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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If this film, a sequel, is half as good as Elizabeth, then it will be one to wait for. Blanchett was simply outstanding in the first movie.
I was interested in the comment by the actor, Clive Owen, who said he was not bitter at being passed over for the role of 007. I am not sure I entirely believe him – but then there was a lot of spying going on in Elizabethan England, so instead of holding a Walther PPK, he gets to use a rapier sword instead. Arguably, M16 and its cousins can trace some of their origins back to that period.
And let’s face it, Cate Blanchett is certainly easy on the eye.
I drive around London at weekends occasionally – I have a car but do not bother to use it to get work (I can reach my office in Westminster on foot, thanks to living nearby Pimlico). But when I do get behind the wheel, the congestion is terrible, not just at the usual peak times. Getting out of London often takes longer than on the open road. For example, whenever I go to visit my parents in Suffolk, at least half of the journey time is taken up by driving from Pimlico through the eastern reaches of London before actually hitting Essex on the A12. Pretty much the same dire situation applies if you head north, south or west.
Has the congestion charge, introduced by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, made much difference? I doubt it; it always looked like a revenue-raiser to me, whatever the spin. While in theory I have no ideological problems with the charge – if the roads are genuinely privately owned, that is – in the current context the charge seems like a bit of a con to me. Or at least it is unless we can get rid of the curse of the Bus Lane. But then the charge does not apply at weekends, so my view might be affected if I had to drive during weekdays. On those rare times when I have done so, I thought the traffic was pretty heavy.
This guy agrees with me. But what to do about it? Well, cutting down the number of buses – heavily subsidised – might be a start since they hog up so much space; some road widening might be workable in places but given London’s densely-packed streets and historic buildings, maybe not easily doable.
Maybe I should face the facts: if I want to drive without raised blood pressure, live in Nevada.
Lincoln Allison, a contributor to the excellent Social Affairs Unit blog has this rather amusing, if at times harsh, list of various people he thinks are not quite the greats they are cracked up to be. Revealing the conservative tilt of that blog, his candidates are:
Princess Diana, Che Guevara, Salman Rushdie, John Lennon, George Best and John Osborne.
Maybe I am getting soft and liberal (in the US sense) in my early middle age, but with the exception of Guevara, I rather like most of the above, or at least I do not get as exercised as some right-of-centre folk do. Diana? Well, she was annoying, or at least the hysteria over her death was, but I was saddened by her death, sorry for her sons and relations and would rather she was still with us.
Lennon? A bit of a nob as a person, maybe, but a brilliant musician – Revolver is one of my favourite albums.
Osborne – no real opinion, although I loved his personification of evil in Get Carter.
Then there is Rushdie: I just cannot agree with Allison; for all that I cannot be bothered to tackle his fiction, I admire his unbending stance on Islamic fanaticism and his no-compromise approach to free speech.
And then there is dear, dead George Best (I met him a few times). Allison makes the rather unusual approach of not actually attacking George Best’s drinking or womanising but attacks his skill as a footballer, claiming that Northern Irish players like Danny Blanchflower were greater as they achieved success with “lesser” teams (I am sure Spurs fans will be galled to hear that their lot was a lesser team in the 1960s than Manchester United. Spurs in fact won a sackload of trophies in that decade). He also says Best could not cope with Italian-style defenders. Well, he did not play against Italy much so how do we know and Best made mincemeat of the likes of top European sides Benfica and Real Madrid. His demolition of the former team at their home ground in 1966 – the year I was born – remains one of the highlights of 20th century football.
Regular readers will know that I have a sort of allergy to the Sunday Times columnist, AA Gill. In the glossy magazine section, Gill spreads his wisdom about the utter pointlessness of space exploration and settlement. Bravo AA! No doubt some commissioning editor thought that what with all this renewed interest in space flight, the Google project, Richard Branson’s support for the Rutan project, etc, that it was time to do what Gill knows how to do best, arguably, the only thing he knows how to do – take the piss. Here is a paragraph (no web link available):
The one lasting aesthetically beautiful thing that did comes from the whole guzzling, ugly space business was that photograph of the blue planet; astonishing and moving and vulnerable, our great group photo. And ironically, that image did more than anything to galvanise the nascent ecology movement.
There is a nugget of wisdom here, but he grossly exaggerates. The back-to-nature-can-we-just-turn-off-the-whole-industrial-thingy?” movement arguably started as far back as the bucolic sentimentality of Rousseau and the Lake poets and their horror at the Industrial Revolution; I’d argue that books, however flawed and tendentious, as Carson’s Silent Spring did a lot to encourage the Green movement. Pictures of the Earth taken from space are indeed fantastic, but I doubt it got a lot of would-be Greens going; what those photos demonstrated was the brilliance of the space project, the daring, the sheer bloody-minded persistence required to get up there in the first place.
