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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Regulars may have already come across this article, but if not, click on the link as this is a good item showing that the “Austrian” school of economics, in particular, did predict the credit crunch and the problems associated with it. It is just no good for folk to prattle that “no-one saw this coming” yadda yadda. (H/T: Adam Smith Institute Blog).
As an aside, the award-winning FT journalist, Gillian Tett, whom I once met many years ago, has a book out about making the argument that modern financial engineering has to bear much of the blame for the crisis. I have not seen many reviews of it – is it any good? My worry is that no analysis of the crunch makes sense if you ignore the broader issues of how financial systems become deranged in a world of fiat money in which central bankers start to believe in their own myths and where the rules create perverse incentives. Blaming derivatives for the crunch is a case of shooting the messenger, methinks. Even so, I’d be interested to see what Tett has to say. She holds a doctorate in anthropology, by the way, which gives her a bit of an insight into things like crowd behaviour – a very useful insight indeed.
On the day that the UK starts to roll out its planned and useless ID card project, in Manchester, there are pictures all over the web of the Prime Minister. The background seems appropriate. I mean, it was obviously not deliberate but how the f**k did Brown grin away in that ghastly way of his and not realise what was in the background? We have to face the rather sad fact, in my view, that the PM has lost it.
I bet the Private Eye picture editor is working hard to come up with a nifty headline and quotes for its next edition.
I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins – famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s – it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter).
Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton’s local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed.
The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich’s huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed – surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does.
I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment.
One of the beauties of the blogs, I find, is that the link-rich medium enables you to fly off on all manner of tangents and think through issues that might otherwise not arise or come into one’s head so fast. The recent posting on Samizdata about Ayn Rand – which seemed to trigger a rather bad-tempered and long comment thread – led me to a site put together by this fellow, who wrote a rather rude comment about Rand – nothing very new there – and I decided to take a look at his own blog. This is what I found. James Hooper is a socialist who once, apparently, was a “teenage libertarian”. I guess one does not come across many libertarians who imbibed their Hayeks, Rands, or Rothbards and later decided that what the world really needed, in fact, was lots of collectivism, progressive taxes, and the rest of it. I suppose John Gray fits a similar path, although as Brian Micklethwait has noted, Gray is consistent in his pathological gloomsterism.
Anway, back to James Hooper. In his latest post, he writes this:
“Healthcare is an area where the market has proven utterly inadequate, indeed it’s hard to find any pure market approach outside of the Third World (company insurance is decided by CEO boards and unions, state insurance by governments), although I’d imagine that those who have died in America owing to lack of insurance didn’t rate the distinction that much.”
Now it seems to me that there is something very wrong about this statement. Human beings require health care, just as they require food. Now, in the West, food is – mostly – produced by the free market, although as a libertarian I’d be the first to note that there is a lot of regulatory control over food production (ask any farmer, slaughterhouse owner, food retailer, etc) and a lot of subsidies, such as under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. But by and large, the process by which we get our fruit, veg, meat and carbs is via capitalism. This seems to work tolerably well. It could work a heck of a lot better, of course, but in general, you don’t see people, even the very poor, starving in the streets as happened under communism in Russia (1930s) or Mao’s China (1950s, 60s), or see the sort of state-induced disasters in Zimbabwe, etc. So clearly, something as basic as food seems to work best when left to the market.
So what is so different about health care that it can only – according to various statists, including many right Tories – be provided by a mixture of private/public operations or even, only by state monopolies, such as the UK’s National Health Service? For sure, some people, such as the very poor, will not be able to afford all the healthcare they want, but then the same issue applies to very poor people who cannot get all the food or housing that they want. Their problem is poverty, not something peculiar about food or housing. I understand that healthcare purchases tend to be less frequent than purchases of food; there may be inefficiencies or supply-demand issues that perhaps don’t let a market in health care function as well as in say, baked beans. But even so, for a person to state as a bald fact that a market in health care does not work seems, well, to be a case of ideology trumping experience and elementary logic. This article by Ronald Bailey lays out a good argument for a free market in health.
