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]
|
My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, “The Right Stuff”, based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.
Via the Andy Ross blog, here’s a review of a new book on von Braun.
Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.
I guess the rise in commodity prices – as I alluded to in my post below on farming – has galvanised a fair bit of commentary on the business of producing, shipping and selling food. Perhaps it is a welcome sign that in an affluent age such as ours, when so many people are utterly divorced from this most basic human activity, we have been reminded of it. Anyway, it tells one a lot about the state of the culture that this is considered a good headline in the Daily Telegraph: “Big supermarkets are not evil.”
Of course they are not evil. But at a time when any business, even if it has to operate in a ferociously competitive one like retail, is regarded as morally dubious if it is simply big, it is at least good that some in the MSM are, however belatedly, sticking up for such enterprises. About the only thing I can think of that counts as a legitimate criticism of supermarket chains is when their bosses exploit, or actively seek, to get governments to pass eminent domain, or compulsory purchase, laws to make it easier for them to build their sites. That is a just cause for free marketeers to complain about. Otherwise, though, bleating about supermarkets is largely nonsense. If they do “force” smaller shops out of business, the truth is more often that regulations, high taxes and extortionate rents are hurting small shops. It may well be that low-price supermarkets, which exploit economies of scale, are biting into the margins of some mid-tier shops that neither have the benefits of bigness nor the niche attractions of a high-margin, specialist retail outlet. But I suspect that a lot of the dislike of this trend is more aesthetic than economic. Oh the vulgarity!
One issue that tends to be overlooked is that in our prosperous age, we have lost some of that early awe, even excitement, that people used to get when they had walked into a massive shop for the first time. Back in the early 1950s, when there was still some rationing in Britain, my father remembers how impressed he was by walking into a supermarket in Canada. You could, he noted, buy anything from a suit, a tractor, to a tin of salmon. He thought that was fantastic.
This unintentionally hilarious news story at The Observer reveals a great deal about the mindset of the urban, ecologically aware types that write for that newspaper:
Soaring food prices are threatening to inflict widespread ecological damage on the countryside, as farmers abandon environmentally friendly schemes that have improved much of the landscape.
It is a matter of debate whether these schemes have improved or harmed the landscape: such an observation has as much to do with a certain aesthetic taste as anything else. For years, policymakers have thrown vast gobs of taxpayers’ money to discourage farmers, such as in my native Suffolk, from growing crops like wheat, barley, soybeans, beans and so on. Now that the price of wheat has skyrocketed, encouraged by such developments as biofuels and rapid growth in emerging market economies, the economics of “set aside”, as the daft policy is known, looks completely indefensible. So farmers are acting as entrepreneurs should in the face of rising prices for their produce: they are growing more crops. If that means that land that had been set aside for cute little meadows is now being ploughed up and sown with wheat, well, that is just too bad. Do the Observer journalists argue that there should not be some change in land usage at a time of rapidly rising food prices? There is no point in bashing the current government for such rising prices – I don’t think even the most fanatical Gordon Brown hater thinks he is to blame for this – if farmers are not allowed to exploit market forces in the way they should have been allowed to do all the way along.
For what it is worth, the Suffolk farmer’s son in me rather objects to the countryside being regarded by the Guardianista classes – many of whom have no idea about husbandry – as a glorified park for them to ramble around in. It is, as this article reminds us, primarily a place of work, where food is produced. It is sometimes useful to be reminded that the landscape has been moulded by the hand of Man. I personally rather like to see large, golden fields of wheat. But then I’m kind of strange in that way.
Here is a long and good article about the destruction of the economy of Venezuela by Hugo Chavez, the president who recently attempted – unsuccessfuly, thank goodness – to get himself voted president for life. I know I am preaching to the coverted around here by pointing out the sheer folly of what this thug is attempting, but sometimes you have to keep pointing to such examples lest people in other parts of the world forget just what a disaster state central planning is.
It never fails to strike me how such a resource-rich nation like Venezuela can be ruined by a political operator like Chavez, and contrast that with how a small colony, with hardly any resources at all apart from sheer entrepreneurial spirit, like Hong Kong, can rise to be one of the richest places on the planet.
For a great guide to some of the key drivers of wealth in countries down the ages, this classic by David Landes is greatly recommended.
In Third Way Britain both the bureaucrats and the nosey neighbours get to spy on you sunbathing nude in your garden.
– A line from a gloriously rude review of an absurd book by our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.
The Labour Party has suffered a crushing defeat in a by-election for one of its supposedly safe seats. The odds now must be rising that Gordon Brown will be challenged for leadership of the party. Having been given the job in a coronation last year rather than face a democratic election, his credibility is in shreds. Quite who would want to step up to challenge him is another matter. Labour looks to be headed for defeat at the next election, which must happen by 2010, and who wants to be the man or woman at the helm when or if that happens?
Watching the BBC television networks this morning, I see Labour folk blaming the government’s woes on the economy. This is pretty disengenuous. Yes, of course, the darkening economic situation is a worry for millions of people and Labour – which shamelessly tried to claim credit for the previous fat years – is now suffering from the effects of rising economic worries. But the reasons for the public anger go much deeper. There is a sense that this government is lazy, out of ideas, corrupt, incompetent.
I also like to think that the government’s assault on freedom, particularly civil liberties, might have something to do with the public anger, plus its shameful behaviour over the EU Constitution, sorry Treaty, being rammed through parliament in flagrant defiance of Labour’s previous election promises. It would be nice to imagine that authortarianism was a reason for hatred for this government.
