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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Quite a lot of the time, I get irritated by the Channel 4 news programme, and its anchor, Jon Snow, who is often so blatant in his bias that it no longer angers, merely bemuses. But in fairness to that channel, it still seems willing to take risks with genuinely intelligent and argumentative programmes of the sort that the BBC will often rarely touch these days. Case in point was this programme. It does not pretend to be coolly objective: it is fiercely pro-free market; it hammers away at the fact that Britain is massively in public debt and that this issue primarily stems from decades of the Welfare State and a socialistic polity. Various people, such as Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, appear on it. (Very good he is too, as the old film reviewer Barry Norman used to say). I would imagine that anyone watching this who is a Keynesian or big government type would be spitting blood by the end of the show, particularly as a result of how, for example, it raves about Hong Kong under the benevolent guidance of John Cowperthwaite during the late days of Hong Kong’s colonial history. Another thing struck me: Alisdair Darling, the former finance minister in the recent Labour government, came across as incredibly weak in defending his views; he looked a broken man. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, looked like a complacent City banker during the fat years.
This show is not an isolated example of how the channel has thrown rocks at the received wisdom. This show was another case; and this more recent tilt at the gods of AGW alarmism was another.
Of course, these may only be isolated examples. But I am not so sure. There is, at the moment, a general questioning among some people about certain supposedly “settled views”, such as that we need governments to prevent AGW, or that printing money and expanding the state is a good thing, or that genetically modified crops are the mark of Satan, and so forth.
And I can remember the Channel 4 Diverse Reports series of the 1980s, including its show, The New Enlightenment (which I don’t know is still available). I remember watching it for the first time and imagining how the the heads of leftists and tweedy Tories would be exploding.
I left this comment over on Tim Worstall’s blog yesterday, and I thought I might reproduce it here:
“While it is undoubtedly true that there are barriers to entry in certain fields that give the incumbent management the kind of “rent-seeking” powers you talk about, it strikes me that shareholders, over the long run, are hardly likely to tolerate payouts of massive salaries for crummy investment returns. Ironically, it is precisely the sort of mercantilist policies that the left supports – such as attempts to restrict foreign takeovers of “national champions” – that shield management from competition and hence, breed complacency.”
“There is a genuine, global market for talent, and in this globalised, increasingly fiercely competitive world, the pay for the top people will be high. Sure, we can and should remove barriers to entry, and one obvious way to do that would be to encourage small businesses to grow fast and challenge the supposed hegemony of Big Business; this means more free trade, not less; it means fewer regulations and lower, flatter taxes, not more of them, and so on.”
“In other words, if high pay for supposedly underperforming CEOs riles you, then we need more capitalism, not the sort of statist ideas propogated by the likes of Compass.”
For those who may not know, Compass is a leftist pressure group in the UK that tends to argue for such clever ideas as higher taxes, ever greater regulation of business, and so on.
I read this article by Peter Oborne and felt more or less in sympathy with it until I came to this clanger:
“But this shift, while of long-term significance, has been dwarfed by the most astonishing development of all: the apparent ending of the 20-year Tory civil war on Europe. Last weekend, David Cameron opened the way for a sharp increase in our budget contributions to Brussels, while giving the green light for a new treaty to save the eurozone. On Monday, he announced a new era of defence co-operation with France. The Prime Minister has developed an easy, relaxed and mature relationship with both President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel. Until very recently indeed, there would have been uproar had a Tory leader countenanced any of this. Last week, there was scarcely any reaction on Conservative benches. The spectre of Europe, which has engulfed the Tories since the assassination of Margaret Thatcher exactly 20 years ago, may have been laid to rest.”
That paragraph is written in a tone of approval. Now, unless I have missed something, wasn’t Mr Oborne the man who wrote a book a few years ago condemning the rise of a political class that tended to associate its own material interests with those of the country? I remember at the time pointing out that Oborne failed to give due weight to the significance of the European Union in all this. Well, now it appears he has become a sort of cheerleader for Britain giving ever greater sums of money to countries determined to pursue wrongheaded economic policies.
Well, it was nice knowing you, Peter.
I see that EU Referendum thinks as I do.
Dr. Bernanke unfortunately does not understand economics, he does not understand currencies, he does not understand finance. All he understands is printing money. His whole intellectual career has been based on the study of printing money. Give the guy a printing press, he’s going to run it as fast as he can.
– Jim Rogers, investor and commentator, giving his considered view on Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Now that the US mid-term elections are over and the Republicans have scored a decisive victory in the House, and won seats in the Senate, the thought must occur that California, which has stuck to its socialistic politics, is ever closer to going bust. The GOP in Congress is unlikely to tolerate a bailout for a state run by delusional, mostly Democratic, fools. But if California does go bust and defaults on its debt, what happens then? Maybe this would be a good thing in the long run. Several South American states have defaulted in the past, but they did recover, eventually.
I guess one not-so-difficult thing to predict is that businesses and people will continue to flee California. It is so sad: the last time I was there, the place appeared – maybe only on the surface – to be booming.
Rand Simberg has thoughts.
“But his [Peel’s] chosen remedy for widespread poverty was already apparent. It did not lie in changing the Poor Law, or reducing factory hours through a Ten Hour Bill, or in accepting the irrelevant political demands of the Chartists. Still less did it consist in commissioning that engine of public welfare and State guidance of the economy to which we became accustomed in the twentieth century. Peel and most of his contemporaries would have regarded our giant complex of State machinery as a destructive restraint on individual freedom.”
