“It says something about our prospective future prime minister that when he decided to respond to accusations of being a lightweight, he did so by granting privileged access to the “most fashionable man in Britain”, and that the subsequent book that was produced (for which he was paid £20,000) and the subsequent articles that continue to be produced (Jones recently wrote a 3,288 word piece on Cameron for The Mail on Sunday), have resulted in revelations such as the fact that Cameron doesn’t really like Pot Noodle, that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, that he has “small flecks of grey in his thatch” and that his karaoke song of choice is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles, because “even I couldn’t muck up a song like that”.
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The news out of Haiti today has been uniformly grim. As I watched the TV footage of people trying to find survivors from underneath the rubble, it was natural to wonder whether we haven’t been rather pathetic here in Britain to carp about the harsh winter, since, although the winter snows have not been a ton of laughs, it has not meant the kind of devastating loss of life and wreckage of homes that happens in an earthquake event. Rand Simberg makes the point that while there is never complete protection for any kind of country against natural disasters, it tends to be a pretty useful rule of thumb that richer countries, with superior building standards and better means of rescuing those in danger, tend to fare better when nature strikes. Maybe he is right – I think the Japanese, for instance, with their almost constant experience of earthquakes, are in a better position, due to the wealth and technical prowess of that country, to deal with such events than a miserably poor, conflict-riven nation such as Haiti. But frankly, even the richest, most technically savvy nation on earth is going to be clobbered hard by a high-category quake. Let’s hope help can get to those who need it most. Here is a site that seems to be offering shrewd advice and links to those involved in the relief efforts. January 13th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am always struck, whenever I take the Eurostar train to Paris, as I did this morning, at how much graffiti there is on the walls near the railway tracks and on the sides of the often ugly buildings that sit next to the tracks near Gare du Nord. Some of the graffiti is in fact rather well done, even rather amusing. Here is a collection of the sort of stuff you can come across in the French capital. Of course, graffiti is an assault on property – the assault is part of the thrill for those who do it – so beyond issues of whether the daubs are ugly or not, it is something that a liberal respectful of property and boundaries will be interested in. Even if I see a clever piece of graffiti, it makes me angry that someone’s property, on which attention might have been lavished, has been defaced. In the case of privately owned property, the offence is clear and obvious: spraying graffiti on the side of your house, say, is the same, in terms of the assault on what is yours, as spraying paint on your face. With public buildings paid for by taxpayers, my view is that taxpayers are entitled to expect that, assuming they have to be forced to pay for buildings at all, that the buildings are respected and kept in good condition, and not disfigured. I suppose some folk of an anarchist type might feel that defacing public buildings is a way of protesting against such things, although I have never seen a piece of graffiti with any slogans on it that might have appealed to an individualist anarchist like Lysander Spooner or Benjamin Tucker, say. If I see an item of graffiti saying that “taxation is theft” or that “the state is not your friend”, I’ll be sure to try and photograph it. On a related point, I have to say that the Eurostar terminal at King’s Cross St Pancras in London knocks the spots off its Paris counterpart. What a magnificent building. For once, old London town has its French rival beat when it comes to sheer architectural magnificence. January 12th, 2010 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Elvis would have been 75 today. I remember the day he died, and he was a megastar way before I was a twinkle in my mother’s eye. But I watched a couple of TV shows last night about him, featuring some of his performances, and even with the grainy old TV, some of that amazing charisma comes across. January 8th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anatole Kaletsky still inhabits the mental world where debt-driven crises are cured by more debt, where the damage inflicted by madly cheap money can be cured by, er, even cheaper money. And in the process, he dismisses anyone who might demur from this fantastical notion as mad ideologues or right-wing troublemakers:
So perhaps Mr Kaletsky can explain why, if Brown was such a great man, he presided over a situation as finance minister when the UK ran a budget deficit even when the economy was – according to official statistics – growing reasonably strongly before the crisis. And maybe he can explain why, in previous historical episodes, such as in Britain during the early 80s or in the early 1920s in the US, the economy recovered from recession without massive government spending and oodles of cheap central bank money. Of course, Kaletsky is right to point out that this massive pile of public debt that has now been built up will have to be reduced, and probably far more severely, than the UK’s opposition Conservatives have been willing to let on. But then such a process is bound, by the logic of Mr Kaletsky’s own neo-Keynesian macro-economics, to drag on any future recovery, since such a debt reduction programme is bound to involve tax rises as well as public spending cuts. By “anti-Keynesian academic ideologues” – as opposed to sober-minded sages such as himself – Mr Kaletsky is presumably referring to what can be loosely described as the Austrian school of economics, a school that regards money not as a metaphysical abstraction to be manipulated at will by a handful of central bankers and their political overlords, but as a claim on real resources, which cannot be simultaneously used by different people at the same time. Instead of sneering at such views, it would be more edifying if Mr Kaletsky, and those who share his views, could address them cogently. Here is a decent article on a related theme. January 7th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.” – Arnold Kling. The quote is equally applicable to the UK. Read the whole item. It contains interesting commentary on a new book by Thomas Sowell. By the way, the question of the influence of an “educated class” begs the interesting question as to whether this class is all that well educated in the first place. Surely one of the hallmarks of a traditional, liberal education was understanding certain lessons of history, such as the dangers of concentrations of power in a few hands with few checks or balances. Just a thought. January 7th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story is a fairly nice summary of the icy conditions affecting bits of North America, Asia and Western Europe. Here in London and the Southeast, we are getting snowed on quite a bit; other parts of the UK have been hit even harder. This time last year, I had cause to snigger at some of the Man-made global warming folk out there and I suppose I was being a bit mischievious, in that AGW alarmists would argue that one or two bad winters hardly undermines their argument, which is true, but then a couple of sizzling summers cannot, by the same logic, be used as confirmation of AGW, either. But much more of this in the next few years, and I would not be at all surprised if public skepticism about the whole AGW issue deepens yet further. One by-product may be changes to transport and the types of cars people use, with more four-wheel drive vehicles coming along (and no, not necessarily SUVs, but smaller ones). And expect sales of these things to rise. And maybe, this book might get more readers, too. The story, “Fallen Angels”, is about what might happen when governments succeed in massively cutting C02 emissions. Be careful what you wish for. January 6th, 2010 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness. In truth, sexual conservatives wants to make everyone else pay for their own dark thoughts.” January 6th, 2010 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
