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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Simon Jenkins, the columnist and former editor of The Times (of London), is capable of making a strong argument at times and he tries to do so with his thesis that the Blair government continued much the same policy mix as Margaret Thatcher. Yes, really. Jenkins argues that in some ways, the Blair government was more enthusiastic in privatising certain industries than the Thatcher one (he says Mrs T. was opposed to selling off the railways, but I am not sure that is true). Even without the odd quibble, it is a quite persuasive piece of writing. However, in the light of this week’s events as related by Perry de Havilland below, Jenkins spoils his piece by this piece of utter nonsense:
Although Blair made a spirited bid after the 2001 election to make Europe, as he put it, ‘the cornerstone of the new parliament’, he found it merely a source of dissension with Brown. He signed the Maastricht treaty as promised in his manifesto but did not implement it and eventually ceded to Brown a de facto veto not just over the euro but over further European integration. Blair’s 2005 presidency of the council of ministers was a fiasco. Under him Britain remained semi-detached from Europe and beyond Thatcherite reproach. His glee at being let off the hook by the French and Dutch referendum votes against the 2005 constitution was ill-concealed.
I think even Jenkins probably feels a bit of a twit about those words. Because it appears Blair was pretty keen to transfer more sovereignty to the EU all along. The idea that he was pleased at the outcomes of the referendums in previous years is not borne out by his sly actions.
Brian Micklethwait of this parish has this zinger of a quote on his own blog. I could not resist posting it here:
A good friend of mine defines regression to barbarism as literally a matter of how many dogs there are around the place. Dogs equals barbarism, she reckons. As you can imagine, she is not a happy bunny. Well, if you were a bunny, you wouldn’t be, would you?
Read the whole thing. It is not just about our furry friends.
Anatole Kaletsky, one of the newspaper columnists I read regularly, despite his incurable Keynesianism, has smart things to say in defence of private equity firms that have been taking over major businesses lately, provoking the ire of unions and leftist policians. Good for Anatole for refusing to jump on a silly bandwagon. Here are my thoughts on the issue a while back.
(Full disclosure: I do work for a non-listed company, thank god).
The other week, I wrote about the Bridge card game ploy known as the Yarborough – taken from the third James Bond story, Moonraker. The names given to various card game gambits can be wonderful. Consider this one:
The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King. He calls it ‘Kournikova’ because it is very pretty but never wins.
Well, I rather liked her.
A week or so ago, Ross Clark, the eminently sane columnist who writes for the Spectator, defended globalisation and attacked what he sees as a growing hatred of rich people. We see it in the endless bleating about the supposed Evil of private equity and hedge funds, or of financial speculators generally. Much of the reason, I think, for this hatred, is not that the rich are so much better off in relative terms than the poor – the poor probably don’t have the time or the inclination to spend time hating the rich – but that the rich are a lot better off than the broad middle class. In my experience, many anti-globalistas are middle class intellectuals, not poor folk living in state subsidised housing. As it becomes more difficult for middle class folk, for example, to educate their offspring privately without going into massive debt, and to buy a house for the same reason, naturally the Man on the Clapam Omnibus – or his US version – gets a bit cheesed off if he sees City financiers buying swanky homes or sending children to nice schools with ease.
But this hatred of wealth is dangerous and it draws on economic illiteracy. To demonstrate a good case of such dunderheadedness, in the print version of the Spectator (16 June, page 26), is this letter from a Mr Edward Collier, of Cheltenham, a traditionally genteel spa town in the west of England famed for its posh girls’ school and a rather fine horse racing festival in March:
“Sir, In his article “Hatred of the rich is back in fashion” (9 June) Ross Clark wondered “What about the people who sew £10,000 handbags together – surely the more that the wealthy spend on their handbags, the more they earn?” Does he really believe that the sewers of hyper-handbags earn more than those who sew the mundane totes of everywoman? They’re sewn by the same people, for God’s sake, and for the same pathetic pittance.”
