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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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?
I thought about the line in the title – from Monty Python’s Life of Brian – when I read this article today about the diabolical “summer” that we are enduring. Floods, thousands of people displaced from their homes; huge insurance payouts……yes, all the ingredients to keep us Brits moaning as only we know how. The article does make clear, in fact, that we have had terrible summers before. In 1845, one of the wettest summers on record precipitated the Great Famine in Ireland, as potatoes, on which the Irish population were dangerously reliant, were hit by blight. The disaster led to mass starvation and emigration of millions of Irish people to the US and Australia, among other places (the rancour that was caused by that calamity has never entirely disappeared, unfortunately). It also precipitated the end of the UK’s tariffs on corn, as the then Prime Minister Robert Peel pushed ahead with free trade and caused a split in the Tory Party, leading to about 30 years of Liberal Party dominance in the age of Gladstone.
I am a global warming skeptic (not the same as denying it) and I do not know whether our lousy summer is linked to the increased violence of weather conditions that some say will be caused by global warming. But this is the weirdest weather I have experienced. A friend of mine who has taken up viniculture in the hope that hotter UK weather would lead to a revived UK wine industry may be wondering whether he has chosen the wrong career path. But then next year may be a scorcher. That is the beauty of global warming – you can blame anything on it.
Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
– George Carlin, US comedian.
Even to a jaundiced observer of the mainstream UK media like yours truly, it is sometimes surprising how much bias there is against private property and privately owned business. The left just about tolerates big listed companies, I suspect because socialists imagine that such companies are easier to harass and bully via large shareholder groups like pension funds. This has certainly been part of the thinking in the United States, where large state pension schemes, such as the Calpers fund in California, have used their shareholder voting power to hammer the boards of firms they dislike or think are letting investors down. It is odd, as I remarked a few months ago, that the left, in the form of writers like Observer columnist Will Hutton, used to wax indignant about the short-term investment horizons of listed firms, and now regard them as the finest business model that there is, while regarding companies that are owned by private equity firms as somehow bad, even evil. Well, we had another example of the sort of prejudice against non-listed companies today in the Observer:
Britain’s leading bookmakers, including the private equity-owned Gala Coral, face serious allegations about the vulnerability of thousands of staff who are regularly attacked during robberies and by punters who have lost huge sums on new-style gaming machines. Gala Coral is owned by Permira, the private equity company headed by Damon Buffini.
Union officials paint an ugly picture of betting shop staff regularly abused and intimidated by gamblers, with hundreds of employees experiencing serious attacks. Staff have been injured and murdered as robberies of shops become an increasing occurrence.
The implication, lazily expressed, is that the horror of being robbed and murdered is somehow connected to the private ownership of the firms in which these people work. The Observer has been among the most vociferous attackers of private equity firms – firms that buy businesses and restructure them, usually with large amounts of borrowed money – and its criticisms are usually wide of the mark. Various studies, such as from Nottingham University, have shown that private equity firms invest for the longer term, create more jobs in total, and generate more profits, than listed businesses. But these firms are mega rich and their owners are very wealthy men (it is a male-dominated world) and so are clearly evil in the eyes of the left-leaning media. But even I was struck at how casually the Observer has tried to link the problems of robbery to private ownership in readers’ minds.
Of course, with interest rates rising and debt markets getting a lot rougher due to the sub-prime mortgage SNAFU in the US, the ability of private equity firms to borrow money will drop, so those economic illiterates at The Observer can rest easy, and go back to bashing publicly-quoted firms.
Classical liberal scholar, Randy Barnett has a long and excellent post (which I came across via Instapundit) spelling out some of the contradictions that occur when libertarians, be they minarchists, anarchists or more ‘pragmatic’ types, get into arguments about events like the war in Iraq (I have been called a lot of names, but hey, I can deal with branded a warmonger and a sappy peacenic, as has happened).
In particular, he notes something that some of us at Samizdata have observed many times, which is that for a certain kind of isolationist libertarian, they almost endow foreign, sovereign governments with the sort of respect that they never have for their own states. Barnett calls this the “Westphalian” attitude (derived from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th Century which recognised sovereign state’s boundaries in Europe at the end of the 30 Years’ War). Barnett ends up by making a point that I would make, which is that judging the rightness or wrongness of certain wars cannot be done by simple recourse to a sort of Rothbardian non-initiation-of-force principle, even though that principle is mighty useful as a sort of discussion point (Rothbard is a hero of mine, notwithstanding certain problems I have with his specific views). Judging, for example, whether regime or thug X poses country Y an existential threat, and what to do about it, cannot be done simply by parroting a few principles. One has to judge the facts of the situation and ask questions such as, “is this war prudent”? or “Will it make threats to us worse rather than better?”, or “What are the balance of risks?”. Prudence, as the Greeks knew, is a virtue, although it seems at times a little unfashionable to point that out. With the benefit of hindsight, prudence might have led us to take a rather different view of what to do about Saddam, assuming we had to do anything other than deter him by threatening to nuke him out of existence (but then, that shows that acting in strict self defence can come at the cost of killing millions of innocent people, which is not exactly libertarian. Does this mean “strict” libertarians must be pacifists?).
Anyway, Barnett’s essay is first class. For the more straightforward anti-war line out of the libertarian tradition, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute still has what I think is the best essay on the subject. It reads pretty well in the light of events. Both articles are pretty long so brew up plenty of coffee first.
An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women – in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife.
As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject.
David Friedman has some thoughts on the whole business of human mating and money. I suppose I will be deemed incorrigibly flippant, but I could not help but immediately think of this crackerjack of a funny post on such matters by the one and only Harry Hutton.
Deplorable, obviously.
Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, “screwball” movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times – well, at least in the first series – but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there’s been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era).
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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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