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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Heathrow’s Terminal Five, the one which is fingerprinting passengers even if they take domestic flights, has got off to a glorious start.
The British Airports Authority, now owned by Spain’s Ferrovial, is a joke. In an ideal universe, it would be broken up – as it should never have been privatised as a monopoly in the first place. If the wannabe Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants a campaign issue, this is it.
Update: I should of course stress that BA, which operates out of the terminal, bears a heavy lump of the responsibility for this. Its share price is down today by more than 3%. At least BA feels the economic chill of this sort of mess, BAA does not. One commenter points out that hitches often happen at the start of a new venture, but that does really wash since one assumes – right? – that the baggage and check-in facilities at a new airport were beta-tested to make sure they work properly. One would like to think that this is standard procedure in any new operation.
Raising issues like non-intervenionist foreign policy on a site like this is a bit like poking a bear with a stick: potentially hazardous. In my recent item on WW2, the issue surfaced again of whether a viable foreign policy for a nation is the “Swiss model” (no, not that kind). I personally doubt it works for all nations, certainly not the largest ones with long, porous borders. But as I have praised tax havens recently, I am reminded of how the Swiss seem to cope very well thankyou outside a surpranational organisation like the EU or a military alliance like NATO. But is that country what economists call a “free rider” – taking advantage of the fact that other, bigger nations have done the heavy lifting in standing up to tyrants, etc?
This priceless comment adorns the Financial Times comment pages this morning:
“Public funds are also not always well-directed”
Wow, alert the media!
This remark is contained in a remarkably wrong-headed piece of analysis as to the implications of a recent decision by 3i, the large UK investment firm, to pull out of financing early-stage companies, or what it is generically known as venture capital. Compared to other news events, this might seem like arcane stuff, but in its own way, tells us a lot about the rough environment that entrepreneurs face not just in Britain but in the continent. Venture capitalists typically will back dozens of fledgling businesses, hoping that a minority of them become Google-type successes to compensate for the inevitable failures and just-about-break-evens. VC is very much a long-term game: it can take up to 10 years or more for a portfolio of these investments to bear fruit. The epicentre of VC investing is in northern California; investment outfits like Sequoia Capital have helped to fuel the Silicon Valley startups that are now part of business folklore.
Yet the writer of the FT piece lamely argues that public – taxpayer’s – money be used to encourage such businesses. Groan. It is vain to point out to this person that politicians should have rather more urgent things to do than risk public funds on highly speculative investments. Far better to get to the roots of why 3i and similar outfits have turned their backs on venture capital: a stifling tax and regulatory climate in Britain and elsewhere. If the rewards to success are not taxed at high marginal rates, then the money will flow in eventually, just as it has in the US.
In my neighbourhood of Pimlico stands one of the ugliest public buildings in the known universe: Pimlico School. Unbearably hot in the summer (all that glass), miserable in the winter, with the sort of cavernous, Stygian style unlikely to suit enquiring young pupils, the place is being demolished for hopefully something rather more attractive. I cannot help but wonder, though, at the resemblance between the school and the main spacecraft in Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, I have not seen any Raptors flying out of the end of it.
Some people actually like Brutalist architecture.
A nice article in the Daily Telegraph on how to make flying a bit more fun, which admittedly is a tough proposition as the enthusiasm for “security theatre”, as some call it, makes for longer queues at airports. The term means security measures designed to give the impression of making us safer rather than actually doing so. I rather liked the article’s almost heartbreakingly simple suggestion: pack a set of ear mufflers. They don’t have to be big, but they can cut out the racket, such as the noise of a fractious baby child. I am going to get some. For years, I always dreaded the prospect of having to share part of the cabin with a set of screaming kids or for that matter, a chatty adult who did not get the hint that I’d rather read one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers than hear my neighbour’s personal problems.
Problem solved!
The late Arthur C. Clarke would have been impressed by this discovery, I reckon:
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that’s not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it.
I came across this temperately argued but brutal demolition of one of those books purporting to claim that we’d all be a jolly sight better off by letting that misunderstood Adolf H. chap do what he wanted in Europe and Russia and that Britain and those other warmongering Anglos should have minded their own business. The book in question is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and written by Nicholson Baker. The reviewer is Andy Ross.
Excerpt from the review:
“Mr. Baker seeks to rehabilitate the interpretation of World War II advanced by isolationists and appeasers in the 1930s. That interpretation was refuted by history itself. If it was necessary for the survival of civilization to stop Nazi Germany from dominating Europe – from replacing freedom with tyranny, suffocating culture and thought, inculcating racism and cruelty in future generations, depopulating Eastern Europe and turning it into German lebensraum, enslaving tens of millions of Poles and Russians, and exterminating European Jewry – then it was necessary to fight the war.”
And:
“A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously”.
