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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Bloody hell, I did not see this coming. Bank of America has bought the 94-year-old brokerage, Merrill Lynch, for a cool $50 billion after the latter firm got hammered by worries about its ability to sustain huge losses. Meanwhile, the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the veterans of Wall Street’s banking sector, has gone bankrupt. I know a lot of people who work for both places. I imagine that the atmsophere is grim.
About the best that can be said about all this is that at least the Fed, or the US taxpayer, have not been asked this time to ride to the rescue, as was partly the case with the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, as that deal was underwritten by guarantees by the Fed. At last, it has dawned on policymakers that hurling more public funds into the black hole of the current financial mess merely prolongs the agony; it does not end it. That, of course, is zero consolation to the thousands of people who will lose their jobs from these institutions.
This may be the “dark that comes before the dawn”, but it will not feel like that if you are close to the action. I just hope that politicians resist the urge to lock the door after the horse has bolted by imposing new reams of pointless legislation. We have already had endless efforts by central bankers and other luminaries to impose capital requirements on banks through what is known as the Basel process, and a fat lot of good that has done. What is pretty clear from my own vantage point is that we are seeing the culmination of a credit and asset price bubble that has burst very nastily. Relearning the merits of sound money is going to be painful.
A point for the economists to ponder over is whether the use of complex financial products like derivatives have concentrated the risks of financial collapses or made it easier to spread those risks around, so that although there is pain, it is not lethal to an entire economy. I incline to the latter view.
Bruce Dickinson, front man for the heavy metal rock group, Iron Maiden, is a qualified civil aviation pilot and was involved in flying home tourists left stranded by the collapse of a UK tourist agency. A nice story.
Of course, if I am on a flight that Bruce is piloting, I’ll insist he plays something really, really loud during takeoff. Go Bruce!
His supreme blogness, Glenn Reynolds, links to an NYT article on how American firms are increasingly warming to hiring former military personnel, on the grounds that the quality of such hires are getting better and are frequently far better than those who have never been in the armed forces. Hmm. It is the sort of story that might be dreamed up by an army recruiter saying: “Join the Army and when you want to quit, make a great life afterward”. That makes a lot of sense. For most people, a lifetime in the forces is not something they would ever want to contemplate, but a short spell, maybe. I know quite a few people who have got decent careers and businesses after having served in the forces, and I notice a few patterns. Of those I know, the following:
My father (RAF navigator): farmer.
RAF jet pilot: air traffic controller, West Drayton.
RAF Defence Rgt: Senior security manager, public transport.
SAS operative: security advisor, South Africa, Middle East.
Army officer, cavalry rgt: salesman, farmer.
Tank commander: hedge fund administrator.
Army officer: wealth management industry job-search executive.
Australian navy officer: property developer.
US navy officer, financial journalist.
US navy submariner: software engineer, paramedic, post-grad student at Columbia.
South African army: landscape gardener, property developer.
Army officer: property developer.
Army officer: pharmaceutical industry executive.
Army sergeant: pest control business owner (no irony intended!).
RAF tailgunner (WW2), social worker.
The last one always struck me as poignant. The man is now in his eighties, was a tailgunner on Lancasters during WW2 and saw his fair share of death and destruction. He ended up running a youthclub for kids in Pimlico for much of his adult life and one of my relations benefited from his tender care.
I’d be interested in seeing if commenters with military backgrounds ended up doing anything comparable to the stuff above, or something totally different.
Here is a tribute to the firefighters who lost their lives on this day, seven years ago, trying to rescue those attacked by mass murderers in New York City.
May they all rest in peace.
There is a new computer game out there, called Spore, which takes up on the theory of evolution. Looks like fun and educational, as many such games are, a fact that critics of computer games rarely seem to take on board.
Here is another item about this game.
Over at the Cato Institute blog, contributor Daniel Griswold argues that the US, the world’s biggest user of energy, is not quite as dependent on energy from only a few nations as one might think. I agree. Energy “independence” sounds like a smart strategy if you fear that a handful of nations, run by thugs, have a heavy armlock on energy supplies. Fortunately, Mr Griswold argues, it is a bit more varied than that.
