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]
|
They still don’t get it. In what is a generally very good, readable account of the life and times so far of Andrew Sullivan and his role in driving the blog format, the author, Johann Hari, comes out with this:
Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.
Well I cannot recall what Oakeshott – a writer that I have studied a bit – said about the Road To Serfdom (both men taught at the London School of Economics, by the way), but that strikes me as a terribly confused paragraph. The whole point about Hayek’s demolition of the argument for central planning and socialism is that these ideas take no account of human ignorance, of the inability of any central planner, or group of planners, to have at their fingertips all the knowledge needed to co-ordinate supply and demand. Capitalism, and the “discovery process” of competitive markets, and risk-taking of entrepreneurs, works precisely because it does not require humans to be omniscient, but to capitalise on what they do know. Far from being a utopian, Hayek’s brand of classical liberalism – he called himself an “old Whig – is premised on the very kind of doubts and skepticisms that someone like Andrew Sullivan professes to hold. In fairness to Sullivan – to whom I have been rather unkind because of his support for a Big Government man like Mr Obama – he understands this point, or at least he used to do so.
Hari then goes on to approvingly quote a bete noire of mine, Naomi Klein:
This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”
The “real version” of free markets can be found in say, parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain, when wealth exploded by any historical precedents; in Hong Kong, a place with no natural resources other than the entrepreneurial vigour of its people, and in the US, for much of its history, etc.
The more free, the less distorted, such markets are, by such things as central banks, taxes and regulations, the better such places tend to be, although the public can be misled by the prophets of big government into thinking that further progress requires something different. As I unashamedly say over and over, the current financial snafu lies, at root, on the doorstep of central – state – banks. That is not just a quibble. It is at the heart of the issue. It is no good socialists like Ms Klein trying to compare free market critics of mixed-economies like the UK with socialists trying to claim that the Soviet Union did not work because it was not done right or was a bit oppressive. The two worldviews are coming from fundamentally different premises about the issue of how you deal with lack of complete knowledge by individuals who must still act and take decisions. The disasters of socialism are features, not bugs.
There is another point for Mr Hari and others to consider: when firms go bust, it actualy generates knowledge and encourages businesses to do something different, to adjust. When a government department fails, as the CIA failed in not stopping 9/11, or the SEC failed in not stopping Bernard Madoff, does the organisation suffer the equivalent of going bankrupt? No, of course not. Instead, there are calls for more regulations, more officials, bigger budgets. There is no negative feedback loop in government, apart from the highly unreliable process of the occasional general election.
At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, “Because they are evil”, since that clearly is not quite right. Why do such misconceptions stick, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, so tenaciously? Perhaps such people have crafted a viewpoint for themselves that defines their very being. I guess even I might have to admit some of that.
Update: Sullivan asks some hard but fair questions about the Tea Party protesters. He’s got a point. If opposing the bailouts means letting say, AIG go down the U-bend with all that implies, the protesters should perhaps concede as much. That is why the work of economists over in the UK such as Kevin Dowd is so important. We need to chart a course to a better, less imperfect, place.
“There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest.”
– Blognor Regis
And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.
Okay, let’s remember that there is a world outside the Westminster Village. The president of Iran is not a man whom anyone would want with his hands on the nuclear button, certainly not Israel, which has reason to worry that the man is an anti-semitic fruitcake. It appears that there has been a possible change in the tack of US policy towards Iran now that Mr Obama is at the helm. Now it may be that Mr Obama is playing a devilishly cunning game and, by trying to make nice to Iran, is either buying time or trying to engineer real, positive change. Of course, it also may be that Mr Obama is out of his depth and has made the fatal mistake that one can do business with a regime like Iran.
The danger, it seems to me, is that failing to stop Iran from proceeding with an enrichment programme for nuclear material is going to worry the hell out of Israel. And remember, that while Iran may not be the West’s immediate problem, it is a massive, existential one for Israel. The US may be wise not to want to pick a fight on this issue, given that such a course could go horribly wrong. Israel may not have the luxury of having to make even that choice.
Given that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction tends to work when both sides are basically rational, even if they are bad, it is folly to suppose that nuclear deterrence will work with a regime led by a man who sincerely dreams of taking his place in heaven, and putting lots of those he loathes somewhere else, very violently. At the very least, a defence policy must now involve greater development of anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down incoming weapons, since there will be the risk that the launch sites and development sites may be out of reach of an airforce or ground assault team.
Consider this: why does Iran, with all its oil reserves, want to spend billions of its currency reserves on developing enriched fissile material? What does the Iranian government propose to do with it – use it for garden compost?
“When you keep a kennel of attack dogs then I guess you can’t entirely claim ignorance or absence of responsibility when one of them bites several passers by.”
– Andrew Neil
Via this website is a list of the ten most annoying taxes. I am not sure if I agree with the rankings, but still.
The website does seem to have many attractive features (absolutely! Ed).
This Daily Telegraph story, which if true, implicates Gordon Brown directly in the recent scandal about a brutish plot to smear political opponents, is dynamite. (Guido writes to point out that he got the story first. But of course).
