about it. Does Mr Hitchens think, for instance, that those who have been living in the UK for some time, and who hold UK passports, should, if they fall into the “wrong” demographic groups as he might define them, be deported? To where? How? Never mind European “human rights” legislation, how can any supposed “conservative” such as Mr Hitchens, with his famed love of “family values” and the rest, countenance a reversal of mass immigration without spelling out the details? Casually referring to “reversing” X or why without saying how is foolish, in my humble opinion.
Of course, there are tens of thousands or more people who emigrate from the UK every year in pursuit of a better life. And I suspect the recent mayhem will only add to the shift. But I get the impression that such folk are not the ones that Mr Hitchens has in mind.
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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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