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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Guido Fawkes, in a break from his usual occupation of digging up scandals on our political class, instead focuses a bit more on the underlying policies of the UK government and the opposition. He rightly notes that sterling’s falls against the dollar undermine Gordon Brown’s attempt to frame the crisis as something that has hit Britain from afar, like the impact of a meteorite or SARS virus. Many of Britain’s problems are home-grown. Guido also reminds us of that little-noticed adjustment to the Bank of England’s inflation target back in the early ‘Noughties. Brown removed housing prices from the index of inflation that the BoE targets. Result: house prices no longer figured as a reason for setting interest rates. Brown, in a word, helped make the property price bubble worse than it might otherwise have been.
Now, I know some of us hardline defenders of free market banking will say that this is a quibble about how to run state monopoly money, and they have a strong point about that. But clearly, even the supposed wondrous Brownite creation of an independent central bank turned out to be an illusion. No wonder sterling is falling against the dollar and the euro. As I work for an export business, I guess I should be grateful.
Brown, in his current efforts to create a narrative as “Gordon the statesman who fixed the crisis” reminds me rather of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten, the UK Royal Family member and disastrous military commander and Indian Viceroy who managed, at least for many years, to create the idea of him being some kind of hero. Sooner or later, Brown is going to get, and deserve, the Andrew Roberts treatment. (Roberts helped to annihilate Mountbatten’s reputation).
Matt Welch – author of a recent fine study of John McCain – has this to say about the recent cave-in by so-called conservatives to calls for a massive bailout of failed businesses and banks:
In June I read what I thought I’d never see again: a mainstream column, by a mainstream columnist (The Washington Post’s David Ignatius), arguing against the effects of airline deregulation, one of the most liberating government acts of the last four decades (see “40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets,” page 28). When reregulation is suddenly on the table even for an industry where market forces have cut prices in half while doubling the customer base, it’s time to get back to first principles and fight like hell to secure victories we’d long thought won.
Indeed. Like a few other Samizdata contributors – such as carbon-footprint monster Michael Jennings – I am a big fan of the deregulated airline business. This business has been a huge boon in places like Europe. Thanks to the lower cost of flying around, I can see friends in Europe, see my family (and they, ahem, can visit me). The development of the cheap airline business model, notwithstanding some of its flaws, has done more to bring Europeans together than all the EU directives ever passed. Arguably, such directives have in fact been a hindrance, rather than a help, to such closeness.
On Matt’s broader point, he is right that we are going to have to make the case for free markets, dispersed property rights, entrepreneurship and trade all over again. It is extraordinary to think that barely over a year ago, Conservative Party leader David Cameron was attacking cheap flights. He has allowed a Big Government, environmentalist message to overshadow what must always be a staunch support of freedom and property rights. He reminded me of the comment attributed to the Duke of Wellington in the 1820s about the railway train: he disapproved of them as they would encourage the common people to move around.
Thankfully, such nonsense has disappeared But just you wait: as and when the good times reappear, the inhabitants of Notting Hill, the Upper East Side and central Paris will be arguing for shackling the unwashed masses to living and holidaying within a few miles of where they live. It is vital, therefore, that the defence of the market order, and resistance to bailing out politically well connected firms like GM or RBS, be given a strong, populist image. Defending deregulated airlines strikes me as a good sort of issue to use in this respect. Keep your stinking, socialist hands off my Ryanairs, my Easyjets and my Southwests! Unleash the spirit of Richard Cobden!
“Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.”
Mark Steyn. As he points out, the upcoming US government bailout of General Motors and god-knows-what-else should nail the idea that the US is the land of “unregulated capitalism”.
Update: PJ O’Rourke writes in similar vein.
Tim Worstall, whom I read daily, has a good post dealing with the idea that it is somehow wicked for banks to charge a higher interest rate for a mortgage than the official base rate as set by the Bank of England (or any other central bank, come to that). It is, as he says, a matter of pricing for risk. Lending money to a person with a relatively small deposit – or collateral – relative to the total value of a loan is risky. I am going to have to renegotiate my mortgage in the next few weeks, and because the pricing of risk has risen dramatically, I can expect to pay more even though my loan-to-value ratio is quite low and I have a decent amount of equity, while both my wife and I earn a reasonable amount of money. It is not a great situation to be in, but it could be worse. For many years I chose to rent and stash up enough money to put down a good deposit, as did my wife. That, by the way, is one reason why there is a basic injustice when relatively prudent folk get taxed to bail out the imprudent, such as a person on a 100 per cent mortgage.
To be honest, had the price of risk not been artificially reduced by recklessly loose monetary policy over the past few years, we would not be in this pickle in the first place, but that’s another story.
I had a look at this test and think I would do reasonably okay. The only flaw in PM’s headline is that it refers to skills that men should know, but I would have thought this applies as much to women. As my wife likes to point out, she’s much smarter at changing a tyre on a car than most men we know.
“I have met several people, who when explaining the extreme youth or old age of their parents, have told me, “Of course, I was an accident.” Well, if they can admit it, why can’t we all. Our existence is not due to the preference of some fabulous Being: it is just dumb luck. Why people should feel bothered by this I don’t know. They have won the lottery of life!”
