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.
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This comment by Tim Sandefur pretty much captures my own view on the row over the “Mosque” at Ground Zero (or whatever this building is meant to be called).
In a separate forum, I got into quite a heated debate with folks over the fact that I said that while I defend the rights of owners of property to do what they want with said property, that does not mean I cannot be angry at the gesture of say, building a Islamic centre right next to the scene of an act of mass-murder by Islamic fanatics. My anger, apparently, has led to a few folk calling me out as a sort of bigot. Not so: I can see both sides of the argument here: the families of 9/11 victims feel, with cause, that the location of this building is a fairly crass and provocative gesture and are concerned at the possible choice of name – the Cordoba Center, and about the possible sources of funding for it.
On the other, let’s not forget – and this is a point that needs to be made regularly – that Muslims going about their lawful business were murdered on that terrible day, and their families might want to have that fact acknowledged in some sort of way by having a place to worship in a place that gives meaning to their grief.
But it would help things if those who are concerned about the motives of this centre would not automatically be dubbed as stooges of Sarah Palin or some sort of great right wing conspiracy. Part of the annoyance that folk feel about this is that there is a sense of injustice that while Islam benefits in the West from the broad protections of freedom of expression, that that tolerance is not reciprocated in the countries where this religion holds sway. Try building a Catholic church in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, after all, is a country that has funded dozens of mosques and other places, including those encouraging some of the most extreme forms of Islam. Saudi funding is akin to a government grant rather than a donation from a private individual.
I like this article about the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. It is a reminder that at one time, the holder of that office did not regard himself as a rockstar. Maybe he was lucky in being born before the age of TV. If he had been around in more recent times, maybe our views would be different. I bet Churchill would have been massacred on TV.
My favourite story about Silent Cal, as he was known (not a man of long windy speeches), was when he was once coming out of a church, and was approached by the usual journalist types asking him about what the preacher said in his sermon. “Sin”, replied the POTUS. “Er, what did the preacher say about it?”, asked the hacks.
“He’s against it,” replied Mr Coolidge. (Try and top that, PJ O’Rourke).
Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, about which I wrote the other day, taught me a good appreciation of Coolidge. There is also a nice collection of some of his comments here.
Tim Worstall has a good headscratcher of an article about an aspect of the recent financial crisis: what is called securitisation. To those not familiar with this term, it is the process by which banks and other financial institutions that lend money out – such as mortgages – use the repayments as collateral to take out loans of their own, at a (hopefully) lower rate of interest, and thereby make a profit on the difference between the two. The idea is that by packaging loans and other IOUs into big parcels, and then selling these packages to end-investors such as pension funds or life firms, that the risks inherent in the individual mortgages and loans are spread out among a wide circle of investors.
On the face of it, that sounds smart: spreading risk is, after all, the basis of insurance. However, unlike say, fire insurance, defaults on bonds tend to rise and fall in line with the economic cycle: you do not usually get a massive uptick in fires every three or four years, for example, although in bad periods a combination of natural disasters can hammer insurers.
A lot of this financial engineering, and the associated alphabet soup of acronym terms for the various products involved, has come under fire from all those books that got published in the aftermath of the crisis. A typical example is Gillan Tett’s effort, Fool’s Gold, which tends to play to the “evil bankers” schtick that has become so familiar. I prefer this and this.
As Tim says, the problem, however, is that banks did not – contrary to the conventional wisdom that has condemned securitisation – done nearly enough of this sort of thing. In fact, when the shit hit the fan in 2007/08, many banks and other lenders had not managed to securitise their loans and had to make massive writedowns as defaults mounted. Case in point: HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK.
The trouble, though, is that beating up on banks for not doing enough to remove credit risk from their balance sheet ignores, I think, the underlying problem that has been mentioned before here, which is that in a world where central banks set interest rates and cut them at any sign of economic trouble, banks will be under enormous commercial pressure to chase yield where they can, by lending money to high-risk ventures. Until and only when borrowing is financed from real savings rather than central bank Monopoly money, the underlying causes of such recent messes will not go away.
