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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I fly a lot and have spent more hours in aircraft and the associated departure lounges than I care to think (don’t get me wrong, I am a regular propellerhead). One thing that really cheeses me off is that creature: The Flight Attendant/Pilot Who Thinks He Is The Next Great Wit. On a recent flight our pilot insisted on mixing up his usual spiel (read the safety instructions, we arrive at X GMT, please fasten your seatbelts) with a sort of annoying, endless attempt at making the whole process funny. You could tell that the passengers were getting restless. One chap sitting behind me shouted out “Don’t give up your dayjob” but it was no good. The jerk went on and on for about 10 minutes before, mercifully, takeoff commenced.
A small plea to any wannabee Bob Newharts out there in the airline business: just fly the goddam plane and shut up.
Okay, I feel better now.
Charles Moore on the lamentable Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone:
This man is the Mayor of our greatest city. He condemns the bombing of that city (because it was an attack on “working-class Londoners”, not on “the mighty and the powerful”). But he is friends with our enemies. New York had Mayor Giuliani at its darkest moment. We have Mayor Livingstone. We are in trouble.
We are. The time has long gone when Livingstone and all that he represents could be dismissed as fringe Moonbattery. But he remains in power because he is such a cheeky chappy. Well, I am not laughing.
Thanks to regular commenter Julian Taylor for pointing out the Moore article. Read it all.
For all that I am sometimes bemused about the views of the assorted rock stars, media wannabes and other folk gathered around Sir Bob Geldof’s “Make Poverty History” campaign, I was a bit taken aback at this story. A UK regulatory body has banned the group from making any television or radio advertising on the grounds that it is a political group.
It would surely take the wisdom of Solomon to figure out the fine boundaries defining what is and what is not a “political” organisation. So many charities nowadays seem to stray into territory that one might construe as political. Many think tanks, which describe themselves as education or research institutes for the purpose of getting charitable tax status, are often highly political, if not in the simple party sense.
In my view, if a charity is deemed unfit to broadcast its views on the telly, it should be banned, full stop. For example, a radical Islamist or neo-Nazi group claiming to be a charity which is banned from spreading its message should also be banned as such (although some libertarians might argue that even such groups should be tolerated unless their members advocate violent acts with a reasonable chance of carrying them out).
The state has no business trying to define the boundaries of what is and what is not a charity. Ultimately, of course, the way to cut through the problem might be to end the tax breaks that charitable status brings and cut taxes across the board so that the designation of “charitable status” no longer is something decided by the Great and the Good but left up to we mortals to decide for ourselves.
It is fair to say that I do not always agree with what I read over at the Lew Rockwell blog, considering its position on foreign policy to be sometimes naive to the point of downright obtuse. (That should get the comments fired up nicely, ed). That said, this article drives home very effectively what might be one of the few silver linings of the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina: it may undermine respect for the wonders of Big Government and underscore the importance of local initiative in times of great danger.
And this article by David Kopel certainly adds to disquiet about what certain state officials are up to.
Surfing the cable television channel briefly on Friday lunchtime, I came across a CNBC programme about oil prices, in which a couple of analysts fielded email questions from the public about why prices are so high. One guy claimed that the price of oil – currently about 70 dollars a barrel – was grossly inflated by those evil speculators and the “real” price of oil was more like 40 dollars.
Okaaay, said one of the analysts. If that is the case, maybe the emailer should quit his or her day job and take up oil speculation if the “real” price of oil was far lower. Armed with this insight, the correspondent would make a killing, said the clearly rather bemused analyst. It is rare on television to see this sort of nonsense smashed out of the park in such a fashion. Certainly not likely on the BBC.
While on the subject of nonsense about the role of speculators and prices, this is worth a read.
I think the field known as nanotechnology just took another pretty major advance, judging by this story:
Scientists have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology which could hasten the development of molecular machines that could act as artificial muscles or drug delivery systems in the body.
Chemists at Edinburgh University said on Wednesday they had built molecules that can move objects larger than the size of an atom in an advance in the technology that deals with manipulating materials on a minuscule scale.
If nanotech can be harnessed to deliver potentially life-saving drugs to parts of the body, to deal with conditions such as cancer, for example, its impact on health care could be enormous. And knowing a few people who suffer from cancer, including a good friend of long standing, this is a very personal issue for me.
