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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This looks like it would swallow up my entire living room wall:
Move out that old armoire and clear off the living room wall – it will soon be time to make room for that new 70-inch LCD television.
With 42-inch flat-panel TVs flying off retailers’ shelves this holiday season as prices dip below $1,000, brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note on Tuesday that 70-inch TVs could be the “right size” in 2009.
“We decided to investigate the optimal screen size for high definition viewing,” wrote analyst Jeff Evenson in the note. “We conclude that 65 inch to 75 inch is the right size for a 10 foot viewing distance.”
Mind you, given my income levels, I am happy to stick to my modestly-sized flatscreen for the forseeable future.
The late Milton Friedman was famous for many viewpoints but one that stands out for me was his admirably blunt statement that the purpose of a business is to make money for the people who own it, not to advance some social, environmental, religious or other agenda. Period. A publicly-quoted firm on the London Stock Exchange or Wall Street should focus on making money for its shareholders. In a competitive market – key proviso – such a purpose will tend to work, as Adam Smith said it would 230 years ago, in the interest of the consumer and worker:
Friedman wrote:
When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
The doctrine of corporate social responsibility is very much on the march in Britain. Companies are increasingly encouraged to do things to help the environment and help local communities. My own firm encourages its staff to devote some time to voluntary work and sets aside time and resources for that end. Now, I have no trouble whatsoever with a firm that, with the consent of its owners – shareholders – decides to back certain causes so long as the shareholders realise that such activity could affect their shares either positively or negatively. So long as it is made explicit and the owners are allowed to decide yes or no. The problem starts to arise however when this doctrine is forced upon the business owners by state regulation. This is not simply a problem that can face listed companies; it can also potentially affect firms that are not publicly listed but owned, say, by a private equity fund or an individual.
One problem, I think, is limited liability laws. Such laws, one might argue, create a bit of a “moral hazard” problem in that the firm’s owners are less mindful of the harmfulness or riskiness of their decisions than if they were subject to the conditions that used to prevail under the old English Common Law. Might the reason that we have so much focus on the supposed social responsibilities of business stem in part from the idea that limitied liability is a privilege that carries responsibilities? Purist free marketeers might say that the logical step is to remove the privilege, but would the ability of firms to operate on a large scale, with all the advantages that can bring, come to an end without limited liability?
I am not sure about the answers to all these questions, which is why I ask them. I know that some libertarians and classical liberals, such as Sean Gabb, have posed the argument that limited liability is inherently contrary to a consistent free market doctrine, and that the creation of large corporations with certain immunities has actually created businesses that are increasingly indistinguishable from government. On the other hand, one might envisage how constraints on corporate liability might emerge without state legislation, although I confess I am not sure how this would work.
Related thoughts here and here.
This recent posting of mine here referred to the wonders of global divisions of labour and the consequent availability of cheap goods and services that would have once been luxuries. The posting quoted an example about something as simple and evocative as exports of flowers (aaahhhhh) but of course it applies to anything: computer software, underwear, books, automobile components and furniture.
The ensuing comments were interesting (one of the reasons I like blogs with comment threads is that they give me ideas to write about). One argument, which I have heard several times, went something like this: globalisation and free trade is obviously grand in many ways and gives us all manner of goods unknown to our ancestors. However, the people who do best out of this tend to be smart people who can handle the rapid pace of change that globalisation brings. But not-so-smart folk, who are used to manual labour but not much up to anything else, will end up on the scrapheap. This is a bad thing as it erodes the social fabric, destroys established communities (such as Yorkshire mining villages, etc), and in particular, means that the sort of folk – mostly men – who used to expend their energy and pride on producing ships and material goods lose purpose in life, turn to crime, etc, etc. If they get jobs at all they tend to be worse-paid, “McJobs” which are demeaning to perform. Conclusion: globalisation has big losers as well as winners.
