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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The following headline appeared in The Times (of London) this morning:
Greggs chief attacks speculators for driving up the price of wheat
The managing director of Greggs, the high street baker, has attacked speculators for driving up the price of wheat and fuelling famine in Africa.
Sir Michael Darrington, who yesterday announced that he would be stepping down after 24 years in charge, said commodity traders were more to blame for spiralling food price inflation than poor harvests or farmland given over to biofuels.
Ah, bash the speculators. Where would we be without those terrible people? It may be that some of the high price of wheat – now over $13 a bushell and up 118% in the past 12 months – is down to hordes of greedy, Gordon Gekkos bidding up prices for the stuff, but these people make a living by trying to correctly guess future prices and act on imperfect information. They cannot, however, defy the laws of economic gravity. If supplies increase, as is likely if prices are so high and there are big profits to be made growing the stuff, or if demand slackens, as people use wheat substitutes, then all that speculative mania will fall away. In any event, unless this business executive or other folk have looked at what happens when wheat is no longer traded as a commodity but handled by government regulations, they will realise the nonsensical nature of bashing speculators. In the 1980s, years of agricultural subsidies led to the infamous “wheat mountains” that were subsequently dumped onto the world market, hitting producers in the Third World.
Now consider this headline:
Bread basket that is left to grow weeds
The item goes on to explain that large tracts of good, agricultural land in Eastern Europe are lying fallow, ie, un-planted, because of tariff barriers and other restrictions. The Times rightly hammers the EU’s wretched Common Agricultural Policy, the USA’s farm support system, and other regulatory controls on farm production, for contributing to this farce.
It is a joke to attack speculators, who after all bet their own or their banks’ money on trying for forecast supply/demand trends, when it is politicians, who rarely, if ever suffer the consequences of bad investment decisions, who get to bugger up global agricultural markets in this way. At least if a bank or hedge fund gets a bet wrong, the principals in the fund get bankrupted, or executives are sacked. This does not always happen, of course, but generally the market is much tougher on mistaken bets than the political system is. As prices soar in the shops and hit poor consumers, the petty meddling of Chancellor Alistair Darling in today’s budget statement is small beer indeed. Great former UK politicians like Robert Peel have put free trade front and centre of their economic philosophy. It would be a welcome step if western governments today did the same.
A lot of elections at the moment. Besides the US elections, we have just had the Spanish elections and in my wife’s small country, Malta, the ruling Nationalist Party, a vaguely right-of-centre party that supported Malta’s entry into the EU and the euro, won by an incredibly slender margin (just over a thousand votes). As I have a vested interest in Malta remaining a broadly open country, I am glad that the party won, or at least relieved that Labour, the main opposition party with a vindictively regulatory streak, did not. But my views on Malta’s election are tinged with a bitter-sweet taste as the Nationalists, for all their generally pro-enterprise views, have made serious errors. The party took Malta into the EU. By staying out of the EU, Malta could have retained and expanded its status as an offshore tax haven, providing Monaco, the Swiss, Liechtenstein and Gibraltar with some useful competition as a friendly venue. Malta has quite a thriving IT and financial sector and English is widely spoken there, a priceless advantage. By keeping out of the EU, it could also have avoided becoming a conduit for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who use the small island as an entry point for the EU. Malta, an island the size of the Isle of Wight with half a million people, is not a country that can easily absorb a large influx. But as my better half points out, Malta, a Catholic country, has long feared the shadow of its Muslim neighbour, Libya, just a hundred miles or so to the south, and sees EU membership as somehow tying it ever more closely to a non-Muslim population. The Maltese are quite a tolerant bunch but they are fiercely pro-western. The Archbishop of Canterbury would be thrown into Valetta’s Grand Harbour.
One reason for the closeness of the elections is that there is a lot of anger at the governing party, even among most moderate voters, at some of the crasser building developments in the densely populated island. Even the most ardent defender of free enterprise will sometimes struggle to defend the ugly high-rise developments in part of the island that have gone up next to the attractive, honey-coloured buildings along parts of the country (in the smaller neighbouring island of Gozo, such developments have been far fewer, thankfully). Tourism is a crucial source of income for Malta; its historic buildings are part of its appeal, so long-term tourist entrepreneurs should hopefully follow their self-interest and avoid damaging the very thing that makes Malta a nice place to visit. This is an interesting subject for economists: ugly developments make money for investors in the short run and arguably, are better than no development at all, but the long run costs can be in the form of less tourism overall as would-be visitors go elsewhere for somewhere prettier.
Anyway, back on topic: this has to have been one of the closest election results I have ever read about.
The editor of The Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona, is not what you would call a combative journalist. I tend to feel that the Spectator, while still a highly readable publication these days, has tended sometimes to tag along a bit too tamely behind the Cameron/Brown consensus, although the magazine retains its robust elements, not to mention that entertaining if rather self-parodying old card, Taki.