Jamie Whyte, Bad Thoughts, page 128
Well, I reviewed the previous effort by Daniel Craig, so here we go with the next instalment: Quantum of Solace, with Daniel Craig in his second outing as Ian Fleming’s hero. It is the 22nd film in the series, which is quite something in itself, when you think about it. I went to see the film with pretty high expectations after what I thought was a great debut by Craig in Casino Royale.
Quantum of Solace – which has absolutely nothing to do with the short story Fleming wrote in a collection – is a sequel to the first Craig film. Having been betrayed and left heartbroken by the death of Vesper Lynd, 007 goes after the organisation that is behind the death of Lynd. We are led on a series of furious chases and action scenes in Italy, the Caribbean and Latin America. The direction of the movie is handled at an incredibly high tempo, much in the manner of the Bourne films starring Matt Damon. (Poor Matt, I haven’t been able to think of him in the same way again since watching Team America: World Police).
This is a very violent film. Craig did several of the stunts himself and got quite badly hurt in some of them. If you want lots of fight scenes, with minimal dialogue and no gags, this is for you. The problem, is that I think that Craig and his directors are trying far, far too hard to react against what they rightly regarded as s the foppish versions of Bond served up by the likes of Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan. QoS is a still a good film but it could have been much better with a bit more variation of pace, and a bit more opportunity for Craig to show how 007 is developing as an agent and as a person.
Supporting actors are generally good, if not as strong as in Casino. I like the chap who plays Felix Leiter, who is not the character of the books but I reckon is going to be a regular feature of future Bond films. Judy Dench is wonderful as M; in fact she holds much of the film together. But the other women in the film are not very strong characters and not a patch on Green’s Vesper.
I will give this film seven marks out of a possible 10. I would give Casino Royale 9 stars. The Bond franchise has definitely been rebooted by Craig, but the film-makers must not turn Bond into a humourless brute. The character created all those years ago was a tough bastard all right, but he was a bit more than that.
We have sometimes been pretty harsh on John McCain at this blog. It is only right, though, to remember the very fine qualities of this man. Coffee House does so. Well said.
Some of the comments that we got yesterday after the Community Organiser from Chicago was elected were wonderful. Here is my personal favourite:
First, demonize him and ascribe his motives to evil and malfeasance, not just policy differences. We should proclaim often and loudly that he is not our president, that he stole the election and he has no mandate. We should repeat false stories about him, no matter how crazy or wrong, until they are accepted as common wisdom. We should create lies and urban legends to smear him and demean him. We should ridicule any verbal slips or gaffes, and ascribe them to his native stupidity and intellectual vapidity. We should accuse him of every sin and crime under the sun and attempt to have him impeached for policy differences, which we should call crimes. We should undermine any programs he wants to pass by misstating their goals and content. We should take quotes out of context to make him seem ridiculous and to make him seem mean-spirited. We should repeat often that he doesn’t care about people who aren’t the same race as he is, and that he is only out for his own kind. We should claim that he is going to try to force a coup and take over the country by force. We should claim he’s going to lock up any dissenters. We should loudly scream about losing our rights and interfere with his speechs and disrupt any gatherings of his party. Our politicians should cynically misstate his policies to make him look bad.
Update: one or two commenters are outraged by this and the words “native stupidity” have prompted at least one commenter to accuse me of being a racist in putting this paragraph on the blog. For goodness sake: the whole point of the comment was that it was written by a very bitter man who understandably feels that it is time that Obama should be attacked in exactly the same way as was Bush, who after all has been constantly attacked for being stupid, for his Texan drawl, whatever. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I don’t normally respond to comments by adding to my original posts, but in this case I think it is necessary to lay down a marker to all those Obama supporters out there who might get twitchy when their hero gets any flak: criticism of Mr Obama is not some form of disguised racism. If the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the MSM spend the next four years trying to ward off all criticism of their man as racist, they will demean the genuine examples of racism that still exist. Further, they will, either unwittingly or not, harm racial harmony in the US and elsewhere. They will also deserve our contempt.
Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online’s The Corner blog makes the point that the election of Mr Obama, by a landslide, does rather crush the idea that colour is any longer a serious bar to achievement in the US. Well he has a point, although I am sure there are still plenty of racists around who might try to hinder the efforts of others on grounds of race. But as we free marketeers like to point out, outside the world intermediated via political coercion, being a bigot imposes a serious cost on the bigot, since being prejudiced against a smart, hardworking person on the grounds of their skin colour is stupid. A rational employer, for example, even if he is a bigot, will employ people if he or she can get a competitive edge thereby. That is why markets can have a general tendency, if they are allowed to work vigorously, against bigots, even if racial prejudices persist.
With the institutions run by the state, meanwhile, Mr Goldberg argues that with the election of Mr Obama, it is going to be much, much harder for defenders of racial quotas in things like university admissions to continue with the idea that reverse discrimination is required any longer. Hmmm. I personally am a bit skeptical: there is such a large vested interest in maintaining the politics of grievance that getting rid of reverse discrimination will not be easy. But I think one welcome aspect of Mr Obama’s election is that he will emphatically knock down the image of America as closed to non-whites. It has been nonsense for years of course, as a prominent, black economist like Thomas Sowell has been pointing out. Condi Rice and Colin Powell’s advancement to the summit of government hardly squares with the idea of a bigoted Republic, although having served under Republican administrations, they do not get much of a pass from the MSM. But the grievance industry, as an unintended consequence, just took a big hit with the election of the Community Organiser from Chicago. That is surely a good thing.
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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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