Superficially, this sort of argument carries a certain amount of force, but only lasts until one realises that this sort of line could be used not just to stop cheap imports from China and inflows of Polish construction site workers, but could, for example, be used to ban people in California from importing stuff from neighbouring Nevada, or ban a guy living in Paris from moving to Bordeaux because he is “stealing” a job from people who live in the French coastal town. In other words, when one realises that national borders are lines on a map, the perversity of protectionist economic arguments is manifest. Taken to its logical extreme, I am “taking” jobs from people in East London because I work in Canary Wharf but live in London’s central area of Pimlico.
The other sort of problem here is that it reminds me of how people still view work that involves physical objects, such as manufacturing, as being in some way more “real” than service-based jobs. It demonstrates the lingering Marxian view that wealth is not wealth unless you can drop it onto your foot. It is a view that also, I think, reflects a highly gloomy, if not disdainful, view of one’s fellows. Despite the difficulties involved and the wrench of closures of factories, millions of jobs have been created in countries like the United States that have replaced the old jobs, and many of those jobs are not the supposedly-terrible “McJobs” but jobs that have long-term career prospects. (Although folk that poke fun at “McJobs” tend to ignore several things, such as that such jobs are good entry-level jobs and people then move on to something else).
Here is an admirable debunking of the idea that free trade encourages a “race to the bottom” in terms of incomes. Another admirable paper by the late Murray Rothbard here.
Readers may wonder why I am bothering to write about this, given that protectionism is pretty discredited (I have yet to meet anyone who, when sober, takes Lou Dobbs seriously). But the easy charms of protection continue to seduce lawmakers and even quite intelligent interloctors on blog comment threads. Like ivy threatening to throttle a young plant, protectionism needs to be ruthlessly cut back by argument, over and over again.
A BBC journalist this morning informs us that the death in highly suspicious circumstances of a former Russian KGB official could lead to a “potential diplomatic incident” between Britain and Russia.
You think?
Last night, I went along to see the latest 007 movie along with my wife, as well as Perry de Havilland of this parish, regular Samizdata commentator and friend Julian Taylor, David Shaw and others. There had been so much media noise and excitement leading up to the film, starring Daniel Craig as Bond, that I just had to go and see it.
I am very glad that I did so. I am one of those folk who actually prefers the original Ian Fleming books to the films, and I have a consequent dislike of the nonsense of the Roger Moore films, and the excesses of gadgetry and sheer silliness that the film-makers imposed on the stories after the first two or three of the Sean Connery movies, which are my favourites. So the fact that the new film deliberately sought to be more hard-edged, less dependent on gimmickry and cheesiness, was a good development.
Daniel Craig has been a controversial choice for Bond. The Bond of the novels is a slim, dark-haired old Etonian, of Swiss-French and Scottish ancestry – with a hard streak, a weakness for beautiful women in distress and a belief in living life to the full. Craig does well to convey the hard side of Bond, but he tries a bit too hard, sometimes. He comes across as a sort of over-muscled army squaddie, who struts about the set rather than adopt the sort of feline grace of Fleming’s character. But there is no doubting that Craig – who says he loves the Fleming novels – has taken up the challenge of portraying Bond as not just some suave dude who can kill and seduce the girls, but who can also take risks and get hurt in the service of his cause – his country. And that is the unspoken message of this film, and very un-PC it is. Bond is a patriot (not much sign that he wants to work for the UN). He kills without the need to consult a post-traumatic stress disorder clinic, and is more likely to drink a large glass of bourbon instead. He gets cut, he gets beaten up, and he falls in love and learns the dangers of emotional involvement with ravishing brunettes (not that there is anything wrong with ravishing brunettes, ahem).
I thought the scene in the casino was the highlight, and even though the game was poker rather than baccarat – as in the story – the tension is built up nicely. The setting is nice, the actors who support Bond are pretty good, and the actress who plays Vesper is lovely – I can see why any red-blooded man can fall for her. The torture scene, taken from the original book, is pretty nasty, although the scene in the book is far nastier (it gave Raymond Chandler nightmares, apparently).
