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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I have felt for some time now that for all its many faults – and there were many – the UK’s traditional Labour movement, with its desire to see prosperity for all, was likely to be deeply at odds with the Greens. Yes, the former, with its foolish confidence in central planning, redistributive taxes and the rest, had some shockingly silly ideas, but at least it wanted people to be better off, to be materially richer, for there to be more stuff about to enjoy. Indeed, having a good time was part of the idea.
As for the Greens, or at least those taking a more ‘Deep Green’ approach in ideological terms, their agenda was and is very different. It cannot be stressed too often that parts of the Green movement are profoundly reactionary. Well, it seems that some leftist commentators have joined in the voices of environmental skepticism about things such as man-made climate change. In this case, the commentator is justifiably irritated that Greens such as George “Moonbat” Monbiot have welcomed the onset of a recession, a fact that is hardly likely to go down well with traditional Labour voters scrabbling to pay a mortgage.
I think that libertarian free marketeers such as ourselves should see this as an opportunity for a spot of intellectual, friendly outreach to the more moderate, still-post Enlightenment bits of the left. There are surely fissures to be exploited. For as Paul Marks has noted below, part of the far-left has hooked up with radical Islam much in the same way as it has hooked up with the radical Greens, and for a similar purpose: a hatred of science, rationality, individualism, progress, enjoyment of this life and Man’s ability to reshape it. Islam means submission; the Greens want Man to submit to their static view of the Earth.
So, is it really very surprising that those parts of the Left that still cling to a tradition that goes back to the Enlightenment are getting irritated by all this? Or, to pick up on a theme occasionally mentioned by Samizdata commenter Ian B, this can be framed as a class issue: the deep Greens and their far-left/far-right friends are part of the ‘posh establishment’ that want to keep the nice views to themselves and bugger the unwashed.
In fact, if there is an upside to this period of economic turmoil, is that it might, just might do serious damage to part of the Green cause. Well, it’s Monday and one might as well kick off the week on an optimistic note.
In these days of modern motoring safety features, racing – either F1 or other genres – is not as dangerous as it used to be, when fatalities were common and some racers, such as the Austrian racer Niki Lauda, suffered terrible burns. I am glad the sport has got safer because the close racing of last year, when Lewis Hamilton famously won by a whisker in Brazil, can be just as exciting even when you know that the cars are so well made, the circuits so well designed, that death is not such a close presence on the track. The idea that we need the risk of death to spice up a sport is not a view I share.
One sport that remains bloody dangerous, in my view, is downhill ski racing. Anyone who has skied on a difficult, icy slope in Europe or North America, say, will know what I mean. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to ski at 90mph or more down an icy race track such as the famous one at Kitzbuhel, Austria. It frightens me just to think about it. Here is a story showing what I mean.
Anyway, considering my work commitments and the low value of sterling, I cannot really afford to hit the slopes this year. Next year, maybe…..
Jonah Goldberg, who writes at the US conservative publication, National Review – and other places – is over in the UK next week talking about his recently-published book, Liberal Fascism. I have not read it but some of the readership might find it interesting. He’s in London at venues like the London School of Economics.
Meanwhile, as our own Brian Micklethwait pointed out the other day on his own blog, Kevin Dowd, an economist very much in the free market camp and an authority of monetary economics, is delivering the annual Chris R. Tame memorial lecture of the Libertarian Alliance in March. Kevin Dowd is not just a very nice fellow and a sharp economist, he is also an advocate of free banking and a critic of state monopoly money. He and his colleagues have been doing important research on the topic up in his academic redoubt in Nottingham. I definitely recommend this lecture. It pays to book early.
It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively.
– Fraser Nelson, The Spectator.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, the markets are continuing to fret over the scale of the financial hole the country is in a day after the UK government stepped in and hosed the banks with yet further large amounts of public funds. According to the media pundit and investor, Jim Rogers, sterling is a sell and the country’s economy is headed for further trouble. Even though Rogers’ prediction of a 25-year commodity boom has not quite panned out – oil prices have crashed from $140+ to about $40 now in just four months – he did predict some of that boom and commodity investors who sold out at the right time would have made a killing in some of Rogers’ funds. His take on the economic situation is worth studying.
I see no reason to buy sterling on speculative grounds until Mr Brown is removed from office along with his re-heated Keynesian colleagues. Even then, the return to sound money will be hard and unpleasant. It almost makes me wonder if the Tories would want to regain power with such a poisonous inheritance.
