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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I do not expect to obtain any medals for originality, but as we have noted before around these parts, this is a puritanical age we are living in, at least in respect of certain lifestyle aspects (with the possible exception of sex).
Consider:
“Sir Stuart Rose, the executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, has attacked the idea of minimum pricing for alcohol as “insane”. His comments have emerged just a few days after his rival Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that it might help solve binge drinking and called on the Government to investigate introducing it. Sir Stuart said: “Artificially fixing a base price to stop people drinking wine is insane. As an extreme example, if you go back to 1930s America, prohibition doesn’t work.”
Of course, there is – as some commenters occasionally point out – a long-standing puritanical streak in the English-speaking world, which varies in intensity and in the object of its obsessions. In the last few decades, it has tended to focus on health and the environment. Before then, it was about sex. There is a distant, now deceased, old relative of mine who was brought up in a Methodist household where dancing was frowned upon, and so on.
This mindset is, I suppose, ineradicable. But what is not inevitable is allowing this mindset to win.
Here is a sharp item over at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog about the sort of credulous characters who go to various collectivist places and write gushing prose about how marvellous these places are. What is particularly satisfying is that it focuses on Matthew Yglesias, one of those bloggers whose reputation I have never been able to fathom.
For readers interested by the “ship of fools” headline, I got it from a wonderful piece by PJ O’Rourke, about the sort of tourists who used to go to the old Soviet Union to witness the many delights of central planning. It is in his classic, Republican Party Reptile.
“Mediocracy prides itself on being progressive. Its critics (to the extent they are permitted to survive, and allowed to express themselves) are derided as conservative, reactionary, and so on. However, the kind of progress that mediocracy promotes is rather specific. Curiously, it often takes tribal life as its paradigm. Movement ‘forwards’ is movement towards a model of a pacifist, egalitarian community, not exploiting the environment, sharing all tasks equally, with each member answerable to the whole community. Other kinds of change are considered inappropriate, and therefore not described as ‘progressive’: e.g., greater freedom from state interference, fewer restrictions on commercial activity.”
Mediocracy, by Fabian Tassano, page 142.
Tim Worstall asks a good question about why the UK taxpayer is giving aid to countries. First off – as can be seen in the associated comment thread – it seems madness to give money to a rapidly growing economy such as India when that nation has a space programme and a nuclear weapons programme. True, that country still has immense numbers of very poor people, but surely the best way to address that problem is to continue with pro-market reforms, encourage as much free trade as possible, and so forth.
Another good reason for opposing government-to-government aid (and that is what a lot of such aid amounts to), is because it bolsters existing, sometimes very harmful regimes, is frequently stolen and stashed away, or is misused, or deranges local markets, and creates a bureacracy with a vested interest in continuing programmes far beyond their useful life, assuming they ever had a valid reason in the first place.
Unfortunately, “Overseas Aid” has taken on a near sacred status in UK political discourse on a par with “National Health Service”.
Over at Counting Cats, NickM uses suitably salty language to say what he thinks of the actor Jeremy Irons for coming out with “there are too many humans on the planet” sort of comments.
I am not going to add to the post in question – I am pretty certain that we have trodden this ground fairly well already – but I wanted to ask the question as to why is it, that folk in the acting profession, or at least most of them, seem to hold such statist/Greenie views? Maybe it is an impression not based on a lot of hard statistics, but I’d guess that the acting trade is disproportionately full of folk who hold these kinds of opinions. Of course, there are actors who are a bit of a break from the trend – think Michael Caine, Clint Eastwood and the playwriter, Tom Stoppard, but they are often notable for being exceptions to the rule.
Maybe it is because, as actors, they view business, and people with cash, as somehow alien. Or maybe it is because, as actors, they often take on a generally adversarial view to the prevailing culture, and for many, being adversarial is still to be left-wing, to champion things such population control, government aid to Africa, or whatever.
Or maybe it goes right back to when they were at school. They probably were not on the same wavelength, emotionally or socially, with the kind of people who excelled at hard science, or who showed a flair for business and sport. Some may even have been quite badly bullied or put upon by the school “toughs” and took a sort of view that they’d take their revenge on society by the kind of plays/films they would get involved in, or the causes they would espouse.
