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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The British master of literary parody, Craig Brown – who lives in my old stamping ground of Suffolk – had this absolute blinder of a sendup of the whole, ghastly Prince Diana industry of ropey biographies and kiss-and-tell stories that cropped up after she was killed in that Paris car crash almost 10 years ago (I remember the headlines the following day so clearly, I cannot believe 10 frickin’ years have elapsed).
Here’s a sample of Brown in action:
A forthcoming book, Diana Ablaze (HarperCollins), carries an interview with an unnamed “highly placed” eyewitness to the blaze at Windsor Castle who claims to have spotted Princess Diana skulking in the shadows with a packet of Zip firelighters peeping out of her top pocket.
I nearly spilled my coffee all over the desk at that one.
I can also recommend this for students of history with a twist.
I am certainly not the first person to state what a miserable process travelling by civil aircraft now is, unless one happens to enjoy the use of a private jet (a growing sector thanks to ventures like this one). Even before the latest terrorism problems, the security measures put in place added to the tedium of queuing, increased the tendency of staff to be rude and highhanded towards customers, and added to the cost and expense of flying. The budget airline changes wrought by the likes of Easyjet or Ryanair in Europe certainly have been a massive bonus for anyone who likes to regularly hop over to Porto for a nice weekend or buzz down to Malta to see in the in-laws, in my case. But the fun of flying is pretty much dead. (There is, alas, a similar problem with driving cars today). Airline food is terrible. The safey procedures are a joke – I have never seen any passenger take them seriously. Delays are considerable and getting worse, simply due to the massive amounts of traffic and the lack of airport space. And finally, in places such as London’s Heathrow Airport, the place is a nightmare: noisy, dirty, resembling nothing so much as a grotty provincial shopping mall. What can be done about it?
Well, part of the problem is that airport operators like BAA, now owned by Spanish company Ferrovial, operate more or less as a monopoly. There is relatively little competition in the sector and the state regulatory body lacks the market incentive to worry about improving the comfort and enjoyment of passengers. There is something to be said in forcing a breakup of the monopoly of the main airports and encouraging more competition. I personally make it a personal mission to avoid Heathrow Airport at any cost and fly from Gatwick when it is possible, or go to a smaller airport instead. Competition is urgently needed to shake up this industry and put a bit of glamour and excitement back into the business of flying.
Glamour is not a word one hears very often about modern aviation. For all that it is fashionable to bash him (his beard and toothy grin seems to drive some folk up the wall), Sir Richard Branson tries his hardest to inject some fun into the process. But not nearly enough airport/airline operators seem to have that spirit. This industry needs a few more Howard Hughes-type characters to kick it hard up the backside. If they don’t, more and more people like me will look for any alternative to taking to the skies in the future. Airlines may think that treating people badly will make them profits, but the long-term cost in alienating people who are seeking alternative forms of transport is bad economics and bad business.
Checking some details, I came across this rather interesting site. Well worth a look.
Scanning various news websites this morning, as is part of my routine, I came across this article over at Reuters. Scroll down and you will see that the item refers to a person commenting to the effect that car ownership is “immoral”. Think about that: ownership of a piece of metal, with wheels at each corner, that conveys people from A to B by the harnessing of controlled explosions in something called an engine, is immoral. Not unwise, costly, difficult or impractical, but “immoral”.
Maybe these creeps will next argue that Man’s possession of opposable thumbs is “immoral” too.
“If Michael (Moore) thinks healthcare is expensive now, just wait when it’s free.”
P.J. O’Rourke, in a remark attributed to him in this nice takedown of Moore’s latest “documentary”, Sicko, a film making the case that we would all be better off in having tax-funded healthcare free at the point of use, like the magnificent British National Health Service that is the envy of the world (cue sarcasm alert, sounds of hollow laughter).
Arnold Kling has thoughts on the movie. Here is what I wrote about some of the issues arising when people want healthcare free at the point of use (ie, they want someone else to pay for it).
Do not misunderstand me: private healthcare in some countries, such as the US, is far from perfect. For a start, it does not have a lot to do with unfettered laissez faire capitalism, as anyone who has encountered the powerful American Medical Association will point out. The insurance system in the US encourages inflated prices for treatment, and there are other regulatory and legal costs which have become a lot worse in recent years. But if Moore thinks British cinema audiences will be wowed by his paean of praise for Britain’s Soviet model of healthcare, he needs to have his head examined.
Mind you, I have often wondered whether Moore is for real, or a sort of performance artist secretly working for Dick Cheney.
(Update: further thoughts on whether Moore is a clown damaging the already-weak case for socialised medicine can be seen here.)
The EU Referendum blog, a euro-sceptic site that I read regularly, has few doubts about a key part of Tone’s legacy:
There has already been a Cabinet reshuffle, in Europe. A new member has just joined the European Council. The shiny car in which he is driven to Downing Street should be bearing not a Union Jack but a ring of stars, to remind us of his coming servitude.
That also would be an acknowledgement of Tony Blair’s true legacy to this nation. Ten years ago, he entered Downing Street to a flurry of Union Jacks, waved by enthusiastic supporters. Today, he leaves – to an unprecedented standing ovation of the House – bequeathing his successor a blue flag with twelve yellow stars.
I would also add that a badge depicting Blair – and Brown’s – utter contempt for the traditional liberties of this nation, and our Common Law, might be appropriate. The trouble is, who among the broad British population would know what such a badge stands for?
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.
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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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