Gill lists, with his usual sneer, all the various inventions that are sometimes linked to the space race, like teflon coatings or GPS navigation equipment, the latter being ridiculous, he reckons, in that it allows us to reach Leeds without using a toll road. Such wit, such intelligence! (Has Gill ever met a person in the military, or a sailor or mountaineer for whom GPS has proved a lifesaver? Probably not). But one might as well sneer at say, the discovery of tobacco, the potato or other plants as a result of earlier “pointless” explorations. Earlier explorations drove the development of accurate clocks, which in turn improved standards of engineering; they encouraged development of storage of food, improved medical treatments to avoid problems like scurvy, and so on. No doubt some equivalent of AA Gill in the 18th Century would have mocked such things then (I am sure these people existed; they are of an ineradicable human type, alas).
Yet amidst all the smart-alecisms of Gill, he misses the really big criticism that one should make of the space race: it was almost entirely funded and directed by government. As a result of the gigantic sums raised in tax to spend on spaceflight, other, less spectacular but in the long run arguably more useful private ventures were squeezed out. If such private ventures could get going, it is hard to see how AA Gill or others could object to people risking their own money on such things although as his article implies, I reckon Gill would be quite keen to ban such “pointless” things if he thinks it somehow diverts precious resources from preserving the status quo on earth.
Here is a blast of fresh air on the subject, meanwhile.
I’ll be poised to grab a cinema seat for this one when it comes out.
I liked this film, 3:10 to Yuma. The death of the Western is one of those occasional refrains, but this is fine piece of film-making. There were one or two clichés in it (those evil rotten railroad barons) but those clichés had some basis in fact.
The picture of the old West was almost completely bleak, but it made for great drama, and a terrific set of gunfights. For a rather contrarian view of the West, this book is worth a look.
His supreme blogness, Glenn Reynolds, likes to put up posts about disaster preparedness and pretty much anything that encourages people to figure out for themselves how to deal with emergencies, protect themselves from danger and protect their loved ones or indeed strangers out of simple human generosity. Being a broadly libertarian character, Reynolds defends the use of firearms in self defence but there is much more to it than that, including knowing about first aid, dealing with sudden loss of electric power, drinking water, and so on (I would be interested to know how many commenters here have studied first aid or rescuing people in difficult situations, like from drowning).
Glenn has a round-up of links here which is pretty good. I could not help notice the contrast between Reynolds’ very American can-do attitude with the sort of pathetic, rule-obsessed attitude demonstrated by so-called police officers who failed to act, at least with great urgency, to prevent the drowning of a young lad.
When I hear people talk about the erosion of civil society under the impact of officialdom, it is tragedies like this recent story that demonstrate what I mean.
I have quite enjoyed watching the rugby so far; the Argentinian side has been a revelation; some of the South Pacific sides have played with their customary bravery and gusto; even England, after a stuttering start, look a bit better. The side that is – supposedly – fancied to win the contest this year by many observers are the New Zealand All-Blacks.
So you can imagine my befuddlement yesterday afternoon when I watched the game with friends down in deepest Suffolk. The shirts of the ‘All-Blacks’ were covered in a sort of grey-blue, while the Scots, instead of their old, neat blue shirts with the old Thistle emblem, instead had some weird grey-blue stripes on top of some other colours. At a distance, it was actually pretty hard to tell the two sides apart, colour-wise. I understand all the marketing stuff that goes on in sports these days but is not a fairly basic notion that you can tell one side apart from the other? I mean, during the thick of a rugby match, for example, it might actually be a good idea for teams to be easily able to recognise one another. As a friend of mine put it yesterday, the referee should have ordered one side off the pitch to change into recognisable shirts.
The whole thing was bizarre. Mind you, New Zealand won by a large distance, to no-one’s great surprise.
This reviewer plainly does not care much for Naomi Klein, scourge of the supposed evils of global capitalism. I plodded through some of her writings once just to see what the fuss was about and the economic illiteracy of this woman surprised even a jaundiced observer like me. She has achieved the rare feat of making the late JK Galbraith look like a great sage by comparison, which is quite a feat, given that many of his predictions were wrong, although he was a witty writer at times, which I suspect explains a lot of his appeal. And yet it is all such a shame: I think we free marketeers need to be challenged by high-class criticisms in order to sharpen our own defence of the market order; the problem is that if the anti-capitalist types out there become self-parodies, we can fall into a sense of false security. It never fails to surprise me just how bad a lot of anti-market writing often is.