Robert Peel, page 243, by Douglas Hurd.
Indeed they would have so regarded the modern state of the late 20th and 21st centuries. And with good reason. Somehow, I doubt that even the founder of the Metropolitan Police would have liked the idea of the modern Surveillance State. I am not too sure that he’d have been all that keen on top tax rates of 50 per cent and more, compulsory schooling to the age of 18, or the hideously regulated labour market of today.
And this historical shift, I think, can explain to a certain extent why, to a British audience dulled by decades of socialism, the sight of Americans protesting against Big Government and the like is so odd. Last night, on the BBC, the broadcaster and one-time Sunday Times (of London) editor, Andrew Neil, was looking at the Tea Party movement. It was not all bad as a documentary – he had a great short interview with the son of Barry Goldwater – but in the main, the general idea that the viewer was meant to draw was that the Tea Party movement was comprised mainly of cranks, bigots and fools. The problem, I think, is that Britain has not really had a genuine, tax-cutting protest movement since the anti-Corn Law League of the 1830s and early 1840s, which is why I was so struck by that passage about the Peel administration. We have to go back to the early years of the Industrial Revolution to find anything remotely like such a protest for government retrenchment and tax cuts. No doubt Mr Neil would regard Cobden, Bright, or indeed Peel himself, as a bunch of nutters.
And that, of course, is why the accurate teaching of history, such as around such episodes as the Industrial Revolution, is so important.
“Not for to hide in a hedge,
Not for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.”
Robert Burns.
As quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, FA Hayek, page 118.
Great essay by Sean Gabb on the UK government and supposed plans to reduce public spending. The article contains a lovely line in relation to Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister.
Along with Sean and others, I will be at the two-day Libertarian Alliance annual conference tomorrow, held at that ancestral seat of 19th Century liberal politics, the National Liberal Club.
Chris Dillow, over at his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, writes this:
“A few days ago, the great Paul Sagar noted an asymmetry in the Tory attitude to “fairness” – that whereas they are keen to point to the “undeserving poor”, they are silent about the undeserving rich. I was reminded of this by listening to Nick Clegg on Desert Island Discs.This provoked the question: why do the undeserving rich not recognise their undeservingness?”
The reason why they do not “recognise their undeservingness” is that they are not asking that the state, with its violence-backed power to tax, should give them something, only that they should be left alone to enjoy their wealth, whether it be undeserved or not. On the other hand, if we are going to have a state with these powers to make transfer payments, then it follows that people are more likely to support such coercive transfers if they are made to people who are considered, by some measure, to “deserve” these transfers. Seems a fairly simple argument to me.
More broadly, though, the idea of “deserving” poor or “underserving” rich is, in my view, loaded with ideological significance, depending on who is using the term. Clearly, people feel a lot more relaxed about handing out money – either from a charity or from a government department – to people who are down on their luck but of good character, than they are about handing it out to the feckless. Similarly, it follows that there is more support for taxing supposedly “undeserved” wealth than “earned” wealth. The trouble with such words, of course, as has been shown by FA Hayek in his famous demolition of payment-by-merit in The Constitution of Liberty, is who gets to decide whether our circumstances came about due to “desert” or not. Such a person would have to have the foresight of a god. It is, as Hayek argued, impossible to do this without some omipotent authority being able to weigh up a person’s potential, and then being able to measure whether that person, in the face of a vast array of alternatives, made the most of that potential.
Another point for redistributionists of all kinds to remember is this: if person A does not, according to some yardstick, “deserve” his or her wealth, then neither does anyone else “deserve” that wealth, either, since why should they presume to grab the benefits of such unearned luck? The logical result, surely, would be to destroy that wealth, so that no-one receives it at all.
Of course, whether Nick Clegg or David Cameron would give such a comment is unlikely; I guess they’d go on about how their good fortune means they have an “obligation” to “society” in some form. That seems to be the view of a lot of those who come into the world with a lot of good advantages. It is by no means a fake or ignoble motive, at all; there is some sense, after all, that a lot of people are dealt a shitty hand by natture or Providence and that there ought to be a way that those down on their luck can get something better. But such a point of view in no ways sanctions state thieving (tax), in my view.
It may be surprising to present-day readers to think that it was once thought a “soft option” to transport a convicted criminal to a colony such as Australia’s Botany Bay. But as this letter shows, that is what some influential people thought at the time:
“the sentence of the Court is that you shall no longer be burdened with the support of your wife and family. You shall be immediately removed from a very bad climate and a country over burdened with people to one of the finest regions of the earth, where the demand for human labour is every hour increasing, and where it is highly probable you may ultimate regain your character and improve your future. The Court has been induced to pass the sentence upon you in consequence of the many aggravating circumstances of your case, and they hope your fate will be a warning to others.”
Sydney Smith, Whig clergyman and wit, as quoted in Robert Peel, by Douglas Hurd, page 78.
As an aside, Peel was involved in two issues – re-connecting bank notes to bullion, and the 1844 Bank Charter Act – that have enduring relevance to our own time. Hurd’s biography is very readable and has a nice tone to it; in my view, however, Norman Gash’s study remains the definitive one.
Surfing on the blogs, I came across this item that I have not seen anywhere else. Israel has, potentially, some pretty handy oil resources.
Wow, better tell Halliburton & all those nasty right-wing neocons and advise them to cook up some fake reason for invading the place…
This article has more.
This news story, if it turns out to be accurate, should cheer up the retailers of booze at airports.
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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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