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]
|
…the value of a scientific theory is judged by its power to predict – not in the sense of “psychic” predictions headlined in supermarket tabloids, but in the sense of predicting further experimental results. One failed prediction is enough to torpedo a theory. Success with every prediction, on the other hand, means only that it has survived everything thrown at it thus far. So, if evolution is valid, the newer discoveries made since its inception ought to be consistent with it. Apart from some haggling among specialists over relatively minor details, this has turned out to be overwhelmingly the case. Darwin and others predicted the essential properties of inherited generic units, even though genes and chromosomes were unknown at that time. From evolutionary theory, DNAs from different species should exhibit a branching pattern that reflects the same time sequence of divergence as it is deduced by other methods; they do. The primitive metabolic chemistry of ancestral organisms should be discernible in today’s organic cells; it is. There shouldn’t be much difference in the genetic code inherited by all organisms; there isn’t. And so it goes.”
“And of the predictive power of creationism? Can it predict which band in a series of tree rings should indicate the same age as a given mix of carbon isotopes? Or the tidal record that ought to be found written into fossil corals by the moon’s orbital motion of several hundred million years ago? Does it have anything to say about the composition of the early atmosphere and the kinds of minerals that would be formed as a consequence – their chemical nature, where they should be located, and at what depths we should expect to find them today? Can creationism, in fact, give a hint of any future finding? Not a one. It operates with hindsight only. Because of its built-in unfalsifiability it can cobble together an explanation of anything at all – but only after the fact as established by other means. As a method of prediction it is sterile.”
James P. Hogan, Minds, Machines and Evolution, in the chapter, “The Revealed Word of God, pages 174 and 175. Hogan wrote good SF and non-fiction, although this Wikipedia entry (treat with some care), suggests he also was a Holocaust denier, which is a bit like finding out that your close friend is selling hard drugs to teenagers. He died in July this year.
As some may know, I wrote a while back about what I saw as an unconvincing attempt by the UK journalist Christopher Booker to play the victim card and assume that advocates of AGW scepticism and intelligent design proponents (i.e., creationists), were both equally victims of intolerance from the scientific community. But actually, as one commenter – I think it was Counting Cats at his own blog – pointed out, there is more in common between AGW alarmists, with their almost religious approach, and creationists.
The reason why I keep returning to this topic is that for all that I am unbudgeable on tolerance for all manner of views, barking mad or eminently sane, the point is that if we are going to be able to resist some of the more oppressive demands of AGW alarmists, it pays not to ally ourselves with what I regard as seriously flawed ideas, such as creationism. It is the sort of thing that will be seized upon by the AGW alarmists, in their quest to treat any dissent as examples of bad science. Just sayin’.
In the UK edition of Wired magazine is an article on the use of environmental markets in which, for instance, property developers or industrial users of water pay others, such as owners of wetlands or somesuch, if they want to make a development. The way the article is written gives the impression – at least in my eyes – of this being a great example of how capitalism and the Greens can work together. I am not so sure.
For instance, take the idea of “banks” of wetlands. Typically, what happens is that a government, such as the US one acting under legislation, will decree that there can be no net loss of wetland in given geographical area A, so if any area of wetland is destroyed, then the destroyers must offset this by paying to create another area of wetland somewhere. I immediately see a problem here: someone in authority has decreed that whatever happens to be the area of wetland at the time the new system is introduced is the area that must be maintained ad infinitum; but why not say that the area should be twice as big, or three times, or four times, or half as big? Also, the supposed “market” for such development permit trading depends on the existence of government regulations of certain areas, like wetlands, which might clearly go against the property rights of the folk who have owned those wetlands in the past and might have wanted to turn them into golf courses or whatever.
To be fair, though, the article does address the fact that property rights or markets of some sort represent a smarter way of addressing issues such as conservation, pollution and so on than traditional “lets just ban it” approaches used in the past. The article contains a great example of how the French mineral water industry did a deal with farmers over the latters’ use of fertilizer and pesticides in order to protect the water and keep the farmers happy. That is the kind of market transaction that works, and probably could have worked without government getting involved. My worry, though, is that a lot of such artificial markets in things such as environmental resources can become prey to corruption and mission creep of all kinds. Nigel Lawson, for instance, wrote dammingly about carbon trading in his recent book on the global warming controversy.
