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.
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Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and media columnist, has this to say about the new top income tax rate of 50 per cent, due to take effect from next April. He is pretty blunt:
So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s. If Gordon Brown remains in power – and perhaps even if he does not – Britain’s top rate of tax will soar far above that of our most important global competitors. China, Germany and Australia are on 45 per cent maximum; Italy is on 43 per cent; Ireland on 41 per cent; France on 40 per cent; and America is on 35 per cent.
I would not mind so much if I thought this expedient was temporary, or that it would work. If the 50p tax was going to plug the hole in the nation’s finances, then it might be a good thing, and it would be right that the rich should pay a larger share. But even on the Government’s figures it is only due to raise £2.5 billion of the £700 billion required – and those estimates may be wildly optimistic. This tax is predicted to drive away at least 25,000 people; it may simply encourage more avoidance; it may actually cost money, not bring it in.
As he says, many of those whose lives are shaped by the shrivelled, dog-in-the-manger philosophy of collectivism will not give a damn. So what, they will say? And in the Daily Telegraph article that Boris Johnson writes, you can read a goodly number of such dismissive comments, from the sort of cretins – I use the word without apology – who seem driven more by hatred of the rich than by a serious desire to improve conditions generally.
But what interests me in the politics of this is how emphatic Mr Johnson is in saying what a disaster the top rate will be. He’s absolutely right, of course, and it is heartening that a senior figure from the opposition Conservatives should say so. I have my problems with Mr Johnson – he’s certainly no consistent advocate of small government – but by goodness, it is good that he is making this point and in this emphatic way. No doubt Mr Johnson will be told by the various unlovely allies of David Cameron to shut up, to not be “difficult”. (The same thing happened when he mentioned the Tory promise to hold a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty). Well, to hell with that.
It appears that an incoming Tory – or BlueLabour – government will not reverse this new, top rate in the first budget after any election. That would be a gross mistake. I hope Mr Johnson does not shut up on this issue. Of course, he also has to practice what he preaches in his own job.
As Samizdata regulars might recall, I am not exactly a great fan of Naomi Klein, author of the Shock Doctrine, a book that tries to argue, rather absurdly, that various dastardly free market governments (which ones? Ed) exploited, in a sort of underhand way, the inexplicable failures of socialism (the horror!) to impose those terrible ideas of people such as Milton Friedman. Yet there was nothing underhand or deceitful about what say, Sir Keith Joseph – one of Mrs Thatcher’s close political allies – argued when he said that the stagflation of the 1970s had undermined the Keynesian settlement and proved that big government was harmful. Far from being some sort of sly attempt to exploit a shock, the governments of Reagan/Thatcher or even some of the social democratic governments in the 80s such as Spain, implemented some forms of free market reform because it made sense, given the situation. Anyway, you can read some of my views on this here, and there is a demolition of the book here.
Robert Higgs, a libertarian writer, has pointed out that in fact, it is frequently the case that disasters of various kinds frequently are used by political leaders to expand, not roll back, the state. It may be that the partial halt, if not reverse, to the growth of the state that occured under the Reagan/Thatcher episode was an aberration, although I obviously hope it was not.
Of course, in the ultra-long run, the numerous failures of endlessly repeated regulation, tax and yet more regulation and taxes, may yet produce such a disaster that this “shock” may once again encourage the “doctrine” of free markets, limited government, honest money and free trade. So I guess we must hope that in a perverse kind of way, Ms Klein is vindicated, if not quite in the way she imagines or wants.
Why give a damn what this person says? Well, she sells a lot of books. A lot. JK Galbraith, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and others do the same. And there are articles by the Richard Murphys, George Monbiots and countless other characters that feed the collectivist narrative that what the world needs even more of is more government, more rules and more powers for the likes of them. Therefore, I share the view of the US libertarian and author, Tom G. Palmer, that we need to be better at knocking their theories down and responding vigorously. And that is why I salute the indefatigible Tim Worstall, who seems to have dedicated part of his blogging energies to making the existence of Richard Murphy, hater of economic and social liberty and a general buffoon, a waking nightmare. It may seem cruel to mock the afflicted, but bear in mind that at the moment, the Murphys of this world seem to be succeeding in their desire to shut down an element of global markets, otherwise known as tax havens, since these places create one of the few incentives left to keep taxes down. He’s not just a harmless buffoon, comforting though it might be to assume so. He’s certainly not harmless, and neither is Ms Klein.
“The first World War is one of the topics in history that interests me the most. I really think that if more people focused on leadership during that war, the concerns over “market failure” and the faith in political leadership would decline. I challenge anyone to come up with a group of business villains who caused as much death and suffering as the “legitimate” political leaders of 1914. My proposal for Veterans’ Day observances is that they should include a re-telling of the history of World War I along the lines of the Passover re-telling of the Exodus. My goal would be to help inoculate people from believing in the wisdom of the ruling class.”
