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 other day, my article about the antics of footballers and the shifting balance of power between players and clubs prompted one or two commenters to argue that this shows that market economics and sport do not always mix. The argument, so it goes, is that a sport like football or motor racing needs to operate an almost egalitarian policy when it comes to limiting the power of any participant, because otherwise the most powerful clubs and participants will dominate a sport so much that they destroy the very competition that makes sport enjoyable. Example: the current dominance in the English Premier League of Chelsea, which is now backed by the vast and dubiously-acquired oil wealth of its Russian owner. Another example: Ferrari and its dominance for nearly a decade of Formula One motor sport.
But while such observations have merit, it ignores the fact that sporting institutions like the Football League or Formula 1, the America’s Cup yachting race or whatever are voluntary associations of likeminded people who want to create a set of rules in order for people to have, well, fun. Those voluntary bodies can change their own rules if a participant’s behavioural dominance starts to squeeze the very competition such institutions hold. People effectively choose to submit to rules, just as members of a symphony orchestra voluntarily submit to the dictates of a conductor. In an open society such as ours, we get a profusion of autonomous institutions set up for the purpose of say, staging sports competitions where there are tight rules on behaviour of the participants but where such participants are free to leave.
I personally think that if, say, Chelsea tried to squash all competition beyond a certain point, it could drain interest out of the sport and possibly force the league officials to cap things like the use of foreign players and perhaps even limit the size of a squad that any club can have. And that would be “autocratic” of the league but also no assault on the “freedom” of Chelsea since that club draws is raison d’etre from being a club participating in an intensely rule-bound voluntary association.
Also, if a sport gets bent out of shape and the interest wanes, there are things like “breakaway leagues” or new competitions designed to revive interest. The case of motor sport is instructive: in the last few years, there has been a rising chorus of criticism that F1 motor racing is dull, unglamorous and market-driven (and although no-one will admit this, also very safe). So you get a rise in interest in alternatives, such as rallying, motorcycling, saloon car racing, classic racing, revival meetings, and so forth.
There seems to be a sort of parabola of development in sports. As technical excellence and physical fitness of players increases, some sports can reach a sort of stalemate end-point (Brian Micklethwait made this point about squash and the World Cup soccer tournament recently). But so long as sport remains outside the maw of the state and people can arrange their own events, there is no reason why people who become bored by the spectacle of spoiled-brat soccer stars or processional motor racing cannot do something about it.
Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).
Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.
There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it’s the “dank and gray” area of the Hague he was raised in or the “arrogance” of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.
Van Gogh’s murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland’s flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan “activist”, who didn’t like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. “The sobering truth,” wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, “is that Europe – democratic, gun-controlling Europe – is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.”
Read the whole article.
The Cato Institute’s invaluable index of liberty, compiled along with another free-market think tank, the Fraser Institute, says that liberty, as measured across a variety of fronts, is advancing. It uses a sort of numeric to calculate the overall impact of government rules, and puts Hong Kong at the top, with Ireland and Britain tied at sixth place:
Nations that have made substantial gains in economic freedom since 1985 are Hungary, Iceland, El Salvador, Zambia, Poland, Bolivia, Israel, Ghana, Uganda, Peru, and Nicaragua. Nations that have registered significant losses in economic freedom since 1985 are Myanmar, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. The bottom ten nations were the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Venezuela, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe.
Of course, libertarians would argue that the right to dispose of one’s labour and property is indivisible from other non-economic liberties, which is why I tend to view such exercises as having indicative value only. A country like Singapore, for example, ranks high on the charts for entrepreneurship but operates an-often stifling regulatory regime on personal behaviours, while other countries may allow more freedom in things like drugs, porn or gambling but also have weightier taxes and regulations on activities such as saving and investment.
Even so, it is pretty clear, as the Cato press release states, that places that are economically free and open to entrepreneurial vigor tend to be richer, and also nicer, places to live, while those that seek to freeze the economic status quo are also not just poorer, but tend also to be less pleasant, less tolerant towards minorities, harsher towards women, and generally crappier in the quality-of-life stakes.
Benjamin Friedman, hardly a fire-breathing free marketeer, also points out that wealth begets niceness in his recent book.
If you love innovative photography, particularly of landscapes and modern, soaring buildings at day and night, go and have a look at this. Wow. (Hat-tip, Andrew Sullivan).
Even by the megalomaniac standards of modern Premiership soccer, this allegation, if true about former Chelsea player William Gallas, is astonishing:
Chelsea say they sold William Gallas because he threatened to score an own goal if he was selected for their first game of the season.
The Stamford Bridge club have released a statement explaining their reasons for allowing the French defender to join Arsenal on transfer deadline day.
Gallas, 29, allegedly refused to play again for the Blues.
Chelsea claim he said he would score an own goal if he was forced to play against Manchester City on 20 August.
This story has had the amazing effect of making me feel a tincture of sympathy for the charmless Chelsea football manager, Jose Mourinho.
