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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A good article over at Reason by Ronald Bailey, the magazine’s science correspondent. He talks about the factors that explain why humans haven’t been back to the Moon since the early 1970s. It is, he says, because of a lack of profit.
Every time I write something about the incredible feat of putting someone on the Moon, as happened almost exactly 40 years ago, there is an inevitable chorus of criticism – much of it justified – about how the huge sums of taxpayers’ money involved rendered the project beyond the pale, even if the critics grudgingly accept what a great adventure the whole thing was. It has to be accepted that by “crowding out” private space initiatives in the way they did, government agencies both in the US, former USSR and elsewhere have arguably retarded more promising, long-term space ventures that might have got off the ground. The existence of large, politically directed agencies like Nasa do not help innovation, either. Consider how quickly the aircraft design process occured from the Wright Brothers and through to the jet age, and then compare the rate of progress of space flight over the past 40 years. It is not a flattering comparison. So this is precisely why Dale Amon is so right to comment on stuff like this.
The best way to honour the likes the astronauts, both the living, such as Buzz Aldrin, and the dead, such as Gus Grissom, is not to continue down the statist path of space flight. This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats.
I always thought gleaming, European or US wooden motorboats were the height of cool. One can imagine David Niven, Cary Grant or Sophia Loren behind the wheel of one of these beauties. Yes, I know that in technology terms, some of the modern stuff is much better, but never mind. All I need now is my private Italian lake, and I can use one.
(You can tell I have been out of the country for a few days and my mind is not entirely on TARP, Gordon Brown’s mental health, taxes, ID cards…..)
Until fairly recently, I have been a fan of budget airlines, if only because they have enabled my family and friends to whizz around the skies of Europe seeing interesting places and keeping in touch with loved ones. (Until I make my millions and can afford a Learjet, this will probably not change). I prefer Easyjet to Ryanair in this – by a whisker – because the commutes from the airports that airline uses to wherever I want to go tend to be so long as to undermine some of the cost savings of using the airline. This is a marginal difference between the two airlines and other passengers might take a different view. So Easyjet gets the nod. But until now.
Yesterday, on a fairly routine flight out of Europe, I spotted something that made my jaw drop – although that may be my naivete here. A young, short woman – less than 5ft tall – was struggling to push her hand luggage item into the locker above her seat. The bag was not all that big or heavy. But the flight attendant, a 30-something young guy with a rather annoying tendency to giggle at the passangers and staff constantly, refused point blank to help her move the item. I think the line went something like this: “It is not my job to move your stuff. If you cannot move it, then it is too big for you and it goes into the hold.”
Eventually I helped the lady put the bag, which was fairly light, into the locker. Now I have checked the regulations on the Easyjet website and I cannot see where it is stated that flight attendants are not supposed to help short people push their bags into a locker. In other words, a woman was refused help because she was short, as far as I can tell. My wife speculated that Easyjet staff do not get medical insurance as part of their pay package, so they have refused to do anything – such as lift bags – that might lead to a problem. That may be the reason.
I hate the whole litigation culture so I would not advise the person in question to have a go at Easyjet. And it is a hassle to spend more money to fly with an airline where the staff do not come close to treating their paying customers with an attitude hovering between fake bonhomie and outright contempt. And in these straightened times, we’ll probably do the British thing, bear up and put up with it. But all the same, I was not impressed by the orange airline, and will be avoiding it in future if at all possible. In fact, when I head for France next month, I’m taking the ferry across the English Channel and then duelling it out wiith the motorists of the Fifth Republic.
Update: another big and fatal air crash. There seem to have been rather a lot of them lately.
“It has always been one of libertarianism’s insights…..that massive concentrations of government power are more likely to be used to benefit other huge concentrations of wealth and power than help the needy or downtrodden…the powerful few who benefit from government action are more highly motivated to work the mechanisms of democracy to their benefit than are the masses who all pay a little – often too little in each specific case to feel it worth fighting, or even knowing about – and thus win in the democratic game of shifting property and wealth from person, or group, to another. If a government were restricted to its libertarian minimums of protecting citizens’ life and property from force and fraud, all a corporation could do is to try to sell us something and we could decide whether or not to buy. It couldn’t tax us for its benefit, raise tariffs on its competitors to make their products more expensive, subsidize bad loans or overseas expansion, or take formerly private property on the grounds that it will make more lucrative use of it than would the former owner.”