– Arnold Kling
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new President of the EU state – for that is what it now is – will not be our own former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, but a Belgian politician of glorious anonymity. And quite right too. While some of us might have hoped that the election of Mr Blair might have provided much entertainment as he swanked around the chancelleries of Europe and the world with his wife, and therby discredited the whole purpose of his office, it was not to be. Far too many European politicians, while they are enthusiastic members of the EU oligarchy and supporters of transnational progressivism like Mr Blair, did not approve of his full-hearted support for the recent removal from power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and of Mr Blair’s support for the evil Boooosh. So that was that.
Oh well, I am sure Mr Blair will find a way to pay for all his expensive houses.
David Thompson – a blogger who seems to find some superb photos for his site, by the way – has a nice roundup connected to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, about which Perry de Havilland has already had some thoughts. As a reminder, here is a film I mentioned some time ago, based in former East Germany, that is a telling story about the dangers of the surveillance state.
It remains something of a mystery as to why Communism was able to appeal to some very smart people for so long. Oh sure, many supporters of totalitarian socialism were transparently evil or very, very thick but obviously that does not quite explain it all. The idea of Marxism-Leninism as a substitute for religion comes closest, in my mind, to explaining its hold on many well-meaning minds as well as less benign ones. Some of that religious-substitute drive has now been shifted to the Green movement.
But even so, I continue to this day to be surprised by how supposedly sharp people got swayed by communism. Take one random example: the 20th century spy novelist and film screenwriter, Eric Ambler. I have long been a fan of his fiction: the modern spy novel owes a lot to his style and method. He died in the late 90s at a ripe old age; reading an introduction to one of his books, I was a bit taken aback – although maybe I should not have been – to read that he was an enthusiast for the Soviet Union right up until the Hitler-Stalin pact at the start of WW2, which “depressed him deeply”. One wonders why this acute observer of human nature in its more sleazy respects had not cottoned on to the massive killings, the Man-made famines, that were already an established feature of 1930s Russia? By the mid-30s, this stuff was not a secret any more. British journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge had already exposed a lot of what was going on; even old Bertrand Russell, a man capable of considerable foolishness as well as brilliance in other ways, fingered the Soviet Union as a gangster state.
“I can easily see how there’s a connection between individualism and depression. Once you manage to throw off the social-collectivist hive-mind and think for yourself, you cannot fail to see how deeply into-the-shit ‘society’ has got itself.”
Tanuki, a Samizdata commenter, writing about this.
It is Friday, and I cannot be bothered to ponder the latest outrages of our political oligarchy. For our mental health, let us ponder the lines of this new little beauty from Porsche.
Burn that carbon, baby!
Blogger and debunker of various economic fallacies, Tim Worstall, points out something that tends to be forgotten in some of the angrier, gloomier commentary about the European Union and the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty. We – the UK that is – can leave if we wish to do so, and it will be a lot less complex than such a process can be made to appear. That surely is the 800 llb gorilla in the drawing room – we can get out pretty fast if the whole edifice becomes intolerable. And there is nothing that any EU bureaucrat or their political allies can do about it. How likely are they to ever use a military option? Hmmm.
Simon Heffer has a pretty good – and by his standards, measured – take on how Mr Obama has been doing. Latest election results in Virginia and New Jersey were clear slaps in the face for him, and a boost to the GOP.
But as we have found here with Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has profited from the sheer, plodding ghastliness of Gordon Brown, the welcome fall from grace of Mr Obama, a puffed up Chicago machine politician, is very different from meaning that the GOP is back on the road to recovery. As our own Perry de Havilland points out, the Republicans need to rediscover the “leave me alone” agenda of limited government, low taxes, tight spending and free trade. And they need to rediscover it convincingly, and learn the lessons of George W. Bush’s terrible error of talking the free market talk while doing the exact opposite. The GOP also needs to remember that being in favour of small government is not just about economics, either.
As I wondered at the time, the absurd decision to award Mr Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace was almost like a curse. And maybe it proved a turning point: the point at which the sheer absurdity of this hard-left “community organiser” and his Marxist associates became too much for too many Americans to bear. The odds must be shortening on him becoming a one-term occupant of the White House.
A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if the allocation of scarce resources that have competing uses is no longer the province of voluntary market exchange, but state control, it gives all manner of power, sometimes life and death power, to state functionaries. I wrote about the issue of healthcare, but we have had another example here in socialist Britain, in the form of our state education system.
