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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“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.”
I am a bit late to this debunking of a book called The Spirit Level, which I had seen on sale in paperback at a local bookshop. Via Kristian Niemietz – who writes at the IEA blog – I came across the essay attacking TSL’s contention that egalitarian societies – where wealth gaps are small – “almost always” outperform societies in which governments do not seek to equalise incomes.
I must admit that I nearly bought The Spirit Level to see if it did say anything of value, but it turns out to be yet another call for controls on our terrible materialism and consumerism, perhaps in the same vein as works such as “Affluenza”. Ugh.
I have noticed from some libertarians, such as “left libertarians” such as Roderick Long, a hostility to the idea of limited liability corporations. I understand and even sympathise with such opposition to statutory limited liability. It can and does foster corporate structures that become so unwieldy that they are indistinguishable from the State in key respects. But the key word to remember here is statutory. Consensual Limited Liability of a sort that can be arranged without an explicit statutory power is, in my view, no different from say, other consensual commercial transactions that are recognised in law, such as via Common Law. Of course, limited liability firms may be far less common under such a system but it is unwise to bet on it disappearing. And given all the benefits of limited liability: the ability to get large pools of investors to finance large ventures, it seems an issue worth examining in detail.
The reason some free marketeers, particularly of the more radical sort, get angry about limited liability is that they see ownership and control torn asunder, creating a serious misalignment of interests. Case in point being an argument made by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson, in their book that analyses the recent credit crunch, Alchemists of Loss. They take the view that listed banks, protected by limited liability, have, unlike old partnership-owned banks with unlimited liability, made dangerous bets. A problem that is, of course, made much worse by corporate welfare via bailouts, central bank funny money, the usual. In the same way, you could argue that limited liability companies in general exhibit negative behaviours when politics intrudes.
But one of the High Priests of libertarian capitalism, Murray Rothbard no less, made it clear that there is nothing in principle wrong with the idea of limited liability. His argument strikes me as pretty solid:
“Finally, the question may be raised: Are corporations themselves mere grants of monopoly privilege? Some advocates of the free market were persuaded to accept this view by Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society. It should be clear from previous discussion, however, that corporations are not at all monopolistic privileges; they are free associations of individuals pooling their capital. On the purely free market, such men would simply announce to their creditors that their liability is limited to the capital specifically invested in the corporation, and that beyond this their personal funds are not liable for debts, as they would be under a partnership arrangement. It then rests with the sellers and lenders to this corporation to decide whether or not they will transact business with it. If they do, then they proceed at their own risk. Thus, the government does not grant corporations a privilege of limited liability; anything announced and freely contracted for in advance is a right of a free individual, not a special privilege. It is not necessary that governments grant charters to corporations.”
I used to hold fairly high hopes about Nick Cohen, who had the courage to tell his leftist friends a few home truths about the sheer madness of their consorting – in the case of the hard left – with radical Islamists. He does not adopt the default “Blame America First” line on issues such as, say, Iraq, or for that matter, events in the Balkans. In the very big scheme of things, he’s one of the good guys, in my opinion. The trouble is that he is still a big government leftie; for him, the reductions in spending by this government, which are not that much more than envisaged by former UK (Labour) Chancellor Alisdair Darling, are wicked. Oh well.
He attended the protests against the UK government’s supposed “cuts” on Saturday (the sneer quotes are there because it is not clear that government spending as a share of GDP will actually shrink). Before I return to his comments against the “cuts”, here is what he said about the kind of folk causing a tear-up in the West End:
The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics. As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.
Quite so. All we have to do now is get Mr Cohen to give up on the nonsense of this Keynesian idea that cutting public spending – and hence debt – somehow reduces “demand” in the economy. Given that a large chunk of tax revenues are gobbled up on debt interest payments alone, it seems fairly good public finance to make an adjustment. Cohen and others would do well to realise that Britain’s public finances were on their way to ruin long before anyone had heard of sub-prime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, or for that matter, Ben Bernanke.
As an aside, I was in Piccadilly on my way to a meeting yesterday, and could see some fairly extensive damage to shops, banks, etc. Well done guys.
Well, well. This will get some luvvies in a tizz: I knew a bit about the life and times of the great, late Liz Taylor, much-married Hollywood actress and drop-dead gorgeous to boot (those violet eyes, ye gods). But I was not aware that she was such a keen supporter of Israel. . She was definitely not of the “Michael Moore school” of Hollywood.
Somewhere up there, she’s having a glass of bubbly with Richard Burton. RIP.
Mark Steyn has been in London, and although his visit has coincided with truly wonderful weather – I have spent a great afternoon with my wife and friends eating good food on the side of the Thames in Richmond – it has also been a time of protest:
“In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists. Judging from the many marchers partial to robotic, pseudo-ethnic West African drumming, the British left’s plan is presumably for the entire country to relaunch itself as the world’s least rhythmic percussion ensemble.”
This denial of reality is everywhere. Consider this YouTube spot featuring Mark Littlewood, head honcho of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a friend of mine) alongside some hard-leftist type who regards the mass protests yesterday as an example of the Labour movement “striking back”. As far as this guy is concerned, our national debt is relatively low (seriously), we can, somehow or other, grow our way out of any problems that might exist, etc. In fairness to the BBC interviewer, she did not let this guy make these points without challenge and I thought Mark acquitted himself well. A good, perhaps “soft” point to make here, as Mark did, is the “think of the children” angle. The protesters who want to protect final-salary public pensions, vast numbers of state jobs, etc, are choosing to do so regardless of the debt being loaded on the shoulders of future generations. And in their adolescent fantasies, they imagine that all the mess can be somehow put right by taxing the evil rich bankers. There is, in this worldview, a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, usually located in a tax haven. But what these folk don’t seen to understand, or perhaps, don’t want to understand, is that taxing banks even more means lower savings rates, higher borrowing charges, worse service, lower investments. If we drive sources of capital away, as happened in the 1970s, then does this young activist really believe that will benefit the more vulnerable people in this country in the medium-term? I suspect he either does not care or imagines that somehow, something will turn up.
This mindset does not come out of thin air. The activist was trotting out the standard, dreary line about how all the things he imagines are good (and I regard as thoroughly bad), such as comprehensive state schooling, socialised medicine and Big Government, arose even when Britain was broke after WW2. Arguably, these developments ensured we stayed thoroughly broke, right up until the 1970s when the UK was, humiliatingly, bailed out by the IMF. As Mrs Thatcher said, in the end, socialists always run out of other people’s money.
A difficulty for any government is that once the drug of state dependency has been created, it is a long, hard road back to sanity. I don’t like this government, which is hardly close to my own classical liberal worldview, but some measure of credit is due here. A larger chunk of voters than is perhaps realised have no conception of self reliance, independence, or a desire for said.
Many voters have been clients of the state all their lives; changing that will be enormously difficult. Whole cities, such as in the north of the UK and pockets elsewhere, derive the bulk of their incomes from taxpayers in the more prosperous parts of the UK. Londoners are a fairly stoical lot, but we are getting a bit tired of folk coming to the capital, trashing it, and demanding that this evil den of capitalism should go on providing them with the lifestyle to which they think they are entitled. Maybe London should declare itself an independent state and we’ll see how well the rest of the UK can cope without this high finance. The Atlas Shrugged narrative continues.
Independence for London. Hmm, there have been worse slogans.
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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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