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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 Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today’s art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced.
In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly.
Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway.
French voters go to the polls this weekend to vote on the European Union constitution, with polls so far suggesting that the “no’s” will narrowly win and shaft the wretched project, although one should never, ever under-estimate the ability of the political establishment to scare voters into saying “oui”. My hope, needless to say, is that the French vote against the constitution and throw a great big spanner in the works and prevent the creation of what will be, explicitly, a European superstate.
It is pointless at this vantage point to guess exactly what will be the impact on British political life if the French do nix the constitution. My rough guess is that Blair will secretly breath a deep sigh of relief, as will the Tories. I also think that the United States will also be glad about a no vote, although I am just guessing.
As Anatole Kaletsky writes in the Times today, the chronic underperformance of the euro zone economy is at the heart of much of that disenchantment (although other issues are important too).
Here’s a key graf:
The relative economic decline of “old” Europe since the early 1990s – especially of Germany and Italy, but also of the Netherlands and France – has been a disaster almost unparalleled in modern history. While Britain and Japan certainly suffered some massive economic dislocations, in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s respectively, they never experienced the same sort of permanent transformation from thriving full-employment economies to stagnant societies where mass unemployment and falling living standards are accepted as permanent facts of life. In Britain, unemployment more than doubled from 1980 to 1984, but conditions then quickly improved. By the late 1980s it was enjoying a boom, the economy was growing by 4 per cent and unemployment had halved. In continental Europe, by contrast, unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 per cent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 per cent only once in those 14 years.
He has a point, although I am struck by the fact that in France, much of the hostility to the constitution is coming not from pro-free marketeers, as is the case in many respects in Britain, but from those who fear that the process will open up France’s high regulated, high-tax economy to the icy winds of laissez faire. The ironies abound.
Of course, the fact of mere voters saying no to the EU juggernaut is unlikely to deflect the mixed assortment of deluded idealists, crooks, place-seekers and sundry camp-followers from trying to advance their aims. But a delicious irony would it be if the land of Bonaparte, de Gaulle and Asterix puts a major block in their path.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s social democratic (SPD) party has been hit hard in regional elections over the weekend, with voter anger at his party over the crummy state of the economy overwhelming an attempt by some of his own party members to whip up a storm of anti-capitalist sentiment in order to cling to power. Good. I honestly don’t know whether we are seeing a transition phase in Germany towards sanity and liberal economics. What is clear is that a country that has suffered double-digit unemployment for more than half a decade cannot go on like this without dreadful strains on its social fabric. Maybe some of the more intelligent parts of the German political class might get this point. We need the once-mighty German economic machine, brought to such a pitch by the late great Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Ehrhard (friend of Hayek) brought to a purring level of growth again. It is in no-body’s interests, least of all ours in Britain, to see that nation permanently in the doldrums.
There is a related article here about what has gone wrong in Germany here in the latest edition of the Spectator. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, read the whole thing.
Story here that says that far from being a bad thing, sitting outside in the sun for at least 15 minutes a day is good for you, latest medical findings suggest. It certainly is a bit of a change from the period, I well recall, in the 1990s, when it appeared to be the case that any exposure to sun was fraught with danger as a result of the supposed hole in the ozone layer. I recall the constant worries, fuelled in the press and elsewhere, about skin cancer and the dangers of overdoing the sunshine.
Sometimes you have to just laugh. Of course being exposed to the sun is good for you in moderation! Mankind was not meant to sit indoors or conceal every aspect of the body all the time. Anyone I know who spends the vast majority of his or her time indoors looks, well, unwell, in my opinion. I always make the effort to break out of my office at lunchtime to get what passes for sunshine in this damp country of ours. It is not rocket science.
Coming next: medical experts reveal that regular exercise, eating vegetables and playing sports can do you some good.
Britons, even those uninterested in sport, would have to have been ignoring the news for the past few weeks not have seen reports about the audacious purchase of English football team Manchester United by American tycoon Malcolm Glazer. His bid, which looks likely to succeed and will take the club off the stock exchange, has enraged fans, concerned that a man with no knowledge of football or the club’s history will wreck the club.
