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From Orwell’s collected essays, which should be on everyone’s bookshelf. January 25th, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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. January 25th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. January 24th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. January 23rd, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. January 23rd, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Longish article in the Telegraph today about the increasing domestic economic woes in Iran, which puts pressure on current leadership of that country. If such a country is this state when the price of crude oil has been so high, albeit off its peaks – Iran is a major oil exporter – then imagine how things may pan out if the price of the black stuff goes down even more. January 21st, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across the Moses Wine novels of US blogger Roger L. Simon after reading his blog a few months. Blogging has opened my eyes to authors I might never have encountered before, and I am sure many readers of this site probably had similar experiences. I am a fan of John Scalzi’s science fiction books, for example, and came across them after seeing favourable mentions over at Instapundit. And so on. I have been enjoying Roger’s book, Peking Duck, which relates the tale of Moses Wine’s trip to China in the late 1970s during the years immediately after the death of Chairman Mao. Wine is persuaded to go on a trip with a bunch of liberal-leftist writers, publishers, fashion models and various other Californians by his Aunt Sonya, who is a sort of ageing communist straight out of central casting. The group with whom Wine travels are shits of varying degrees of ghastliness, egomania and falseness. The book flags up Roger Simon’s own gradual shift away from socialism and Wine’s own observations on China and his travelling companions are well observed, all the more so for not being overtly political. It is a fictional version of PJ O’Rourke’s wonderful article, ‘Ship of Fools’, which depicted a group of far-left travellers to the former Soviet Union in his book, Republican Party Reptile. The fondness among a certain demographic for communist and repressive regimes has not died out. By coincidence, blogger Matthew Sinclair recently fisked an appalling piece of flim-flam by the British writer Will Hutton, who can still not bring himself to acknowledge the full scale of the slaughter perpetrated in Mao’s China. (Hat-tip, ASI blog). Of course, in reflecting on such matters, we should not forget that on the other end of the spectrum, there were plenty of people, like the Mitfords and so on, who were only too happy to travel to places such as Italy in the 1930s and drool over the supposed efficiency and orderliness of Fascism, or more recently, to defend ‘strong men’ types such as Saddam Hussein. Human capacity for folly is not confined to the left side of the spectrum. January 20th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
An idea of the late FA Hayek was that people could use different currencies within the same jurisdiction and break away from the idea that if you lived in country A or B, you could only use one currency within A or B and never use more than one in each place. The idea of “monopoly money” is so ingrained that to broach the idea is to incur looks of incredulity. (“But surely that would be messy!”) Now, I have looked quite a bit at the idea of competing currencies and there strikes me as being nothing that is implausible about such an idea as such. This story in the Daily Telegraph is therefore most interesting:
Article worth reading here from time back by Max More. January 18th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some time ago I had these thoughts about the high price of crude oil and the implications for the energy market. Well, the price of oil has been falling, rather fast, these past few months. High prices have forced people and businesses to economise on their use of oil. Sales of large-engine cars and SUVs are down. A perceived slowing in the pace of global economic growth is also hitting the price. New sources of supply, and spending on new refinery capacity, is also pushing prices down. Some of the speculative froth in the market which may have added to the high price of oil is also unwinding a bit. The rise in the price of oil to nearly $80 a barrel last year triggered all manner of near-hysterical claims about how governments must act to drastically reduce our reliance on such a source of energy. But market participants were acting even as political and media blowhards predicted doom and gloom. There is nothing like a fast rise in the price of a key thing like energy to focus minds on how to adjust behaviour. The rise in the price of oil has spawned a plethora of ventures to develop new sources of energy; encouraged new drilling and exploration efforts to find new oil supplies, and encouraged people to economise on their energy consumption. With any luck, if oil keeps falling, it will slow the flow of money into the coffers of thugocracies like Saudi Arabia and also crimp the ambitions of Hugo Chavez in oil-producing Venezuela. That has to be a good thing, although George Galloway might have a problem if oil-rich dictators lose some of their revenues. January 16th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently, Samizdata’s own Paul Marks had a post about F.D. Roosevelt and considered his reputation, his actions and the New Deal. The blogger under the name Hedge Fund Guy has this scathing assessment of the man regarded by many Britons to this day as a good guy:
