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]
|
George Walden, the former Conservative education minister, Foreign Office mandarin and now a writer on various affairs, makes the claim that the Tories may have a hunger for office but lack a clear idea of what they would do. That is true up to a point; but I think it has already become pretty obvious that Cameron’s Conservatives are a pretty centrist lot, with no great obvious desire to shrink the state, reverse the enormous burdens of regulations and tax, or to roll back the intrusive legislation that has robbed owners of private property, be they homes or businesses, of many freedoms to dispose of their property as they see fit even with the consent of their fellows. And when I consider some of Walden’s advice, I wonder what would be gained by taking it:
The luxury of Opposition, meanwhile, has rarely been so alluring. If ever there were an ideal moment not to be in government, it is now. Either you grapple endlessly with unrewarding tasks (gérer la grisaille, or managing greyness, as a Frenchman has put it) or you are on your knees praying that sub-prime mortgage failures in America do not dynamite the economy, or find yourself disarmed in the face of environmental or terrorist threats. At such moments, Opposition is the place to be. The insouciance it can bring can be seen in Tory suggestions that the Government should have had arks in waiting for the floods, or in the cynical denial of the need for identity cards or longer detention for terrorist suspects. Thank God it’s not us in charge, the subtext runs, otherwise we would have had to do both.
Consider “the cynical denial of the need for identity cards or longer detention for terrorist suspects”. Oh really, George? If it is “cynical” for the Tories to deny that we “need” ID cards that proved useless in preventing terror bombings in countries like Spain, where people have ID cards, then the more cynicism, the better. And if it is “cynical” for the Tories to show occasional flashes of respect for the English Common Law, and the web of checks and balances that this legal order contains, then I say “well done Mr Cameron” – a rarity from yours truly.
Here is some other advice from Walden, of equally dubious quality:
Conservatives, like Labour, have backed away from a fundamental rethink of our centrally maladministered, Stalinist National Health Service. Nor has either party the courage to tackle the divide between public and private education which, by severing the head from the body, kills the possibility of a high-quality state sector stone dead. City academies, a refuge from this reality endorsed by both parties, will make no difference. The notion that an absurdly fragmented railway system can ever work in our horribly over-populated island is another joint pretence. So the question is simple: if the Tories have no serious policies to offer, and share the Government’s problem-dodging instincts, what is the point of office?
Apart from agreeing with his description of the NHS, I accept little else. Walden skirts around the fact that the NHS is a monopoly funded out of general taxation, is mostly free at the point of use; there is little serious competition from the private sector (although this is slowly growing) and therefore there is little incentive either for people to arrange their own health affairs more intelligently or for health providers to cater more carefully for what people want. (And in case anyone raises the case of the US health system to bash private medicine, I should point out that the US system is so warped by litigation risk, regulation and restrictive practices that it is hardly a model of laissez faire). Walden then goes on about the supposed evil divide between state and private education and wants to blur this: does this mean that independent schools lose their independence, which is precisely why they appeal to parents and pupils in the first place? What would Walden say about the constant desire of governments to raise the school-leaving age, creating a new grouping of bored and disruptive students? Does Walden not realise that the way to improve education is to inject a sharp dose of competition and parental/pupil choice across the board, through a voucher system or tax-deduction approach? On the contrary, Walden wants the Tories to make the state even more dominant in education, it seems.
The Tories are getting lots of advice these days. I doubt any Tories spend a lot of time reading this blog but for any that do, the best advice I could give them is to advocate policies that expand the liberty of the individual and get the state out of our lives. Period. All else is blather, even if it comes from supposedly clever people called George Walden.
One of the problems of living such a busy work life is falling behind on reading books that have been around for a while. I finally have managed to complete “Project Orion” by George Dyson, the son of the famed scientist and writer, Freeman Dyson. The book recounts the story of how various US government agencies and some private contractors got together in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the project was finally halted in 1965 – to develop a rocket that would be launched by firing nuclear bombs underneath it. The basic idea was that you could put a seriously large rocket into space and fly it major distances – such as to Mars – by firing a nuke underneath the rocket, and use the force of the blast to push against a plate underneath the craft. By using this method, craft could travel far further than using the liquid fuel rockets developed at the time by the likes of von Braun and other engineers. There is a lot of complex engineering and scientific material in this book, which may send the head of a non-scientist spinning, but after working through this book, I get the strong impression that there is no insuperable obstacle to the technology actually working, although there seem to be practical issues such as how to avoid nuclear fallout problems near launch sites and how to avoid areas becoming seriously contaminated. Even so, we may hear again of nuclear rockets, although to assuage fears, I reckon they will be called plasma rockets instead.
