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]
|
A few days ago, I linked to an article that seeks to frame some, if not all, of Obama’s political ideas within a sort of anti-colonial setting. It is fair to say that not everyone is buying it, and this article brutally takes on that thesis. And the writer, Heather MacDonald, is no leftie. At all. She writes for the Secular Right blog, which as its name implies, is a site written by those of a generally conservative bent who are not religious and generally regard the Republican Party’s involvement with the Religious Right as not a Good Thing.
She does not pull her punches. And she has a point, although I still think the anti-colonial angle has some traction. It does, I think, explain things such as Obama’s apparent no very great affection, that I can see, for the UK. Even so, in general my take is that Obama is a hard-left politician who has – at least for a while – bamboozled a lot of people into thinking of him as a centrist. But it is worth pointing out that his Big Government views are not really so odd in a nation once ruled by the likes of Roosevelt, LBJ, and for that matter, Richard Nixon (who brought in wage and price controls, let’s not forget).
Anyway, read the whole piece.
This is fascinating, and must strike the Briton of today, with the UK’s draconian restrictions on the use of guns, as a very alien sort of blog post. I got some insight into the sort of ideas and methods he is discussing when I did a 4-day defensive handgun course in Nevada back in the September of 2002 with an American friend of mine.
One thing that strikes me is how some of Eric’s observations on the need to be “tactically aware” of your environment when seeking to be safe can apply not just to anyone thinking about firearms, but more generally. For instance, when I have entered a nightclub or pub, or thought about entering one, I tend to avoid those places where I cannot see any easy way to get out, or if there are folk in there who almost radiate menace. It does not have to be an issue of physical appearance, either – the tone of voice often sets my alarm bells off.
And one good piece of advice in the comment thread: if you want to drink booze, do not carry a gun. It seriously interferes with reaction times. And even in the UK, where you can still do stuff like shooting clays, avoid the sauce if you go on a sort of jolly day out. I have heard of some right twerps getting nearly killed because they were guzzling alcohol on driven game shoots, etc.
The author of the economics high-seller, The Black Swan, has given a fairly fierce denunciation of US government fiscal policy in recent years. In fairness, he probably is not just beating up the current holders of office, but previous ones too.
Last night, I attended a very entertaining Adam Smith Insitute event at which Eamonn Butler and guests talked about Austrian economics. Mr Butler has a new book out and it is an excellent, succinct summary of what this form of economics is all about. And he touches, very briefly, on the issue that seems to be getting some people worked up into a tizzy: fractional reserve banking. FRB is an issue we have already had a good working over on at this site and a good comment thread. A brief summary of my view is that I don’t think many forms of FRB would be able to survive in a pure free market without bailouts, “too big to fail” protections, government deposit protection, etc. But it should not be banned: if folk want to take the risk of depositing money in an FRB account, then that is their business, like smoking, off-piste skiing and unprotected sex. With currency competition and removal of legal tender laws, such FRB banks would have to be run with ruthless attention to risk control. So I don’t see the need for any restrictions.
However, what annoys me about the reaction of fellows like this is that they seem to be supposing that the current banking system, the system that has recently been brought almost to its knees, with such shining examples such as Northern Rock, the Dunfirmline Building Society, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, etc, etc, is somehow basically okay. Riiiight. They are saying that those pesky Austrians, with their “loopy” ideas about how two people cannot simultaneously hold the same claim to the same money at the same time (which strikes me as a perfectly sensible view, in fact), should shut up. Well, they are not going to shut up.
I have to say I find the sheer gall of these “why don’t these guys shut up?” line of analysis to be pretty unedifying. If FRB – at least as it currently operates – is so splendid, and if banking really is about “borrowing short and lending long”, then maybe the defenders of the current form of banking could explain to the taxpayers of the UK quite why we have had had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds in the recent banking clusterfuck. Just asking.
I can think of few greater contemporary British journalists than Christopher Booker. He is the AGW alarmists’ waking nightmare. In fact, he inflicts sleep deprivation on all manner of promoters of scares, seeing, as HL Mencken once realised, that scares are a means by which power-hungry folk can persuade benighted citizens to sign up to the latest safety measures.
