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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“As an old Sci-Fi fan, I firmly believe that we will encounter alien races someday. These conversations are good practice. I would imagine there will really be some different worldviews when that happens, esp. if they’re hydrogen breathers.”
Comment by regular Samizdata contributor calling himself VeryRetired, who describes what it feels like to debate with apologists for radical Islam: ie, the sheer inability to bridge a gulf of understanding between those who support the open society, free speech and enquiry, and those for whom the statements contained in a book written over a thousand years ago contain the sum total of wisdom, the criticism of which should be dealt with violently.
I certainly do tend to think that understanding of how to cope with radical Islam can be usefully supplemented by reading Robert A. Heinlein, say, or Vernor Vinge rather than the editorial pages of the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph.
Sir Freddie Laker, the man who took on the nationalised airlines in the 1970s with his cheap “Skytrain” airline, only to go bust, has died at the age of 83, according to this report. Laker was, despite the failure of his venture, a hugely influential figure in the airline industry by daring to suggest that flight need not be the preserve of the wealthy. He laid down the model to be copied by the likes of Southwest, Easyjet and Ryanair. His tough business battle with BA also inspired Sir Richard Branson to have a crack at the privatised national carrier’s transatlantic business.
The economics of airlines has fascinated me, not least because as a business it has attracted some of the largest egos and some of the few remaining examples of buccaneering entrepreneur. Perhaps that is why we like them or even if we don’t, find them fascinating. They stand out from the grey suits. None more so than Sir Freddie.
On the subject of cheap airlines and their globalising impact, here is an excellent piece from a year ago by Matt Welch in Reason magazine.
This item from America’s satirical Onion site is too funny for words. Would advocates of “intelligent design” get the joke?
“There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts – the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realised with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp…”
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, page 420.
The above passage relates to when one of the central figures in Stephenson’s marvellous Baroque Trilogy enters the-then famous Leipzig fair. What struck me about this section of the book was Stephenson’s brilliant description of the sheer fun that markets can involve. (Yes, the curmudgeons out there will start muttering about the triviality of reducing market economics to fun, good heavens). His description even reminded me of a more modern market: the futures exchange in London’s Cannon Street. I used to visit the LIFFE building and would look down from the gallery to look at the sea of men – not many women – trading odd-sounding things like short-sterling futures and options, gesticulating at each other in small groups, more often resembling folk on the verge of a pub brawl than a place where gazillions of pounds, dollars and euros were being transacted.
We are so used to critiques of capitalism from people who decry the supposed coldness and soulnessness of markets, unlike the supposedly warmer and more fulfilling communal lifestyles they claim to favour. And yet as Stephenson has reminded me, the market is that supreme example of social interaction and co-operation, often gaudy and loud, alarming even, but never dull.
Techie and futurism magazine Wired has a delightful article about how the toy company Lego is harnessing the best minds of the computer software industry to make its toys even cooler and intricate than before. I used to love playing with the stuff back when I was a small boy and generations of kids have had fun playing the brightly coloured building blocks, fashioning them in to planes, cars and houses, rather as an earlier generation used to play with Meccano kits. In its way, it helped probably fire enthusiasm for a whole generation of engineers and builders.
And the kicker is that Lego is Danish. If you have children or friends with youngsters, perform a nice gesture and buy them a pack.
One of the advantages of having a comments section is providing me with new ideas to write about, even when the comment in question is so flat-out wrong that it makes me gape with amazement at the screen. In my recent post about the economic fallacies surrounding immigration, a commenter opined that Indian immigrants into the UK were leeching money out of this country by not re-investing it in new businesses but merely writing cheques to “inactive” folks back in the old homeland.
It is a lousy argument on a number of levels, and I am not even going to dwell long on the obvious dangers of inciting distrust and hostility towards economically successful immigrant groups and accusing them of not being sufficiently “patriotic” by not spending all their profits in Britain. The argument also fails because it ignores the subjectivity of economic value. If a businessman earns a million pounds in profit from a drycleaning business in Birmingham and sends the odd cheque back to his aged relatives in Bombay, then how is economic value being destroyed? In the eyes of the businessman, helping his loved ones is worth more to him than investing that money in something else, even though other people might disagree with that decision and think him to be deluded. It is none of my business to force a change in that decision.
