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 row about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to refuse to give children up to gay couples has already caused a great deal of controversy, and there is a very, smart article on the issue at The Devil’s Kitchen blog which takes a pretty firm libertarian line on the matter. In my view, if a Catholic or any other religious organisation wishes to refuse to hand over children entrusted to it to certain sorts of people on grounds of religious doctrine, then one can certainly object to those views, but they should not be banned, in my view.
The problem, however, is that such adoption organisations receive money from the taxpayer: you and me. I am not a Catholic (although my wife is) and I am not happy that I may be financially enabling people to act on views I regard as wrong. This in my view demonstrates the great dangers of encouraging charities to receive tax moneys or indeed to get involved in state initiatives of any kind. By receiving such moneys, these bodies will slowly but surely lose their autonomy. The Catholic charities that are involved in areas like adoption may choose to sever any links with the state apparatus, and I strongly urge them to do so.
This government, remember, is one that regards autonomous institutions, be they businesses, charities, or any associations of people, as a threat to its power and designs. It wishes to bend these institutions to its corporatist, collectivist ends. In a sense, this is in fact a profoundly fascist government, in that it maintains the appearance of tolerating private property rights and institutions, but in fact seeks to regulate them so closely as to turn them into empty husks.
I hope this whole episode drives home in people’s minds the extent to which civil society, traditionally understood, has been weakened by this government. It was the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen I think, who once remarked that NuLabour would no longer seek to nationalise industries. Instead, it would nationalise people.
The good news from India keeps coming. This week, the international credit rating agency, Standard & Poors pronounced that the “Third World” nation had become so prosperous that the risk of lending money to the country had fallen significantly.
New York-based Standard & Poor’s said it upgraded India’s sovereign rating to BBB-, the lowest investment grade rating, from BB+, the highest junk rating.
The rating revision could help reduce India’s borrowing costs on the global market.
As anyone who has taken out a personal loan or mortgage will know, getting a stronger credit rating is a big deal. India is now ahead of economic basket-cases such as Argentina or Venezuela, and has got there by a programme of economic liberalisation. I keep banging on about the vigour of the Indian economy – notwithstanding the still-grinding poverty in parts of the country – because it is probably the most positive economic story of our times. It shouts, loud and clear, that markets work. Market economics is doubly potent when combined with a relatively robust civil society, protection of property rights and the priceless asset of an international language like English.
Meanwhile, India-based Tata Steel has sealed its purchase of UK steelmaker Corus.
“I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.”
– Denis Leary.
“It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.”
Auberon Waugh, journalist, novelist and son of the writer Evelyn Waugh. I once had the pleasure of chatting to Auberon for a long time at a party and reflected on what a thoroughly nice man he was. He is much missed, although not by Polly Toynbee, I suspect.
Today is Milton Friedman Day. Interesting selection of links to events marking the great man’s life over at Virginia Postrel’s blog.
Here is the main event link.
On a Sunday afternoon, when recovering from a close friend’s birthday the previous evening – in the Dover Street wine bar – god help my liver and I – there is no better way to resume some semblance of humanity than to listen to this woman. I first chanced upon one of Diana Krall’s CDs about a decade ago and she has held a firm place in my music-playing selection ever since. Her version of “Face the Music and Dance” was my choice of first musical piece at my wedding last year, taken from this CD.
Norah Jones is great, Peggy Lee was wonderful and Ella Fitzgerald could charm the birds off the trees, but Krall is as good as any of them – not to mention rather easy on the eye – and hopefully will be around for a long time yet. No wonder Clint Eastwood went nuts when he saw her playing in a local Carmel bar before she became a megastar.
My hangover is fading already.
The other night I glanced at the television to see an advertisement for a smooth-looking new car by Hyundai. All very clever with a sort of liquid metal effect – due to the wonders of computer generated technology – but absolutely nothing at all about the car. There was no description of how fast the car could go, what sort of gearbox it had, how many seats, how much it costs, what its fuel consumption is. Nothing. It was about as informative as watching a North Korean press release.
The reason, I think, why modern car advertisements are like this is because of a campaign by the UK authorities, with bodies like the Advertising Standards Authority, to remove all reference to the idea that a car is desirable because it goes fast. One must not offend against the Gods of Health and Safety by implying, stating or otherwise celebrating that this or that set of wheels goes like a rocket. No sir. One must not lead the gullible British public into the sin of speeding and other naughtinesses. What we therefore have are adverts that are self-indulgent eye candy, of no more import than a nice piece of modernist artwork. Here is an example of what I mean.
It is, I suppose, a reflection of the society in which we live that advertisements, like old Tom and Jerry cartoons, get bowdlerised or otherwise influenced by the desire to remove all risk from life. But life is not free from risk, and risk is actually one of the ways that you know that you are alive rather than dead.
On a brighter note, Richard Hammond, “The Hamster” as he is known to his Top Gear TV colleagues, is back to the screens this Sunday after recovering from a stunt that went badly wrong. What I continue to love about that show is that you know, you just know, that the serried ranks of the do-gooder classes cannot abide this programme.
Go Hamster!
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
From Orwell’s collected essays, which should be on everyone’s bookshelf.