What the Spectator thinks of Gordon Brown may not count for much outside the Westminster village of media/political junkies, but I reckon this ferocious column by d’Ancona about the government’s repulsive behaviour over the recent EU Constitution, sorry, Treaty, represents quite a shift. Whatever respect that d’Ancona used to voice about Brown has disappeared. I have never read anything so sharp by d’Ancona before. The trouble is, that it has taken far too long for the truth to dawn on even supposedly cynical media commentators that Brown is not a man of honour or principle. The mistake is to think that because he is Scottish, dour, unable to do the Blairite Dianaesque rhetoric, that he is therefore somehow more ‘solid’ or ‘honest’ than the actor-manager that he replaced. The truth, alas, is quite different. Brown is just another machine politician.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the men and women who serve in the volunteer armed forces have been attacked on their own soil. There has been an attack on a recruitment office in the US. It is a sign of the times. In Peterborough, East Anglia, RAF personnel serving in such nearby bases as RAF Wittering have been abused, although it does not appear – yet – that any of the abuse has involved physical violence. As a result, force commanders are thinking of rescinding the idea of letting service personnel wear their uniforms while off-duty. Given that a chap traditionally liked to wear his uniform as a matter of pride, not to mention its wonderful women-attracting qualities (sorry if this offends PC readers), this is a poor state of affairs. I read this unpleasant story with a certain amount of personal interest as my father used to serve at Wittering with 23 Squadron, a fighter squadron that in the 1950s operated aircraft such as Venoms and more latterly, Phantoms and Harriers.
The identity of the abusers is not described. For all we know, they could be anti-war types, Islamists, or just local youths trying to impress their mates by “having a go” at folk in uniform. When I lived in Ipswich 15 years ago, there were always stories of how Army squaddies at Colchester, a nearby army town, were getting into scrapes with the locals. It was, however, much rarer for the US servicemen at RAF Bentwaters, Woodbridge, Mildenhall or Lakenheath to encounter problems, since overseas US guys tend to be more polite and let’s face it, if you insulted an F-16 pilot after drinking too much Adnams ale in an Ipswich boozer, the chances are that the guy would order in a squadron of B-52s to nuke the place. At least I like to think that was always an option.
Sometimes I wonder whether the news editors in the media “join the dots”, to coin a phrase. Scanning my Bloomberg machine this morning (part of my day job), this headline was prominent:
Chicago’s Snowiest Winter Since 1979 Depletes Budget
Then, on the same Bloomberg front page, is this:
Gore Invests $35 Million for Hedge Funds With EBay Billionaire
Gore has, of course, made himself a mint and also burnished his Green credentials with his film, An Inconvenient Truth, a film that has had great influence in encouraging the idea that the Earth is at serious risk from man-made global warming, although others remain to be convinced. Fair play to Gore: if he has managed to make a lot of cash by producing a film and persuaded enough paying customers to see it, well who am I, as an ardent capitalist, to complain? If he wants to invest in those mysterious-sounding things called hedge funds, even better (they are not all that bizarre, by the way, just a form of investment fund with a few tricks). But if the city of Chicago is running short of cash to pay for all the snow clearance, maybe the councillors should phone up Al and ask for a donation. After all, the current freezing weather in so many places must be er, Man’s fault, right?
That the EU Referendum blog is unhappy at the latest turn of events in the UK parliament is an understatement:
In other words, in a very real sense – not at all an arcane, academic point – as Lisbon bites, it will no longer makes any difference at all who we elect. For sure, any new government will have some residual powers which it can call its own, but these will gradually be stripped from it as the EU starts to exert its newly-acquired powers.
It occurs, therefore, that the one thing we need to do is boycott the electoral process. If there is no point in having MPs, we should no longer partake in the charade that we have meaningful elections. There can be no better message to send to MPs than an ever-declining turnout. This robs them of even the pretence of legitimacy.
Quite so. It seems to me that we have the bizarre spectacle of MPs choosing to make themselves irrelevant. Perhaps they have reached the deep realisation that they are unworthy of being legislators, that their real role in life is to fiddle expenses, disport themselves on TV and go to foreign junkets. There is, quite frankly, no further use for them.
In moments like this, when so many powers are being transferred to a supranational entity like the EU with remarkably little democratic accountability, and on a scale that has no clear modern parallel, it makes me wonder what, if any point, there is in things like intellectual activism. Getting the message across in a national context is hard enough; trying to persuade Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Greeks, Portugese, Belgians and Finns of the case for less government is next to impossible. One of the reasons why I, as a libertarian, am broadly in favour of self-governing nation states is not out of some starry-eyed belief that they are always better than some broader alternative, but because experience teaches us that it is increasingly hard to make changes on a large, supranational level where there is not a shared culture or shared language.
The EU has had its merits, but I think the sad truth is, and has been for some time, that lovers of liberty cannot expect it to be reformed from within or turned into some sort of benign free trade zone. We have to get out.
Matthew Lynn, a columnist for Bloomberg, has a good and succinct take on the latest nonsense about actions by the German and British government to use information – obtained in highly dubious circumstances – to go after people who have put their money away in tiny European tax havens such as Liechstenstein. Philip Chaston of this blog has already touched on the subject. The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians – if there are many – have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their ‘responsibilities’.