I hope the fans’ worst fears do not come to pass. The deal is, however, troubling. Glazer has taken on a vast amount of debt to finance the deal, presumably calculating that he can earn enough profits to service his debt to make the deal – known in the jargon as a leveraged buyout – viable. With concerns rising that the economy could slow down and dent the firm’s profitability, such a deal could easily end badly for the club. A number of teams, most notably Leeds United, have fallen on hard times, nearly going under due to mountains of debt.
As a gung-ho defender of free enterprise, I can hardly claim that Glazer was not entitled to bid for this team under the rules of the stock market. He has taken his gamble and who knows, it may pay off, although the financial details don’t appear very reassuring. I have noticed more than just a whiff of unpleasant anti-Americanism in some of the reporting on this deal in some quarters of the media.
I follow another team – Ipswich Town FC – but have always had a bit of a soft spot for the team that has given us the likes of Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bryan Robson. I hope that this rather oddball entrepreneur from Florida understands what he is doing and does not wreck one of the most famous, if the most famous, sporting institutions in the world.
Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn’t any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don’t worry, you’re not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.
Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.
Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.
These are difficult times in Western car industry. The Economist magazine reports that dark clouds are gathering in parts of the world economy, pointing to a slowing of consumer spending, higher interest rates and large government budget deficits (facts which may start to really hit the re-elected UK Labour government). I hope the Economist is wrong since I have a mortgage to pay and bills to meet, but its arguments are quite convicing. And one possible harbinger of trouble right now is the car industry.
The recent demise of British carmmaker Rover is well known. Across the pond, however, two even bigger auto firms have hit trouble, and yet caused surprisingly scant news coverage outside the serious parts of the MsM and the business news pages: General Motors and Ford. GM and Ford have been downgraded to “junk” status by international credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. That means that as far as S&P is concerned, GM and Ford are risky debtors, and there is a relatively high chance that the rustbelt companies could default on their debt. The downgrade has sent shockwaves through the financial markets, forcing many big investors, like pension funds, to wonder about the wisdom of holding corporate bonds at all.
The problem may be confined to these firms. GM, for example, make a lot of the big SUVs that environmentalists get steamed about, and these monsters of the road are now proving more difficult to afford in a world of high oil prices. There is also a glut of cars on the world market and the industrial growth of China and India, and indeed of parts of Latin America, are a growing threat to GM and Ford’s home market.
Britain’s car industry has been through a torrid period since the 1960s, but even in the world’s largest economy, making cars is proving increasingly tough.
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite…If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.
– Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, “The Devil’s Chaplain”, crushing all manner of shoddy thinking.
First impressions that this is going to be a much worse night for Labour than some polls have suggested. Exit polls are pointing to a big cut in the size of Labour’s majority. Early days yet.
German’s leftwing SPD politicians have been bashing those symbols of hated capitalist activity, private equity buyout funds which look out for distressed firms, sell off some of the assets and reconstruct the remainder in the hope of turning a business around, before selling it at a profit. How shameful. Such people are “locusts” destroying Germany’s economy, scream the politicians (who of course have been doing a tremendous job on that score).
In fact, I find all this abuse rather encouraging. If entrepreneurs see value in the German economic landscape, and perceive there are rich profits to be made in turning around businesses and then flogging them off, it is very good news indeed for the country’s economy. By releasing capital from uneconomic areas and focussing it on lucrative new bits, the overall pie gets bigger, jobs get created, and productivity is also increased.
In fact, one could almost create a new economic law: the amount of abuse raining down on entrepreneurs is directly proportional to the good they do. I haven’t seen much reason to doubt this law yet.
The indefatigible Radley Balko has a nice roundup of latest regulatory nuttiness from across the world, including my personal favourite, a rule in Italy stating that dog-owners must walk their furry friends at least three times a day. Tremendous stuff, the sort of law that would make the land of Julius Ceasar and Enzo Ferrari proud.
Joking aside at this lunacy, we are surely far beyond the point at which it is possible to subject this sort of regulatory mania to Monty Python-style satire. How on earth can one excite the anger of people against this sort of thing when it appears that the humourless berks who want to pass these rules feel no shame, no sense that they are infantilising the public?
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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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