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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“I close this sermon with these words: Avoid anger, recrimination, and personal attack. Those with whom you are angry are probably (taken by and large) at least as filled with or as empty of virtue as you. Moreover, they are the very ones you might wish later to welcome as your allies. Avoid panic and despair; be of good cheer. If you’re working in freedom’s vineyard to the best of your ability, the rest is in the hands of a higher authority anyway. If you can see no humor in what’s going on (and even at times in your own behavior) you’ll soon lose that sense of balance so important to effective and reasoned thought and action. Finally, take comfort in the thought that the cause of freedom can never be lost, precisely because it can never be won. Given man’s nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defence during that short period of time when we were potentially a part of that struggle.”
– Can Capitalism Survive? Benjamin A. Rogge, page 300. Originally published in 1979 and republished by that splendid organisation, Liberty Fund.
I have been reading this book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda, and it is full of gems. We take the ability to order a book or other item online and have it delivered in days for granted, and perhaps tend to forget how much we have got used to this unless, that is, such services are disrupted by things such as security clampdowns or Icelandic volcanic eruptions.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
“Despite its handicaps, LAX has been the catalyst for the city’s metamorphosis into America’s premier trade entrepôt over the last 30 years. It was during those decades that the industrial fulcrum of California first shifted north – out of the hangars of Hughes Aircraft and into Silicon Valley – and then west, all the way to China. We have LAX to thank for our iPhones and iPods being `designed by Apple in California, assembled in China,’ as they advertise on their backs. Not just Apple, but every Valley company that began life combining transistors there – think Intel, Hewlett Packard, Sun, and Cisco – long ago began outsourcing work from its messy, depreciating factories to ones across the Pacific. Now they wait for airborne freighers to land in Los Angeles with the first samples of their latest holiday smash in the hold.”
(Page 29)
“Anyone lucky enough to have hitched a ride aboard a freighter or been taken under the wings of the `freight dogs’ who pilot them could tell ou enough stories to pass the eighteen hours to LA from Singapore. At any given moment, there are aloft `incomprehensible quantities of the mundane,’ in the words of one such witness: 160,000 pounds of roses leaving Amsterdam, 25,000 wiring harnesses bound for auto plants around the Detroit, or 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto games inbound for LAX. Another writer babysat a stableful of horses in transit between O’Hare and Tokyo, including a dozen Appaloosas bound for a Hokkaido ranch. One pilot recounted the tale of a mysterious ice chest, insured for millions, which he later learned was the vessel for the first HIV drug cocktail.”
(page 33).
“White extremists are rightly shunned by mainstream politicians. Muslim extremists are courted by the likes of Ken Livingstone. White fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism need each other. But white fundamentalism, unlike its Muslim counterpart, does not have a presence in legitimate institutions. The white Right should not be ignored by the security authorities – but it would be dangerous to divert our attention from the real threat.”
Andrew Gilligan, journalist, reflecting on the wider implications of the horror in Norway. I would add that security authorities should also not forget such threats as from remnants of the IRA in Northern Ireland, Deep Greens, and parts of the Far Left. There is, alas, plenty of fanaticism out there.
I have a few Norwegian friends and they are, thank god, safe, but in a small country, almost everyone in that fine nation has been touched by this act of mass murder. By the way, do any Samizdata commenters know about what the laws are about firearms in that country? I am appalled at how easy it was for this man to kill so many without challenge for so long. But then this bastard had clearly planned out his attacks, knowing that it would take time for the police to get to the island.
“The early aircraft business resembled that of the shade-tree mechanics who, in building hot rods, gave rise, then as now, to true advances in automobile design. See also the chopper shops of California and their influence on the world of motorcycling. A list of these shade-tree mechanics includes the Wrights, Cyris McCormick, Henry Ford, Tesla, Tom Edison, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Burt Rutan, and Steve Jobs. How would they and American industry have fared had government gotten its hands upon them at the outset – if it had taxed away the capital necessary to provide a market for their wares; if it had taxed away the wealth, which, existing as gambling money, had taken a chance on these various visionaries? One need not wonder, but merely look around at the various businesses that government has aided. And now it has taken over health care.”
– David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge, page 79.