Several things struck me about the period in the late 50s and early 60s when this project operated. First, the race by the US to beat the Soviets in space clearly was a massive impulse for technical and engineering advance, but it also sucked vast amounts of taxpayers’ money into a variety of projects, many of which came to nought. The book raises the old issue of whether military/other competition between states does generate significant new knowledge that would not otherwise be generated (I remain unconvinced). Second, there was a remarkably tolerant attitude among the public – at least until the mid-60s – towards big scientific projects of all kinds, including nuclear power. These space projects were cool. This was the age, after all, of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. All of these men were heroes in the media as well as renowned in their own profession. Nowadays, it is a different story, although as Dale Amon of this site regularly reminds us, a tremendous amount of good work is going on to promote commercial spacefaring. Even so, in the time when the rocket was being developed, the environmentalist lobby that has done so much to lobby for restrictions in certain areas was hardly visible on the radar. Reading about the scale and number of nuclear tests in the Pacific or in the western US desert, for example, reminds me of how long ago the 1950s are in some ways.
A final thought about this excellent book: it demonstrates how the US federal government and its agencies developed a huge and sprawling bureaucracy to run different space projects. At times, I found it hard to follow the ins and outs of all the various acronyms representing different agencies of government as the scientists and adventurers begged and campaigned for funding. After a while, I started to drown in alphabet soup. After reading this remarkable book, I am more convinced than ever that when space flight technologies really do take off, they must do so as far away from the maw of the State as possible.
And on that final note, here is an author I really recommend.
Contrary to what people might sometimes suppose “ought” to be the case at a blog like this, I have never felt that I have been under some sort of pressure, imposed either by myself or the editors, to write solely about politics or Big World Affairs. Yes, of course, we bash the various statist intrusions, the general crapness of David Cameron, Green reactionaries, islamofascists, privacy-trashing New Labour politicians, etc, etc, but of course we also write regularly about science, spacefaring and so on. And as regulars will know, I often mention fillms or films that have become part of the public conversation. My last comment about so-called “art house” films drew from one, perfectly polite commenter the remark that “why cannot I write about something important?”.
I think films are important, because they are part of culture, and, whether we like or not, the contents of a film, just like a painting, piece of sculpture, novel, ballad or poetry can sometimes – not always – say something interesting about the sort of values that permeate a society. To borrow from Ayn Rand for a moment, art can reveal the philosophy, world view, or “sense of life”, of the person who made that book, film or picture. (A person who prefers to listen to atonal music may have a different psychology or outlook to someone who likes rock n’ roll, for example). The artist may not himself be aware of that philosophy or be able to articulate it clearly, but it exists. In the case of arthouse films, for example, particularly of the sort that were produced by the Europeans like Bergman, Traffaut and Godard, they they certainly did tell us something about the state of the culture at the time: anti-bourgoios, anti-heroic, not very interested sometimes in actual drama, sharply defined characters or plots; the tone was often ironic (sometimes very funny), amused, but also very dark at times. The films fitted into the intellectual world of the time, to a world still recovering from the long-dominant strains of socialism and collectivism in vogue for much of the 20th Century. There are exceptions and oddities to this sweeping statement of mine, of course, but as a generalisation, I think it holds a fair amount of water.
On one level, arthouse films can and are enjoyed for being quite entertaining, even brilliant (I might rent out Bergman’s the Seventh Seal to see if it as good as the commenters say) but the reason why I chose to write what I did was because I agree with the likes of Toby Young and even Jeremy “The Rottweiler” Paxman that a lot of what passes for great art from such film directors is pretty thin gruel indeed. Art is important, because it says something about the civilisation in which we happen to live, often far more so than any number of books in a library.
Maybe I should point out this story to my lovely Japanese sister-in-law. I wonder how many ordinary British people, never mind women, do things like this to make money?
Stephen Pollard, the UK writer and BBC Newsnight anchorman Jeremy Paxman may not agree about everything, but these two are certainly on the same page when it comes to a dismissive view of so-called “arthouse” movies. In particular, Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm when he said recently less than complimentary things – Paxman is not exactly what I would call a diplomat – about the late director, Ingmar Bergman. Quite right too. On Tuesday evening’s show, Paxman, journalist Toby Young and some film reviewer fellow from the Financial Times were having a right old argument about whether art house films are worth the effort. I tend to side with Toby Young: long after people have forgotten about the likes of Bergman, they will be watching the films made by Hitchcock, John Ford, Coppolla and the rest.
