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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100 years ago, Albert Einstein formulated the equation E=MCSquared, that expresses Einstein’s theory that as one accelerates an object, it not only gets faster, but gets heavier. I must admit it is not very often that I come across the anniversary of a theory like this. We normally mark dates of births, deaths, battles, elections or great reforms. Theories don’t quite have the same resonance. I don’t imagine that there will be grand parades marking Einstein’s achievement.
I have read a bit about this incredible man and his life, and to this day I’ll frankly admit to finding it pretty hard to get my head around some of the ideas of relativity. (Physics was never one of my stronger subjects, something I intend to fix at nightschool. Never too late to learn). But there can be no doubt at all about the impact this man has had on the subsequent 100 years, in terms of our understanding of the universe and of course in fields such as nuclear power, both in its benign and not-so-benign forms.
And Einstein of course is incredibly famous not least for personifying the “eccentric genius” with his mass of scruffy hair, wild-eyed expressions and casual manner. How often are scientists in the movies, television and theatre portrayed in this way (assuming that scientists are portrayed at all). More recently, the late great Richard Feynman continued the tradition for iconoclastic irreverence, famously deflating science establishment in a marvellous collection of books about science and public policy.
For those interested in Einstein’s contemporaries in the science community in America, I can strongly recommend this book by Ed Regis.
It has been a sad few days in British sport, which has lost arguably the most talented football player these islands have produced in George Best. He died, as many people will know, a few years after having a liver transplant necessitated by a long history of alcohol abuse. For those unfamiliar with his story, he was born in Belfast and played at Manchester United in one of its most successful periods in the mid- to late 60s but left top-class football aged only 27.
I am glad that in most of the coverage about him, the focus has been on the football rather than the messy personal life. And what a fantastic player he was! If even Brazilian maestro Pele called him the greatest player in the world, then who are we to demur? I was born in the year – 1966 – that Best gave what aficionados and team-mates reckon was Best’s finest display, demolishing Portugese side Benfica with two goals, the second involving a mazy run past several defenders before sticking the ball into the back of the net.
Best was an alcoholic, which some people regard as a disease that one is born with rather than a condition over which people, possessed of free will, have control. Interestingly, I get the impression, by reading some of Best’s own remarks, that he was a man in control of his own destiny and did not, as far as I am aware, choose to play the victim card. There is no doubt, though, that some people have found it hard to conquer the bottle, although others, such as Tottenham soccer ace Jimmy Greaves, managed to give up on booze and preserve their health and live into a ripe old age.
Anyway, I expect DVDs of Best’s football brilliance to be hot sellers this Christmas. May he rest in peace.
If you thought that going to the gym allowed you to burn off that stress and get away from the office, think again. A new hi-tech gym means you can type away on a keyboard and do an aerobic workout at the same time. Not quite sure this is going to work when it comes to pumping the weights, though.
I have just finished reading James Bartholomew’s fine book, The Welfare State We’re In, which lays out, in tightly argued detail and a welter of colourful character sketches, the disaster wrought by state welfare in Britain. One of his chapters deals with the state’s actions in the area of pensions, now a red-hot controversial area for politicians not just in Britain, but in much of the industrialised world where populations are greying and birthrates falling.
Today, it appears that Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, may have pre-emptively stiffed a report, due out next week, from the Pension Commission panel. The Commission is thought to be advocating measures such as tackling the disincentives to saving caused by means-testing, and in raising the state pension age to 67 or more.
Whatever happens, Bartholomew’s diagnosis of our ills is a powerful one and lays out the brutal fact that our political class, if judged by the same laws as applied to financial firms like insurers, banks or fund managers, would be indicted for fraud on an epic scale. It makes one weep to think of the opportunity that was lost in the destruction of Britain’s fast-growing private savings culture prior to the First World War.
I can also strongly recommend Bartholomew’s blog.
I have devoured pretty much most of John Le Carre’s spy stories, such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, A Small Town in Germany and Smiley’s People. His novels have a chilly, grittily believable quality that stands in contrast to the sophisticated romps of Ian Fleming (Who is actually a pretty good read, as Anthony Burgess once said). More recently, Le Carre, bereft of a Cold War to provide his theme, has turned his attention in a different direction. He has turned it towards the supposed evil of global capitalism and big drug firms.
The Constant Gardener, a film which hammers the allegedly rapacious activities of drug companies, has now been turned into a film starring the British actor Ralph Fiennes (whom I once saw live giving a somewhat histrionic performance in London in the Ibsen play, Brand). The Social Affairs Blog, has a fine demolition job of the book and film here by UK academic Kenneth Minogue. Minogue’s treatment of the film is brutal.