Even so, Tim has raised a smart point that kicks against the usual clichés, which is one reason why his blog is one of my daily reads.
“Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.”
– Mark Steyn, writing about Greece and the ongoing train-crash of the European welfare state model.
The blogger, David Thompson, who seems to have the knack of unearthing all matter of weird and wonderful stuff for his Friday postings, also has a posting about a far less amusing subject: the cringeing of certain Western, post-modernist types when confronted with a direct, brutal example of violence by the Taliban.
This is what I meant in my previous post about the fact while radical Islam poses a threat that should not be underestimated, there is nothing inevitable about that threat succeeding. What is necessary is for the heirs of our great institutions to start growing a pair, so to speak.
Thoughtful, long article here by Alex Massie at the Spectator on the real and presumed issues surrounding Islam and the UK, and whether some commentators on the subject are seeing phantom menaces:
“To my commenters and the others worried by the “Islamification of Britain” I would ask only this: why are you so afraid and why do you lack such confidence in this country and its people’s ability to solve these problems? Perhaps my confidence is misplaced but I think we can probably do it. This is, in many ways, a better, more tolerant place to live than it has been in the past and, unless we blunder, it should remain so. The annoyances of idiotic council regulations about Christmas trees and crucifixes or inflammatory articles in the press ought not to distract us from that fact. The open society is an achievement to be proud of – for conservatives and liberals alike – but the most likely way it can be defeated is if we allow ourselves to be defeated by our fears and, thus, in the end by ourselves.”
“Diversity need not be a threat, though diversity cannot work unless all are equal under the law. But Britain is changing and doing so in often interesting ways. It is, in general, a comfortable, tolerant place made up of people with complex identities that make it a more, not less, interesting and decent place. Yeats’ famous lines do not quite apply here. On all sides, the worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity but the best do not lack conviction even if we don’t shout about it. Perhaps we should do so more often.”
Definitely worth reading the whole article. I think one point to make straight away is this: if we have more confidence in the resilience of Western civilisation and the virtues of a post-Enlightenment, pro-reason culture, and encourage support for such things in our places of higher learning and in the opinion-forming world, that in itself might encourage more moderate-minded Muslims in the West realise that the long-term trend was not on the side of the Islamists. Showing a confident front to the world is not bravado – it helps us to win.
The American media has used up its credibility on vanity projects. AGW was the primary one over the last few years, but the biggest vanity project of theirs was Obama. He’s been elected, and no one in America really has any illusions, on either side of the aisle, that he was “the media’s candidate.” The problem that they face is that they are now tied to him, and he’s sinking fast. Turns out, despite how many times they claimed it wasn’t true or didn’t matter, that he’s inexperienced, indecisive and lacks any sort of guiding principle. They spent all the credibility they had with the American people over the last 15 years or so, and ramped that spending way up to get Obama elected. They are now broke, incredible, and paying the price. Fox News is the only one that didn’t waste its credibility capital on this (and have learned to horde it viciously after being under credibility attack by the others since its birth) and is now thriving because of it. Even leftists in America are now turning to Fox more than the rest of the media when they need hard news, like in a crisis or attack situation. The media wasted the reputation they built up since WW2 on tawdry baubles like AGW and Obama, and now no one trusts them. That’s the state of the US media.
– Samizdata commenter “Phelps”, writing about this.
“Befitting his ideology, Krugman has only one policy to propose, regardless of topic: Transfer more resources from the discipline and dynamism of markets to the inefficiency and cronyism of government. Government-run health care. Government-controlled banks. Government bailouts. High taxes. High spending. Krugman wants it all, just like in Europe (which, in 2008, he called “the comeback continent”). And Krugman has no problems denying economic science and current events to advocate it.”
– Fred Douglass, on the NYT columnist and supposed Harvard economist. For what it is worth, I have never taken Krugman all that seriously since he became a hired attack dog for the Dems. A pity, since some of his writings on trade, for example, are excellent.
