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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In the previous posting by Brian on the alleged match-fixing scam involving Pakistan’s cricket team, one commenter called Jim made the excellent point that gambling is illegal in Pakistan. It is, as the practice is banned under Shariah law – but there is a vast and thriving underground gambling industry there and indeed across the Indian sub-continent.
Now, as we libertarians like to point out, if you ban consenting activities between adults – such as betting on sports – then when such activities are driven underground, criminals get involved, with all the sort of consequences we are now writing about. That is not to say, of course, that if gambling were legalised in Pakistan, that the match-fixer gangsters would hang up their hats and do something else. But it would, in my view, help a great deal to drive some of these scum away.
Americans bored by all this talk of cricket might recall that baseball has had its problems in the past, as have other sports too. This Wikipedia entry is worth reading (and maybe improving).
And there are certain parallels in this issue with insider dealing in financial markets. On one level, I think that it should not be made illegal since it is difficult to work out the difference, sometimes, between a trader who is just quick off the mark to exploit new information and someone who happens to be privy to inside information. Arguablym, distortions caused by insider dealing eventually get arbitraged out by other investors. However, in the case of private stock markets, they are, as private institutions, perfectly entitled to set the rules so that trading is seen to be “fair” and open, if only to encourage investors to buy and sell stocks who might otherwise have been cynical about insiders getting all the best deals. It is like a private sports association setting down rules against things such as use of enhancement drugs, and so on. So long as no-one is forced to compete against their will, no-one can carp about the rules, and the adoption of such rules draws in more people and interest.
Back to the insider dealing point: As more people play in a market if the rules are seen to be fair, then this encourages greater liquidity and reduces the cost of capital. With the match-fixing issue, the costs of not punishing wrongdoers is something similar: it will drive away people from the sport due to greater cynicism, and hence reduce revenues, investment in new grounds and facilities, and so on. Cynicism, whether in sports, business or elsewhere, is a sort of deadweight cost on an activity by driving away fans, investors, etc.
A pretty fair summary of what the Tea Party movement means for current US politics and the races leading up to the mid-term elections. For non-US readers who are unfamiliar with all this, the article is not a bad introduction. At least the Reuters report does not write it off as full of racist nutballs or religious bigots, and actually focuses on the anti-tax, anti-spending viewpoint of the Tea Partiers.
I think that in the light of the recent controversy about the place possibly known as the Cordoba Center near Ground Zero, the real cause for annoyance on the part of any New Yorker, surely, is why it has taken so long to get going with any serious construction down there. This Wikipedia entry on the Empire State Building, for example, suggests that the building in Midtown was erected in a space of only a few years. That was in the early 1930s – what was so radically different then?
I suspect that if we already had an impressive and dignified piece of architecture in the southern tip of Manhattan, the row about what happens to nearby buildings would not have erupted so much. It seems that planning and political issues are at stake here – after all, places such as Dubai and various parts of Asia put up skyscrapers with great speed these days.
Or maybe the intention all along is that Ground Zero should remain a flat, empty space of land, purely in the form of a place for remembrance.
I came across this article, which reads like a plotline from a Robert Ludlum thriller. Gloriously bonkers.
(H/T, David Thompson).
“So Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are all on Air Force One. Suddenly it malfunctions and crashes. Who survives? America.”
From a commenter on this item.
Actually, the logic applies to most countries and their governments. Parts of our MSM like to believe that if the leader of X or Y has a problem, dies or whatever, that the nation will be plunged into chaos. Not so; it is a mark of a healthy country that the passing of a leader, even in tragic circumstances such as those affecting Poland recently, is not a massive blow to the country per se.
Tangentially, this book by Gene Healy about the “cult” of the modern presidency is worth reading.
“Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling. This parallel is important to keep in mind, because Nixon’s reaction helped cause the worst energy crisis in American history.”
Alex Epstein.
Alas, the rest of the article is behind the WSJ subscriber firewall (I wonder how that is working out for Mr Murdoch, Ed).
In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America’s eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take “risks for peace.”
– George Will.
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.
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