A new film is to be made about Che Guevara, the man whose image adorns the T-shirts of many a young student “radical” or someone trying to appear hip (even if they haven’t much clue about his real life). This story, drawn from a report at the Venice Film Festival, suggests that the man will be portrayed warts an’ all, making use of declassified CIA files. Good. It is something of a pet issue here at Samizdata that while the monsters of Fascism are rightly excoriated in film and print and unthinkable of a youngster to wear a picture of Adolf Hitler on his shirt, it is considered okay to do the same with the portrait of a mass murderer like Lenin or Chairman Mao. Of course in some cases the results of this mindset are unintentionally amusing.
Maybe the message is getting through. Totalitarian socialists are not hip, and not clever.
Apparently, according to this great story over at CNN, it was still possible to get a decent drink in the centre of New Orleans over the past few days, in the finest decadent traditions of that city.
That must have really annoyed the self-loathing creeps who opined that Katrina was some sort of Divine Punishment for the city’s libertine, jazz-loving past. Screw ’em and make mine a tequila.
Thanks to the eagle-eyed Reason Hit and Run blog for the pointer.
The European Union has agreed an “equitable” outcome with China over the vexed issue of whether the Chinese should be allowed to sell textiles to us at those oh-so unfair low prices. It looks like a pretty fudged deal to me, possibly not as draconian as the original quotas demanded by protectionist lobbies in Europe, but still a slap in the face for principled free trade.
While I have my concerns about China – it has a lousy record on human rights for starters – the development of the country’s economy along hopefully free market lines is surely one of the most positive developments of its kind in the world at the moment. Europe’s economy can only benefit in the long run if China becomes prosperous and hence generates a large middle class with a keen appetite for consumer goods and services.
And some of the poorest people in Europe surely stand to gain if they can buy garments for far less than the amount they would otherwise pay. If the case for free trade is to succeed, it is vital that this point is rammed home time and again.
Let Adam Smith have the last word on this from his Wealth of Nations:
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce
Compared to the overall scale of the disaster, this tale about part of the costs of Hurricane Katrina may not seem that big a deal. But as a music-lover and fan of blues and jazz myself, one cannot fail to be moved by this story.
Tyler Cowen over at his Marginal Revolution blog lists out a load of articles about the case for privatising stuff like flood defence, and critiques of U.S. Federal efforts in that direction. He personally believes that flood defence, spectacularly breached in New Orleans, is a proper function of the state. But being the fine scholar and liberal writer he is, gives a comprehensive roll of reasons for thinking these things could be done better out of the State’s hands.
Flood defence can be presented as one of those classic “public goods” that cannot arise via the Invisible Hand of the market. Is that really the case, though? It seems to me that if the full, insurance-related costs of living in a flood zone were presented to the people either living or looking to live there, it might either encourage a lot of flood-related civil engineering defence, or for that matter discourage locating in such areas in the first place.
Anyway, hindsight is very easy, especially if you are thousands of miles away. In the meantime, I urge folk to look at the many examples of voluntary compassion flagged up by Glenn Reynolds.
Boris Johnson, the Tory MP and magazine editor, occasionally bugs me with his latter-day Bertie Wooster routine, which has become a bit of a self-parody, but it is hard not to like a man who writes a wonderfully clear-headed, cant-free article on China like this.
The Member for Henley-on-Thames is unimpressed by the current vogue for getting all upset about matters Chinese, whether it be terrors about Avian flu, dread of ultra-cheap clothes (low-price bras, oh the horrors!) and so forth. Boris is particularly harsh on the European Union’s bout of protectionist folly against cheap Chinese textile exports and the role of that lowlife, EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson:
It is all stark staring nonsense, and founded on the same misapprehension as Peter Mandelson’s demented decision to slap quotas on Chinese textiles, so that the mouths of the Scheldt and the Rhine are apparently silting up with 50 million pairs of cut-price Chinese trousers. It is idiocy, and not just because it is unlike Mandy to come between a British woman and her knickers.
And again:
The emergence of China and its integration into the world economy has been a major spur to growth and a deterrent to inflation. It is an unalloyed good, and it is sad to see our politicians responding with such chicken-hearted paranoia.
UPDATE: I put the wrong article in the link and have changed it. Mea culpa.
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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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