Now, there are good books worth reading that debunk some of the myths of the war, such as that Churchill was a great strategist (he was not and made loads of mistakes), or that Roosevelt was the same (he was not, and unbelievably naive about Stalin), or that things should and could have been handled far better. There might even be a case for selling the “appeasement” line that we should have kept out of the war, at least early on, or bided our time. The trouble is, that most books I have come across selling the isolationist case, such as by John Charmley, for instance, fall down because they fail really to address how America and Britain could have realistically coped with a massive Russo-German fascist empire stretching from Vladivostok to Brest, murdering millions of non-Aryans, dominating international supply routes, and so on. Now of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. Churchill may not have known that Hitler was embarking on mass murder of European Jewry, although he was more alive to this threat than most politicians at the time. But Churchill had a pretty good idea that very ugly developments would accompany a Nazi empire, and of course had no illusions whatever about what would happen to Europe if Stalin’s Russia conquered all of it.
It is just about possible, I suppose, that Britain could have struggled on a bit as an independent nation next to such a monstrous empire – assuming we could have lived with an ounce of self-respect by leaving France and the rest in the lurch. As for America, it could, I suppose, have traded on with its southern neighbours, bits of Africa, Australasia and those scattered nations not under communist/fascist rule, but huge parts of the globe would be hostile, poor, nightmarish places. And I very much doubt that we would now be enjoying those fruits of a globalised trading environment that we unashamedly champion today on this blog.
One of this Government’s proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq – where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.
– Ross Clark.
Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.
Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.
For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.
The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.
This quote is great:
“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”
Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.
Al Gore, call your office:
Forecasters are predicting a cold and windy Easter weekend, with snow, gales and heavy downpours in some regions. With snow expected to blanket the north, temperatures will drop as low as -8C in some areas, with particularly treacherous conditions possible over the Scottish mountains.
From the Independent newspaper, ironically one of the most vociferous advocates of the idea that the Earth is doomed from global warming, killer bees or whatever.
Of course, as Dale Amon said the other day, it makes sense to think how free marketeers should address the question of “what if man-made global warming really is a problem?” rather than just poke fun at it, as I am doing here. Dale is right, of course, just in the same way that advocates of civil liberties need to recognise that we face a terrorist threat and not, as one or two libertarians of my acquaintance can do, deny it. Changing ocean currents, caused by movements in the Arctic ice shelf, might, for example, explain why the Gulf Stream is not working its balmy magic on the British climate this time of year. But you can see how perplexing all this must be to people constantly harangued about the need to drastically cut down on carbon usage. The earth does not seem to be getting hotter, at least not around here. It is bloody cold, in fact. But then, my parents and grandparents will point out to me that Easters have often been terrible in the past; they can even remember it snowing in late April.
It was always a mistake to think that the demise of UK mortgage lender Northern Rock, entailing a massive bailout of the bank by the UK taxpayer, would be the only major example of a financial institution getting into dire trouble. Investors have woken up this morning to the news that JP Morgan, the blue-blooded US bank, has bought US bank Bear Stearns for less than a tenth of what Bear was worth, based on its share price, late on Friday. Wow. Bear Stearns, which has been building a fancy new European HQ in London’s Canary Wharf (that is a often a bad sign), was one of the earliest victims of the credit crunch. Two of its hedge funds were smashed last year by heavy losses linked to US mortgage-backed debt that has turned out to be worthless. The Fed has stepped into the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns deal with a £30 billion (don’t you just love these big round numbers?) funding facility. The dollar is in free-fall, which might be great for US exporters, not so marvellous for Germany, France or other countries. There is a whiff of panic in the air.
One of the more thoughtful, if sobering, analyses comes from The Times (of London) columnist William Rees-Mogg. He points out that once again, the late Milton Friedman has been proven correct: we have been through a period, since the 1990s, of rapid monetary growth. The inflationary impact of that growth had been temporarily masked in the High Street and the labour market by the deflationary effect of cheap goods from China and elsewhere. But for those who wanted to look hard enough, the warning signals were plenty: asset price bubbles in property, gold, antiques, fine wine, equities, as well as the frenzy of mergers and takeovers, much of which was funded by cheap debt, as well of course as the heavy lending to sub-prime borrowers in the US, Britain and elsewhere.
The trouble, however, is whether central banks have, or ever had, the weapons to control runaway lending. Consider this: for much of the 1990s and “Noughties”, Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, operated a zero-interest rate policy. Its official interest rate today is 0.5%. Let me repeat: 0.5%. As a result, speculators have borrowed vast amounts of money from Japan and reinvested the proceeds in places like Britain, where rates have been over 5%, or the US, or Switzerland, or Australia, New Zealand, and the euro zone. This is what is called the “carry trade”. These carry trades mean that to all intents and purposes, low-rate nations set the prevailing value of borrowing money.
Of course, old-style mercantilists might argue that this proves the need for exchange controls, capital controls and the like. I disagree, but I can understand the reactions. We live in a globalised market for money and credit, but without some sort of international “anchor” mechanism like the old gold standard, there is a dangerous vacumn in the system. Yes, I know all the arguments against tying currencies to gold (which is above $1,000 per ounce), but surely the finest minds of our economics profession need to figure out one of the key challenges of our time: how to ensure that the price of money is handled intelligently in today’s global market place.
Update: Megan McArdle has thoughts.
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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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