I think the problem are the words “art house”. It conveys the idea that the benighted viewer is not just watching a film, but is having some wonderfully clever experience which is likely to be lost on the plebs. There is a lot of anti-bourgeois posturing in such films. Worse, they are self-indulgent. I find most of them unwatchable. I’d rather watch Bruce Willis in Die Hard any day of the week than this stuff. And the point that the FT writer – I forgot his name – seemed to overlook is that films that lack plots, strongly defined characters, a sense of life and drama, do not achieve the lofty goal of somehow making us “think about the big lessons of life”. (He probably regards films with a beginning, middle and an end as “popcorn movies.”) Arguably, you are more likely to learn a bit about humanity if you watch The Simpsons or The Incredibles rather than some dreary French art flick.
Talking of witch, Die Hard 4.0 is on. I must get some tickets.
We should really ban oxygen as well: bullies use that also. That would take care of the problem, right and proper.
– Greg Lorriman, Leatherhead, UK, a commenter on a Times (of London) article about the supposed terrors of bullying via such sites as YouTube. Amazing what people find to get alarmed about, isn’t it?
Well, that appears to be the reaction so far of wealthy French ex-pats who have turned away from the land of Moliere and fine wine for other climes in order to flee the French taxman. New president Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to cut, or at least change, some of the more crushing taxes on wealthy people to lure them back to France. If he wants to revive the French economy, this has to make sense. An even more obvious policy would be a dramatic tax cut across the board, in a flat tax fashion, with the overall burden sharply reduced. (Waiting for hell to freeze over? Ed).
The effects of French hostility to the rich, or least les nouveaux riches, is pretty obvious here in Britain. The areas around Chelsea, South Kensington and Knightsbridge are full of young French people who work in the capital, such as in the Canary Wharf financial district. A number of big banks, with their fancy derivatives trading platforms, operate out of London and French education still churns out the sort of highly qualified maths graduates who work in sectors like hedge funds and futures markets. I don’t know the exact figures – who does? – but I have read that upwards of around 350,000 French people live in London today.
I remember a while back that the French model and occasional actress, Laetitia Casta, left France after shortly having been chosen as the model for the French revolutionary heroine, Marianne. She apparently quit the nation for tax reasons, although she also denied that as her reason, according to the Wikipedia entry linked to here.
Of course, there is no excuse whatever for Brits to guffaw about this. Lots of Britons quit these shores every year for nations like Canada and New Zealand, where the taxes are are sometimes lower and the opportunities for raising a family etc appear more easy. As one senior lawyer told me this morning, the best advice to any rich person these days is to try and head for Switzerland. Britain may be, temporarily, a haven for some City pros like the private equity bosses, but for how long?
Moreover, American Idol is a rebuke to those silly “crunchy conservatives” who insist that modern technology and mass production denigrates community, and so forth – in T.S. Eliot’s idiotic words, “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.” But that’s not true! The community has all joined in on this wholesome, fun, harmless moment to celebrate opportunity, singing, and lightheartedness. What could be more American than that? Lightheartedness is, I think, a profound and incredibly rare value, and one which our country has figured out how to mass produce. That may be among its greatest accomplishments ever.
– Timothy Sandefur, US blogger.
Rod Liddle in this week’s Spectator has a fiery article about the English floods (the Scots have not been flooded, but their turn may come). It starts off in poetic fashion. When Rod is good, he’s very good:
England’s habitually well-mannered and inoffensive chalk streams have been uncharacteristically full of themselves this last week or so — as you may have gathered from your television evening news programmes or, if you’re unlucky, your kitchen.
The Pang in West Berkshire, for example, rarely bothers anybody. Scarcely 15 miles in length, its job is simply to adorn the Thames in agreeable manner, as if purchased from a sort of riparian Accessorize. Not this week, though. It has puffed its chest out and pretended to be one of those hectic, rough, uncouth northern rivers — the Tees, say — all swirling brown water and ill-concealed anger. It is possibly in your front room right now, making itself at home. The same is true of those other gently bourgeois downland streams; the Windrush, bored of the Cotswolds, engulfing the village of Standlake. The Ock pelting down from the White Horse hills, spilling its load hither and thither, the Lambourn doing its best to drown all those expensive horses. What has got into them all of a sudden? Not just rain, surely?
