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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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…
Take a look at this short video featuring Bill Browder, founder of the investment firm Hermitage, who several years ago was suddenly denied entry into the former Soviet Union for the “crime” of asking awkward questions about various Russian firms he had invested in. As I say, this sudden refusal of entry came to light a few years ago, but for some reason the video got made recently, and has stirred up fresh controversy about Mr Browder, and his treatment. I hope he has got decent security and takes care of himself.
To be honest, whenever I have an off-the-record chat with any private banker strategist, hedge fund manager etc., they tell me the same thing: avoid Russia if you do not want the risk of having your wallet lifted, or worse. It is that bad now.
But then I consider how the bond-holders in the US auto industry got the shaft during the recent bailout of said as orchestrated by Mr Obama and his pro-union political allies. The abuse of property rights knows no national boundaries.
I would be willing to wager that the Nobel represented the time when, in retrospect, it started to go really wrong for Mr Obama. He could have come across all modest and statesmanlike and told the Nobel prize givers that their award was very touching, very nice, etc, etc, but he just did not feel he had done enough to receive it, and there were more deserving recipients. To have done that, of course, would have been to demonstrate a capacity for embarrassment, for shame. Now Mr Obama has shown us that he has no such shame, that his vanity is as bad as it appears to be from this end. And that will be his downfall.
Even some folk over at that haven of idiocy, the Huffington Post, are not greatly impressed by what happened last week. Michael Moore, of course, is. With friends like these…
More good sense on the current economic difficulties.
Beyond parody.
Maybe they awarded him the gong for his attempts to shut up Islamic terrorists, etc, by the power of endlessly talking about himself. You never know, there may be something in it.
Here is a good-looking study of India, a country that, as we occasionally point out, has been and is playing a much bigger role as an economic power. I am pretty upbeat about India’s prospects.
By the way, the review of the book (H/T, Stephen Hicks), makes a passing swipe at the Economist magazine that will gladden the heart of that publication’s tormentor, our own Paul Marks.
This might be the start of the end for Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, who in many ways has the honesty that many of our NuLabour pols do not, to express his sheer brazen enjoyment at the benefits of being in office. But he is a terrible man in many ways – it is not as if he has rolled back the parasitic Italian state, for example. The trouble is, whoever replaces this character will be just as bad. Maybe not as venal, but just as unlikely to shrink the state.
Sir Christopher Bland (somewhat unfortunate surname, Ed) has a debate in the latest edition of the UK magazine, Standpoint, with Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor, as his opponent. Moore – who has vowed not to pay the BBC licence fee tax until Jonathan Ross – a boorish chatshow host and radio DJ – is sacked for a certain incident, challenges the whole idea of tax-financed broadcasting. His arguments are forceful, not least the point that the BBC, as a privileged recipient of funds raised on pain of imprisonment, can and does undermine would-be commercial competitors, therby stifling potential new ideas and models of broadcasting. He points out that while the BBC claims to not be biased, it is in fact biased, and it would be better for such biases to be upfront rather than concealed. I am sure that Samizdata readers are mostly familiar with the standard liberal critique of the BBC’s very existence, so I will not rehearse the argument here again.
What struck me, however, is how lame Sir Christopher’s debating points are. Check them out for yourself, gentle reader. Pretty much most of his comments fall into the “only a fool could deny how wonderful the BBC is” and gives variations on how the sky will fall in on the quality of UK television if the licence fee system is scrapped. We get the now-standard sneer about American and foreign TV. Zzzzz. In fact, he rarely engages very energetically with Moore’s points; rather, he harrumphs that Moore is some sort of free marketeer zealot, and of course, brings out the standard BS line that anyone who disagrees with tax-financed broadcasting is a “philistine”. The lameness, the refusal to think in principles of any coherent kind, is really quite striking. It is hard not to smell a certain whiff of defeat.
The attitudes of Sir Christopher – no doubt a most civilised and agreeable member of what might pass for the “establishment” in this country – are pretty widely shared across much of the population. His worldview, his inability to understand a world in which the state did not grab such a huge share of our lives and attempt to manage it, is shared, for example, by all those who cannot consider how healthcare will be delivered without a Soviet-model system such as the NHS. Moore makes this point; he even points to the parallel between the old Church of England, and its now-abolished tithe on parishioners, be they Anglicans or not, and the licence fee, which is paid by those who either watch the BBC, or who do not. Bland, of course, just brushes it aside. One suspects that much of his worldview is shared by the likes of David Cameron.
Incidentally, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Standpoint. It is a definite plus in the UK magazine scene.
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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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