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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Blogger Timothy Sandefur has an interesting item questioning the argument that the inefficiency of using slaves rather than free labour would have gradually eroded the institution anyway, such as in the Old South of the US. He makes the point that as far as the owners of slaves are concerned, maximising wealth may not be the only reason why they keep slaves, so the inefficiency of this repulsive institution may not prove fatal to it. In other words, it would be naive for defenders of say, the Confederacy, to argue that a war was not necessary to get rid of this institution.
Sometimes, oppression does not just wither away. A loathesome institution or regime can endure for a long time. You need action, sometimes involving bullets, to remove these evils. For those of a pacific nature, this is not a comforting conclusion.
Here is an article I wrote some time back celebrating one of the great British campaigners against slavery, Thomas Clarkson, who is a lot less well known than William Wilberforce. Reading through the comment thread reminded me that a lot of people imagine that free marketeers like me claim that capitalism will inevitably weaken slavery. There is nothing inevitable about the demise of any human institution, certainly not one that satisifies the human lust for power over others.
The Financial Times carries a report – if we can dignify this rather biased piece of journalism as a report – stating that European business leaders are becoming embarrassed at the size of paychecks that are being paid out to the heads of some companies. Oh dear. The story’s underlying assumption that equality of outcome, as opposed to equality before the law, is a good thing, is unquestioned. Of course, if the economic pie is of fixed size, then the fact that Fat Capitalist Bastard X has a larger slice of it than Poor Oppressed Worker does become an issue of justice. But therin lies the rub.
European economies, certainly in the more mature economies of Germany, France, Italy and the Low Countries, have grown at barely more than 2 per cent per annum in recent years, with Germany among the better ones, at 2.6 per cent last year. Take a look at this grid of growth rates, with European ones often at the bottom. After an extremely painful period of restructuring inside the straitjacket of the single currency, Germany has become more prosperous, or at least its blue chip companies like BMW and Siemens have. France is still floundering: President Sarkozy has not proven much of a reformer. So it is unsurprising that Europe’s economic “pie” has not expanded much. In such an environment, where you have some global companies based in Europe which are doing well, their CEOs get paid a fortune, but among the mass of the public who work for small and medium-sized firms dependent on domestic markets, the picture is far less rosy. Throw in the impact of rising commodity prices like oil and wheat, and no wonder the income gap is expanding relatively.
Of course, the FT, a faithfully centrist publcation in its political complexion, does not point out that this inequality does rather undermine the idea that the social-democrat, or “Rhine” model of “managed capitalism” is so much better than the anarchic, Anglo-Saxon sort. And remember than in France, for example, the country has a relatively steep, progressive tax code, plus a wealth tax on the super-rich. It has an absurd 35-hour work-week rule and some of the most protected labour markets in the world. And yet inequality is, according to the FT, increasing.
One of the few positive things in the article, however, is the point that some large institutional investors, like pension funds, are using their market clout as shareholders to vote against massive payouts to CEOs in firms that do not perform well. This is the sort of pressure I support. As an investor, if I hold a stake in a company run by a chump who demands a 10 per cent pay rise, for example, it is only right that I should say no. Of course, the other option is to sell that firm’s shares. Sooner or later, companies run by over-paid idiots tend to lose money for their investors. As for CEOs that run strong firms and are paid big bucks, well, if their shareholders are relatively better off in terms of the returns on their investment, than the headline-grabbing paychecks of a CEO are easy to defend. After all, if being a CEO was easy, there would be more of them around, and hence, they would be less well paid on average. The question that the FT does not ask is why the supply of CEOs and other senior managers is not greater than it is.
“Everyday life is as important to understanding of what happens as are historical milestones. It might help people realise how little it takes for the society to find itself in a grasp of a toxic ideology and how gradual the decline can be, how unnoticed the erosion of freedom, dignity and moral strength.”
From this blog’s Adriana Lukas, in her moving and chilling account of an exhibition in Hungary, yesterday. Scroll down and read it all.