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, page 589.
“Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the Earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says: “Let’s give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Jones will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions in the hand of Jones, we will be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.” Surely in that sort of situation, no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule…..it is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of the State that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social protection and defense.”
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, page 68, quoted on pages 380-381 of Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty. The paperback copy contains a rather barbed piece of blurb by the publisher. The book is far from “hagiographic”, but is clearly sympathetic.
Doherty’s book is great. It is a bit of a shame that it does not say all that much about what happened in the libertarian scene in the UK, but that is a sort of British bleat from yours truly.
In response to a US article that talks about David Cameron, Conservative Party leader, and some other prominent figures, such as Iain Duncan-Smith and his own brand of Toryism, I left this comment:
“I am not sure what is so libertarian about Mr Cameron’s brand of soft-paternalist Toryism. For sure, they are tolerant on certain social issues, but as we found a year ago on issues like Green taxes on cheap airlines, the instincts of this lot are to regulate, to tax, to “nudge” us unwashed masses in the direction they want us to go.”
“IDS may moan that Mrs Thatcher and others were unduly focused on economics; what these critics miss is that the underlying problem in the UK right now is, still, about the relationship between the individual and the state. The state takes about half of our wealth, and regulates a good deal of the rest of it. How anyone with a claim to be called conservative can defend this state of affairs, or criticise those who would push the state back to a more modest role in our lives, is a total mystery.”
While the Tories may have pledged to shut down the odd quango and scrap ID cards (but not, as far as I know, the underlying database), anyone expecting the Tories to lead us to the sunlit uplands of freedom is a fool.
I am not quite sure how robust this report is in terms of its data sample, but it does rather undermine the standard complaint that the British are the worst tourists. I am still not entirely convinced, but still:
PARIS (Reuters Life!) – French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as bad at foreign languages, tight-fisted and arrogant, according to a survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.
They finish in last place in the survey carried out for internet travel agency Expedia by polling company TNS Infratest, which said French holidaymakers don’t speak local languages and are seen as impolite.
Blimey.
“It’s mainly the fact that they speak little or no English when they’re abroad, and they don’t speak much of the local language,” Expedia Marketing Director Timothee de Roux told radio station France Info. “The French don’t go abroad very much. We’re lucky enough to have a country which is magnificent in terms of its landscape and culture,” he said, adding that 90 per cent of French people did their traveling at home.
Yet we Anglos are not that great at speaking foreign languages either. I mean, I speak passable French, German and a few phrases in Italian, but most French folk I have met abroad do speak English of varying degrees. To a certain extent, such a finding might depend on the type of tourist and the places they go to: most French tourists or expats living in London will tend, I find, to be pretty keen to find out about where they are and so will learn the language a bit.
The report concludes:
“But French tourists received some consolation for their poor performance, finishing third after the Italians and British for dress sense while on holiday.”
Touche!
I was not able to make it to last weekend’s extravaganza of classic cars, racers and glorious carbon-emitting beauties of Formula 1, but I certainly wish I was there. The Goodwood Festival of Speed, held in west Sussex in July, is always a great event.
Here’s the sort of vehicle that will be running. Serious petrol-head eye candy.
Distance can lend enchantment, and I fondly remember my holiday trips out west to California, trekking in Yosemite, drinking wines in Napa, gorging on seafood in San Francisco and Monterrey, firing handguns in Santa Clara, and wandering around Getty’s art museum in Malibu. Wonderful stuff. I started going there in the early 1990s to visit an old US buddy of mine who lived in Cupertino, in the San Jose area, at the time, working in the software business, as almost everyone else there seemed to do at the time. It seemed bright, shiny and incredibly affluent. IThe locals were very friendly. It is easy to see why the area can appeal to an outsider who has become fed up with crusty old Blighty.