If this whole affair helps accelerate the demise of Gordon Brown, a conceited, foolish and ultimately rather revolting character, and hence speeds up the day when we might just improve some of the things that vex us, then I am going to send Guido Fawkes a bottle of some very good red wine. That’s a promise, Mr Staines!
It is a strange atmosphere at the moment. Such has been the oppressiveness, but also clownishness, of this government, that it resembles that of Charles I. His time did not end well.
Update: Since we are in the process of jumping up and down on Mr Brown’s soon-to-be-dug grave, I should add that one thing that has bugged me about him is this whole schtick about his being “the son of the manse”. What is a “manse”? I understand it is a sort of Scottish vicarage. Like this commentator, I have had to search for enlightenment. “Manse” is – with apologies to Scottish friends of mine – not a terribly attractive word. For a while, we were given the line that Brown, while he may not have the charisma of Mr Blair, had this sort of Calvinistic, godly work-is-good-for-the-soul quality, which meant that he would not use the sort of sordid, Renaissance Italy-style tactics that have now been exposed. And I am afraid that one side-effect of this whole sorry mess will be a further estrangement between the English and the Scots. Mr Brown is not a great advert for a nation that has given us Adam Smith, James Watt or this even great man.
Update: I see that EU Referendum blog, which I recall has actually partly defended the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green by anti-terrorism police officers (remember that story?), is now arguing that all the blogging about Derek Draper, or whoever, is playing the same game as the MSM, which is to encourage the real, underlying problem of mediocre people rising to positions of power because anyone who has a spicy private life cannot survive.
I disagree. If mediocre people are so rising, it is surely because a political class has deliberately emasculated itself by enabling a situation in which about 80 per cent of laws in this nation are not made here, but in the European Union, a point that EU Referendum points out regularly. Mediocrity is what you get if serious power drains away from an institution such as Parliament, leaving only perks and minor stuff behind. The 900 llb gorilla in the living room is the fact that Parliament, and backbench MPs, are far less important than they used to be. By discrediting this statist monster of a Labour government, and keeping pressure on a Cameronian Tory Party, bloggers such as Guido are not fostering mediocrity or timidity, but quite the opposite.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day. But I wasn’t on that particuar job.”
– Brian Clough, the late English club football manager who did not suffer from the national trait of false modesty.
I see that Tony Blair’s former master of spin is trying to put as much distance between himself and Gordon Brown’s henchmen as possible. Truly glorious stuff.
I have been deliberately avoiding the internet these last couple of days as I have been enjoying a lovely Easter weekend with my relations. We sank a bottle of Rhone wine last night that was particularly enjoyable. Having caught up on the news via Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, I am decanting another one. Oh yes.
Happy Easter to believers and non-believers alike.
It is has surprised me that David Cameron’s Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.
Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?
Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.
Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.
Following from Philip Chaston’s post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying – in vain, hopefully – to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.
I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?
Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.
From a nice article on revisionist accounts of the New Deal and Roosevelt.
Via Marginal Revolution, which has a quite good comment thread on this issue.
Talk of Warren Harding, a much maligned president, reminds me of Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times, in which that president gets a much-overdue rehabilitation, along with Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge.
One issue that does not appear to have provoked a lot of discussion, at least not yet, is how the government bailouts and encouragement of mega mergers between struggling banks has created a banking industry that is, if not monopolistic in its structure, then pretty damn close to so being. Now – as I once argued four years ago (gulp!) – the fact that a firm such as a computer software house or bank is big is not, by itself, harmful. One should not confuse bigness with control over the consumer. A lot of anti-trust laws – which I believe often create more harm than they supposedly solve – are based on the mistaken idea that a firm’s being big is somehow proof of malign intent and that bigness, is, ipso facto, harmful. Well it all depends how the firm got to be big in the first place, and whether it retains its market size by continuing to offer good products that people want. For a firm to stay big at a time when barriers to entry in certain fields are being slashed by new technologies such as the internet, confusing bigness with lack of competition is a serious mistake.
Now turning to the banks, it is clear that the mergers between the likes of UK’s Lloyds and HBOS, or Bank of America and Merrill, or Wells Fargo and Wachovia, have produced a number of large banking groups with the state acting very much as the encourager of such mergers, rather than, as might have been in the case when anti-trust lawyers were on the prowl, hostile to them or at the very least, skeptical. As free marketeers like to point out, monopolies that are supported by state powers and privileges are harmful, while those that arise out of a dynamic market process tend not to be, since state-backed monopolies are the least likely to fall prey to new, nimbler competitors. Without state support, even supposedly invincible big firms, such as IBM, Ford or for that matter, Microsoft, can find their market share eroded by a newcomer.
One of the reasons why I actually favour free banking and competition in money is that it might create more banks and give the established banking sector a much-needed dose of competitive pressure. I am pleased to see that the likes of Tesco’s, the supermarket chain, is getting into banking. That is good news for the consumer, hopefully, although the haters of Big Retail might complain.
In the UK, for example, Lloyds Group, after its acquisition of HBOS, controls almost 45 per cent of the UK mortgage market. Any new entrants that can put that behemoth under pressure are to be welcomed.
|
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.
|
