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 inevitable has happened. The British government has nationalised Northern Rock, the stricken British mortgage lender and bank that got itself into terminal trouble last year as a result of its ambitious, nay, reckless policy of relying on funding itself through the short-term money market. When inter-bank rates spiked, as they did as a result of the credit crunch caused by the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Northern Rock suddenly found it impossible to go on funding its mortgage products. It was ruined.
As I have said several times before, the most logical, if painful step, would have been to let the company go bust; depositors would be protected if necessary, but otherwise, the company would be wound up. It would have been a painful, even traumatic example of how unwise lending policies can go unstuck. It would have served, for years to come, as a harsh reminder about the dangers of trying to run a bank without sufficient savings to back it up its lending. Instead, the government’s move to pick up the tab for Northern Rock’s problems will act, however marginally, to weaken the necessary harsh message that should come out of the Northern Rock fiasco.
Now, I know that Samizdata readers will not give a brass farthing about the EU angle, but a thought does occur to me, as it has to others: how on earth can the company be allowed to offer highly attractive savings rates, which are more attractive than those of some of its competitors, when Northern Rock is able to enjoy the status of a tax-funded company, when other, rival banks, such as Alliance & Leicester, are not? How, exactly, is the British government going to be able to square its actions with the single market of the EU?
Just asking.
Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): “This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn’t it?”
It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories’ opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this.
Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks – which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project.
Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan.
Bastards.
We get emails! Some people still entertain the idea that it is possible for sharia law and its adherents to operate cosily alongside a code such as the English Common Law. I have already described why I think sharia and a liberal legal tradition on matters of marriage and treatment of women are like oil and water; it is also remiss for the Archbishop not to spell out what criteria he would use to judge which bits of sharia are okay in England and which are not; he is far too vague on the latter point. Rod Liddle, writing in this week’s Spectator, points out that is rather presumptious for the Archbishop to lecture Muslims about which bits of sharia are legit and which bits are not in England. As Liddle says, it might be a more productive use of this man’s time to focus on preaching the message of the Gospels, although I accept that talking about the love of Jesus, sin, redemption and all that boring stuff is so, well, Bible-Belt, dahling.
Anyhow, a gentleman wrote the following email to Samizdata HQ:
Johnathan Pearce criticized Archbishop views on sharia law but didn’t
seem to actually have read Dr. William’s speech, which seems to me
eminently reasonable from a libertarian point of view.
Alas for this correspondent, I have read the speech all the way through – all the way through its tortured logic, non-sequiturs, question-begging expressions and the rest. A second reading or a third does not improve one’s experience. Dr Williams’ feeble grasp of the subject means a second or third read is like the experience of drinking another glass of an indifferent red wine; it only tastes good if you are already slightly pissed.
Matthew Parris, a libertarian to the core, has also read the speech. In his civilised, gentle way, Parris states what is painfully obvious: the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a particularly intelligent man. Having a white beard does not make one smart or benign.
Here is a list of the 20 most ugly university campuses in the USA. I do not disagree with the choices. I have to say that back home, one of the worst was the University of Brighton, where I studied; the only mitigating factor was the lovely Sussex countryside. Other graduates of Brit universities may disagree. Go on, put up your votes for the worst, or for that matter, the nicest (it has to be pretty much any of the old Cambridge colleges).
(Hat tip: Stephen Hicks).
Random question: is there a correlation, or even a cause-effect relationship, between the aesthetic crapness of a place of learning and the amount of learning that actually goes on?
We all know that the Olympics is a money-pit; ask any council-tax payer in London about the cost of the 2012 London Olympics and you are likely to get a scowl. The benighted citizens of Communist China, like the Brits, have relatively little say over the vast circus about to start later this year.
And of course, anyone who wants to watch television has to pay for the BBC; “Auntie”, bless her, is sending 150 journalists to cover the Beijing Games. 150 sentient lifeforms. The next time I hear a BBC executive carping about job budgets, I will bear that fact in mind.
Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and widely read bloggers, has not been exactly slow off the mark to attack the US administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and certain conservative bloggers and writers, of encouraging what he calls “Christianism”. He has a certain point: there is no doubt that the influence of Christianity, at least in its more evangelical forms, has increased in parts of the Right. The US, despite what some historians like Paul Johnson might claim, is not just a product of Christianity but is also a child of the Enlightenment, with all the scepticism about religion that implies, and long may it remain so. Sullivan is right to call for a clear separation of church and state to be preserved. Ironically, that separation is one of the reasons why religion flourishes Stateside, while is often tepid over here.
But I have to say, given the appalling treatment of gay people by fundamentalist Islam, that Andrew, a gay man recently married to his other half, has been remarkably silent about the remarks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on allowing sharia law to become the law of this country, at least for certain folks benighted enough to fall under its ambit. Sullivan has certainly been ferocious about the Islamic treatment of gays, and women, before, so it is a bit odd that he has not written about this issue now. However infuriating Sullivan can be with his volatile punditry – one minute hailing George W. Bush as a potential Truman, the next damning him to eternity – he is one of the great voices of the Anglosphere. Go on Sully: fire a broadside at Lambeth Palace.