Now I can see why, as pointed out on this blog concerning the firm Pfizer, some drug companies get a deserved hammering. But what I don’t quite understand is the sheer venom directed at drug firms in general by people who presumably must realise that developing and researching drugs can be highly expensive. If drug firms cannot be sure that their products won’t be instantly copied by other manufacturers, who can be sure that drugs to combat AIDSand other killers would make it to the marketplace? The issue of intellectual property rights does of course remain a very tricky issue among libertarians, but do the opponents of any such property rights imagine that we can or should leave drug development to the State, given the experience of our own Soviet model of national health care? It seems as if the attacks on drug firms stems from a desire to seize the hard work and graft of others because one has a “right” to curative drugs.
But if, as Le Carre and others contend, we should give drugs to the poor of the Third World for nothing, the bill for this could be enormous. I don’t really like the idea that the wealth creating capabilities of people should be held in partial ransom by the open-ended needs of billions of other people.
On the subject of AIDS, it is always worth reading Andrew Sullivan, who has HIV, on why he loves drug companies.
A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be “genuinely bowled over” by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK’s own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about “shortages” or X and Y and then not realise that one person’s shortage is another person’s entrepreneurial opportunity.
The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past.
If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis.
A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term.
For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here
Like Brian Micklethwait, I have been at the annual conference of the Libertarian Alliance , held at the National Liberal Club, a glorious Victorian building erected at a time when Britain’s ruling Liberal Party (formerly the Whigs) was genuinely liberal in the classical sense of that word. Among the topics to fuel the mind: libertarian approaches to the environment, a debate about whether limited-liability companies were a good thing; the contribution to libertarian thought of Ayn Rand and reflections on private enterprise and defence. An excellent collection of subjects.
As some regular readers will know, the founder and director of the L.A., Chris R. Tame, has been fighting cancer and made a great effort to be present throughout the entire conference. Anyone who knows and admires this clever, generous and tenacious man will not be surprised at his determination not only to set up this conference but also to set in train plans for future events. He received a surprise award celebrating his achievements on Saturday night’s banquet, and no-one deserved it more. Without Chris, it is probable that Britain’s present libertarian movement would not exist, and I don’t think I am writing out of turn in doubting whether Samizdata would be quite what it is now, either.
Those strange-sounding financial entities known as hedge funds, which are sometimes depicted as the Darth Vaders of the modern market, often have rather odd or dull names. So I was glad to come across a firm in the United States with a name that proudly celebrates the free market with unabashed gusto.
The firm has a great merchandise selection, too.
A regular commenter on this blog asked the question of whether the present Labour government is the most corrupt UK administration, ever. It is an interesting one. Blair and his wife enjoy the trappings of office, and at the taxpayer’s expense, with a gusto that is certainly hard to take. Cherie Blair’s activities are particularly questionable, such as the fees she reportedly made for speaking on behalf of charity. The recent demise of David Blunkett, who resigned earlier this month as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in scandal about his financial dealings, underscores how socialists are often unseated by money.
But is this the most bent government ever? I don’t know. It would be nice if there were some sort of mathematical metric to judge the relative probity or venality of different administrations. The previous Major government had its share of pretty corrupt politicians. In the early 1990s we had the Matrix-Churchill affair concerning arms shipments to Iraq. Mrs Thatcher’s governments were relatively straight, although a few ministers did move remarkably easily into the top jobs of industries they had privatised. The Callaghan government, as far as I know, had few major financial scandals, although the Harold Wilson government had its low points, not least in Wilson’s unfortunate choice of friends. → Continue reading: How corrupt is Blair and does it matter?
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
Robert A. Heinlein. Sackloads of other quotes by the great man here.
P.J. O’Rourke, the Republican Party Reptile supreme, has some caustic things to say about David Cameron, who may become the next leader of the Conservative Party. He is not terribly impressed:
The guy obviously doesn’t understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the “worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it”.
Just once, I’d love to hear a politician say: “We’re going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this.” The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much. They’ll fix lunch or take the dog for a walk before they get on to pressing political problems of the day – and by the time lunch is over, it’s time to take the dog for another walk and prepare dinner. That’s the right order of political priorities. The greatest danger in politics is people who try to do things.
By coincidence, Cameron has an article bashing Blair in the same edition of today’s Sunday Telegraph. It is not a bad article and correctly identifies much of the arrogance and reliance on a Big Government worldview. Like O’Rourke, I really would like this fellow to live up to his own declared scepticism about government activism and place the government of this country on a more modest, intelligent course.
For what it is worth, though, I could not care less about whether Cameron has gone to a smart private school or not. Even O’Rourke clobbers Cameron for this, much to my susprise. Social chippiness ill becomes advocates of classical liberalism.
Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an “enemy of Islam”, not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let’s hope Prince Charles takes notice.
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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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