At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.
Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may – may – be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers. And as traditional checks and balances are eroded – as they have been in Britain recently – we need all the constraints on national and supranational power we can get. We should therefore see the efforts by EU and other nations to create a global tax cartel as being every bit as dangerous as the alleged cartel deals forged by the 19th Century “robber barons”, except of course that this latter group were usually unfairly maligned. Compared to the tax-cartel zealots, Rockefeller and Co. were strict amateurs.
I quite enjoy going to the Proms, the renowned series of concerts held in the Royal Albert Hall, west London during the late summer. As many readers know, the last night of the Proms ends with a rousing performance of some of the best-loved works of Edward Elgar, such as “Land of Hope and Glory”. A government minister has claimed that the event does not fit in with the bright, shiny vision of Britain that the Gramiscians of New Labour believe is the one to which we should all aspire.
I could not agree more. It is time to face the fact that Britain, or indeed just England, is no longer a land of hope or much glory. Far better that the symbols of modern Britain be such things as state ID cards, unfunny standup commedians like Ricky Gervais and lumps of dead animals at The Tate.
Ok, rant over.
It is a widely accepted fact that one of the key ingredients to the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War was the ability to crack the Enigma codes used by these powers, and keep that code-breaking achievement a secret.
A question I’d like to put to Jon Snow, the chief news reader of Channel 4 news and usually a fairly cool-headed fellow, is whether he would have complied with any wartime requests to keep the Enigma achievement a secret, had he been a working journalist in the 1940s. Judging by his antics over the Prince Harry and Afghanistan episode, the answer to that question would be a no. It also makes me wonder whether anything on the scale of the Enigma code-breaking and its remaining a secret could be repeated now. Of course, the argument cuts both ways: in our more open world, it might also be harder for a country like Hitler’s Germany to make its moves in the first place. (I admit that is a guess of mine, not a prediction). Even so, the implications for military secrecy, when it is something of vital importance in defeating an enemy, are troubling if the media outlets refuse to protect a secret for an agreed period of time. And libertarians, even the most ferocious opponents of censorship, need to realise that keeping military secrets is perfectly consistent with supporting armed forces necessary for the protection of even a minimal, nightwatchman state.
There may have been an element of PR in the whole Prince Harry kerfuffle, but he’s already shown more balls than most of the folk who have sneered at him in some internet comments I have read. Come St George’s Day this year, I will be very glad to hoist something alcoholic to the fellow. Well done him.
It has been rather cold lately in different parts of the world. As this gentleman points out, if worries about man-made global warming can cite the early appearance of flowers or migrant birds in support of their case, the argument cuts both ways. In case any supporters of the man-made global warming thesis get sniffy about this point, I am not a ‘denier’ of the thesis: I think there is some evidence that it may be happening. The trouble is that my views are coloured by the fact that supporters of it tend to support a Big Government agenda. And frankly, I see an awful lot of dodgy investment ideas being sold on the basis of encouraging ‘Green’ technology.
I am looking forward to the first article, meanwhile, that tries to blame Britain’s earthquake this week on human activity. Take a good look at the British Geological Survey website: it is fascinating. Apparently, there have been even been quakes in Norfolk. Norfolk, fcrissakes.
There is a depressing article at Reason magazine about the protectionist instincts of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What the article does not tell us about much is whether McCain is much better (I honestly do not know, so I welcome comments about his voting record). And of course George W. Bush hardly made friends with Britain by slapping tariffs on steel imports – which also hurt American manufacturers and builders (but they lacked powerful friends in Congress). America is the largest economy in the world and despite what some of the more starry-eyed writers on China or the other ‘Brics’ might claim, is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Basically, America matters. If the country goes down a more protectionist path, it will hit the world economy in general. For all his many flaws, Bill Clinton’s signing of the NAFTA Treaty – admittedly when Congress was in Republican hands – was one of the few major achievements of his time in power. It has helped to fuel the ascent of the world economy, lifting millions into higher living standards: if any fans of trade restrictions out there want to contest that assertion, let them provide figures. Here are some official US ones that give some pretty punchy numbers.
As the title says, I wish they could all lose. I have had it with the media guff about how a McCain-Obama contest will somehow elevate American politics and ‘restore’ its image in the eyes of the world. What is the point of winning image points among the Guardian-reading classes if you pull a rug under the world’s economy through greater trade restrictions? How is that going to help America’s ‘image’, assuming that Americans could or should give a flying **** what people think of them in the first place?
A novel based on the Joss Whedon cult SF series, Firefly, which was one of the very best in recent years in my opinion, has been released and you can view it online, thanks to a Creative Commons platform, here.
If you have not seen the TV series, correct that ommission immediately. It beautifully blends western-style cowboy drama with its strong individualistic, screw-authority ethic with science fiction, nifty and authentically grimy spacecraft. There are plenty of dashing men and gorgeous women to please both sexes. And there are sword fights and lots of shooting. What’s not to like?
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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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