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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As the US television journalist John Stossel points out, when politicians start calling for “windfall” taxes on oil or other evil firms for making “obscene” profits (which begs a question of what the right level is), they ignore the fact that such taxes will reduce dividends and shareholder returns, including those of pension funds. And the pension fund members – us ordinary Joes – lose out when politicians decide to come a-lootin’.
Part of the trouble is the vocabulary. “Windfall”, like “windfall apple”, implies that a good – such as a juicy apple – has fallen to earth and the acquirer of said has done nothing to earn it. It is, so the argument goes, just dumb luck that the chap who found the apple did so. And so, to switch to those Big Oil firms, there is no merit in clocking up monster profits when the oil price spikes. But this ignores the fact that oil firms and their investors took a risk in seeking to find, process and sell oil products and those risks could easily have gone wrong. We tend to forget how risky, both physically and economically, investing in oil is. When Brent crude was trading below $10 a barrel in the mid-90s, did those politicians who want to chase a few votes by bashing Big Oil cry any tears for the oil firms that were taking big losses at the time? No, of course they did not. And frankly, given that petrol is so heavily taxed in many major nations today, it is, to put it politely, rank hypocrisy for any politician to strike attitudes on the supposed venality of oil firms at all.
By the way, John Stossel is a marvel. If only we could have a few of him in the British television media.
I came across this from the online version of the German magazine, Der Spiegel (hat tip, Tim Worstall):
The scoundrels in Brussels have sold the European people a lot of things: a single market, the euro, the lifting of many border controls and, most recently, a binding global climate policy. These have all been good things, and they have helped make Europe an eminently livable continent. Despite the many dull moments and emotions that have been negative at best, the end result has been laudable.
“All good things” – oh really? The euro has not been a great success. Sure, it is a strong currency relative to the dollar at the moment, largely because of the Fed’s policy of printing money like it had forgotten all that sage advice from a certain late Professor M. Friedman, but the one-size-fits-all interest rate of the euro zone has proven a burden on the likes of enfeebled Italy, has boosted the Irish economy to boiling point, and now of course Ireland is in trouble, suffering a sharply contracting property and stock market. I am not sure how that impresses the Spiegel editors. For them, the whole project is going splendidly. As for the “binding” climate policy, I guess it does all rather depend on whether one accepts the thesis that Man-Made global warming is either happening; is happening at the speed some people claim, or justifies imposing heavy costs on industrial nations to correct it in ways that might affect other, more urgent human needs.
But this paragraph is the beaut, the one to savour:
Most of these improvements would have been held up, if not outright prevented, by referendums. Democracy doesn’t mean having unlimited confidence in citizens. Sometimes the big picture is in better hands when politicians are running it, and a big picture takes time.
Jeez.
What the hell is going on in Japan?
I’ve spent more than a decade working as a nightclub doorman. I’ve been involved in hundreds of violent incidents, including many away from the club. I can state unequivocally that in situations where some of these punks decide they’re going to pick on myself, or someone with me, with the intention of stealing our property, terrorising us or just for shits and giggles, on the occasions I’ve been armed, the situation has suddenly resolved itself when I produce a weapon.
A doorman, quoted at the blog of Rob Fisher, occasional commenter over these parts.
I have eased up a bit on “serious” blogging the last few days – I almost felt I had reached the point of mid-summer blog burnout – and have been too busy with other stuff, not least work. But I cannot resist linking to these fine folk who have set up a blog dedicated to the ferociously competitive world of barbecue food. God, I feel hungry already. No doubt those citizens of Jefferson’s Republic are gearing up for 4th of July. In a moment of transatlantic solidarity, may I ask commenters what sort of BBQ’s they will be doing on that day to give me some ideas?
I’ll be back to bashing Gordon Brown and the rest of them later, I promise.
“The fundamental story about consumer taste, in modern times, is not one of dumbing down or of producers seeking to satisfy a homogeneous least common denominator at the expense of quality. Rather, the basic trend is of increasing variety and diversity, at all levels of quality, high and low.”
– Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: how globalisation is changing the world’s cultures, page 127.
Tim Worstall provides a suitably terse response to the latest piece of economic illiteracy from leftie writer Richard Murphy, who is against admirable things like avoidance of high taxes, and who now is supporting measures to prevent, or at least hamper, investors from making money by “shorting” the shares of firms they think are likely to perform badly.
