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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The journalists who produce the UK’s Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam – whom I have met – had a brief slot on last night’s daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.
Mr Islam went on about the “complex models” that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don’t recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional “soft Keyensian” views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.
There was no apparent attempt – admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot – to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this “school” is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam’s documentary left unmentioned.
The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as “consumer demand” etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.
As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.
Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.
David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.
I liked Gordon’s final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.
Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.
James Bowman on the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, a sort of cartoon treatment of WW2:
“It is important for us to remember that those known to history as Nazis were not cartoon characters. Nor were those who fought and finally defeated them. Nor was that defeat accomplished by a gang of bloodthirsty, free-lancing American Jews in search of revenge who manage to commandeer a ludicrously implausible scheme to assassinate the entire German high command, including Hitler and Goebbels, in a small Parisian cinema by setting fire to a pile of nitrate film. I know, I know. Mr. Tarantino’s are not real Nazis, any more than these are real historical events. But that doesn’t seem to me enough of an excuse for them when American schoolchildren — for whose eyes this film is principally intended — may scarcely be supposed to know what was real.”
I think I’ll give the movie a miss, having never cared for any of Tarantino’s output. A friend of mine once told me that he thought T’s films were brilliant, but wicked, morally empty. For balance, here is a slightly more favourable review by Roderick Long.
I came across this gem of a comment by an Obama supporter – assuming the commenter was sincere and not a troll, and it is just too good to go unremarked. The comment was made on a suitably acerbic column by Matt Welch, one of those Reasonoids who have gone very sour indeed on the US president.
Here is the comment:
“I´m american and not angry. i´m happy with our new president. vladimir putin likes him, too. looking forward to his next 3 years as president.”
Priceless.
“The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out “crime insurance”, which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution. It would be interesting to know whether the net effect would be more satisfactory than the current system, but when you consider the all-but-total failure of the punishment system actually employed in, say, the United States and Canada, it is difficult to believe that it wouldn’t be a major improvement. Everyone agrees that we have very far to go in the way of improving our system of responding to crime. It is a sobering thought that getting rid of one of the most spectacularly cost-effective systems in the history of mankind short of war is perhaps even less likely to be seriously considered than is abolition of war.”
Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pages 230-231.
Sometimes it is the willingness of a person to be brutalised, rather than its enforcement as such, that chills me to the bone. Check out this story.
Of course, if the woman genuinely consents to such treatment, then I suppose it would be no different to that of a person who visited S&M bars and liked being beaten up, etc. But a lingering suspicion lurks that this woman, and many others, are not really acting with a great deal of control over their lives.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel lays out a pretty solid case for saying that the US government will let down international borrowers, and fairly soon. This is not a new or original argument, but he does so with great aplomb. Definitely worth a read.
“To kill someone for their class origins is just as bad as killing someone for their religious or ethnic origins. You’re killing someone, d’ye see? That Uncle Joe did it in the name of the proletariat while Hitler did it for some other reason he’d made up does not make Joe less evil, sorry, it just doesn’t.”
Tim Worstall.
As FA Hayek pointed out many years ago in his masterpiece, The Constitution of Liberty, if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation and delivered free at the point of delivery, then in a world of scarce resources – and healthcare is always constrained at any time by the supply of doctors, drugs, etc – then such care must be rationed by some form of bureaucratic/political rule. As Dr Hayek presciently warned at the time (1950s), any such rationing will put doctors, politicians or other people in power in the position of a god, in having the decision about who gets treatment for what, or whether life A is more “worth saving” than life B. For example, one such utiltarian consideration might be that it is more “cost-efficient” to save the life of a young kid with his whole life ahead than an 90-year-old. That is what happens when socialised medicine is established. It transfers key powers to people in ways that raise disturbing issues of accountability and control.
Now a socialist might respond that it is still better for health care to be rationed by some rule they consider to be “fair” than by the supposed lottery of the market, although in fact, as I would respond, there is, due to the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship, far greater chance that all but the poorest will get better healthcare under a genuine free market in health than under the system of centralised, state-provided healthcare. Also, if the possession of a large fortune is partly a matter of luck, then luck, being blind, cannot be either just or unjust. It just is. Some folk have access to better dentists or whatever because they are richer. That may annoy someone who cannot afford the whitest teeth, but that is not proof of unfairness, as such. To prove it, one would have to construct an ethical theory that says that humans have an apriori claim on their fellows to receive a certain amount of healthcare/watever as a “right”. But such “rights” are abuses of the term: one cannot have a right to X that requires that another be forced to provide X, such as forcing folk to train as doctors to serve the sick, and so on.
I was led to think about the latest twist in the US healthcare debate by reading an article by the US writer, Nat Hentoff. He totally bypasses the issue of how to deal with scarcity under socialism in ways that are fair. He rightly worries about the sort of brutal choices that state-rationed healthcare provides, but then does not see that any system of state-run, and socialised medicine, makes such issues of rationing unavoidable. Rationing by such tests of age, “need” and so forth is a feature of socialised medicine, not a bug.
(H/T: The Corner).
Like his blogging Highness, Glenn Reynolds, while I love the visual cleverness of Mad Men, the TV series, and the brilliance with which this show has caught the mood of the time, I find the series rather depressing. I mean, the guys who are portrayed as “having it all” in an age of heavy smoking, drinking in the workplace, womanising and the rest seem to be, a rather depressed bunch. It is a series that certainly plays to the stereotype of business as venal and zero-sum – which is what anti-capitalists like to think it is. But these guys and gals certainly knew how to dress snazzily for work.
But whatever one thinks of the sense of life communicated by the series, Jon Hamm, who plays the main character, Don Draper, is unquestionably a compelling actor who has created one of the most memorable characters in TV drama for a long time (he certainly seems to have quite an effect on this lady). It will be interesting to see what he does next.
A thought occurs to me: Hamm makes a potentially good James Bond and even looks more like the character of Mr Fleming’s books than Daniel Craig, even though the latter actor did a very good turn in Casino Royale.. But the last film, Quantum of Solace, while brilliant in its stunts, was awfully humourless and bereft of character development. And it would not be that big a shift to cast an American in the role: our Jim is an Anglosphere character, anyway.
“In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie.”
Stephen Pollard.
I agree with some of Mr Pollard’s analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt “progressive” or “traditional” methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.
Arnold Kling has been debating – in a friendly way – with fellow US blogger Will Wilkinson on the relative power of exit, the ability to take oneself and one’s business away from place A to B, for example, with “voice”, such as voting. There is a good Wikipedia item on the forces of “voice” and “exit”. Arnold is definitely an “exit” man and is in favour of things like creating new nations and the power to secede and emigrate. I need to think a bit more about the exchange between Will and Arnold before commenting at great length, but my two cents on this issue amounts to observing how the right of an individual to take his or her money out of reach of a country’s tax net to a less oppressive place has come under a harsh spotlight because of the recent case of Swiss bank UBS.
As I keep saying, the current crackdown on certain so-called tax havens shows that some political leaders understand the power of “exit” only too well; they know that if folk can emigrate, take their money and affairs abroad, then that puts a monkey wrench into the wheels of Big Government. And so there is no wonder that such Transnational Progressive organisations as the OECD and the rest are kicking up a stink about the supposed evils of tax evasion, and putting huge pressure on such countries as Switzerland. It is, in my view, rather important that escape routes remain plentiful, and multiply.
Yes, that’s three posts from me in a day. My holiday break in France seems to have done the trick.
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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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