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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With all the understandable attention being focused on the dreadful situation in the lands skirting the Indian Ocean, there is always a danger that disasters of a different, more Man-made kind, get overlooked. Well this week the German statistics office reported a dreadful set of unemployment figures, showing the number of jobless in Europe’s biggest economy to be at the highest level for seven years
A Bloomberg report on the story contains the following passage:
New measures cutting benefits for the long-term unemployed took effect on Jan. 1. Those without a job, including people previously registered as social-welfare recipients rather than as jobless, will also face increased pressure to accept job offers or risk losing benefits. The changes will add an as yet undetermined number of people to the January jobless total.
But it is clear that the German authorities are still tinkering with the issue. That 10.8 percent of the working age population of such an important country should be out of a job is a disgrace. What I find odd though is how little outraged commentary in the economics part of the press there is about this. It is almost as if the European chattering classes have come regard this problem in Germany, and also France, with an air of sullen resignation. Of course, dealing with it will involve lots of vulgar, Reaganite actions such as deregulation, tax cuts to spur business formation and the like, which of course goes against the grain of Germany’s ‘managed’ form of business so beloved of leftist commentators like Britain’s own Will Hutton.
Germany needs to get its act together. Some 15 years since reunification with the eastern part of the country, Germany has failed to live up its early promise. With so many young people, including those from immigrant backgrounds, on the dole, no wonder commentators wonder about the social fabric of that country. They should.
Entrepreneurship does not seem to get a very fair run on our main terrestrial television channels, as far as I can tell. The BBC is a particular offender. So credit is due to the BBC for a programme that shows how contestants with business ideas compete for money and interest from a panel of venture capitalists.
I watched the programme on Tuesday evening, and after my initial reservations about the format I became pretty engrossed. At the end, the final contestant, who eventually negotiated a deal where the others had failed, came across as such a smart fellow that I would have invested my own meagre funds in his idea.
The impression I got was that the producers asked the panel of VCs to play the role of flint-faced, capitalist bastard. They certainly succeeded. I disliked all of them intensely. No doubt that was the goal of the producers, but despite all that, I could not fail to be impressed by the enthusiasm of the wanna-be entrepreneurs.
The BBC may not fully realise it, but it is spreading the entrepreneurial meme.
Must say I am particularly impressed by the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar this year. In these dark days of January, what better than some quality cheesecake to lift the gloom!.
As regulators impose more onerous capital adequacy and reporting requirements on the Western world’s banks, investment firms and brokerages, demand surges for increasingly sophisticated computer infrastructure to keep track of all the new systems deemed necessary to make the regulations work. As a result, demand is rising, according to this Financial Times article, for graduates with science degrees, especially in the field of physics. And it does not come as much of a surprise to learn that Britain’s mostly state-run education system is not doing a very good job at churning out young physics students. I am shocked, shocked to hear this!
I would greatly prefer it if clever folk with scientific knowledge were engaged in the potentially fruitful areas of nanotechnology, biotech, aviation and civil engineering, all fields likely to see continued rapid growth, than working to make increasingly Byzantine bank regulations work better. It looks like a waste to me. We want our budding Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmans working on spacecraft, not greasing the wheels of the latest EU banking directive.
The little iPod portable sound system that allows you access to thousands of your favourite tunes is likely to be flying off the shelves this Christmas. No wonder. The device is a marvel and one of those trendy “must-have” items that our modern capitalist system seems to excel in. Apple’s sales growth has gone up tremendously over the past year partly as a result of the gadget.
Interestingly, this emblem of shameless materialism is also finding uses in the field of medical science, if this story, which I came across via libertarian author Virginia Postrel, is a guide. Medical researchers use the device to help them keep records of medical data and relay it back. Clever. It shows how certain types of technology that start off in a supposedly frivolous field like portable music gadgets can accomplish something more serious, as Postrel points out. Side point: I wish she would increase the font size of her blog. It is killing my eyesight. As I pointed out a week or so ago, another product of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, the eBay auction site, has been used by buyers as unusual as the London Underground for the purposes of getting obscure spare parts.
I think what this demonstrates in general is the yawning gap between the dynamism and creativity of the private sector and the plodding performance of all too much of what goes under under the aegis of the State. It also reminds us a bit I think of the good news that continues to be out there, if we want to look for it. Let’s be honest, a lot of what we have written about lately, such as the ID card issue and free speech infringements, makes for dark reading. Let’s not lose sight of the ways in which free enterprise is still on the march.
On that cheery note, have a very merry Christmas and happy 2005, and hopefully, a prosperous and peaceful one too. Thanks to my fellow contributors for making this blog so much stimulating fun.
This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.
Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America’s modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the ‘perfect’ military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.
I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.
As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt’s defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower’s head on a stick by now.
The man who gave us New Journalism, The Right Stuff, A Man in Full, From Bauhaus to Our House, the Painted Word, and of course such classics as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, has suddenly crashed against the buffers of British satire. Yes, Tom Wolfe, one of the grand men of American fiction, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award for a truly cringe-making passage of sexual dialogue in his latest novel.