I am glad to see that a long-standing US friend of mine, Russell E. Whitaker, is back posting to his blog, which has had a bit of a haitus due to the man’s shift from California to New York and his being incredibly busy with work. Russell writes a lot and has a lot of knowledge of martial arts. Thanks to him, I started to go to Bujinkan classes in London’s Hammersmith. It is great fun and an extremely useful set of skills about self-defence, although physically tough as well to learn. Unfortunately, due to work reasons – I had to work late in the evenings last year – I was not able to attend as much as I liked last year but that has changed and I intend to resume. In the meantime, I have started to fence. Fencing, I find, is even more physically demanding than Bujinkan (yes, really). Initially, I am learning to use the foil, a very light sword where you score if you hit the opponent on certain parts of the body. Depending on which type of sword one uses, you score differently by hitting certain body parts. Of course fencers wear lots of protection these days so there is little chance of getting injured although you cannot afford to be reckless. I find it incredibly good for eye-hand co-ordination. I have also learned that one needs to do lots of stretching exercises since fencing requires people to be flexlible. My knee joints felt pretty sore the following morning after a class. It is a good incentive to get really fit.
Our lead instructor is a Frenchman – French seems to be the language of fencing – and another instructor is a Hungarian. More than half of the class are women, who are often much better than the men.
On the subject of fencing, we all have our favourite films. There are some great sword fighting scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Bossu, and in the excellent Ridley Scott film, The Duellists (starring Harvey Keitel).
For those interested in fencing as a sport, here’s a book worth looking at. But in the end, if you want to have a go, you have to go to a class. One word of warning: the kit can be expensive, so it is best to go to a few classes, use the class stuff to see if you like it first.
Everyone has things that they would destroy them if they were publicised. I once orchestrated a coup in a small African country from a base in an extinct volcano with the aid of a lot of fit-birds in 1960’s specs and very short lab coats, holding clipboards for no apparent reason, whilst I stroked my Persian cat. That should never be revealed. Oh, bugger! Like all Bond villians I give it away towards the end.
I love that. Readers will recognise the inimitable prose style of regular Samizdata commenter NickM, who now writes regularly at this place. This is taken from an excellent attack on the idiotic efforts of UK police to prevent people from criticising Scientology. It shows how respect for freedom of speech – which must, by definition, include the right to offend and upset – is now under serious assault in this country.
Any attempt to censor criticism of belief systems is an outrage. So long as the critics do not try to violate the lives and property of the people they are criticisng, the law should stay well out of it.
Read the whole of Nick’s piece.
There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.
– Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Daily Telegraph, perhaps not surprisingly as this is not a flattering story for the current government, points out that official figures show that almost 2 million Britons have left the UK since 1997. However one tries to spin this, such an outflow of people is not exactly a ringing endorsement of government policy, although there has always been and I hope will remain a steady two-way flow of people to and from this island, if only as an expression of the understandable desire of people to live in new places, to strike out to make a new life and so forth. Naturally, much of the media focus will be on the reasons why people are leaving. This is well-trodden ground already (crime, tax, weather, cost of living, etc).
One factor that struck me was that 1.58 million foreigners resident in the UK left during the 1997-2006/7 period, which suggests that while millions of foreigners come to the country, many of them do not choose to stay for more than a few years. What counts of course is the net trend. During the period, 3.9 million people came to the UK, with 500,000 arriving in 2006 alone. The pace of inflow – and possibly outflow – seems to be speeding up.
As I learned on a previous posting about immigration and emigration, there is a tendency – even among generally liberal people – to treat the movement of people from A to B as a utilitarian calculus, to work out if the net benefit or harm of human migration can be computed into a neat, hard number. Rarely does one hear the question addressed in terms of the freedom of a person to move to another place more to their liking so long as they respect the rights and property of whomever they choose to make their new neighbours, do not violate the laws of a host country, etc. Instead, the point is asked, “How does the arrival or departure of people to and from this nation benefit or harm me?” The question has no easy answer. For some low-paid indigenous workers, the sudden arrival of foreigners will put downward pressure on wages in the short run, but add new sources of consumer demand in the medium and long run. An exodus of entrepreneurs, meanwhile, reduces the “national pie”: but should any classical liberal worthy of that name care about the collective wealth held within a given geographical area? The UK is not a company – which has a defined end, like making cars – but an association of hopefully free persons pursuing their own ends within the boundaries of certain laws. I think it is sometimes worth stepping back to reflect on the fact that in this globalised age, millions of people are taking advantage of the ability to find the place to live that most suits them and their families and achieve their ambitions. I happen to think this is mostly a good thing, whatever caveats one can throw in about welfare, the pace of cultural assimilation and the like.
Here is an article by the journalist and parliamentary sketch-writer, Edward Pearce, that is well worth a read.
Thanks to those invaluable guys at The Taxpayers’ Alliance, we have a clearer idea of how much of our money is spent on quasi-governmental organisations. What is even more shocking is that the UK government does not provide such clear information and as a result, we have to rely on the likes of TA to provide it. I guess it bears out the comment of P.J. O’ Rourke in his wonderful “Parliament of Whores” book, to the effect that one of the key reasons why government and its agencies are so massive is no one can understand the sheer amount of what government does or claims to do.
I rather like this story about one of the smallest islands in the Channel Islands group being up for sale, or at least its lease is.
I like this detail:
Herm is the first Channel Island to go on sale for years. The asking price for the 40-year lease includes a manor house, 13th century chapel, 80 acres of farmland complete with a dairy herd and what is thought to be the world’s smallest jail.
And this:
Buyers could in effect have their own tax haven, paying 20% on income and avoiding death duties and capital gains, in common with other Channel Islands residents.
The only catch is that the price tag is £15 million.
As to whether the new owner of the property would be in a position to declare self-government and become an independent state, I am not sure. It would be a nice idea, though. Here’s a book on the subject.
As a Pimlico resident, I naturally would be amused to see if we could ever follow the example of a brilliant 1940s movie.
|
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.
|
