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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Well, I cannot say I am remotely surprised.
An estimated 11.3 million people – including parents who join school rotas to take pupils to sports events – already face having their backgrounds checked to allow them to work with children.
But Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.
It is really hard to know how a satire publication like the Onion or Private Eye can make a living these days.
Following on from this post about how technology can boost some businesses but later turn them over, I thought about a specific type of business that I use, as a result of one of the comments. Namely, the optician. I am one of those folk who wear glasses pretty much all day and I do not like bothering with contact lenses or laser eye surgery. I have a slight stigmatism in my right eye and contact lenses for such a thing are very pricey. Since I was a young boy I have worn specs, and after the usual phase of being teased as a “four-eyes”, I got over that, and decided, “To hell with it, I am going to go for the intelligent preppy guy look instead”. (It worked on the ladies, I find. Come to that, I find some women in glasses incredibly attractive).
But will modern technology and things like the internet put some opticians out of business? Possibly. If you know your prescription and the type of lenses you need, then I suppose that if you see a frame that suits, you can submit the order, and assuming the postal system is working, get the specs in a few days. In my case, though, I actually like to browse through a number of different frames and try them on first. There does not seem to be a substitute for doing it in the flesh, so to speak. It is the same, surely, for buying some kind of clothes, even off-the-peg ones where you know your size. Sometimes there is just no getting around the need to go to a store, go to the changing room and try stuff on.
The week resumes after a highly enjoyable and stimulating annual Libertarian Alliance conference, which I attended along with one or two other members of the Samizdata crew, such as Brian Micklethwait. I may put together some more considered thoughts about some of the ideas and issues that arose over the past two days, but for now, let me join in congratulating Antoine Clarke – another occasional Samizdata writer – for picking up a deserved literary prize, and also Tim and Helen Evans and Sean Gabb, for putting this event together. What was encouraging was how we had delegates from all over the globe, with plenty of new, young faces.
One of the best sessions was the final one, in which we were treated to a survey of how the UK public actually thinks about banking and the credit crisis. The results, as Antoine himself suggested, might show that people are far less naive in believing fashionable nonsense about financial affairs than politicians assume. It would be nice to think that whenever some warmed-up Keynesian goes on about “quantitative easing”, the response from Joe Public is to roll the eyes.
The conference also featured a highly entertaining post-dinner speech by Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes. As Paul noted, it is galling that the word “freedom” is conspicuously absent from the rhetoric of any of the main party leaders in the UK. The same, for that matter, can be said of those in countries such as the US.
There is an excellent article in the Times (of London) today about the bitter fruits of relativism, of the pernicious idea, so beloved by our faux sophisticates, that there is no such thing as objective truth. That notion has done enormous damage; far from shielding us from the effects of bigotry and violence, the idea that there are no rights or wrongs has arguably achieved the opposite. Give up reason and respect for evidence, and monsters fill up the resultant gaps. Just look at the wasteland of much of our education system today, for example.
I am reminded of an outburst from a gentleman at a recent talk I attended by the University of Texas philosopher and Objectivist, Tara Smith (a very smart and nice lady, by the way). I blogged about it here. The person concerned – I do not know his name – became incredibly angry that she had dared present any argument that says that there is an external reality outside of ourselves, that existence exists whether we like it or not, that there are laws and principles one can discover, etc. What he did not realise was that his own certainty about his own opinion undermined the notion that one cannot be certain of anything. In the act of attacking certainty, he in fact validated it.
“There is no real evidence that any fewer UK banks would have gone bust had this separation been in place. It was not proprietary trading that brought down HBOS, it was bad lending to commercial property. Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley and the Dunfermline did not own investment banks. RBS was brought to its knees as a result of a multitude of bad lending decisions, the over-priced takeover of ABN Amro and vast holdings of dodgy “assets”; its collapse was not caused by a giant investment banking bet gone wrong. In the US, it is likely that Citigroup would have required a bailout even had it not owned an investment bank. Generally, the same is true of all of virtually all the recipients of Tarp funds.”
– Allister Heath, arguing against the idea, floated the other day by the Bank of England governor, that governments should force banks to split off their supposedly high-risk investment banking arms.