Considering how many health-scare news items there are these days, it makes me want to smile in a wry way when I also read about the supposed problems caused by an ageing, greying, population. The first and obvious question is: if we are all at such risk from obesity, drugs, booze, stress, pollution or the angst of watching Jonathan Ross, why are we living so much longer than our parents or grandparents? If this is what happens when the sky is supposedly always about to fall in, then what must a healthy population be like? And yet there is something in the human psyche, or our culture, that rebels against the happy prospect of a longer life. We are told, or at least have until recently accepted, that three-score years and ten is Man’s rightful due (perhaps a tad longer for women); it is almost a hangover from religion to believe that it is impious, even blasphemous, to want to live for much longer. Andrew O’Hagan, writing in the Daily Telegraph today in a moan about how the elderly are treated in Britain – a valid subject – makes this point:
Growing old is now considered more of an option than an inevitability, something to beat rather than be resigned to, something that is thought to take away from one’s individuality rather than deepen it.
I don’t really know how death, or its inevitability, adds to one’s individuality. I think I know what O’Hagan is trying to say: We are unique, precisely because we are mortal. We cannot be replaced, or copied.
The trouble, though, is that I don’t see how one’s uniqueness is somehow reduced by living for 200 years rather than say, 100, or 50, or 30. Were the ancient Romans – average lifespan about 35 – more individualistic and unique than a 21st Century Brit? How on earth can one measure this? Also, the desire to keep the Grim Reaper at bay surely attests to a love of life, not a denial of its value; if one believed in a craven acceptance of the inevitable, then why do we have doctors and hospitals?. I value my life rather a lot and am in no hurry to see my hair go all grey, my face resemble tree bark, and my limbs to seize up. Sorry, Mr O’Hagan, but I’d rather not suffer that fate any time soon. I go to the gym and try to keep fit despite my enjoyment of red wine. I have not signed up for cryonic suspension or anything like that but I keep an eye on life extension research and have been greatly impressed by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, among others. (Don’t be put off by the immense beard, he’s not a nutter). I lost a good friend and intellectual mentor, Chris Tame, nearly two years ago to the horror of bone cancer – he was in his mid-50s – and I am pretty sure this most unique of people could and should have been around for many more decades among us. (I particularly miss his outrageous jokes).
I remain to be convinced of the idea that to value one’s life, it must be short, or that we should resign ourselves to it meekly. Meekness did not build the space rocket, the Aston Martin DB9 or even produce modern dental surgery.
Update: Glenn Reynolds has interesting thoughts on this subject. He’s been writing on this for some time. Ronald Bailey, whom I met over a year ago during a book tour of London, is also well worth reading on this and related topics. I read this Peter Hamilton novel which touches on rejuvination; it is not one of his best tales, unfortunately (the Amazon.co.uk book reviews are not very flattering).
A New York billionairess was once reported to have said, to her eternal shame: “Only the little people pay taxes”. It is an attitude of mind that nicely demonstrates how, under even high-tax regimes, some people, if they have the right lawyers, smart tax planners and political connections, try or even succeed in avoiding paying as much revenue as possible, leaving those on lower incomes to pick up the tab.
Of course, the ideal solution to problems of tax avoidance by the rich is to cut taxes, drastically, across the board. And with all the current complaints about the British taxman’s crackdown on “non-domiciled” residents in the UK, it would be refreshing if those champions of capitalism like Lord (Digby) Jones, or William Rees-Mogg and the rest could acknowledge this point. I don’t mind non-doms being able to pay little tax; I hear all the arguments for why it is sensible to encourage them to live and invest in Britain. But would it not be nice if, say, the Tories could focus on what is a genuine problem: resentment by the increasingly taxed middle class of what is seen, however, mistakenly, as favourable tax treatment to very wealthy people? The solution, of course, is not to hit non-doms, but to cut taxes sharply, simplify them, and put the brakes on public spending, and then hit the reverse gear-shift.
It is often wrongly assumed that a supporter of capitalism has no business complaining if a beloved sports institution, like a cricket or football team, becomes a vast, worldwide brand, or if sports contests are held outside the venue from which the institution sprang. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (to quote a line from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop). As a libertarian, the key thing for me is that autonomous institutions, set up and created under certain rules of association by their members, should continue to be run on said principles since otherwise, the whole point of the association is destroyed. Since no coercion is involved, there is no reason, for instance, why a group of socialists could not join together to create their own communes. The only proviso being that people who live in these places have the right to quit and form their own, ‘break-away’ groupings or just leave if they so wish. The same applies to say, professional football. I happen to think that the influx of non-British players and oodles of cash into the game has been a mixed blessing; just because I support the right of people to spend their money how they want emphatically does not mean that good things always happen when they do, nor is it contradictory for a free marketeer such as yours truly to wonder whether sports can be ruined by wrangles over money.