I imagine that even we hardened watchers of public affairs are getting a tad bored by the Murdoch/phone-hacking/police corruption affair, but an angle that is starting to gain some ground in the last few days or so is just how biased the BBC has been in its coverage. There is, of course, a website, Biased BBC, that tracks the failings of the BBC. As a state-licensed broadcaster in receipt of a licence fee collected on pain of imprisonment, the network has a status, and a presence in the media world, almost unlike any other. (I often have to explain to my American friends how the BBC is funded: they are frequently shocked when they find out).
Stephen Glover at the Daily Mail has a particularly good item on just how biased the BBC’s coverage of the Murdoch business has been. And here is a good item by Charlie Cooke at the National Review’s “Corner” blog.
When all is said and done, News International and its sister businesses do not send me a letter demanding that I pay for its services and products with a threat of fine or worse for non-payment. That fact needs to be pointed out more than it has been. The BBC needs to be broken up more urgently than any other media business.
There is an interesting discussion at the Cafe Hayek blog about how much it matters that Americans don’t currently save very much. Well, given that real interest rates (taking into account inflation) are negative, and that holding cash means real wealth declines, it is not surprising that real savings have been steadily eroded. The blog’s author is certainly right about this point, however:
“If saving is good for Americans, the nationality or place of residence of the savers whose saved resources are invested in the American economy is irrelevant. If saving is good for Americans, then given Americans’ saving rate, savings invested in the American economy by non-Americans are a blessing – a blessing that is bigger the greater is the amount of this foreign savings and investment in the American economy.”
“Yes, we Americans would be even wealthier materially if we Americans saved even more – wealthier materially both as a product of many or all of us having larger financial portfolios, and as a product of the economy of which we are a part having an even greater volume of total output. But for this very reason we Americans are made wealthier also when foreigners save more and invest their savings here, regardless of how much or how little Americans save and invest.”
Of course if I can nit-pick, I would make the point that when, say, Chinese investors bought oodles of US government bonds in the years leading up to the credit crunch of 2008, it helped drive US long-term interest rates even lower, hence encouraging even more US domestic consumer spending and borrowing, a process we know went horribly wrong. (The main culprit in all this was the Federal Reserve, not China, I should point out). Of course, if non-domestic savers are channeling those savings into investments that yield a positive future return, such as investments in technological innovations, new products and services, then that’s all to the good.
If we were to move away from fiat money to a commodity-based monetary system and 100 per cent reserve banking for demand deposits, then a savings culture would be encouraged considerably. At present, persuading people to save is understandably hard because people, even if they are not hard-money zealots like me, smell that there is something rotten with our money.
In some ways, I see parallels between the loss of faith in paper money and the declining credibility of the AGW crowd. I think it was Brian Micklethwait of this blog who said something along the lines that we have had junk science, and now junk money. There is only so much junk that human civilization can stand.
Given the prominent – and arguably, admirable – role that the Guardian newspaper has played in exposing some of the naughty, even allegedly criminal behaviours of certain Murdoch journalists in recent years, it is perhaps worth noting that the Guardian itself was not above obtaining sources of information that were obtained by breaking a few laws. Consider this article in Vanity Fair about the awkward, but also perhaps beneficial, relationship that developed between the Guardian and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Remember, as the Samizdata comment thread regular “Llamas” pointed out the other day, that the sort of people who are condemning Murdoch journalists, and rightly so, are the sort who thought what a great thing it was that so much confidential information had been splashed all over the media due to WikiLeaks and its media users.
There are some double standards going on around here. And let’s not forget that governments, including such supposedly law abiding ones such as Germany, are not above using taxpayers’ money to obtain stolen information about private individuals’ bank accounts; or that governments have, allegedly, used harsh interrogation techniques (ie, torture) to obtain information, or snooped on private communications without a judge’s warrant, etc, etc. Now, such governments may argue, perhaps rightly, that they are acting in the public interest, and that News of the World hacks chasing after celebrity tittle-tattle are not. But who gets to decide here?
And here’s another thing: with police officers in the UK being accused of flogging valuable information on persons to journalists, it surely reminds us how dangerous it is to have created the Database State. By aggregating vast amounts of data in the way they do, the governments of Britain and other countries create an enormous temptation for bent public officials to sell that data. It’s going to happen, human nature being what it is. This is an angle that I hope pressure groups such as No2ID take up in the months ahead. We cannot trust governments, including liberal democratic ones, with our private information. That is a meme that deserves to gain traction from the Murdoch scandal, however it eventually plays out.