Some of the stunt/action scenes do not seem to add a great deal to the plot – such as the amazing scene at Miami airport – but they are incredibly well-done. For sheer excitement, the opening half-hour of the film cannot be beaten.
What is clear is that the film-makers, seeing how the Bond movies were mocked by the Austin Powers series of Mike Myers, have decided that our Jim is not going to put up with being a joke any more. Daniel Craig deserves a large, well-made vodka martini – made the right way, obviously – for playing 007 so well, and with such obvious conviction and relish.
Good review of the movie here.
The original Fleming novel is definitely worth a read. Meanwhile, Jim Henley has thoughts.
One final gripe: will the moviemakers ever get the casting right of Felix Leiter, Bonds’ CIA buddy? In the books, he is a fair-headed Texan, ex-Marine Corps with a wonderfully sardonic sense of humour.
(Update: here is my review of Simon Winder’s recent diverting if also irritating book about the James Bond phenomenon and post-war British history.)
The UK Olympic Games of 2012 are shaping up nicely to be the expensive, possibly corrupt affair that many of us crusty cynics claimed it would be over a year ago. There is only the grimmest of satisfaction to be gained from having been proved so emphatically correct. Given the history of publicly-financed construction projects in recent years, or even projects in which public finance is only a part, the predictions should not have been difficult (think of the Scottish Parliament, or Wembley Stadium, or the Channel Tunnel, to take just three).
The likely bill – to the taxpayer – of these Games is likely to be far higher than originally projected. It is almost certain that this fact was known to British politicians and sports-establishment types who lobbied to hold the Games in Britain over a year ago. If a company had bid for a contract with the same degree of financial acumen, probity and sense as the idiots in the UK public sector, rather long gaol terms, fines or hefty compensation packages might now be the order of the day.
We are remembering the late, very great Milton Friedman a lot at the moment, digesting his contributions to the fields of technical economics, monetary theory, politics, education and much else. But I think that his often disarmingly simple statements about the role of the state and the dangers of government will endure the longest, if only because they carry truths from the start of human history:
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
Finally, I can spend somebody else?s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I?m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.
(Via David Farrar’s blog)
I think the Olympic Games falls into the final category. I do agree with Stephen Pollard on the possibly sensible idea of cancelling the Games, even at this stage. The lead article in the Times (UK), by contrast, is remarkable for its breezy indifference to the cost of the Games and the fact that the money for it will be screwed out of the pockets of people who regard the whole spectacle as an expensive joke.
Oh, and before any commenters of a pro-state sympathy start to wonder, no, I am not a sport-hater. I enjoy watching football, cricket and other sports, and play one or two sports myself (not very well, I will admit). However, I do not expect my fellows to support my enthusiasms. Is it too much to ask the same of others?
A few weeks back yours truly and Mrs P. decided to find out what all the hype was about and went to see the film Borat. I guess unless you have been living on the South Pole or some other remote part of planet Earth, you will not have heard of this film. Borat is a spoof “journalist” character created by Sasha Baron Cohen, the Jewish comedian who also created characters such as Ali G. The basic idea is that Borat goes to different places and countries and tricks folk into either revealing more about themselves and their views than they would otherwise do, or to simply make assholes of themselves. A few of his victims do misbehave although most seem to emerge with most, if not all, of their dignity intact.
I have mixed opinions about the film. Some parts of it were so funny that I laughed along with the rest of the cinema audience. He does want to send up the insanity of anti-Semitism, which seems to be the serious core of this film, if it has one at all. There is always the risk, I suppose, that some of the thicker viewers will not get the joke and think that anti-semitism has been legitimised by this movie, but you would have to be pretty dense to do so. Beyond that, though, I did not think the movie was all that funny, and not much beyond scatalogical humour of a basic sort. Part of the idea is to play on the natural desire of the victims – in this case, ordinary Americans – to be polite to strangers, even a crazy-looking chap with a big moustache claiming to come from central Asia. Some of the victims on the New York subway tell Borat to go away, but pretty much most of the victims put up with it up until the point when the behaviour gets too bad to ignore.