Take the current controversy over the idea of staging Premier League football matches outside England, for example, in order to appeal to the hundreds of thousands of folk who allegedly are desperate to watch English Premier League football. Well, sorry guys, the whole freaking idea of an English premier league is that the games are played in England, not Planet Zog. If fans in England are increasingly priced out of their clubs’ games – which means that crowds often have all the passion of wet cement – and if players become exhausted by a 365-a-year playing season, then the game will suffer. And that, in the end, will damage the game that the heads of sports associations are supposed to be taking care of.
Yes, I know that the purist idea of autonomous sports institutions has been badly eroded in recent years by the attempts by governments to muscle in on sports. That is a key, if separate issue. But stay with me on this: in a free society, it is nevertheless the case that good things, like friendships, clubs and voluntary organisations, do not revolve around the desire just to make pots of money. Sport is something one enjoys and plays for its own sake, not just to win. As Michael Oakshott, the conservative philosopher said, some things, like being a member of a club or having a good friendship, have no external ‘end’. As a supporter of Ipswich Town, I think that is probably just as well.
Here is an interesting profile of Deborah Ross, the American entrepreneur who also manages to home-school her children. Naturally, the thought does occur to me, in the light of the recent controversy kicked up by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s thick-headed remarks about sharia law, whether parents with strong religious views who want to indoctrinate their kids, against their children’s will, might bring the idea of home-schooling into disrepute. Personally, I think the benefits of letting parents play a much more hands-on role in schooling outweigh some of the disadvantages, particularly if children have the ability at a certain age to choose how they want to be schooled (the issue of giving children more freedom is still a very controversial one, even among liberals). The key change that must come, in my view, is an end to compulsory schooling or at the very least, a sharp reduction in the existing school age, rather than raising it ever further. I am also in favour of hacking away regulations to make it easier for companies to take on youngsters as apprentices. Many young folk are bored senseless at school and would be far less disruptive if they could learn a trade and generate the pride that comes with a paying job, while keeping up with academic subjects at a later date if they want (this might also reduce youth crime a bit).
Children are naturally inquisitive and rebellious against authority – thank goodness – so my reservations about some of the people who want to school their kids at home are not very large, although I do not dismiss them lightly. I sometimes hear in discussions about home-schooling the old canard about how children educated this way are less well ‘socialised’ than their supposedly more fortunate, state or private-school peers. I doubt this: having myself suffered the joys of state schooling, with all the charms of bullying and indifferent teaching that went with it, the idea of encouraging a possibly more individualistic culture as a result of home schooling is to be welcomed (my education experience was not all bad: I got a good degree in the end, so must have done something right). Many people who have been subjected to more than 11 years of compulsory education in a boarding school or some state school never recover their self-confidence as adults. In any event, the whole point here is that education should not have to follow one ‘ideal’ system at all. As a libertarian, I say let education evolve where it will. Does that mean that Walmart or Barclays Bank should be able to run schools? Yes, why the heck not? I look forward to reading headlines like this: “Education Ltd, Britain’s largest listed schooling company, launched a daring bid for Lycee France, the Paris-listed school chain which has boasted the highest examination result tests for the last five years. The deal, if it goes through, would produce a group to rival that of School Corp, America’s largest education chain by market cap.”
Anyway, I strongly recommend people read the whole article. This Wikipedia entry is also a pretty interesting overview with loads of links for different approaches around the world to homeschooling.
Via the excellent engadget blog, here is a nifty item to put on the wall for all you health-freaks out there. Perhaps I should strap my arm to one of the controls the next time I read about the Archbishop of Canterbury, the eco-Leninist thoughts of Madeleine Bunting, or watch the English rugby/cricket/football team give up a lead?.
Or maybe I should stop doing all these things for a longer, happier life.
Following on from my post yesterday, I scanned the front pages of the main British papers today; with one or two mild exceptions, the headlines – including the Guardian – were pretty damning (David Blunkett was admirably blunt; proof that the former Home Secretary has his good points). As far as the general thrust of commentary is concerned, as well as the straight news reports, the tone is that the Archbishop has made a right royal berk of himself.
I disagree with fellow Samizdata contributor Guy Herbert that the Archbishop is not an ‘ass’ but guilty at most of over-optimism; frankly, a man of such supposed learned views as Dr Williams should know that a religion that has a legal code that applies to women in the way that it does is outrageous; doubly outrageous, considering that the Church, with all its faults, has in the past acted as a moral beacon on stirring up consciences on issues like the slave trade. I am sure there are admirable aspects of sharia: it is hard to believe that it would not have died out were it not to have contained such features. But let’s be crystal clear: if the Archbishop thinks it is right that whole groups of the UK population can choose to deal with issues like marriage, divorce and treatment of women outside the structure of the English Common law and its insistence upon treatment of women as consenting adults in matters of marriage, then he might as well hang up his cassock.
I do not know if he will resign over this, or indeed if it is right and proper for anyone to call for his sacking. Some commenters might know of how these things work, but it seems to me that the General Synod of the Church of England might want to discuss this issue, vigorously.
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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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