Ouch. He then goes on to attack much of FDR’s record, and I don’t have a quarrel with a single word of it. Even so, it interests me that a man who, objectively speaking, was a total failure in cutting the massive unemployment of 1930s America managed to hold the reputation as a saviour of capitalism for so long. I recall my O-Level history classes and how Roosevelt was presented as essentially one of the Good Men of History, while Herbert Hoover, FDR’s immediate predecessor in the White House, was presented as a Republican who did what he could but not nearly enough (in fact, Hoover was a persistent meddler and regulator, and carries considerable responsibility for the scale of the Great Depression, as do the protectionists in Congress at the time). Roosevelt was a great showman. His “fireside chats”, his folksy manner, his ability to surround himself with a loyal and capable grouping of what we would call today “spin-doctors” ensured that the FDR myth lasted a long time. His friendship with Winston Churchill – albeit subject to strains and disagreements such as how to deal with Stalin – also ensured that the man is viewed by some Britons in a positive light. Being entirely selfish, I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War on Britain’s side, and one of the reasons why I am a visceral pro-American is that I believe that Europe today would be in a far worse shape than it is now were it not for the courage shown by America’s airmen, soldiers and sailors (some U.S. folk joined up on the British side even before America joined). I have absolutely no truck with the absurd isolationist view that the United States should have sat back, let Stalin/Hitler do their worst and if need be, come to some sort of accomodation with an entire European/Asian landmass under totalitarian, race-based thugs. So it is easy to see why Roosevelt’s image burned bright for many people. I think the lesson of how FDR managed to hold a high reputation for so long is that a political leader, particularly if he or she is adept in the arts of propoganda and can come across as “doing something” to fix a problem, however counter-productive, can get a fair pass. I do wonder, however, whether FDR would have been as successful in narrow political terms now. This book, written very much from the “Austrian” perspective, has a particularly devastating chapter on the New Deal, the record on unemployment. January 15th, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Okay, another plug for a funny piece of entertainment following my previous posting. My kid brother bought me the DVD of the first series of ‘Look Around You’, which is a glorious send-up of the 1970s programmes which were used to teach pupils and college students about science, maths and other subjects. The production styles: slightly fuzzy camera shots, corny old folk music, guys with Frank Zappa haircuts wearing tweedy jackets and black-rimmed spectacles, brought back scary memories of how long ago in style terms the 1970s now appears. I went to primary school in that era of flares, British Leyland cars, Roxy Music and endless labour disputes. The education programmes used to be narrated by some posh-sounding gent, or occasionally woman, normally with a perfect received pronunciation and heavy touch of condescension. The programme-makers would sometimes be a bit daring and let the vowels of Edinburgh or even Wales onto the show. It may be unlikely material for a spoof, but the show Look Around You is in my view the funniest television comedy I have seen in years. I do not know if someone who was not brought up in Britain when these original programmes were made would ‘get’ the gag. However, if you are British, aged about 40 and your blood runs cold at mention of the words NHS spectacles or “modular study guides”, then rent out or buy this DVD. We like to bash the BBC here at Samizdata because of the tax-financing of it, sorry, the licence fee, but this is a gem and is in the same bracket in my opinion as ‘The Fast Show’. (Health warning: I laughed so much at this show that my jaw is now actually quite painful. Avoid liquids). January 14th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Monty Python purists may be offended – I tend to find such people awkward company – but if you want to have a fun night out and laugh yourself hoarse, then the crazy musical/panto/ “Spamalot” is a must-see event. It has been running in London’s West End for a few weeks now and has already been a smash in Broadway. “We are the Knights who say neeeee!” January 14th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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