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.
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Jeff Randall, writing about the excellent performance by Britons so far in the Olympics, reckons some people are getting all het up about the sort of folk who have been winning the gongs:
Unfortunately, no sooner had our rowers, cyclists and sailors collected their medals than the carping started – largely on account of their successes being clocked up in “posh” sports. That a disproportionately high number of these British champions went to fee-paying schools is regarded by some as a symptom of a divided society, evidence of a deep-rooted malaise.
In place of celebration, there is consternation: dark mumblings about the benefits of privilege. In the warped view of the Grumblies, middle-class successes are to be resented, as if, like those of drugs cheats, their places on the awards podium were the result of improper behaviour.
Britain’s middle classes are already in the dock for heinous crimes, such as seeking the best schools for their children, paying extra for private healthcare and determining the output of Radio Four. Now, it seems, they must endure being rubbished for having the audacity to produce results in a sporting arena that the nation expected to be dominated by foreigners.
He has a point, but I have not sensed much of this sort of snide carping. What I tend to notice from the coverage has been how pleasant and modest most of the sportsmen and women, of all backgrounds, appear to be. I watched as one guy with a thick Scouse accent was interviewed after he fought in a hard boxing bout against a chap from China, I think, and I remember thinking of how decent and philosophical the man was about his chances of success. The meritocracy of the whole event, and the way it has reached people of all classes, is what has shone through.
For all that I dislike the politicking and corruption that goes along with the Games – I dread the likely bill of the London Olympics, which I oppose – there can be no denying that the folk who have done well in th Games, from all nations, are, with the odd exception maybe, pretty admirable sportsmen and women and that bleatings about their class have not been much in evidence.
Randall continues:
But, for me, the finest moment was when the British men’s coxless fours rowed down the formidable Australians to snatch gold. Some will denigrate them as “posh boys”, largely because they can tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb, but that doesn’t make them substandard Olympians.
Quite. It is a pity, though, that something like accent or polish in a TV studio now is considered a measure of a sportsman or woman. After all, our Jeff speaks with the twang of London, so I am not sure what is going on there.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.
This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.
At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.
On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as “Nannyfornia”. In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, “Did you mean California?”. That’s gotta hurt.
A new film is out later this year in the US taking the p**s out of Michael Moore. It looks quite amusing. Here’s the trailer. Some of the one-liners are excellent.
“We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?”
Dirty Harry’s Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.
As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick – the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues – this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:
Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — BAA Ltd., the owner of London’s Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.
The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was “flawed.”
Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.
Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.
I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial’s lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA’s management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.
“Never brush your teeth if you’re dressed in black. Don’t trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Always put the shower curtain inside the bath. Life is forever teaching us lessons, and here’s another that I learnt last week: it’s impossible to be mates with celebrities.”
– Sathnam Sanghera
With all the troubling economic news that has come out of late, such as the UK Northern Rock fiasco, or the US housing and mortgage crunch, there has been a fair bit of headscratching on how bad it could all get. Amity Shlaes has an item looking at the mistakes made in the 1920s and 1930s around the time of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent depression. In a nutshell, she says that errors on monetary policy, a disastrous ratcheting up of protectionism and intervenionist economics turned a bad but temporary situation into a catastrophe. This book also comes to the same conclusion and points out how much of Roosevelt’s New Deal failed, even on its own terms, to work, since unemployment actually was worse by the outbreak of WW2 than when FDR was elected.
Meanwhile, to keep us in a jolly mood, the Daily Telegraph highlights some recent economic data from those old-style monetarists at Lombard Street Research, pointing out that there has been a dramatic contraction in the “broad money” measure of the US money supply, known as M3. The Fed stopped publishing data on this in 2005, on account of it not being reliable. That sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyway, the author of the piece, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, points out that sharp moves in his measure presage significant changes, either inflationary or the opposite. He is surely correct. For much of the ‘Noughties, the world was awash with cheap money, much of it in the form of recycled savings from Asia. To a degree, the spigot has been shut, with an obvious impact on asset prices.
My only caveat here is that Pritchard has tended to be a bit of a permanent “we are all doomed” voice these days. If I earned a pound every time he had predicted the demise of the euro, for example, I’d be able to retire to the South of France. But he may be right this time.
This story will not come as a surprise to the techies that read this site, nor many other bloggers, but I was still struck by a report from TowerGroup, the research firm, that says that the day is approaching when millions of people on low incomes living around the world will be able to switch funds to their relatives and friends over the mobile phone with as much ease as downloading tunes on to an MP3 player.
This is big money, when gathered together. The market for remitting money is worth about half a trillion dollars, although goodness knows quite how one quantifies this accurately. Existing middlemen will be cut out of the equation.
“Ultimately, TowerGroup expects mobile phones will do for financial services what Apple iPods did for music – spur a sea change in the way consumers access services and suppliers deliver them,” one of executive said.
Just think what this will mean to parts of the world like Africa, already a continent where it has been easier to put in mobile phones than bother with the traditional wire-based stuff.
As far as I can see, the key issue to get right is security. But then that applies to Internet banking already.