Thanks to Guido Fawkes for the Rogers quote. Guido has been a bear of sterling for some time. To stay with the lingo of the markets, investors should be shorting Brown stocks, a heavily touted investment based on no underlying merits whatsover.
Virginia Postrel has a nice item about WW2 aviator style and the Tuskegee airmen who broke racial barriers of their time in WW2. I must say that there is something deliciously satisfying at the thought that these guys helped shoot down the airforce of a racist German empire. And that they flew such glorious birds like the P-51 Mustang as they did so.
Andrew Roberts, the UK historian, pens what can only be described as a robust defence of soon-to-be-ex-US President, George W. Bush. It has stirred up a hornet’s nest of comments, some of which include open support for OBL’s cause, which makes me wonder about who edits the Telegraph blogs these days, if at all.
Unfortunately, this piece suffers from a number of basic factual errors that make one wonder about the quality of the editing of the Daily Telegraph’s print edition, never mind the electronic version. He says, for example, that Oliver North directed a movie about Bush, when in fact he meant Oliver Stone. These Olivers are a bit of a pest: I mean, there’s Oliver Reed, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Twist, and loads of others. It might rather tickle both Messrs North and Stone – one a rather controversial soldier, the other a former-soldier-turned leftwing filmaker, to be so conflated.
On a more serious note, though, Mr Roberts suffers from over-reach in his understandable desire to set the record a bit straighter. For a start, any believer in the small government brand of conservatism, even a hawk who supported the overthrow of Saddam and the fight against the Taliban, has to confront the continuing expansion of government and debt under the Bush administration. Bush went over the heads of Congress to support the bailout of the US auto industry. Then there is the whole nonsense of No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, Patriot Act, and the rest.
As for protecting America from attack, it is true, that he deserves – as I said some time ago – some, if not a lot, of credit for the fact that there has been no major repeat of a 9-11 sort of attack on US soil since that terrible September morning; and yes, I happen to agree with Mr Roberts that paying a pure “wait-and-see”, defensive posture after that day was not really plausible.
Libertarians continue to argue among themselves, never mind with others and often vehemently, about the proper scope of foreign policy, or whether a libertarian foreign policy is an oxymoron. For me, the principle of self-defence cannot rule out the need, in certain circumstances, to go after declared enemies with a track record of violence and mayhem. Bush went after some of those enemies and made mistakes along the way. But I think, that on foreign policy at least, the judgement of history on this man will be rather kinder than at the present time.
One of my favourite actors, star of the great series, The Prisoner, has died. Here’s a great appreciation of that cult 60s television series by the late Chris R. Tame. It goes without saying that the message of that series – the dangers of an all-encompassing state – are more relevant now than ever.
Patrick McGoohan, rest in peace.
This guy clearly is not impressed by the recent Hollywood film about ‘Che’ Guevara, which I will not be watching:
I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives.
The quote was seen at the blog of David Thompson.
I have said it before and I will repeat: for all its possible charms, I am not setting foot in Cuba until it becomes a haven of capitalist decadence. Not a minute before. Even if that means paying more for cigars and the booze.
Here is a film about Cuba, starring Andy Garcia, which is much more worthwhile.
One of the reasons why people get so cross about the cost of petrol is the knowledge that a high proportion of the price paid at the pumps is accounted for by tax, rather than the cost of extracting, refining and distributing the stuff. The same goes for a pack of cigarettes, pint of beer or a bottle of wine, to name a few. With a lot of grocery produce, such as your humble carrot, most people may not appreciate – yet – how much of the cost of getting those vital vitamins is accounted for by government-created production costs. Well, there have been a flurry of stories on the wires about a recent EU Parliamentary vote to ban dozens of pesticides that are deemed harmful. As a result, farming groups claim, output of crops will fall and presumably, if other things remain equal, prices will go up at a time when household budgets are under strain. It does not seem to have occured to policymakers that a simple option would be to put what chemicals are used to treat crops on a packet so that consumers can figure this out for themselves and take an informed decision.
The trouble with stories like this is that the votes to ban X or Y at the EU level rarely gain a lot of coverage for more than a day or so, and then the issue tends to fizzle out, of interest only to obsessives and geeks like yours truly. A busy populace, worried more about their jobs, mortgage or children, will hardly dwell on the issue. But when Mr and Mrs Briton wonder why on earth it costs so much to buy basic groceries, the temptation will be to imagine that it is the fault of big, evil supermarket chains, for example. Rarely will the cause of the cost be seen as stemming from bureaucrats and European MPs.