Also, that businessman is doing something that supporters of a liberal civil society have traditionally supported: philanthropy. How can it be wrong for a man to steer a portion of his wealth to his dependants, educate them, feed and house them? Who gives any entity the right, least of all the State, the power to say yay or nay to that decision? The argument that such transfers are wrong is an echo of the old Bethamite notion that the State is entitled to seize wealth if that maximises the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.
A final point. No doubt large sums of money are paid by immigrants and migrant workers back to the points of origin all the time. This has happened for centuries. These transfer often sustained people in great hardship.
I have come across some dubious economic arguments in my time, but the idea that immigrants paying money to their folks is some sort of parasitical waste has to be one of the weakest.
“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the real historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, (as quoted in The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, page 347, also well worth reading).
That passage, while written in the 1940s, carries a certain resonance now, I think.
The Japanese are working on a robot that can operate as a butler. Hmm. If they can create a character that can talk like Stephen Fry portraying Jeeves, make the perfect gin and tonic and do my ironing, I might consider one. Second thoughts: I’d probably be irritated as hell with the thing after a while.
Anthony Browne, writing the main feature article in this week’s Spectator, says policymakers have underestimated, or quite possibly fibbed, about the scale of immigration into the United Kingdom from Eastern Europe. I do not want to get into all the cultural arguments that have been aired a lot here in recent months. Suffice to say that Browne makes some good, if slightly alarmist, points about the ability of a small crowded island like Britain to go on taking more and more people, never mind from often very different cultures.
He seems to make the mistake, however, when discussing the impact of immigration on wage rates, of what is known as the “lump of labour fallacy”: the notion that there is a fixed amount of work to be performed in an economy. It seems a bit odd that Browne, who calls himself an economic liberal, should fall prey to this fallacy. After all, as surely the late economist Julian L. Simon pointed out, every additional person is not just another mouth to be fed, but another brain and pair of hands to create wealth.
“You can’t fight in here – this is the War Room!”
– Peter Sellers, playing the President of the United States in Dr Strangelove.
Big selection of essays, some long, some short, about the great composer who was born on this day 250 years ago. Even if you care little for the rather overblown commemorations in Saltzburg and the associated commercial circus, it is hard not to join in the Mozart mania if you are a music fan, as I am.
I particularly enjoyed this essay by Terry Teachout. He asks the question to which there is probably no easy answer: how did such a man churn out such a fantastic and enduring collection of music?
Out of balance, there is also a rather sour piece by Norman Lebrecht . He obviously feels the need to break wind at the party, so to speak.
He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak”
Oh, what a magnificent put-down! After all, great music is supposed to be difficult, not easily understood by the great unwashed (sarcasm alert). But why should ‘easy-listening’ music be inferior to the supposedly hard-listening sort? He also argues that Mozart was not an innovator in the way that J.S. Bach was. Now Bach was a genius, but I am not aware that originality – assuming we take Lebrecht’s argument at its face value – is always the virtue that it is cracked up to be.
Anyway, I think that attempts to define some kind of objective judgement on music is fraught with difficulty, but I do know in my own heart that the Austrian composer has the capacity to speak to me as he does to millions of people, and I rather suspect that is likely to remain the case as long as music is played.
Quick quiz: which of Mozart’s pieces of music do you like the best?
The other night I enjoyed a pleasant meal with a business contact, who works in the property industry and for a large U.S. company. He was talking to a group of people and struck me as a thoroughly charming fellow: articulate, funny, interested in other people, highly intelligent. And then he said something that slightly vexed me in that he started to go on and on about how we must be so appalled by this nutcase rightwinger in the White House, how most Americans were insular and dumb, yadda-yadda. It was so obviously an attempt to deflect what anti-American prejudices potentially might have existed by getting in the blow first. He was, then, slightly surprised me when I said over a drink later that I did not like the way that Americans felt the need to abase themselves this way, or denigrate their home country, or its people. In fact, I told him that, much that I disagreed with many of Bush’s policies, such as his fiscal profiligacy and Big Government leanings, I liked the United States a great deal, not least much of its culture, its vitality and the niceness of most Americans.
So a gentle tip for American travellers from this Brit: don’t slag off your own country when abroad. The locals will see through it and despise you for it. Be proud of what you are as an individual living in Jefferson’s Republic, which for all its faults is the greatest free nation on the planet, and likely to be so for a while to come.
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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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