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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This will not surprise some of our regulars here, but I see that Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency has cut the debt rating and outlook for the US. (What kept you? Ed).
I’ll be intrigued as to how cheerleaders for current administration policy, such as Paul Krugman try and spin this. “Those evil bond market vigilantes…”
Time to start dusting off the “D” word.
Update: Talking of defaults closer to home, in Europe, Tim Worstall has been writing that it would be better for countries to openly discuss, and then manage, the chances of default rather than bury their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn argues that the demise of the euro can and could be handled much more smoothly than many people believe. I hope he is right.
Another update: Dan Mitchell – of the Cato Institute, talks about lessons from Argentina. Oh great.
The US Civil War, a bloody conflict in which more than half a million people perished, started earlier this month, 150 years ago. I have occasionally written before about how historians, given their regional or ideological opinions, have revised the accounts of what happened, and some of the revisionists – especially from the Confederacy -friendly side, have been counter-attacked themselves. A book that stands in the revisionist tradition but which avoids some of the sillier forms of name-calling against Lincoln, while not downplaying the centralisation of power that came after the war ended, is a very fine study by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, which I have started to read.
I see that Taki, the mega-rich columnist for the Spectator who is very much a part of the isolationist, paleocon Right, repeats the accusation that slavery, as an issue, never really emerged as a causus belli in the war until at least two years after the conflict started. That may well be true: the idea that the fight between the Union and the Confederacy was some sort of simple war between the forces of Northern good against Southern evil is wrong, or at least does not recognise the genuine grievances that some on the Southern side felt. Let’s not forget that war histories tend to get written by the victors. I can even see why some libertarians, for instance, look favourably upon the Confederacy in terms of the issues of states’ rights – if not the evil of slavery, obviously. But there are times when the enthusiasts for the Confederacy do make fools of themselves, and Taki does it with this little line in his Spectator column this week (behind a subscriber firewall)(page 55): “Lincoln did everything for effect, and his death even got him on the back of the five-dollar bill, whereas in my opinion he should have been tried in absensia for the crimes he committed during the war and the destruction he caused to one of the loveliest societies that ever existed, the antebellum south.” (Emphasis: mine). It is tempting to write Taki off as a bit of joke, a sort of ultra-conservative clown. Any man who can write of a society in which a large number of people were owned as slaves and subject to all the humiliations of slavery, as “one of the loveliest societies that ever existed”, deserves to be treated with the utmost contempt.
The scars of the Civil War still exist, and the issue has also roiled the libertarian movement in recent years. A case in point being the observations about the Lew Rockwell crowd by Timothy Sandefur, for instance.
Update: Sandefur has more thoughts.
“If any place should be concerned with a robot takeover, it is the red-light district.”
– PW Singer, Wired For War, page 419.
Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957 and has sold vast copies, is released in a film version – or at least in a first instalment – this coming Friday in selected cinemas across the United States. I hope we can see it here in the UK. Interestingly enough, parts of the media are picking up on this. Here is an interview with an investment manager who is inspired by Rand’s “radicals for capitalism” philosophy and worldview. I am definitely going to make a point of seeing this film, whether it comes out at a UK cinema, or via DVD.
The reaction to the Financial Panic of 2008, with its massive bailouts, calls for “unregulated capitalism” (!) to be regulated, banker-bashing, etc, has certainly given Rand’s novel new resonance. I often heard it said that her villains are more convincing than her heroes, although Hank Rearden has always struck me as a well-drawn character. As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.
Praveen Swami, diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a good piece – although I might quibble on one or two points – concerning the problem of Somali piracy, about which I have written several times here at Samizdata. I am not going to add further comment to what I have already said, but I was impressed by this article and a longish comment attached to it by a person with the signature of “IgonikonJack”. It is pretty good. And another, by “itzman”, refers to the issue of “letters of marque”.
A related point is that I have been reading Wired for War, by PW Singer, and it has fascinating things to say about some remarkable new technologies as apply not just in areas such as robotics and pilotless aircraft – those “drones” – also in the innovations now under way in the nautical world. They will surely play a part in any move to suppress piracy, but as Singer points out, the bad guys can increasingly get their hands on technology as well, and often by entirely legitimate means. This is all the more reason why libertarians, who are sometimes at the cutting edge of thinking about alternatives to government-imposed laws, as in the case of legal writer Bruce Benson, should get involved in how to address issues such as piracy.
In the Daily Telegraph article I link to, is the fact that, at the time of writing, more than 1,000 people are being held hostage by Somali pirates. If the same amount of people had been taken hostage on civil airliners, say, I think the major powers of the world might have adopted a more robust view by now.
“If the Victorians turned up off our shores and threatened me with a gold standard, 7% taxes, property rights, free trade, the right to bear arms, the restitution of double jeopardy, free association, and the right to remain silent, while at the same time guaranteeing the repeal of civil forfeiture and detention without trial, etc., etc., etc., I would welcome them with open arms.”
– Samizdata commenter, John W responding to a point about the supposed evils wrought by the UK on other parts of the world.