The market for footballers and other sports remains a strange one. Footballers have, in the space of under 50 years, gone from the position of being treated almost like serfs with capped wages to swaggering characters thinking they are able to command whatever salaries they want, on any terms. But I suspect that this process is hitting the buffers. There has been a great boom in professional soccer and the surrounding business over the past two decades but one suspects that that has now reached a sort of plateau
Football has to compete with other forms of entertainment. The less-than-stellar performance of England in the World Cup, coupled with lingering sourness and the antics of certain players, may have sated the public appetite for shelling out vast sums for a season ticket to a game. And when a player becomes so deluded about his importance to a club that he actually threatens to damage it by scoring own goals and so on, then he has to be pushed out. Chelsea had no alternative. if this guy had been a bond dealer at a bank and had threatened to hurt the company if it failed to do what he wanted, that person would probably be sued to an inch of his life.
At least 14 people were arrested on Friday night in south London as part of an anti-terror operation by police. Developing…
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen.
I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women).
Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out.
In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers?
Well shall see.
This headline took me a bit by surprise:
Treasury Department Official Says Banks Cutting Ties With North Korea
I did not realise that international banks had many ties with one of the last remaining Stalinist totalitarian countries in the world to start with. Live and learn, I guess.
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Sir Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield in a Man for All Seasons. Even if Tudor history means nothing to you, I definitely urge folk to rent out this movie. It is an object lesson in what integrity means.
Thanks to a commenter for pointing out that I got Scofield’s first name wrong. It was Paul, not John. (Dolt!)
Report here stating that Israel’s response to Hizbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers took Hizbollah by surprise, particularly the extent and ferocity of the IDF action, according to a Hiz deputy leader.
Given the determination of Israel’s armed forces to defend the tiny Jewish state over the years against a host of enemies, why some terrorist organisation like Hizbollah should be surprised is, frankly, surprising. In any event, this interview may suggest that Israel’s campaign to hammer Hizobollah may not be quite the debacle that some commentators have supposed. The jury is still out on the future of the current Israel administration, however.
British government scientists claim that Britain faces a growing crisis of obesity. And of course such predictions, which carry all the usual credibility of such things, are accompanied by calls on the powers-that-be to “do something” about it, including the likes of bans on advertising for sinful foods, funding for sports and so on.
First point: even our waistlines are expanding, is it any of the state’s business? At present, one might argue that because we have socialised medicine in the form of the National Health Service, taxpayers, both slim, chubby and positively enormous, have to pay for the consequences of bad health habits. So the neo-puritans will argue for controls on how we all live to reduce the tax cost of bad habits, which is an example of what economists might call a ‘negative externality’. Surely though, the approach that would encourage good habits and treat citizens like adults is one based on private medical insurance. If people want to cut their insurance premiums, then they will have a strong market-driven incentive to do so. In a private sector model, there may be much more encouragement from health providers to get in shape and give up the triple cheeseburgers. Of course, there will always be feckless people who do not give a damn and end up demanding some kind of handout when things go wrong, but I do not see why the liberties of the majority of us should be tossed away to deal with people who are too weak willed or plain stupid to act differently. In any event, I imagine that as in the days before the NHS came along, there will be health care available for those who cannot afford it – as James Bartholomew pointed out in his book – provided through charitable means. I actually think that a charity which supports doctors might, for example, insist that if a poor person wants to get medical care for his or her obesity-related problems, then as part of any treatment, that person has to do something about their problem.
Such an approach may, at first sight, appear to be ‘unaring’ or harsh, but I think there is no greater respect that one can give to one’s fellows than to accord them the ability to act like adults.
Goodness, all this venting has made me hungry. Anyway, as I head towards the kitchen, may I recommend this collection of articles by Reason magazine on the obesity issue.
Bon appetit!
Right, I am taking a break from scribbling about the iniquities of inheritance tax, dumb airline security and so forth to link to this terrific article by Ed Brayton about golfing phenomenon and American icon, Tiger Woods. Even if you do not give a two-foot putt about the game, this article is a fine study of the sheer force of will that has propelled a man to become the master of his sporting world:
I have to admit to being absolutely fascinated by Tiger Woods. I’ve followed his career closely, despite doubting him initially. I remember watching the press conference when he announced that he was leaving Stanford and turning pro. I particularly remember watching Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, talk about the $40 million contract they had signed with Woods, and I remember laughing out loud and ridiculing Knight when he said that Tiger Woods would transcend the game of golf the way Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali transcended their sports.
No way, I said; not a chance. No matter how good he is, no matter how much he dominates the sport, golf will never be anywhere near as popular as basketball or boxing and that will limit his fame and his standing in relation to the rest of the sports world. Golf is too much an exclusive sport, too tied in with the rich and the well born to have the kind of universal appeal that other sports have. And it’s solitary, one man by himself, with no defense to be played and no one on one competition to fuel rivalries. Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t put any money on that prediction.
Brayton’s blog, Despatches from the Culture Wars, is definitely worth a regular visit, too.
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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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