Like I say, this is all very impressionistic. But the weakness for certain celebrities in the acting business for such causes deserves to have a sort of Phd thesis. I wonder if one has ever been written.
“The core problem over the past few decades was not bankers’ greed or the complex financial instruments that enabled them to satisfy it. It was the immense pyramids of debt built up by the Anglo-Saxon half of the world, and the equally massive mountains of savings created in the other. Almost everything that occurred in the past couple of years was, directly or indirectly, a consequence of this.”
– Ed Conway, Daily Telegraph. He has not bought the whole free market line on what is wrong with finance today, but this is pretty good.
This blogger makes the sort of point that ought to be on the lips of any member of the UK government right now. On the BBC Breakfast TV show this morning, one of the presenters tried to make out that the UK government’s planned £6 billion cut in the current financial year would be painful (cut to photos of concerned civil servants, etc). But in the context of the gigantic sums the UK government spends every year, £6 billion is chickenfeed. It is practically a rounding error. Even the tiniest adjustment in spending and revenues renders such a number utterly nugatory.
So what gets me is why this fact is not made clear by the government. And in addition, when asked: “So Minister, are you planning to make public sector staff redundant?” the answer must be, “Yes, there will be cutbacks. The state has taken on hundreds of thousands of folk, not in front-line services, but in the long tail of administration. Some of that has to go, hopefully by voluntary redundancies and the like but there will also have to be compulsory cuts. It will unpleasant, but the idea is to shrink the state, non-wealth creating bit of the economy and expand the wealth creating bit. There has to be a significant adjustment. Thank you very much and enjoy the Chelsea Flower Show”.
That’s what I’d say, anyway. Guess that’s why I am not an MP.
Following on from Brian’s recent essay in which he wonders about the point of spacefaring, here is a sort of related essay by the science fiction author, John Scalzi. Strongly recommended. (H/T, Boing Boing).
I have read a number of Scalzi’s novels and I enjoyed them a lot. I recommend that people who are interested start with Old Man’s War.
This is the sort of story that must give the anti-proliferation folks nightmares. On a more positive tack, though, it is testimony to the continuing trend towards minaturisation that we see in fields such as computers, engineering and medical technology.
Original link fixed. My apologies.
As recounted here in a justifiably passionate editorial about the European Union’s plans to beat up the City of London, we are reminded that, whatever the vote might have been in the May general election, that with qualified majority voting in the EU, states can – and do – gang up to put a particular country’s economic affairs in grave difficulty.
Paris and Frankfurt have, in particular, resented the prosperity of the City. And as the recent travails of the euro show, there is precious little to be said for the supposedly wiser governnance of the euro zone. There was a certain amount of gloating after the US and UK got hit by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown (some of that gloating might have been justified) but it is quite clear that the rigidities of the euro zone remain a severe problem.
Why we are in the EU again?
My good friend Stateside, Russell E Whitaker, is, like an increasing number of Facebook users, getting annoyed at how any privacy settings that might seem to be available on the service are not being respected and have in fact been eroded, according to this report. Now, I have always taken the view that the internet is not a fully robust thing from a privacy point of view, but then again, if a business claims to respect privacy, but it turns out there is a problem, then users are entitled to feel angry.
I have a FB page, but I never put sensitive personal stuff on there and I tend to prune so-called “friends” pretty ruthlessly if I find that anyone is taking liberties with me. But I take the risk, at least for the moment.
But the beauty of this technology and indeed of capitalism is that complaints about an issue – such as privacy – are already spawning new ventures and ideas. I am not sure how this venture will work out (based in NY) but I wish it the best of luck.
“Yes, we might all think that sending a virtual red rose over Facebook is silly but those sending them (and presumably to some extent those receiving them) do value them. And that value is what we measure when we talk about GDP and it is the creation of that value that allows people to make profits. There is absolutely nothing at all in the capitalist system, the free market one (these are two different things please note), the pursuit of profits or even continued economic growth that requires either the use of more limited physical resources or even the use of any non-renewable resource.”
Tim Worstall, nicely skewering the idea that economic growth is the same as ever rising consumption of finite resources. Not the same thing at all.
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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.
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