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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Christopher Hitchens – I hope he can fight his cancer as long as possible – has this crackerjack of a piece about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the soldier, explorer, journalist and raconteur who recently died at the age of 96:
“Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn’t look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.”
Marvellous stuff. I have one of Fermor’s books on the shelf, as yet unread. I really look forward to dipping into it soon.
Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as “News of the Screws” (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator’s own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson’s defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.
This one, by a “David Lindsay,” wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of “High Tory” who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, “I’m All Right Jack”, when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with “the bosses”, is praising life in Stalin’s Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:
“In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers’ educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either.”
As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.
For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.
Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People’s Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers’ Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.
What are they doing “to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention”?
I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.
“Recent theater encounter: Trailer for “Battle Los Angeles”. Some fat angry looking woman starts hissing. I shout “I didn’t pay $10 to listen to you. Save your opinions for that blog no one reads. Not even your friends.”. After that, not a peep. If you want to save our culture you’ve got to stand up to the barbarians.”
A commenter called Guan-ju, writing about an article at the Big Hollywood blog concerning the oafish behaviour of some cinema-goers. Well said indeed.
In my fortunate experience, I have generally not suffered from chatty couples, paper rustlers or smelly eaters. However, I often will be sitting in front of someone who keeps kicking the back of the chair. My usual response is to turn around slowly, and give the offending idiot my best attempt at the “Clint Eastwood stare”. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. (Alas, the use of something handy, like a taser is banned in the UK. Shame. It would be brilliant). The trouble is, of course, is that if you go to a cinema quite late, a lot of the audience will be fairly merry, indeed drunk. At least in the UK, anyway. And of course the type of film will affect this: if you are watching a French art house film, it is probably less likely to be an issue than if you are watching something like Transformers or Dumb and Dumber, or somesuch. On the other hand, the louder the movie (think Iron Man 2) and the more crazy the action, the more the usual pin-heads are dumbstruck into silence.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
James Bartholomew, author of the splendid “The Welfare State We’re In”, weighs on on the subject of Sweden, long a poster child for socialists and possibly, even a certain type of right-winger:
“Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country.”
Another paragraph:
“The main trouble is that, when Sweden was as close as it ever has been to being a socialist welfare state, it went bust. For a while it may have seemed like a great model, but the Swedish government ran out of money. Why? Because Sweden found, like Britain, that if you pay people to be unemployed, take early retirement or be sick, you get a gradually decreasing number of people who claim the relevant benefits. And if you have sky-high taxes, people don’t work as hard, or they cheat, or they leave.”
Read the whole thing.
“Poor old Dave, he tries to mix with some common folk and look what happens.”
A commenter, “Percy”, at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, talking about the arrest of Andy Coulson, former press advisor to David Cameron.
It has been a bit of bad summer for Mr Cameron. He’s lucky he has been up against such a weak opponent.
I came across the following in a research paper about the benefits of “clustering” of financial services and other industries:
“Singapore is a country, which, 40 years ago had the same GDP per head as Uganda. Now, it is the richest country in the world, with GDP per head of $57,238 I 2010, according to the IMF, putting it ahead of the US, Japan, Hong Kong and Switzerland.”
Seems like a classic example of how some places are actually blessed by a dearth of natural resources.
As regulars will know, one of my pet dislikes is “Rod” Liddle, a man who likes to think of himself as a sturdy Leftie but who, in fact, increasingly sounds like the sort of BNP supporter that you might encounter in a bar and who insists on telling you about how so many of our problems are the fault of “the blacks”, etc. Liddle has strayed, arguably, over the line before, but like a man emboldened by his own seeming ability to keep pushing his agenda without severe damage to his bank balance, he has finally gone over the top with all the mad brio of Prince Rupert of the Rhine charging at Cromwell’s infantry in the English Civil War.
In a particularly stupid article for the Spectator (behind a subscriber firewall), on page 17 of the print edition, Mr Liddle reflects on the problems of Greece, and its horrendous debt. He rightly regards Greece’s decision to join the euro as a disaster, as Greece has proven itself incapable of handling the sort of interest rate more suitable to Munich or Lyon. However, in his clumsy way, he reflects on the differences he sees between southern Europe and the more “puritan” North. His title for the article (possibly written by a sub-editor), is: “How did I get it right on the euro? Easy. I was racist”.