Science writer John Tierney – one of my “must-read” columnists – has a good post which gets us to consider why it is considered so terrible for sportsmen and women to take performance-enhancing drugs, or have special surgery done to make themselves stronger, faster, more flexible, and so on. In years to come, suppose that say, a footballer has a knee operation and as a result, he is able to ride over a tackle, pass the ball more swiftly. Or a fast bowler at cricket has the same operation done to make it easier to send down a delivery to a batsman (bowlers often get injured because if they are big guys, the strain on their knees and back can be large). It seems to me that the key issue is disclosure. If you had an “anything-goes” games, with sports folk free to do what they wanted, there could be no complaints about cheating. And the boundaries between what is and what is not considered okay are not clear cut anyway, but they are more readily solvable than just adopting a puritanical zero-tolerance approach on enhancements. I cannot also help wonder whether some of the constant sniping at sports folk for taking drugs is not so much about cheating per se, as about taking the drugs in the first place. There is a sort of desire for “purity” in sport which is a part of the more general puritanism in our culture.
Like I said, the key is disclosure. If any cyclist, swimmer, footballer or for that matter, F1 motor racing driver takes drugs as part of their sport, then it should be okay so long as they disclose it. One could always use a handicapping rule anyway. For instance, if a motor racer is taking a drug to enhance his concentration during a race, maybe the race organisers can impose a 5 second penalty.
As medical technologies progress, this issue is going to become more pressing. Rather than continuing to hold out against any of this, the sports world should focus on disclosure and be adult about it.
Ronald Bailey at Reason has a nice response to the Prince of Wales’ latest attack on GM foods. The Reason comment thread is also pretty good too. One thing that does not seem to cross Prince Charles’ mind – not a long journey – is the fact that by using disease-resistant strains of crops, it will reduce the need for pesticides, which surely any “Green” should support, right?
The Telegraph seems to have a strange indulgence for this sort of fogeyish/Green/oh-god-this-science-stuff-is-ghastly sort of thing. I wonder if snobbery has anything to do with it – “organic” food tends to be more expensive, after all. But to be fair, that newspaper has carried robust defences of modern science and farming, such as this article by Bill Emmott a few months back. Worth re-reading.
Update: Stephen Pollard thinks Prince Charles should shut up. That seems a bit excessive. I do not think that Charles is overstepping some sort of ancient constitutional rules by saying what he thinks. It seems a bit odd for an opinionated fellow like Stephen to be telling people in public life to put a sock in it. If he were King, and had to deal with tricky political issues, then Stephen might have a point. But let’s face it, being heir to the throne for decades is a pretty desperate situation to be in. If Charles wants to hold views on archicture, the teaching of English or the environment, why not?
This is brutal but sadly true about Andrew Sullivan:
There was, in fact, hardly a bigger cheerleader for going to war with Iraq than Andrew Sullivan. And it won’t do for him to invoke the defense that he was misled into the war because Saddam did not possess actual WMD. It’s true that Saddam did not have stockpiles of WMD, as the Bush Administration, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry, and many others believed, along with the intelligence agencies of virtually every nation on earth. In retrospect, we know that Saddam engaged in a massive effort to mislead the world into believing he had WMD. The obligation was on him to comply with U.N. resolutions. He did the opposite, and he paid for his deception (and his cruelties) with his life and the end of his regime.
It is fine for people to change their positions over time, either because of new evidence or because of an evolution in their own views. And almost everyone who has said anything about Iraq has gotten something wrong. But few people have changed their minds as dramatically and emphatically as Sullivan has over the last few years.
Absolutely. And I am not particularly convinced, either, by Sullivan’s reply on his blog today, in which he argues thus:
I simply cannot pretend that what we’ve learned about them these past few years – and what I’ve learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism – hasn’t deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?
First of all, no-one, apart from the most deluded hawk, has or would deny that abuses have occurred, involving not just American but other Coalition forces. The point is that those abuses have in some cases already been punished. One can and should argue that the punishments could have been more severe, but that is a detail. As for the other stuff about “abusive” practices, Sullivan is frankly inviting ridicule to argue that the conditions at Gitmo rank on the sort of scale of horrors that have been inflicted on captured combatants in other campaigns, most notably those involving Soviet forces in the past, for instance. For all that one might be alarmed – as I am – about the willingness of some apologists for torture to argue for it, I certainly do not get the impression that it has been widely used or encouraged by the US and other administrations. Of course if that is the case, I might change my mind.
No. I am afraid that the critics of Sullivan have a strong point. His change of mind has been so dramatic, his use of language so heated, that it is easy to see why people who now are on the receiving end of his ire feel the guy has not been entirely honest about his switcheroo. After all, Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism that Sullivan finds so obnoxious – as I do -was hardly a secret even before 9/11, such as his flagrant abuse of free trade over steel tariffs, for instance.
As to Iraq, what did Sullivan – who is hardly an expert in military affairs – honestly expect would have happened when the invasion began: a squeaky-clean victory, an easy reconstruction and minimal violence? Hardly. To be sure, he was pretty quick to argue that the post-invasion phase needed larger forces, as McCain had argued at the time. And it is easy to see why those who argued that Saddam’s removal from power was justified – as I did – felt angry about some of the errors made post-invasion. But let’s be honest about this. If you back a war, you have to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences – bad shit can happen that you do not expect. To deny this is frankly to invite contempt.
The New Yorker has an interesting article about the risk that excessive granting of patents and copyrights can reduce, rather than increase, the potential level of goods and services. The article is very fair-minded and worth a look.
The issue of patents and IP generally remains a really tough one for me to work out what my own views are. I tend to take the view that state-granted patents are a bad idea, and think it is entirely arbitrary to work out whether a patent should run for X or Y number of years before expiry. But notwithstanding the arguments of the likes of Lessig and other “open source” folk, I can see the case for giving people some financial incentive for coming up with an idea and trying to make money from it. This seems particularly so in areas like drugs, where the costs of research and development are very high, for example.
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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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