In response to Fraser Nelson’s article about a recent book and TV series by Niall Ferguson, I came across this classic comment, from “Daniel Maris”. It blends self-loathing, bigotry, “fixed wealth” fallacies, Greenery, and other pathologies in a magnificent, take-it-with-ice, blend:
“Your praise is overblown. It was (the parts I saw) a good and interesting series, but it was hardly original stuff. Calling success factors “killer apps” doesn’t really take you much farther forward does it, however arresting the phrase?”
“However, unless I missed it, he didn’t really address the fact that the most successful economy on the planet at the moment is one that rests on a communist political dictatorship, firm rejection
of Christianity, oppression of its people, no free market in labour, no idea of private property as we would understand it, centralised planning and absence of academic freedom.”
But China has embraced elements of the free market, hence its current prosperity. Duh.
“Incidentally what does the mass immigration thing mean? Solvent can be taken to mean something that dissolves OR paradoxically it is commonly used to mean a glue.”
I think Fergon’s meaning is pretty damn obvious.
“IIRC Ferguson was claiming that it was a low figure? Is that right? Well that is absurd, because behind those 100 plus people lie 1000s of close associates and beyond them hundreds of thousands of general supporters – the sea in which they swim.”
“Mass immigration is nearly always favoured by capitalists who benefit from cheaper labour and are insulated from the negative effects (their children don’t go to the schools where 50 languages are spoken).”
Oh yes, all those evil foreigners causing trouble again.
“I suppose Scots feel they have to justify our imperial past given you find them in the forefront of the imperial project: colonisation, slaughter of natives, the slave trade and slave management (including of the women of course). It’s a dirty disgusting past and we should be ashamed of it. We should always ask how we would feel if the tables were turned (and some of us to now know how it feels).”
It is all the fault of those evil Jocks! (In fact, quite the opposite).
“Thankfully, I think the age of trade is probably coming to a close. We see the signs everywhere. Now with renewable energy, a country can have its own energy industry wherever on the global, no need to import energy. With advanced hydroponic and polytunnel agriculture we in the temperate zones can grow crops associated with the tropics. With improved recycling and use of novel materials, the need for imports is decreasing as well.”
Oh god, never mind the division of labour (Adam Smith was another Evil Scot!), we can make it all ourselves with recycled vegetables.
Have a good week.
The Daily Mash site has overtaken Private Eye or even The Onion as one of the funniest satire sites out there, in my view. And some of its items are remarkably believable. I can just imagine some crusty, America-hating “young fogey”, or far leftist type, saying some of the things in the article I link to here.
“So far, George Osborne has taken the comfortable line that the eurozone meltdown is nothing much to do with Britain. As a result, he has chosen not to question the shoddy compromises, the straight lies and the probable illegality that have characterised Europe’s response to its greatest financial and political crisis since the 1930s. But the disaster will hit us, too. Britain is a shareholder in the ECB, and Britain is a core part of the bail-out mechanism. It is time that we started to poke our nose in, to demand honesty and transparency, and to stop sending good money after bad. Above all, George Osborne has an urgent duty as Chancellor to construct a firewall that protects Britain as much as is possible from the catastrophe that now looms over Europe.”
– Peter Oborne.
For many months and years, commentators – many of them at the Daily Telegraph – have predicted the eventual collapse of the single European currency. So far, it has failed to happen, if only due to the fanaticism of the European political class. But maybe, just maybe, the endgame is upon us. This is going to be nasty; some big banks could have to write off a huge amount in the way of bad loans.
And to think that a few years ago, it was claimed that the euro could rival, or even overtake, the dollar as a reserve currency. I am still a dollar bear, but who would want to bet on the euro?
I remember reading this book, The Rotten Heart of Europe, when it came out, and its author has that dubious pleasure of being able to say, “I told you so”.
David Friedman, the academic, libertarian and enthusiast for things such as Medieval cooking, has a nice post up about the way in which parts of the left try to claim that Adam Smith said things that support their ideas, such as progressive tax. Friedman shows what a misleading thing this is to say. I suppose it can be seen as a sort of backhanded compliment that socialists, or Big Government types generally, should feel a need to try and claim that Smith was “one of them”, despite his being renowned for support for free trade and limited government.
Here is something I wrote by way of a critique of an article on Smith in the American Conservative; here is also something I wrote a while back on some books on the great man, such as by James Buchan and PJ O’Rourke.
“Education of judges, government officials, law professors, and journalists could dissolve antitrust. Understanding the nature of antitrust and its lack of factual foundation undermines its appeal. Education about antitrust history not generally known but not difficult to understand might make a difference. History shows that the breakup of Standard Oil accomplished nothing. It was `part of a moral conflict’. It was like preaching against sin without defining it. Corporate consolidation need not be feared. No amount of magic `market power’ can force buyers to buy. For anyone interested in developing intelligent public policy, these ideas are not difficult to absorb.