Of course, part of what bugs me about the constant demand for energy independence is the concern that this might be a form of protectionism in drag, much akin to calls by western farmers for “food independence”, often just a thin excuse for tariffs on imports.
I see that Gordon Brown has come out in favour of Mr Obama winning the White House.
For Mr McCain, this must be a hopeful sign. As Guido Fawkes likes to point out, Gordon “Profiles in Courage” Brown has a track record of cursing any cause he attaches himself to.
Of course, I can see why Brown might relate to The One. Both of them have never done a stroke of work outside of politics in their lives.
More important, would a U.S. government default indeed be “the end of the world”? …..One could plausibly argue just the opposite. In fact, a firm refusal to bail out the mortgage agencies would establish a strong barrier between U.S. Treasuries and the fortunes of not only the mortgage agencies themselves but also the myriad other institutions that we can imagine receiving similar treatment. Wouldn’t that in fact help maintain confidence in U.S. government securities?
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
Similar arguments, of course, apply to state bailouts of other institutions, such as UK mortgage lender Northern Rock, for instance.
Thanks to Reason’s Hit & Run blog for the pointer.
London mayor Boris Johnson chides the United Nations for urging the planet to go vegetarian as a way to conserve resources. Instead, says Mr Johnson, the UN should, as it used to do, focus on the problem of “over-population”. I have written quite a lot about how fears about a population “explosion” have often proved wide of the mark. Suffice to say that in western Europe, for example, birthrates have been falling; the problem if anything is the reverse.
Of course, as a father of four children, Mr Johnson does not think that concerns about too many people should be a reason for making changes to his own personal sexual behaviour. No siree (as he would no doubt put it), that’s for other people, old bean.
Meanwhile, here is an old and wonderfully acerbic review of a book touting Malthusianism by Ronald Bailey.
Bob Bidinotto has an excellent appraisal of John McCain. It should serve as a corrective to some of the hopes that people may have about him after his – in my view – wise choice of Sarah Palin as his VP choice.
John McCain is a decent man of great character, with a wonderful sense of life and a courageous spirit. But he is no intellectual and certainly no philosopher; ideologically, he is very much a mixed bag. He is governed by his feelings, which are shaped in turn by his personal code — the code of national service, of “Country First.” Just as his notion of “selfishness” falsely packages legitimate self-interest with narcissistic self-indulgence, so too does his notion of “Country First” falsely package legitimate patriotism and “free enterprise” with the idea of individual sacrifice to the state.
In this incoherence, John McCain perfectly embodies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American society: the clash between its conventional morality of self-sacrifice, and its political-economic system of individualism and profit-oriented capitalism. The fact that so many conservatives also try to square the circle of these logically incompatible premises means that McCain’s candidacy is dragging the Republican Party significantly to the left in its basic philosophy.
I can also recommend Matt Welch’s recent book about McCain. For all that the senator from Arizona might like to claim the mantle of a maverick, he is not quite that, and Welch points out that McCain is a different animal in certain respects from his Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater.
That is not to say that there is a not much to admire about McCain, especially his obvious courage under captivity. But like Bob I really worry about McCain’s version of “national greatness conservatism”. Any politician that takes Teddy Roosevelt as a political idol should be treated warily. Roosevelt inflicted the monstrosity of anti-trust on the US, for example.
Bob comes to this conclusion:
On individualist philosophical grounds, then, we are left with the choice of supporting either a profoundly flawed representative of America’s founding premises, or of supporting a candidate whose philosophy and every policy proposal are profoundly at odds with those premises. For me, that is no choice at all. (I leave aside the Libertarian candidacy of Bob Barr, who has zero chance of being elected; the only meaningful choice is between McCain and Obama.)
“What is the point of growing food if you let them get destroyed by pests? And another thing, if a sheep gets a headache, I’d give it an asprin.”