Can he recover? Does this titan of American literature, who has mocked the lunacies of modern art, brilliantly described the feats of Chuck Yeager and the Mercury astronauts, bounce back from this potentially mortal blow? Let’s hope so.
A few days back, Perry de Havilland wrote about the sheer weight of regulations which empower officials to tell homeowners what sort of windows and fitting they can have in their own homes and mused as to whether such laws might, given their sheer impertinence, help provoke Britons to revolt. Maybe. I hope so but I want to mention another related thought – how the state makes it harder for us to carry out practical tasks in our daily lives, and what this does to our society.
Let’s face, it, home maintenance or ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) is not every man or woman’s idea of fun. In today’s hectic world, it makes a lot of rational economic sense to ‘outsource’ work to plumbers, electricians, plasterers and carpenters, and such folk can make a good living thereby (I read somewhere that a lot of ex stockbrokers have retrained as plumbers – it pays better). The usual Adam Smith arguments apply. But there will always be folk who, for either economic reasons or plain love of working with their hands, will want to look after their homes themselves. My dad is such a person and built the very house my parents now live in. It is a very good building.
Some of the satisfaction people get in buying a home – as I am about to do – is knowing that you can paint, decorate and shape your possessions as you like, subject to getting insurance cover, which tends to be rather more effective in promoting quality than government rules. In today’s world, of course, things like preservation orders and planning regulations impose tight limits on certain alterations, but even with such restrictions, owning a home gives us the chance to make a small physical mark on our world in a tangible way. This matters to people. Owning your own bit of bricks and mortar touches something in our psyche deeper than abstract political treatises on liberty ever can.
By telling us whether we should be able to wire a plug or put in double glazing, the State officials is continuing to infantilise the public, and also alienate us from our physical surroundings by telling us that we are not allowed to alter anything without a permit. By frustrating our desires to enjoy the simple pleasures of property ownership, our splendidly caring masters may be denying many of us the chance to to grab those small but priceless parts of daily life.
Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline “Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay”. The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.
Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain’t complaining.
It makes me wonder how many other major businesses are resorting to services like eBay to solve their inventory supply needs. I think it is still not yet possible for an airline to buy jet engines that way, though you never know. Is capitalism great or what?
Michael Bloomberg, founder and owner of the unlisted financial media firm bearing his name, is planning to sell up and transfer much of his assets to a charitable foundation on similar lines to that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. As Mayor of New York, Bloomberg has not really been able to give much day-to-day attention to his media empire, preferring to spend his time on matters such as banning smoking in bars.
I do not like much of what I hear about Bloomberg the politician, but I do greatly respect Bloomberg the businessman. The single-minded determination he has shown to challenge, and in some cases beat, rivals such as AP Dow Jones and Reuters has been impressive. In the space of little more than 15 years, Bloomberg has broken the near-duopoly on wholesale financial news and data once held by Reuters, the listed British firm which is more than 150 years old, though still bigger in terms of overall coverage of news.
If Ayn Rand were still alive, I would wager a small bet that she would think of the fellow as a likely business hero. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to this segment of the news business over the next few months and years.
This senior British police officer tells the Daily Telegraph that householders should be able to use force, lethal force if necessary, to beat off burglars. Good. It may not immediately lead to a change in public policy but I get the feeling that a watershed was passed in the murder this week of City financier and Chelsea resident, John Monckton. Regular readers of this site will know that the crime was committed within a few yards of our own Perry de Havilland’s home.
I am not going to repeat all the arguments we have seen about the issue of self defence, both on this blog and in our comments section. For me it is simple – the right to life is not worth much if one cannot use the means necessary to defend it. Full stop, no ifs, buts or qualifications. What does strike me, though, is that restoring the right of self defence will also, indirectly, improve the quality of our police forces. There are still a lot of very brave, committed and smart people in the police. Such people join up not just for the nice pension but also out of a desire to put thugs behind bars and protect the public. By being turned into “the paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper”, as blogger David Farrer memorably put it, many good policemen and women may have been demoralised and driven out of the force.
So if we want to be able to encourage smart and good people to be coppers and restore the reputation of the boys in dark blue, then restoring the liberties and protections of our Common Law is an integral part of that goal. All good Bobbies should be cheering on the rights of self defence.
I have just got back from seeing The Incredibles, the computer animation movie about a family of superheroes and superheroines. I have read good things about this film and was not in the least bit disappointed. It proceeds at a crackling good pace, is often extremely funny, includes some rather clever and sly digs at America’s litigation culture, and is endowed with a wonderfully positive, life-affirming sense of life throughout. It also has great, brassy backing music.
To state the obvious, what really stunned me was just how good computer animation now is. Some of the scenes in the jungle, the big city and the sea just took my breath away. It is easy to get blase these days, given just how good film making now is, but this film goes even further than that other great animation hit of recent years, Finding Nemo.
Go and see it. You know you want to.
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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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