Of course, if, like Marx, Mr Hooper believes that a socialist society will be based on the “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, then that of course begs all kind of momentous questions of interest to defenders of liberty and prosperity. As I have pointed out before, if you say, for example, that I have a “right” to “free” healthcare, what that really means, in practice, is that I have a right to coerce someone who is able to work as a doctor/nurse/lab technician to give me what I want. In short, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities” presumably means that the state must have the power to decide what are the “abilities” that Johnathan Pearce, or James Hooper, etc, actually have, and then have the power to harness those abilities to fullfill the needs, as the state has defined them. In short, the Marxian formulation requires conscription of abilities.
There is a word for this state of affairs. It is called totalitarianism.
Mary Riddell, who seems, as it was once said of Oxford University in the 19th Century, to be the home of lost causes, has a column with this glorious headline in the Daily Telegraph (WTF?) today:
“Brown is a better hope for Labour than his rivals”.
In other words, all the other remaining senior figures in the party are even worse, even madder, more delusional, more statist, tax-grabbing, unpleasant, devious and venal than this guy.
That’s the end of that lot, then.
This story is bizarre: China is ordering folk to smoke to boost the economy? Maybe the Chinese authorities figure that with air pollution already so bad, what could be any worse?
It goes without saying that being a good liberal that I am, I consider it as outrageous for a government to encourage smoking as to use invasions of property rights and censorship of things like adverts to stop it. This sort of issue cuts both ways. What next: forcing folk to get hammered every evening?
Thomas E. Woods, who has a good book out about the recent financial turmoil and the bone-headed reactions to it, has this excellent piece on the sort of nonsense written about the supposed villains of this story. As he notes, when a leftist author cannot even be arsed to spell FA Hayek’s name properly, you tend to suspect the author has never read the person he is attacking. Or maybe they think Salma Hayek is an economist. (Great excuse for a gratuitous link, Ed).
A great article on why the opposition Tories need to have the cojones to take on the flat-earth economics of confiscatory tax.
“Democracy is nowadays a greatly over-hyped blessing, particularly by Americans, who have no pre-democratic history to provide a perspective. It is clearly less important than freedom, the rule of law and constitutional government, which ideally it should entrench, but may well not do so.”
– Nigel Lawson, former UK finance minister, journalist and more recently, a fine debunker of global warming alarmism. His children such as Dominic and Nigella seem to have done okay as well.
The One comes out with some jaw-dropping remarks at times.
“As bad as things are at the moment, it seems a mite premature to write off policies in the 1980s as an abject failure. We have not lost 30 years of wealth, and living standards have increased for billions of people since the 1980s. Income inequality has increased, and that can be undesirable, but the welfare of many low-income people has dramatically improved.”
The Economist.
The 1980s were only an “abject failure” in the eyes of those whose political ideas never developed beyond a sort of bastardised Marxism. They were not a failure for those who enjoyed, say, the ability to get a phoneline installed in 24 hours rather than six months, or not be forced to join a trade union, or no longer pay cripplingly high taxes, or be banned from taking more than a paltry sum of money abroad on holiday. The 1980s were a good decade in my view across a number of fronts with two main, glaring exceptions here in Britain: the-then Thatcher government did not truly uproot the Welfare State and the “enemy class” that ran it, and she did preside over what was later to become a relentless assault on the checks and balances of the English Common Law. But generally speaking, that decade goes down in my book as a good one.
Talking of Mrs T, it is now 30 years since she came to power.
Well, in a change from my usual ruminations on current affairs, I thought I would mention that I am planning to take a scuba diving course. I am off to my regular haunt of Malta/Gozo this late-summer to do a PADI course, as well as relax down there. Yes, you have guessed it, people blog about scuba diving as well as many other pastimes these days. As a keen amateur sailor, I have always wanted to have a go at exploring what lies under the waves and the blue seas surrounding Gozo, in particular, look just too damn inviting. If any readers have any tips or suggestions on how to avoid rip-offs or other problems, I’d be very pleased to hear them.
The island of Gozo seems to be packed with diving school firms, such as these guys. The PADI courses, which are internationally recognised, are a good example of how a benchmark for a particular activity can arise without any central government agency decreeing it.
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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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