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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Apparently, the humourless twerps who lead many of the world’s main industrial nations got a touch of the vapours over these parting remarks from the President as he left the G8 cant-fest in Japan:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Oh please. Mr Bush, who I imagine is fed up to the back teeth at the preening hypocrisy, moral posturing and downright dishonesty of the Green lobby, has clearly decided that the US is not going to be ashamed of being an industrial nation. The constant calls by various environmental groups for the US and other major states to slash CO2 emmissions by more than a half by tomorrrow afternoon or whatever are unworkable, and they know it. The massive cost of shifting energy sources to supposedly cleaner ones could help to tip parts of the world economy into recession or make the existing slowdown even worse; the push for biofuels, for example, is, arguably, hurting poor people in countries that are traditionally highly dependent on grains etc for basic foodstuffs.
In case any commenters ask, no, I am not a climate change denier, but I do seriously doubt whether a massive cut in carbon emissions over the timescale demanded by some is going to work without causing havoc.
No, I am glad Mr Bush gave his rival leaders the verbal equivalent of a kick in the nuts. More please.
On that miraculous Saturday, therefore, when the Vulcan took to the skies again – there was perhaps only one regret – that the bomb bay was not filled with ordnance, with the destination Brussels via Westminster.
– EU Referendum. The author had been to watch the magnificent example of Cold War aviation take to the skies once more. Here’s a link to a site about this splendid aircraft.
I must admit I have tended to view Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo, the anti-capitalist book, as a committed socialist but not obviously a downright liar. If this scathing review of her recent book, The Shock Doctrine, is accurate, then she he has appallingly traduced the late Professor Milton Friedman, accusing him of holding attitudes that he did not actually hold, such as over the recent invasion of Iraq (she claims he was for it, in fact he opposed it). The book, according to the review, reveals that she cannot figure out what the difference between a classical liberal and a neo-conservative is, for example. As the reviewer, Johan Norberg makes clear, a lot of “shock” events, like terrorist attacks, wars and hyperinflation do not work in the interests of classical liberals, but quite the opposite. In Weimar Germany, inflation destroyed much the middle class, helping to pave the way for Hitler. Wars have been used by national leaders to justify big increases in government powers that are often not rescinded. And so on. Klein either knows this, or cannot be bothered to mention it as it does not fit into her thesis.
Anyway, read the review. It is superb.
Apologies: I got the woman’s surname wrong, now fixed.
That invaluable organisation, the Taxpayer’s Alliance, has worked out that the total cost of the various surveillance and data-gathering services favoured by the UK government is just under £20 billion, or about £800 per household. The figure is a total, not an annual sum. £20 billion is a huge figure, even in these times of inflated financial sums.
Now the question arises whether, if we really do face serious security threats – and I think we do – what else could that £20 billion have purchased that might actually have made us safer?
Of course, £20 billion could also enable quite a few tax cuts, but that is obviously hark heresy these days (sarcasm alert).
One of the more annoying features of tennis today – certainly in the Wimbledon Men’s Finals – is how the victor often feels the urge to climb up the side of the stand after he has been declared the winner to embrace his family, girlfriend, mistress, personal trainer, etc. Last night, after winning the thrilling match against Federer, Nadal did all this, and then tried to climb all over the stand. I thought, “Christ, the idiot is going to fall off”. It would have been a bit tragic had this marvellous player suddenly injured himself in this way.
In future, Rafa, keep off the bloody stands.
A report in the Daily Telegraph today over the Group of 8 gathering of political leaders in Japan carries this:
Mr Brown will call for the creation of a new international panel of experts – mirroring a similar panel for climate change – which will examine long-term trends in food supplies and offer advice to individual countries.
A panel of experts? Surely, the best judges of long term trends are those investors who have been putting their own and their clients’ money on the line. Those evil people – speculators – have a strong vested interest in getting these long-term trends right. I would rather listen to the famed investor and commodities writer Jim Rogers than a bunch of academics hired to form some form of panel.
He will also pledge to increase investment in agricultural research and push for an increase in aid to agricultural projects in the developing world. In total, Britain’s contribution to tackling higher food prices has now cost the Government more than £500m.
How about not spending taxpayers’ money on such ventures and instead, removing trade barriers and other trade restrictions, such as production quotas and the like?
As for encouraging research, there is no need for states to do this. Large companies in the agricultural sphere, such as Monsanto and Bayer do oodles of research already. These governments would do better to resist attempts to outlaw GM foods and other “frankenstein” technologies.
Another senior UK figure – one of the most senior judges in the land – has argued that some aspects of Sharia law should be permissable when it comes to settling certain disputes between Muslim couples. This re-ignites the controversy sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who argued for the same.
Once more, the bedrock principle of a liberal order, that men and women should be treated equally before the law, is potentially at odds with a code that, by definition, does not accept this equality as part of its essence. The inherently anti-women bias of Sharia is not a bug, it is a feature. Take cases where, for instance, a young English guy who is an atheist or Christian tries to take a Muslim girl out on a date and the latter gets physically intimidated by her family (this is not a hypothetical situation, it has happened). To what authority should the woman or man appeal in dealing with such cases? Unless the judge is able to answer that sort of hard question, which goes to the heart of why sharia is considered unworkable in a liberal order, the judge would be well advised to focus on his core responsibility, of seeing that justice is done under the laws of this land. This is one of those examples of why I do not think that a polycentric legal order can really work unless it is possible for its members to elect to choose under which code they wish to be treated. Muslim women would not have that choice if sharia law was incorporated. More importantly, they do not have the key right of “exit”, the right to choose no longer to be treated under a specific code of their families.