I could quote more from this character, but you get the idea of where he is coming from. So let’s spell it out for this Sage of Cheltenham: if more people spend money on luxury goods, which typically often require more intensive labour to produce, such as fine leather handbags or Breitling wristwatches, this increases the profits of the people who make these things, and in turn, increases the demand for the skilled labour required to make them, and hence, raises the real wages of the persons who make them, and so on. If a luxury leather handbag really does require no more skill to produce than a bag one could buy for a fiver, then presumably this letter writer might have a quarter of a decent point, but he does not. He merely asserts that the “same people” produce high-value goods as cheap ones, and uses this to dismiss the argument that when rich people spend their milions, it recycles wealth back into the economy.
In fact, even John Maynard Keynes’ argument of stimulating demand to encourage production presumably was based on the notion that if people spend money in the shops, it creates jobs, and therefore is a good thing. What this character seems to be saying is that no matter how much money rich folk spend on luxury goods, it makes no difference whatever to the people who make them. Apparently, the money never reaches the poor downtrodden producers, but ends up in a few capitalists’ pockets. But presumably, if more money is spent on goods than before, then, other things being equal, the prices of those goods will rise or output will have to be increased. To argue that none of this process filters through into the living standards of people is quite extraordinary.
Meanwhile, this story, if it is true, is not going to help the blood pressure of Mr Collier, I fear.
I am looking forward to this book by Ross Clark.
I missed this sharp and wise article by US columnist Jonah Goldberg a few days ago – but I had the excellent excuse of being on holiday – but his piece, which nicely sums up what is happening in Britain from a US perspective, demonstrates how some Americans are waking up to what a nannied country Britain now is. Of course, north American readers of this blog have been aware of this progressive infantilisation of the UK adult public for some time.
The question that keeps coming up, and which makes an appearance in Jonah’s article, is exactly when will the conveyor belt of nanny-state interference in our liberties stop? When, exactly, does the excrement hit the fan? Just how bullied do we have to be before something snaps?
I am still none the wiser as to whether we really know the answer to those questions.
“Make sure you are well-scrubbed, your nails are clean and your hair is washed. Remember that girls are as nervous around you as you are around them, if you can imagine such a thing. They think and act rather differently to you, but without them, life would be one long rugby locker room. Treat them with respect.”
From The Dangerous Book for Boys, page 127. Sound advice on every page. The book is a non-PC work of genius that has tapped into a sense among many folk that life has become too obsessed with safety and avoidance of risk.
This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:
This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.
Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.
But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?
Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk – Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind – might have had enough of reading about the feats of “The Greatest Generation” and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller’s book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.
But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.
I have travelled to a lot of cities in the world in my relatively short life (Paris, San Francisco, New York, Cologne, Geneva, Milan, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Vienna……) and there are quite a few more that I want to knock off the list before I step off this mortal coil. Well, this week, I did just that and spent a wonderful day ambling around the old southern French town of Montpellier. The city is a university town with a strong commercial base, oodles of history and some of the swankiest French urban architecture outside of Paris. Access to the city from Britain is easy: a one-and-a-half-hour flight from Gatwick.
I know that there is a lot to gripe about with France: the taxes, red tape and as we know, considerable problems with a large and angry underclass, made worse by a lack of assimilation of its Islamic population. However, from my point of view, if newly-elected Nicolas Sarkozy manages to cut taxes somewhat and reverse some of the daftest labour market restrictions, then any advantage to living in Britain rather than France will look increasingly slender. (I see no sign that Britain’s petty brand of health and safety puritanism has completely taken hold). I am not the first person to make that observation, of course.
Mind you, the beer is alarmingly expensive, but you can buy wine for a Euro a litre – and it tastes good. Emigration never felt so compelling.
“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
Victor Hugo.
I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff.
“It is not the State that creates a healthy society. When the State grows too powerful people feel they count for less and less. The State drains society, not only of its wealth but also of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best. Our aim is to let people feel that they count for more and more.”
– Margaret Thatcher, 10 October, 1980. Taken from the rather good tome, Great British Speeches, a collection compiled by Simon Heffer. Perhaps out of an impish desire to annoy, the book contains Blair’s ghastly and embarrassing ‘forces of conservatism’ speech, perhaps the ugliest statement of political authoritarianism in recent British political history.
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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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