You can always count on Sean Gabb to take a controversial line. And on the British Empire in India (he says it was in many ways a good thing), he is not frightened to do so, even if it means saying things that have driven a few Indian or expat Indian readers into a rage. (I urge readers to read the entire Gabb piece).
There have been empires of a fairly liberal nature, and at times, it is fair to say, that there was greater respect for life, liberty and property under certain relatively liberal empires than in sovereign, nation states. I have heard the Austro-Hungarian Empire defended on such grounds; the British Empire was in some ways a pretty loose-knit thing (it had to be – we did not have the manpower to run it in a more heavy-handed way); and certain other empires might have stacked up quite well when looking at what replaced them. But, and this is surely the key point: we are talking about empires. They developed out of conquest, of kicking out rulers or property owners of various kinds, and moving in. Sometimes the invaders were actually invited in to get rid of the existing scumbags, but usually not. (Malta, in the late 18th Century, asked Lord Nelson to kick out the French who had taken control of the island. The Brits stayed until the early 1970s).
So, it does rather make me scratch my head to read Sean’s defence of the BE when I consider that, for example, he and many others like him in the Libertarian Alliance have fiercely criticised the European Union as a sort of France-German imperial regime, imposing a certain kind of social democratic worldvew. Libertarianism is not a monolithic creed (thank god), but on the face of it, the presumption must be that a believer in liberty must look askance on empires and conquest, and be wary of attempts to rationalise it by reference to certain outcomes that are only known after the event.
Take another sort of “empire”: the Brussels elite of the European Union – who are not exactly respectful of democratically expressed “no” votes in referenda, may defend their ambitions as being high-minded, and indeed, there is a sort of “new imperialism”, known as Transnational Progressivism, or Tranzi for short. Or take the case of US foreign policy, also sometimes damned as imperialistic. It is also worth noting that Sean, and other critics of the American-led military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, have condemned what they see as the “neocon” doctrine of seeking to spread democracy and liberty into barbarous lands at the point of a bayonet (or Apache helicopter). But that is exactly how Sean frames the case in favour of the British Empire. Odd. The likes of Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and other priests of empire (not to mention Kipling) were the neocons of their time. (In fairness to Sean, he also criticises the conflicts in the ME as not being about the defence of British interests).
Some of this support of empire also explains, so I understand it, some of why Sean Gabb casts Churchill as a villain of 20th century history, as a destroyer of empire. Gabb claims that by refusing to capitulate to Hitler in 1940 and sue for peace and leave Western Europe under Nazi rule, Churchill ensured that the British Empire was finished, whereas had we been neutral in the 1940s, then – so the argument goes – the Nazi-dominated Europe of the time would have left the Empire alone, or at least for a fairly long period. Although obviously horrible for those Europeans under Nazi rule, avoidance of war with Germany would at least have spared the Empire all the losses it suffered.
I am not convinced of this line of reasoning. First of all, it is far from clear, given Hitler’s record as being a serial breaker of treaties, that any non-aggression pact signed between Britain, its Empire, and Germany, would have been worth the paper it was written on. If the Empire had stayed out of military conflict with Germany, that would have given Hitler the knowledge of having a free hand against Russia, making it far more likely that Germany’s invasion of Russia would have been more of a success. From Bordeaux to Vladivostok would have been one, huge national socialist empire, greedily looking south at the oilfields of the Middle East under British influence, potentially threatening the Suez Canal and link to India. It is hard to see how such an immense landpower would have been able to rub along with the British Empire without conflct in the medium term.
In any event, the Empire, while it may have come to an end sooner than it did due to the immense costs of WW2, was already in a state of flux: Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other dominions were moving towards greater self government; there was a vigorous, pro-independence movement in India during the 1920s and 1930s, and suppressing that movement with the use of armed force hardly sits easily with a libertarian credo.