Of course, with the “too big to fail” doctrine now more or less entrenched, the danger is that politicians will feel – with some justification, arguably – that they do not want taxpayers to be held to ransom by the threat of having to bail out huge firms, so the “solution” is to prevent banks being so big in the first place. My own preference is that all state-backed deposit protection should be abolished, so that any bank operating on a fractional reserve basis would have to take its chances in a free market, with the only deposit protection coming from private insurance. But in the current policymaking environment, that does not appear very likely or politically palatable. But sooner or later, the idea of taxpayers’ underwriting the losses of FRB banks has to be confronted.
There is obviously plenty of controversy – seen across the internet and the MSM – about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC’s Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional “personality” take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.
Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only “mainstream” parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as “mainstream”. After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK’s membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.
Given that the BNP – a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way – has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?
“If you want to be a conservative in an England broken by revolution, you need to look beyond a rearguard defence of forms from which all substance was long since drained.. The conservative tradition may have been dominated since the 1970s by Edmund Burke. But it does also contain the radicals of the seventeenth century. And – yes – it also has a place even for Tom Paine. If you want to preserve this nation, you must be prepared for a radical jettisoning of what is no longer merely old, but also dead. The conservative challenge is to look beneath the plumage and save the dying bird.”
– Sean Gabb. He pulls no punches in condemning what he sees as the poor conduct of the British monarchy in signing off on a host of liberty-destroying legislation, including its apparent silence over the Lisbon Treaty. Strong stuff, and I urge folk to read the whole piece.
Via Iain Dale’s blog, I came across this nifty piece of Conservative Party electioneering poster art. As Mr Dale says, this is incredibly prescient. Of course, the glee of Mr Dale in finding this is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Conservatives have not, to put it mildly, covered themselves with glory on this issue down the years, even though, to be fair, that it was Churchill’s Conservatives who axed ID cards and the final bits of rationing in the early 1950s. But whatever quibbles one might have, there is little doubt that today, Labour MPs will struggle ever to be taken seriously on the civil liberties issue. That is for certain.
Last night I listened to a great talk by Henry Porter, the journalist and book author, and the spy fiction novelist Charles Cumming. For Porter, civil liberties issues form a part of his latest book. Recommended.
This essay, written by the philosopher Edward Feser in 2005, contains much food for thought. I like these couple of paragraphs:
“The claim that we all own everything is more in need of justification than the claim that no one initially owns anything. Surely such a claim is not merely unjustified, but counterintuitive, even mysterious. Consider the following: a pebble resting uneasily on the surface of the asteroid Eros as it orbits the sun, a cubic foot of molten lava
churning a mile below the surface of the earth, one of the polar icecaps on Mars, an ant floating on a leaf somewhere in the mid-Pacific, or the Andromeda galaxy. It would seem odd in the extreme to claim that any
particular individual owns any of these things: In what sense could Smith, for example, who like most of the rest of us has never left the surface of the earth or even sent a robotic spacecraft to Eros, be said to own the
pebble resting on its surface? But is it any less odd to claim we all own the pebble or these other things? Yet the entire universe of external resources is like these things, or at least (in the case of resources that are now
owned) started out like them—started out, that is to say, as just a bunch of stuff that no human being had ever had any impact on. So what transforms it into stuff we all commonly own? Our mere existence? How so?”
“Are we to suppose that it was all initially unowned, but only until a group of Homo sapiens finally evolved on our planet, at which point the entire universe suddenly became our collective property? (How exactly did that process work?) Or was it just the earth that became our collective property? Why only that? Does something become collective property only when we are capable of directly affecting it? But why does everyone share in ownership in that case—why not only those specific individuals who are capable of affecting it: for example, explorers, astronauts, or entrepreneurs? It is, after all, never literally “we” collectively who discover Antarctica, strike oil, or go to the moon, but only particular individuals, together perhaps with technical assistance and financial backing provided by other particular individuals. Smith’s being the first to reach some distant island and build a hut on it at least makes it comprehensible how he might claim—plausibly or implausibly—to own it. This fact about Smith gives some meaning to the claim that he has come to own it. But it is not at all clear how this fact would give meaning to the claim that Jones, whom Smith has never met or even heard of, who has had no involvement in or influence on Smith’s journey and homesteading, and who lives thousands of miles away (or even years in the future), has also now come to own it.”
He also beautifully undermines the claim, sometimes made even by pro-market people, that no-one has been able to prove that property rights can ever arise justly ex-nihilo, that they are all, in the end, derived from a sort of act of initial theft. He takes that point apart.