And yet even great men have their off days. In last week’s edition of the Spectator (which is behind a subscriber firewall), he writes, on page 20, that there is a dastardly campaign by the Darwinian establishment to crush any signs of dissent from those who subscribe to some form of Intelligent Design (or what might be more accurately known as Creationism). He then goes on to liken the plight of these poor, oppressed ID advocates with AGW skeptics. And yet the parallel strikes me as absurd. AGW skeptics fall into various camps: those who simply want to trash any suggestion that AGW is a problem; those who say that AGW is a problem but who are unsure about its effects, and those who realise that AGW is probably happening but who debate whether it can be mitigated, reversed or adapted to, and who want to know about the pros and cons (think of the likes of Nigel Lawson, or Bjorn Lomborg, etc). A lot of AGW skeptics pore over immense amounts of data to highlight their doubts; and some of them, such as Lawson, employ powerful economic and related arguments that draw on known facts.
But ID advocates do not have the same kind of facts, as far as I can see, to conclusively press their case. What they have instead is a sort of “We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we’ll assume a Creator got involved”. Not terribly convincing, is my reaction. I accept that some scientists might be sympathetic to ID without losing any integrity, but what Booker’s article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be “created”. All they do, it seems from Booker’s article, is to state that because there are “gaps” in fossil records, etc, that therefore the gap must imply that some outside agent (like a God), caused X or Y. But his article does not go beyond that to explain what sort of processes these ID folk imagine happened. And the reason for that is simple: they don’t know. By contrast, AGW skeptics seem to a far more persuasive lot and are able to throw out all manner of facts and data to back their case up. I am just not convinced that Creationists come remotely close.
In fact, a recent comment on this kind of issue by someone called bgates on Samizdata nicely captures a key issue here, because it might explain why a lot of people treat evolution theory and creationism as being on an equal footing:
“It’s interesting that so many people who think they’re proponents of evolution discuss the matter in terms of “belief”. I’ve never heard anyone voice a belief that red light has a longer wavelength than blue, or a belief that B-lactam antibiotics work by interfering with bacterial cell wall synthesis. Those statements are instead presented as facts that have been deduced from an examination of physical evidence. The difference seems to be that so many of the most fervent defenders of the theory of evolution are unaware of the (astonishing, voluminous, and altogether convincing) physical evidence supporting the idea. They don’t have knowledge of the evidence, they have faith in their belief, and they’ll fight for their beliefs as passionately as any mujahedeen.”
And in conclusion, for all I support Booker’s general stance on free speech and resistence to any thought control, I think – as a AGW skeptic myself – that is not really smart for Booker to lump AGW skeptics into the same supposedly “oppressed” category as creationists. If creationists come in for abuse, they need to raise their game and employ the same rigour, if they can, as those who have looked at the AGW issue, and cried foul.
Sidepoint: Timothy Sandefur had some interesting thoughts about science and freedom of expression, and the role of the state, here.
I guess it will be interesting to see whether there is any pressure among backbench Tory MPs – or at least some of the more intelligent ones – for the government to try and edge out “Vince” Cable from his post as Business Secretary, following a terrible speech that has been monstered in many quarters, such as here, and here.
The funny thing is, had Cable said something on the lines of “risky gambling by banks and hedge funds has been a problem and has been encouraged by irresponsible central banks”, he’d have a very good point. Had he, in his attack on monopolies, attacked the regulations, taxes and other government moves that drive up barriers to entry, he’d also be correct. But he does nothing of the kind. He’s a sort of economist who, trained from, I suspect, neo-classical textbooks full of elegant supply-demand curves rather than real human beings, imagines that any market that does not have a vast number of identical players with no pricing power or edge is “imperfect”, and therefore in need of correction by government. He ignores how it is the very “imperfections” of the real world – such as differences in tastes, values, levels of knowledge and so on – that give markets their raison d’etre, as understood by the “Austrian” school, with its view of competition as a discovery process, not as a static game full of omniscient Gods.
In fact, the government actions that lead to less flexible markets continue to get worse, which is something Mr Cable seems not to be dealing with. At the moment, the Financial Services Authority, the UK financial regulator, is rolling out a programme of “reforms” called, excitingly, the Retail Distribution Review. The aim, which sounds very noble, is to raise the standard and independence of financial advice. The effect, however, will be to drive hundreds of financial advisors out of business – some industry figures predict that as many as 20 per cent of UK IFAs could go by the time the RDR takes full effect in 2012. This, of course, only worsens the problem of how financial advice is often something that ordinary UK citizens rarely use.