Martin Baker, the UK journalist – he worked for several years at the International Herald Tribune in Paris as one of his stints – is someone who has realised that there is an untapped seam out there to be mined: thrillers about the world of finance. I have often myself wondered why, considering how much news is written about financial speculators these days, that there have not been more novels with speculators and the like as the main characters. There are some exceptions: there is Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of The Vanities; there is, of course, Ayn Rand’s great celebration of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged, although the book is more about industry than money-lending. The novel Cash McCall is a neglected 1950s classic. Occasionally financiers feature in other novels but that is pretty much it. As for movies, ask anyone about a fictional presentation of a Wall Street speculator or City buyout king, and they will say Wall Street, with the glorious Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. And he was supposed to be a baddie, remember.
Mr Baker wants to plug a bit of a gap and he has written a thriller called Meltdown, which came out a little while ago. I picked up my signed copy and a few days ago, I read it. I am afraid I have to say the book comes as a bit of disappointment. If a movie is ever made out of it, it could be toe-curlingly embarrassing unless they sort out some of the plot and characters.
Without giving away a rambling plot, the protagonist is a brilliant young Oxford academic called Samuel Spendlove, who is persuaded to be employed by some shady media types to spy on a bank in Paris, to discover the doings of a proprietary trader who makes gazillions of dollars on deals, to report back on his affairs, and presumably, to bring said shady trader to book. What we get is what I might call the “misadventures of Samuel”, a story of a once-innocent academic fallen among knaves. There are sex scenes so bad that I fear for Martin Baker’s reputation. And they add nothing to the plot. There is a feeling that we need a least a bit of sex in there to clinch a movie deal for the novel. Much of the dialogue between the main characters is clunky and lacks believability. I have worked in finance and the media and can state without qualification that yes, there are some nasty pieces of work in both, but they do not talk as Martin Baker has them talking, at least not all the time.
Also, the plot does not make a lot of sense, and the central premise: that a single proprietary desk dealer and a few buddies can bring down not just a couple of other banks, but wipe out parts of the global economy, simply does not stand up to scrutiny, although it plays to the notion that bankers are “Masters of the Universe” with deep and dark powers. Of course, there can be spectacular blowups and we are witnessing some of that now, as the recent cases of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns prove, and as Barings and Long Term Capital Management did before it. But the idea that one private bank can cause a major recession seems over the top; to do that, they need the assistance, however unintended, of governments and central banks. For sure, in a thriller, a bit of licence is okay, but you need enough believability to carry the reader along. I do not think Mr Baker quite pulls this off.
Perhaps my biggest disappointment is not the credibility of the plot, but that the character of Spendlove is not quite convincing: he seems too gullible. I never quite believe that such a smart guy could let his media puppetmasters treat him like so badly. We never really find out what motivated his media controllers to act as they did. If I were Spendlove, I’d tell his bosses to get lost and go back to doing something more intelligent instead. He lacks depth; we do not really get to grips with what makes him tick as a character beyond a desire to get some excitement away from the academic world and earn pots of money.
There are good things about the novel, to be fair. Mr Baker knows how finance works or at least he knows about the jargon used around it; he has a good feel for what a dealing room looks like, how people in these places act and he sometimes gets the dialogue right. As a journalist, he has an excellent understanding of how markets move on rumours, how news services like Reuters or Dow Jones cover the news and how bankers’ hours get elongated by time-zones. Some of the touches are a bit cliched, but the cliches do not grate too much.
Generally speaking, however, I rate this book as a two out of five, with five as the top score and one as poor. There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game. Mr Baker does at least understand, to his credit, that there is a yawning gap in the arts world’s treatment of finance. It is a bit of a shame that he has not really filled it. Maybe the next one will be better.
There are many aspects of the European Union that I dislike but I have never quite shared the view that the euro is due to collapse at some point, even if one or two member nations revert to domestic currencies, which at this stage looks highly unlikely barring an Asian-style collapse. Of course, I certainly think that imposing a single, monopoly currency on widely diverging economies at different points of the economic cycle is fraught with danger but that, remember, applies to single political jurisdictions like Britain or the US as well as blocks of different countries, which is why I am interested in the idea of free banking and multiple currency systems within a single polity. People who scoff at this idea have to argue why, if this is so weird, you can operate in a world with different forms of computer software, etc. Here is another interesting article on the idea.