I guess if you want to see a film that makes you want to experience a deep fuzzy glow of superiority to supposedly simple redneck Americans, this is the movie for you. On the other hand, for comedy of genius that does not target the ordinary Joe but tries for genuine wit, I’ll be relying on my beloved Monty Pythons and Blackadder collection. And for the silly stuff, there is always Peter Sellers, Terry Thomas and those supremos, Laurel and Hardy. Their brilliance will never fade.
Richard North shares my opinion, although he is a bit harsher.
I sometimes watch nature programmes and often as not, the narrator(s) of such programmes will wax lyrical about the complexities, the marvels of the natural world. (Programmes such as The Blue Planet by David Attenborough). In moving over into the Man-made world, we often get similar sentiments of praise and wonderment at things like great buildings, bridges or even whole cities, but seldom is such language employed in looking at the area of human commerce.
All the more reason to savour expressions such as this, written over at the admirable Cafe Hayek blog a while back:
This winter morning I bought a bouquet of wildflowers from the supermarket. Its price was $5.99. The flowers are fresh, beautiful, fragrant – and from Ecuador.
Ponder this fact.
For a mere one hour and eight minutes of work, a minimum-wage worker in the United States can acquire a bouquet of fresh flowers grown in South America. In other words, for 68 minutes of working in the U.S., a minimum-wage worker can take home some of the beautiful fruits of the efforts of strangers in Ecuador who plant, tend, and pick flowers – of other strangers (where?) who make the protective packing material used for shipping the flowers – of yet other strangers who pilot the planes and drive the trucks that transport these flowers fresh from Ecuador to U.S. supermarkets – and of the countless other strangers who build the planes and trucks, who fuel the planes and trucks, who pave the runways and roads used by the planes and trucks, who feed the pilots and drivers, who insure airlines, trucking companies, and supermarkets against casualty losses, who wake up at pre-dawn hours to put the flowers into an attractive display in the supermarket.
These and millions of other strangers all worked — all cooperated — to make it possible for me and my family to enjoy a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers in the deep winter. And all for a mere $5.99.
The time you hear or read someone complaining about the supposed evils of global trade, remember sentiments such as that.
We have been unkind to Conservative Party leader David Cameron at Samizdata, but I think he can count himself as having gotten off lightly compared with what they are doing to him at the EU Referendum blog. All I can say is that I agree with them completely.
I must admit that the stuff about the Russian poisoning story is reminding me of when the Cold War was pretty chilly. It is also, its perverse sort of way, a reminder of what the world was like when a former naval officer, journalist and stockbroker began to churn out thrillers at his Jamaican holiday home back in 1953. Casino Royale, the first and one of the best James Bond adventures has been turned into a film that yours truly will be seeing on Thursday night. I admit that when Daniel Craig was first cast in the role, I had my doubts, but the reviews so far have been mostly favourable. Craig, even though he looks like a well-groomed football hooligan, seems to have conveyed the darker side of Fleming’s creation, showing that Bond is a bit more than a dude in a suit, as well as keep most of the bits that cinema viewers have come to expect, such as amazing stunts, special effects and the odd witty one-liner.