Should Microsoft be allowed to add a media player? Should GE be allowed to acquire Honeywell? Should IBM be broken up? Antitrust supplies a vocabulary to discuss these questions but does not provide answers, no matter how much help is obtained by economic theory. Antitrust judgements are subjective choices of the judge about public policy. Law students should be taught that antitrust is not law enforcement. Journalists and opinion makers should be encouraged to ask themselves, `Do we really need to fear that some greedy capitalist will monopolize sardine snacks or mashed fruits and vegetables?’ The public should be told what is going on, that antitrust decisions are political decisions misleadingly portrayed as law and economics. Those in a position to do so should force more discussion of such questions as, `Can salaried government officials in Washington make better decisions about how many distributors of office supplies there should be in, say, Wheeling, West Virginia, than people whose capital is at stake?’ Although today’s antitrust community is alive and well, antitrust is atrophying. It is becoming a relic, an anachronism, the irrelevant debris of past political demagoguery. Education in the antitrust facts of life could accelerate the process.”
The Antitrust Religion, Edwin S. Rockefeller, page 103.
Well, as we can see in the case of Google, the antitrust movement still has legs today.
Like a lot of libertarians who had to put up with abuse from his more “purist” minded fellows for my support for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime in Iraq, I had second, third and even fourth thoughts about the whole venture. And my views on the situation are still not really settled eight years on from the start of full combat operations in 2003, and so I am still trying to reach a conclusion.
With that sort of thought in mind, a few days ago I got hold of Douglas Feith’s War and Decision, a book by a former senior Bush administration policy man at the very centre of things. Feith’s book contains absolute dynamite: links between Saddam’s regime and various terrorist groups (established as a clear fact) including al-Quaeda, and also a fair, but in its way devastating critique of the politicking, deviousness and general uselessness of the CIA. And after reading this book it occurs to me, rather like it did to writers such as Mark Steyn, that the CIA had become riddled with bureaucratic do-nothingism around the time of 9/11. There is a very good case for shutting the CIA down and rethinking how to handle such issues from a clean sheet of paper.
The book is also fatal to the reputation and judgement of Colin Powell, former Secretary of State. It also rehabilitates that of Donald Rumsfeld in certain respects, while not sparing criticism where it is due. And the book certainly does fess up to the administration’s failure to predict the scale of the insurgency, although Feith argues that one major error – encouraged by the CIA and the likes of Paul Bremer – was not moving fast enough to get Iraqis, both “external” and internal, into the government of Iraq post-invasion. By acting as an “occupier”, Feith says, the US gave opponents valuable propaganda. He’s got a good a point: consider that one of the smart moves by Churchill et al in 1944 was to get the Free French involved in the invasion of Normandy and subsequent entry into Paris. Getting the Iraqis to have “ownership” of the liberation of that tormented country would have been a smart move. It never really happened. And part of the reason for that was an almost pathological distrust of expat Iraqis by Powell, the CIA and other anti-neocons. This is fascinating stuff I had not really been aware of before. Another big error is over the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction: Feith argues that Bush and others gave needless ammuntion to fairweather hawks by arguing that Saddam had large stockpiles of X or Y; rather, the problem was Saddam’s capacity and clearly proven willingness to produce such weapons and use them that was the core of the problem. The 1990s-era sanctions were fast eroding by the turn of the last century; given a few years, it is highly likely that Saddam would be able to re-start his WMD programmes and use such weapons to deter any regime from trying to make him behave, in much the same way that Iran is now dangerously close to the point where it can support terror groups with impunity.
Through it all, the central issues that remains – in terms of foreign policy and defence – is George W Bush’s “pre-emption” policy. And it is well to remember that as far as Feith and other wonks were concerned, this was not about spreading democracy at “the point of a gun”, or about some dastardly neocon project to completely reshape the Islamic world. Rather, it was about a more specific objective, and one which, in my view, is fully consistent with the libertarian principle that military force in self defence is justified. That objective is to throw jihadists and their state sponsors off-balance: by destroying their bases, cutting off funds, killing key operatives, etc. The more that jihadists have to hide, to run, and spend time playing defence, the less time they have to cause mischief.
It is pretty clear from the letters and information presented by Feith that terrorist groups were using Iraq as a haven, and with Saddam’s active blessing. It also nails the idea that because Saddam’s regime was, in some ways, a “secular” one, that meant he had no real incentive to support islamic terror against the West. As Feith says, this argument has been greatly overdone: there is plenty of reason to suppose that tactical, for-convenience-sake alliances between “secular” and religious groups can be as lethal as those between religious states and religious groups.
Anyway, having read the book, I can strongly recommend it. I leave with this quote, on page 523:
“But the largest benefit of success is avoiding the horrific costs of failure. Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with. After the Cold War, some commentators argued that the West’s victory was no big deal because the Soviet Union’s demise proved that the communist empire wasn’t much of a power after all. Likewise, because the United States has not suffered a large-scale terrorist attack since 9/11, some commentators have belittled the challenge of jihadist terrorism as overblown and ridiculed the description of it as “war”. And since Saddam has been overthrown, there are critics who speak dismissively of the danger he posed.”
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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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