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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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who currently covers economic issues for the Daily Telegraph, wonders whether the €uro zone, faced with a possibly ruinously high exchange rate for the single currency against the dollar and some other major currencies, will embrace the “nuclear option” of imposing exchange controls to prevent the euro rising much further. Evans-Pritchard wonders whether such thoughts are idle. I think he is right but is also right to ponder this issue. If, in order to protect the likes of Airbus and other big exporters, the EU were to halt or control inflows of capital to the euro zone, the impact on places like London, the world’s largest forex market, would be devastating. Tens of thousands of jobs in the money market business would be lost. Such controls would further hammer any idea that the EU had, or ever has had, much to do with free trade. It would set back the cause of global free markets for years. Some defenders for exchange controls might try to argue that they would be less bad than higher tariffs on imports to the EU, but there are plenty of those tariffs already.
The general popularity of the euro at the moment is more because it is – temporarily – seen as a more reliable store of value than the dollar, rather than because of a new-found belief in in the economic prowess of Germany, France, Italy or Spain, for instance. With a large budget and current account deficit, the US has been letting the buck drop to make its exports more competitive overseas and as a result, the euro and the pound have risen, making it cheap for Brits to take their holidays in the States, for example. There is some sign that this exchange rate movement is working (I am actually pretty bullish about American exporters for the next year. I am actually quite upbeat about the US economy, which is always written off, with a hint of anti-American bias, by the usual commentators).
I do not think the EU will embrace exchange controls; such a move would be hugely controversial and unlikely to succeed. Prophets of doom would do well to recall that West Germany, back in the 1970s, lived quite successfully with a strong deutschemark; there is nothing axiomatic about why the EU cannot cope with a strong euro, at least not in the short run. The more fundamental problem, of course, is whether the countries making up the euro zone should have joined it in the first place, given their different characteristics. I think the euro could be a disaster for some nations, or at least a very painful experience. My wife’s country, Malta, is about to join the euro next year. Thank god it does not have a big export market.
Ramesh Ponnuru scoffs at the notion that Ron Paul’s tilt at the White House has, supposedly, encouraged an upswelling of libertarian sentiment in parts of the Republican Party. My rough guess is that he has had a bit of a positive effect and has raised a lot of money over the internet, pretty fast. Some people try to dismiss Paul as a kook but their dismissals seem to amount to little more than smears of half-understood points, such as his championing of gold-backed money (I am not convinced the dollar should be tied to gold but it is not nearly as daft, when you think about it, as the idea that the world’s largest economy can be run by a Federal Reserve bank by an army of economic gods). Despite my own differences with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy, which, pace some libertarians, is not necessarily a logical outcome of the non-initiation of force principle in the face of major foreign threats, Paul is a breath of fresh air. He is no Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater in terms of his name recognition factor or charisma – I bet hardly anyone in Britain outside a small group of political anoraks has heard of him, but his profile is pretty impressive.
Ponnuru points to Ron Paul’s own stance on abortion to prove that he is not quite the darling of the libertarian movement that some might claim. Rubbish: if Ponnuru has read any libertarian authors thoroughly, he would notice that libertarians can and do differ quite a bit on the issue. The issue of how one goes from the axiom of the right to life to the vexed question of when life begins is a difficult one, and I am not sure I am clear myself on this one. Ron Paul is against federal, ie, tax funds for abortion clinics. But that does not make him anti-abortion, it makes him anti-spending, at least on this issue.
Paul Marks has argued on this blog elsewhere that Ron Paul’s record on spending is not spotless – it is hard to think of any politician who is – but I think he is generally a positive influence on American politics.
The prospect of such a man in Britain’s Conservative Party reaching any sort of senior position at present is, of course, nil.
The government has managed to lose data on 25 million people this week. An impressive achievement, you must agree. Question: what information about yourself would you most hate losing? I think my bank account number comes top of that list.
Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.
– Alice Thompson.
The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word.
– Daniel Villey, “Economique et Morale”, in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing.
Samizdata readers who are bored senseless by team sports can scroll down – Okay, this evening yours truly watched as England’s football team lost 2-3 to Croatia in the qualifying stages of the European Championship to be held next year. As a result of the loss, England will not take part in the competition; England’s manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to be out of his depth in the role, will either resign – not yet at the time of writing – or be sacked. Many of the players, who often earn vast salaries to play for their Premiership teams, played with a lack of guile and commitment that was embarrassing to behold.