The judge, like the Archbishop, is proof to radical Islamists that some of the most senior figures in what might pass for the British Establishment lack the intellectual or moral fibre to defend the core values of this nation.
As a voracious reader and hoarder of books, I have a bit of a problem. I live in a small flat in Pimlico. My wife is also an avid reader. I work from home for some of my day before heading to the office and have to keep a fair amount of literature connected to my job at home. The place is getting full.
There is some advice here on how to handle it. I would like to ask commenters what you folk do about this. I have thought about putting some of my books into storage, but the rental price on storage can be pretty high. I have given away some books to charity shops and flogged a few of them on E-Bay, but I am reluctant to part with some of them as I like to dip into them if I am researching anything. And I am not yet ready to move into a larger house, although one day I shall do so and create my own private library.
I guess this is a problem if you are a libertarian geek like yours truly. The late Chris R. Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, had a huge personal library; his flat in Bloomsbury was crammed with books, which I happily enjoyed going through when I briefly lived at his flat. Sadly, when he died two years ago, dealing with his book collection proved quite a headache for the executors of his estate. I have wondered whether, in my own case, I should create a sort of virtual online “library” that close friends and ideological comrades can use to borrow some of my stuff – and send it back of course – to ensure that my collection does get read and valued by people who might enjoy them. I honestly do not know whether that is workable, though. In my experience, lending books or DVDs to friends can often be a problem if you want them back by a certain stage.
Of course, some people may argue that in the internet age, this issue will eventually no longer be a problem because all books can be stored online. Up to a point. The trouble is that this old fart rather likes to have the physical examples of his favourite books on hand, on the shelf. I like them as physical objects as well as for their content.
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
From the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
It is a melancholy thought that in much of the Anglosphere today, the concepts of classical liberalism: natural rights, limited government, private property, free trade, freedom of speech, rational enquiry, and the pursuit of a happy life, are under attack. The US has been and still is an imperfect exemplar of those values, but in my mind it still is the best of them, amd I wish my American Anglosphere cousins a very happy Fourth of July.
Fire up the barbecues!
Last night, flicking through the TV channels after watching Andy Murray get pulverised by Nadal, the muscle-bound Spaniard, in the tennis, I watched in bemused fascination as ITV and the BBC both devoted quite a lot of air time to celebrating – that word was used repeatedly – the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service. There has even been a church service, attended by Prince Charles and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to mark the anniversary of Britain’s monopoly provider of health care, an essentially socialist creation that is hardly emulated anywhere else in the world, and for good reason. None of the major objections to health care that is provided via tax and distributed “free” at the point of use were mentioned. Last night’s stories gave no balancing comments from skeptics or opponents of the NHS to counter the general feel-good presentations.
At the Institute of Economic Affairs, here is a rather more sober treatment of the NHS. As the US writer PJ O’Rourke once warned his countrymen about socialised medical care, if you think US private sector healthcare is expensive, just wait until it is “free”.
A person calling him or herself “Thorkel” left a comment over at Wired magazine’s recent item on water shortages:
Your article on the planet’s dwindling supplies of freshwater (“Peak Water,” issue 16.05) shies away from the obvious: There’s not a hope in hell of avoiding dangerous water shortages until demand is reduced. And there’s not a hope in hell of reducing demand sufficiently until the human population is significantly reduced. We can either start taking measures to curtail our own breeding, or we can die in thirst and hunger and in the wars over what little is left.
How “significantly” we should reduce the human population, or by what means, is not explained. Apart from “curtailing our own breeding” (by forced sterlisation, compulsory abortions on the Chinese model, perhaps?) is not explained either. Neither is this writer, I expect, aware of how previous predictions of disastrous shortages of water and food been shown to be utter nonsense.
More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. That seawater is not drinkable but then the problem is therefore one of using resources to convert that water into drinkable form. But to suggest that the Earth has a water shortage problem is a nonsense; what it has is currently an under-investment in the systems that might be needed to convert seawater into liquids fit for human use.
The always readable Leon Louw, who spoke at last year’s Libertarian Alliance conference on the issues raised here, is good on this topic.
Data is accumulating that the British residential property market is now undergoing a significant fall. The commercial side of it has been suffering for some time. Apart from some prime residential bits in central London – and even these parts are not immune to change – average prices have now fallen month on month across the country for quite some time.
Some of this may abate eventually. I hope so, since a collapse in house prices would presage a major recession. It is all well and good for people to say that a shakeout is necessary to clear all this cheap money out of the system – and I understand that point – but it is pretty grim having to endure the process first-hand. But beyond that, what this episode reminds me of is the unwise move by many people to put all their long-term retirement savings options into property. I know quite a few people who cheerfully tell me that they have no pension and are relying on a business or set of properties to do the job. Well, they have a half-decent point: many pension savings schemes are a rip-off and poorly invested. But relying on bricks and mortar to keep us comfortable in our rocking chairs does not strike me as very smart. Maybe market developments will act as a wakeup call. And anyway, as I have remarked before, more and more people are going to have to re-think the whole notion of “retirement” anyway, particularly if we are going to live longer, and in healthier shape, than our ancestors.
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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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