Liddle then goes on to argue that the floods are not really caused by global climate change – we have had lousy wet summers before – but by a different change: mass housebuilding. He argues that as more homes and roads are built, rainfall has fewer places to soak into the ground and runs off quickly, creating “flash-floods”. As more houses are built, so the argument goes, the flash-flood problem will get worse. Solution: build fewer homes, or at least build them in places where the drainage has been sorted out. This makes a degree of sense.
The problem I have with this article, however, is that Liddle misses obvious points and then goes on to ride his hobby horse, anti-immigration, in a rather trite way. Here’s one paragraph:
Three fairly calamitous floods in the last seven years, for example (2007, 2004 and 2000), the latest seriously affecting a vast swath of the population, something like five million people in all. And the cost is already estimated at more than £3 billion. Meanwhile insurance premiums are likely to rise between 15 and 20 per cent as a result, according to the Association of British Insurers.
I suspect the total insurance bill could be even higher. If insurance premiums do rise, then if housebuilding did operate in a genuine free market – it does not, unfortunately – then those higher premiums would incentivise housebuilders and would-be occupiers to build them in places at low risk of flooding. That is why I fervently hope that the government does not try to limit increases in insurance costs, but on the contrary, lets them rise sharply to remind people of the costs of living in a flood plain. If the government tries to artificially subsidise people by capping insurance costs – as I believe happened in the Mississippi Delta in the US – it creates a moral hazard problem.
However, Liddle does not make this point. Instead of using insurance premiums as a market method of constraining construction on flood plains, he wants to limit housebuilding by direct state action, and goes on to argue that Britain does not need new homes anyway, since our indigenous population is quite stable. No, it is all those smelly foreigners and welfare-sponging migrant workers:
Nobody has factored in the cost that accepting migrant labour — a workforce characterised by low skills, low aspirations and of a necessarily temporary nature — will incur. But we might hazard a pretty good guess. A higher crime rate occasioned by the entirely understandable sense of injustice experienced by a poorly paid immigrant labour force; a concomitant constant drain on our health and education and social services, resulting in higher and higher council tax. And the provision of cheap, ugly housing which, remarkably, manages to square the circle of increasing the likelihood of both flooding and chronic drought. More cars, roads, shopping malls, petrol stations, leisure centres. Whole cities of pale faux-brick starter homes, the rainwater deprived of an opportunity to sink down into the earth.
Migrant workers may not be rocket scientists, but it is surely a sweeping statement to say that they have low skills and have low aspirations. If a person gets off his behind to travel thousands of miles to get work and live elsewhere, that strikes me as pretty aspirational, actually. If the problem is that a lot of these people are low-paid, it is because the marginal price of the work they perform is quite low. Of course the solution to such a problem of supposedly pointless migrant labour – at least as Liddle sees it – is not to stop migrant labour, but to ensure that no welfare and other tax-funded benefits will be paid to such migrants for a period of say, at least 5 years. Immigration and welfare states do not mix: if you want one, you cannot have the other without creating a genuine sense of injustice among the existing taxpayer population. But to argue that housing shortages will no longer be a problem if we close immigration off is wrong. The days when people lived as one family, of several generations, under one roof, has gone: grannie has her flat, young singles do not want to live with their folks into their 30s, and divorce and other facts have increased the number of people living on their own. Even had the domestic population been static since WW2, we would have had an increase in the demand for homes, not to mention for things like second homes as incomes grow.
No, if the problem of the floods is that it is caused by building on flood plains, bad drainage and so forth, the problem is government. The government refuses planning permission in areas where the drainage might be good, such as the “green belt” land surrounding London, yet it encourages building in areas already at risk. It should let the market force of insurance premium increases do its job in encouraging building in places of low risk and deter it where risks are high. Bashing immigrants and imagining we can keep the UK population stable is not, frankly, sensible economics. It is about as intelligent as King Canute ordering the tide to flow out from the beach.
There have been quite a few films made in recent years about singers and musicians’ lives. We have had films about the late Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, to name just two. The latest of this type is the biopic of the French singer, Edith Piaf. Even if the film exaggerates a bit for effect, she led an extraordinary and in certain ways very sad life. Edith Piaf, was probably the most famous French person in the middle of the 20th Century apart from Charles de Gaulle or Maurice Chevalier.
There are lots of good things in the film, starting with the performance of Marion Cotillard, who is uncannily good in the lead role and it has plenty of strong supporting performances including a short but strong set of scenes with Gerard Depardieu, who plays the nightclub owner who discovers young Edith singing for cash in the streets of Paris. The scenery is nicely handled; we are given an idea of what early 20th Century France was like for people born on the wrong side of the tracks (at one stage, young Edith was raised in a brothel). She was born during the First World War and lived in Paris during the Second, and according to this Wikipedia entry, helped with the French Resistance. What is interesting, however, is that almost no reference whatever is made to WW2 and occupied France in the film, as if the subject matter is either too sensitive for the supposed audience – the movie is made in French, with subtitles – or some other reason. And yet the way in which such artists managed to survive and even forge some sort of a career during wartime is surely an interesting subject.