Golf. There’s a sport to stir up hot passions or deep waves of apathy among certain people. British blogger Clive Davis is clearly not a fan of the sport once described, I believe by Oscar Wilde, as a good way of spoiling a good walk (okay, it may have been said by one of those other smartypants writers who are quoted for their supposed wit and wisdom, but whatever). Clive does not care much for the sort of people who often play golf and for the way it is often used by political types – mostly rightwing ones – in the United States. He has a point. Golf bores are tedious, just as football bores, rugby bores, athletics bores, horse racing bores (now that is really boring) or F1 motor racing bores, are, er, boring. However, Clive’s post hits a duff note in having a poke at Michael Douglas, in my view. Douglas, as well as being outrageous enough to have married Catherine Zeta-Jones, is a golf nut! Aaaaggghhh. I do not know why Douglas seems to bring out a certain hostile reaction in some folk. His Gordon Gekko remains, for me, one of the highlights of 20th Century cinema (yes, really). And I distinctly recall that Douglas, shortly after 9/11, decided to fly over to the UK for an Anglo-US amateur golf tournament, shrugging off worries about security to slug it around the links. He won my respect for that move.
Golf is both a team game and an intensely individualistic one and the latter point may explain its enormous popularity in certain parts of the world and also explain its appeal to a certain demographic. Although the number of people has expanded a lot in recent years as people get richer and due to the influence of the mighty Tiger Woods, it is still overwhelmingly viewed as a sport for the gin-and-tonic slice of the population (although I see nothing actually wrong with that). It is also a social game in that it is often the sort of game that allows people to discuss business and so on as they go around the course. My brother, a lawyer, seems to get briefed most of the time when he is on the fairways. (He once beat his boss and made a mental point not to do so again).
And I suspect this taps into the continued links between sport and class in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain. Golf, rugby union and arguably, cricket, is middle class, while polo or yacht-racing is seen as posh, and football (soccer) and rugby league is working class. I often find that people often reveal themselves quite a lot when “their sport” gets “invaded” by non-typical supporters. In the last soccer World Cup tournament in Germany, for example, I remembered reading comments by football regulars denouncing all those Home Counties types for showing a sudden interest in the English team selection, although perhaps England would have fared better had Ericsson paid some attention to their views. And the same goes, I recall once, when I went along to a sailing regatta and overheard some old salt muttering about “Chavs” becoming interested in sailing (an unlikely prospect, as far as I can tell. I cannot quite envisage this part of the English population wanting to navigate a yacht or change a spinnaker at speed in a heavy sea).
Anyway, as I write, it is around 3pm. Time for the football to begin.
Well, I am off to bed and despite my interest in politics, have not really the desire to wait up to see what happens in the U.S. Congressional races. My hunch is that by the time I wake up here in London, the Democrats will have taken the House and the Republicans might just hang on to the Senate, but it will be a very close call. I sympathise with the argument, put by various libertarians and small-government Republican supporters, that Bush needs what we Brits call a mighty kick in the bollocks for a number of bad moves, such as the explosive growth of spending on non-defense items, tariffs, the Patriot Act, growing interference in people’s private lives, etc, etc. I can see why many voters, even hawkish ones, have become bitterly angry over the mess in Iraq and wondered whether the Coalition should have heeded the voices of caution and pursued a containment/deterrence line rather than pre-emption. (I backed the ouster of Saddam pretty much from the start but have had my doubts about how the power vacuum might get filled without a sufficiently strong effort to help rebuild the country). The Republicans might, just might learn a valuable lesson: they have had power in Congress since 1994 and more recently, the White House. People do not tend to vote for centre-right parties in order to see a big rise in the size and power of the state. Maybe someone should send Bush a copy of Barry Goldwater’s old classic, The Conscience of a Conservative.
My main worry, drawn from the experience of Britain’s Conservative Party, is that a defeat for the Republicans may not lead to the sort of questioning of the Big Government philosophy known as “Compassionate Conservatism” as championed by Bush in recent years. We have seen how David Cameron has sought to meld the Tories into a pale imitation of NuLabour, in some ways trying to outdo Blair in the spending and taxation stakes. For all the talk that American politics is deeply polarised, perhaps the real truth is that the choices in front of the electorate are not distinct enough.
In case you want to scare off a mugger, why not buy some of these and put them on your coat? Tastes may vary.
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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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