Of course, it may well be that the chemicals being banned are as harmful as is claimed, although given the way these things work, I doubt it. We are told that for a healthy diet, your average person requires several servings of fruit and veg a day; such things are considered good for warding off cancer. Even if there is a health risk from chemicals, the health risk of not eating enough vegetables because of high costs is even higher. These things involve a trade-off between one set of risks and another, rather than some imperfect and perfect state. If such chemicals are banned, resorting to grow-your-own is hardly a viable alternative, since modern farming can, through economies of scale, achieve better yields and lower costs-per-output than someone tending their vegetable patch. And importing fruit and veg from countries such as Spain via air transport, for example, is also becoming less attractive an option due to increased fuel prices and governments’ taxes on air travel.
Once again, the Forgotten Man gets the shaft. This chemicals ban, like measures such as “employment rights”, paternity leave or 35-hour weeks, impose costs on the populace without a government having to take the potentially visible and unpopular step of raising taxes. Joining the economic dots is hard. I just hope that some in the MSM try and do so occasionally so that the message gets through. We bloggers cannot do it all on our own.
Update: in the comments, one person argues that I have contradicted myself by pointing to public apathy or lack of time to scrutinise EU actions, on the one hand, and my stress on the ability of consumers to read packaging labels, on the other. There is no contradiction, though. People shop daily, weekly, monthly, etc. They constantly come up against labels, look at packaging, see advertisements, surf the Net looking at products, and so on. One of the great things about markets is that it is a constant provider of information. Not always accurate, of course. By contrast, once an EU directive has been imposed, that is usually the last that any ordinary member of the public will hear about it. As soon as a law is passed, the media and political wagon rolls on.
“Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”
– Bryan Appleyard. Those squirrels cannot catch a break.
This gloomy Bloomberg article, talking of capitalism’s global “winter of discontent”, argues that the current troubles are the first globalized crisis for free enterprise. Well, when an article makes an error in the first paragraph it does rather dim one’s enthusiasm for reading on. Arguably, we have had cross-border crises in markets dozens of times: the recession of 1870s, the Great Crash of the 1930s, the 1970s oil-shocks and stagflations in the US and UK, the early recession of the 1990s in countries as different as far apart as Japan, UK, Germany and US, etc. Maybe the sheer extent of the malaise now is what has struck the Bloomberg writer, but truth be told I think this is a matter of degree. According to this excellent book, markets were in fact more globalised 100 years ago than they are now.
To use one of my least favourite words, there is now a constant “narrative” as to how the recent turmoil somehow proves that unregulated capitalism has failed and too closely interlinked. Quite how anyone can, with a straight face, argue that financial markets have been unregulated in recent years is a joke. Here are some of the regulations financiers have been dealing with, often with counter-productive results:
- Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (known snappily as MiFID). This is designed to make EU financial markets more competitive, but as so often is the case, has been designed to raise barriers to entry in certain fields and has led to a rise in regulatory costs and loss of choice.
- Basel II bank capital adequacy rules. How’s that working for ya?
- Patriot Act – the finance provisions
- Various anti-money laundering laws
- Tax information sharing treaties (various)
- UK capital adequacy regulations of financial advisers
- UK laws banning/controlling certain types of financial advertising. Apparently, we poor saps need protecting from crooks. Shame none of the big banks spotted Bernard Madoff then.
- Restrictions on sell-side analyst research. This is built on the quaint idea that analysts working for banks should be models of Corinthian virtue and not have a bias.
- Sarbanes-Oxley accounting laws – these have been a disaster, encouraging a flight of US businesses offshore, killing IPOs and squeezing new business formation.
- And last but not least: central banks. These are state institutions, issue monopoly money and have been behind much of the current trouble. Sometimes, when reading criticisms of “unregulated” capitalism, you might imagine these banks are purely commercial entities.
I am scratching the surface and I am sure readers can come up with more rules and regulations. Every time any of you good readers hears this canard about “unregulated capitalism”, call them out gently for this and ask them in what field, apart perhaps from security or medicine, are activities more heavily regulated than finance?
Update: oh, I should have mentioned the US federal housing agencies such as Freddie Mac, and their contribution to creating a massive moral hazard problem in the house lending market.
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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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