Nichola Pease, a top City executive, caused a stir last week when she said that state-enforced maternity leave “rights” for women – and for that matter, paternity leave – was a cost that had a bad consequence. If you tell a company that it must pay a woman her full salary for a year while she is not working and raising her child, say, then, other things being equal, fewer women will be employed in the first place, however hard one tries to enforce so-called equal opportunity hiring practices.
This is a simple fact. If you raise the cost to a company of employing a person or increase the risk that employing a woman will be more expensive than employing a man, say, then fewer women will be employed. It is a fact as undeniable as a the laws of gravity. Unfortunately, one of the driving characteristics of many politicians down the ages is a petulant hatred of such facts, and a desire that 2+2 could equal five rather than four. Consider this reaction to Ms Pease’s comments by a Labour MP. It is not so much an argument as a tantrum:
“I am absolutely horrified to hear such an old-fashioned view expressed by someone who should know better.”
In other words, a City executive has said something that this MP considers to be unsayable. There is no argument given, no attempt to explain how driving up costs will not have an adverse result. End of discussion.
What needs to be pointed out is that every time the government creates some new “right” to such things, such as paid long holidays, long periods of paid leave for child-rearing, or whatever, there is a cost of some kind, that is borne by someone, often those more vulnerable than the group intended for the original benefit. The honest answer is for such MPs to openly admit as much rather than to pretend otherwise. For example, it would be refreshing if defenders of minimum wage laws could state that they prefer a bit more unemployment to the sight of people working on very low wages. Of course the argument is still bad and involves coercively arranging affairs to benefit some groups at the expense of others, but it would at least be preferable to what we usually get.
Matthew Parris, writes the following, in the course of pointing out what a total joke the UK government has become:
“The British electorate have an intuitive grasp of politics, but there’s one misunderstanding to which the generality is prone: to think driving a country would be like driving a car. Your eye would be constantly and intelligently on the road ahead; miss the brake, let your foot slip, jerk the wheel, or turn round to argue with the passengers, and you’d crash. The truth is different. As those who acquire power discover to their dismay, the controls are mushy and indirect, and the machine will run on, driverless, for some time. In the harsh light of experience, the illusion that a British Cabinet is in day-to-day control cracks.”
If it is true that the UK electorate think that a country is like a machine, with an engine, brakes, headlights, gearbox, controls and steering wheel, then that surely only demonstrates how far the poison of socialism, or what Hayek called constructivist rationalism, has seeped into the consciousness of said electorate. A country is not a single vehicle, which has been created by some single designer or set of designers, and which is designed to perform a specific purpose – such as take someone on a road from A to B. To think of a country in that way also begs the question about the choice of driver. We hope the driver will be safe, alert, and not take dangerous risks. The analogy is completely wrong. A country in fact is, as we should have learned from Michael Oakeshott, an association of persons who form certain common institutions and abide by certain laws and customs for the purpose of achieving their diverse ends.
There are many bad ideas that need to be shot down, and the “country-as-designed-machine” one is high on my hit-list.
“If spending on munitions really makes a country wealthy, the United States and Japan should do the following: Each should seek to build the most spectacular naval fleet in history, an enormous armada of gigantic, powerful, technologically advanced ships. The two fleets should then meet in the Pacific. Naturally, since they would want to avoid loss of life that accompanies war, all naval personnel would be evacuated from the ships. At that point the US and Japan would sink each other’s fleets. Then they would celebrate how much richer they had made themselves by devoting labor, steel, and countless other inputs to the production of things that would wind up at the bottom of the ocean.”
– Thomas E. Woods Jnr, in Meltdown: A free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse. (Page 105).
This is a marvellous, succinct and pretty devastating indictment of bailouts and an excellent little primer on the Austrian school’s analysis of the business cycle and the role of money. I thought I knew quite a lot about the subject but this book explains the idea of money, as a claim on resources, and the importance of understanding the balance of supply and demand for savings, quite beautifully. The book also highlights how the sharp recession of 1920-21 ended with no bailouts and is an episode that seems to baffle Keynesians.
Rather amusingly, this has been a New York Times best seller, much to the chagrin, no doubt, of NYT columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, needless to say, believes that the sort of massive government spending seen during WW2 helped end depression. To think that he actually won a Nobel. Oh, wait a minute…
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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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