Whatever pious comments George Osborne, UK finance minister, or David Cameron might make about encouraging savings for the long term and less reliance on borrowing, blah, blah, blah, this sort of policy, assuming it is true, shows that this government does not give a rat’s arse about encouraging savings. Coupled with the new top tax rate of 50 per cent, reduced tax-free allowances and other adjustments, the enterprising class of those who work to build up pension pots for themselves just got a serious setback.
At a time when there is so much talk about a pensions “time-bomb”, this sort of announcement is also disheartening since it sends out the message that pension schemes are a contrick. My own managing director at the firm at which I am now a small partner does not bother with pensions and intends to rely on his own business/properties to pay for his old age. When announcements like this come out, who is to say he is really wrong?
I have been busy travelling lately, so not much opportunity to post much on the site at the moment, but I could not resist this.
Lord (Robert) Skidelsky is the biographer of JM Keynes. Keynes is, as regulars here know, a man generally regarded as the “dark knight” of economics, a man who made intellectually respectable notions that had been often regarded as little more than the ploys of quacks and charlatans. Books by Henry Hazlitt and William Hutt, for example, have in my view pretty much demolished his central idea: that the way to get out of a recession is for governments to print money in large amounts and hopefully, when the sun comes out from behind the clouds, to turn on the monetary and fiscal brakes later on. It is an approach that was destroyed by the stagflation of the 1970s, when a combination of high unemployment, out-of-control trade union power, low growth and skyrocketing prices forced policymakers to seek alternative sources of wisdom, in the forms of Friedman, Hayek and the rest. However, the attempts by governments to revive their economies in the past few years have given what I consider to be a spurious impression that Keynes’ ideas are still appropriate to our time. I disagree.
Skidelsky argues that the current Tory/LibDem coaltion government is making a fearful error in trying to reduce debt and spending. He also argues that what the world needs right now is a new sort of Bretton Woods agreement, moving on from the original deal as signed in the 1940s at the end of WW2. That agreement achieved, among other things, strict controls on capital flows between nations. It is hard for younger people to realise that it was not all that long ago that it was illegal, for example, for Britons travelling abroad to take more than a small amount of money out of the country without explicit consent. This is serfdom: if people are banned from taking money from place A to B even if they have earned it, then what is the difference between that and a serf seeking the consent of his lord before moving to another village down the road?
And in any event, as Lord Skidelsky knows only too well, the BW agreement eventually failed because of a combination of forces: rising government deficits, rigid, unionised labour markets and inflation (caused by things such as Vietnam War, the Great Society welfare policies in the US and UK); the oil crisis of the early 1970s, and developments such as the offshore Eurodollar market, which encouraged a relatively unregulated, vibrant financial market that made BW increasingly hard to operate. The stresses proved too great; the US finally severed any link between the dollar and gold during the Nixon presidency, and Bretton Woods was dead. A good summary of how it all went wrong can be seen in this recent book by Deepak Lal.
Keynes was not completely wrong on all the topics of the day, and to his great credit, the post-war settlement did include attempts to foster free trade and reduce protectionism, which policymakers realised had been such a disaster in the 1930s. But the idea of governments spending vast sums of central bank funny money as a way to deal with the results of previous monetary excess looks less and less wise with every day that passes. Keynes still has his devotees, such as Paul Krugman, but his ideas are not, by and large, what are needed to get us out of our current predicament.
“It is true that individual financial institutions made bad decisions. In my opinion, they should have been allowed to go out of business—that would have been the proper way for them to be handled. However, their decisions were secondary to government policy. It should be remembered that the Federal Reserve owns the monetary system in the United States; we do not have a private monetary system. In 1913, our monetary system was nationalized. If you’re having problems in the monetary system—which is where the problems in the economy began—they are, by definition, government problems. This is analogous to interstate highway bridges falling down: If interstate highway bridges were falling down, everyone would recognize that the government owns the highways and conclude that this is a government-caused problem. Well, the government owns the monetary system, and the errors by the Federal Reserve are the foundations of the financial problems we’ve experienced.”