But, and it is one hell of a big but, California has serious problems. The state government is about to go bust. The locals seem unable to stomach voting for less spending to curb runaway debt. Thousands of firms are relocating to cheaper places to do business where the regulations are less stifling, such as Nevada or Texas. California is, in many respects, a harbinger of what could happen to the rest of the US if Mr Obama gets his way with ideas such as carbon cap and trade, socialised medicine, heavier taxes on the middle and upper classes and more regulation of business. California is as near as it gets to a European-style social democracy. Well, the results are in, ladies and gentlemen, from this experiment, and it has been a disaster.
And for that reason alone, it is hardly very reassuring that David Cameron, or iDave, as he is sometimes called for his enthusiasm for all things trendily tecchy, is looking to California as a model. Of course, there was once a part of California – Orange County – that was a hotbed of libertarian-style conservatism in the heyday of Barry Goldwater and to a certain extent, under Ronald Reagan. But unless I have missed something, that Goldwaterite spirit of rugged individualism has gone on the wane in the Golden State.
It pays to watch California. In many ways, it has been a place that has set the tone not just for politics in the US, but by extension, in other English-speaking nations. So it pays to learn the right lessons.
There have been a few clashes between Switzerland and the US, and to a certain extent, Britain, in recent months over the fact that centuries-old Swiss bank secrecy laws prevent Swiss-based banks from divulging information about their clients to foreign governments that suspect people to be evading taxes. Evasion is not a crime in Swiss law, contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon legal distinction between avoidance (which is broadly ok), and evasion (which isn’t). UBS, the Zurich-listed banking and wealth management giant, is currently embroiled in a case in the US in which the Department of Justice is demanding that the Swiss bank reveals details on up to 52,000 US clients. UBS is, so far, telling the American authorities to sod off. But the affair has cost UBS: the bank has stopped offering offshore banking to US clients and other non-US banks may also follow suit, or start to do so.
Meanwhile, countries such as Germany and the UK have been leaning on Switzerland to crack its secrecy laws, but that is not easy. To do so means that the Swiss electorate would have to approve primary domestic legislation and given that Swiss banks account for about 13 per cent of the country’s GDP, I can hardly see the Swiss voters, unless they are very stupid, throwing away one of their economic ace cards.
And I have defended tax havens several times before, for those who want to see why I take my position in the way I do. In summary: I consider what some countries are doing to be nothing less than an attempt to create a global tax cartel, with jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Singapore or Monaco in the position of non-cartelised competitors. But as we have seen in the case of OPEC in the 1990s, when the oil price was low, cartels crumble eventually. I cannot see countries such as India, China, Russia or Brazil shunning the opportunity to provide low-tax attractions to investors who become fed up at the larceny of their home governments. Even though some taxes – such as sales taxes and land taxes – are quite hard to dodge, I think it is a mark of an open, free world that people can migrate to jurisdictions where the taxes are to their liking, rather than have all their options cut off at source, which the cartelisers would do. Unfortunately, the drive against tax havens is too good an opportunity for the current transnational progressive class to miss.
Of course, the US has a tax haven called Delaware, and the UK has its numerous offshore dependencies, such as the Isle of Man, Jersey, British Virgin Islands and the Caymans. There is an element of cant to the stance taken by the likes of say, Barack Obama on this.
So, drawing all this together from a symbolic point of view, I hope Roger Federer, the debonair Swiss tennis genius, overcomes the boom-boom serving machine, Andy Roddick. No offence Andy – who seems a nice guy – but I want the dude from the mountains to win.
There is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this story, on how one UK government minister – seen as a potential future Labour leader – has announced, without telling Gordon Brown, that the case for compulsory ID cards has been scrapped.
Of course, the real issue remains that even without compulsory ID cards, we have a state database on every person in this country; and the aggregation of data about us gets more intensive, and is unlikely to be reversed regardless of the outcome of the next election. Too much money has been spent, too many corporate interests have been bought, for that to stop.
Thanks to our vigilant commentariat, I read this excellent, pithy demolition of central banking by Jamie Whyte, the banker and writer on philosophy and other subjects. Good on the Times (of London) for running it. It’s a healthy antidote to the flawed semi-Keynesian nonsense of Mr Kaletsky.
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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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