The practice of “shorting” seems to get a certain class of person all upset. Earlier this year, when the shares of HBOS, the UK banking group, came under pressure, the cry went up that those irresponsible wreckers called hedge funds were deliberately trying to destroy the firm to make a fast profit. What this ignores is that if there were not investors willing to temporarily borrow stock as part of their short-selling tactics, then this would reduce the total number of counterparties in a market, and reduce liquidity and efficiency in the pricing of shares, which is a bad thing. Illiquid markets – which can produce big jumps up or down in the prices of shares – are generally not good places to be in, particularly for smaller investors.
If I take a dim view of a company that I do not own, shorting lets me act on that view and maybe make some money out of it. Quite why this is so terrible, Mr Murphy does not bother to explain.
Some time ago, when I wrote about this topic, one sarcastic commenter moaned that I was insulting the intelligence of readers by trying to explain what “shorting” is. I reject that criticism since it s plainly obvious that even among supposedly intelligent people, the workings of the financial markets are mysterious. And what people do not understand, they fear.
The Irish “no” vote on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty has already had some positive effects, such as the lessening chances of the European major states attempting to create a tax cartel. Well, we can all hope, anyway:
France has dropped plans to push forward with tax harmonisation under its European Union presidency, following Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty.
Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, told the Financial Times that while the proposal for a common consolidated corporate tax base had not been abandoned altogether, Paris would no longer press other governments to back it over the next six months.
Yes, perhaps the French, rather than attempting to prevent some horrific “race to the bottom” on tax rates, should instead admit that tax competition, including that which comes from those dreadful offshore centres, is a good thing.
The comments ought to underscore just how serious are the consequences of creating an EU state and the benefits that exist from resisting that ambition.
Well, maybe I write these words in a spirit of optimism as the light pours through my window. Indulge me for a while.
Nice item on the writings of this wonderful author. I remember watching the TV series Shogun many years ago and remember how enthralled I was.
On her blog over at the Spectator website, Melanie Phillips, a writer with whom I generally agree on certain things, not least the right of Israel both to exist and defend itself, writes what I think is a poor article on David Davis’ recent decision to hold a by-election in his parliamentary seat to highlight the loss of civil liberties:
Much is being made in some quarters of the apparent gulf between the view taken of David Davis’s resignation by the political and media village (he’s lost the plot/is a one-man plot/is a monstrous narcissist) and the public (he’s a hero fighting for Britain’s ancient liberties). I can’t help but see all this as yet another example of the replacement of reason by emotion. I can certainly see that Davis has touched a popular chord among people who feel passionately – and I have much sympathy with this – that MPs no longer act in the public interest and no longer speak for them but instead are machine politicians whipped by their party leadership into a systematic denial of reality. I also sympathise with the general view that the state is encroaching more and more oppressively into people’s lives – the abuse by local councils of anti-terrorist legislation being a case in point. To that extent, the quixotic Davis is surfing the popular tide of anti-politics, which explains much of the support he is getting and is not to be under-estimated.
“Much is being made”. Yes, that is because the loss of civil liberties and the spread of the database state has reached the point where ordinary members of the public – those ghastly people – are getting riled. David Davis is a sufficiently paid-up member of the human race to have spotted this. But to dismiss his action as some sort of Dianaesque emotional display, rather than what is in fact a pretty shrewd, calculated act seems a bit patronising. And then we get to the reasoning that explains why Ms Phillips dislikes what Mr Davis has done:
Second, he says he is against 42 days because he stands for the hallowed principle of not locking people up without charge. So does that mean he is against the 28 day limit as well? And if he is, then surely he has to be against the 14 day limit that preceded it, and the seven day limit before that. Indeed, according to the principles he has laid down he has to be against any detention before charge at all. Similarly, he says he’s against the whole ‘surveillance society’ including speed cameras, DNA databases, CCTV and so forth; yet he also says he’s not against all of this, and doesn’t want to get rid of all DNA testing because some of it is perfectly sensible. So what exactly is he fighting for? And why couldn’t he do so within his own party, which largely takes precisely the view he professes? Has he given this any systematic thought at all? Despite his SAS image and multiply-broken nose, is he not merely beating his chest and emoting, in tune with the sentimental irrationality of the age?
Well, leaving aside the snide remark about his “SAS image”, I am not sure how Mr Davis would reply to all of those points but his recent remarks make it pretty crystal clear that he is against the holding of DNA on innocent people, for example, or even shorter periods of detention without trial. Ms Phillips, presumably, is in favour of all the above and more.
