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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If this deal goes ahead, it will be the largest example yet of an Indian firm buying a British one. How the world has turned, 60 years on from the end of the British Empire in India.
Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group Plc is set to recommend a 4.1 billion pound takeover by India’s Tata Steel Ltd as soon as Friday, sources close to the matter said.
Corus’ board met on Wednesday evening to rubber stamp the deal but is waiting until Tata’s board meets, which is expected on Thursday or Friday, before making an official announcement to its shareholders, the sources said.
It will be interesting to see how those anti-globalisation campaigners, who in the past were the same sort of folk to demand that the rich West gives aid to “Third World” nations like India, respond to Indian business purchases of British and other European firms. That is the trouble with fighting evil capitalists – one minute they are wearing pin-striped suits and speak in posh English accents, the next, something quite different. It must be very annoying.
The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person’s identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.
This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.
(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)
If reality contradicts your thoughts, that’s delusion. If your thoughts contradict your actions, that’s madness. If reality contradicts your actions, that’s defeat, frustration, self-destruction. And no sane being wants delusion, madness and destruction.
– From the Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright, page 212
An almost-hidden jewel in London’s collection of museums is the Gilbert collection of jewels, furniture and historic art in Somerset House, on the banks of the Thames near the Temple tube station. At the moment, there is a retrospective exhibition of the work of the great Tiffany jewellery business, going back to that firm’s origins in the middle of the 19th Century. In some ways, the rise of the house of Tiffany mirrors America’s own rise as a mighty economy, since the industrial progress of that country created vast fortunes, and naturally, people wanted to show this wealth off. And boy, did they do so. I strongly recommend this collection for anyone who wants to see the jewellers’ art at its greatest.
My only word of caution: if you are thinking of taking someone there for the start of a sophisticated date, be warned. The jewels there may give your other half Big Ideas. Very Expensive Ones. Gulp.
I do not think that George Walden, former Conservative MP and minister, cares much for David Cameron, according to this article that came out a few weeks ago. Excerpt:
The politics of sentiment increasingly dominate public discussion, and sentimentality tinged with cynicism was what Diana was about. The same is true of Cameron’s social politics. The cant of the new elites emerges with numbing shamelessness in his public declarations. Recently the one-time PR man for ruthlessly profitable trash TV made a heartfelt speech in which he said that money wasn’t everything, and that the quality of our culture mattered. In his more mawkish mode it is possible to discern in the Tory leader’s political pitch a faint echo of Diana’s Christ-like affectations. With her, it was a scrupulously choreographed contact with people sick with Aids. With Cameron, it is an ostentatious tolerance of the lower orders: suffer the hoodies and the hoodlums to come unto me.
Brrr… Walden might as well have called Cameron a patronising wanker. He must be glad the practice of duelling has been abolished.
Iain Dale, usually the most civil of commentators, is not impressed much by Walden, however:
Former Tory MP George Walden was one of Britain’s worst ever High Education Ministers. Since leaving Parliament he has earned a living writing pseudo-intellectual drivel about politics and culture. It’s usually unreadable. I attended a discussion evening with him and his wife a couple of years ago, organised by Living Marxism. He was insufferable and spent the whole evening putting down his wife. In the Independent on Sunday diary there is a piece on his book The New Elites in which he slags off David Cameron for “being a posh man pretending to be common”. Utter rubbish. But even if it were true, it’s better than a pub bore pretending to be an intellectual.
Aren’t Conservatives lovely?
Great article by Brendan O’Neill on the attempts – vain, I hope – to silence folk who dare contest the Truth of Global Warming.
Right, it is Friday evening, I have a life, so have a good weekend and try not to think about English football.
Economist Bryan Caplan has posed the question: which law would you like to break? I guess, that being a libertarian kind of guy, he favours giving the finger to those laws that do not protect life and property but instead regulate our behaviour for our own good.
So, it being the start of the weekend, I shamelessly steal Bryan’s idea and pose this question to the Samizdata hordes: which law would you like to break? And also, why?
One of the things that struck me, reading the comments on the recent thread about the casualty toll in Iraq, the North Korean bomb test, and the ongoing debate about what to do about Islamist terror, is what are countries doing to defend against missile attacks, including nuclear ones? When George Bush was first elected in 2000 (whatever Michael Moore might claim), he made a great deal of play about missile defence and the ABM Treaty. Now I may have missed something, but anti-missile defence, as a topic, seems to have gone a bit quiet. But surely, if North Korea has the bomb, with Iran not far behind, then anti-missile defence ought to be one of the top priorities for defence planners.
Even if you are a paleo-libertarian who thinks defence policy rules out any form of pre-emption, you presumably – unless you are a pacifist – embrace technologies to ward off attacks. So it seems to me to be a bit strange that we have not had more discussion about what countries should be doing in this area, and the pros and cons of the technologies involved. (There may have course have been a lot of discussion, but it has been out of the media spotlight, for various reasons).
Some old thoughts of mine about the merits and perils of pre-emption. Here is a book about what a defence policy that is really about self-defence might look like, via the Independent Institute.
The obesity crisis, epidemic, or whatever (is fatness contagious?) continues to keep the chattering classes busy. In the Daily Telegraph today, Andrew O’Hagan, of whom I was blissfully unaware until about a month ago when he sprung to the defence of Mel Gibson after he made his anti-Jewish rant, argues for stuff like taxing “junk food” and encouraging a whole cultural battle to get the moronic lower orders off their dietary habits. It is an article reeking of disdain for vast swathes of the UK population. Perhaps it is deserved. Many Britons are disgusting people, I suppose, but being the wild-eyed libertarian that I am, do not consider it my business to nag them into eating better by a mixture of state exhortation, punitive taxes and compulsory five-mile runs.