John Allison, former CEO of BB&T, who is that rarity in financial services, a genuine free marketer who knows what the prime cause of the credit disaster has been.
(The quote is taken from an interview of Allison by The Objective Standard, a fine magazine. Most of the articles are behind the subscriber firewall.)
It looks as if some reporters who wrote about the late British comic actor, Norman Wisdom, have learned – assuming they actually gave a shit in the first place – that using Wikipedia as your source for information is a high-risk strategy.
Doh.
This is a headline in the leftist New Republic magazine, over an article lauding any kind of US government spending, by Jonathan Cohn:
“Wanted: More Fraud, Abuse in Government Spending”
Here’s a paragraph to show just how far down the Keynesian rabbit-hole parts of the pro-stimulus crowd have gone:
“But efficiency isn’t the Recovery Act’s primary purpose. Reviving the economy is. And that’s required spending a vast amount of money very quickly–a goal that, inevitably, is at odds with spending the money carefully. Or, to put it another way, a stimulus that threw a little more money away might have created more jobs.”
So “throwing away” money – which is ultimately not the government’s to “throw away” but belongs, or is claimed, from individual citizens – “creates” jobs, does it? So if the US unemployment rate is stubbornly holding just below 10 per cent – a miserable result – then what is needed is yet even more spending, more money printing. These guys remind me of what was said, not always fairly I might add, of WW1 generals, who, when faced with the failure of their latest mass infantry assaults against the German army in Flanders, were urged for one more push, one more bout of bloodletting and hence on to victory.
Einstein once defined madness, I recall, as the repeating of an error and failing to learn from such errors over, and over again. By that measure, parts of the media and commentariat in the US are out of their conceited, Keynesian minds.
“Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.”
– Allister Heath.
It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters.
“I don’t know what organically grown chickens are; I’ve never seen one.”
– Tony Curtis, one of the greats, who died this week.
“There’s something really quite joyous about a woman so ignorant of business that she bemoans the advertising, the commercialism, the specific slicing and dicing of the market to maximise the value of those ads, when that same woman’s salary is paid by the advertising, the very specific advertising in The Guardian’s jobs section for example, which is carried by the newspaper in which she writes.”
– Tim Worstall, writing about comments from Zoe Williams, the Guardian writer.
I have a simple explanation for the issue that Tim confronts here: folk like Williams believe they are above the fray of grubby advertising, and are free of being persuaded by the evil, silent tricksters of the ad trade. But the unwashed plebs, with their love of glossy magazines, game shows and the rest, need to be protected by their betters, you see. Sometimes, it comes down to simple arrogrance of a mindset that is hostile to the idea to freedom, to the grubby, glorious vulgarities of the market. It is a mindset that is common to “liberal” Hampstead and High Tory Lake Poets in the early 19th Century.
Reading this item over at National Review’s Corner blog, which relates to recent attempts by Al-Quaeda types to attack targets in Western Europe – apparently foiled for now – got me thinking. One of the possible targets, judging by the comment, was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It makes me wonder when the “blame-the-West-First” crowd are going to understand that it was always idiotic to claim that 9/11, or the Madrid atrocities, or the London bombings/etc could ever be described as the West getting some sort of “blowback” for its allegedly dastardly deeds against Muslim lands. Whenever this argument is made, the implication, explicit or not, is that the appropriate policy to adopt is the equivalent of hiding under the bed.
France, let’s not forget, has more than its fair share of bad relations with some Muslim lands – Algeria in the 1950s being a case in point – but in recent years, the country’s government has been at pains to distance itself from the supposedly “cowboy” policies of Bush/Blair, although possibly things might have hardened a bit under Sarkozy.
But it makes no difference. Whether you are an isolationist, multilaterialist, or neocon interventionist, the outcome is the same: the Islamists will try and kill you and your fellow citizens without discrimination. We can try and placate the crocodile, but it is ultimately a futile strategy. It is occasionally necessary to remind people of this grim fact.
|
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.
|