I would like to put on an act and claim I do not care about all this, that it is “just a game”, blah, blah, but that would be lying. I enjoy watching football but England’s football team was abject, terrible.
I wonder whether there are every any political or cultural implications of things like this – I am not sure. But the crapness of the football team does rather reinforce the glum mood of this country right now: lost data, Northern Rock and a rapidly cooling economy. Football is the English national game – even more than cricket or rugby union. But it might not stay that way much longer.
A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:
Has anyone here heard anyone (other than another libertarian) suggest that child benefit should be abolished so that this never happens again?
No I had not, but now that you mention it….
I don’t think it’s difficult to follow the argument that child benefit is a waste of everybody’s money except that of net welfare recipient families.
I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families – it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word “state” is the problem.
It certainly cannot operate without a database of every child and their parents.
Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or ‘tax credit’ (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.
It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning.
“You could argue, indeed, that the great lesson of the 20th century – desperately hard learned in less fortunate countries than Britain, but tough to swallow even here – is that the state does not have the answer to human problems in the way that so many hoped so naively for so long.”
– Martin Kettle, at the Guardian. I love his expression “you could argue”. There’s no argument, Martin. The failure of the state is so total, so widely proven, that it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on.
I keep telling my wife that she bears a certain physical resemblance to this eyeful. I am not sure if Mrs Pearce wants to spend her life as an opera singer, mind. (Latin dance is more her thing). Anyway, compared with most of the over-rated warblers of modern music, Cecilia Bartoli knocks the competition into the proverbial cocked hat. Her continued excellence helps assuage music-lovers’ grief at losing Luciano Pavarotti earlier this year. It is one of my regrets I never saw him live.
Quite a lot has already been written about the British government’s demented suggestion that security of public transport will be improved by installing airport-style security checks at 250 “strategic” railway stations (places, presumably, such as Paddington, St Pancras, Victoria and Liverpool Street in London). Bloody marvellous. A hint of the chaos this will cause, the enormous economic damage and ruination of the railway industry that will ensue, struck me this morning as I took a Tube ride from Covent Garden to Victoria on my way to work from an early meeting in the City. Victoria’s Tube station was closed due to “overcrowding on the platform”, according to a public announcement. The crush of crowds was terrible. Now, just work it out, gentle reader. Imagine in say, two or three years hence, if Gordon Brown’s daft idea takes root: massive queues at London railway stations in the evening rush-hour as people struggle to get home, huge groups of people milling around stations waiting to be passed through security. A perfect target for a terrorist, you might might think.
You might indeed think that. I bet a few of the more intelligent police and security service folk realise that. But not Gordon Brown. I am no longer convinced that Brown is particularly bright, in fact. We have long been assailed with this image of a brooding, obsessive Scot with his books and his clever ideas. Cleverness? I think his intellect should be regarded like one of those flakier tech stocks in the late 1990s – greatly over-priced and due for a rapid fall. I already sense that this process is under way. Let the selling continue.
Here are some wonderfully good photographs, ideal browsing for a grey Sunday afternoon.
The other day, flicking through one of those glossy property magazines that get shoved through my letterbox, I came across this article about the Russian emigre, Leon Max, who fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s, went to the States and founded a now very successful fashion business, Max Studio. He has recently bought a beautiful stately home in Northamptonshire – Paul Marks’ stamping ground – and I sympathise with most of the sentiment behind this paragraph in the magazine, Country House: “Max admits that England’s favourable tax regime was a factor (in buying the house). He is not apologetic about this. He is an enthusiastic free marketeer and libertarian. In his own self mocking words, he says, “Considering I was brought up under Communism, I am a little to the right of Pinochet.” (There is no web link to the article).
Not sure I like the Pinochet argument – he was a torturer although no worse than most Latin American regimes and better in many ways – but I get the general idea of what Leon Max means. Frankly, if more people like him want to live in Britain, bring them on. It may partially counter a trend of emigration among smart young Britons as noted by Fraser Nelson, the journalist, in a recent article.
Perhaps Britain’s newest classical liberal think tank, Progressive Vision, should ask Leon Max for a donation.
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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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