That was broadly the gist of a remark made this morning on a BBC food show by Gregg Wallace, the grocer and UK television presenter, who is not a devotee of organic food. Ah, I thought, this guy is prepared to pull the chains of the organic purists on live TV! But then he spoiled it all by going on, as a lot of prominent TV chefs seem to do these days, about the supposed evils of Britain importing food and hence the locals not developing what he regards as a strong national culture that appreciates food. He also criticised working mothers for forgetting how to cook. I must say I smiled at this point since all the folk cooking on the show were men. To be fair, Mr Wallace did not go quite as far as that over-exposed blowhard, Gordon “four letter word” Ramsay, whom Perry of this parish criticised lately.
This is nonsense, to be polite about it. For a start, Mr Wallace bashed the enclosure of UK open land as somehow playing a part in Britain’s historically drab cuisine. Funny, because I thought that the enclosure of farms, and the development of the four-course rotation system that went along with it, helped to make possible the vital leap in UK food production, and hence a surplus, that freed up capital to be used elsewhere: the Industrial Revolution. Up until the late 18th Century, remember, starvation was a regular feature of life in Europe. So much so, in fact, that Thomas Malthus’s prediction that population growth would always be checked by starvation and food shortages was a reason why economics got known as the “dismal science”. Well, the Irish were “self sufficient” by living on potatoes while evil imports of cheap corn from abroad were restricted by the Corn Laws, a situation that came to a terrible conclusion in the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, in which millions of Irish families emigrated to the US to at least have the chance of something to eat. Self-sufficiency, indeed.
All this talk about self-sufficiency by the affluent members of today’s media and entertaiment classes does make me wonder at their lack of understanding of basic economics. To begin with, what sort of geographical area does Mr Wallace think it is acceptable for trade in agriculture to occur in? A county, a parish, a region, a nation, a small street, what? Furthermore, surely the benefits of diversification in agricultural production around the world, made possible by rapid transportation, refrigeration, storage techniques and the rest, actually makes the world as a whole less not more, vulnerable to sudden shifts in economic conditions, or the climate, or even war, although during wars, of course, it may be necessary to build up food supplies, as happened in the UK during WW2.
If it makes more sense economically to grow tomatoes in Spain and fly them over to Manchester rather than for Mancunians to eat only what our foodie superiors deem to be “in season”, why should not such imports occur? For sure, if you want to patronise your local farmers’ market to ensure that local farmers make a living, that is your right. But why are “local” farmers more “deserving” of your wallet than a farmer in Kenya, New Zealand or Canada? At this stage, the Greens will say it is a “waste” to import food from afar if that involves gobbling up expensive fuels, but then in a free market, if the cost of importing food becomes expensive, then local farmers can and should be exploiting that cost advantage. This in fact may already be happening.
And in any event, if there has been an improvement in the quality of food produce and restaurants in the UK in recent years – and I believe there has been – then trade, globalisation and mass transport have driven much of this. A generation that now regards it as routine to fly off to France for a long weekend courtesy of Ryanair or Easyjet has raised expectations of what should be on sale in shops in the UK. We should not forget the significance of the abolition of exchange controls in the UK in 1979 in also driving this increase in travel, and hence a broadening of tastes.
I am sure Mr Wallace means well. He comes across as the sort of no-nonsense, food-loving East End Boy made good for whom I have a lot of admiration. By all means encourage folk to learn more about food, to cook and appreciate food and fine wine. But for goodness sake, TV chefs, spare us propaganda about the evils of imports and stick to what you do best. That’s the division of labour for you.
Right, time for lunch.
“In general the most important effect of the government attempt to shield itself and its clients from uncertainty and risk is to place the entire system in peril. It becomes at once too rigid and too soft to react resourcefully to the new shocks and sudden challenges that are inevitable in a dangerous world.”
– George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 235 (1981). His comment ought to be on the walls of every state regulatory authority and central bank.
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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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