Here is something I wrote before on attacks on the City.
There is a new film out, with a fairly strong, leftie vibe about it, called Made in Dagenham, celebrating the campaign by women factory workers in the late 1960s to get the same pay as their male counterparts. It sounds such a self-evidently just cause that no doubt any film-goers will come out of the cinema nodding to themselves about the rightness of the cause and the evil of the chauvinist, exploiter bastards who presided over the previous, unjust state of affairs. Throw in lots of period costumes and some nice background music and this is a sort of feelgood movie, in a way.
The trouble is, as I suspect readers will tell, is that the situation is not quite as simple as all that. As Tim Worstall occasionally likes to point out, a lot of the supposed injustice involved in lower pay for women for doing the same jobs as men has a perfectly rational basis, however politically unpalatable it might be to say so. Here is another one of his articles over in the Guardian (brave man, is Tim).
In part, it is worth remembering that in the far more unionised labour market of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the resistence to women entering the workforce to do the same work as men came from male trade union members, not from the firms. And companies, realising that many women are as talented, if not a damn sight more so, than the men, obviously realised that they could attract such workers willing to work for a slightly lower wage than their male counterparts. Outside unionised businesses, such a difference was likely to be even more marked. It reminds me of the fact that the labour movement, with such features like the closed shop, has often been at odds with the Left’s alleged concerns for things such as equality between the sexes and races. I would be interested to know if this aspect of the labour movement comes out in the film.
I suspect that, absent labour market restrictions such as closed shops and other deliberate barriers to entry, women’s pay would have approached that of the men much faster than it did, but for reasons adduced by the likes of Tim Worstall, there will remain gaps which cannot be blamed on the free market.
“Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn’t all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn’t have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don’t. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don’t, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.”
David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase.
Asks Virginia Postrel in this article. Yes, there are public policy issues involved – such as the declining ratio of workers vs retirees in many developed countries – but she gives a typically constructive, even optimistic take on the issue. Recommended.
I often get the impression – and that is all that it is – that much of the world of government is concerned with achieving stability of various kinds. But there are “good” forms of stability – such as safe and secure property rights, honest money, and laws to protect the person from violence – and “bad” kinds, such as the stagnation of a flat-lining economy (as in 1990s Japan). Consider, we used to hear Gordon Brown drone on, in that manner of his, about “economic stability” (he spectacularly failed to attain it); we used to hear critics of George W. Bush’s foreign policy claiming that he was undermining the supposedly marvellous “stability” of the Middle East; and of course when it comes to issues such as governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, “stability” and the smoothing of all that naughty market activity is taken as a public good.
Sure, the last few years have been frightening in some ways on the economics front, but the gains to living standards across the planet, by and large, have not been thrown away. And in a recent book by Deepak Lal, in “Reviving the Invisible Hand”, he notes that some, “unstable” economies such as Thailand have managed to chalk up much greater growth in wealth overall than those which have grown at a more sedate, less volatile way.
Of course, it might even be argued that it is difficult to distinguish total stability from death. A straight line on a graph, remember, resembles the line of one of those gizmos that tells a doctor that the patient has pegged out.
“Brooks and Krugman are on some sort of Thelma & Lousie like quixoticly suicidal journey to be the last guy off the bigger government meme. They’re going off the cliff, but they couldn’t be happier. At least their abusive small-government loving spouses won’t hurt them anymore.”
From the comment thread of this article about the absurd David Brooks. No wonder he writes for the New York Times.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does not lose his temper, or at least not much. He favours a fairly dry, laconic style. So dry, in fact, that the duller sorts can miss it. So when he does come out with something unusually sharp, I tend to sit up and take particular notice.
“Ah, but remember when you now-disappointed Obama supporters were lecturing us about the fierce moral urgency of change? With such overweening self-righteousness? Even as you resolutely failed to look at what was going on, or to inquire into what Obama was actually like? So pardon me, now-disappointed Obama voters, if I point out that you’re rubes.”
By the way, does anyone bother to read Andrew Sullivan these days?
Update: I see that Matt Welch, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, has become unusually sharp about Sullivan these days. The latter’s blind devotion to TARP and the rest is driving even some people who are generally nice to Sully increasingly to distraction.
|
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.
|