Earlier in the week I wrote about how UK finance minister Gordon Brown’s economic record is likely to be a poor one. If you ask many people about what they dislike most about the gloomy Scot, they will tell you of how he changed the tax rules in a way that sucked billions of pounds out of company final-salary pension funds. Hundreds of these schemes have shut their doors to new recruits and in some cases, like UK pest control business Rentokil, have cut the benefits of even existing pension scheme members. We are living for longer, and the shift in human longevity continues to push up pension liabilities. These liabilities are accounted for as a debt item on corporate balance sheets – something that has hit many businesses as a shock.
In the case of once-nationalised utilities like British Telecom or the airline, British Airways, the big black holes in their pension schemes are almost as large as the market value of these firms. Companies are pouring billions of pounds into these pension schemes to stay on the right side of Britain’s official pension regulator. No wonder that British Airways is suffering with its struggles against budget airline rivals such as EasyJet or Ryanair, and the impact of higher fuel costs and security-related costs.
One cannot pin all the blame on Brown for what has happened. Having a beer with fellow Samizdata contributor Philip Chaston last night, we agreed that in some ways that final-salary pensions were probably due to fade out or decline anyway, since they were part of an era when a person worked for one firm for their whole life, retired in their sixties and then had the good actuarial grace to drop dead. In an age when people change jobs regularly and live into their 80s and beyond, this particular form of retirement saving is not viable for many companies. In fact, over time, I expect many companies to cease running any significant pension schemes altogether. There is no doubt, however, that Brown has had a crushing impact on pensions, and his continued tax-and-spend policies are unlikely to foster a significant saving habit among the public. Quite the reverse.
I am writing this with a few minutes to go before a documentary on ITV looking at the scale of the UK pension meltdown. It is unlikely to be jolly viewing.
The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector
– Henry Hazlitt, author of books including the superb Economics in One Lesson.
It is easier to grumble than to get off one’s backside and do something if a disaster hits and the supposed emergency systems of the state prove to be a joke, as was the case when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast over a year ago. In catching up on some reading, I came across this terrific and highly encouraging story of how assorted groups of volunteers, many of whom had a refreshingly dim view of officialdom, swung into action to help the people of New Orleans and others in the surrounding area. The article also reinforced my view of how the internet is helping fuel voluntarism in a way that feeds into the “Army of Davids” perspective of Glenn Reynolds recently.
The article contains this line:
“Here is a place where government failed absolutely, and as such it could be the perfect place to argue that government itself is a failure.”
I agree. I think the energy and neighbourliness of ordinary Americans as shown in this article are a welcome corrective to the cynicism many people may have felt when reading stories about looting or disorder in the aftermath of the disaster. (Some of these stories were questioned). I recall reading about the blackouts in New York a year or so ago and about how people banded together to ensure that folk got home safely. American civil society, precisely because of the still-strong ethos of voluntarism that so struck Alexis de Tocqueville 160 years ago, is in many ways in much better shape than here. I was particularly struck when I read the latest reports tonight of how looters scrambled to grab what they could from the cargo washed up on the English coast from the grounded container ship. I wonder how many ordinary people ever bothered to wonder how they could help protect the beach from pollution or ensure that no-one got hurt? Yes, I know that looting goes on after disasters around the world, but there seemed to be no countervailing examples over the past few days of people volunteering to help recover items for their rightful owners, for example. The idea of volunteers helping owners to sort out their property from the wreckage is just too bizarre for we Britons to contemplate.
Generalisations are always risky, but I get the feeling that if I was in a natural disaster, I would rather be in America than in Britain. It is a sad thing for a proud Briton like me to say, but I think that in this respect at least, the sort of neighbourliness and willingness to lend a hand has more or less died, although I may be a bit too gloomy here. To describe what might have killed that spirit would take me longer than a blog posting, so I will leave it to the commenters.
It appears that Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, has timed his run to be our next Prime Minister just in the nick of time as the economic data starts to look a bit sickly. Even with all the usual health warnings about data that seeks to try to capture the complexities of an economy in numbers, the figures on inflation and productivity do not look good. (In the case of productivity, they are not disastrous, mind).
It is probably not grounds for great worry – yet. When an economy expands and more people join the workforce, this can have the perverse effect of reducing “productivity”, while if an economy stagnates but millions lose their jobs, then output per person can go up. Productivity growth is not the be-all or end-all of economics. But the ability of an economy to grow rapidly without triggering inflation is helped if the productive capacity of an economy grows. There is no doubt that after nearly 10 years of this hyper-active Chancellor, with his taxes, lust for regulation and control, that the arteries of the British economy have hardened.
Brown inherited a British economy in 1997 that was, by the standards of the 70s and early 80s, in remarkably fine fettle. The state took less than 40 percent of GDP; inflation was low, productivity was rising, the ranks of the rich and the decently-well off were rising fast. Yes, problems of crime and the weakening of civil society were serious and yet how optimstic so many people were at that time that some of the remaining social evils could be addressed. How long ago that now seems.
For years, I have heard it said that Labour’s ace card was its handling of the economy at the macro-economic level. I tended to go along with that in the main, and I think the decision to put the Bank of England in day-to-day charge of interest rates was sound. Brown’s move of the inflation measure to the less exacting euro zone measure of consumer prices – which does not capture housing costs like mortgages – and his sometimes dubious picks of BOE personnel to set interest rates, threaten to tarnish even that achievement.
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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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