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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My comment the other day about a rather imperfect – if interesting – article about the late F.A. Hayek suddenly turned into a comment thread argument about whether religious parents have the right to have the genitalia of their children adjusted (as in the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc cultures). Now, I am not all that interested in the specific health or medical arguments here, although I would be interested if those with actual medical knowledge could give some ideas on the value or otherwise of said. What interests me, as a defender of liberty, is what should be the boundaries on what parents should observe when it comes to raising their children when it comes to actions that actually affect the bodies of their kids. For example, suppose a parent of religion/ideology X decided that he or she really wanted to put a small tattoo on the forehead of their son with the symbol of their family faith? Suppose the operation to do this was painless. Would it be justified? (In my view, no).
I put this point because in the comment thread attached to my post about Hayek, one commenter called Gabriel argues that banning such operations on children done for religious reasons constitutes discrimination against his faith. Such an argument is, I think, an example of multiculturalism gone mad.
On a related theme of protecting kids, David Friedman – son of the great Milton Friedman – has thoughts.
I definitely want to see the new Batman film (it pays to book well in advance, Ed). Here is an interesting take on some of the politics of the film. Another useful review – without spoilers – is over at Bob Bidinotto’s blog. In a nutshell, he says he liked the film a great deal but felt the film tried to cram too many themes and plotlines into it.
Mind you, I am looking forward even more to the film based on the Watchmen story series. Bring it on!
“Weren’t the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn’t even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic…Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an inalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley.”
– PJ O’Rourke
One reason I fervently hope that the oil price eventually crashes if new energy sources are developed, is so it will pull a rug under thuggish regimes in places such as Venezuela and Russia:
The future of BP’s investment in Russia hung in the balance last night after Robert Dudley, the chief executive of TNK-BP, decided to leave the country.
In a humiliating defeat for Britain’s largest company, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, said that Mr Dudley had left Russia temporarily, after an intense campaign of harassment by TNK-BP’s Russian co-owners, Alfa, Access and Renova (AAR), that had been “deeply unpleasant” for Mr Dudley and left him unable to carry out his job. Mr Dudley’s departure from Moscow was not disclosed until he was in the air en route to an undisclosed location.
I would like to think that if the BP executive were physically threatened or harmed in any way, that the full fury of the UK state would descend upon that gangster regime, but of course that is most unlikely and probably unwise anyway, so it is a folorn hope. As long as oil is so strong and countries in Europe are such heavy importers of Russia’s natural gas, this sort of bullying will continue. But it surely is also a reminder that investment in that country is fraught with danger. The hedge fund manager, Bill Browder, was kicked out of the country a few years ago for his role as the asker of awkward questions when it came to investing in Russian firms. If ever Russia hits economic difficulties in future, as happened in the debt crisis of 1998, I hope that when Russia goes asking for aid, that other nations have the good sense to tell that country to perform sexual acts on itself, so to speak.
Stories such as this make me convinced that among the “Brics”, Russia is not a good long-term bet, at least not until the political complexion of that vast nation changes for the better. That is going to be a long wait.
If you can speak and write mandarin Chinese to the extent that you can also teach it, then chances are that this is going to be one hell of a lucrative career right now, according to this report.
I fear that this is a trend I am going to miss out on. Even if I had a flair for languages – and I speak French and German a bit – Chinese is a whole different ball game. And at my age – 42 – it would be probably far too late to start anyway. Mind you, an old colleague of mine who is in his 40s had been learning for several years and is how working in China, in the media business. So it is possible if one is determined enough, I guess.
Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing “bubble”, which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don’t discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time.
– Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog.
But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying!
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Ford Model-T car, the vehicle that changed the face of the automobile business, helping to put the four-wheeled auto within reach of a vast swathe of the American population. Ford’s mass-production techniques may not have been totally original, since one can argue that some of the features of mass production used had been employed in parts of the industrialised world before. But the factories that churned out these cars were probably the most famous forms of mass-production in their time, and encouraged a host of imitators.
Here’s a nifty slide-show on the anniversary.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the “second-shift / Costco” sense.
– The wonderful James Lileks.
Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse.
It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union.
One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:
Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.
That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty.
Here’s another one:
Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical.
Huh?
But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic.
The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap. → Continue reading: A civil, but still flawed look at Hayek from the left
Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here’s a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.
A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein’s recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.
Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.
At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.
Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.
Glad to know that at a time when people are concerned about the economic outlook, crime and so forth, that those chaps at the European Union have not taken their eye off the ball:
The acre, one of Britain’s historic imperial measurements, is to be banned from use under a new European directive. The measurement, which will officially be replaced by the hectare, will no longer be allowed when land is being registered. After being agreed last week, the new ruling will come into force in January 2010.
I do not know why this story riles me so much, but it does. It is not that I cannot understand the logic of using a metric system so that it is possible to make instant comparisons between say, the price of a hectare of land in France and Britain, which is quite useful to be able to do when looking at the state of our respective economies. But it is the illegality of registering land by using certain measurements that is so barmy. If there is a market in land – well, partially free anyway – surely the persons buying or selling can measure it any way they please, so long as the amounts are agreed and are accurately registered. It is the accuracy of the register, not the units per se, that counts. Apart from anything else, cannot the EU and its minions do some basic maths? An acre is equal to 0.404 hectares. Every time one has to convert the old English Imperial measurements to metric and vice versa, it has the salutary effect of encouraging people to do a bit of maths, which is a good mental exercise anyway.
Many units of measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon world have been ingrained in our mental lives. I can – just about – visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare. Far from being fogeyish or illogical, there is nothing essentially better or worse than one or the other. Roger Scruton has a nice discussion of the benefits of traditional weights and measures here. Every time there is an assault on such traditional measures, it is an assault on differences because they are differences, on the eccentric, the quaint, the odd, the unusual, the untidy.
Compared to many of the other creeping forms of “harmonisation” beloved of the Eurocrats, this may seem like a paltry measure, and I am sure that is right. But it has really annoyed me. Leave our acres alone, you tidy-minded bastards.
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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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