“Insofar as I understood the economic permutations of what it would mean to be in or out of the single currency, I was vaguely opposed to joining. But my real reason for objecting to our membership of the euro was, and still is, I’m afraid, straightforwardly racist. I didn’t want to have the same currency (or government, effectively), as people in the south of Europe, who, I thought were, in the main, lazy, hot-tempered and uncivilized.”
(Emphasis, mine).
Here’s another gem:
“But it cannot be mere coincidence that the countries in trouble are those in the south, and that the further south you go the worse these problems become, until you reached the dislodged chunks of marble and the flaming fast-food shops of central Athens, where one protester said to the camera crews: “We don’t owe any money, it’s the others who stole it!”
What is so cretinous about Liddle is his use of the word “racist” instead of what would be more accurate – “culture”. It is, arguably, the culture of some countries – by no means all – that helps explain such things. But the idea that there is some sort of general rule that says the further south you travel, the worse the population behaves, is bunk. My wife’s small country, Malta, which is even further to the south than Greece, has a conservatively-run banking system, strong public finances and a relatively strong respect for property rights and the rule of law. It is also a member of the euro-zone. Maybe all those years of Malta being under the British Empire might have helped, as our “leftie” Mr Liddle might argue, but Malta exhibited many fine qualities long before the Brits, in the form of Lord Nelson, showed up. It is bizarre to claim that the further towards the Equator you get, the sillier, more corrupt and naughty people become. As Liddle must surely recall, in chilly Scotland, once famous or infamous for its puritanical version of Christianity, for example, a large chunk of the populace now lives on benefits, and many of the traditional characteristics once associated with the land of Adam Smith, James Watt and David Hume seem to be notable for their absence. This is a cultural, economic and political development which cannot be explained by reference to some glib reference to geography, much less the race, of the people in question. Even more unfortunately for Liddle’s notion is the example of Iceland, and its catastrophe of failed banks. Those blue-eyed folk with their blonde hair seriously screwed up.
Good ideas can be discredited by bigots purporting to advance them, if we allow these people to speak without rebutting their biases and showing them for the fools and knaves that they are. And Rod Liddle, however amusing he can sometimes be, or correct about something like the euro in one sense, is a bigot, and the kind of friend Eurosceptics can do without (I sometimes wonder whether he is working for the other side). Well, now he is on the record – he’s a racist, and seems to be proud of it.
“Politics is a lagging indicator of American society”.
– Nick Gillespie, of Reason magazine, talking about his new book, co-authored with Matt Welch, at CATO. An interesting presentation, if you can spare the 40-odd minutes to watch the talk and Q&A.
Look, I know that firms such as Cisco value the massive potential earnings from China, but this sort of story – if it is true – does leave a nasty taste.
As briefly mentioned in a post below, people – a lot of them who seemed to be classical liberal stirrers like yours truly – gathered in the sun-lit gardens in front of the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, to witness the unveiling of a statue of Ronald Reagan. I like this editorial in CityAM by Allister Heath, who signs off with these two paragraphs. His comment about JF Kennedy is very much on point:
“In fact, Reagan wasn’t even that original. The best exposition of how tax cuts can reinvigorate an economy remains Democratic president John F Kennedy’s spectacular 1964 reforms, which reduced the top rate from 94 per cent to 70 per cent (Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, of course, but his tax cuts were agreed prior to his death). Two years later, the federal tax haul was 11 per cent higher than forecast: more people made more money and their taxable efforts more than compensated for the reduced tax rate. Kennedy had been proved spectacularly right when he had argued that “an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
“In 1981, Reagan reduced the top rate of income tax to 50 per cent. In 1986, he cut it again to 28 per cent. Of course, this benefited the richest disproportionately – but they nevertheless ended up shouldering a greater tax burden and paying for a greater proportion of public spending. The share of tax raised from the best-paid 1 per cent jumped from 19 per cent in 1980 to 25.6 per cent in 1990. The moral: to squeeze more tax out of the rich, lower the top tax thresholds. We learnt that in Britain starting in 1979 – but with top earners now taxed at 52 per cent and millions paying 42 per cent, the lessons have been forgotten again. Britain needs to discover its very own Ronald Reagan, a hopeful, optimistic, pro-individual liberty, pro-growth politician with an uncanny ability to communicate. Any takers?”
Well said. In a spirit of fairness, though, I link to an interview with Reagan’s former budget director, David Stockman, who is a fierce critic of the deficits (he also strikes me as somewhat embittered). I am not sure if his call for tax rises in the absence of any serious spending cuts is going to find any welcoming audience. I also think Stockman is far too dismissive of the fact that because of the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, revenues boomed.