I pretty much endorse this list, over at Big Hollywood, of the 10 worst films of the past 10 years, although I am sure Samizdata readers will come up with some more for their own lists. I did not see No Old Country For Old Men, which is one of the derided films on the list, but the way that certain reviewers wrote about it, meant I just knew it was the sort of pretentious, nihilistic waste of several hours that the writer in the article I have linked to said it was. Plus I happen to think the Coen brothers are a bit over-rated anyway, although I quite enjoyed Fargo. As for the best 10 films of the past decade, name your choices. For my part, I would say that two films I saw last year – The Wrestler and Gran Torino – deserve to be on such a list. Here are my other choices: The Aviator – the biopic of Howard Hughes. Serenity – Okay, it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series first, but even so, a fine film. Casino Royale – Despite some flaws, it marked a triumphant reboot of 007 on the screen. Ian Fleming would have approved. Sideways – A funny comedy set in California’s wine country. My tour of Napa and Sonoma was not quite as eventful. Spirited Away – Proof that Miyazaki remains one of the world’s greatest animators and film artists. The Incredibles – I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The “designer” character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand. Gladiator – “Upon my signal, unleash hell”. The film that made Russell Crowe a megastar. The Lives of Others – Brilliant film set in former East Germany, demonstrating the utter evil that is done in the name of the “surveillance state”. January 3rd, 2010 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie – writing in the WSJ – has a nice article up about how the ‘Noughties (sorry, I cannot think of a better term) have been generally miserable ones for those concerned about liberty and constraining government. He also has a few predictions for the next 10 years. Even leaving aside the response to 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments have lost few chances to find reasons, or excuses, to tax, monitor and generally annoy us. I love this paragraph:
Nudity as a condition of air travel. There’s an idea to conjure with on this cold Sunday afternoon. January 3rd, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And what should our mood be? The population restrictionists say we should be sad and worry. I and many others believe that the trends suggesst joy and celebration at our newfound capacity to support human life – healthily, and with fast-increasing access to education and opportunity all over the world. I believe that the population restrictionists’ hand-wringing view leads to despair and resignation. Our view leads to hope and progress, in the reasonable expectation that that the energetic efforts of humankind will prevail in the future, as they have in the past, to increase worldwide our numbers, our health, our wealth, and our opportunities…..Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solving those problems.” – Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, 2nd edition, page 588. The other day, Perry de Havilland took aim at those who would use the violence-backed power of the State to restrict human population. The late Julian Simon had no time for the neo-Malthusian mindset. Among other things, he did not regard wealth as somehow fixed and that if there were more people around, there would be less for each person. We are richer now than we were 100 years ago, and there are more of us. If you want a book that cuts through the crud of the gloomongering cast of mind, this book still ranks up top as one of the very best. December 30th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This headline and lead paragraph in the Times (of London) deserves a sort of award: Thrifty families accused of prolonging the recession –
This is a sort of reflexive crude Keynesian message at work; the laziness of the assumption that recessions are ended by people spending more – never mind where the money comes from – continues to hold a grip on the MSM. In fairness, maybe what the writer is trying to say is that saving is a good thing but if everyone saves “too much” (however one can define that), then in the aggregate, it drags everything down. But that does rather ignore the situation that has built up over the years, and the disruption to the economic system caused by excessively cheap credit. People who try to reduce their debt, save more and decide to forgo spending money they haven’t got are not “prolonging the recession” beyond some point that can be marked down on a graph. The current economic Snafu was caused – as the author of this newspaper item must be dimly aware – by a country hooked on the drug of cheap credit, beguiled by the idiotic notion that whenever the drug wore off and the hangover kicked in, that that nice Dr Greenspan and friends would administer yet more of the drug, to get yet another high. That way lies the equivalent of liver poisoning. It may seem a Scrooge-like message for this time of year to point out that you cannot spend money that you don’t have; businesses cannot invest money that has not been already saved, and that interest rates must reflect the balance of supply and demand for savings. The “Austrian” economic insight that money is a claim on resources, and that two people cannot hold the same claim on a resource at the same time, needs to be relentlessly rammed home. The best way to end a recession is to unravel the massive misallocation of resources caused by printing money as soon as possible, to let labour markets clear, to cut public spending and cut taxes, and where necessary, recapitalise banks speedily. (Check out this paper for a good course to steer). Such a process is inevitably painful. In the short run, the pain is worse than the sort of dragged out situation we have now. But ask yourself this question, dear reader: what is the more compassionate policy – a short, sharp recession and closure of failed banks, followed by a rapid 1921-like recovery, or a Japanese-style multi-decade of stagnation? On that note, this makes a good Christmas present for those interested in economic affairs, if you still have the time to get it shipped. December 23rd, 2009 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
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