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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Taking a break from life in riot-torn London, I came across this item at the FT about some of the implications of longer lifespans. It is a mixed situation. Excerpt:
“Maxmin admits there are no miraculous solutions to the problems of a fast-ageing society. We will all have to work longer, save more and pay more in tax to cover the costs of a world with a greyer population. Even so, he thinks models like Elder Power can have a much wider application. Perhaps moments like the collapse of Southern Cross, he tells me, could (in the right hands) become moments of opportunity. More generally, models like Beacon Hill Village, ITNAmerica and Elder Power show glimpses of a future in which more elderly people can stay in their homes for longer. All three use innovative technology, make use of assets in their local community and bring together the resources of local businesses, volunteers and the state to solve problems none could have solved individually, at reasonable cost.”
How we deal with ageing, and the issue of longer lifespans, is of course intertwined with the current fiscal breakdown of many developed economies. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. And in that Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda book I have been linking to lately, about the impact of mass aviation, there is a segment on how said aviation can be used to dramatically reshape healthcare, such as by flying people with problems to cheaper, but arguably better run, hospitals in Asia. It struck me while reading this book that while automobiles and consumer electronics have been propelled by their Henry Fords, Michael Dells and Steve Jobses, we haven’t really had, in healthcare, a similar set of individuals to drive innovation and push things sharply down the price curve. The dynamics of Silicon Valley, allied with cheap Chinese manufacturing and just-in-time stock inventory systems, hardly touches healthcare at all, although this is starting to change, perhaps. Of course, much of this is caused by how healthcare is seen, wrongly in my view, as somehow “different” from such vulgar things as selling flatscreen TVs or cars. Healthcare is political. That’s the problem.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
– Philip Johnston, journalist.
Read the whole article.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.
– Brendan O’Neill.
You don’t have to buy some of the slightly misty-eyed stuff about working class “communities” to see that he has a strong point. As I often like to point out, an open liberal society requires a modicum of basic respect for the lives and property of others, a certain amount of fertile soil for particular virtues to take root in and flourish.
My area of central London – Pimlico – has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he’s okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:
“As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.”
(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.
In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:
Life At the Bottom;
The Welfare State We’re In.
Mind The Gap.
Guns & Violence: The English Experience.
I’d add that a common complaint – sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives – is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC’s coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory “cuts”, was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.
I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:
“The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain.”
I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.
Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch’s blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn’t even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.
Anyway, here’s another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:
“How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders.”
On an optimistic note, I’d add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.
I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it’s Friday:
“Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy.”
And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the “upper class” etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.
Let’s not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.
“Flowers begin arriving past night and bidding starts before dawn. To ensure their lilies and hyacinths are ready for the auction block, growers move them from cold storage onto carts in the early morning, or else rush them from Schiphol after overnight flights from Quito, Nairobi, and Tel Aviv. It’s impossible to see, much less make sense of, the Aalsmeer at eye level, as the floor of its central warehouse is a thicket of carts bearing blooms, all waiting their turn. This is the world’s largest commercial building at ten million square feet, more than twice the size of Chicago’s Willis Tower or Merchandise Mart….” (Page213).
“From a catwalk running above, you can study the crazy quilt of tulips, sunflowers, azaleas and hydrangeas bleeding into daubs of orange or pink on the horizon. The quilt constantly changes colors and patterns as burly Dutchmen at the wheel of one-man tugs trail daisy chains behind them.” (Page 213)
What is interesting about these passages, concerning the marvels of the vast flower-auction market in Holland, and the global reach of this business made possible now due to aviation and refrigeration, is that the author does not fall into the usual stale bromides about how all this aviation-led trade is killing the planet. I liked this passage, on page 232-3:
“Food miles cannot begin to compare in toxicity with flatulent cattle. Anyone who’s read the Omnivore’s Dilemma can recite chapter and verse on the perils of force-feeding corn to livestock in feedlots. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more potent than carbon, as a by-product of digestion…..A breakdown of the Big Mac revealed that nearly a third of its [carbon] footprint stems from feed production, another third from storage, and much of the rest from slaughtering, frying, and baking. Food miles contribute 3 per cent.”
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda. 2011.
Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review’s Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:
“The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years.”
Exactly. I’d also add to VDH’s list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling – it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).
VDH’s points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.
Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax “avoidance”, so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.
We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”
– AJP Taylor, historian. The funny thing is, that AJP Taylor was a lifelong socialist and therefore, supported policies and ideas that led, directly and indirectly, to the destruction of some of the liberties he wrote about in this much-cited passage, on page one, from his classic, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).. Like many of his generation, he was naive about the Soviet Union, to put it kindly, although he did break with communism while remaining a lifelong member of the Labour Party. But as he would respond, much of the damage to British freedoms mentioned in this passage had been done by the calamity of the First World War and its aftermath. And piecemeal changes – starting in the late 19th Century and arguably hastened by the arrival of the mass franchise, made these liberties vulnerable. But are we being starry-eyed about Victorian-era liberties? Is he describing a myth or a reality? There’s a question to stir up the commenters.
I see that Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media liked this quote too. I imagine it resonates with American readers quite as much as with a Brit.
“Little does Barack Obama understand that he has forever branded himself as an incompetent and failure. His narcissism and lifelong history of receiving public adulation will not allow him to comprehend the damage. He does not understand that now few will listen to his speeches, no matter how well delivered; that few will believe what he is saying, as he has lied and obfuscated the facts so often. Many world leaders have already arrived at the conclusion that Barack Obama is a leader that cannot be trusted, the citizens of the United States are beginning to understand that he is a man without a core set of principles thus incapable of guiding the ship of state. The media, increasingly realizing their culpability in the nation’s current state of affairs, has begun to ask more penetrating questions and grudgingly question Obama’s fitness for office. Columnists once infatuated with his ability to deliver a speech and skin color have finally begun to admit their error. The Left has become more open in their criticism, as they now understand that the hero upon whom they vested so much hope is a hollow shell.”
– Steve McCann.
In front of an admittedly pro-“Austria” crowd at the LSE, it seems that academics defending the free market views of the late F.A. Hayek managed to fairly heavily beat those speaking up for JM Keynes.
This may not amount to much, but what I think these things accomplish is to remind the defenders of people such as Keynes (such as Lord Skidelsky, his biographer), that there are now hundreds, in fact thousands, of smart young economics and politics graduates and undergraduates who regard, say, Keynes and other economic interventionists, as wrong. Some of these people will become teachers and lecturers themselves, or, if they want to make serious money, work in banks and the like. Slowly but surely, all those people teaching stodgy, wrong Keynesian ideas are getting older and greyer and newer people with other ideas are taking over, however slowly at first. This LSE debate is the sort of event that makes me think that while the 2008 financial crash might be seen, in one way, as a supposed setback for “unregulated capitalism” (yeah, right), it has also pushed attention on ideas that got out of focus in the lazy, fat years of the dotcom boom and the early parts of the past decade. (And then of course there are all those tens of thousands of book sales of Atlas Shrugged, etc).
Libertarians and other non-socialists like to moan how our places of Higher Learning have been gradually taken over by people with bad and wrong ideas. We need, I think, to realise that that argument can cut both ways. People with good, insightful ideas can also enter these institutions, however slowly at first, and make a key difference. I think this is happening more than people realise. I know that optimism is deeply out of fashion these days. Wallowing in despair is, in my view, a cop-out.
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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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