As Heath says, hero-worship is something any genuine liberal should avoid. The list of heroes in public affairs is, as far as I can judge, short. Reagan is one of them.
It bemuses me that a certain type of commentator will often – sometimes rightly – be angered at the over-reach of Western powers’ foreign policy but be quieter about other, less obvious, intrusions if they happen when a more leftist government happens to be in power. And a lot of this sort of double-standard occurs with the United States.
Such critics appear to have been silent on the following issue: under the current Democrat presidency of Mr Obama, the US last year passed a stunningly badly crafted piece of legislation, known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The law was passed at a time of what can best be described as hysteria about the amount of money that Americans were allegedly stashing abroad in places such as Switzerland, the Bahamas, the Caymans, and so forth. The major governments of the world, such as the US, Germany and UK, fondly imagine that there is, so to speak, a huge pot of gold that got lost down the back of the sofa.
What FATCA does is require any financial institution that is believed to deal with expat US citizens and Green Card holders to provide a great deal of information to the Internal Revenue Service. In other words, all manner of financial institutions, ranging from big banks to small investment boutiques, must prove to the Internal Revenue Service’s satisfaction that they have not got US citizens/GC holders on their books if they want to be unmolested by the IRS’s powers. If they have such clients or invest into the US stock market, etc, they must provide huge amounts of additional reporting data to the US. “Foreign Financial Institutions” must report investors who are taxable in the US to the US tax authorities. If they fail to do so, they pay a 30 per cent withholding tax. And proving that someone is, or might be, a US citizen might be hard, particularly if that person has been living outside the US for decades, and there is not much paperwork going back, say, 30 years.
This is a quite stunning extension of the IRS’s power around the world, affecting European, Asian, African, Latin American and other regions’ banks, who may have been blissfully unaware that some of their clients had, at any point, a US “taint”. And I am frankly astonished that not more has been said by non-US governments about this; however, given that governments such as those of Germany have resorted to the dubious practice of paying for data stolen from Swiss banks, I have no great hopes that respect for sovereignty or the rule of law applies.
The net effect of this law will be to make it even less likely that banks and other firms will want to touch Americans living outside the US due to the heavy compliance cost. The law will be a blow against globalisation and business growth, as this article at Forbes makes clear. It will be even less profitable for firms to deal with Americans if they live abroad. Those US nationals working in the City of London, for example, will find it is harder to open a bank account, manage a mutual fund or get insurance. A former US colleague of mine is in a nasty predicament. When I called the US Embassy here about the matter, I received nothing but blank ignorance.
FATCA is yet another blow against the free movement of people around the world, and will be particularly tough on the middle class, hard-working professionals who don’t have access to the flashiest lawyers and advisors. The super-rich and well-connected will, of course, be okay. I doubt that someone like the US Ambassador or military types serving abroad have even heard of it. (The US military tends not to be affected by such legislation anyway, although you can never be sure. If any serving personnel do get hit, it would be good to know the details).
It is sometimes said, by a certain type of sneering European or self-hating international travelling American, at how bad it is that all those ghastly, ignorant hicks don’t hold passports. Well, part of the reason is that getting a passport is a bureaucratic nightmare in the US. Another is that the US is a big and beautiful place with so much to see that why would any sane American want to leave for any extended period of time? But another reason is that the IRS, which is out of control, is making the process of being an expat a waking nightmare.
As for whether politicians of any kind, including the Tea Party crowd, give a flying f**k about this issue, is unclear. There may be few votes in it, but I would have more respect for supposedly libertarian-leaning GOP members such as Ron Paul, his son, or one or two others, if they could be persuaded to lobby for wholesale repeal of this atrocious piece of legislation.
“Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, willing to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfil it, with respect to both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.”
– The Forgotten Man, page 209 from On Liberty, Society and Politics. The Essential Writings of William Graham Sumner, Edited by Robert C. Bannister.
His idea that a large swathe of people who asked for no favours – nor received many – has its echoes, however imperfect, in such expressions as Richard Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” or, in the UK perspective, “Middle England”, or perhaps, “the coping classes”. Sumner is a useful reminder that the great classical liberal thinkers of the 19th Century and before acutely understood the issues of class and the difference between the self-reliant and others, but without the tedious animosity and simple-mindedness of the Marxians or the patronising dreams of High Tories a la Disraeli or, god help us, David Cameron or the late Harold Macmillan.
I strongly recommend this book, although these reprints of old classics by Liberty Fund are not exactly cheap.
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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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