On the issue of anti-capitalism, this old gem by Ludwig von Mises is a must-read, as fresh now as when he wrote it decades ago.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
– HL Mencken, US journalist. I would love to have seen him write about the likes of Bush, Blair and Gordon Brown.
The decision of the British government to rescue Northern Rock, the mortgage lender, with billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money, represents a terrible long-term blunder, in my view. It may also put the UK afoul of EU law, for those that care about such matters. Of course one feels very sorry for the people who have savings with NR and I suppose many of them are mightily relieved at the turn of events. I am sure I would be relieved if I were in their position.
But hard cases make bad law, and bad policy. Consider what has happened: a company gets itself into a pickle because its funding policies are up-ended by a sudden rise in short-term interbank borrowing costs; fears grow that the firm cannot make good all its commitments and a bank run occurs. Before the days when financial institutions of a certain size were considered too large to be allowed to fail, the collapse, however tragic, of Northern Rock would have been seen as a necessary if very nasty reminder that capitalism has its risks.
Banks and other institutions that lend money must not lend to people without being sure of the latter’s credit worthiness. But that caution has been thrown to the winds in recent years: in the US and Britain, for example, borrowing covenants have been relaxed, and pretty much any sentient lifeform has been able to get a mortgage. Some financial institutions are to blame for their plight although in mitigation, the price signals that are the essential feature of markets have been distorted by a long stretch of cheap money. The ultimate culprits, as I said the other day, are the central banks and their historically low interest rates. With so much cheap liquidity, the sort of returns investors made on safe investments were peanuts and so they took greater risks for often only a slightly higher reward. We are now moving to a position where risk is more realistically priced. The Northern Rock bailout undermines that move.
The rescue of Northern Rock also shows that the supposed success by Margaret Thatcher and even John Major in rolling back socialism is itself an exaggeration. It proves that if a company is big enough, it can call on the public purse. Northern Rock, based in Labour Party heartland of the north-east, has been effectively nationalised by the government, and inevitably, the clamour will grow for more and arguably more deserving groups of people to be bailed out. I can think, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of people who face retirement without a decent pension because Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor, helped to shaft private sector pensions by changes to how equity dividends are taxed. They are arguably far more deserving of some form of recompense.
Of course, if the Tories had any moral or political backbone – and they most certainly do not – they would have denounced this state of affairs, rather than take the easy way out of playing to the gallery by supporting the tax-funded bailout of Northern Rock. Back in the mid-1990s, when Barings went down due to dodgy trades in the derivatives market, the collapse was seen as a harsh but necessary lesson about the realities of risk. For a while, Barings served as a useful warning, far more useful than any group of regulations. With the rescue of Northern Rock, careless financiers will now regard the state as an easy touch.
This is a pretty good yarn explaining to the layperson how exactly we moved from a period when the financial markets only ever seemed to go up to the time, now, when there are long queues of anxious customers trying to pull their money out of mortgage lending and savings firm, Northern Rock. Hedge funds have lost money. Weird-sounding entities called ‘SIV-lites’ have lost cash (the absurd jargon of financial markets never fails to amaze me). I do not share the view of some Jeremiads that this saga will bring about a recession – although I do not discount that possibility – but the pace of the UK economy is bound to slow down. Suddenly, this present government is going to find it a lot harder to pay for all those new public sector sinecures it has created over the past 10 years – possibly as many as a million public sector jobs. Slower growth will cut into revenues.
The Northern Rock saga has jolted financial markets so much that the US equity market today fell because of the situation. Normally, the UK stock market takes its lead from the US, not the other way around. By coinidence, meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has been plugging his memoirs and airing his views about the current problems. Like a lot of people, I take a less than reverential view of Greenspan, although I can see his many fine qualities too: he is a good economist, pretty sound on markets as such folk go, but he abandoned his old, gold-bug principles a long time ago and was a pretty “seat-of-the-pants” sort of Fed head, making up economic doctrine almost, it seemed, on the hoof. It is a bit rich, frankly, for Greenspan to bash Bush for the tax cuts (one of the few good things that Dubya did as President, actually). Greenspan operated a relatively loose interest rate regime and this fuelled the lending practices that have come back to haunt us, especially the whole sub-prime debt Snafu. Cheap money that is detached from economic reality begets trouble. As a man who once learned his economics in the circles of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, it is a shame that even he could not understand this, or if he did, act upon it.
I have said it before but I repeat it here: it is high time that the cult of the detached, Olympian central banker setting interest rates for whole land masses was ended. Here is the classic statement of why central banks with monopoly rights of currency issuance keep coming a cropper.
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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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