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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A report in the Times (of London) states that one of the UK’s leading charities, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), has told gap-year students (students taking a period of time off between school and university or whatever) not to take part in costly and often useless aid projects.
Indeed. Far better to encourage students not to take a gap year off at all, but to work hard, get a job, and then use all their energy and idealism to campaign to scrap all tariff barriers, trade “pacts” and other distortions of the world trade system.
As a subject for reading, this I highly recommend. I wonder if any university dons care to put it on their students’ reading lists?
The simple fact is that advertising doesn’t compel anyone to buy a product. At best, it can create some warm and fuzzy associations. A person can act on those random impulses — or he can choose to think about his purchases. It’s wholly up to him.
Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway.
David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one.
Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria.
Okay, that’s quite enough seriousness. My question for the weekend is, if you were organising a dinner party and could invite six famous people around, alive or deceased, who would you pick? Mine are:
My wife, obviously (she will be famous, some day)
David Niven.
Joan Collins
PJ O’Rourke
Diana Rigg
Groucho Marx
Choices are not based on trivia such as looks – Mrs P being very good-looking, however – but on style, wit and elegance.
I’d naturally ask Stephen Fry to work as the butler for the evening.
When people start blaming Big Evil Capitalists for the latest SNAFU in the global capital markets – the collapse of many debt products linked to what are called sub-prime mortgages in the US – remember that the problem stems in part from how lenders have been positively encouraged by some states to lend money to risky borrowers and people with a history of debt defaults and late payments (thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link).
Of course, ultra-low interest rates in many nations, such as Japan, have also fuelled a vast rise in the levels of global monetary growth, which in the near-term encouraged people to invest in any asset class offering a decent return regardless of risk of assets held, like bundles of sub-prime mortgages repackaged into exotica called collateralised debt obligations (please do not ask me to define these, it is too early in the morning and I have only had one coffee). Low interest rates have cut the price that investors typically demand for shouldering risk; now that rates have risen to curb inflation, the price for that risk has gone up.
Milton Friedman and Robert Heinlein may be dead, but the truths they espoused are very much alive. As they said, there is not, and never has been, such thing as a free lunch.
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?
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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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