One final point, to which I am indebted to Paul Marks for pointing out: there was a brief campaign, led I think by the likes of Joseph Chamberlain, to create an Imperial Parliament in which all members of the Empire would have had some sort of representation, perhaps like a sort of BE version of the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. The idea never really got off the ground as a serious political venture.
Bryan Caplan has some thought-provoking comments about Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times” – in my opinion, one of the greatest works of history by a historian of any era, let alone ours. Johnson, a devout Roman Catholic who has written about, and met, many of the leading figures of post WW2 history, including Churchill, is a writer never afraid to let you know his point of view. He enjoys overturning certain stock images of historical “heroes” and “villains”; he memorably defended the reputation of Calvin Coolidge, a much underestimated POTUS, and tries his best to be nice about Richard Nixon (I think he does not quite succeed), and reminds us of what a great old fellow was Konrad Adenauer. Johnson is also merciless towards Ghandi, whose reputation he trashes.
The great thing about the man – now in his 80s and still going strong as a writer – is capacity for narrative, for making history a story; he is stickler for dates. You really do get the “sweep of events” from Johnson, in much the same way you would from an Edward Gibbon, Hugh Trevor Roper or a TB Macaulay (whom he some ways resembles). (Here are more thoughts on Johnson in the same blog.)
Like Caplan, I am not entirely sure that moral relativism captures the full nature of what went wrong in terms of the 20th Century, although I think Johnson does capture quite a lot of the problem with that concept. For me, the ultimate disaster of that century was the idea of the omniscient State and of the associated idea that governments, run by all-knowing officials, could solve many of the real or supposed problems of the age. The 20th Century was not unique in witnessing the growth of government, but it was an age when government had, like never before, the technology at its disposal to be immensely powerful, probably more so than at any time since the Romans (and even the writ of Rome had its limits). We are still, alas, in the grip of that delusion that government can and should fix problems, although there is perhaps, hopefully, a bit more cynicism about it than say, during the late 1940s when the likes of Attlee were in Downing Street.
Johnson is right, however, to point out that in a world where there is no stated respect for the idea of impartial rules and law, no respect for reason and for the idea of objective truth – or at least that it is noble to pursue truth – that terrible consequences follow; every irrationality, might-is-right worldview, will fill the vacumn. However, unlike Johnson, I do not think that morality requires the anchor of belief in a Supreme Being, and he tends to make the mistake, like a lot of devoutly religious folk, of assuming that atheists, for example, cannot arrive at a moral code, which seems to rather overlook the role of people such as Aristotle, who had a huge impact on views about ethics, and from whom other religions have borrowed (think of the Thomist tradition in Catholic thought, for instance).
Stephen Hicks, in his book on post-modernism, comes to a similar conclusion in certain respects. Another gem of a book is Alain Finkielkraut’s gem, “The Undoing of Thought”.
The sleep of reason really does bring forth monsters.
It seems that the Saudis and the UAE have got upset about the use of Blackberrys for such evil purposes as enabling young men and women to get a date. Various so-called “national security” issues are also cited.
Sheesh.
An interesting piece about how the oil slick disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Something is getting attention: there is not as much of an oil spill as some might suppose. Apparently, in warm water like this, and due to certain acquatic organisms, the oil is gradually absorbed. It is, in a manner of speaking, gobbled up. (Belch).
That got me thinking that yes, oil slicks caused by human error are obviously going to cause a lot of anger and lead to tort lawsuits from affected parties, such as fishing businesses and owners of beachfront property, but then again, what about an oil leak that is caused by tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust? In some geological areas, oil leaks of its own accord, sometimes in very large amounts. Which suggests that oil-cleaning technologies are a useful thing to invest in even if there were no offshore drilling.
None of this should, of course, remove any heat off those oil firms and contractors responsible for this disaster – which is what it is – nor indeed of the US government for its tardy response. However, it might help if more folk acknowledged that oil is the stuff of nature, and you know what, this stuff tends to move around occasionally, even without Man’s assistance.
(Apols for my light blogging of late and thanks to the others for all the great articles. I have been incredibly busy of late).
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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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