Of course, I know that the prime reason for objecting to the euro for many people is not the economics anyway, but its place in the political agenda of those who wish to forge a European single state, relegating the separate nations to the status of provinces. But if people imagine that the economics of the euro-zone are going to blow the whole thing apart, they may have to wait a long time. A couple or more years ago, remember, it was argued – with a lot of convincing detail – that the euro would fall apart and countries like Italy would be forced to quit. That has not happened. The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, with columnists like Evans Ambrose Pritchard and Liam Halligan, have argued several times about the euro’s demise. Halligan is arguing this again. Well, try as I might, it is quite hard to imagine at the moment that the euro is about to fall to pieces. Try telling that to anyone who has bought euros with sterling or dollars lately. We might soon be reaching the point where, to borrow from Mark Twain, the comment is that rumours of the euro’s death have been much exaggerated.
How remiss of me to forget – today is the anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France. In a few weeks’ time me and the missus are heading to Honfleur, the French port town in northern France, for a long weekend. It is one of my favourite bits of France.
We should never forget the sacrifices made on that day and in the weeks thereafter. A relation of mine was in the British beach landings, and he lasted the entire campaign right through the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhine crossings and later, as part of the post-war occupation of north Germany. He went back to Normandy a few years ago and said the same family were working in a cafe near Caen as when he was a young lieutenant in the artillery. Oh, and he married a German girl from Hamburg, who was a lovely woman without a trace of bitterness.
As several commenters like to point out here, the UK parliament, having shed so many powers and transferred them to Brussels, is now more like a branch office of a large company, in which the great majority of the powers are exercised from the centre. The branch office staff may try to kid themselves that they are important, and voters in national elections may take the view that they are wielding meaningful power by voting, but the truth is that they are not.
Also, the workload of politicians as serious legislators has seriously declined. They are essentially implementing laws that have been, to a great extent, decided by someone else. So it makes sense, perhaps, to cull the number of MPs and cut their pay to reflect their diminished status.
I should have linked to this before, but Tory MP Peter Lilley has argued for precisely this: cutting MP’s salaries to reflect their weaker powers. Mr Lilley is a reminder that at least some MPs really get what has happened. As I occasionally point out, as MPs become more pointless, their behaviour, perks and corruption become less tolerable. Lilley’s proposal may not come to anything, but it is a meme worth spreading: these people are unimportant, and should be remunerated accordingly.
In an ideal universe, MPs would not be paid by the taxpayer at all, of course. We can always dream.
I watched Iron Man a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Downey is excellent, as are the rest of the cast. And how can you not like a film that starts off with a bunch of US soldiers driving along in a truck listening to AC/DC?
One thing I noticed is that Audi must have wangled some kind of product placement thing: all the main cars that feature are Audis. One of two aspects do not quite work and the physics of the energy system that powers the suit is not something I am fit to judge, but it seems a bit far-fetched. But what the heck.
Jim Henley, a comics buff, has a good review of the film. Mind you, I still have not entirely forgiven Jim for sliming Mark Steyn over the recent Canadian free speech kerfuffle a few months ago. Not his finest hour.
“I’m not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit – the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such as Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call.”
– Stephen Pollard
I am interested in this story as I am one of many people for whom the hopefully sunnier weather of summer is accompanied by the irritation of hayfever. I do not suffer from it as badly as when I was a child but it is still unpleasant sometimes. I once played in a cricket match and my symptoms – streaming eyes and sneezing – got so bad that I could hardly continue to play the game.
Anyway, it may be soon be possible to significantly nail the problem with a vaccine.
The other day I referred to a PJ O’Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:
“The pregnant mother of four told the U.K.’s Daily Mail that she owns guns similar to the ones she used in “Tomb Raider.” Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are not against having weapons in their house for security reasons, she says.”
“If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I’ve no problem shooting them,” she said.
Jolie, 32, has starred as a heat-packing vixen in several action movies – two “Tomb Raider” films, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and the upcoming futuristic thriller, “Wanted.”
“I can handle myself,” she said. “There’s a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there’s a side to me that’s a mommy. But there’s also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns.”
If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie.
Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.
Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones – heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry – they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He’s great. I particularly like the tune, “Roadrunner” – ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast.
Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed.
Here’s an album of some of his greatest hits.
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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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