At present, parents who send their children to state schools must send them to a school that operates in a “catchment area”. Parents who want to send their children to a school in a different catchment area cannot do so, except in exceptional circumstances. And much to the comical horror of our educational establishment, some parents have told lies about where they life so they can send their children to the highest-performing schools. The performance figures of school pupils are now published and, while a crude measure of performance in some ways, give parents at least some idea of where the best schools are. And so naturally, parents like to choose the best schools.
Of course, if we scrapped the state schooling system, and gave generous tax breaks or vouchers worth several thousand pounds to any parent with children, they could directly shop around for the best schools, and the whole nonsense of catchment area allocation would disappear. New education entrepreneurs would spring up. The catchment area mentality is partly drawn from a classic piece of egalitarian zero-sum thinking, which goes a bit like this: there are only so many good teachers to go around, and it is wrong that some children should be better schooled than others because of some unjust inequality in the spending power of their parents. But leaving aside the fact that I deny it is unjust for parents to spend as much as they want on their children’s schooling, the fact is that if you give far more choice to parents, competition will drive up the overall standard of schooling, and this, in my view, will disproportionately benefit youngsters from the poorest backgrounds. It is poor children who most need the kind of competition and drive of a school that has to worry about keeping its “customers”. Let’s face it, children from middle class schools will always be able to have some of the benefits of private tuition, etc.
I know that one objection to vouchers is that the state could, presumably, dictate certain standards for any school receiving voucher cash, and might use that power as a way of interfering with education another way. Fair point. To reduce the dangers of that happening, any voucher scheme or tax break system for schools should be accompanied by the obliteration of the current education bureaucracy. This is desirable on a number of grounds, not least for the cuts to state spending. It is, however, folly to imagine that a perfect free market system would be on the table any time soon, but as an intermediary step, greater parental choice, which would be of particularly great value to parents on low or moderate incomes, would be an enormous benefit to society, not just in educational terms, but also as a way of reinforcing the power of parents and of families generally. As some readers might remember me saying before, any such reform should also be accompanied by a reduction in the school leaving age.
But the present system of allocating school places by a rigid geographical formula, and policing it in the current way, is simply unendurable. It is also worth considering something else: in UK society, many of the big spending decisions that people make, either as individuals or as parents, are not mediated through the voluntary exchange of a market, but via the “tax-now and we might give you something in return” route of the state. On education and health – two of the most important issues for us – the role of the private sector is squeezed to the margins. One would have thought that the great growth in the prosperity of the West would have made the involvement of the state in such large areas less necessary than it might have appeared to someone in say, the late 1940s, but judging by this story about schools and catchment areas, the statist mindset is as strong as it was in the era of Clement Attlee.
We are used to all manner of choices in our lives in the West, whether it be our choice of holiday, spouse or computer system. Is it really such a massive leap to hope that parental choice of school will soon be as unremarkable as any other choice we make in our lives?
Via those observant followers of tech weirdness, Boing Boing, here is an electronic map that identifies where US bailout money gets spent. I am not quite sure of the accuracy of the plots, but cynics will have their views confirmed that a lot of bailout money seems to be clustered in politically sensitive places.
Whatever the flaws, I am all in favour of such “gimmicks” if they help people to visualise the scale of the state, taxes, and so on. For example, I support the way the UK’s Adam Smith Institute and others make a point about “tax freedom day”, the day in the year when you cease to work for the state and your earnings go to you. Such things can ram home just what government costs in way that no amount of elegantly written treatises can do.
“The Japanese government did absolutely everything the Austrian theory suggests it should not do in order to fight recession. It engaged in every single activity that Keynesians like Paul Krugman recommended. As a result, its slump went on for a decade and a half. Keynesians continue to recommend these very policies for the United States, as if the debacle in Japan never occurred. In late 2008 financial newspapers in the US actually began to speak of a revival of Keynesian thinking (claiming, absurdly enough, that the present crisis gave the ideas of Keynes, one of the twentieth century’s collection of inexplicably respected crackpots, a new lease of life) again with no mention of Japan.”
Thomas Woods, Meltdown, A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Page 84.
This book is full of great passages like this. I have already quoted a nice line from Mr Woods mocking the contention that the enormous expansion of government spending in WW2 helped “solve” the Great Depression. Incredibly, there were people who actually defended this absurd idea on our comment boards. It never fails to amaze me that people overlook a basic fact of economic life: we work to produce stuff that people want to consume. The kind of state domination of a country during war, with its rationing, government direction of labour, and of course, mass conscription, hardly sounds like the sort of policy that anyone interested in increased prosperity should favour.
There is one point where I disagree with Mr Woods. He says the veneration of Keynes is inexplicable. It is in fact pretty easy to understand: he had a sort of superficial plausibility, and of course his ideas were meat and drink to politicians looking for intellectual cover to expand their powers. Even so, I do kind of wonder if Keynes would be embarrassed by some of the people who claim his name as justification for their views.
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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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