I am not entirely sure what to make of Mr O’Hagan, or indeed the decision of the right-leaning Telegraph to hire him. I thought his article on Gibson was a terrible piece, both patronising towards Jews, other groups, and offensive but perhaps a one-off lapse, one which might not be repeated. But pretty much everything he has written since seems to be entirely lacking in humour, grace or wit. I fear that paper is in one of its down-cycles. O’Hagan may perhaps fit in nicely into the modern Conservative Party.
For a related article on obesity, diet and the nanny state, read this by Jacob Sullum.
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
– Evelyn Waugh, novelist.
This morning, I went along to a business conference where the subject was on the issue of pensions (eyes suddenly glaze over, loses will to live, please when can I leave? Etc). One of the speakers was a certain Adair Turner, the man who, between 2003 and 2006, was chairman of the Pension Commission, a government-created body of the Great and the Good given the task of figuring out how to sort out Britain’s creaking pensions system – a big topic.
In his comments today, Turner spent a bit of time talking about what is known as ‘behavioural economics’ and how it shows that, far from being a utility-maximising creature, Man, often as not, behaves irrationally in ways that can be corrected with a spot of gentle paternalistic direction. In the case of pensions, many people simply do not save enough money to cover their old age, even if they know they should, so the argument goes. Other things, like paying off the credit card, or refurbishing a house, or paying for a new car, get in the way. As a result, Turner says we need to compel people – nicely of course – to sign up to pension schemes so that they do not become a burden on the future taxpayer. It is an approach that has in the past been dubbed ‘soft paternalism’ because it is borne out of the idea that economists and other supposedly clever people know better than we benighted citizens how we should arrange our affairs. It is not exactly out of the Ayn Rand handbook, is it?
I have several problems with this way of thinking. First off, if we are so lazy, short-sighted or plain thick to run things like our long-term savings, isn’t that rather corrosive of the idea of a nation of free citizens with the right to vote in elections? If a person is deemed incapable of saving for his dotage, should he be allowed to decide which careerist should get the keys to 10 Downing Street or the White House? Are we not endorsing a sort of elitist model of governance in new, supposedly scientific, garb? I think we are.
Soft paternalists also perhaps lose sight of why many people are so short-sighted in affairs such as planning for retirement. Over the past century, the Welfare State, and the associated rules and regulations over the private sector, have created a pensions saving system of horrendous complexity, way beyond what should be needed. Politicians have created this monster, so they should hardly then claim that even more intervention is needed to allay the public’s fears. Even the financially savviest citizen faces a forbidding task in trying to work out the best option for savings, even before they have grappled with the latest investment ideas, such as private equity, hedge funds, or whatnot. If one then realises that private savings and the incentives to save have been eroded by things like means-tested benefits and the Welfare State, it is perhaps not surprising at all that many modern Britons are supposedly incapable of thinking about these matters, let alone acting on the calls to save.
What I find depressing about the soft paternalist mindset is how little historical perspective it involves. 150 years ago, Britain was already well on the way to enjoying a vibrant and widening market for personal saving and investment through the existence of groups such as Friendly Societies (these were the precursors of the modern mutual insurance and life firms, and some of the names still carry old historical references, such as ‘National Mutual’ or ‘Friends Provident’). This web of saving vehicles, covering even poor industrial workers in Victorian Britain, was fatally weakened by the Fabian socialist thinkers and politicians before and after the First World War. ‘Liberal’ politician David Lloyd George, and many others, fashioned a welfare and pension system that eventually drove the old Friendly Societies out of the primary business of providing for old age and sickness, or at best, to the margins.
There is a positive and negative circle at work in this area. If you stifle the ability to acquire private savings, it means that you hamper also the accumulation of a deep and rich soil of self-reliance, responsibility and individual financial know-how.On the other hand, the more that people learn how to save for old age and see their parents doing this, the more confident they become, the less they fear independence and hence resist the easy charms of Big Government. The social and cultural consequences of Victorian mutualism and the subsequent decline have been well-documented by writers such as Ferdinand Mount, David Green of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and James Bartholomew.
So the next time you hear a policy wonk or newspaper writer chiding the feckless ordinary Briton for not saving enough, remember that Victorian statesmen like William E. Gladstone were so moved by the thrift and savings culture of industrial Britain that they became convinced that the humblest factory worker was entitled to run their own affairs. A bit of Gladstonian wisdom would not go amiss now. Soft-paternalism may sound nice and cuddly, but the long-term side effects are a steady weakening of positive financial habits.
US blogger Jim Henley has some interesting thoughts about the politics of ace science fiction adventures series Battlestar Galactica. In my typically languid British way, I have just about started munching my way through series 2, which I find rather dark and depressing compared to the excellent series 1, but I am savouring the programmes even so, and looking forward to the third series, already now showing. My addiction to this series is worse even than Babylon 5 or, to roll back the years and to a very different genre, to Blackadder. The acting and the plots are consistently enthralling and entertaining.
It got me thinking about drama and storytelling more generally. If you tell a certain type of person that your favourite television show is Battlestar or Firefly, you are sometimes put in the ‘geek’ category, but it seems to me that in terms of quality and ability to describe the human condition, SF television shows can hold their own with the most pretentious dramas. In some ways, they are the final redoubts of romantic realism in drama.
Now, I wonder if that guy on the Tube was a Cylon…
[Editors note: for some previous thoughts on Battlestar Galactica on Samizdata, see here]
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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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