Then we get an argument that Mr Davis is in favour of all this “emotional” civil liberties stuff because he is insufficiently aware of the threat Britain faces from Islamic terrorism:
It also strikes me that there is a strong and quite vicious sub-text to the support he has been getting within certain political circles, which are backing him against what they call the ‘neo-cons’ in David Cameron’s circle — by whom they mean in particular Michael Gove and George Osborne. The thought-crime committed by these two is to analyse correctly the threat to this country posed by Islamism and to support America in its fight to defend the free world. The anti neo-cons believe, by contrast, not merely that Britain must put critical distance between itself and American interventionism, but that the threat to Britain from Islamism is hugely exaggerated, both from within as well as from without. It is in that context that they maintain that 42-days is unnecessary because the dire warnings about the likely threat to this country are unproven and that the extension of the detention limit is instead a Trojan horse for the willed erosion of our ancient liberties.
The reasoning is weak. It does not seem to cross her mind that one might be as concerned as the next man about terrorism – as I am – without feeling the need to chuck out long-standing protections of the individual that were not even removed – or at least only shortly – during emergencies such as the Second World War. It may be that some people on the right dislike the “neocon” argument out of some naive attitude about terrorism, or some sort of hatred of Israel/America, etc, but that does not appear to be the case with Mr Davis. As far as I can tell, he is very much from the Atlanticist tradition of conservatism.
Ms Phillips is also playing to the bad argument that to be a defender of liberty is to be a softie on security. We have to absolutely nail this terrible idea that you can trade off one against the other.
By contrast, here is a cracking article that takes Mr Davis very seriously indeed.
The annual jamboree that is known as the Wimbledon tennis fortnight gets going in a few days’ time. I watched the Roddick/Nadal match yesterday and was stunned at the sheer speed with which Andy Roddick, the US player, served the ball. On several occasions he hit serves of more than 140 mph. Jesus. It made me wonder whether there is any wisdom in John McEnroe’s suggestion that wooden racquets are brought back to put some more finesse into the sport. There is no doubt that modern sports technologies, including the materials used to make everything from tennis racquets to the heads of golf drivers, have evolved at an amazing pace. One reason why modern tennis championships have to use special gadgets to test that a ball has fallen inside a court boundary is because of the ferocious speed with which the ball can be hit. It is almost impossible for a line judge to see the fall accurately over the course of a long game. I play occasionally and bought a racquet in a sale that, to my amazement, can be used to hit the ball incredibly fast. But I wonder whether this makes for a better game overall.
In the meantime, here are some good reasons to watch the sport. As for the ladies, I am told they are rather keen on the young Spanish maestro, who threatens to dethrone Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players I have ever seen, from his spot as best player on grass.
The Guardian newspaper, which regards David Davis’ resignation as an MP to hold a by-election over detention without trial as a “stunt”, carries this rather sniffy editorial that tells you a great deal about the mindset of those in power and their media lackeys. Excerpt:
He is right on ID cards, but only on the basis of an excessively sweeping mistrust of the state. The liberty he is concerned with is, almost exclusively, liberty from official interference. There is little place in this conception for freedom from destitution, for example, which only the state can provide. There is also a strongly patriotic dimension, baffling to those who see rights as universal. Mr Davis’s defence of the age-old liberties of English common law, such as habeas corpus, is impressive, but his past disdain for the Human Rights Act sits strangely with that. The European convention which that act codifies may not be exclusively English, but it will provide the only legal basis for a challenge if 42 days becomes law. Another convention right is that to life. Liberals who see that as the most basic freedom will be uncomfortable with Mr Davis’s personal support for the death penalty.
As Perry de Havilland of this parish would put it, that is wrong on so many levels. At the most basic level, the Guardian has conflated the idea of liberty and the idea of power. There is “negative liberty”, which says that liberty is the absence of coercion, and “positive liberty”, which blurs the idea of freedom with the ability, or power, to do things, or have things one wants, such as food, shelter, good health, nice weather, and so on. The late, great Isaiah Berlin skewered this reasoning years ago. The problem in claiming, as the Guardian does, that being “destitute” is the same as lacking liberty is that it ignores what has caused such destitution. A destitute person, living in a free country, will not be molested by the agents of a state in the way that anyone, rich, middling or flat broke, can and will be in a society that has the sorts of restrictions that Mr Davis is opposing. Of course, in some extreme cases, a very poor, or handicapped person is vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others, which is why prosperous societies full of people willing to help the weak and vulnerable are far better places to be. But socialism makes the fatal error in conflating liberty with power. In fact that error leads to the idea that somehow, all manner of regulations are okay so long as we have a full belly and somewhere to lay our heads at night. David Kelley, the philosopher, also confronts the nonsensical idea that poverty and coercion are the same thing in his book about welfare. Here is a review of that book that is worth reading.
→ Continue reading: Getting confused on the meaning of liberty
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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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