To say that she was unlucky in love was an understatement; she was also a serious addict of painkiller drugs and other substances and died of liver cancer in her mid-40s, but the film does not make her into some sort of whining, pathetic victim although it does at times slip into a tragic sense of life – to use Ayn Rand’s expression – which becomes a little oppressive at times. On the whole, however, it is quite clear that she made certain choices in her life and benefited and suffered accordingly. I certainly left the cinema with a greater understanding of why this little, charismatic woman from the streets of Paris rose to become one of the greatest singers of all time. Here’s to her memory.
The UK floods are still wreaking havoc. I have friends who live in the Thames Valley area and they are out of danger, but many other people are not so fortunate. Besides the damage to homes, another problem will be the damage to crops. In my native East Anglia, the wheat harvest – the area is a sort of mini-version of the North American plains – is likely to be poor. Horticulture, in areas like Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire on the Fens, has been hammered, although thanks to modern greenhouses and the like, not everything has been lost. We can expect prices of groceries, or at least some items, to go up, at least in the short run.
That got me wondering about our food supplies. As I mentioned in a previous post, the terrible summer of 1845 led to the Irish famine. In centuries past, bad weather was not just destructive in some ways but it also meant people starved in their millions. That is unlikely to happen now. And one reason for that is that we are no longer reliant on home-grown food. Food production is not only much greater because of modern techniques, drainage, use of fertilisers and machinery, but also because the 60m souls on this sodden island have access to a global market for food. Free trade can be a risk – this nation’s food supply routes need to be protected by naval forces, as we found out during the German U-boat menace – but in normal circumstances, having a diverse range of non-UK supplies for food makes great sense, particularly as climatic conditions change, as some argue.
The next time you watch a programme or read an article going on about the wonders of self-sufficiency and which bash supermarkets and global trade in foodstuffs, ponder what would happen if we really were reliant on the local farmers for everything we eat.
Colour me unsurprised. This latest opinion poll (yes, yes, I know how fickle these things are) says more voters are becoming disenchanted with Conservative Party leader David Cameron. One stifles any desire to gloat, but as the former deputy prime minister, Willie Whitelaw once said after the Tories crushed Labour in the 1983 general election, “I’m jolly well going to gloat”. Cameron has had his honeymoon: a remarkably pliant press, a fair hearing from the usually left/liberal BBC, a relative absence of mirth about his stunts such as riding a bike to work followed by a chauffeur, but clearly the gloss has gone. We ideologues have been hard on him for some time and it does not surprise me that the cynicism felt by the likes of us is spreading wider. But what should the Tories do now?
I think it is too late to get rid of Cameron, even if that were possible. The Tories have chosen this man for the superficial reason that he looked quite nice, sounded reasonably pleasant. His ideas have all the plodding, unremarkable banality of the BBC/Guardianesque classes, but then such people have a huge influence on this country, although for how long one cannot tell. Cameron is in the job and he has to stick at it. If the Tories get rid of him, they might as well implode.
What Cameron and his supporters need to do is to oppose. That means, while not reverting to some sort of rottweiller mode, learning to attack this government. It means reminding the electorate that Brown, when Chancellor, helped to destroy a large and vibrant private pensions sector; it means pointing out that Brown starved our armed services of the funds it needed to carry out its various missions abroad while hosing money on the unreformed NHS and adding nearly 1m people to the public payroll since 1997. It means opposing a government led by a man who has massively inflated the size of the UK tax code. All this and more can be done, but to be done well, means that a Tory Party worthy of the name has to argue for the opposite: a small, lean, efficient state, low taxes, free trade and encouragement of enterprise. It does not require one to be a rocket scientist to figure this out, nor does it take a genius to put forward these essentially liberal ideas in a way that can capture the imagination. For example, just about one of the few good things about Cameron is his opposition to ID cards. Why does not he link the freedom to go about one’s business unmolested by officials to the freedoms to trade, to create wealth, etc?
Cameron has lost his gloss, but he needs to remind us of just how devious and bad Brown is. You never know, this mini-crisis for Cameron may be the making of him. Let’s face it: does any man with an ounce of respect want to be liked the BBC?
|
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.
|