This article at the Economist (Paul Marks, please switch channels now! Ed) is getting a lot of attention. It argues that the F-35 fighter of the US is likely to be the last manned fighter to be developed, even though manned fighter jets will probably remain in use for a quite a long while yet. The future is about drones, due to reasons of cost, rising sophistication and efficiency.
Here are some paragraphs:
“What horrified the senators most was not the cost of buying F-35s but the cost of operating and supporting them: $1 trillion over the plane’s lifetime. Mr McCain described that estimate as “jaw-dropping”. The Pentagon guesses that it will cost a third more to run the F-35 than the aircraft it is replacing. Ashton Carter, the defence-acquisition chief, calls this “unacceptable and unaffordable”, and vows to trim it. A sceptical Mr McCain says he wants the Pentagon to examine alternatives to the F-35, should Mr Carter not succeed.”
“How worried should Lockheed Martin be? The F-35 is the biggest biscuit in its barrel, by far. And it is not only Mr McCain who is seeking to knock a few chocolate chips out of it. The bipartisan fiscal responsibility and reform commission appointed by Mr Obama last year said that not all military aircraft need to be stealthy. It suggested cancelling the STOVL version of the F-35 and cutting the rest of its order by half, while buying cheaper F-16s and F-18s to keep numbers up. If America decided it could live with such a “high-low” mix, foreign customers might follow suit.”
“The danger for Lockheed Martin is that if orders start to tumble, the F-35 could go into a death spiral. The fewer planes governments order, the more each one will cost and the less attractive the F-35 will be. This happened to the even more sophisticated and expensive F-22. By cutting its order from 750 to 183, the Pentagon helped to drive the programme cost per aircraft of the F-22 up from $149m to $342m.”
Oh well, it appears that all those young men and even women hoping to be the next Chuck Yeager will be disappointed. The era of the “fighter ace” may be drawing to an end. Somehow, telling a girl in a bar that you fly a drone remotely from a shed in Nevada does not sound quite so cool as saying that you fly Lightnings or F-16s. But then again, as our own Dale Amon might point out, if you want serious aviation action and adventure, then commercial space flight is where the fun is.
As I have referenced before, this book by PW Singer is essential reading for how technological developments in the current age are shaping military spending and warfare. From a libertarian point of view, it might be nice to hope that this would lead to a dramatic reduction in costs. The figures produced in the Economist’s report are, indeed, shocking.
“It is worth asking in both the British and American contexts why people who regard themselves as believers in free speech and liberal democracy can be so openly eager to close off – silence, kill, extinguish – different political views from their own. This is the question that is at the heart of the matter and which will remain long after every News International executive who may possibly be incriminated in the current scandal has been purged. There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious.”
– Janet Daley.
Someone I know quite well said she hoped the problems at Murdoch’s media empire will lead to Fox News being shut down. Not changed in ownership, you understand, but closed. This person is, you will not be surprised to learn, very “liberal”.
While some of its members may genuinely believe they are doing good by their fellow human beings in protecting health and potentially dangerous things, as they think genetically modified plants to be, the dangers of the Precautionary Principle are highlighted to a stark degree by the activities of Greenpeace activists in Canberra, Australia. According to a report, trials in producing GM wheat have been badly damaged.
The persons who did this will, hopefully, be caught and punished with the full weight of the law. Remember, if these guys had their way, the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the decades leading up to the Industrial Revolution might not have happened, or at least to the same degree.
Here is an article by the excellent Ronald Bailey on the GM crops issue.
“Brecht, an East German, was allowed by the Communists to keep his wealth and live at ease in Switzerland – a show dog of Communism. His accomplishments, however, must be seen not as an indictment, but as a ratification of the power of free enterprise. As must the seemingly ineradicable vogue for the notion of Government Control. The free market in ideas keeps this folly as current as any entertainment reviled by the Left as “mindless”. But the fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is, at essence, like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.”
David Mamet, page 3 of his book, The Secret Knowledge. I love his line about NASCAR. The whole book is stuffed with one-liners such as that.
Here is what I wrote a little while ago about Mamet.
“Revulsion, however justified, is a dangerous counsellor.”
– Bruce Anderson, on the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch. A good article overall, somewhat spoiled by a daft remark about Australia.
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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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